“Clearly hopelessly infected.”
Certain.
So much so that he does not see the full implications of his advocacy.
But he does a good job of illustrating how they think and what their philosophical underpinnings are.
Because his advocacy would take him from his lofty position as a paid academic and put him to work in the lettuce fields.
Yes, that became obvious when he began describing the background and development of critical theory.
It is nothing more than a subjective narrative in which the feelings of the aggrieved and downtrodden individual or class becomes the only valid framework for the evaluation of reality. The objective of this “evaluation” is to create revulsion at the existing societal order and the necessary zeal to accomplish the goal of revolutionary overthrow of existing economic, political and societal structures and radical societal reorganization.
Historically, it is ironic what happens after the revolution succeeds and the new order of things takes hold. For every policy or decision the party makes, persons like our author and his fellow academics will churn out the necessary revolutionary theory justifying it.
Years…no, several decades actually, I took an undergraduate political science course introducing various theories of political and economic organization. The instructor was head of the Political Science Department and referred to himself as a “reformed liberal.” (He was quite a character and used the descriptor sarcastically as when a conservative is defined as a “liberal who has been mugged.”)
Anyway, these classes took place during the last years or the Vietnam War on a liberal university campus. So naturally the subject of status of conscientious objection (CO) under Communism came up. The professor answered that, under communism, CO was not allowed because the perfection of the state and of society had been achieved and that its decisions perfectly reflected the will of the collective (workers). So the right of an individual to object to its actions on the basis of individual belief was not only impermissible, it was positively illogical. The properly educated citizen not only understood that the perfected state must be defended but was actually expected to eagerly do whatever work the collective needed to be done. Religious objection was disallowed because religious belief itself was irrational and also forbidden.
You can see a straight line from that to the late 1980s, when the more humane Soviet Union under Gorbachev choose to commit its political dissidents indefinitely to mental hospitals rather that have the KGB/FSB deal with them. “Your objections to state policies are a sure sign of mental illness! You will be here until you feel better, comrade.”