Education Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Marxism, in Lyotard's telling, isn't just a set of economic claims but a wager on an alternate operating system for society: reorganize social relations and you don't merely redistribute wealth, you rewire what counts as knowledge and what knowledge is for. The line is doing two things at once. It grants Marxism a certain grandeur - a total theory that reaches into epistemology - while quietly marking the place where Lyotard will later apply the knife.

The key phrase is "function of the knowledge". That's a loaded, almost technocratic formulation for a philosopher best known for distrusting grand designs. Knowledge here isn't a neutral mirror of reality; it's a social product with a job description. In Marxism, that job is historically oriented and practical: knowledge should help expose domination, demystify ideology, and enable collective transformation. Lyotard is pointing to Marxism's claim that truth can be socially situated without collapsing into mere opinion: the standpoint of labor, struggle, and material conditions supposedly yields a privileged grasp of society.

But the subtext is warning. Once knowledge has a prescribed function, it invites policing: which facts "serve" emancipation, which questions count as counterrevolutionary, which narratives get to be called scientific. Lyotard's postwar context matters: the collapse of faith in revolutionary metanarratives after Stalinism, the bureaucratization of the left, the rise of technoscience and managerial rationality. By framing Marxism as a model of society plus a theory of knowledge-production, he clarifies its ambition - and exposes its vulnerability. The same architecture that makes Marxism compelling also makes it susceptible to becoming a regime of legitimation, where power and "knowledge" start speaking with the same voice.