What is your opinion on Marxist ideology being taught in Universities?

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What is your opinion on Marxist ideology being taught in Catholic Universities? Would you say this is indoctrination of young people?
 
Actually I know exactly what it means. Communism end of story.
 
Well, I don’t know if Marxist ideology is taught in Universities. I graduated from Columbia University in 2003. Part of our required reading was not only parts of the Bible including Augustine’s Confessions and City of God and Aquinas, but it also included reading Marx, Freud, Darwin and Nietzche. The course are our Core Curriculum and are taught in discussion style with no more than fifteen students per class.

Well, what I will say about Marx is that it’s not dangerous to read. He misinterprets, and greatly so, another philosopher called Hegel who is known as the protestant Aquinas. I rather love Hegel and as a Catholic found I had an easier time understanding his abstract work than other students not acquainted with his work.

From what I remember Marx argues that it is the inevitable course of history for the laboring class to rebel against the small minority of Capitalist to regain their dignity in work. The natural course of things (again this is where he misinterprets Hegel and Hegel’s Philosophy of History) is that Labor after having been exploited in the industrial process will one day reclaim ownership of his work in a Communist society. He talks about the objectification of labor who can only add a cog to or a part to a finished product in a repetitive day instead of actually taking ownership of his work by being in control of the manufacturing process. Again, to Marx Labor rebellion is the natural course of history that can’t be stopped. The Capitalist himself would be replaced by Labor owning the company or the firm and a society without a Capitalist class.

Again, Marx doesn’t specify anything about governance or how this is to one day be implemented. I’m not a Marxist, but it doesn’t seem like Marx was looking to Russia or China for the satisfaction of his theory instead he was looking squarely at Western Europe and America. So, while Communist States may have found their motivation in Marx, they did not get their Economic Structure from him because he does not address governance and Economic Structure.

So, that’s what I know about Marx. You can ask me about Freud, Darwin and Nietzche but in terms of noxious views of the nineteenth century that created pervasive problems in the twentieth century I think the latter thinkers are worse.
 
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I have never seen any evidence that actual communism is being pushed in Catholic universities, or that it’s being taught in any way other than the basic historical one. What I’ve seen mostly is that support for things like universal health care or openness to immigrants get labelled as “communist”.
 
My experience in my own country is that, students are taught to have a self loathing and have no attachment to the homeland, “openness to immigrants” really means, they are taught not to believe in ethnicity and are happy to hand the homeland over to anyone. Not many show loyality and love for their own people. Indoctrination is bad with them.
 
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I concur. I’m taking a class at a University of California. The class is a requirement and it’s called Education in a Diverse Society. I’m essentially learning about how group identity is fundamental and how straight, White, Christian men are too privileged to know they’re privileged. I’m learning how oppressed groups (minorities) need to be stronger by claiming they’re oppressed and how they deserve more resources to “catch up” to White people.
 
Gosh, I must have forgot that part. It’s been over eighteen years now. I’m not going to go back and re-read it again. I’ll just take your word for it. Again, the only point I was making is according to his theory he is just the messenger and regardless of whether he wrote the manifesto the natural course of history was a revolution by the laboring class against the capitalist class.
 
Yes. It’s a very interesting fact that those who believe in predestination (Notably Calvinists, Marxists, Moslems) feel compelled to further their cause energetically. Logically they should sit back and wait.
 
Yes a great deal of that goes on in universities but it is not strictly speaking marxist ideology.
 
Well, Marx seems to make it pretty clear in the Communist Manifesto that the ultimate form of government would be democratic, but there would need to be a period called the Dictatorship of Proletariat, where a technocratic autocracy needs to set up the economic systems. Keep in mind that Marx and Engels believed the revolution would happen in industrialized states as they stood in the mid-19th century. With the exception of Hungary’s first very brief flirtation with Communism in 1919 with the First Hungarian Peoples Republic, none of the Communist states that formed, beginning the Soviet Union, were actually industrialized to the significant extent that would have met Marx’s conditions. Both Russia and China were still primarily agrarian economies more feudal in nature, so you’ll notice that in both the USSR and China there were rapid industrialization programs to try to bootstrap the economies, and the early Communist periods attempted some degree of economic liberalization before clamping down.

The only kind of Marxism I can think of that has ever really penetrated academia is the notion of class struggle. This is where Marxist theory is probably on firmest ground, since it does explain a number of historical events like the Social Wars of Ancient Rome and the Peasants Revolt. The tendency of economists and historians up to Marx’s time was to really only look at the top end of society; the aristocracy, nobility and the mercantile classes, and basically ignore commoners and peasantry. What Marx did accomplish was to force scholars to look at society much more broadly, so history’s began to read less like “King so-and-so fought rebellions by his barons” or accounts of wars without any attempt to put those wars into any wider socioeconomic context.

That all being said. Marx’s economic theories were absolute bunk. None of his predictions came true. There were no successful workers revolts that overthrew the major capitalist states of the 19th century. Those states, by and large, either were already in the process of liberalizing (like Britain, as the House of Commons gained supremacy and voting reform acts steadily increased the voting franchise) or rulers moved quickly to integrate more workers rights into their political and legal systems, as happened in Germany with the explicit legalization of trade unions and other workers and education reforms. So the states where Communism took hold were states, ironically, not sufficiently economically advanced enough according to Communist theory. Leninism and Maoism were all attempts to explain away Communism’s utter failure in the more developed states, and explain why it was necessary in the agrarian states they took root in.
 
Thank you. What I wrote is what I most remembered, but your additional analysis is very good.
 
I think it is because it considers we ought to fundamentally view the world as composed of groups which can be categorized as either oppressor or oppressed. He just divided groups by class whereas we divide them by race, gender, etc.
 
It should be noted that every single Communist revolution got stuck, as it were, at the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The promised democracies were a sham, with elections taking place from lists of Party-approved candidates. The democracies in places like the Soviet Union, China and Cuba were rather like the Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror VII episode, where Clinton and Dole are replaced by Kang and Kodos, and when their true identities are revealed, they declare “You have to vote for one of us!”
 
RepetantCatholic said:
You can ask me about Freud, Darwin and Nietzche but in terms of noxious views of the nineteenth century that created pervasive problems in the twentieth century I think the latter thinkers are worse.
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Really? How many dead? Over 100 million.
 
Well, I don’t know why I would cause offense with that assessment. So, I hope I didn’t mean to offend you. When it comes the Nazi regime the remnants of their ideology could be seen in Nietzche and their assessment of race could be seen in Darwin. As for Freud, the sexual revolution in part hearkens back to his views on sexuality and it’s place in society. Again, I’m not a Marxist but out of all views from a Catholic perspective I would find most offensive those views would come from Freud, Nietzche, and Darwin.

Also, unlike Marxism which has had it’s time and really isn’t a concept now, Freud’s, Nietzche’s and Darwin’s thoughts pervade secular society and the world at large currently. Sure, there is Bernie Sanders that is a Socialist but once again this isn’t what Marx envisioned and I don’t put Socialist in the same category as Marxist. Europe, including England, has many Socialist elements to it and they seem to get on fine. I wouldn’t call Europe Communist. Again, I wouldn’t vote for Bernie Sanders either.

So, in terms of longer term problems for religious people in the world the boxes Freud, Nietzche and Darwin unpacked will reverberate throughout society for centuries. In the case of Darwin it was necessary and less controversial, again the case against Darwin is abiogenesis and even genetics itself which has it’s roots with a Catholic Monk Gregor Mendel. But in the case of Freud and Nietzche far more incendiary and unnecessary. But again, their thinking isn’t new and it was around for a long time (look up sixteenth century Breughel paintings or the Leviathan by Thomas Hobbs or Machiavelli the Prince ) but just their total disregard for morality and decency in favor of power and the feelings of power. That is something society will contend with for a long time.
 
Well, just the Economic model of Communist countries didn’t work. We studied this in a few classes in Econ School. The way it was described were the Economies were run by Central Planners otherwise known as Bureaucrats whose sole job was to set prices. OK, these guys weren’t dunces apparently. You had Statisticians and Mathematicians and other analytical types like that setting prices of goods in the Economy.

Well, in a basic Supply and Demand model where Supply intersects with Demand constitutes the price and quantity everyone is happy with. So, the idea is that in a free market prices are accurate and rise and fall based on supply and demand conditions dictated by the consumer and supplier. OK, in a basic model any price other than the equilibrium price, which is determined by consumer and supplier in interactions in the market place, you will either get a surplus of goods or a short-fall of goods. So, the planners would price milk cheap below the equilibrium market price, suppliers would only supply less than optimal quantity due to the cheap price and now you have a shortage.

Again, the real world isn’t as simple as an Economic Model. Even in our Capitalist society there are monopolies (think the cable businesses which are allowed by government to be a monopoly in return for planting infrastructure like 5G) and Cartels like OPEC. There are Oligopolies like the Big Banks, hence some businesses are too big to fail. And so on…but in a basic model, the Communist Economy doesn’t work.

I’m not certain how old you are, but what the internet age and the resulting globalization brought us 1) prices that are reflective and efficient to change 2) a variety of goods previously not available 3) international trade of goods which further allowed for efficient prices. Again, before the Internet you would go to your local Sears (now pretty much out of business) and bought whatever they had in stock when it comes to electronics no matter what price they sold it for and often times there was not much variety. Now, with the internet age because there is more competition and there is more information prices tend to reflect more of what people want to pay with a diversity of goods to choose inferior options based on budget.
 
Again, I’m a Catholic but a Democrat. So, when I was in Econ School globalization and the impending trade was seen as a good thing. Well, the professors were never factoring in losses in the labor market due to cheaper methods of production from foreign countries. So, years after the nineties and NAFTA, Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (I don’t praise Michael Moore but I believe he is Catholic so that particular documentary is one to watch just to get a sense of the time, again I’m not a huge fan of his) we have a populist reaction lead by the changing labor market and bringing back jobs from oversees. Back in Econ School and the discussion of Globalization, it was assumed that America would be solely a high skilled service country and all low skilled labor would necessarily go abroad. OK, all these professors were Manhattan Elites so they were unaware what was going on in the Rust Belt and other areas.

So, while I am not a Trump Supporter I understand their plight. Again, it’s going to take long term solutions in America to change the course of this country. Unfortunately, the market is judged by short-term gain. But I would hope one day for an FDR or LBJ and a Job Corp stile program like the sixties and seventies getting people in urban and rural areas the skills at any age to join any skilled trade. Right now the Democrats don’t have that vision or leadership.
 
But Marx does not get off the hook just because the communist states never were successful. His theories were the basis for what followed.
 
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