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This article has three primary goals centring on a re-examination of the research frameworks we use for understanding the politics of social movements. First, I detail the ideological and methodological deficiencies of the old social movement/new social movement framework. Second, I highlight the positive contributions of research that favoured or in some way promoted one side in the debate over old and new social movements. Third, I elaborate what I consider to be the major challenges which new forms of social movement organising pose for adult education research interested in advancing social justice.

This article identifies and describes the major principles and themes that emerge from an analysis of the revolutionary pedagogical practice and ideas of Ernesto Che Guevara. The principles and themes outlined in this article are based on a thematic investigation of the approximately 2000 pages of Guevara’s writings, speeches and interviews available in numerous English‐translation compilations and full‐length books. The analysis also draws on what are considered to be some of the most important biographies and secondary sources on the educational and political thought and practice of Guevara in English and Spanish. The article is organised thematically and in each section that outlines a major theme or principle of Guevara’s pedagogy, examples are provided from Guevara’s practice that help illustrate the theme or principle. Reverences are made throughout the text to other revolutionary pedagogues and movements that share specific commonalities with Guevara’s pedagogy.

While most of Gramsci's party work is well known to education scholars of Gramsci, and the educational aspects of his writings have been repeatedly analyzed, what remains a constant in education‐based Gramsci studies is the nearly universal minimization of this work for what it was, namely party work. For Gramsci, it would have been unthinkable to consider this work outside the framework of a revolutionary party. Yet, for contemporary educational scholars it seems unthinkable to consider Gramsci's work within the framework of a revolutionary party. The goals of this article are to outline Gramsci's interrelated conceptualization of the roles of the revolutionary party; the nature of education within and by the revolutionary party; and the aims of party education. For considerations of space, I limit this analysis to Gramsci's pre‐prison praxis, the period of his active militancy in the PSI and the PCI. I conclude the article with what I consider to be lessons with continued relevance from Gramsci's praxis...

The Russian communists are a first-class ruling elite. As all those who have dealt with him have attested, Lenin has revealed himself as the greatest statesman of contemporary Europe. He is a man who radiates prestige, a man who can enflame and discipline whole populaces; a man whose vast brain can dominate all those social energies, throughout the world, which can be turned to the benefit of the revolution; a man who can check and even checkmate, the most wily and refined statesman of the bourgeois political routine. (Antonio Gramsci 1994 [1919]: 92) One of the most striking characteristics of Leninism is its formidable coherence and consistency. Leninism is a unified system of thought and practical action, in which everything hangs together and everything confirms everything else, from the general conception of the world right down to the most minute problems of organization. The fundamental nucleus of Leninism, where practical action is concerned, is the dictatorship of the proletariat and all the tact...