But why would someone ever support Marxism? ( conspiracy )

submitted by pitenius

Based on some non-confrontational interviews with SJW types, I think the structure of education has invoked a little mental trick that makes Marxism appear inevitable and encourages SJW mentality. If you have an interest in how the Frankfurt School wormed its way into the US, that's kind of what I'm after. My analysis has been derived from the types of schools that produce "policy directors" more than the kind of school that produces "community organizers". Quite often, the people I've been watching are completely detached from the communities which they claim to serve -- except through connections to "community organizers" (which should make anyone suspicious). One of the nefarious ends of this division, is that the "policy directors" can disavow the most egregious effects of their collaboration, essentially claiming "over-zealous staffers" did something bad. In this analogy, imagine that Soros is the "policy director" and Shaun King is the "over-zealous staffer", soon to be thrown under the bus. But that's a digression -- how can an academic setting make Marxism seem inevitable?

What I have found is that many of these schools organize their classes like an initiatory tradition. There's an outer layer of neophytes. These are the "diversity" classes that are encouraged but rarely directly required at elite schools -- like initiatory traditions, the "free will and accord" of the candidate is important. These courses are often something of a farce. The classes are fun and irreverent. (This is why engineers and "serious students" rage against them. In short, they've been suckered into a premature opposition.) These classes offer new and facile explanations of society, history, and culture. They focus on conflicts and sex. Accepting or rejecting the conclusions is not so important as allowing the breakdown of rigorous methodology to gain a foothold.

There's a middle chamber, too. The best indicator of "middle chamber" classes is the use of the word "theory". What happens in these classes? Is it all just a fem-positive romp in the glorious man-free fields of whitey hate? Not really. Some people try to pass their classes this way. Monkey-see/monkey-do will get you a passing grade, but not much more than that. Maybe not even that if the ideas border on offensive. This allows the departments and adherents to claim some kind of academic legitimacy. A paper titled "Sociological Necessity of Purging White Imperialism" can be shot down with a C-. These students picked the "right" team but are "useful idiots". One purpose of elite schools is weeding out these types -- or at least trying to get them to maintain a gloss of respectability.

Getting a 22-year old to play with shitty ideas isn't hard. Getting them to adopt those ideas for life is tricky. This is the clever stroke that I think I have identified in these programs: the students pass through about 2 years of classes with ill-defined terms (patriarchy, hegemony, imperialism -- typical SJW words). It's not that these terms don't have meanings. It's just that the students are never given clear definitions. They're criticized when they use the terms in correctly. They're criticized when they introduce logical fallacies into their arguments. There's criticism, alright. You can do "post-colonial marginalization studies" wrong. In fact, you probably will. As I wrote, aping the professor is not enough. This leads the student to believe they are always struggling toward something -- that they're making real progress.

From what I've observed, the last year of these classes, the senior seminars reserved for the departmental majors unbars the sanctum sanctorum : they finally read Marx. Everything is explained. They've arrived at truth. They now see how and why their initial efforts were unsatisfactory. Then, before they have much of a chance to reflect on the glorious received wisdom, they graduate. They'll spend years trying to claw their way back to the moment of insight, but you only go to college once. They move on to graduate school so they can define other fields in this way (or... heh... control the means of reproduction), or they go to law school, or get social activism jobs.

Why is Marx saved for last? So much of what these students read is based in Marx, one wonders why they don't encounter it first. I think this is because Marx has a bad reputation in a post-communist world. There are crushing critiques of this flawed historical method, his deceitful economic definitions, and his naive insight into human nature. In short, there's opposition. If Marx is presented as the solution to past difficulties, he's more alluring than if he's presented as a necessary first step of a rationalist philosophy. Based on the fact that I've seen this methodology at ... the same types of school... I think this pedagogical choice is deliberate. And I think it's a bit of a mind-fuck.

looking

Let me only say that I didn’t quite understand your post, but one theme struck me. You write:

“This is why engineers and "serious students" rage against them.”

These are very crude comments, but I only try to show some of the major basis of the current situation:

One decisive issue is the rearrangement of the universities in the nineteenth century, first in Germany around the year 1840, to the situation we all received as mother’s milk, the division between the humanities and the sciences. The production of facts, with their necessarily impressive objectivity, and the consideration of the remainder, of laws and language, with its squishy texture.

One could say with the greatest possible simplicity, the situation appears to be a question of what there is, and what one wants to do with what is. And the what to do with it seems, by the current opinion, to be wholly arbitrary.

Usually people speak here of ‘facts and values,’ or one could say, means and ends. The current situation is the result, in some major way, of the abandonment of the possibility of judgment of the higher and the lower in so-called cultural things, but simply the acceptance of sheer difference or variety as the value par excellence.

The difficulty is that although this appears as the most powerful principle of society, it is never realized simply. Because one does go on judging higher and lower, that literacy is better than illiteracy for example [i..e, when we think of developing countries as lower forms of ourselves, whilst claiming a value-neutral attitude to other so-called cultures], even when one changes the names, in order to conceal the judgments.

One can say the Chinese technocracy, a society governed by the engineers, most agrees with this attack on Marx (of yours). Ironically—since they themselves are quite Marxist. Because the Marxist idea is that labour is the key thing, practitioners of realism over airy rhetoric or ideals. Or, facts over values, sciences over the humanities.

One might ask if the Frankfurt school says, how can one upset this situation at the roots, that everything is grasped either as engineering or vapid talk? Of course, from the perspective of the engineers, this middle position, seems not only unsatisfactory, but identical to the airy vapidity it claims to critique with its study.

pitenius

Hmm... I think I follow... Sometimes I write things to help me arrange my thoughts.

I am curious about the restructuring of universities in Germany, and the "American echo" of that in Johns Hopkins and the Sheffield Scientific School. I should think about this, but it borders on "the German ideology".

What I was most curious about was the fact that Marx is always presented as a capstone rather than an introduction. Those readings tend to come in the senior year, which makes the "middle chamber" struggle feel resolved but never allows an opportunity to reflect on the answer.

As for my own objections to Marx, they are most inherited American biases. I guess I could spell it out, but I think others have already done that. I doubt I could ever convince any of his adherents.

I'll decline to address my own complicated feelings on China.

I've been thinking about something else, based in McLuhan recently, so I apologize if I had an insufficient response.

looking

I didn’t know of that Yale school. I too am interested in learning more about the way this division elaborated. It is a practical correlate to the theoretical and philosophical transformation of human society.

I'm not aware of the 'capstone' practice. I think the name Marx is used as a synonym for revolutionary or revolutionary theory (almost the same as 'radical'). It means, presumably, 'far left.' And, therefore, by the WWII era thinking, anti-fascist and often anti-authoritarian. But my impression is that proper-Marxist thought is wholly outmoded, if through no great theoretical refutation, by the fact of post-industrial society.

Marx himself, so far as I know, never championed egalitarianism in the sense now associated with his name. Rather, he championed the end of exploitation and a return to the so-called real nature of labour. The principle that all value is due to labour (which precedes Marx). Jonathan Rawls and Milton Friedman, a philosopher and an economist, have both concluded that there simply are no serious economic arguments for something like egalitarianism, which means almost the same thing as fairness. Humans like it, but it has but anecdotal economic rationality to argue for it. Whereas ‘Marxism’ has, presumably, come to be a crypto-red letter for this so-called ideology (or so-called value tied down with arguments leading to so-called facts) of fairness or justice.

The China example is rather obscure with respect to the allusive current sense of 'Marxism.' It just shows the sense, realism over idealism. Which is so characteristic of our own age.