The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
14 — Wednesday, November 11, 2020
statement
I
n the course of an undergraduate
education here at the University of
Michigan, there are just some things
one is bound to encounter at some point or
another. The Big House, the Shapiro Under-
graduate Library, the block ‘M’; not to men-
tion Zingerman’s, Hatcher Graduate Library
and Angell Hall; these are the perennial
names, spaces and places that make the U-
experience what it is today.
If we look a little closer, however, there is
another figure that tends to receive a consid-
erable amount of attention here as well: His
name is Karl Marx.
Marx was one of the most influential
thinkers of the 19th century and one of the
most important critics of the economic sys-
tem of capitalism. At the center of the Marx-
ian critique is the inverse relationship be-
tween the accumulation of capital and the
misery of the working class, a critique that
seems to have no less credence today than it
did in Marx’s time. However, to reduce his
impact to this particular effort would be a
mistake. More than an ideological founder of
communism, Marx’s writings touched prac-
tically every corner of social life.
During the University’s fall 2020 semester
alone, courses in fields as diverse as cultural
anthropology, classical civilization, French,
German, political science, sociology, women
and gender studies, and philosophy mention
Marx in the description of advanced junior
and senior-level courses. Any student major-
ing in these fields, as well as someone taking
a course in these fields to meet requirements
or for persona; curiosity, would be hard-
pressed to avoid Marx or exploring Marxist
thought in an academic setting.
In one sense, being exposed to radical
new ideas, such as those presented by Marx,
is just part of a “liberal” education; one in
which, while studying a given subject, stu-
dents also acquire critical thinking skills
they can apply in a broad range of situations.
Michigan students, so says the mission of
the University, are expected to “challenge
the present and enrich the future.” The LSA
website propounds a similar belief about the
task of thinking: “thinking doesn’t have to
be elegant — it can be messy, it can shake up
the status quo and it can set minds in motion.
Evolution, after all, is rarely neat.”
Both the materialist notion of setting
minds in motion and the call for students to
“challenge” or “shake up” the preconceived
ideas of their time express a commitment to
social change of which Marx would have ap-
proved. I can only wonder whether the au-
thor of these words had next to them a copy
of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” originally
written in the spring of 1845. In the “The-
ses,” Marx expressed his own frustrations
with academic pursuits that lacked practi-
cal application, writing that “philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Let me not overstate my point, however.
Marx is a controversial figure, and there is
not a general acceptance of Marxist thought
or practice in any academic institution.
What is undeniable is the scope of his im-
pact on the minds of the world in general,
and the minds at the University in particu-
lar.S
o, what is the impact of Marxism
on the University? As with any ide-
ology or body of intellectual contri-
butions, the tangible effects are difficult to
measure.
Nevertheless, there seems to be a conser-
vative hypothesis that neo-Marxism runs
rampant on college campuses across the
United States, with harmful consequences.
For example, a Fox News article laments the
“lopsidedness of the social sciences,” refer-
ring to the high proportion of faculty who
self-identify as Marxists, leftists, or simply,
Democrats compared with conservatives.
Similar articles repeat the refrain that now-
defunct 20th century economic Marxism
mutated into the cultural and literary theo-
ries of postmodernism, which they argue, are
too often obsessed with identity politics and
privilege. Riffing off a New York Times ar-
ticle on the mainstreaming of Marxist ideol-
ogy, the Foundation for Economic Education
accused Marxist ideas of fleeing to “English
departments and other more abstract disci-
plines,” while still exercising a detrimental
effect on the good sense of university gradu-
ates.
I think these and other accusations of
Marxist indoctrination fundamentally miss
the mark. Liberal arts colleges are not like
churches; they do not preach a singular,
unified gospel that worshippers are then
expected to spread far and wide. While it is
true that universities in the U.S. lean left, in
my experience, professors have no interest
in indoctrinating their students. Particularly
in the humanities, it is hard to survive if you
never question the intellectual authorities.
For example, in my phone conversation
with Rackham student Deven Philbrick, he
explained how his teaching was political in
nature, but not in the normal sense of the
word.
“In terms of who people vote for, what
governments are in power, who is in those
governments, things like that … nothing that
I have in my teaching is very interested in
those problems,” Philbrick said. “Although,
certainly, I do teach sort of critical think-
ing skills that could then be applied to such
problems, but that’s not what I’m asking stu-
dents to do in my classes.”
What, then, is expected of students in
Philbrick’s courses? Part of the answer lies
in the intellectual legacy of Marxism. When
I asked Philbrick if he had drawn any par-
ticular ideas from his reading of Marx, he
explained that the most important idea Marx
instilled in his subsequent attitude was the
need to “engage in ruthless criticism of all
that exists.”
“In my teaching, I try to show my students
that one of our tasks is to criticize in this aca-
demic sense of picking something apart, but
that we want to do that to everything,” Phil-
brick said. “That is, to think radically, in the
strict technical sense of radical; to get to the
root of the things that we’re talking about.”
The idea of “ruthless criticism of all that
exists” comes from Marx’s 1843 letter to the
German philosopher Arnold Ruge, in which
he commends his countryman for leaving the
stifling atmosphere of Germany for the rela-
tive freedom of Paris. In the letter, he argues
that any improvement in the condition of
mankind requires an inquiry of critical un-
derstanding into the prevailing conditions,
an inquiry that the government in Germany
allegedly suppressed. He writes that, in con-
trast, “we do not dogmatically anticipate the
world, but only want to find the new world
through criticism of the old one.”
Philbrick’s use of the word, “radical” rein-
forces the pedagogical goal of ruthless criti-
cism. “Radical” comes from the latin radix,
meaning “root.” To get to the root of some-
thing is certainly a laudable goal, an “end” in
the sense that after that you can go no fur-
ther after achieving the root. Today, however,
there is a stigma attached in the U.S. to radi-
calism and radical political movements. The
criticism emanates from the right and center
of the political spectrum, seeking to ideologi-
cally separate the so-called radical from the
mainstream. However, the poetic meaning of
this word should give us pause; is it not the
goal of any problem-solver to get to the root
of their problem? And would society not be
improved if more people thought critically,
or “radically” in this way?
S
o, if there is a fundamental shared
intellectual goal between Marxism
and the University, it is to engage
in “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” or, in
the slightly watered-down version, to “chal-
lenge the present and enrich the future.”
However, in drawing a comparison be-
tween these two general practical commit-
ments, it is not my intention to hide the more
“hardcore” versions of Marxism that exist on
our campus.
While the University as an institution
does not explicitly endorse any political affil-
iations, there is no shortage of students, fac-
ulty or organizations that support the con-
tinued study of Marx and different aspects of
Marxist thought.
In fact, a Michigan student who is curi-
ous about Marxism would probably do well
to start asking their peers; some of them al-
ready hold a lot of knowledge on the subject.
I talked over the phone with LSA sopho-
more Garret Ashlock, who started reading
Marx while in high school. He explained
how Marx was the first thinker with whom
he seriously engaged, opening his eyes to
brand new ideas and ways of thinking.
“Especially for a period there, I tried to
read all the Marx that I could,” Ashlock said.
“That included, of course, ‘The Communist
Manifesto,’ but also ‘Capital,’ the ‘Grun-
drisse,’ ‘The German Ideology,’ even a lot of
his earlier texts I was very much interested
in.”
Though the University consistently of-
fers courses related to Marx, Ashlock has
conducted much of this intellectual explora-
tion outside of school. The sheer volume of
Marx’s writings requires this level of self-
study, especially if Marxist ideas constitute
only part of the syllabus, as is the case in most
courses. That being said, Ashlock also touted
the social aspect of reading Marx along with
an interested group of peers.
“I certainly have a lot of people that I talk
to about Marxism,” Ashlock explained. “You
know, certain circles or social groups where
we’ll read secondary texts and share com-
ments on them.”
Ashlock admitted that a lot of the con-
temporary conversation on Marx errs more
on the side of literary and cultural theory,
though he disputed the claim that Marx’s
critique of capitalism had been vanquished
with the fall of the Soviet Union. There are,
he argued, some notable Marxist political
economists out there today, and plenty of
reasons to study Marxist economics in the
21st century.
To learn more about this, I spoke with
Rackham student Alejo Stark, coordinator
of the Marxisms collective at the University.
The collective, composed mostly of graduate
students and professors, was formed in 2011
in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis.
With the collapse of the global economy due
to intertwined speculative bubbles in hous-
ing and banking, many University students
turned to Marx as an explicitly political and
economic thinker.
Reading Marx in
Ann Arbor
BY ALEXANDER SATOLA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
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ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE