ABSTRACT
The Education of Radical Democracy is about learning to practise hope at the edges of political possibility, and it focuses on two things. One is the roles that knowledge, practical reason and learning education in its broadest sense play in struggles for humanization in general, and economic, political, cultural and epistemic democracy in neoliberal contexts in particular. The theoretical approach developed in this chapter can be described as a kind of 'prefigurative materialism'. The concept of prefigurative materialism, which is only sketched out here, problematizes a common criticism that 'prefigurative' forms of politics uncritically celebrate the superficial performance of new possibilities in 'cracks' of domination without either seriously compromising or actually disengaging from institutionalized systems of power and structural relations of force. The chapter focus on an even smaller niche of work concerning how, through learning and practice, people become able to make a start on throwing 'themselves into what is becoming' in critical and hopeful ways.
