The everyday lives and the cultural identities of early school-leavers in the Republic of Ireland are explored, drawing up a political practice, a cultural politics, that relates to the position of early school-leavers. This practice is theorized within a poststructuralist and post-Marxist framework. Part 1 presents conversations with urban early school-leavers, organized around how they represent their experience of schooling, how they view leaving school in retrospect, and their current material and social situations. Part 2 argues that early school-leavers occupy a subordinate position in terms of material well-being. Sociological theories of reproduction and resistance are explored and applied to the experiences in Part 1. Part 3 constructs a discourse of social change without transcending the realities early school-leavers experience. A cultural, political, and educational strategy is presented for work with, by, and for early school-leavers. Theories of radical social democracy and theories of cultural production provide a transformative theoretical framework from which the issue of early school-leaving can be moved beyond the current crisis of political space. (Contains 136 references.) (SLD)