I’m putting this here rather than in a politics thread because it’s fundamentally very silly.
What struck me most is that these professors appear, in the main - how do I put this? - a little slow-witted? Somewhere on the left-hand side of the bell curve? The one in the middle has the presentation skills of a tree stump. They’re the sort of people you’d expect to find asking “would you like fries with that?” rather than making inquiries on the nature of society.
Anyway, it’s good for a chuckle if you have 25 minutes to kill.
It’s funny until you realize that taxpayers money is used to fund most of them and that some people end up having huge school debts to “study” that sort of stuff.
Funny you put it that way. In Berkeley, many fast food and barista jobs are filled by people with advanced liberal arts degrees. They provide the same service as the high school drop outs, but with much worse attitudes.
It’s good to know they’re finding jobs suited to their skill set.
Which goes to show, I suppose, that capitalism, like democracy, depends on a critical mass of people with at least some sense of discernment to make it work.
Incidentally … how many of you skipped through to view the professors in descending order of obesity?
I don’t have anything against fat people apart from them using too much public space and setting the AC temperature too low and draining our Health Insurance budget with their coronary problems, but it is interesting to see how high the ratio of fucked-up to normal is in that SJW/feminist collective.
Back in the ol country, when I was in college, I’d say 90% of college professors are socialist, not marxist. The rebels, the despised ones, are the capitalist or worse, libertarians.
Now, I’d say it is still mayority, except in private universities wher ethey charge an arm and a leg for even a paper clip.
But nowhere would anyone dare to show up with a Che T-shirt. We know.
Socialist is an umbrella term encompassing everything from social democracy (also known as democratic socialism), which seeks to compromise with capitalism, to communism, which seeks to overthrow capitalism and create an entirely new economic order. The terms social democracy and communism also vary in how radically they oppose or work within capitalism. For instance, the US Democratic Party has some slight social democratic tendencies towards wealth redistribution, but is still a pro-corporate/pro-business political party, whereas many social democratic European political parties are more pro-labour. Similarly, the Chinese Communist Party was more open towards capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao than it was under Mao (and than it seems to be under Xi).
Marxism is an economic school of thought that seeks to understand history and society through the lens of class struggle. Not all socialists are Marxists. In fact, these days, many socialists don’t see class struggle as an important factor for understanding society at all. Many socialists these days (although this has been going on since the 1960s and earlier) look at history and society through the lens of environmental and identity issues (such as race and gender).
I didn’t watch all of the video, but from what I saw, the professors aren’t Marxists. Or, at least, they don’t express any Marxist leanings in these videos. Some people might call them adherents of cultural Marxism, which is a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that liberal elites (such as media owners and university professors) are projecting Marxist thought away from economics into social issues (such as race, gender and identity) in an attempt to undermine society and destroy all tradition. It’s basically the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews corrupting society through Jazz music and skimpy clothing, but in a new non-Jewish guise (although some of the more fringe cultural Marxist conspiracy theorists do, indeed, blame it on “the Jews”).
Interesting. How do those professors reconcile their dislike of capitalism with receiving a large salary for their services?
Seriously though : how do people in your neck of the woods view El Che and people like him?
I agree with @FatKaz there that the speakers aren’t Marxists. I doubt they’ve ever even read Marx (has anybody got through the first chapter of Das Kapital? That guy was one boring writer). The word is used today more as an epithet than to imply that someone actually identifies with KM’s economic theories. I really only posted the video because I enjoy laughing at stupid, uncouth people who genuinely believe they’re important public intellectuals.
The connection with anti-Semitism seems a bit tenuous. My view is that idiots cause massive social disruption simply by failing to understand that they’re idiots (see Carlo Cipolla).
I don’t think it’s tenuous. It isn’t just a coincidence that the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory sounds almost word-for-word like the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of yore (“They control the media!”, “They’re indoctrinating our children in the universities!”, “They’re corrupting society!”, etc.). This is because “cultural Marxism” comes from the Nazis, who called it “cultural Bolshevism”. But the Nazis didn’t invent it, they just took the old “Jewish world domination” trope and repackaged it for a modern world.
I’m sure that most people who believe in the cultural Marxism conspiracy aren’t anti-Semitic, but some of them certainly are. I should know, because I spend way too many sleepless nights trawling conspiracy theory forums.
The right-wing-conspiracy-theory idea is also hard to square with the passage below, from 1973, which refers in turn to movements in the 1920s and 1930s:
If that’s enough for the Dems to qualify as socialists, it’s enough for the Reps to qualify as well, the only difference being that the Dems are slightly more socialistic.
It’s also enough for basically every actual or plausible regime on the planet to qualify, if you think about it. Taxation is, at heart, redistribution of wealth. (So is theft, and so is charity.)
If we differentiate between redistribution that only benefits the wealthy (“socialism for the rich” as Gore would say) and redistribution that benefits society as a whole, we might have a useful concept – i.e. not every regime that’s ever existed was a socialist regime, so the word actually means something – but even then, it’s hard to escape it entirely. All kinds of social programs and public services have existed over the millennia, just usually not on the kind of scale seen in modern times.
The point being, the (mostly) American obsession with throwing the S word at everyone “on the left” and using different standards to judge everyone “on the right” amuses me.
ETA: I probably should have identified Gore by his surname, Vidal, to avoid confusion with Al.
By way of comparison, feminism is a left wing conspiracy to some, though there are feminist tendencies (both overt and subtle) within parties and movements that are generally considered mainstream right. Using the original meanings of left and right, anything against the status quo should qualify as left, so feminism in general should be left, and so should Trump in general.
I think it’s fair to say that cultural-Marxism-as-conspiracy-theory (just like Marxism-as-conspiracy-theory) has some resonance with older, less fashionable conspiracy theories.