(no subject)
Laurence Caromba writes Marxism in Four Steps (quoted for sheer delight)
This is for all those readers who are entering the higher education system this year. Good luck. You are about to experience the wonderful world of binge drinking, student riots and Karl Marx.
If you don't yet know who Karl Marx is, you're about to find out in a big way. Here is a list of reasons why Marxism is cool and fun:
1. Marxism is simple. All Marxists theories sound exactly the same, so if you can memorise one, you've memorised them all. A Marxist theory on x is always "x is a mechanism that the bourgeoisie use to enrich themselves and keep the proletarian masses poor". Instead of x, write one of the following terms: democracy, international trade, banks, capitalism, political parties, the media, social stratification, social mobility, racism, the police, the military, printer cartridges, holidays to Florida, Nigerian e-mail scams, etc.
2. Marxist writing is impossible to understand. The second thing you must learn about Marxism is that Marxists write in their own language because they consider normal English beneath them. This is an example of what Marxist academic writing sounds like:
We must here return to one such “distortion”, the most important one for the understanding of the interaction between the African modelity and the international arena, i. e. the “inverted” societal structures with the resulting importance of superstructural factors. “The assumption... is not that there are specific socio-economic preconditions that have to be met before democracy becomes possible”, wrote the American political scientist, Marina Ottaway, “but that there are conditions that facilitate a democratic transition. If those conditions do not exist - and they do not in Africa - then democracy has to be attained purely through politics: political action by small democratic groups has to provide the leverage for change that has not been provided by social or economic transformation. Democratisation, in other words, takes a curious Leninist twist, becoming a process where political organising must make up for the unfavourable underlying socio-economic conditions”.
"Help," you're thinking. "I don't know what this means." It doesn't matter, nobody else does either. Thus, any interpretation you make up is de facto the right answer. Just make sure you include lots of references to capital, the proletariat, etc. (See Point #1)
3. Marxism is immune to falsification. If you write like a Marxist, nobody can disprove what you're saying. Simply memorise the phrase "Yes, but that just shows how sneaky they are!" and use it to destroy any counter-argument. Let's say you're discussing social mobility in a capitalist system. You argue that the capitalist system does not allow class mobility. The person you're arguing with points out that some people do start out poor and become rich, and offers a few specific examples in support of this. Immediately respond with "Yes, but that just shows how sneaky [the capitalists] are! They allow a few people to get rich so that everyone else will labour under the illusion that they can get rich too instead of overthrowing the capitalist sytem!"
4. Karl Marx is an academic super-star. You will soon learn that Karl Marx is the single most important intellectual the human race has ever produced. Every department in the humanities and the social sciences claims that Karl Marx is one of their own. This is great, because it means you only have to learn one theory, and you've effectively studied for seven different subjects. Departments that prominently teach Marxism include sociology, philosophy, political science, international relations, economics, history, anthropology, English, and probably a lot of others I don't know about.