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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I don’t know that you will see this question, since you’ve blocked me, but I would like to know what Big University you have in mind that’s staffed by Marxists.

It is not controversial to say that most universities are skewed heavily to the left. Claims of Marxism are much more specific, as well as much less compatible with the kind of boring neoliberalism which shows up elsewhere in white-collar America.

I think you are crafting a strawman, here, in which the specter of Communism justifies suppressing your political enemies. I don’t believe that you have an example university with such a staff, much less one that has buried a law, social program, or politician in service of Marxism.

Well, in order to properly answer your question, it would be useful to know whether or not you consider the Critical Theory tradition to be Marxist. I obviously do, and I’m confident that @JarJarJedi does as well, but this seems to be a common point of divergence between left and right as it regards how to assess Critical fields. If you believe that Crits are not Marxist because they have moved past materialist economic critiques, then we could present all the evidence in the world that countless universities are absolutely swimming with Marxists, and you would find it unconvincing because you don’t share our assessment of what makes somebody a Marxist.

I think this is also not very important who exactly is defined as "Marxist". It's just a word, if we use another word to define the same set of folks, sharing roughly the same ideology and occupying now most of the academic space, the outcome would be the same. "Marxist" is a convenient word because it gives a good estimate what this ideology is about and where its roots come from, and I think it is not a bad estimate. But if the word is the problem one can use any other word, that's not the point and there's no use to get bogged down in trying to refine the precise definition if we already know what we're talking about.

That might be a fair point.

Okay, let's grant that critical theory is, literally, Cultural Marxism. What's the most prominent university that you would say is overwhelmingly critical theorists?

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