So I didn't go to Columbia or Berkeley, I did my undergrad at UMass Amherst - it has a well-earned reputation as a radical campus. And I actually took both History 316: Soviet Russia and 115: Modern China. Pretty sure both courses produced net negative communists. History will do that.
Like what’s wild to me is that like yes, I’m a democratic socialist (which I would argue is a far cry from like Marxism-Leninism) I feel like if the conclusion after taking history classes is “capitalism as is isn’t great but Stalinism is” one half of the conclusions have been chucked out.
communism is from the past, it's just a name they use to attack socialism, becuase that is a great system that makes people happy but billionaires not so much
Bernie Sanders, AOC and many others are socialists and have nothing to do with Mao etc. They were sociopaths/psychos. I’m really sick of people like Stephens not knowing better. Well…actually he knows better. He just thinks we are too stupid to not know the difference.
I took a course on the Soviet Union in college. I am nowhere close to being a communist. Jesus no.
When I teach about the communist revolutions in China and the USSR, even in a very red area, my students are usually taken aback by how much I hate them both
Me: This week we're reading Marx Students: Are you indoctrinating us? Me: You can't criticize what you don't understand. Marx was a real tool Them: ???
In sleepy west, of the woodest east... ... we've got ideas, to us that's dear, like capitalist, like communist, like lots of things, you heard about.
If i'm not mistaken, joey and frank lived in Van Meter
Reading Diktotter’s trilogy on post-communist China. Yeah, I’ll never be a communist.
Stunningly bourgeois and superficial analysis!
It's funny, I also took 317: Russian Rev (I don't have the numbers memorized, I have digital copies of my transcripts handy for job searches) and recall quite clearly a pack of students from the communist student group in that class have an...experience...interacting with actual history.
I actually think *NOT* teaching Marx is a problem. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the ideas were kind of abandoned because they were beclowned by History.
Honestly, when I see a lot of the fashionable sort of Marxism in certain online spaces, I am invariably struck by how aesthetic and superficial the engagement is; all vibes. Hard to maintain that detachment reading Lenin ordering the execution of every sex worker in Nizhni.
then it doesn't sound like you e actually engaged with the people youve encountered
Engaging with the actual implications of the ideology - when it isn't just vibes and speeches but "what would it mean to implement this" - and it turns out it means nonstop stupid awfulness that devours itself and everything around it - turns out to be pretty informative, as an exercise.
I do think it is hard to avoid vibes with Marx...
The thing about Marx is that he wrote more or less about the theory of the firm in a way that has zero predictive value about the behavior of firms or economies. Quite the opposite. The application of his ideas to government are a horrorshow.
And like, the labor theory of value wasn't his - it was quite popular in economic theory at the time. It's just very wrong in very obvious ways. The other irony is that the industrial revolution was terrible for workers, but the real progress in labor rights did not come from communists.
Which in turn made them more violent.
I mean, every revolution has that moment when you realize the theory doesn't "work" without the intense and constant application of state violence.
True, but it’s amusing with communists, since they assume the working class will just fall in line.
But Stalin killed more German leftists than Hitler. The arguments have always been thus:
I do think that the threat of communist revolution/communism as a semi-viable alternative to capitalism was key the rise of labor rights and the welfare state. That Sword of Damocles was what forced capital to the negotiating table.
My more fanciful notion, that I'm not quite sure I believe, is that the Western neoliberal turn away from a lot of those policies can be directly traced to communism's relative decline as a viable political system in the 70s and 80s. Obviously this only accelerated with its subsequent collapse.
i love when "communisms decline" is mentioned as some kind of inevitably like an illness that ran its course and not the actual result of the neoliberal project
what implications specifically
It's also rough how people don't read any other economists aside from Friedmanite 20C economists. If you actually read them, they are animated by basically the same humane impulses that you find in Marx. The actual text of Wealth of Nations would go hard in a DSA reading group!
I took Russian Revolution from Pipes at Harvard in the 80s (he coined the Reagan phrase "Evil Empire") and it was suffused with hatred of communism and of Russia. We had an entire class on the deaths of the Romanovs.
Pipes' The Russian Revolution was our core textbook (supplemented with primary source reading, of course) for the Russian Rev course. The professor (Altstadt, still teaching) made sure we read the forward so we understood Pipes' viewpoint, but, you know, still assigned the textbook.
I bet there was no class on communism taught in a big league US university which had as the takeaway -- communism is great, works really well, let's give it a shot. Another data point -- when I was a gsi at Berkeley in the 90s I had to sign a loyalty oath to the US (and CA) constitutions.
As a postdoc at UMass around the same time I had to do a loyalty oath to the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the USA.
I was at Riverside in the 2010s, it's very much still A Thing.
I was able to teach for five years and not once take any actions that undermined the constitution of California - you?
I once reassessed my students' property taxes on an annual basis rather than only when it was sold.
vai termine!
I don't remember signing one of those, but I was only a GSI at Riverside
Potentially naive ECR question— you seriously need undergrad transcripts for job apps???
Some request them, some do not. Government jobs - a thing which used to exist - also generally require full transcripts.
How strange— I get it for Ph.D. admissions, but past that I can’t imagine what useful and valid understanding a potential employer could interpret from that…
federal positions for job series with education requirements will need an official transcript from the university prior to the final offer is made For instance, a physical scientist position (GS-1301) needs to show they have a degree in chemistry, geology, physics, etc
I took a course on the Russian Novel from a genuine Communist who had been harassed by the FBI...and banned from the Soviet Union for advocating for human rights. Everything I learned in that class suggested Tsarism, Communism, and later Putinism were barely distinguishable, and frickin' evil.
You can't go from "Dead Souls" to "Gulag Archipelago" without hearing the screams of Russians yearning for basic human rights and freedom. The political professions of the prof had zero presence in the classroom: he taught the texts, and the culture.
The courses I took in Russian and Soviet history were taught by a freshly minted PhD who had emigrated from Ukraine. His anecdotes were funny and sad and his aggravation and frustration with the class's resident tankie was almost physical.
Probably half of the instructors in our Slavic department in the 1990s were like that, as was my sister's German instructor. I did run into tankie instructors in places like sociology and the education department, but they had a fairytale view of it that kind of requires abject ignorance.
I actually took a history class taught by a marxist professor. It was so grating and silly that I’m sure it too produced net negative marxists.
I took a lot of Chinese history classes in the late 90s and found zero professors who were communists or Maoists or who had anything positive to say about the regime. I am not sure the same would be true today because of all the CCP money, but these guys take more of it than anyone.
Nah, your Chinese history professors are still pretty universally and loudly anti-CCP.
Amazing how historians of China seem to despise the group that destroyed every historical Chinese artefact they could get their hands on.
I never met a communist in college but I met a shitload of wannabe Gordon Gekko psychopaths
The notion that college students arrive on campus as empty vessels, and that Marxist professors convert them into "Maoist cadres," is ludicrous.
But the American right has spent decades telling everyone (especially themselves) that anyone to the left of Fox News is a Marxist/Maoist, so if people tend to come out of college even just a bit more center-left-ish, then case closed.
Besides the occasional book clubs where people try to outdo themselves on their "Trotsky" levels, are there really any communists these days? Socialists? sure. anarchists? Some. But actual communists? It's just a boogie man term at this point
Not just Communism; if you're a far-right fearmonger you're supposed to be afraid of Marxism too.
hi!👋
History is a powerful antidote to ideology Learning from the past dismantles simplistic narratives and exposes the flaws in both extremes Education should challenge assumptions not reinforce dogma #HigherEd #CriticalThinking #HistoryMatters
Exactly. When you learn what actually happened to the Russian and Chinese people communism is not an attractive proposition.
Got a history degree from UMass Amherst, was blessed to take courses with @hcrichardson.bsky.social. She never taught communism, but these ghouls think anything that isn't slobbering worship is "Communism."
Universities are institutions where left-wing ideas get taken seriously (which is not necessarily the same as agreement), and conservatives like Stephens can't abide any place where their ideas do not dominate.
This.
Historians as a cohort are pretty suspicious of all authority and the ideologies used to justify that authority. If you want to find true believers, you'll need to go down to the English Department and some of the others.
Take a look at the official report from UMass Amherst administration about the on campus protests in late 2023. The admin is definitely not wanting to be radical (they are full of shit, tbh, esp the current chancellor). www.umass.edu/sites/defaul...
A lot of lies/misleading “facts” in that report according to students who were there.
Full disclosure: I am the parent of a current student who suffered unfair consequences for her opposition to the bombing in Gaza (not from the school itself, but school-related).
fist-bump. I also took Modern China at UMass, although probably years before you did. It was *really* informative.
Even in the famously radical econ department, just about everyone in my undergrad cohort ended up as solid left-liberals rather than Marxists despite the some of the faculty and our inclinations to contrarianism