>
> 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."
> >
> > ___________________________________
> >
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
>
>
____________________________________________________________________________
________Ready for the edge of your seat?
> Check out tonight's top picks on Yahoo! TV.
> http://tv.yahoo.com/
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk