Is Marx a Zombie?
It's a strong conviction of mine that religious impulses will find expression in even the most atheistic among us. Much like a zombie, religion may be dead but it keeps moving. These impulses will make themselves felt as a will towards some indeterminate objective. Dealing with this problem is something I consider one of the major questions of my life.
Two years ago I was forced to read Pablo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (oh the irony!), a book I found interesting if ultimately useless.
Why I found it useless, however, presents an important question. Freire's book is basically a form of Marxist pedagogy, and like any good Marxist pedagogy its objective is clear, if implicit: revolution. In class, I raised the objection that I couldn't really support Freire's pedagogy because I had no interest in starting a Marxist revolution. Interestingly, I think I was the only one in the class, including the teacher, who considered this the objective of the book. My classmates found the book useful, if rather abstruse, as a means toward...well, I'm not sure what it was a means toward, if not revolution. It was not something anyone could pin down.
What, I reasoned, was the point of Marxist pedagogy without revolution? Marxism seems to me in my ignorance to be a philosophy that is, for better or worse, bound up with its historicism and activism. History would culminate in communism and while the mechanisms of history would act of their own accord (and here is a strange contradiction of his philosophy) it is the duty of the individual to "change the world" as Marx himself said of philosophy. But change it to what if not communism? I think my point here is that I feel Marxism needs a discernable purpose to be meaningful.
And so we find ourselves in a post-Marxist world, where literary scholars practice Marxist criticism as a means toward something unknown. Oh sure, there are justifications, but they are strange ones to reconcile with their inspiration: liberalism, self-consciousness, knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Like a zombie, and like religious impulses finding outlets in strange new ways, Marxism lurches on towards some indeterminate objective. One gets the feeling of going through the motions, of a cottage industry of dissertations and pointless and unreadable scholarly books to no end but self-perpetuation.
My final question is one that I think deeply concerns our Weblord: What is the use of Marxism in a post-Marxist world?
Two years ago I was forced to read Pablo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (oh the irony!), a book I found interesting if ultimately useless.
Why I found it useless, however, presents an important question. Freire's book is basically a form of Marxist pedagogy, and like any good Marxist pedagogy its objective is clear, if implicit: revolution. In class, I raised the objection that I couldn't really support Freire's pedagogy because I had no interest in starting a Marxist revolution. Interestingly, I think I was the only one in the class, including the teacher, who considered this the objective of the book. My classmates found the book useful, if rather abstruse, as a means toward...well, I'm not sure what it was a means toward, if not revolution. It was not something anyone could pin down.
What, I reasoned, was the point of Marxist pedagogy without revolution? Marxism seems to me in my ignorance to be a philosophy that is, for better or worse, bound up with its historicism and activism. History would culminate in communism and while the mechanisms of history would act of their own accord (and here is a strange contradiction of his philosophy) it is the duty of the individual to "change the world" as Marx himself said of philosophy. But change it to what if not communism? I think my point here is that I feel Marxism needs a discernable purpose to be meaningful.
And so we find ourselves in a post-Marxist world, where literary scholars practice Marxist criticism as a means toward something unknown. Oh sure, there are justifications, but they are strange ones to reconcile with their inspiration: liberalism, self-consciousness, knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Like a zombie, and like religious impulses finding outlets in strange new ways, Marxism lurches on towards some indeterminate objective. One gets the feeling of going through the motions, of a cottage industry of dissertations and pointless and unreadable scholarly books to no end but self-perpetuation.
My final question is one that I think deeply concerns our Weblord: What is the use of Marxism in a post-Marxist world?
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