Retired University Marxists: Tax-Funded Laughingstocks of a Truly Lost Cause
What do you do in retirement after you have wasted your life on a lost cause?
Your youth is gone. Your dreams are gone. Your audience is gone. The clock is ticking. So, you putter around the house, and recall better days.
Marxism is a lost cause. When the Soviet Union committed suicide in December 1991, the cause was lost. At the heart of Marxism was its theory of historical inevitability. In Marxism, the forces of production took the place of Calvin's God. Things seemed to be looking up in the October Revolution of 1917. Russia leap-frogged from rural feudalism to socialism without passing through capitalism.
But then the biggest incarnations of Communism, Red China and the USSR, pulled the plug. Deng turned China into a mercantilist/capitalist powerhouse, beginning in 1978. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union posted "Under New Management" on the USSR in 1991. It was all over. The 74-year run closed.
Variety ran its most famous headline on October 30, 1929, the day after the stock market crash: "Wall Street Lays an Egg." On January 1, 1992, the anti-Communists around the world ran this virtual headline: "Communism Lays an Egg."
The revolutionary slogan of the 18th century was this: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." In Communism's case, there were only broken eggs.
In late December 1991 everyone knew: Marx had been dead wrong. Communism was not inevitable. It was a fad. The fad was over.
Around the United States, the "books for a buck" bins in used book stores filled up with titles like this: What Marx Really Meant. Nobody cared any more. Hardly anybody ever had cared in the United States, outside of faculty members in tax-funded American universities. University-employed Marxists began to hear a virtual sound: snickering. They had become laughingstocks. There had never been many Marxist economists. The Union of Radical Political Economists, the tiny subgroup with the well-deserved acronym -- URPE -- became even smaller. Today, the URPE website's Alexa ranking is 6,260,997 -- basically invisible. The Mises Institute's Alexa ranking is 29,393 internationally and 9,668 in the United States: huge.
I did a Web search recently on Marx's view of Malthus (hostile). The top link was an unpublished article -- unreadable -- written by a sociologist. When you combine Marx's analysis with sociology's jargon, you get truly unreadable prose. I had never heard of the author. The essay was an updated version of a 1971 article. The author was listed as an associate professor at the University of Colorado.
I thought about this. The University of Colorado for half a century has been known as one of the nation's leading party schools. With pot legalized in Colorado, the University has adopted a re-branding program to shed the party-school label. This is the equivalent of Madonna trying to shed her branding as an eccentric performer.
I looked her up. She is now retired. She had been a three-fer: one salary, three quotas. The University for decades used her to qualify as politically correct in three categories: Marxism, feminism, and Hispanic. There have never been many three-fers on faculties.
We learn from a Virginia Tech website that she achieved the following. She is "the founding editor of PSN -- Progressive Sociologists Network, PPN -- Progressive Population Network, together with Chrys Ingraham and Rosemary Hennessy, founded MATFEM -- Materialist Feminism, and together with Malgosia Askanas and Carrol Cox, moderates M-Fem -- Marxism-Feminism."
This got me to thinking. What does someone like this do to while away her well-funded retirement years? So, I went to her University of Colorado faculty member page. It has not been updated in a decade. It has a photo of the pleasant-looking grandmother-like lady.
She begins with this: "This cartoon is to remind us how privileged we are as we teach Marx and other theories and topics we enjoy, so that we do not forget the conditions that render our work possible." These conditions included academic tenure -- she could not be fired easily -- and taxpayer funding. Residents of Colorado were compelled by threat of violence to support her in her ideological activities.
But this is not all. "I collect quotes, jokes and other fun things."
And this: "I love making fabric bowls and other kinds of fabric art."
But that's not all. "Reading Mysteries is fun."
Then she shares this: "I love to read in stormy weather, as I sip a cafecito."
Ten years ago, she promised this: "A short personal history will be available soon." We are still waiting. (I use "we" in a symbolic sense.)
That's it. A lifetime devoted to the promulgation of Marxism-feminism -- Marx would have been amused at that hyphenated academic discipline -- and this is what she has to show for it, other than a fat pension.
It was all so exciting back then. She thought she was on the cutting edge of social revolution, but far above the targeted battlefields. She taught nine hours a week, graded a few term papers, and received a salary two or three times higher than the oppressed workers under capitalist tyranny. She taught a generation of students who were in a college major only slightly more challenging intellectually than young child education. She called party school kids to the barricades.
As for the 100 million people -- give or take -- killed by the Communists, that was just one of those unfortunate things. Sometimes experiments go wrong. Next time, it will not happen.
Fortunately, there will not be a next time for Marxism.
Her career reminds me of the career of Bettina Aptheker, another feminist-Marxist. Dr. Aptheker is far batter known, of course. Her father was the real deal. I wrote about her life's ideological and academic odyssey, in 2006.
Here are a pair of lifetimes spent in tenured academic Marxism, and all they have to show for it is this satellite photograph of the two Koreas. They believed that North Korea was the wave of the future. Solidarity forever!
Sorry. But thanks for playing.