It’s odd watching a group of left-wing academics buck up each other’s spirits after they’ve encountered the cold, cruel world outside academe. Such a gathering was on display at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this month whenever the Radical Caucus of the MLA met. “The failure of communism did not result from Lenin, Stalin and Mao,” Grover C. Furr of Montclair State University told the group. “These were some of the greatest men in the world.” “Socialism preserved the contradictions of capitalism, such as differentiations in pay. We should abandon the term ‘socialism.’ Marx and Engels did...