I Hate Karl Marx

Last week I spent an hour working with a student on a response paper. The assignment required an analysis of a cultural anthropology text: a quick summary of the author’s position, an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of its argument, and an identification of its methodology or theory. Routine stuff.

The student, other than being a multilingual learner with a few ESL issues, had a great sense of how to move forward, even if he lacked some confidence in his ability to do so. The article was an investigation of the socioeconomic ramifications of the drug economy on a small South American nation; the student, a native of that country, had a clear and nuanced opinion about where the author’s argument and data held up and where it didn’t. He even correctly identified the research and writing as based in, or closely related to, cultural materialism: the problem was more deeply understanding that relationship, and how to make that tie explicit in his paper.

We set about breaking down what, exactly, cultural materialism is – and in our discussion, I brought up Marxism as the underpinning theory. The student visibly bristled. “I don’t want to talk about Marx in my paper!”

“Okay, ” I said, but just so you’re aware, this whole idea that we’re talking about, and that you agree with – that the structure of this economy in which a few people own the coca farms and the paste processing places – the means of production – that this structure determines how everyone else in society lives – this idea comes directly out of Marx.” A few seriously reductive points later – and a pointing out that cultural materialism grew out of the incorporation of other theories into Marxism, he visibly relaxed. He then said that no one had ever explained what Marx meant in such simple and understandable terms.

Of course, one could write reams about the assimilation of some students to an overarching resistance/knee-jerk reaction to what mainstream American culture has deemed a four-letter word. But it’s troubling that an otherwise seemingly intellectually curious and pretty assiduous student would simply shut down at the mention of Marx, and try really hard to separate it from the later cultural theory that it’s ok to learn and know about, since that theory is required directly on the syllabus. Obviously, the simple solution is a quick and simple demystification of Marx, as occurred here. But I can’t help but wonder if, on a classroom scale, in the wake of reactionary discourse on “academic freedom,” professors not teaching the history of Western philosophy might not just want to gloss over the whole thing entirely.

This weekend I participated in a panel at the art fair Volta NY entitled “Communism’s Afterlives,” and had the opportunity to rewatch the following video by artist Rainer Ganahl when a colleague showed it as part of her presentation. For those who like their Marx-hate steeped in satire, with a deeply nuanced understanding of the shared ideological histories of West and East, and an acknowledgment of the vague Western fear of China taken to an extreme: enjoy.