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

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE

