Teaching Marx in Kentucky in 2024
Philosophy professor W.D. James on the relevance of Marxism today
Hey Folks,
We here at Nevermore have published quite extensively on the subject of Marxism, and most of what we have published is quite critical.
Both myself and Paul Cudenec are strident anti-Marxists, though neither of us would deny that we have been influenced by Marx’s ideas, specifically his economic analysis.
If you ask me, there’s no shame in admitting this. After all, most of Marx’s ideas weren’t Marx’s ideas. Once upon a time, both anarchists and communists belonged to a single movement of working class people who called themselves “socialists” or “revolutionary socialists”. Marx compiled many ideas that were popular during his day, building a body of theory that now bears his name.
My favourite example of this is that the communist axiom “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”, which is generally attributed to Marx, was already a popular revolutionary slogan in his day.
Due to the present unpopularity of the Marx brand, critics of industrial capitalism may now wish to distance themselves from it. But it is difficult to avoid sounding like a Marxist sometimes, because Marxism has provided the “official counter-narrative” to capitalist hegemony for over a century now. My conclusion: we should avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We should regard Marx’s ideas with suspicion, but we shouldn’t reflexively reject specific aspects of his analysis simply because we don’t like Marxists.
It would be a gross exaggeration to say that all of Marx’s ideas have been debunked. For instance, the idea that human beings evolved a social structure of “primitive communism” over the course of millennia is still accepted by anthropologists today. Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Poverty, and the State in 1884, and it seems to have stood the test of time. That’s an impressive feat.
In any case, what you are about to read was written by regular Nevermore contributor W.D. James, who is a professor of philosophy at a university in Kentucky. Recently, he taught a course on Marxism, and decided to share some thoughts about the relevance of Marx’s ideas today.
We hope you enjoy this piece,
Crow Qu’appelle
p.s. If you wish to check out some of our previously published critiques of Marxism and the legacy of Bolshevism it inspired, I refer you to the following articles:
The Anarchist Case Against Marxism (Crow Qu’appelle)
Lenin Was a Psychopath (Tobin Owl)
Why Should Anyone Care About Karl Marx Today? (W.D. James)
Anarchist Vs. Marxist Mythos (Part 1) (Crow Qu’appelle)
Anarchist Vs. Marxist Mythos (Part 2) (Crow Qu’appelle)
“Communism Ruined Us” (Rozali Telbis)
Is Time Money? (On Marx’s Labour Theory of Value) (Crow Qu’appelle)
The False Red Flag 1: Pseudo-resistance (Paul Cudenec)
The False Red Flag 2: Lies and repression (Paul Cudenec)
The False Red Flag 3: Industrial slavery (Paul Cudenec)
The False Red Flag 4: A repugnant racket (Paul Cudenec)
TEACHING MARX IN KENTUCKY IN 2024
by W.D. James
Last fall I responded to a request from Crow Qu’appelle at Nevermore Media to write something on Karl Marx: apparently there was a deficit of people who were interested in saying anything positive about Uncle Karl.
In that essay, I noted that at one time I had considered myself a Marxist and still felt that my views were influenced by his theories. I noted that in having surveyed students, there was an interest in a class on Marx and I was preparing to teach that class in the spring semester. Having now done so, I thought it would be good, at least for myself, to think about what the main takeaways of that experience were.
The class itself was comprised of 21 students, slightly over the enrollment limit, so the class filled up and then some. The class had a good mix of folks racially and ethnically, with a couple of, I believe, foreign born students. In terms of gender, it tilted slightly male, probably because I had a good contingent of football players who tend to like to huddle together in classes just as they do on the line of scrimmage. Politically, the students tilted toward conservative and some somewhat further right than that. Socio-economically I think there were few if any students from genuinely wealthy backgrounds, but most are probably from comfortable to upper middle-class families. The athletes probably tend to be more diverse in this regard due to the scholarships available. From my perspective, it was a better than average class intellectually and in terms of willingness to engage seriously with ideas, but that is always a minority of any class these days.
I set the class up to be saturated with media to attempt to convey the idea of working-class struggle, culture, and ideas in a visceral way. We watched five full length films and listened to about 25 songs touching on the genres of folk, socialist anthems, rock, metal, country, punk, post-punk, hip hop, and probably some others. Our readings were mostly primary texts by Marx and Engels. Students read all of The Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as well as substantive selections from most of Marx’s other major works. The only other texts were brief selections from Alasdair MacIntyre and Byung-Chul Han to give them a sense of contemporary uses of Marx, especially uses that incorporate a positive stance toward religion (that’s my thing). In terms of readings, it was heavy duty stuff. Students were by and large engaged and responded positively to the material and ideas. So, there is the background. What follows are my reflections based both on having re-engaged pretty seriously with many of the original Marxist texts myself and from classroom and outside the classroom discussions with my students.
Bring back class analysis
A large part of my own continued interest in Marx over the years and decades has been his solid class-analysis of society. No one else even comes close to him on this. Class has largely been banished from our social, cultural and political discussions. In part that reflects intentional decisions of the post-Marxist left to focus on race, gender, and other ‘marginalized’ identities. With Marx’s materialist analysis of social structures, exploitation, and social change I think my students felt he was talking about something real and not just trading in platitudes.
Further, his description of the structural relationships between workers and employers helped make sense of their own experiences working. Showing how, structurally, the interests of those who own vast capital and those who own no capital cannot coincide is enlightening. Only one student reported positive experiences in their work lives thus far. He apparently has a lot of autonomy in his job and feels genuinely valued there. He already has an IT degree and works for a company that helps other companies off-shore their operations to take advantage of lower labor costs. An exception that proved the rule if there ever was one.
Also, it became clear that they had never really been exposed to ideas of class struggle: it was seemingly completely foreign to them. Their two favorite movies we watched were both gritty documentaries: Harlan County, USA and Roger and Me. The former is a story of striking coal miners in Kentucky in the 1970s. Their main takeaway from that film was how badly the workers were treated and how the government sided with the coal company in suppressing the strikers. The latter film is a pretty humorous look at the closing of auto plants in Flint, Michigan in the 1980s and 1990s. They really seemed to be able to connect with the theme of de-industrialization and the miseries it has imposed on working-class communities. The scenes that they discussed the most were a sheriff’s deputy going around evicting now unemployed workers and a gala hosted by auto company executives with a Great Gatsby theme where they hired unemployed auto worker to serve as human statues dressed in 1920s costumes (see top photo; woman in the center of the image).
What they reported liking about these films was their grittiness and honesty. I think this generation of students share a pretty wide perception that the media and culture more broadly aim at manipulating them and are filled with lies. They liked something that felt real and authentic. Also, they were clearly capable of a good bit of empathy with the workers portrayed. I don’t think they found anything too revelatory about the companies’ behavior in either film. I think they have a sort of disillusioned and somewhat cynical take on power, but accept its reality. Also, I think this resonated with economic anxieties my students experience: more about this below.
So, my valuing of this aspect of Marx was confirmed by my students.
Speak to aspirations and values
Though they appreciated the ‘scientific’ examination of these issues presented by Marx and Engels, my students wanted to also approach them from a moral perspective. In that regard, I think a contemporary radical politics would do well to include both aspects.
Also, there was almost a complete lack of utopianism or strict altruism on their part. They want a good life for themselves. They want careers but fear the economy may not provide them. This is also the first fully ‘COVID’ generation and they really want a normalcy to return, that they and I suspect they will not be afforded. They want a decent income but want to escape both the proletariat and the corporations by becoming entrepreneurs or some other creative alternative. In this regard, they are looking for something other than what traditional Marxism has to offer. Universal proletarianization is not what they are in the market for.
They did tune in pretty well to Marx’s critique in terms of quality of life as addressed in his theories of alienation, ideology, and commodity fetishism. Even the most ‘conservative’ seemed to share a solid conviction that capitalism’s values are all wrong, a life built around consumption is saturated with lies and manipulation, and that essentially no ‘authority’ (cultural, economic, political, educational) is telling them the truth about anything. In these regards, I think they are more in tune that the average college student. They have accepted being a post-truth generation, but don’t like it.
Be anti-authoritarian
There was no interest amongst my students for consolidating economic and political power in the hands of the state. They split about evenly on the question of whether the ideas of Marx himself lead to this (Soviet style Communism). That is, they largely split over the Leninist interpretation of Marxist revolution and the more democratic interpretation characteristic of Western non-Leninist Marxists. Either way, Marx’s prescriptions were not very interesting to them. However, interestingly, they felt Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism was still largely valid.
Race, Gender, Etc.
I utilized the movie Matewan to explore the Marxist critique of racism. I laid out a pretty high octane orthodox American Marxist interpretation. The film is about the events leading up to the Matewan Massacre which initiated the Mingo County War which is the largest multi-racial uprising in American history and the Battle of Blair Mountain is the largest battle on continental US soil since the Civil War. Coal miners and the company thugs and private army (and air force) went at it pretty good.
The film emphasizes the capitalist strategy of using black and immigrant Italian workers as scabs to try to break the strike by native white workers. As I mentioned, my class leaned right. You could visibly see some of them roll their eyes and start to tune out—but then they got interested again as I presented a decision theory model of especially southern white working-class options and cost-benefit analysis in a class situation further divided by racial division.
Ultimately, they saw that the critique I was offering was not ‘woke’ and I think they gave it a good deal of sympathy. Our school is not particularly woke, or at least the students aren’t. Reflecting on this, I notice that the Marxist critique of race (and gender) was resisted by corporations with a great deal of vigor while currently corporations, the larger and more global the better, actively embrace ‘woke,’ or more specifically Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. A political philosophy guy who has read Marx can’t help but ask: why is that?
A revolutionary tipping point?
A Marxist critique of DEI efforts seems blatantly obvious to me, but I can’t say I have seen it made forcefully. I am told that this sort of critique is launched by the left in Europe. That makes sense in that the Euro left has usually had more radical elements in it and the American left has usually been dominated by liberals. I think it would go something like this. Within DEI, diversity is understood primarily in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Class, if it comes in at all, is only layered in as a secondary factor in mapping out the intersectional aspects of disparity. This is the opposite of a Marxist analysis. Further, I don’t see the relatively well compensated DEI functionaries in universities and corporations making any direct challenge to economic structures. They seem content to focus on the redistribution of privilege within the existing economic structures. I’m guessing they don’t regularly call for worker expropriation of the owners’ capital.
Hence, from a Marxist perspective, I think DEI would be seen as a conservative or actually reactionary ideological formation (since it actively undercuts the ability of the working-class to formulate a radical critique of the ownership of the means of production and, in fact, seeks to incorporate many of those who would have reason to be critical of the current arrangements, while reinforcing those very arrangements, and managing to divide the working-class along race and gender lines as well).
So, that same political philosopher might ask: why are corporations, especially, actively embracing this ideology and the consequent redistribution of privilege along intersectional lines? If one also notices the steep decline in class mobility, which is becoming especially acute and undisguisable amongst the millennials and gen Zers, the increasing costs of higher education, and increasing student debt, the situation starts to become clear.
An undergraduate college education has increasingly ceased to be about actually acquiring skills or growing as a person (though both of those still happens to some extent) and has essentially become a credential to enter the elite (if you go to certain colleges) or at least the large mid-level managerial sub-elite (the rest). From the end of World War Two through most of the 1980s the American economy could pretty well incorporate everyone who obtained that credential (essentially a marker of class standing and a level of ‘professional’ socialization).
Also, one needs to realize that tuition pricing is essentially a Ponzi scheme. Remember, what one is buying is a credential to enter ‘the middle class’ or ‘upper class’. As the popular demand for increased access to that credential increased, government responded by increasing funding for public universities and providing student aid and loans. The trick is that universities know students will pay whatever it takes or they won’t get the credential, the golden ticket. So, the more government provides, and the more students are allowed to borrow, the higher tuition costs go (essentially to fund the burgeoning legion of ‘administrators’). The real cost to attend university is around 3 to 10 times what it was in the 1980s, depending on the institution. Up until the 1990s, not much of this mattered as at least certain sectors of the US economy could grow enough to accommodate all the credential holders.
What is clear from declining class mobility, increasing student debt, and the active embrace of redistributing privilege within the ‘elite’ is that ‘the system’ can no longer do that. Since at least 2008, the economic elite has been operating under something like an austerity mindset: opportunity is more like a zero sum game. Hence, privilege needs to be redistributed intersectionally to provide social stability (every group gets some of the pie). Both continued dynamic growth and radical reform are off the table, from the elite/corporate perspective, for objective historical economic reasons (to get back to Marx).
This promises to potentially create the most revolutionary of social situations. Revolutions usually do not come when oppression is the heaviest. They come when expectations or aspirations rise above what the status quo can deliver. Further, it helps if those whose expectations are not being met include a significant portion of the more highly educated and skilled. That situation is now reaching a tipping point. My students are still willing to take on a lot of debt and hope for a lucrative spot in the economy. At this point, many of them will find that, but some won’t. When that tips to a significant portion not finding those spots, or otherwise capable potential students realizing that it is simply not worth taking on the debt to start with, given the limited opportunities, that is a whole new situation, one the Western ‘developed’ nations have not faced since the 1930s.
Lessons for a contemporary radicalism:
· Incorporate a solid materialist class-analysis
· But also include the moral and ‘spiritual’ case
· Teach the history of class struggle
· Cultivate class cultures
· State control of the economy is not a desired outcome
· Likewise an authoritarian political party is not appealing
· Attention to ‘quality of life’ issues is (alienation, false capitalist values, etc.)
· Also, ‘realism’ as to people wanting a decent material standard of living and worthwhile work should not be ignored
· Woke and DEI are not winners, but people are open to objective considerations of race, gender, etc….
· Diminished opportunities for class mobility, especially among the educated, is a potential point of radicalization.
· Workers, petty bourgeois (entrepreneurs, small businesspeople), and underemployed intellectuals of the world unite?