Marxism and other radical thought has little or no exposure _as such) in the academy. This is territory I know; I've spent most of my adult life in the biz, both at glitzy and not so glitzy institutions here and in England. Let me tell you from the inside as someone who lost one academic (philosophy) job for being too red, you'd have to be a complete idiot to come out as a Marxist, anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, or other sort of radical if you were not tenured and didn't have ambitions to move to a more prestigious school. Cleaver's no fool, but he's eccentric, and I think he's wrong.
Economics is probably the least promising territory for finding mirror image or any sort of Marxism. Leontiff doesn't exactly count -- although an anticommunist he studied economics in Leningrad in the early 1920s, and thus got a very good exposure to Marx when it was still taught in Soviet Russia, which he turned to excellent account in his later career, which included sympathetic writing about Marx. He's not typical either in his education or his interests. Lange was Polish AND a Marxist who returned to Poland after the war, Robinson was English, etc. And_all_ of these people are at least three generations back No major American economist has paid attention to Marx since Samuelson wrote those papers in the 1960s, I'll stand by that. I don't deny that there may be some discussion of Marx in a biz school text or even a few, in fact, there's a (possible still?) Marxist biz & Econ prof at Harvard, Stephen Marglin, a 60s holdover.
I forgot to mention the law, where I now teach; there again there are the "crits," who are not Marxists but postmodernists and are pretty much over at this point.
Probably the closest to institutional inverted Marxism you will find is the Law & Economics movement, which involves an upside-down vulgar "Marxist" economic determinism, although this is probably not entirely accidental, because Judge Richard Posner, a founder of the movement, came from a Communist family. His outgrown clothes, as a boy, went to the Rosenberg kids. I don't think Judge Posner has read any Marx in 40 or 50 years, but he grew up in a house full of Marxspeak.
The biz press is class conscious. It often tracks Marxist insights, which it generally arrives at by itself in a sort of half-assed way. That's because those insights are _true_ and the better biz press has _some_ interest in the truth, although I wouldn't overstate the point -- I subscribed to The Economist for decades (finally, when I was in legal practice, I ran out of time and couldn't read it, so I let my sub go), and while it's better than 99% of journalism, it's also absolutely chock full of lies and ideology.
Of course if you are involved in management-side industrial relations in a practical way you will have to know about class struggle. That's not a big sector of business or academia.
"Military science" hardly counts; yes, the people in that area will quote Mao and Guevara and Debray, and in fact the Green Beret were constructed on a sort of "people's war" model, and their official motto is De Oppresso Liber - to free the oppressed, much good it did them in Vietnam; in fact their operational motto is Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out -- but the frisson that certain aspects of the military get with flirting with leftist ideas is not a big ideological influence in the world -- the Western military's ideological importance is hardly in representing people's war or anything except bellicose nationalism and militaristic macho brute force.
The ruling classes of course are class conscious and discourage class consciousness among the working classes. That's important, and it bears repeating but it is not a new idea. "The ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class," some old German once wrote.
--- "B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hey Andie,
>
> Well, I mentioned one college text, _The Labor
> Relations_Process_, meant for MBA's, that does
> explain
> Marx, even his theory of alienation, the IWW, CIO,
> etc., and basically shows prospective bosses how to
> keep a union-free workplace under the pretense of
> understanding labor law. On the other hand, I don't
> know of many college textbooks that teach you how to
> organize a union, though I heard Harvard (!) has a
> program for it or something (?). The
> _Labor_Relations_Process_ MBA textbook does tell how
> a
> union can be organized, but its audience is business
> planners, not rank and file workers. I can scan
> pages
> from the thing if you'd like to see for yourself.
> You'll have to pardon the previous owner's heavy
> underlining of passages that talk about industrial
> sabotage and communism, something the previous owner
> seemed especially excited with.
>
> Secondly, maybe I should have said that business
> elites are very class conscious, aware of their
> position in society, in a way that ironically
> reflects
> Marxian insight, and yet this same sort of
> class-consciousness is discouraged among ordinary
> schlubs. Class consciousness = bad for workers, but
> good (even necessary) for elites.
>
> This is a passage from the Introduction to Harry
> Cleaver's _Reading Capital Politically_:
>
> "While this might at first sound a bit far-fetched,
> even a brief review of the Marxist tradition will
> show
> important instances where Marx has been used not to
> further revolution but to contain it. Business cycle
> theorists, growth theory specialists, industrial
> organization experts, and other orthodox economists
> have often drawn on Marx's writings in the
> development
> of their work. Perhaps one of the best-known
> examples
> is that of Wassily Leontief, the father of the
> modern
> techniques of input-output analysis that are the
> basis
> of many contemporary capitalist planning models. The
> roots of his ideas, as he is quick to recognize,
> come
> partly from Marx's reproduction schemes in Volume II
> of Capital."
>
> There's a lot more but I can't quote it all. In a
> footnote, Cleaver adds: "A number of bourgeois
> evaluations of the usefulness of Marx to bourgeois
> theory are included in David Horowitz,
> _Marx_and_Modern_Economics_. See especially essays
> by
> O. Lange, W. Leontief, J. Robinson, Fan-Hun, L.R.
> Klein, and S. Tsuru. Others who have explicitly
> drawn
> on Marx in their work have included William Baumol
> in
> his _Economic_Dyamics_ and Irma Adelman in her
> _Theories of Economic Growth and Development_."
>
> Cleaver is a bright guy. and has been in UT's Econ.
> Dept for a very long time. He isn't just pulling all
> this out of his ass.
>
> It's not all that surprising, really. Military
> scientist Andrew Krepinevich regularly references
> concepts like Mao's "Peoples' War" and Trotsky's
> "War
> Communism" in military planning documents for the US
> government. Military science doesn't care about the
> source of the strategy for war -- it can come from
> Mao, Trotsky, Che Guevara, or the planet Mars. If
> it's
> useful, they'll use it. Same with capitalists.
>
> As I mentioned, Chomsky has also cited some sources,
> and famously has stated he reads mostly the business
> press precisely because it is so highly class
> conscious. I can find exact quotes later.
>
> But I'm overposted.
>
> -B.
>
>
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> "FWIW, I do not think this accords with the facts.
> If
> capitalist ideologues know anything about the world
> that fits with Marxism, it is largely because they
> have come to the same conclusions independently."
>
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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