Exploring the nexus between aesthetics, pedagogy, and politics illustrates the central role education plays in reproducing injustice and inhibiting confidence in revolutionary struggle. Demonstrating how capitalism and its attendant forms of oppression are not merely cognitive but perceptual, Derek R. Ford proposes that revolutionary education demands the production of aesthetic experiences through which we sense the possibility and actuality of alternative worlds. In response to this pressing task, Ford develops a praxis of teaching and a pedagogy of unlearning that, in our current conjuncture, creates conditions for encountering what Jennifer Ponce de León calls "an other aesthetics." Mapping contemporary capital as a perceptual ecology of structures, social relations, beliefs, and feelings, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution provides an extensive new set of concepts, practices, and readings for revolutionaries to better plan, enact, reflect on, and refine our organizing efforts. "This book offers an expansive and inspiring examination of an issue crucially important to revolutionary practice and the struggles of all working class and oppressed people: how are humans' understanding and perception of the world forged through class struggle? In it, Derek Ford brilliantly illuminates key insights of Marx and Engels' work, as well as that of Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Paulo Freire, and many contemporary Marxist theorists. His far-reaching discussions of ideology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the arts offer valuable tools for unlearning capital's perceptual ecology and forging new worlds of sense and perception that concretely contribute to the communist struggle." -Jennifer Ponce de León, author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War. "Ford expertly wields a robust analysis of sensory perception and perceptual mapping against the dominant aesthetic ecological regime which reigns as an extension of the dictatorship of capital and which is reproduced, according to Ford, pedagogically. What emerges from this exploration is essential reading for educators, organizers, and anyone interested in (un)learning the ideology and imposed sensorium of capital and, ultimately, in teaching the actuality of revolution!" -Breht O'Shea, Revolutionary Left Radio "Ford knows that those reading his book—anybody and everybody—don't need him to tell us the system is broken. We know that, even if we can always benefit from deeper analyses. He does quickly spill some ink, however, on those intellectuals who are either afraid to put anything on the line (and so deploy watered down theories) or accept the unquestionable dogma permeating the academy today: that revolutions are impossible. On the contrary, socialist revolutions are actual, and revolutionary education's primary task in our current conjuncture is to facilitate encounters with the actuality of revolution." - Peter McLaren, Monthly Review. "If we take seriously the notion that the university and the school are entangled in the prioritization of capitalist learning over socialist education , we must unlearn the former in pursuit of the latter. Perhaps only then will we make-sense of the actuality (and necessity) of revolution. Indeed, in the final analysis, Ford teaches us that this actuality is presently possible, right here, and right now." - Eli J. Pine, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies "Derek R. Ford's book, Teaching the actuality of revolution: Aesthetics, unlearning, and the sensations of struggle, offers thought provoking insight for pushing the envelope in taking to task the academic industry's activist scholars who wage a class struggle on behalf of capitalism" by "providing a rupture in the aesthetics for common sense 'meaning making' and 'understanding' by way of engaging in alternative world views." - Jesus Jaime-Diaz and Aimée Azul Chávez "Ford's work has an importance for those of us on the educational left, one shared by few other contemporary writers. That importance rests in part on two almost paradoxical features of Ford's (let's face it, prodigious) writing. First, its loyal adherence to communism, and the innovation of Ford's avowedly Marxist, communist scholarship on pedagogy. Second, the daring way he reads writers from within and at the margins of Marx's legacy alongside or against one another, and here I am thinking of writers who would usually be characterized as wildly at odds with one another." - Simon Boxley, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies "The author's particular focus on the intersections of aesthetics, pedagogy, and the political and his identification of the revolutionary counterpolitical with the pedagogical method itself are what make this intervention so unique." - Sylvester J. Cruz, Rethinking Marxism Cover Painting: " El Mapa " by Daniela Chaparro.