<p>I am not even kind of a communist and I think marxist studies classes would be really interesting. But then, I am a poli sci major.</p>
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<p>Closet Commie.</p>
<p>^It’s hyperbole because you don’t have to be “ultra-communist” to look at texts in a Marxist theoretical framework. You can recognize Marx and Marxism for what it brings to the table and TEACH Marx and Marxism without being a propagandist Communist 
Even Duke’s Marxist studies department is probably not overrun by self-professed radical communists, though there may be one or two of those I think you’d be even more hard pressed to claim any English department in the entire United States is some kind of haven for ultra radicals. Just because the students/professors find it interesting and relevant doesn’t mean they’re radicals themselves.</p>
<p>Honestly the same could be said then for a history or government department. There’s a NEED to learn about these theoretical constructs in these fields - there’s a need for experts in the fields of leftist studies - not the least of the reason being that a LOT of people in the world have been influenced by the left, and the fact that they’re being taught and examined doesn’t make the professors radicals :p</p>
<p>Thanks for the article zapfino. A good read, but it outlined some trends in English departments over the years without explaining the “why” of those trends or going into much detail about each trend.</p>
<p>I found a wikipedia article that might maybe possible put in more context the problem I was trying to discuss. Here’s an excerpt:</p>
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<p>[Sokal</a> affair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair]Sokal”>Sokal affair - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>just adding what my experience has been:
It’s sometimes necessary to include historical context, for example, John Donne’s Satires make a lot more sense when you get the context that he was writing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and was a Catholic before he converted to Protestantism. Otherwise, you just get a bunch of rhymes about sex…
I also didn’t notice my professor going on about sociology or communism, more of just laying out the background of writers so they were more easily understood. Essentially, teaching. The other courses listed in the coursebook have titles like Jane Austen, Study of Shakespeare, Writing Modern Fiction, etc. I didn’t notice any on grammar, but that could be because college students should be expected to be basically competent??? Linguistics is its own major at my college, so I can’t speak on why there’s none of that in the English department. Basically, I am not an English Major, but the English class I have taken was not what you described and neither was the professor.
As for the other issue of why a core curriculum is necessary. I feel that people need a baseline before they start specializing. Without it, they don’t fully recognize all the options they have.</p>
<p>"I am not even kind of a communist and I think marxist studies classes would be really interesting. But then, I am a poli sci major. "</p>
<p>Well like I said on the other page, we learned a bit of Marx in World Philosopher’s on Death, it was the entire second unit. He made a very nice case for saying how capitalism steals our individual identity. It’s been a year so I don’t remember the ENTIRE argument but it was essentially saying something like this: John is a Pencilmaker, he makes Pencils, that’s his identity. At the end of the day he is paid in x amount of pencils which he can then trade to others for equivilant goods and services. If money is put into the equation, then the identity is shifted away from the “pencilmaker” and to how much money he made each day, which is then used as a universal currency for everything. Then it becomes less about “John the Pencilmaker” and becomes “John the guy who just bought the $1500 plasma screen for the back of his $10,000 monster truck w/ trucknut attachment” </p>
<p>I’m not really… putting it as eloquently as it was explained in class but that’s the general idea. I really don’t get these people who immediately vomit vitirol whenever -gasp- Marxism is mentioned. What, you’re SO afraid of an opposing viewpoint that you feel the need to stamp out Marxist, Communist, Socialist, non-Capitalist viewpoints entirely? They’re SO subversive to you they shouldn’t be allowed to be taught? That’s not how college works, sorry. The only place that flies is in Reparative Therapy because that ****'s not an opposing viewpoint as much as it is abuse. </p>
<p>Seriously, the works aren’t that bad, you can’t understand the classics if you don’t understand the mindset along with it. You can’t understand The Stranger unless you’ve at least been INTRODUCED to Existentialism, not at the deepest level anyway. How can you read The Ramayana, Mahabharata, or the Bhagivhad Gita if you don’t know the Indian caste system? For that matter, Dante’s Inferno/Divine Comedy if you don’t know medieval Europe’s OWN caste system? Really… you can’t.</p>
<p>Who is saying Marx shouldn’t be taught? If for no other reason, he is an important part of understanding the history of economic thought. He’s one of the most misunderstood figures in history. Even his alleged followers barely understand what he was really teaching. Without a solid grounding in the classical economics of his day, you can’t hope to understand him. Unfortunately he is mostly taught these days by humanities professors who barely understand modern Econ 101 let alone classical economics, and who get many key aspects of his teachings wrong. And you certainly can’t look to people like Lenin or Trotsky for proper interpretations of Marx.</p>
<p>A few common errors you hear are:</p>
<p>1) Marx had a labor theory of value (he had a <em>definition</em> of value, not a theory, big difference)
2) Marx favored top-down socialism of the kind you saw in the Soviet Union and North Korea today (he didn’t favor ANY kind of forced socialism, rather he expected that socialism would emerge via voluntary action by individuals after capitalism went through the stages he predicted, he was expressly against it being forced on anyone)
3) Marx favored using education as government propaganda (he was against the government interfering in school curriculum)
4) Marx was 100% the opposite of capitalism as embodied by Smith, Ricardo, et al (he was no more “against” the free market than a lepidopterist is “against” larvae, he saw it as a necessary stage of societal development and recognized the improved prosperity that it brought)
5) Marx would be in favor of price controls (he and Engels both wrote against them, they understood how prices allocated resources, an essential component of the market economy)</p>
<p>While Marx had a brilliant mind, he was pretty much wrong on everything <em>original</em> he had to say about economics. I mean this in the nicest way. It’s true that Marx was right on some things, but those things he was right on were commonly taught by economists decades before Marx arrived on the scene.</p>
<p>By the time Marx had died and the volumes of Capital were being published, economics had completely passed him by via the Marginal Revolution. Even later communist economists, like Oskar Lange, considered him discredited. The basic problem was that Marx’s analysis of a market economy was wrong, which meant that all of the predictions which followed from that were wrong too. Marx was very specific about how he interpreted the workings of the free market and what he thought would happen, step-by-step, in the future of capitalism. But he turned out to be wrong because his precepts were wrong. Too much to go into here, especially since this isn’t a thread on Marx.</p>
<p>As for “capitalism stealing your identity,” while you can’t argue with a <em>definition</em> of “identity,” you can argue with the ramifications of the theory. And it has been empirically demonstrated time and again that freedom of expression and individuality are squelched under socialism and flourish under a free market.</p>
<p>Higher education is a market economy. If demand isn’t there for a department or a school, something needs to happen to that department or school before it ceases to exist. I think given the evolution of our times, an English major then(50 years ago or decades ago), might have lead to specific jobs as an editor or writer, where as now an English major isn’t necessarily studied to lead to specific jobs or careers. If this is the case, then it would make sense for it to be more broad than specific. I can understand and see why you would make statements about the English professors, but I think if anything it’s an added benefit to studying literature with someone who is highly passionate about what they think they read or see in a work of literature. Being in classes with professors like this(across all departments, not just in English) serves to point out what one may have missed had one’s independent reading been different. To be taught that, I think isn’t a matter of indoctrination(even though it may seem like this for some), it becomes a matter of developing the skills to think more abstractly, critically, and analytically of just about anything.</p>
<p>With Philosophy, the opposite happened. Philosophy is now more pedantic than it used to be, with its main aim and concern appearing to be about clarity, language, and logic. If English was once pedantic and one were interested in this type of education, one could possibly find a home in Philosophy. In thinking about Philosophy, I’m sure statistics of philosophy, as it being a great major for high lsat scores, has had some influence in the supply and demand of it by those who know for a fact they want to go into law school. If at one point Philosophy was too abstract and liberal, and it lead to fewer students in the department, the changing into the analytical may make sense as given with time more students have tended to go to college for a piece of paper to get a job, as opposed to learning for the sake of learning.</p>
<p>@Tom</p>
<p>Possibly a bit off topic but you reminded me of something else my professor mentioned in that class, about there being 3 steps of Communism. Educating the public, revolting and taking total control of the government, then reforming it from the top down and relinquishing power. The argument was that all of the dictatorships we’ve identified as “communist” only stopped at step 2, but never stepped down like they were supposed to. I might be misremembering the exact phrasing of the steps but the idea was to take power, reform the system, then step down, and the problem is the leaders get drunk with power and don’t step down. Essentially, the argument was their communism isn’t even actual communism because they never performed step 3.</p>
<p>Well, it is absolutely true that no country has every gone through the stages Marx predicted, and as I said that’s because there were major flaws (less evident at the time he wrote, but much more evident in hindsight after 150 more years of economic theory) in his analysis of capitalism which prevented these stages from occurring (for instance, business cycles didn’t work the way he thought they did, and wages didn’t tend towards starvation levels like he thought they would, etc., a lot of this is because his definition of “value” was off)</p>
<p>What a lot of people get wrong is to say that, therefore, the Soviet Union, Cuba, etc., were never really communist. This is <em>not</em> true, they most certainly were “communist,” they just weren’t “Marxist.” The Soviet Union was Leninist/Stalinist, China was Maoist, etc. Just because they produced totally different results from what most communists hoped for, doesn’t mean they weren’t communist in their methods and institutions. It’s like saying that a person isn’t religious because he is a Muslim instead of a Christian, and only true “Christians” are “religious.”</p>
<p>Marx and his “Communist Manifesto” was not the gold standard of communism, the idea of communism was around before he wrote about it, and after he died and Lenin picked up his ideas and modified them beyond recognition, it somehow got into a lot of peoples’ heads that “Marxism” and “communism” were one and the same thing. As you may have learned from your philosophy professors, one can be a communist without being a Marxist, and one can be a Marxist (philosophically) without being a communist.</p>