HITALTCAASHR, part 3.1: College English leftism: How did it begin? · 3:22am May 6th, 2017
This is a continuation of HITALTCAASHR, Part 2: What are English departments teaching? The series begins with How I took a literary theory class and accidentally stopped hating Republicans, part 1.
How did the shift to the left in English departments begin?
I have here two quotes from people at the center of the process. The first is by the editor of College English during the late 60s and early 70s, and explains in detail how College English became a leftist publication during 1967-1974. The second is a partial recounting of how the Modern Language Association (MLA), the most-prestigious academic organization in English, became radicalized in 1968.
From Ohmann, Richard: WHAT IS COLLEGE ENGLISH? Some Reflections. College English (76:3) Jan 2014, 269-273. Long quote is long, but this is from the pony’s mouth. Or, skip the quotes and go my summary. If you trust me. What's not to trust? 
Well, surprise. There was a war. The civil rights movement gave rise to a black power movement. Within two years, a new wave of feminism began to "inform" the "enterprise" of English--and much else. Soon a gay and lesbian movement emerged. Student activism for a role in curricular decisions and for an education relevant to social and personal urgencies mingled with these other activisms. The postwar boom crested, and along with it the growth curve of spending on higher education.
It took a while for that last earthquake beyond the ivied walls to shake College English. But other tremors from outside arrived punctually in these pages. The last issue (May 1967) of my first year included Edward Nell and Onora Nell's "War Words," a detailed and-to my mind-devastating analysis of the ways that US military and political leaders talked about the fighting in Vietnam…. They were not by a long shot discussing concepts of criticism or the structure of college English (for that matter, one of them was an economist and the other a philosopher). Apparently, in just a few months, I had stretched my definition of our field enough to include a semantic critique of dominant US ideology.
The anti-war movement was surely channeling me, when I accepted the Nells' article. No other was so directly about Vietnam, but the war and resistance to it ran like a current through CE from then on. Peter Elbow's discussion of sincerity in his classic, "A Method for Teaching Writing" (Nov. 1968), drew heavily on his experience advising students on the essays they needed to submit with their applications for conscientious objector status. Irving Halperin's quietly reflective piece on teaching through and around the strike at San Francisco State was filled with students' anger about the war, as well as about racial injustice. Bruce Franklin's far from quiet polemic, "The Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire" (Mar. 1970), took heart from the way the "struggle of the revolutionary masses of Vietnam [threw] the lie into the rotten teeth" of "cynical men of power" (556).
The movement for racial equality made its way into CE in various registers, from Darwin Turner's smoothing out of the prickly question, are only black people qualified to teach black literature? ... to the purposeful prickliness of Michele Russell's "Erased, Debased, and Encased: The Dynamics of African Educational Colonization in America," next-door neighbor to Turner's "The Teaching of Afro-American Literature" in the April 1970 issue. The same issue included Dennis Szilak's "Afro a.m.: Renaissance in the Revolution," an argument for teaching respectfully about Black English and--on occasion--in it. A number of articles in other issues took up the related matter of bidialectalism (mostly on the negative side). African American perspectives were the chief expressions of college English from below, through this time, but claims for and of other previously excluded or denigrated voices reached these pages, too: for example, in Gerald Haslam's "iPor La Causa! Mexican-American Literature" (Apr. 1970); and, in February 1971, "Vision and Experience in Black Elk Speaks," by Robert Sayre and "The Study of Nineteenth Century British Working Class Poetry," by Martha Vicinus. In 1966, the flagship's admiral [the author means himself] had not foreseen a multicultural college English. The canon failed to make his list of critical concepts needing attention.
Neither had he anticipated or hailed feminist criticism, women's studies programs, more women's literature in the English classroom, fair treatment for women in college English, or--for that matter--more articles by women in College English. There had been fewer than one per issue in the last year of James Miller's editorship. The entire first year of mine featured one article (co)authored by a woman. Two issues into my second year came Lynn Bloom's article, coauthored with Martin Bloom. Now I learn from her essay in the March 2013 symposium that the manuscript came to CE with only Martin Bloom identified as author. Might I have rejected it if I thought a woman had (co-)written it? Too humiliating to contemplate.
So it was without guidance from the bridge that CE sailed out toward second-wave feminism. Rather, the women's movement arose outside the academy and then spread inside it. Academic feminists rebelled and organized in various fields, including the one represented by the Modern Language Association [the other main academic publication in literature], which responded by forming a Commission on Women that held a forum at the 1970 convention. Susan McAllester, the poetry editor of College English and herself an early feminist, gathered and edited a number of talks from the forum and associated workshops into a special issue on "Women in the Colleges" (May 1971).... I consider this one of the most important issues of a professional journal to have appeared through this tumultuous period in US higher education…. The same was true of the successor issue on women in the colleges (Oct. 1972). Elaine Hedges guest-edited it. This was another fine moment in the history of CE, featuring articles by Tillie Olsen and Adrienne Rich. I was proud of it, from my back seat on the bridge of the flagship.
I was also gratified by the way Louie Crew and Rictor Norton ended their editorial, "The Homophobic Imagination," in the November 1974 issue that they guest-edited: "The appearance of gay space in this issue of College English is more than a refreshingly novel turning of the tables: it is a step towards human liberation" (290). I could have imagined no such step when I wrote my 1966 directive for the journal; nor would I have taken that step in 1974 without the prodding and hard work of Crew and Norton. Their editorial bears close rereading today. It was learned, visionary, practical--a kind of founding statement for gay studies, in what I think was the first issue of a professional journal on this subject. "The New Marxist Criticism" (Nov. 1972, edited by Ira Shor and Richard Wasson) was far from the first on its topic, but it was an early and influential effort to reopen an old field that McCarthyism had driven underground for nearly twenty years. When the flagship sailed into new seas, guests were often at the helm. I think of them now as disciplinary guides thrown up to the bridge by surging 1960s and 1970s political movements. I was active in the anti-war movement and close to some of the others. To shift the metaphor: were activists my college English "networks," comparable to those Byron Hawk helpfully analyzes in the March 2013 symposium, to describe the process of disciplinarity? Retrospectively, mine seem to have inhabited a good deal more territory outside the academic institution, at first. Hawk challenges the familiar idea of the flagship journal as gatekeeper (to shift the metaphor yet again): looking back at CE that way, I'm inclined to say a big historical wind blew the gate open, knocked down the gatekeeper, and somewhat violently reshuffled practitioners' understandings of disciplinarity in college English.
During those years, two other movements-the student movement and the counterculture-left their marks on the journal, often calling into question the basic terms of our field's disciplinarity, or the profession itself. For an amusing and striking example, see Tom Reck, "The Assistant Professor Who Returned to His Own Discipline" (Mar. 1968). But these movements were diffuse and largely unorganized; to follow their traces through CE would be a challenging task. In any case, I have said enough to make my point: that at some historical moments, changes in a discipline as registered in and facilitated by a flagship journal may evolve more or less independently of the editor's expectations and ground rules, in response to historical pressures from outside the discipline--in fact, from outside the academic sphere.
From the introduction to Lennard Davis 1990, Left Politics and the Literary Profession:
It was December of 1968. The prehistory constitutes an almost mythical chronology: the student sit-ins of 1960s and the organization by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964; Berkeley 1965; and the Columbia strike of spring 1968. Kampf, Lauter, Florence Howe, and others informally decided to turn the December meeting of the Modern Language Association into an occasion for radical politics. One of the issues at hand… was a demand that the MLA take a stand against the Vietnam War and against the repression of Eldridge Cleaver and Octavio Paz [1]. The "demands" all passed — except one to cut the American author series, which was seen as an attack on scholarship itself. Out of that convention and other events came the impetus for a political movement in literary studies — and Kampf and Lauter's anthology was conceptualized along with the Radical Caucus of the MLA.
In the introduction to that anthology, the editors describe the state of the English profession in 1968 as one rife with bad feelings. English professors were defensive and apologetic about their profession and contemptuous of their students. Teachers experienced burnout and in general were filled with a sense of uselessness. One of the issues raised about this malaise was how the teaching of literature could be translated into political practice. How could English professors make their teaching politically relevant? But the main concern of radical teachers at that moment was not pedagogy but political activism. Teachings against the war, racism, and inequality were high on the agenda; reconceptualizing the teaching of literature and culture was not. Emotions were charged during those days. People seemed to know quite clearly what the issues were, where they stored, and what to do. There was an integration of emotion, intellect, and action directed toward an issue in which many profoundly believed. [p. 2-3]
So, it was the co-occurrence of Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and early feminism that radicalized English departments. Probably this happened especially to English departments because, as I indicated (shakily, but I'll go with it) in my Annie Dillard post, and Bradel addressed in the comments, English departments had no objective measure of quality, no essential skills to teach students that would enable them to get jobs, and no clear idea what they were supposed to be doing at the time.
A few things to note in the stories above:
- Student radicalism in the 1960s was tremendously exciting. These kids changed the world. They took on the government, the military, the Man, and the South, all at the same time, and won. Meanwhile the kids who disagreed with them went to Vietnam, and many came back disillusioned or in body bags, and then the US pulled out and lost. It must have been a heady validation for 20-year olds. "It is good to remember the excitement of that moment, when the pressure of events fused our energies into a ruthless critique of all things, as Marx put it," Richard Ohmann wrote (p. 38).
Can you imagine what it was like after, though? After they'd graduated and gotten jobs, and Carter was elected? It must have been like coming back from Vietnam, except without the disillusionment and drug addiction. I've never read about a 60's flower child finding herself in adrenaline withdrawal in 1977, but it must have happened.
So these guys just… kept fighting the last war. Trying to relive the glories of their youth, like Uncle Rico throwing his football in Napoleon Dynamite, they kept calling for revolutionary zeal, denying any real progress had been made. "Inequality is as great in 1985 as in 1945", Ohmann wrote (Davis p. 41).
- The radicalization was led by Marxists, and put Marxists in power, but was not motivated by Marxism. Anti-war sentiment, women's rights, minority rights, and gay rights were the sort of issues that motivated the change. Marxist language and doctrine came much later, and only at the college level, though by 1983 Terry Eagleton could write a popular college textbook on literary theory that assumed its readers were Marxist.
- Ohmann participated in both events. His claims in his College English article that he was just a neutral bystander watching all this happen are disingenuous. He is a committed Marxist who wrote that the West is "founded on exploitation", and all his books since 1970 have been critiques of capitalist English. He was the person at the MLA meeting who nominated the Marxist Louis Kampf for vice-president, and who defended the MLA putsch in the pages of College English. After College English he became editor of Radical Teacher, "a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching."
- This illustrates that sometimes Marxists can win power struggles just because they're willing to join organizations and show up for the meetings. It also illustrates a contradiction in their doctrine: They insist on the importance of a diversity of views in literature, but fight for control of the views in the teaching of literature [3].
- The people who took over teaching organizations or radical movements around 1970 were young. This was fantastic for their careers; they got book contracts and were catapulted to a prominence at age 30 that people normally reach at age 60, if at all. It also gave them an unusual amount of experience at using and keeping power. Richard Ohmann is still a professor today (though he's an emeritus now), and so has been an influential figure for about 50 years.
[1] Cleaver, a communist, US Presidential candidate, and a leader of the Black Panthers, was being "repressed" in that he had fled to Cuba after leading an ambush of Oakland police officers in which two officers were shot. He was kicked out of the Panthers in 1971, probably because he was a psychotic, violent religious fanatic who wanted them to overthrow the US government. He later went to North Korea, Algeria, and Paris, then returned to the US, did community service for his attempted murders, and joined an evangelical church, the Moonies, the Mormons, and the Republican Party, in that order. Paz was in Mexico; all I can find about his situation is that in 1968 he resigned as ambassador to India in protest against a massacre of students by the Mexican government.
[3] The resolution of this puzzle is that they aren't actually in favor of a diversity of views in literature--most of the books published now under the auspices of multiculturalism are written by upper-class graduates of elite American and English universities, and carefully sanitized to erase the racism, sexism, and intolerance of the cultures they claim to represent. But that would be a topic for another blog post.
As long as we're talking diversity, I'll mention something I've noticed while doing all this research to figure out what happened in the past: Every influential figure attended an ivy league school or equivalent. Every book author was a professor at a top 20 school. I've complained in other places about the what-school-did-you-go-to elitism in the sciences, but it's worse in English. If you aren't from one of the top 20 schools in the world, it appears, people in the world of English academia will completely ignore you. No exceptions.
References
Lennard Davis & M. Bella Mirabella, eds., 1990. Left Politics and the Literary Profession. Columbia University Press.
Terry Eagleton, 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Basil Blackwell Publisher, Oxford, England.
I swear to whoever you like; the Vietnam War did ludicrous damage to this country in all sorts of unexpected ways.
derpicdn.net/img/2016/1/4/1059137/medium.png
4521845 US Imperialism is a hell of a drug
4521846
I loved that. "So help me, chat, if you start getting cancerous today, I'm going to replace the chat window with My Little Pony fan-art of my character!"
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/10/4/1264501.png
4521906 4521846
What are u guys talking about?never mind.4521906
Um. What?
4521845
And sometimes it feels like we never really learned anything from it.
Thanks for the material helping me justify my rage at my current Communications college courses; kudos.
EDIT: Now if you'll excuse me I need to get back to my 2000 word essay on meme based social justice activism where I'm only allowed to use prescribed attributions and citations from the textbook the professor wrote themself.
Quite honestly, in my experiences at college and when talking to graduates. (I'm excluding climate change positions purposefully) Those that teach, or have earned a degree in the arts, "English", or social studies swing unflinchingly left. While those in Mathematics, the sciences, or business swing right. Is this as true for you as it is for me?
Huh. Y'know, my lens on the late 60s and 70s is probably the most gratituously leftist POV one could have: the music business, notably in LA and San Francisco. I'm fascinated with those wacky idealistic hippies and what happened to them as they became the most successful wave of musicians anybody ever saw.
And those idealistic leftist torch bearers for justice and freedom… SUCKED at feminism.
The groupie was basically the model for the late Sixties woman in the new freedom and social justice antiwar world. These guys thought they were the living models for justice in the universe, their self-image in most cases was of people expressing saintlike acceptance of liberal causes and extreme left wing views (notable exceptions: Steven Stills, to some extent Neil Young) and their role for women was STILL 'bitch, roll me a joint, then make breakfast', perhaps in more 'gentle hippie' words.
Furthermore, 1970 was no victory. By the time these folks had hit the Seventies, their world had turned from Woodstock to Altamont (and Woodstock was itself a weird ripoff, a truly amazing story of decadence and greed and self-absorption) and their idealism had turned to cocaine and heroin abuse. You say they saw victory, but they saw Nixon. The fact that he was environmentally a hippie in 2017 terms doesn't change that he was a law-n-order conservative and basically the leftist's nightmare.
I'm not in the least surprised that the English Literature Left has clung like desperate maniacs to any victories they gained in their little insignificant fishbowl. The seventies, then the eighties, then the nineties, then the 2000s, were catastrophic for the left in general terms. And of course the antiwar movement failed: see modern history. "Inequality is as great in 1985 as in 1945": surely this is self-evident? Or did you think that in 1945 America was a sort of Handmaid's Tale, where women stayed locked up in kitchens forever? My understanding is that 1945 did see roughly as much women's liberation as 1985: a certain amount, within limits, and with some interesting outliers.
As for Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers, Bobby Hutton was shot more than twelve times after he had already surrendered and stripped down to his underwear to prove he was not armed: so, not much change between then and now, if you're a black man and the cops think you're bad news. The Panthers were split between violent revolution and attempts to feed and support their desolate, starving communities: Nation of Islam also had a significant mission to feed hungry people. Farrakhan ended up becoming a Scientologist, and Eldridge Cleaver ended up becoming a conservative Republican.
I honestly don't understand where you get the 'ascendancy of evil liberalism' thing from, or that the Sixties were any sort of victory. As near as I can tell, the Thirties and Forties were at least as much of a victory for leftism, leading to a time of prosperity that spawned increased urges for social leftism, and then a backlash that's never stopped. If anything, we're fixing to go into a 30s-style leftward swing NOW for much the same reasons as we did then: things just got so stupid that people had no choice but to listen to commies.
4521845
Like most people my history course sort of... stopped after 1945, and so I had to study what exactly happened in Vietnam on my own. It was a surreal experience which led me to the inescapable conclusion that when Henry Kissinger finally, blessedly, dies, he's going to end up in the ninth circle of hell whereupon Satan will give him a jaundiced stare and hand him a shovel.
4522040
...that's not... I mean... that's not how research works.
4522097
I can strongly recommend 'Days of Rage' as a study of those interesting times of, ah, hand-on activism. It finally explained to me what precisely happened to the Left in America. (It got hijacked by utter lunatics)
4522114
I'm sorry, why would I need to research alternative opinions when my professor has already found the correct one for me? I don't understand.
I'm still waiting for some kind of conclusion, or even some indication from you what you think about all this. Are you heavily against Marxism? Do you think feminism went wrong somewhere back in 80's? I can't tell. I mean, "not hating Republicans" can go anywhere from a chuckle and roll of the eye at, "Yeah, I can see why they get bent out of shape about some of these crazy liberals" before going back to your feminism-approved choice of scotch, all the way up to clutching your gun as you stare, salivating, at the tracking information for your FedEx shipment of Make America Great Again trucker caps.
Where do you sit on a scale of scotch to trucker caps is what I want to know D:
4521924 4522013
Well, Super Trampoline was probably making a joke about the length of the quote / the entire post (too long; didn't read -> tl;dr -> teal deer -> picture of a teal deer from derpibooru) but accidentally made a relevant comment. See, that's the OC of TL;DR, who is a Youtuber, and discusses the sort of thing you're posting about, just more in the social sciences than English departments. The peer-reviewed paper on "Black Anality" was particularly memorable.
Anyway, back to how we got here, TL;DR does livestreams where the chat gets shown on the video. When the chat gets too deep into attention-whoring instead of discussing the topic (which TL;DR calls "cancerous"), TL;DR puts them in time-out by covering up their window. Someone once made a comment about his Teal Deer avatar and Twilight Sparkle, someone else made art of it, and Teal Deer x Twilight Sparkle shipping art became the time-out screens for a while.
4522189
Yeah, no. We don't say "hey Winona, let's go to the vet and get you your shots!" because that leads to an hour of chasing the dog around. Instead it's "hey Winona, wanna go for a drive?" and she finds out when we get there.
You might not want your shots, but they're good for you. So... wanna go for a drive?
4522114
Read a detailed summary online a while back, now reading the book. Strongly seconding the recommendation.
Seriously, read the summary if you aren't going to read the book. Read it even if you are going to read the book, because the second half of the article is how it applies to 2017.
4522189
Why is this important to you?
4522097
In other words, they got their regime change but were blindsided by the resulting insurgency.
Fancy that.
4522189 The title is not the place to look in this case. I made a title up at the last minute, and in any case I've learned from fimfiction that it's more important to make titles interesting than accurate.
Conclusions? Um... I don't think I'm going to draw any "conclusions". I don't like what Melissa Click did. I don't like that the teaching of English has become politicized in a way that seems not to tolerate dissent. I don't like that literature professors dislike literature. I don't like that the Norton anthology of theory & criticism contains nothing but Marxists, race-studies-ists, feminists, post-colonialists, & other specialists in discrimination after the year 1960. I don't like that English departments are committed to teaching students philosophy that is very stupid and destructive. I don't like that there are no more full-tuition merit scholarships to elite institutions. I don't like that teachers have shifted from trying to make all students perform better to trying to make all students perform equally. I don't like that the only contemporary books that can be taught in schools are books about racism, sexism, or how evil the government is. I don't like teaching our kids to hate our country.
So I don't like a lot of things about the way things are. But all I'm doing is showing how things are and how they got that way. I wasn't planning to say anything about Republicans. I just don't hate them as much now. Or you could say I hate everybody equally now.
... but that's progress, right?
4522045 I went to a Catholic undergraduate college, where my class advisor was a gay priest, and I took most of my English courses from a GK Chesterton / Inklings fan who said there was a special circle of Hell for the translators of the New American Standard Bible, theology from a rabid devotee of Thomas Aquinas who was still upset about the Condemnation of 1277, Marxism from an economist who admitted it was hokum, and physics from Alexander Haig's younger brother Frank, who I think is a liberal--but just because he's so nice, not because of anything he said about politics. I majored in math, and I couldn't tell you anything about any of my math profs' political views. All I know about the business school is that I lived with 3 business majors once, and they all stayed out late partying every night of the week.
So... I have no idea.
4522297
Oh, all right, that's fair. :B It does kind of leave these as just a lengthy show-and-tell, but it does at least confirm rumors I've heard coming out of college English departments in the last five years, so there's that.
This is more than fair.
I would say this is inherently no worse than teaching kids to unconditionally love our country. Then again, I find nationalism of any degree to be an abhorrent practice, especially when coupled with youth indoctrination. There's plenty to love and hate about any country, after all; starting kids off wholly optimistic either leads to heavy emotional crashes and political backlash when they find out everything wasn't rosy as they were told, or else a steadfast dismissal of anything that doesn't line up with their biased worldview, and that just means they'll be good at politics. :V
Uhhh... wot? At least if we're measuring back income and wealth inequality, it was far worse at stagflation and the Reagan/Thatcher takeover than in the immediate post-WW2 environment.
Oh, honestly, stop. You insist on diversity when your enemies are strong and you are weak. You insist on orthodoxy when you are strong and your enemies weak. If you don't want it to work that way, insist on having some Marxists in Congress.
4522297
Consider a rabbit running into any available hole or burrow when the hunter comes. This is roughly how "radical" moralizing liberals got to entrench themselves in college English departments: defensively.
Like you, I don't actually like this. I scarcely even understand it, as I really think that if you're going to bunker down somewhere, make it somewhere defensible. Go publish your Marxism on the side or under a pen-name while actually working in the chemistry department. Teach English as the art of communication: reading and writing to convey information between persons. Then make sure that numerous classes are taught about scifi, fantasy, romance novels, comedy, tragedy, epics and adventure-stories, fairytales, and of course pastel talking miniature horses.
The issue, however, is that outside academia, the United States spent its 20 years of postwar prosperity purging leftists from polite society. They restricted the power of labor unions, they pushed people out of the professions and public life via McCarthyism, the FBI engaged in subversion campaigns against activist organizations, they allowed right-wing incitement to violence that led to the JFK and MLK assassinations, they came up with blackmail against MLK, they engaged in mass arrests of the SNCC, et cetera, et cetera. The basic rule was: you are not allowed to organize unmolested if you stand anywhere to the Left of the Democratic Party, and even then, you will face opposition.
Which is, of course, why leftists today are bloody idiots: no decades of previous experience to learn from.
4522045
Economists don't tilt as far right as most people assume.
4522495
No, I don't, because I never framed literature as a battle between me and my enemies which requires complete victory and complete homogeneity. English lit is not Congress. (And, in fact, I do prefer balance in Congress over domination by any one party.
A lot of people who aren't Marxists sincerely believe that people can get along with each other and compromise, and appreciate a diversity of views rather than using false allegiance to diversity as a smokescreen. A lot of people are honest, kind, and care about the real other people they meet, rather than only caring about imagined representatives of a class. It's sad that you don't believe that.
The dynamic you imagine does hold between me and Marxists, not because they are "farther left than I can handle", but because they are mad and hope to kill lots of people and destroy my country. I don't want Marxists in Congress for the same reason I don't want members of ISIS in Congress. It doesn't apply to party politics in general.
4522508
Economists have different ideas of what constitutes 'liberal' and 'conservative' on the economic policy front than most political discussion. This should worry people.
4522374
It's complicated. When putting on your scholar-of-history hat, it's best to be neutral in such matters. I'd like people to be neutral and rational, but in a world in which most nations are nationalistic, not being nationalistic gives an advantage to the nations that are. We could do with a lot less nationalism and a smaller military, but I wouldn't want to have no nationalism and no military.
4522257 Huh. That's one opinionated bugger, that fellow, but unless he's making a staggering amount up out of whole cloth, he makes a very good case for this thesis (all in a sort of post-Hunter-Thompson manner).
It makes sense to me and I kinda like it. He's depicting a really formidable guerrilla fighting force who can be counted upon to oppose attempts to structurally exterminate the working and middle classes. That's relevant now, as my country is either doing an elaborate kayfabe where they pretend to gut all social services and health care and then do something else, or actually doing it.
In that light, it makes sense how all that would work. I know quite a few people where I have to make the calculation, 'what are the odds of this person suiciding within two years because of health needs they cannot possibly pay for?'. Pretty much as soon as you kill all the welfare and leftishness and literally make those people die because their bodies are breaking down, you have a whole class of intelligent and sometimes very capable suicide bombers who are organized.
I think it takes a much more twisted person to go all 'Weatherman' when you're comfortable and living a first world life. Once you actually begin starving people and arranging that they'll literally die because they're unfit and can't pay America prices for stuff, it is inevitable that some of them won't just die for you without argument: it's a form of war, a class war, and this time around we don't just have industrialization, we have robots and AI and there's damn-all reason by capitalist standards not to straight-up kill all the poors.
This is dumb. It's always possible to buy peace. I've just watched a documentary on the myth of Pruitt-Igoe, and economics killed Pruitt-Igoe: just at the outset it was an idyll, but a condition of Pruitt-Igoe was that it could have no federal funding for maintenance. It was BUILT in a very socialist manner, but compelled to sustain itself in a completely self-reliant manner, despite literally being a low income housing project and not a 'everybody together' housing project with a full range of economic classes. It took many many years to die, because the true nightmare only happened after the housing project ran for what, decades, with no maintenance or funding, setting up a nightmarish death spiral guaranteeing it wasn't going to suddenly go 'sproing' and fund itself. Also completely dumb. If they weren't going to maintain it in a level where it wouldn't death-spiral, it should not have been built.
Pretty sure the 'new civil war nightmare' is optional. It is entirely conditional on the intent to kill all the poors using structural means, and there's no WAY it will happen unless fueled with a whole underclass of poors who are absolutely going to die anyhow, sooner rather than later, because their country insists they compete against Silicon Valley, robots, automation, and every other poor on the planet to survive.
Oopsy.
I don't think the hard right will hold out that long once it gets intense. I'm glad I live in a crappy little rural town. And the funny thing is, just like the article writer said, leftist violence goes down the memory hole and it won't be making the news. But for every political move to kill all the poor, there will be a horrifying response. It only happens once you squeeze people to a certain extent. Soma cures all ills. (wonder if the explosion in heroin use is in part subsidized by the upper class? Some would say that's happened before in history)
4522495
Then he should have clarified that was what he meant. Without any clarification, dropped into the middle of a discussion of civil rights, the reader assumes he's speaking about equality in terms of women's rights, minority rights, protection under the law, which were and continue to be the things that student activists at the time cared most about and that motivate the left the most. A cheap rhetorical trick, to make a statement that means one thing, and use it to imply something entirely different.
4522604
Dude, the modern global economy in general, and the US in particular, certainly have serious issues, but this is some Alex Jones level moonbattery. The Lizardmen are not hatching a plan to eat poor people's babies and get away with it.
That aside, I think you underestimate the actual right-wing, due to a key difference in thought process:
Remember, I lurk where the actual Alt-Right hangs out, not the Punchable Nazis. Their plan for when the shit hits the fan is simple: minimize your personal exposure, support potential allies, and hunker down until the balloon goes up. Once that happens, immediately go to whatever your personal version of "nuclear response" is, complete with scorched earth on anything you can't or don't wish to hold. They won't do war in the streets with the Leftist Guerrillas. They'll take off and nuke the entire site from orbit (or whatever the nearest approximation to that is in their actual capacity), just to be sure.
4522657 We disagree
nothing wrong with that! Do a body count as years go by, see if I wasn't right.
As for the 'total war' thing, I honestly think that's a human condition. It's not right/left, it's human. That's what I'm describing. What I consider to be 'neoliberal ideology' has been paying lip service to an American Left for many decades now, while selling them out, and still most people do what you describe: hunker down, support personal allies, try not to get hit.
I know rightwingers too: I know a number of very sober serious gun nuts in New Hampshire, through other shared contexts. You would not know how many fully automatic weapons they have unless you visit them socially, and then you get a little warning of 'if this makes you uncomfortable you might want to stay out of this room'. Not any sort of apology, just how things are.
Those people do not fly, and don't have nukes. (One would love to have a tank, though!) The guy in the article is right. You simply cannot exterminate half the country without blowback completely impossible to cope with, and the righties aren't the only ones with automatic weapons.
I'm telling you, it's just a human thing (or an American thing, to cite Cypren). It's not a 'wing' thing. Lefties have not been nearly as pressured as they think over the last couple decades: it's a balance on social issues and a rout on economic issues. You may yet see the article-writer's scenario. I hope not, and it's avoidable. But if American leaders kill too many people by neglect (ideologically-motivated neglect: how dare the poors have bread or bandages! By definition they don't deserve them!) then the true 'scorched earth' will sproing out and surprise other people (not me). You simply cannot expect people to literally die for your greed without blowback. (not your greed, you know what I mean
)
Interesting dichotomy with the SJW claims
1) Every influential figure attended an ivy league school or equivalent. Every book author was a professor at a top 20 school.
2) We can't get ahead because we're discriminated against!
Yeah, if these influential minority figures are really being discriminated against, the discriminators aren't doing a very good job.
4522843 Most of the book authors were white men.
4522874 Burn them! Um... The books, of course. Not that I advocate burning books. Just a second while I look up a list of influential authors and leaders in the SJW cause who do not have an ivy league degree. Uh, huh. Hm... That many?
Ok, I take it back. Other than one (Harvard, '64) I didn't see any in the short list I checked, so obviously our evil conspiracy to keep advocates of social justice out of the most expensive schools in the country is working. Maybe that's where Evil is going wrong. If we bend the rules to get these SJW types into ivy league schools, the crushing debt load they carry when they emerge will force them to get good-paying jobs doing actual work, thus leaving them unable to pursue their twisted agenda (buhahahahaha!)
So it's an Evil Plan in the process. We'll work on it.
4522903 Who are the influential SJW leaders?
I was talking about the authors of books in the Literary Left. Louis Kampf, Richard Ohmann, Gerald Graff, Terry Eagleton, Lennard Davis, Bell Hooks, Sandra Gilbert, Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example.
4522297 Um...hi, new person jumping in (after having gotten the gist of the HITALTCAASHR series despite not being particularly good at literature/English) - so...what you're saying is that this series of posts is more like a written historical documentary and less of a call-to-action?
To be honest, your documentary (if it is one) sounds like Estee's stuff in real life, with an English-y twist.
EDIT: Also, if I may be so bold, how did you change from majoring in math to getting into literature and philosophy?[1] It's a pretty big jump, and I'm kind of curious.
[1] Unless you majored in math AND did literature at the same time...
4522522 When you say:
You say this, and yet below...
Do you really think that, in this thread, myself and Super Trampoline are card-carryingly evil to the point of never believing that people can be honest, or kind, or caring towards real people? At all? And only treating other people as imagined representatives of their class?
If you actually believe that rubbish, I'm sorry, but it comes off as if you've been reading Breitbart's impression of what a Marxist or a socialist is, without ever finding one and asking us what we actually think.
From our point of view, we are socialists because when you operationalize kindness, caring, and respect for others in terms of, "How should the institutional structures of daily life realize these core moral values?", you get radical democracy, which we call socialism. This is nothing less or more than the assertion that since people spend most of their waking hours involved with certain institutions (particularly: workplaces and governments), those institutions should be democratic and run from the bottom-up.
The logical thing, if you believe in the decency of regular people, is to propose that they should be free, rather than dictated-to.
Who said we want to kill anyone or destroy any country? There is a whole lot of "smash the white supremacist settler-colonial imperialist Amerikkka!" that goes around, but frankly, that's exactly what I meant by unconscious Maoist-Third-Worldism. It's not only not sane, it's not even Marxist or socialist anymore. Marx, after all, was writing for a Workingmen's International Association composed almost entirely of white male European workers in countries like England, France, and Germany.
It took another century before Third World theorists got a hold of Marxists texts and maliciously reinterpreted them to claim that workers of the First World weren't really an exploited working class at all. That basically made Marx himself roll in his grave, right alongside every other major socialist leader from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but especially Marx. He had specifically stated that capitalism is a stage which societies must grow through in order to reach socialism, with no shortcuts. He had expected America to become the world's first socialist country, because it combined a ruthless embrace of capitalism with an upstanding ethic of personal freedom. Marx expected that contradiction to result in movement towards socialism well before the long-established ruling classes of Europe would be overthrown by the workers.
There's a long, long distance between Karl Marx, who wanted workers of various European countries to unite against capitalism as it existed then, and my dad who watches too much Russia Today and tells me Crimea was full of ethnic Russians if you don't believe bourgeois propaganda.
The point being, it's really pretty hurtful for you to both strawman socialist views in general as being a murdering death-cult like ISIS, and to just not ask if you have any left-wing followers who could tell you what we're about.
On the other hand, the very fact that you think that shows exactly why you never respect any notion of ideological freedom or diversity when it comes to us: you don't want our real views heard-out and tested against the real world, you've pre-judged that we all need to be in jail for the imaginary murders you imagine we're on our way to imaginarily commit.
4522617
I don't think it was a rhetorical trick. I think the guy was just plain doing it wrong.
4523079
I was responding directly to what you said, which was
When you say that while talking about English literature, that shows you have a very weird way of viewing the world--one that walks into an English Lit classroom and categorizes people as allies and enemies. Someone who cared about the people in that room wouldn't do that.
(I was not talking about socialists.)
First, Marxists kill people. We have lived in a world with Marxism long enough to say this definitively. It is deeply embedded in Marxist culture that killing lots of non-combatants (tens of thousands to tens of millions) is just standard procedure during and after a revolution.
You can try to get around this by saying the Soviets weren't really Marxists, the Maoists weren't really Marxists, the Khmer Rouge weren't really Marxist, the Shining Path wasn't really Marxist, North Vietnam wasn't really Marxist, the Cubans weren't really Marxist, Angola wasn't really Marxist, Mozambique wasn't really Marxist, etc., etc., but when you have to keep going and going for 100 years and still never encounter anything but fake Marxists, you ought to admit something is wrong.
Second, you yourself just today wrote
Marxists have always talked about killing people, and have always killed lots of people. You expressed your disbelief at the idea that people might sincerely try to get along with anybody else rather than waiting for the right moment to seize power, and you said that real Marxists get military training in order to kill people in a revolution (which is what Marxists have always said). You said both of those things today, and now you're already pretending that I'm misrepresenting Marxists without listening to any when I was listening to you.
4523097
I would say these are and were totalitarian and authortarian governments that used Marxism as part of their propaganda to maintain power, but have adapted new philosophy and propaganda to maintain power. The Soviets in particular are new Russian Conservatives using the right and far right to try and take down Western democracies.
4523297 I think they're evidence that any movement that bases its appeal on Marxism inevitably leads to such violence, probably because Marxist texts teach that compromise between classes is theoretically impossible. Or because the Marxist form of government requires much more control and power than most forms. In any case, these examples are evidence that the hypothetical Marxism that doesn't lead to bloody purges isn't possible in the real world, whether because of its violent culture, or because its economic policies don't work, or for some other reason.
4522508
I'm not sure if any of the professors in my department (who are Americans) are Republicans; I'm almost certain none voted Trump. One ran as a write-in candidate. Last year at our skit night, the professors' was all built around mocking him as a then-candidate. In my cohort, out of the Americans I'm guessing at most one out of ten is Republican.
4522523
What do you mean by that?
4523097
I was talking about political conflict, not English Lit. In an English Lit classroom, I classify things as boring and fun.
Nope. What I do say is that politics involves killing people. All political power is based on violence. If you don't see the violence in your favored ideology, it's because you're not looking for it. To take the contrasting example to Marxism, the formation of capitalism was quite violent itself.
If you've got some system by which everyone can be prosperous and peaceful at the same time, without either the systemic violence of the current system or the pointed violence of a system-changing revolutionary effort, I'm all ears.
Worse, there's another variable that explains the variance here: authoritarianism. Social democracy and democratic socialism have traditionally accommodated themselves to the systemic violence of the preexisting capitalist-democracy system, and would thus qualify as "not violent" within your taxonomy. Problem is, there are right-wing systems which also purged tens of millions of people. Fascism and other forms of extreme nationalism are the premier examples.
Actually, fascism is the premier example of violent authoritarianism, period. That's 20 million people killed as war casualties and 12 million total Holocaust victims, within the 12 years Hitler held power. If you start throwing in the purges committed in the course of American authoritarian nationalism (deliberate extermination of Native Americans), British colonialism (Africa and India), other European colonialisms (again, Africa), Chinese nationalists, Imperial Japan, Tsarist Russia's various pogroms, the various capitalist banana republics of South America, the Balkan wars, the Darfurian genocide, the various Middle Eastern wars of the 20th century, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, Somalia for a while now, and the Syrian Civil War now...
It easily adds up to as much or more killing than Marxists committed, just in the 19th century when late-feudalism and capitalism have existed. And then of course we have to consider the fully pre-capitalist, pre-communist wars of the entire rest of history before the late 1700s.
Asking "is this ideology Marxist in its view of the economy" just doesn't tell us more about its rate of killing than "is this ideology authoritarian in its power and governance structure".
Authoritarian Xists have always talked about killing people, and have always killed lots of people. Hell, peasant rebellions have always killed lots of people.
If you want less killing, make a society in which it is easier to be normal and happy, rather than demanding that miserable, degraded, sick, drugged, and hungry people not engage in a varying mix of violent lashing-out and actually trying to solve their problems by removing their oppressors.
My disbelief is at the concept that people would try to "get along" with someone who is actively making their lives miserable. I don't expect anyone in an English Lit classroom to be the ruling class, and you've already got my agreement that politics ought to stay well outside the English Lit classroom. You had my agreement on that the very first instant I commented here.
On the other hand, if you expect that the annual Davos Conferences should not even need security, because of course nobody might care that a tiny elite are deciding the fate of most of the civilized world in seclusion, with our so-called "elections" being shams with choices restricted to those the elite can tolerate... well, what the hell?
Worse, as poverty, hunger, sickness, drug addiction, homelessness, joblessness, and work-hours all rise, the ruling class have shown repeatedly and across the world that they would rather use authoritarian violence to suppress the people than reform their own ways. Reform sounds wonderful until reformists start getting arrested and killed en masse. Then the pitchforks and torches come out.
In the present day, we've already seen people quite violently told that no, the USA isn't going reform, the EU isn't going to reform, China isn't going to reform, Bangladesh isn't going to reform, et cetera, et cetera. How many union organizers or nonviolent activists have to die before people have a right to their pitchforks, do you think?
How much of a Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, Hitler, Mussolini, Milosevic, or Golden Dawn must people passively accept, for your demand for nonviolence to be satisfied?
Now, on the other hand, there have been very many nonviolent revolutions. In fact, they usually lead to greater social stability than violent ones, though they may have risen out of environments with greater social stability in the first place. When nonviolent methods can be used, I'm all in favor.
I just also think that when you're already facing a militarized police state, a V for Vendetta-style nonviolent mass march on Parliament is not an effective way to change your living conditions.
If someone is killing you, you do indeed wait for your moment to seize power and avoid dying. The question is whether someone is actually trying to kill us. I believe yes, you believe no. We both agree that nobody in English Lit class is trying to kill anyone.
4523360
There have been a vast variety of Marxist forms of government. Some were more authoritarian, others less. Some require more control and power, others less. Before Lenin got his grubby paws on it, the word "communism" actually meant, "a bottom-up confederacy of democratically-run city-states." The formal structure of the Soviet Union was even written to work that way, with the problem being the one-party nature of the ostensible "workers' councils", with all members of the "Communist" Party taking orders from the Central Committee and the General Secretary.
Anarchist, democratic, and Marxist socialisms don't have a clear wall between them; one slides into the other depending on certain questions of interpretation.
4524677
This... is bullshit.
Comparing the Game Laws against poaching, or the actions of the Pinkerton detective agency, to the communist purges and genocides around the world which have killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century, is obscene. Numbers matter. A million is more than a hundred. There is no comparison between murders by Marxists and by Western societies. I have already had this argument with Ghost, and the total number of deaths in US labor disputes over 110 years was 824.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes,
That's fewer total over 110 years than Marxists have killed per day on average since Stalin began.
(And using Cortez as an example of a "capitalist" is just... silly. Silly is the kindest word I can find.)
Using Hitler as an example of Western liberal democracies is also... silly.
Why would I count purges committed by Imperial Japan, Tsarist Russia, dictatorial banana republics, Darfur, and Middle Eastern wars, Somalia, and the Syrian civil war, when I'm talking about Western liberal democracies? You really think American capitalists caused the wars in Somalia, Darfur, and Syria? You think the Middle East was peaceful until capitalists butted in? Good thing the Soviets and Chinese never intervene or destabilize countries, or we'd be in real trouble.
Why would I count a war against people who are trying to kill me as being the same sort of thing as mass murders of civilian "enemies of the state?"
The only things only your list that I would even consider are the killing of Native Americans, and African colonialism. That was 150-200 years ago, and the numbers, while large, still pale next to the Marxist body counts. Only a small part of the killing of Native Americans was actual hands-on killing; their numbers were diminished by disease and by game depletion. The worst oppression in Africa was committed by representatives of monarchs, not democracies.
If you look at liberal Western nations in the 20th century, they very notably do not massacre their political opponents when they take over. The Allies did not massacre the Germans or the Japanese after World Wars 1 or 2... oh, except for the Soviets; they did that. They even massacred their allies when they could.
From the Marxist perspective, it can seem like all political power is gained by bloodthirsty purges, because Marxists are fighting lots of different people, and most everybody except the Western nations also purges as Marxists do. Muslims have purged communists in Indonesia and various places in Africa. Various dictators have purged communists. Western leaders haven't. (I mean they haven't rounded up 10,000 of them and shot them. We had McCarthyism, which was terrible, but didn't kill people.)
Western political power is based partly on our reputation as good guys. There might have been a revolution in America in the 1960s if American political power were in fact based more on violence than on consent of the governed.
4524685
But we're not talking about Western liberal democracies. You can't even talk about them in isolation. We're talking about capitalist societies of all kinds, in order to have an equivalent comparison with socialist societies of all kinds. Otherwise you end up having to count Scandinavia and New Zealand as ultra-peaceful, highly democratic social-democratic-to-socialist societies -- let alone the democratic socialism of Allende's Chile, which was overthrown and replaces with a fascist dictatorship by the Americans, by the way.
And again, you can't talk about American liberal democracy in isolation from the CIA overthrowing South American or Middle Eastern governments to get cheaper goods and labor. You just can't. The spice must flow, and someone is making it flow, and that someone has variously been the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and nowadays the American international system (IMF, World Bank, United Nations, NATO, etc.).
"Liberal democracy" and "socialism" are not examples from the same category.
4524685 Ok, if we have definitional problems, I'm gonna lay out my definitions. You can then lay out yours. Let's try to talk in the same terms, so we don't spend pages upon pages on needless conflict.
"Capitalism": an economic system organized around private ownership of productive resources (land, machines, factories, money, stocks, etc. -- all known as "capital"), wage-labor (working for someone else in exchange for a wage, either piecemeal, by the hour, or salaried), and profit (selling things for more than they cost to produce). Absentee ownership or owner-management are both possible within the system.
"Socialism": an economic system organized around worker control of productive resources: you control what you use to do work, but you don't get to rent out land or machines you're not using to other people. Socialism can have markets or money or planned production depending on what kind it is. In the ideal case socialists usually imagine, workers choose to produce according to a plan that meets the human needs of society as a whole directly. I think that's a bit idealistic: you need either some means of exchange, or some form of rationing. Otherwise, how do you get doctors and farmers to engage with each-other? Within one supply chain, everyone can just track how much their suppliers can give and their customers need, and negotiate some equilibrium. Between supply chains, for entirely different classes of goods, it's hard.
A major difference between socialism and capitalism is how they respond to technological improvements. Under capitalism, new technology is usually used to make more stuff before it's used to spend more time on vacation. Under socialism, vacations are supposed to come before more stuff: if society's needs are already met, improvements are just used to work less.
"Communism": roughly, post-scarcity socialism. A system of worker control in which everyone just works as they think necessary and takes what they think necessary, without plans or centralization. This is really idealistic and probably involves a huge amount of automation.
"FULLY AUTOMATED GAY SPACE LUXURY COMMUNISM": what everyone imagines The Future will ideally be like. The Culture or the Federation are such societies. Sufficiently advanced technology that communism can fully, actually work, instead of having to fall back on socialism to coordinate work.
Now political systems:
"Liberal democracy": a system of governance run via elections or referenda, with a large section of the population getting to vote, usually based on age and citizenship rather than merit or rank. Individual human rights are protected by the government, and powers usually balanced carefully between different branches of the state, civil society, and individuals. Can combine with any economic system.
"Dictatorship": exactly what it sounds like. Can combine with any economic system.
"Authoritarianism": top-down governance of society by a distinct set of rulers, usually with a lot of violence. May be monarchist, dictatorial, oligarchical, ideological or not, etc. Can combine with any economic system.
"Authoritarian populism": a mode of governance in which an authoritarian ruling group claim a mandate from "the will of the people" to govern, often by blaming non-majority segments of the population for problems. Yikes.
Now how they combine:
"Capitalist liberal democracy": like liberal democracy, except that private property ownership is considered a human right not to be violated. In its extreme form (in which taxation is considered a violation of private property rights), what American libertarians want.
"Social democracy": a liberal democracy in which private property ownership is not considered a human right as such, but merely a convenient way to arrange a happy society. Usually involves taking some productive resources, but not all, into ownership by the democratic state and control by the freely elected government, to be used to provide universal services to the entire population. Overlaps with market forms of socialism. Usually involves high taxes. This was the future FDR, Truman, and LBJ tried to implement but didn't get. Much of Europe implemented it more. Americans nowadays often call it "liberalism". This is the future Bernie Sanders wants, with a tinge of the next thing.
"Democratic socialism": a liberal democracy in which only socialist forms of property ownership are recognized. All business is worker-controlled, only some productive resources are nationalized (usually mineral resources and such). Land is often in municipal ownership, so as to democratically direct urban development. This is the future the largest socialist movement in America wants.
Now on to historical figures who talked about how the economy worked. I'm going to list them in order of how their work follows logically from each-other rather than historical order.
Ricardo, Smith, George: eliminate feudal land rents, implement free markets, and stuff will more-or-less work itself out. Yay capitalism.
von Mises and the Austrian school: look, even eliminating feudal land rents is just immoral. Capitalism is a moral system, the only sensible moral system, and its economic consequences don't matter next to its morality.
Keynes: nuh-uh. Since profits under capitalism come from a large consumer class, who inevitably have to be a (large) fraction of the broad working class, the system will tend to run itself into depressions and crash. Capitalists try to keep wages low while selling lots of stuff. It's contradictory: you can't sell lots of stuff to people who don't have any money. When the velocity of money drops, profits will follow, in a massive coordination problem. The solution is to have the government stimulate the economy.
Marx (Marxism): the contradiction is even deeper than that. Capitalists could try to sell more stuff with lower wages by using technology to reduce prices. However, since all the other capitalists will implement the same technology, this will eventually just result in even lower profits, due to the lower prices. High velocity of money is just plain incompatible with high profits, by nature. The only true sources of profit can be resource rents and wage suppression. The system will alway drive itself into depression and stagnation. The only solution is to replace it outright, with socialism.
Mussolini (fascism): the solution is not to replace capitalism with socialism. It's to have the state coordinate capitalism by force, bringing harmony between classes for the good of the nation. Also, try to produce everything the nation needs inside the nation, which is called "autarky".
Hitler (fascism, Nazism): when I said "the nation" I meant "the master race", and when I said "by force", I meant "kill the Jews and degenerates". Holy shit.
Lenin (Marxism-Leninism): all of the stuff Marx describes happens because markets are free. Socialism must consist in taking over the state (by force), and using to actively suppress the natural dynamics of markets (by force).
Stalin (also Marxism-Leninism): when I said, "by force", I meant with a shit-ton of tanks and purges. Holy shit.
Mao (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism): the true proletariat isn't the urban working class in factories, it's rural peasants. They will mount the revolution, move into the urban areas, and destroy the urban owning class, then suppress the market by force.
Pol Pot (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism on steroids): when I said, "by force" and "urban owning class", I meant kill anyone who wears glasses for being an intellectual. Holy shit.
Lots of people (Third Worldist socialism, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist New Left): the real class conflict is between the Third World and the First. Also, let's use terrorism against the First World's huge militaries, and have an ethnic tinge to our struggle. Yikes, IMHO.
Thatcher and Reagan (neoliberalism): the only problem with capitalism is those pesky workers. We don't want an intrusive state to affect property owners, but we're going to break workers movements by force.
Allende (democratic socialism, cyber-socialism): we can use new technology to make democratic socialism easier to implement! Free elections, human rights, and a better-coordinated economy. Human conditions start improving in Chile by a lot.
Pinochet (fascist neoliberalism): when I said "by force", I meant "throw unionists and communists out of helicopters, conduct mass purges of workers". Holy shit.
Clinton and Blaire (left-neoliberalism, liberal-democratic New Left): we can make Reaganism a whole lot more appealing by being inclusive to racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities.
Trump, Putin, Law and Justice Party (authoritarian right-populism): we can enforce the breaking of workers' movements without cucking ourselves out to minorities. Autarky will break us out of exploitative trade deals that hurt the working class. The working class and the owning class can cooperate against the liberal upper-middle class. Some force, but not the mass purges and wars that characterized fascism... yet.
Le Pen, Milosevic (neo-fascism): right-wing populism, but removing kebab and warming the ovens for the Jews.
And your definitions?
4524166
I don't think it's that lopsided most places.
4524778
For Trump specifically (he did progressively worse with voters as education levels rose, and we're by hypothesis talking about college professors, and his economics is crankish), I'm not so sure. For R/D more generally, you're likely right, but again I don't actually know the split in my department's faculty. Bear in mind too that liberal arts and sciences econ faculty may be more likely to be D/liberal/left than business school econ faculty for a given university.
4524722
I'm not. I specifically said I wasn't talking about socialists. I was talking about the Marxist habit of committing massacres on assuming power. The only class of interest for comparison would be Western liberal democracies. I don't talk about "capitalist societies of all kinds" because I think that's a nonsensical category, and one which is of any case of no interest. It is no credit to Marxists that Latin American dictators also kill lots of people. If your choice is Marxism or Pinochet, you might as well try Marxism, but that choice is not a burning issue in America.
Which was a response to the aggression of the Soviets through Cuba. Directed by Richard Nixon, who is probably still regarded as the most-evil American President in history.
But we can talk about Marxism in isolation from Russia occupying Georgia to keep their oil pipeline flowing? Why is that?
4524759 I don't want to get into a longer discussion about it. I'll just address the most-important definitions.
I don't think these are useful definitions.
"organized around private ownership of productive resources": The alternative is not to allow people to own productive resources. Hence, they will be owned and controlled by the state.
"wage labor": The only alternative to wage labor is that people are ordered what to do. Slavery, in other words.
"profit (selling things for more than they cost to produce)": Profit isn't "more than what things cost to produce", because you can't produce things for zero profit, or even for small profits. Profits are the production cost of research, risk evaluation, taking risk, and acquiring investment. You can't make those costs go away by having a centralized state--all you do is either pay for those roles with tax dollars, or nobody does them and you get factories making things that nobody wants.
"an economic system organized around worker control of productive resources": This makes no sense. "Workers" en masse can't control productive resources any more than "the people" can write legislation. Some small group of people will end up controlling the resources. If this small group of people isn't the people who own or created the resources, then the system is banditry.
4525418
Actually, no, you can't talk about Marxism-Leninism without talking about Russian imperialism and the failures of central planning. There's a line there, and while it's not Marxism (which is the descriptive, predictive claim that capitalism will fail on its own terms if left alone to do its thing), it is Marxism-Leninism. And Marxism-Leninism is a fucking atrocity the world should never repeat.
4525430
Bull. In real life, almost all productive resources are owned by the state, nonprofit companies, or for-profit companies. The alternative is merely to organize different kinds of companies, which is a matter of statute law rather than state power.
Now you're just being silly. You really claim that no other forms of economic exchange besides slavery and wage-labor have ever existed? So neither feudalism nor gift economies nor debt economies were ever actual things, despite their taking up the majority of human history?
Across history, money and wage-labor are very rare, especially as a way to spend one's entire life. The normal thing in the Late Middle Ages in many areas was that only a teenager or 20-something would spend time as a wage-laborer during apprenticeship, before marrying and setting up as a skilled, trained, self-employed smallholder.
If you're going to claim that ordinary direct and representative democracy suddenly turns into banditry when applied to economic matters rather than governance, you're just being ridiculous. Liberal democracies as we both like them are already existence proofs for being able to run large-scale stuff in a democratic way, and thus have things be of the people. Extending this democratic freedom to economic enterprises is the project of socialism -- nothing more or less.