Workers of the world, unite! Karl Marx’s famous call to action never caught on with its intended target, the working class. But the intellectual class—the world of academia—swallowed it hook, line and sinker. They are still pushing it today. Why? Wh…
Workers of the world, unite! Karl Marx’s famous call to action never caught on with its intended target, the working class. But the intellectual class—the world of academia—swallowed it hook, line and sinker. They are still pushing it today. Why? What do they hope to gain and what does it mean to the rest of us?
C. Bradley Thomspon is the author of “The Redneck Intellectual” on Substack, and America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.
#marxism #prageru #history #karlmarx
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Script:
Engraved on Karl Marx’s tombstone in Highgate Cemetery in North London are the following words: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Substitute the word “professor” for the word “philosopher” (we really don’t have philosophers anymore) and you get right to the core of Marx’s enduring attraction to the contemporary world.
Marx demands that the intellectual class — the professors of law, sociology, history, women’s studies, anthropology, journalism and so on — come out of the Ivory Tower and join the barricades; to see themselves not as the preservers of the dusty past, but the creators of a new and glorious future.
The lure has proven to be very strong. And it’s not hard to understand why.
How much more meaningful, exciting, and romantic to see yourself as an agent of change rather than a mere academic. How much more meaningful, exciting, and romantic to see the young people who fill up your classroom as potential soldiers in the cause.
Send them into the world with the same revolutionary spirit, the same disgust toward bourgeois middle-class values that you feel, and you’ve done your job.
And w..
