Posted on 05/13/2018 7:14:13 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
The communist scholar's ideas are more prevalent than you might realize.
You may have come across communist memes on social media. The man, the meme, the legend behind this trend is Karl Marx, who developed the theory of communism, which advocates for workers’ control over their labor (instead of their bosses). The political philosopher turned 200-years-old on May 5, but his ideas can still teach us about the past and present.
The famed German co-authored The Communist Manifesto with fellow scholar Friedrich Engels in 1848, a piece of writing that makes the case for the political theory of socialism — where the community (rather than rich people) have ownership and control over their labor — which later inspired millions of people to resist oppressive political leaders and spark political revolutions all over the world.
Although Marx was raised in a middle-class family, he later became a scholar who struggled to make ends meet — a working-class man, he thought, who could take part in a political revolution.
The Communist Manifesto is most usually the work of Marx taught in schools, and he is one of the most assigned economists in United States college classes. Many may not know that he also studied law in university. He authored three volumes of Das Kapital, which outlined the fundamentals of Marxist theory of capitalism and also organized workers through the International Working Men's Association, otherwise known as the First International. He was an editor of a newspaper that was eventually censored by the Prussian government for speaking out against censorship and challenging the government.
His writings have inspired social movements in Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Argentina, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and more. Many political writers and artists like Angela Davis, Frida Kahlo, Malcolm X, Claudia Jones, Helen Keller, and Walter Rodney integrated Marxist theory into their work decades after his death.
So how can teens learn the legacy of Marx’s ideas and how they’re relevant to the current political climate?
Teen Vogue chatted with two educators about how they apply these concepts to current events in the classroom.
Public high school teacher Mark Brunt teaches excerpts from The Communist Manifesto alongside curriculum about the industrial revolution in his English class. He uses The Jungle by Upton Sinclair — a text published in 1906 that revealved the exploitative workplace conditions of the meat industry in Chicago and other industrialized cities many immigrants were subject to in the late 19th century — to understand what it was like to work in a factory a little more than a hundred years ago.
Brunt talks about how these factory workers did all of the leg work — including slaughtering animals and packaging meat on top of working long days with little, if any, time off — to keep the factories intact, yet had very little control over their work, including their working conditions, compared to the profiteering factory owners.
“I do a little role-playing with [my class],” Brunt tells Teen Vogue. “[I tell them,] I’m the boss, you’re my workers, and you want to try to take me down. I have the money. I own the factory. I control the police. I control the military. I control the government. What do you guys have?”
His students usually blink at him, he says, totally clueless. He insists they actually have something huge, that he, as the boss, will never have: “It’s always just one student, whose hand shoots up and goes, ‘We outnumber you!’” Brunt says.
He then introduces Marx’s distinction between the proletariat — the working class as a whole — and bourgeoisie — the ruling class who controls the workers and profits from their labor. The tension between the proletariat and bourgeoisie make up the class conflict, or class struggle, he explains.
Although ongoing teacher strikes aren’t necessarily Marxist movements, today we can see still see these tensions between classes at play in the Untied States, between state governments and striking teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona, demanding higher pay and more public school funding.
However, in a Marxist revolution, the proletariat will come together to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ultimately, win the class conflict by taking control over their work, or striking. And if such a revolution occured in Brunt’s classroom, his students would overthrow him as a teacher — and the principal, the superintendent, and so on.
In his advanced class, Brunt also introduces the idea of false consciousness, which is defined as the many ways the working class is mislead to believe certain ideologies — like the belief that the boss should always be in charge, no matter what.
“False consciousness is when you think that the social conditions are different than they actually are,” he says. “You’re tricked into thinking your allies are different and your enemies are different than they actually are.”
Former Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher uses Marx to teach history through an emotional, fluid, and ever-changing lens. He challenges his students to envision a society without capitalism, reminding them that different — though still imperfect and flawed — economic systems existed before, such as feudalism. “When I teach Marx, it’s got a lot to do with questions of how to think critically about history. Marx says we live under capitalism [but] capitalism has not always existed,” Ciccariello-Maher tells Teen Vogue. “It’s something that came into being and something that, as a result, just on a logical level, could disappear, could be overthrown, could be abolished, could be irrelevant.
"There’s this myth of the free market, but Marx shows very clearly that capitalism emerged through a state of violence.
"Some examples of violence that aided in the establishment of capitalism in the United States include stealing the land of Indigenous people and trafficking Africans through slavery.
"We’re oftentimes taught that history moves slowly, but many Marxists disagree with that notion, and believe that that the current socioeconomic system is precarious and can be overthrown at any time.
“Dialectics means that the history moves forward not slowly or gradually or bit by bit, but it moves forward through the sort of crushing blows of struggles between generally two opposing ideas or groups or concepts or people,” Ciccariello-Maher says.
While you may not necessarily identify as a Marxist, socialist, or communist, you can still use Karl Marx’s ideas to use history and class struggles to better understand how the current sociopolitical climate in America came to be. Instead of looking at President Donald Trump’s victory in November 2016 as a snapshot, we can turn to the bigger picture of what previous events lead us up to the current moment.
This time round, the kids won’t be brainwashed unless they want to be. The net has plenty of alternative, reality-based, views of communism.
Wow - they teach teens about anal sex and communism. What a magazine parents are buying for their daughters.
Wow, not even a single mention of the hundreds of millions of people who perished under the rule of commies and socialists. I have seen some bad writing but this takes the cake.
marx bookmark
Teen Vogue will whitewash the left’s history of mass murder and social destruction.
The only minor problem with communism and leftists philosophy in general is it goes against human nature and human nature wins out ever time.
So in an English class, they get the Industrial Revolution and Marxism taught by a Marxist wannabee? No wonder they can’t pass basic tests. Government schools at work.
I guess he leaves out Nov 9, 1989 and the story of the proletariat rising up in East Germany to throw out their communist bosses and that wall?
"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."
Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
“There’s this myth of the free market, but Marx shows very clearly that capitalism emerged through a state of violence.”
Lol, and the Maoist and Soviet revolutions were a bunch of schoolgirls going to a picnic.
Give me the “myth” any day of the week.
Historians put Stalin’s murder count over 69,000,000. Mao murdered still more millions that Joe.
Students are incredibly naive. When I taught the university Intro to Econ class, I used to tell my students I could end poverty overnight, if that really is their goal. They all nodded yes, that was good thing. At the time, a family of 4 making less than $13000/year was considered “poor”. So, what you do is gather all of the people who make $13000 or less, line them up, and shoot them.
Their eyes would go about as big as hub caps.
After the shock wore off, I would ask them: How long do you think it would take before the person making $13001 started bitching that they were the poorest person in the land? We would them discuss the dangers of having everyone making the same income regardless of productive contributions to society and how/why such a system has been tried (New Harmony, Walden, Owensville, etc.) in the past and always failed in the long run.
Trust me, being a conservative economist in a university setting means lots of lunches alone.
net has plenty of alternative, reality-based views of communism
I don’t know much about how the internet works despite using it since 1997 or so. If Facebook,Instagram,Google,Yahoo, etc. ban something, how does it present itself to the tiny minority who are not using them? I am ignorant of this.
Would the users then be the proportionate amount as a print media shopping news versus the NYT and WaPo? .001% or something?
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