Jan 8, 2025 06:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 8, 2025 07:00 PM by C C.)
Parody Alcove: An article to save as a reference. Whereas timid progressives do everything possible to obscure, evade and deny the ultimate sources of policies, proud socialist magazines and websites acknowledge that the various "critical" labeled and other offshoot political ideologies of today are descended from Marxism.
This is why the pessimism about Marxist scholarship being confined to campus circles is unwarranted to an extent, since those literary intellectuals still very much influenced and molded left-wing politics on the outside. Ancestral figures like Antonio Gramsci fueled the historical expansion to anti-Westernism and social oppression in general (i.e., beyond just the class war between the bourgeoisie and proles).
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American Marxism got lost on campus
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/american-mar...cal-theory
EXCERPTS: “American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive.” So laments Mark R. Levin in his 2021 book American Marxism. He explains that American Marxists “occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, boardrooms and entertainment, and their ideas are prominent within the Democratic Party, the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.”
[...] Marxists inspired the establishment of public schools in the nineteenth century and the Sixteen Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, which legalized a federal income tax. The ideas of John Dewey, the twentieth-century educational reformer, emerged from “the Marxist womb.”
Unlike Levin, students of Marxism have pondered the sharp limits of American Marxism, not its reach. Of course, a definitional issue hangs over the subject. Where does American socialism stop and American Marxism begin?
Karl Marx himself sought to distinguish his ideas from other forms of socialism, for instance what he called bourgeois socialism, which was advanced by “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.” These socialists want “the existing state of society” without its “disintegrating elements.” They want a “a bourgeoise without a proletariat.”
[...] In the United States, however, that sea has not sustained a robust socialism. For well over a century, commentators have remarked on the relative weakness of American socialism; and this in a country that lacked a feudal past or an aristocracy — a country that might be considered a pure case of capitalism. While Britain could claim a Labour Party and Germany a vigorous socialist movement, the United States had neither.
This absence struck a German socialist Werner Sombart [...] in 1906 ... he described the United States as “the country where the model of the Marxist theory of development is being most precisely fulfilled.” But the American worker was not embracing “socialism with a Marxist character.” Sombart offered various explanations of this paradox.
[...] the relative prosperity of the American worker doomed Marxism. In a sentence that would be endlessly quoted, Sombart declared: “All Socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.”
[...] Yet history harbored some surprises; Marxism refused to stay in the library stacks. In ... 1967, Bell observed that ... “a New Left has appeared in the United States.” ... “clearly the ideas of Marxism” are now “the common coin of American intellectual life.”
This is astonishing. In 1952, Marxism was dead. In 1967, Marxism was alive and well, indeed everywhere. Bell may have overstated the situation, but what became known as the New Left, itself part and parcel of the political ’60s, led to a renaissance of Marxism unprecedented in the United States.
[...] “We New Left Marxists” were “the first generation of American radicals born into the television era and the all-embracing mass culture.” ... Marxism evolved into “something scarcely recognizable to older generations of American Marxists..." ... In the past, socialists focused on the working class. But ... this was “a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.”
[...] In the German city of Frankfurt, a number of scholars assembled under the sponsorship of the Institute for Social Research to forge a new Marxism. ... With the onset of Nazism, virtually all its principals ended up in the United States, and to this day they are designated informally as the Frankfurt School.
During World War II, many Frankfurt School affiliates worked for government agencies that aided the war against Nazi Germany. By the 1950s, several had become professors in major American universities... [...] Eddies of Marxism existed outside of the universities ... But American Marxism largely unfolded on campuses....
[...] As Michael Burawoy, a Marxist sociologist, has commented, unlike elsewhere in the world, the renaissance of Marxism “in the United States was more confined to the academy.” This fact had both negative and positive consequences.
[...] In an earlier era, American philosophers sought and found an audience outside the campus. ... Today, however, philosophers prosper within departmental confines. ... Their impact remains within the profession. ... Academic Marxists from the 1980s to the present have more or less prospered, but in separate fiefdoms.
[...] the “millennial generation” shows socialist sympathies as evidenced by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for president and by a few new magazines and leftist podcasts. But the author admits that Marxism often seems more symbolic than real: “Witness young online socialists using the microblogging site Twitter to post birthday greetings to Marx on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth.”
Meanwhile, academic Marxists have pursued their disciplinary studies which, if important, remain insular and technical. In general, they adopted postmodern ideas about social constructionism — the idea that everything is discourse or artifice, including gender. In addition, they stapled to their contribution the label “critical,” a term borrowed from the Frankfurt School.
When the Frankfurt School introduced “critical theory,” it served as a code word for Marxism. As insecure refugees in the United States, they did not want to flaunt their Marxism. With little understanding of its original parameters, American academics attached “critical” to such terms as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical sociology, critical geography, and critical readings.
But where is the Marxism? “Critical race theory,” the most public and successful of these endeavors, shows little evidence of (or interest in) Marxism. It is an ideology of anti-racism.
The postmodern bent of Marxism turns it into a sludge of miscellaneous concepts and issues. A working class vanishes.
[...] While exemplary Marxist scholarship has been done, much is also narrow, even jargon-filled, destined to be confined to graduate seminars. Apart from the works of the Frankfurt School, which belong more to German than American Marxism, where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship? (MORE - missing details)
This is why the pessimism about Marxist scholarship being confined to campus circles is unwarranted to an extent, since those literary intellectuals still very much influenced and molded left-wing politics on the outside. Ancestral figures like Antonio Gramsci fueled the historical expansion to anti-Westernism and social oppression in general (i.e., beyond just the class war between the bourgeoisie and proles).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
American Marxism got lost on campus
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/american-mar...cal-theory
EXCERPTS: “American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive.” So laments Mark R. Levin in his 2021 book American Marxism. He explains that American Marxists “occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, boardrooms and entertainment, and their ideas are prominent within the Democratic Party, the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.”
[...] Marxists inspired the establishment of public schools in the nineteenth century and the Sixteen Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, which legalized a federal income tax. The ideas of John Dewey, the twentieth-century educational reformer, emerged from “the Marxist womb.”
Unlike Levin, students of Marxism have pondered the sharp limits of American Marxism, not its reach. Of course, a definitional issue hangs over the subject. Where does American socialism stop and American Marxism begin?
Karl Marx himself sought to distinguish his ideas from other forms of socialism, for instance what he called bourgeois socialism, which was advanced by “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.” These socialists want “the existing state of society” without its “disintegrating elements.” They want a “a bourgeoise without a proletariat.”
[...] In the United States, however, that sea has not sustained a robust socialism. For well over a century, commentators have remarked on the relative weakness of American socialism; and this in a country that lacked a feudal past or an aristocracy — a country that might be considered a pure case of capitalism. While Britain could claim a Labour Party and Germany a vigorous socialist movement, the United States had neither.
This absence struck a German socialist Werner Sombart [...] in 1906 ... he described the United States as “the country where the model of the Marxist theory of development is being most precisely fulfilled.” But the American worker was not embracing “socialism with a Marxist character.” Sombart offered various explanations of this paradox.
[...] the relative prosperity of the American worker doomed Marxism. In a sentence that would be endlessly quoted, Sombart declared: “All Socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.”
[...] Yet history harbored some surprises; Marxism refused to stay in the library stacks. In ... 1967, Bell observed that ... “a New Left has appeared in the United States.” ... “clearly the ideas of Marxism” are now “the common coin of American intellectual life.”
This is astonishing. In 1952, Marxism was dead. In 1967, Marxism was alive and well, indeed everywhere. Bell may have overstated the situation, but what became known as the New Left, itself part and parcel of the political ’60s, led to a renaissance of Marxism unprecedented in the United States.
[...] “We New Left Marxists” were “the first generation of American radicals born into the television era and the all-embracing mass culture.” ... Marxism evolved into “something scarcely recognizable to older generations of American Marxists..." ... In the past, socialists focused on the working class. But ... this was “a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.”
[...] In the German city of Frankfurt, a number of scholars assembled under the sponsorship of the Institute for Social Research to forge a new Marxism. ... With the onset of Nazism, virtually all its principals ended up in the United States, and to this day they are designated informally as the Frankfurt School.
During World War II, many Frankfurt School affiliates worked for government agencies that aided the war against Nazi Germany. By the 1950s, several had become professors in major American universities... [...] Eddies of Marxism existed outside of the universities ... But American Marxism largely unfolded on campuses....
[...] As Michael Burawoy, a Marxist sociologist, has commented, unlike elsewhere in the world, the renaissance of Marxism “in the United States was more confined to the academy.” This fact had both negative and positive consequences.
[...] In an earlier era, American philosophers sought and found an audience outside the campus. ... Today, however, philosophers prosper within departmental confines. ... Their impact remains within the profession. ... Academic Marxists from the 1980s to the present have more or less prospered, but in separate fiefdoms.
[...] the “millennial generation” shows socialist sympathies as evidenced by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for president and by a few new magazines and leftist podcasts. But the author admits that Marxism often seems more symbolic than real: “Witness young online socialists using the microblogging site Twitter to post birthday greetings to Marx on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth.”
Meanwhile, academic Marxists have pursued their disciplinary studies which, if important, remain insular and technical. In general, they adopted postmodern ideas about social constructionism — the idea that everything is discourse or artifice, including gender. In addition, they stapled to their contribution the label “critical,” a term borrowed from the Frankfurt School.
When the Frankfurt School introduced “critical theory,” it served as a code word for Marxism. As insecure refugees in the United States, they did not want to flaunt their Marxism. With little understanding of its original parameters, American academics attached “critical” to such terms as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical sociology, critical geography, and critical readings.
But where is the Marxism? “Critical race theory,” the most public and successful of these endeavors, shows little evidence of (or interest in) Marxism. It is an ideology of anti-racism.
The postmodern bent of Marxism turns it into a sludge of miscellaneous concepts and issues. A working class vanishes.
[...] While exemplary Marxist scholarship has been done, much is also narrow, even jargon-filled, destined to be confined to graduate seminars. Apart from the works of the Frankfurt School, which belong more to German than American Marxism, where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship? (MORE - missing details)