In the past few years since the 2008 presidential election, the intended derogatory label "Marxist" and "socialist" it seems has been hurled around with ever greater frequency. Most of the time the writer or speaker is a right-wing idiot who doesn't know diddly squat about what they are talking about. The fact of the matter is, lots of people think they know about Marx, but they really don't. A one time read through The Communist Manifesto just won't cut it!
Furthermore, I have been following Eli's Rust Belt Philosophy blog for several years now, and I have always enjoyed his debunking of right-wing idiocy and other thoughts. As I understand it, he is a grad student at the Unv. of Pittsburgh's department of The Philosophy of Science (I also took some courses in that department many moons ago, but that is another story). Anywhoo....in a recent blog post, Eli says:
So I'm no Marxist - I've never read the guy and to be completely honest I'm not sure that I get the outlook in general - but that won't stop me from trying my hand at (what I take to be) a Marxist analysis of some movies I've recently seen. On the one hand, there is poverty, represented by Winter's Bone; on the other is wealth and Rabbit Hole.At least he's honest (and I have yet to read his reviews). But I thought to my self, here is a well educated left-leaning fellow, a philosophy of science student no less, who claims he has not read Marx and knows very little about Marxist thought, and this must be corrected! Now I am certainly no expert on Marx and his intellectual legacy, yet compared to the vast majority of my fellow citizens, I am relatively quite knowledgeable on this subject. So I thought, why don't I compile some resources from the web to provide some basic Marxist education for anybody who might want to educate themselves about Marx and Marxist thought? So why don't we start out with a little humor and song? Parts 2 to...... ??? will be forthcoming....
No comments:
Post a Comment