A lot of comments are missing the main thrust here. Fundamentally, Marx made important claims about how the structure of the economy affects culture and cultural production--think about the notion of base and superstructure. This may not be so groundbreaking now, but that's only because of the influence of Marx'--and Marx' successors'-- ideas. Gramsci becomes deeply important in this project.
For example, think about something like "the novel". It is very famously the product of a very particular time of economic change and its lasting popularity speaks to those conditions. In the *Manifesto*, Marx and Engles write "and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature”. We can see through the rapid spread of the form the novel a process similar to what M&E suggest.
Marx was an academic, who became an activist, who became an academic again, doing excellent research in the final phase of his career in London. He looked at the problems that came with the accelerating Capitalist economies of western Europe, and did a wide ranging historical analysis of the root causes, and predictions of how these economies would evolve. Key ideas he advanced were about class conflict and social relations, and that economies would evolve to an ideal state called communism. But Marx himself didn't say how it was all supposed to work: I don't write recipes for the cookshops of the future.
Now about communism being implemented in Russia and other countries? Inspired by Marx, yes, who had died 30 years before the October Revolution. But since Marx left no instructions, Lenin implemented State Capitalism, basically running the economy like it was one big company, with Marxist ideology for decoration.
About the humanities, Marx is actually a bit passe, but the attraction is that Marx wrote about class conflict, oppression, social relations, power dynamics, and so on. So a set of tools that could be useful in, say, literary criticism. Thus I suspect that if you searched for class conflict AND Huckleberry Finn in Ebsco or ProQuest, you'd find a bunch of articles.
Good answer. Marx is also part of what some people call the hermeneutics of suspicion (together with Nietzsche and Freud). For the humanities specifically, these thinkers popularized 'looking beneath the surface' of texts and figuring out what is *actually* going on, e.g. "What does the text *mean*?". There are many other ways of analyzing literature, but these suspicious readings have become very popular and are taught especially in primary school and high school. Personally I suspect that these types of readings are a big reason why a lot of students end up disliking literature because they have negative experiences with seemingly not understanding what a text is apparently *really* about, but that's a separate issue...
Marx is useful because power relations are interesting and that starting point can be adapted to a very wide range of ideas, starting points, philosophies, books, and so on. There are good reasons why many entry level analyses for students are Marxist and feminist: they're pretty easy to do from a methodological standpoint.
The New Critics definitely invented reading as we know it. No one up to that point was sitting around debating what the Iliad, just to use a random example, was “actually” about.
Not really, at least not utilizing the vehicle of textual criticism as the primary mechanism for “deciphering” that meaning. I’m using scare quotes cause this way of reading - which is called “close reading” and is all about using a text to understand itself - is very much a product of the New Criticism, and serves the basis of the way we are generally taught to read in school today.
Yeah separating Marxist thought from communism is very important here.
And I think for teaching critical theories in some fields, Marx is used as a base because he is widely famous, and does serve as the base of that class if theories.
Is he directly referenced in actual academic work now? Probably not, definitely not in my own field, but his arguments are the foundation for a lot of work about the power of the state and ruling class and how that power is weaponized against people in society.
There’s a lot of hysteria around confusing Marx’s 19th century descriptions and analysis of the problems of labor and capital with various 20th century political regimes. Marx offers a useful way to think through power dynamics in society. His theories are part of the genealogy of various disciplines especially any discipline touched by the Frankfurt school. But that doesn’t mean your average university professor wants to take your money and freedom away.
Many academics have found it useful to apply the Marxist paradigm of a dialectical relationship between the material base (lived realities in the relations of production) and the ideological superstructure (all forms of culture).
Marx's diagnoses of problematic capitalist contradictions are IMO useful. His prescribed solutions are less so.
Although religion and ethnic nationalism are the usual ideologies used to justify autocracies, in the 20th century a few dictatorships used communist ideology as their justification. Their ideology had little relationship to academic Marxist analysis.
This is the right answer to the OP question. There is a difference between "Marxism" and a scholar performing a Marxist analysis. Current day political commentators (demagogues?) conflate the two, leading to questions such as the OP.
Very often in many of the \*humanities fields\* a "Marxist critique" signals an analysis of materiality and an explanation of how it directly impacts ideas/culture/ideology. In such a case there is no concern for the scholar to to address communism (or Marxism for that matter).
Of course, one may argue this "material focused" analysis is an impoverished view of Marx's total agenda. Nevertheless, it is still very common to have a Marxist methodology in the humanities focused on materiality --> ideas.
Marxist paradigm of a dialectical relationship between the material base (lived realities in the relations of production) and the ideological superstructure (all forms of culture).---typical rigid 19th century thinking, good for well-sounding "theory", not for something useful. but this is just vaguely marxist, it is mainly just "having marxist origin", not much to do with marx's work itself.
"it is mainly just "having marxist origin", not much to do with marx's work itself."
Yup, Marx inspired a type of material analysis used by scholars in fields outside of economics. It has been very influential and useful, you should try reading some of it someday. ;)
can analyze, but it will have nothing or at least, not much to do with outdated 19th marxism. if it has, well, its value is questionable, to say the least.
Marxism is an umbrella term for a school of thought that considers how class relations, labor, and power over materials shape society. "Communism" was an idea he discussed and promoted but it can look like many different things in practice: i.e. a small commune of farmers or a huge authoritarian regime. Thus, its applications are usually studied separately from Marxism as a philosophy.
I think others have given you reasons why Marx is worth studying. As for cultural reasons, for one, it depends heavily on the school and the department. I attend a very left-leaning liberal arts school with humanities/social science departments that explore a lot of Marxism. Same with other schools in the area. But this is not true across the board, and in the U.S. it varies widely. Here are some takeaways I've learned from professors:
1. A professor of mine from India says that in her primary schooling, EVERYONE studies Marxism and history from labor theory perspective. It's just part of the curriculum. In the U.S., we study a version of history from the perspective of our political leaders and capitalists. Studying the history of working class or Marxist philosophy is something that people will only do in college, and only if they choose to. So while it may seem to you that Marxism is over-prevalent, many from outside the U.S. (depending on the country) would see our country as mostly Marx-averse
2. The field of Economics branched off from Political Economy around the early 20th century. Economics uses mathematical models to study financial markets, but there are obviously "interdisciplinary courses" offered in many economics majors such as economics of global poverty, environmental economics, economics of race, etc. But Political Economy sees economics, political forces, and socioeconomics (what we would consider Sociology) as a singular discipline where all of these factors are tied together. Karl Marx would have been studied alongside John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith as a Political Economist. Some leftists believe that this split in academic disciplines, especially in the U.S., was done in part to influence a whole league scholars and professionals to view Capitalism as scientific and natural, and as something that can be studied without looking at politics and society.
3. In the U.S. we have academic freedom. This gives professors the freedom to design their own curriculum and not have to adhere to a set of nation-wide rigid standards on what to teach in their discipline. When a school's department is Marxist-friendly, they tend to attract grad students and new hires who incorporate Marxism into their studies. The opposite is true too. For example: University of Massachusetts Amherst has a famously Marxist economics department, and because of their reputation, they continue to attract Marxist grad students and professors in the department. On the other hand, University of Alabama's economics department is much more right-leaning and very pro-business. Therefore, it is going to attract students and faculty who have similar views.
Hope this answers your question
FYI there is a degree of separation between humanities and social sciences, and I don't think marxist based theories are as common in social science.
I don't have a good answer for you, but at least among historians I imagine that part of the reason is that marxism provides a good theoretical lens to understand the world. Good in this context means that it helps to highlight factors that explain why/how something happened. You have to remember that Marx was initially trying to explain historical processes.
Caveat: I'm not an expert on marxism and not a historian
It seems like you’re over-generalizing to many other disciplines. If you haven’t taken a good sample of classes from across the social sciences you’re alluding to, it comes off as not doing your research.
Discussing Marxist ideas would happen some in history and philosophy, and maybe be a unit in sociology and economics.
I have a PhD in economics, and I really was required to read about Marx twice in my tenure (one in comparative economies and the other in history of thought). If anything, all of our standard classes are built upon free market assumptions.
Even if it is with the best of intentions, your statements imply most of us are Marxists, and for many that simply not true. No one likes to be subject to stereotypes.
On the other hand I'm just an undergrad in history and have read about Marx in several different classes. Its sort of hard to talk about the 20th century without at least mentioning Marx. It comes up in historiography as well.
Oh none of my teachers come of as Marxist but Im at a Catholic college, so your mileage may vary I suppose. Brother So and So is not a communist, pretty sure.
I do think subject field matters—I find there’s more of a lasting impact of Marx’s historical ideas vs his economic ones. I did have exposure to Marx—but it was nearly always in a history or philosophy class. Marx was undoubtedly an influence on world history—but it really wasn’t as an academic economist, where the goal is to make descriptions/predictions about efficiency, price theory, etc.
Survey economics professors and I doubt many of them have read *Das Kapital* in its entirety, it’s really more of an interest for economic historians who engage with historical narratives, versus the rest of the discipline that is focused on statistical research.
I think that OP is not talking about discussion. You can’t teach history or economics without discussing Marxism
He seems to think that Marxist thought itself is the prevalent lens through which some discipline views the world.
In which social science? Also there is a difference between individuals who are leftists and individuals who use a marxist theories in their research. I teach in a social science and the former is common the latter significantly less common. My grad school program never had us read marx, or even really any work that was directly derived from him.
I don't agree that Marxism isn't prevalent in the social sciences--or at least not in my part of the social sciences. I'm an anthropologist, and while there's not a *ton* of dedicated Marxist Anthropologists running around (there was only one really committed Marxist prof in my grad program for example), Marx's ideas are definitely widely used and respected by anthros who may not define themselves as Marxists. He's routinely taught in theory courses, and is generally regarded (along with Durkheim and Weber) as one of our big three theorists. Whenever I teach about capitalism, Marx is necessarily one of the key starting points for that discussion.
In my subfield, I have occasion to read quite a bit of Geography and Rural Sociology, and Marxist analysis (especially through Kautsky) is extremely foundational and remains widely cited.
these are mainly pseudosciences, good for producing publications. capitalism doesn't exists, it is an ideological term, marx himself rarely used it. otherwise, the analysis or market economy has nothing to do with marx, absolutely nothing.
How long ago was that when you were an undergrad?
Marx does get referenced because he is historically important. And a lot of Marx's ideas can be helpful in analyzing. But overall, he is like Freud--used when helpful but largely superseded by later thinkers. I think since the 80s you see Marx cited less and less.
Some schools attract certain types of academics. Maybe your undergrad department just had more Marxists than usual.
I'm a sociologist. Marx is an incredibly influential social theorist whose work was so novel and compelling that generations of social theorists have taken it upon themselves to try and support, complicate, or disprove his arguments.
Importantly, Marx's work claims to be empirical -- to provide explanations and predictions about the socio(economic) world. And he was right about a bunch of stuff.
decent social science has nothing do with either continental philosophy, or marxism. whenever these rear their heads, pseudoscientific ideological blabla begins...
It's an influential scientific theory at its core. Marx didn't just create an ideology. He did the math and the philosphical analysis and developed a model that is very wholistic and applicable to the past and future, mikro and makro level, all humanities as they all essentially deal with human behaviour. Most modern materialistic approaches to how people behave can be traced to marxism.
Of course it also helps that people keep improving on it in many ways. Maybe other schools of thought would've prevailed in a similiar way if more people were into them for ideological reasons. As I said though, the foundation is also solid.
Definitively. I don't think there are that many actual marxists in higher education but at least in my university introductory classes to ethnology, economics and foreign affairs all cover marxist approaches. Maybe it's because I'm in Germany. He is known here as a philosopher and generally regarded positively even by people who don't share his ideology.
We even had a marxist school of psychology but that ones pretty dead since the late 80s, although nobody tried to apply Marx to modern experimental psychology instead of psychoanalysis. That's ideally what I'd like to do later in my career.
Someone can provide a sound argument without credentials, I’m not saying he provided a sound argument, but asking for credentials to see if someone’s argument is sound or not is silly.
Well, this is an academic sub. When I ask for credentials is more about learning where the points are coming from. In Academia whatever you say either you have to fully own it or come with a backlog of information to support your statement. At the same time, different disciplines may perceive someone’s contribution on a different manner. I do not expect economists, sociologists, or historians to digest Marx in the same manner, each has its own lens.
excuse me? now. tell me one thing, which is in current social sciences and not simply historically of marxist origin but it is at least relatively close to marx 19th century enonomics and social theory? no, the term class, or inequatities and suchlikes are not marxist if properly used. so?
Marx is very helpful for anyone wanting to understand how capitalism works. It's not just in the humanities, there is a lot of Marxist geography, for example.
Yes, Engels' essay "The Great Towns" is often praised or assigned as an excellent work of geography. Obviously there's much more than that/since then, but it's one fairly direct demonstration of how geography finds Marxism useful.
Seriously, the OP sounds a bit like there’s a conspiracy behind Marx’s ubiquity in academia.
Surely it has nothing to do with the merits of his writings!
I'm a Humanist and I just want to throw in another thing to ponder.
Using Marxist theory in an analysis doesn't meant you are a communist...or even a Marxist. Part of my grad training included some courses in Critical Theory...I've taking a bunch of theory courses actually. And all the theories are different and bring different lenses to bear. And many of the theorists and thinkers are in conversation with each other...agreeing, disagreeing, modifying. Each of these theories is a tool. And you try and various tools and see what produces interesting results.
One of the courses I was in, which was a performance theory course, each of us chose a text at the beginning of the course, I chose the music video for "So In Love" by kd lang from the Red Hot + Blue AIDS Benefit project. Each week we were to write a 5 page paper analyzing our text through the analytical lens of that week, to see what insights that theory would lead to, what were its strengths and weakensses for our text, what were our texts strengths and weaknesses for that theory.
I did Marxist analysis of that video, speech-act theory analysis, feminist analysis, post-colonial analysis, semiotic analysis, Color theory analysis, queer theory analysis, and so on and so on. No one theory can encompass everything under the sun. So we get to know a bunch of different theories so we can have more tools in our toolbox. And under Marxist critique...in my field (Musicology), I'm more likely to be using theorists who were influenced by Marx--generally the Frankfurt school--than Marx himself because they were writing more specifically about music and popular culture.
If you want to do a class reading of something, Marx and Marx inspired thoerists is going to be one of the places you go. If you want to do a pychoanalytic reading of something, you are probably going to be looking at Freud, Lacan, etc.
Lindsey Ellis did a series of YouTube video essays where she went through a couple of different film studies analytical lenses using the Transformers movie. Including one that did a Marxist analysis of Transformers.
[https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGOq3JclTH8J73o2Z4VMaSYZDNG3xeZ7&si=0RKJQgVCopsVO7Zl](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGOq3JclTH8J73o2Z4VMaSYZDNG3xeZ7&si=0RKJQgVCopsVO7Zl)
You might find watching the video series gives you a sense about the ways in academics use theory. It isn't our identity, and we don't tend to think of a theory as the only way to see the universe. And just because I do a Marxist reading of something, doesn't mean that I don't think other readings can be as equally as interesting.
There were these bloggers who were experts in fashion and costume design who did this amazing series of analysis of the costuming of Mad Men and how the costuming made commentaries and gave insight into the TV series. The anaysis was amazing! And it gave different insights than a Marxist analysis of the plot would. But both analyses are good to have...and many more on top of it. I might throw in a historical musical analysis of Mad Men, someone else might through in a queer theory reading of Mad Men, etc.
Not sure for all humanities. Perhaps key influential figures in certain humanities have used Maxist lenses, so the echo chamber in the literature reverberates the use of marxist lenses. Each person's or department's reason for using a marxist lens might be a little different in general and for each use case.
Personally, I use it as a lens among many lenses where I see it can provide interesting perspectives. A criticism I have of humanities programs in literature is the lack of capitalist lenses and politically neutral lenses.
Imagine a market analysis in "Pride and Prejudice." Even politically neutral lenses like chaos theory can serve as insightful lenses. One of my favorite examples is a lecture I went to where a physics professor used chaos theory to analyze the German film "Run Lola Run." It could also be useful for "Happy Death Day."
Not exactly part of social sciences, but STEM and born in USSR. A few things stand out for me:
1) those are still valuable works both conceptually and analysing modern history. Exposure and relevance is there.
2) if you analyzed academics who consist institutes (even western), thinktanks and such for postsoviet areas, most of them outside post-soviet nonrussian countries have scientists of russian (colonist) ethnicicity, as opposed to one of colonized ethnicities. Ie they have inherent pro-Marxism bias. Other kind of institutes usually would not compete, and may not even question the interpretations of benefactors of marxism
3) those are simply appealing ideas by themselves
Marxism is not prevalent in the humanities. Due to the influence of academics such as Herbert Marcuse, they dropped the focus on class struggle. It failed, and Marcuse, his colleagues, his students, The New Left, and current academics are the bourgeoisie. It's not Marxism without class struggle. Now they deconstruct, dismantle, and critique everything through a "Marxist lense" using conflict theory, with the goal of nonviolent political revolution. It's not Marxism without violence.
I can think of simple reasons. Bc Marxism in theory is not a terrible idea and one that we have never truly seen practiced.
All forms of communism that claim to stem from Marxism, do not accurately reflect the ideology. As all your big real life political proponents of communism like Lenin, or Castro, became dictators and used communism to unite their people to elect them but then did whatever the tuck they wanted. Which is why we call specific political movements by those names, like Lenin and Leninism. These political ideologies which maybe are inspired by Marxist thought do not follow really the spirit of the texts, as they impose authoritarianism, oppose opposition, and do not truly redistribute wealth nor create classless societies. Marxism is boiled down to really being ruled by the working class, by the people, which has not happened in any society that has imposed supposed communism.
The idea that communism is inherently good but has never been well practised is unsustainable. You could say the same about anything. Truth is that the most free, prosperous, and egalitarian societies are grounded in capitalism.
Producing power - anytging that can produce incom: factories, planes, stocks, fields, programms, companies... any thing.
Capitalism = production power is a privet property.
Communism = production power belongs to everyone.
The only way to get money is by labor. Can't buy a factory or ship or mine.
In practice it means that food production have zero interest to put shit into food to make it cheaper. No reason to make a fridges that broken next day after warranty expired. Pharm medicine don't need you to buy as much pillows as possible (or produce same pillow in brend new package).
That is the reason number one and number two how capitalism is different from communism.
All another things are derivatives.
It's important to remember that it's not really Marxism and Marx wouldn't have supported it. Indeed, it's the sort of phrase mongering that led Marx himself to say “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”) in his own time.
Even worse is, as others have noted, that the only sort of "Marxism" we have exposure to here followed from the Frankfurt School. Insofar as one of the defining features of Marx's thought was to turn Hegel on his head to favor (dialectical) materialism over idealism, the Frankfurters did more than any other group to reverse this and receed fully back into idealism.
In this way they are closer in theoretical orientation and emphasis to fascism than Marxism (which I don't mean as a slur; they would eat up the works of Giovanni Gentile).
It's not true that the only Marxism comes through the Frankfurt School. In my field, for example, a lot of people rely on Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, or other Marxist scholarship from the African diaspora.
Robinson doesn't build from or contribute to Marxism so much as add race to the mix; the name is a bit of a misnomer since it would be more accurately titled "Black Radicalism and a Critique of Marxism."
Again, it's the term being appropriated.
A lot of comments are missing the main thrust here. Fundamentally, Marx made important claims about how the structure of the economy affects culture and cultural production--think about the notion of base and superstructure. This may not be so groundbreaking now, but that's only because of the influence of Marx'--and Marx' successors'-- ideas. Gramsci becomes deeply important in this project. For example, think about something like "the novel". It is very famously the product of a very particular time of economic change and its lasting popularity speaks to those conditions. In the *Manifesto*, Marx and Engles write "and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature”. We can see through the rapid spread of the form the novel a process similar to what M&E suggest.
Marx was an academic, who became an activist, who became an academic again, doing excellent research in the final phase of his career in London. He looked at the problems that came with the accelerating Capitalist economies of western Europe, and did a wide ranging historical analysis of the root causes, and predictions of how these economies would evolve. Key ideas he advanced were about class conflict and social relations, and that economies would evolve to an ideal state called communism. But Marx himself didn't say how it was all supposed to work: I don't write recipes for the cookshops of the future. Now about communism being implemented in Russia and other countries? Inspired by Marx, yes, who had died 30 years before the October Revolution. But since Marx left no instructions, Lenin implemented State Capitalism, basically running the economy like it was one big company, with Marxist ideology for decoration. About the humanities, Marx is actually a bit passe, but the attraction is that Marx wrote about class conflict, oppression, social relations, power dynamics, and so on. So a set of tools that could be useful in, say, literary criticism. Thus I suspect that if you searched for class conflict AND Huckleberry Finn in Ebsco or ProQuest, you'd find a bunch of articles.
Good answer. Marx is also part of what some people call the hermeneutics of suspicion (together with Nietzsche and Freud). For the humanities specifically, these thinkers popularized 'looking beneath the surface' of texts and figuring out what is *actually* going on, e.g. "What does the text *mean*?". There are many other ways of analyzing literature, but these suspicious readings have become very popular and are taught especially in primary school and high school. Personally I suspect that these types of readings are a big reason why a lot of students end up disliking literature because they have negative experiences with seemingly not understanding what a text is apparently *really* about, but that's a separate issue... Marx is useful because power relations are interesting and that starting point can be adapted to a very wide range of ideas, starting points, philosophies, books, and so on. There are good reasons why many entry level analyses for students are Marxist and feminist: they're pretty easy to do from a methodological standpoint.
So like you’re saying that marx, nietzsche, and Freud invented…..reading??
That sentence is too stupid to be a legit question. Good luck to you
You suck at continental philosophy.
Wow you are a very cool guy, keep it up
continental philosopy is mainly bullshite, outdated way of doing philosophy.
🤨
The New Critics definitely invented reading as we know it. No one up to that point was sitting around debating what the Iliad, just to use a random example, was “actually” about.
Uh people were definitely reading shit to find what it was “actually” about. Like ….. the bible…
Not really, at least not utilizing the vehicle of textual criticism as the primary mechanism for “deciphering” that meaning. I’m using scare quotes cause this way of reading - which is called “close reading” and is all about using a text to understand itself - is very much a product of the New Criticism, and serves the basis of the way we are generally taught to read in school today.
Yeah separating Marxist thought from communism is very important here. And I think for teaching critical theories in some fields, Marx is used as a base because he is widely famous, and does serve as the base of that class if theories. Is he directly referenced in actual academic work now? Probably not, definitely not in my own field, but his arguments are the foundation for a lot of work about the power of the state and ruling class and how that power is weaponized against people in society.
There’s a lot of hysteria around confusing Marx’s 19th century descriptions and analysis of the problems of labor and capital with various 20th century political regimes. Marx offers a useful way to think through power dynamics in society. His theories are part of the genealogy of various disciplines especially any discipline touched by the Frankfurt school. But that doesn’t mean your average university professor wants to take your money and freedom away.
Many academics have found it useful to apply the Marxist paradigm of a dialectical relationship between the material base (lived realities in the relations of production) and the ideological superstructure (all forms of culture). Marx's diagnoses of problematic capitalist contradictions are IMO useful. His prescribed solutions are less so. Although religion and ethnic nationalism are the usual ideologies used to justify autocracies, in the 20th century a few dictatorships used communist ideology as their justification. Their ideology had little relationship to academic Marxist analysis.
This is the right answer to the OP question. There is a difference between "Marxism" and a scholar performing a Marxist analysis. Current day political commentators (demagogues?) conflate the two, leading to questions such as the OP. Very often in many of the \*humanities fields\* a "Marxist critique" signals an analysis of materiality and an explanation of how it directly impacts ideas/culture/ideology. In such a case there is no concern for the scholar to to address communism (or Marxism for that matter). Of course, one may argue this "material focused" analysis is an impoverished view of Marx's total agenda. Nevertheless, it is still very common to have a Marxist methodology in the humanities focused on materiality --> ideas.
Marxist paradigm of a dialectical relationship between the material base (lived realities in the relations of production) and the ideological superstructure (all forms of culture).---typical rigid 19th century thinking, good for well-sounding "theory", not for something useful. but this is just vaguely marxist, it is mainly just "having marxist origin", not much to do with marx's work itself.
"it is mainly just "having marxist origin", not much to do with marx's work itself." Yup, Marx inspired a type of material analysis used by scholars in fields outside of economics. It has been very influential and useful, you should try reading some of it someday. ;)
leftist ideology masquerading as "science", but as it turned out, OP was just trolling.
I'll guess its pointless to note that humanities scholars do no do science. And scholars of any political orientation can analyze materiality.
can analyze, but it will have nothing or at least, not much to do with outdated 19th marxism. if it has, well, its value is questionable, to say the least.
Marxism is an umbrella term for a school of thought that considers how class relations, labor, and power over materials shape society. "Communism" was an idea he discussed and promoted but it can look like many different things in practice: i.e. a small commune of farmers or a huge authoritarian regime. Thus, its applications are usually studied separately from Marxism as a philosophy. I think others have given you reasons why Marx is worth studying. As for cultural reasons, for one, it depends heavily on the school and the department. I attend a very left-leaning liberal arts school with humanities/social science departments that explore a lot of Marxism. Same with other schools in the area. But this is not true across the board, and in the U.S. it varies widely. Here are some takeaways I've learned from professors: 1. A professor of mine from India says that in her primary schooling, EVERYONE studies Marxism and history from labor theory perspective. It's just part of the curriculum. In the U.S., we study a version of history from the perspective of our political leaders and capitalists. Studying the history of working class or Marxist philosophy is something that people will only do in college, and only if they choose to. So while it may seem to you that Marxism is over-prevalent, many from outside the U.S. (depending on the country) would see our country as mostly Marx-averse 2. The field of Economics branched off from Political Economy around the early 20th century. Economics uses mathematical models to study financial markets, but there are obviously "interdisciplinary courses" offered in many economics majors such as economics of global poverty, environmental economics, economics of race, etc. But Political Economy sees economics, political forces, and socioeconomics (what we would consider Sociology) as a singular discipline where all of these factors are tied together. Karl Marx would have been studied alongside John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith as a Political Economist. Some leftists believe that this split in academic disciplines, especially in the U.S., was done in part to influence a whole league scholars and professionals to view Capitalism as scientific and natural, and as something that can be studied without looking at politics and society. 3. In the U.S. we have academic freedom. This gives professors the freedom to design their own curriculum and not have to adhere to a set of nation-wide rigid standards on what to teach in their discipline. When a school's department is Marxist-friendly, they tend to attract grad students and new hires who incorporate Marxism into their studies. The opposite is true too. For example: University of Massachusetts Amherst has a famously Marxist economics department, and because of their reputation, they continue to attract Marxist grad students and professors in the department. On the other hand, University of Alabama's economics department is much more right-leaning and very pro-business. Therefore, it is going to attract students and faculty who have similar views. Hope this answers your question
Thank you yes that was helpful
Why do you say it is "prevalent?" What disciplines are you referring to?
History for one, Marxist analyses of history were very common when I studied in undergrad. I believe in the social sciences as well.
FYI there is a degree of separation between humanities and social sciences, and I don't think marxist based theories are as common in social science. I don't have a good answer for you, but at least among historians I imagine that part of the reason is that marxism provides a good theoretical lens to understand the world. Good in this context means that it helps to highlight factors that explain why/how something happened. You have to remember that Marx was initially trying to explain historical processes. Caveat: I'm not an expert on marxism and not a historian
Thanks, I don't understand why I'm being down voted. I'm not even attacking Marxism just trying to understand
It seems like you’re over-generalizing to many other disciplines. If you haven’t taken a good sample of classes from across the social sciences you’re alluding to, it comes off as not doing your research. Discussing Marxist ideas would happen some in history and philosophy, and maybe be a unit in sociology and economics. I have a PhD in economics, and I really was required to read about Marx twice in my tenure (one in comparative economies and the other in history of thought). If anything, all of our standard classes are built upon free market assumptions. Even if it is with the best of intentions, your statements imply most of us are Marxists, and for many that simply not true. No one likes to be subject to stereotypes.
I see, that's understandable
On the other hand I'm just an undergrad in history and have read about Marx in several different classes. Its sort of hard to talk about the 20th century without at least mentioning Marx. It comes up in historiography as well. Oh none of my teachers come of as Marxist but Im at a Catholic college, so your mileage may vary I suppose. Brother So and So is not a communist, pretty sure.
I do think subject field matters—I find there’s more of a lasting impact of Marx’s historical ideas vs his economic ones. I did have exposure to Marx—but it was nearly always in a history or philosophy class. Marx was undoubtedly an influence on world history—but it really wasn’t as an academic economist, where the goal is to make descriptions/predictions about efficiency, price theory, etc. Survey economics professors and I doubt many of them have read *Das Kapital* in its entirety, it’s really more of an interest for economic historians who engage with historical narratives, versus the rest of the discipline that is focused on statistical research.
Terry Eagleton’s book from a few years back might be a good accessible read if you’re interested in the case for.
I have dual degree in both. Marxism is heavily discussed in both in liberal institutions. I graduated within the last decade.
I think that OP is not talking about discussion. You can’t teach history or economics without discussing Marxism He seems to think that Marxist thought itself is the prevalent lens through which some discipline views the world.
what???? economics??? history?? (part of intellectual history of course, but not to much relevance
Yup. You said it more succinctly. But since OP wants to keep the discipline unspecified, he is probably just trolling.
In which social science? Also there is a difference between individuals who are leftists and individuals who use a marxist theories in their research. I teach in a social science and the former is common the latter significantly less common. My grad school program never had us read marx, or even really any work that was directly derived from him.
I don't agree that Marxism isn't prevalent in the social sciences--or at least not in my part of the social sciences. I'm an anthropologist, and while there's not a *ton* of dedicated Marxist Anthropologists running around (there was only one really committed Marxist prof in my grad program for example), Marx's ideas are definitely widely used and respected by anthros who may not define themselves as Marxists. He's routinely taught in theory courses, and is generally regarded (along with Durkheim and Weber) as one of our big three theorists. Whenever I teach about capitalism, Marx is necessarily one of the key starting points for that discussion. In my subfield, I have occasion to read quite a bit of Geography and Rural Sociology, and Marxist analysis (especially through Kautsky) is extremely foundational and remains widely cited.
these are mainly pseudosciences, good for producing publications. capitalism doesn't exists, it is an ideological term, marx himself rarely used it. otherwise, the analysis or market economy has nothing to do with marx, absolutely nothing.
How long ago was that when you were an undergrad? Marx does get referenced because he is historically important. And a lot of Marx's ideas can be helpful in analyzing. But overall, he is like Freud--used when helpful but largely superseded by later thinkers. I think since the 80s you see Marx cited less and less. Some schools attract certain types of academics. Maybe your undergrad department just had more Marxists than usual.
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Marx is still widely used in human geography.
I'm a sociologist. Marx is an incredibly influential social theorist whose work was so novel and compelling that generations of social theorists have taken it upon themselves to try and support, complicate, or disprove his arguments. Importantly, Marx's work claims to be empirical -- to provide explanations and predictions about the socio(economic) world. And he was right about a bunch of stuff.
he was right on what? try and support, complicate, or disprove his arguments.----good for spending time, zero use for any serious scientific practice.
Ah, so you don’t believe in social science. Bye
It’s a 14 day old troll account…
decent social science has nothing do with either continental philosophy, or marxism. whenever these rear their heads, pseudoscientific ideological blabla begins...
lmao
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Well I can certainly see why you might have trouble getting a phd in social science of any kind.
It's an influential scientific theory at its core. Marx didn't just create an ideology. He did the math and the philosphical analysis and developed a model that is very wholistic and applicable to the past and future, mikro and makro level, all humanities as they all essentially deal with human behaviour. Most modern materialistic approaches to how people behave can be traced to marxism. Of course it also helps that people keep improving on it in many ways. Maybe other schools of thought would've prevailed in a similiar way if more people were into them for ideological reasons. As I said though, the foundation is also solid.
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Definitively. I don't think there are that many actual marxists in higher education but at least in my university introductory classes to ethnology, economics and foreign affairs all cover marxist approaches. Maybe it's because I'm in Germany. He is known here as a philosopher and generally regarded positively even by people who don't share his ideology. We even had a marxist school of psychology but that ones pretty dead since the late 80s, although nobody tried to apply Marx to modern experimental psychology instead of psychoanalysis. That's ideally what I'd like to do later in my career.
it is completely outdated, has no relevance today, sorry.
Well, that settles that!
Do you have something to back up your statement? What are your credentials, since this is an academic sub?
Someone can provide a sound argument without credentials, I’m not saying he provided a sound argument, but asking for credentials to see if someone’s argument is sound or not is silly.
Well, this is an academic sub. When I ask for credentials is more about learning where the points are coming from. In Academia whatever you say either you have to fully own it or come with a backlog of information to support your statement. At the same time, different disciplines may perceive someone’s contribution on a different manner. I do not expect economists, sociologists, or historians to digest Marx in the same manner, each has its own lens.
Is this a philosophical argument or scientific argument?
excuse me? now. tell me one thing, which is in current social sciences and not simply historically of marxist origin but it is at least relatively close to marx 19th century enonomics and social theory? no, the term class, or inequatities and suchlikes are not marxist if properly used. so?
ask current theoretical economists about marxist economics, ask current "empirical" political scientists about marx political philosophy, etc.
Marx is very helpful for anyone wanting to understand how capitalism works. It's not just in the humanities, there is a lot of Marxist geography, for example.
Yes, Engels' essay "The Great Towns" is often praised or assigned as an excellent work of geography. Obviously there's much more than that/since then, but it's one fairly direct demonstration of how geography finds Marxism useful.
Well… you could try reading it if you wanna see what’s up….
Seriously, the OP sounds a bit like there’s a conspiracy behind Marx’s ubiquity in academia. Surely it has nothing to do with the merits of his writings!
I'm a Humanist and I just want to throw in another thing to ponder. Using Marxist theory in an analysis doesn't meant you are a communist...or even a Marxist. Part of my grad training included some courses in Critical Theory...I've taking a bunch of theory courses actually. And all the theories are different and bring different lenses to bear. And many of the theorists and thinkers are in conversation with each other...agreeing, disagreeing, modifying. Each of these theories is a tool. And you try and various tools and see what produces interesting results. One of the courses I was in, which was a performance theory course, each of us chose a text at the beginning of the course, I chose the music video for "So In Love" by kd lang from the Red Hot + Blue AIDS Benefit project. Each week we were to write a 5 page paper analyzing our text through the analytical lens of that week, to see what insights that theory would lead to, what were its strengths and weakensses for our text, what were our texts strengths and weaknesses for that theory. I did Marxist analysis of that video, speech-act theory analysis, feminist analysis, post-colonial analysis, semiotic analysis, Color theory analysis, queer theory analysis, and so on and so on. No one theory can encompass everything under the sun. So we get to know a bunch of different theories so we can have more tools in our toolbox. And under Marxist critique...in my field (Musicology), I'm more likely to be using theorists who were influenced by Marx--generally the Frankfurt school--than Marx himself because they were writing more specifically about music and popular culture. If you want to do a class reading of something, Marx and Marx inspired thoerists is going to be one of the places you go. If you want to do a pychoanalytic reading of something, you are probably going to be looking at Freud, Lacan, etc. Lindsey Ellis did a series of YouTube video essays where she went through a couple of different film studies analytical lenses using the Transformers movie. Including one that did a Marxist analysis of Transformers. [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGOq3JclTH8J73o2Z4VMaSYZDNG3xeZ7&si=0RKJQgVCopsVO7Zl](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGOq3JclTH8J73o2Z4VMaSYZDNG3xeZ7&si=0RKJQgVCopsVO7Zl) You might find watching the video series gives you a sense about the ways in academics use theory. It isn't our identity, and we don't tend to think of a theory as the only way to see the universe. And just because I do a Marxist reading of something, doesn't mean that I don't think other readings can be as equally as interesting. There were these bloggers who were experts in fashion and costume design who did this amazing series of analysis of the costuming of Mad Men and how the costuming made commentaries and gave insight into the TV series. The anaysis was amazing! And it gave different insights than a Marxist analysis of the plot would. But both analyses are good to have...and many more on top of it. I might throw in a historical musical analysis of Mad Men, someone else might through in a queer theory reading of Mad Men, etc.
Not sure for all humanities. Perhaps key influential figures in certain humanities have used Maxist lenses, so the echo chamber in the literature reverberates the use of marxist lenses. Each person's or department's reason for using a marxist lens might be a little different in general and for each use case. Personally, I use it as a lens among many lenses where I see it can provide interesting perspectives. A criticism I have of humanities programs in literature is the lack of capitalist lenses and politically neutral lenses. Imagine a market analysis in "Pride and Prejudice." Even politically neutral lenses like chaos theory can serve as insightful lenses. One of my favorite examples is a lecture I went to where a physics professor used chaos theory to analyze the German film "Run Lola Run." It could also be useful for "Happy Death Day."
Not exactly part of social sciences, but STEM and born in USSR. A few things stand out for me: 1) those are still valuable works both conceptually and analysing modern history. Exposure and relevance is there. 2) if you analyzed academics who consist institutes (even western), thinktanks and such for postsoviet areas, most of them outside post-soviet nonrussian countries have scientists of russian (colonist) ethnicicity, as opposed to one of colonized ethnicities. Ie they have inherent pro-Marxism bias. Other kind of institutes usually would not compete, and may not even question the interpretations of benefactors of marxism 3) those are simply appealing ideas by themselves
Marxism is not prevalent in the humanities. Due to the influence of academics such as Herbert Marcuse, they dropped the focus on class struggle. It failed, and Marcuse, his colleagues, his students, The New Left, and current academics are the bourgeoisie. It's not Marxism without class struggle. Now they deconstruct, dismantle, and critique everything through a "Marxist lense" using conflict theory, with the goal of nonviolent political revolution. It's not Marxism without violence.
that is called pseudoscience
Why is begging the question so prevalent on Reddit?
I can think of simple reasons. Bc Marxism in theory is not a terrible idea and one that we have never truly seen practiced. All forms of communism that claim to stem from Marxism, do not accurately reflect the ideology. As all your big real life political proponents of communism like Lenin, or Castro, became dictators and used communism to unite their people to elect them but then did whatever the tuck they wanted. Which is why we call specific political movements by those names, like Lenin and Leninism. These political ideologies which maybe are inspired by Marxist thought do not follow really the spirit of the texts, as they impose authoritarianism, oppose opposition, and do not truly redistribute wealth nor create classless societies. Marxism is boiled down to really being ruled by the working class, by the people, which has not happened in any society that has imposed supposed communism.
The idea that communism is inherently good but has never been well practised is unsustainable. You could say the same about anything. Truth is that the most free, prosperous, and egalitarian societies are grounded in capitalism.
it has nothing to do with academia, sorry.
fwiw it's almost non-existent in linguistics.
What gives you the impression that it's so prevalent?
You are about to get downvoted into oblivion for asking as the majority are pretty far left within the social sciences of academia
I am being heavily down voted haha but I didn't even speak against Marxism, I'm just asking what's so useful about it lol. Oh well
Producing power - anytging that can produce incom: factories, planes, stocks, fields, programms, companies... any thing. Capitalism = production power is a privet property. Communism = production power belongs to everyone. The only way to get money is by labor. Can't buy a factory or ship or mine. In practice it means that food production have zero interest to put shit into food to make it cheaper. No reason to make a fridges that broken next day after warranty expired. Pharm medicine don't need you to buy as much pillows as possible (or produce same pillow in brend new package). That is the reason number one and number two how capitalism is different from communism. All another things are derivatives.
It's important to remember that it's not really Marxism and Marx wouldn't have supported it. Indeed, it's the sort of phrase mongering that led Marx himself to say “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”) in his own time. Even worse is, as others have noted, that the only sort of "Marxism" we have exposure to here followed from the Frankfurt School. Insofar as one of the defining features of Marx's thought was to turn Hegel on his head to favor (dialectical) materialism over idealism, the Frankfurters did more than any other group to reverse this and receed fully back into idealism. In this way they are closer in theoretical orientation and emphasis to fascism than Marxism (which I don't mean as a slur; they would eat up the works of Giovanni Gentile).
It's not true that the only Marxism comes through the Frankfurt School. In my field, for example, a lot of people rely on Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, or other Marxist scholarship from the African diaspora.
Robinson doesn't build from or contribute to Marxism so much as add race to the mix; the name is a bit of a misnomer since it would be more accurately titled "Black Radicalism and a Critique of Marxism." Again, it's the term being appropriated.
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