Academic Post-Communism

In the American academy today a variety of Marxisms have become an influential fashion. A few fantasizers such as Professor Bertell Oilman of New York University and Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University appear to be throwbacks to the 1930s, but by and large today’s academic Marxisms are not the clearly defined metaphysical “science” of the early days, when one could get the strict Party line from the Daily Worker or even drop in on Party headquarters near Union Square.

Today’s academic Marxism does not, well, know much. It does not concern itself with such formerly central tenets as the labor theory of value, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the state, democratic centralism, or even the Dialectic. Our current academic “Marxists,” by tacitly ignoring that whole metallic nineteenth-century system, with its metaphysics and its scientism, that once clanked along like a spinning jenny, in effect admit that its philosophic and historical claims have been completely exploded.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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In the American academy today a variety of Marxisms have become an influential fashion. A few fantasizers such as Professor Bertell Oilman of New York University and Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University appear to be throwbacks to the 1930s, but by and large today’s academic Marxisms are not the clearly defined metaphysical “science” of the early days, when one could get the strict Party line from the Daily Worker or even drop in on Party headquarters near Union Square.

Today’s academic Marxism does not, well, know much. It does not concern itself with such formerly central tenets as the labor theory of value, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the state, democratic centralism, or even the Dialectic. Our current academic “Marxists,” by tacitly ignoring that whole metallic nineteenth-century system, with its metaphysics and its scientism, that once clanked along like a spinning jenny, in effect admit that its philosophic and historical claims have been completely exploded.