How Can Marxist Higher Education Research Help Us Regain the Future in the Age of Uncertainty?

This article asks how Marxist higher education research can help reclaim the future in an age of uncertainty. It begins from the claim that the contemporary university increasingly operates within the closed temporality of capitalism’s eternal present: a future imagined only as intensified competition, expanded measurement, higher productivity, and deeper integration into circuits of capital. Against this horizon, the article revisits the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and the poetry of Nazım Hikmet as historical figures of an institution capable of materially organising a relation to a future beyond capitalism. It then argues that mainstream higher education research cannot adequately confront the capitalist transformation of the sector, because it remains constrained by borrowed conceptual frameworks, liberal public/private dichotomies, and an insufficient account of capital, struggle, and alternative institutionality. In response, the article develops the methodological proposal of integral Marxist critique, organised around three moments: “in,” “against,” and “beyond.” The moment “in” offers a critique of the political economy of higher education, examining how capital subsumes academic labour, study time, prestige, knowledge, measurement, publishing infrastructures, and relations of dependency. The moment “against” turns to student and academics struggles, especially through co-research, as sites where capitalist contradictions become visible and counter-subjectivities are produced. The moment “beyond” identifies the common as the material basis of non-capitalist academic relations already present within universities. The article concludes that Marxist higher education research should not merely interpret the university in crisis, but participate in movements that carry this crisis beyond its capitalist limits.