Marx, K
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">systemic thinker, best critic of capitalism?</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wapo 220</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Paul Kane</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">February 26, 2020 at 1:27 PM EST</font></div><div><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Rubio says Sanders is a Marxist, not a democratic socialist</font></b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) continued to press his argument Wednesday that Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, is actually a Marxist — offering a preview of the kind of Republican attacks the senator from Vermont could face if he becomes the Democratic nominee.</font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Bernie Sanders is actually not a socialist. His sympathies and ideas are Marxist,” Rubio said in a tweet, referring to the ideology named for 19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rubio attached a clip of an appearance on Fox News from Tuesday night in which he made that argument.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This is Marxism, and Marxism is based on the belief that no person has any value as an individual, that your value is that you’re a member of a class,” Rubio told host Sean Hannity. “Second, Marxism is based on the belief that an employer and an employee, a worker and an owner, can’t both help each other and both be better off.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>Liberal policies are incoherent because Democrats have been polluted by these two failed world-views</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon August 4, 2019</div><div>There are no hippies on Haight Street anymore. Along the eponymous road in the storied San Francisco neighborhood, arguable birthplace of the counterculture movement, tourist shops hawk tie-dye memorabilia to commemorate hippie culture, music and style. Yet aside from physical tchotchkes, the spirit of the 1960s no longer permeates the Haight: gone are the grinning, barefoot peaceniks, as are the free clinic and the Diggers. In their place? Aggrieved, techie millionaire property-owners whose primary spiritual tenets are not free love but property values.</div><div>
</div><div>Though the modern Haight resident may seem at odds with the busking, guitar-strumming hippie of yore, the two have far more in common than they might seem. The counterculture ideology of the 1960s was absorbed into Silicon Valley: many of the hippie era believed earnestly that technology, in particular computers, had the potential to revolutionize the world. Author John Markoff, who chronicled the history of the early computer industry in Silicon Valley, writes that the inventors of the PC clustered around Stanford were “deeply influenced by the 1960’s counterculture and by the anti-war movement.” “The computer technologies that we take for granted today owe their shape” to the hippies, he writes, noting that hippies were politically “split between modern-day Luddites and technophiles [w]ho believed better tools could lead to social progress.”</div><div> </div><div>Though it sounds quaint now, many of those who fell into the latter category, including the acid-downing Steve Jobs, thought that networked computers would usher in a populist, user-led revolution where, as digital beings freed from government’s oppressive shackles, we would overcome the The Man.</div><div>
</div><div>That, clearly, did not happen; computers, and particularly networked computers — meaning, the modern Internet — have oppressed us in new ways unforeseen by our utopian hippie forebears. Indeed, Silicon Valley’s internet giants now profit primarily from surveillance, selling targeted ads based on observed knowledge of their users. Yet despite a compelling lack of evidence for its efficacy, this techno-utopian mindset reigns supreme in Silicon Valley, so much so that the scions of Silicon Valley often genuinely believe they’re doing good when they are really engaged in so much surveillance or exploitation.</div><div>
</div><div>How could a movement defined by free love and civil liberties be digested into the tech industry’s cynical maw? The answer is actually quite simple: the vast majority of hippies, in the United States at least, lacked a coherent class-based analysis undergirding their politics. They did not understand, ideologically, the ways in which the rich oppress poor; that meant that a businessman who did not behave like one — who perhaps exploited his workers but wore tie-dye and read Baba Ram Dass — might be seen as a fellow traveler in hippiedom, whereas a poor working-class worker who detested the hippie aesthetic might be seen as an incorrigible enemy, a foot-soldier of “The Man.”</div><div>
</div><div>This lack of a coherent class-based analysis doomed the American hippies’ politics, and their vague and ideologically flexible ideals could be easily folded into something as sinister as Apple, the epitome of wasteful planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption. Partly this was due to the class upbringing of many hippies: most emerged from the middle-class, and were generally white. Thus, their politics were encapsulated by their petit-bourgeois upbringings; indeed, it takes a certain degree of material comfort to be able to drop out and live on a commune for a few years. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While there were <b>pseudo- or fully-Marxist political groups ancillary to the hippie movement — in particular the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, American Indian Movement and the Young Lords</b> — these groups were the exception to a largely formless mass movement whose primary politics were social libertarianism and anti-war sentiment.</span></div><div>
</div><div>But to return to Silicon Valley: there is even a term for the school of thought that defines this synthesis of counterculture libertinism and techno-utopianism: it is called the California Ideology. Jason Rhode, writing in Salon, called it the “belief system of the ruling techie class.” “T]ech culture is right-wing economics covered over with a layer of hippie rhetoric,” Rhode writes; the doctrine’s “central tenet” is that “machines [will] fix everything,” he continues.</div><div>
</div><div>What Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism consistently misunderstands is that technology does not exist in a vacuum; technology is politics. Pieces of technology are borne of political decisions and have political origins; most are designed to maximize profit for the creator. This is a political function of the highest order, and explains why technology never solves social problems, as it literally can’t; only politics can</div><div>
</div><div>Few of the techies who have absorbed these hippie ideals would identify with their indirect origins in hippiedom. Yet on the other side of the see-saw, there are today still some New Agey neo-hippies, direct ideological descendants of the 1960s — people who perhaps have lost the aesthetic, but still believe in counterculture tenets, and have some vague understanding of “love” as the universal answer to all our problems, political and otherwise. Many of those who count themselves among this New Age fork of hippiedom are readily identifiable celebrities: Deepak Chopra, Masaru Emoto, and of course, Marianne Williamson, spiritualist, author, and Democratic contender for President. Williamson is particularly adept at articulating her vague and inconsistent worldview in quick soundbites, as she did towards the end of the second round of Democratic debates:</div><div>
</div><div>I want a politics that goes much deeper. I want a politics that speaks to the heart, because the only way to fight — you keep talking about how we’re going to fight Donald Trump. You can’t fight dog whistles. You have to override them.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>And the only way you can override them is with new voices, voices of energy that only come from the fact that America has been willing to live up to our own mistakes, atone for our mistakes, make amends for our own mistakes, love each other, love our democracy, love future generations, something emotional and psychological that will not [be] emerging from anything on this stage. It will emerge from something I’m the one who’s qualified [sic] to bring forth.</div><div>
</div><div>This reads like an ahistorical spin on a Marxist class analysis. In Williamson’s worldview, oppressors like Trump will not cease oppressing because their subjects rise up — but rather when said oppressors’ voices are “overridden” with an emergent love.</div><div>
</div><div>Historically, this doesn’t tend to work. You can’t appeal to some imagined conscience of those who exploit you. In general, those who are engaged in oppression or exploitation — especially when it has a material basis in which it enriches the oppressor — have shaped their entire belief system around their perception. Or, in Upton Sinclair’s words: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”</div><div>
</div><div>There was never a war that was won because of appealing to the power of love, and there was never a strike that was won by appealing to the power of love. Mass movements are borne of people, action, and protest. The rich won’t change their minds and empty their wallets because you ask them to feel more love — and anyway, even if a few of them did, that wouldn’t undo the structural underpinnings of the system that enables their ilk to exploit. The “power of love” schtick can be part of this type of protest, but it cannot be the only thing — because a lack of love is not what drives exploitation. A want of power and money is.</div><div>
</div><div>The point of all this is, much of American liberalism is trapped politically between two false gods: the utopian technologists of Silicon Valley and the “power of love” crowd exemplified by Williamson. Both are unworkable paths to social change.</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">interesting distinction:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Where Is the Study of Western Civilization?</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If we take the nation’s history in a broader sense, that history is a part of the history of Western</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">civilization, the civilization that in large part made it what it is. Yet here too, not one of the UC campuses</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">requires any coursework in the history of Western civilization. Even more disturbing is the fact that there</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">is not a single history department on any of the campuses that requires a survey course in Western</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">civilization of its history majors. And most shocking of all, on almost all campuses (the exceptions being</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UCLA and UC Davis) Western civilization courses are simply not offered at all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Until recently, a reasonable knowledge of the history of Western civilization was considered an</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">important attribute of a well-educated person. A powerful case can be made for the wisdom of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">that attitude. First, we are all children of the Western tradition – it has made us who we are. To</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">understand where we came from, students must certainly understand the political, scientific, and artistic</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">44 This was in an NAS report: “The Vanishing West, 1964-2010. The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Undergraduate Curriculum,” issued May 2011, http://www.nas.org/images/documents/TheVanishingWest.pdf.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">achievements of ancient Greece, and how these have developed and changed over time until they</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">resulted in the way we live now. The National Association of Scholars’ recent study puts the matter thus:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In studying the rise of the West, students came to grips with how the arts and sciences encountered</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">in other classes had been shaped.” Modernity – that is, the form of life that has spread and is still</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">spreading across the globe – has to a very large extent been shaped by the Western tradition. Again,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the NAS study puts the point well:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Western Civilization has transformed the human condition. This remains</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">invisible or at best gropingly understood by students who have had no chance</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">to study systematically the rise of the West, which brings into focus better</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">than anything else the origins and development of a sophisticated worldwide</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">marketplace; an impersonal, rule-based bureaucracy; the scientific outlook;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">modern medicine, lengthened life-spans, democracy and constitutionalism, and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the massive increase in material abundance….Studying the history of the West</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">brings a student to grips, as nothing else can, with the roots, the shaping events,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the underlying causes of the process and substance of globalization, indeed, of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the creation of modernity itself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This positive assessment of the Western tradition would also be found debatable by the radical political</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">culture of the campuses, and once again the response must be: where is the debate? But if that debate</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">were to take place, the incoherence of this vehement opposition to the Western tradition would soon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">emerge. For the cherished ideas of campus radicals are all very Western ideas, and the thinkers who</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">developed them are all solidly part of the Western tradition. Radicals charge the West endlessly with</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">racism, sexism, class oppression, and imperialism. Yet radical egalitarianism is based on the ideas of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rousseau and Marx, the abolition of the world-wide practice of slavery was a European cause and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">achievement, equal rights for women was fought for and achieved in the West, and it was the European</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enlightenment that led to the end of empires. Properly understood, the place in the spectrum of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">political ideas that campus political radicalism occupies is that of a Western extremist, the exact opposite</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">of an anti-Westerner. Suppose that we ask the question: what is the history of the radical left? There is</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">only one place to go to find its origins. It is part of the history of the Western tradition. A good course in</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the Western tradition might be of great benefit to these confused Western extremists. They might then</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">realize that they are not attacking the Western tradition from without, but on the contrary pressing for a</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">more extreme version of its ideas from within.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We can recognize the need for debate on all of these issues, but one fact remains. Ignorance of the</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">salient events in the history of the great civilization that has made us who we are is, quite simply,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ignorance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Within particular disciplines there are still more bizarre curricular choices that stunt a student’s</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">education, but most of these are only offshoots of the confused and misdirected campus hostility</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">to the Western tradition. On several campuses it is now possible to graduate with a major in English </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">literature without having read a word of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. If this were simply the result</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">of a trendy aversion to dictating to students what they must do, that would be bad enough; but it is</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">not. At UC San Diego, for example, while the literature major does not specifically require a course on</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shakespeare, it certainly does require that all majors must have done a survey course in either Chicano</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">literature, African-American Literature, or Asian-American literature. This is political correctness taken to</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the point of caricature. Political choices come first, while great writers can be ignored. A major in English</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">literature should at the very least make sure that students are exposed to the greatest English-speaking</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">writers, because with that they will gain a mastery of the subtleties of their native language as well as</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an acquaintance with some of the greatest minds in history. But in the current campus culture these</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">considerations are trumped by the familiar theme of ethnicity and victimhood.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another example of a major program degraded by a bizarre curricular choice can be seen in the case</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">of political science. One might assume that any student majoring in political science would of necessity</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">devote much time, thought, and coursework to the constitution and political history of this nation. First,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">because of its intrinsic importance as the longest-running essentially unchanged political system in</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the world; second, because it is at the moment the most influential; third, because it represents the</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">culmination of centuries of European political thought; and fourth, because that is the system that they</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">live with. But on several campuses, a student can graduate as a major in political science and never</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">have taken a course in American politics. Only a quite extraordinary degree of alienation could have</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">produced this absurd result.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If omissions are bizarre and educationally damaging, inclusions can be just as bewildering. <b>Take,</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>for example, the proliferation of courses on Karl Marx at UC Santa Cruz.</b> The politics department</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">has an introductory class on Marx, but so does the sociology department, the community studies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">department, the legal studies department, and the history of consciousness department. Several of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">these departments have a number of other courses on Marxism too. No other political thinker has a</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">course devoted exclusively to his thought. It is as if the news that Marxism is now an obsolete system of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">thought after disastrous results in so many countries had not reached the campus.45 Adolescent Marxist</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nostalgia still evidently reigns on campus and impedes a return to reality – but where are the adults</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">who might be pointing out that it is time to grow up and move on to thinkers who have been able to</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">withstand the test of time and to remain more relevant to modern life? There is little doubt that these</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bizarre curricular choices and omissions result from a lack of political diversity among the faculty.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE | 49</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div>