ABSTRACT
Although political philosophers are still sometimes able to discuss the terms of political discourse with little or no reference to Marx and Marxism this is certainly not the case nowadays with education theory or social policy analysis. This chapter examines the 'rediscovery' of political economy in some contexts relevant to social policy analysis in adult education. Deriving in very diverse ways from Marxist analyses of the social relations of production under capitalism, these approaches all reflect a materialist analysis of society in which concepts of class and class struggle are central. They all imply forms of social control exercised in the interests of capital, processes in which the state is implicated in some way or another. For the majority of adults, therefore, personality is constituted in the last resort by the social relations in which they engage, primarily in respect of work relations and the ideological significance such relations entail.
