WHY INTELLECTUALS LOVE MARX

PART FOUR:

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE...NOT

God only knows, there was enough to fulminate about. We tend to talk about exposes as "turning over a rock" to see what crawls out, but Professing Feminism had more of the quality of unlocking the doors of a mental institution. Patai and Koertge had taught in Women's Studies departments across the country. They knew the landscape from the inside. They documented courses where class time was devoted entirely to consciousness-raising sessions meant to get rid of the "false consciousness" so many female students had that they weren't being discriminated against, courses that encouraged women to redefine "rape" and "sexual harassment" so that the terms covered everything from gang assaults to calling upper-level discussion courses "seminars," and entire class periods devoted to attempting to browbeat male students into "accepting" and "admitting" their "misogyny."

It was one of the more interesting aspects of this discussion that nobody--not even Women's Studies professors themselves--denied the factuality of the reported incidents. The right wing press deplored them, the left wing press defended them, and everybody got down to talking about the culture war. One would have thought that any sensible person, no matter how radical a feminist or how committed a Marxist, would have at least called for an end to the very real nonsense that was going on in these departments--but, alas, that's not how culture wars work.

What's more important, to me, is what never got discussed at all in the thousands of articles that appeared in response to Patai and Koertge's book. Buried underneath the mountain of horror stories was a simple, chilling fact: departments of Women's Studies and the professors who ran them were not stepchildren of the modern university, they were right there at the center of power, especially when it came to formulating university policies on date rape, sexual harassment, and "offensive verbal acts." You and I and everybody else without the need for an intravenous supply of Prozac might think that the only possible response to a professor who claims that a print of Goya's Naked Maja hanging in a classroom where she teaches constitutes sexual harassment is to laugh hysterically and have another beer--but Penn State took the painting down as a violation of its own sexual harassment code.

If you branch out from Women's Studies to the other "victim's studies" departments, you find that the very same nutcase professors who've been exposed for their extremism and irrationality--and dozens more with the same ideas--have become the formulators and enforcers of campus codes on speech and sexual harassment, and of the mandatory orientation sessions and coercive counseling regimes and Star Chamber kangaroo courts put in place to make that enforcement effective.

Credentialed professionals in the humanities and social sciences may have become almost totally irrelevant in the real world, but they've moved closer to the center of power in American universities. They've become the self-conscious moral compass of American higher education, and they like it there just as much--and for many of the same reasons--that Torquemada liked being on the Church's side in the Spanish Inquisition.

And, interestingly enough, they've managed to become that moral compass even on campuses that otherwise have very little use for what they do. It's not only at elite universities that people are worried about sexual harassment these days, or racism, sexism, and homophobia. Given the legal climate--which makes university administrations eager to at least look like they're not ignoring things that could land them in court on charges of discrimination--and the fact that most university professors are trained in places where Mario Cuomo could pass for right wing, professors of Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, African-American Studies, and Native American studies are acknowledged to have "expertise" unavailable to anybody else in what really constitutes a "hostile environment" for minority students. If the university or college isn't large enough for specialized "Studies" departments, it can get what it needs from "specialists" in the literature and social science departments--or from the professor who teaches the one course in African-American Literature or Women's Perspectives on Bioethics.

If you're the kind of person who "read everything" as an adolescent, you may have something tugging at the back of your brain right now that says all this sounds oddly familiar. You're right. What this is is the modern American university equivalent of that old Marxist--and especially Leninist--standby, the "revolutionary vanguard." Common sense says that a philosophy meant to advance the interests of the "workers" would look to the workers for ideas and ideals--but Marx was never much interested in common sense. He was interested in reality, and even in his time, when working conditions in Europe were such as to make Communist revolution more likely than it would ever be again, there was one thing about reality that he couldn't ignore: the "workers" aren't very revolutionary.

In fact, in general, working class men and women tend to be conservative if they're politically aware at all. That doesn't mean that they're not in favor of unions or of practical programs of public provision such as Social Security and public schools. It does mean that they've had enough experience being on the wrong end of government to have developed an instinct to distrust it, and that their ideas about morals and family life tend to stick to the tried and the true as they know it. They're especially not interested in noble poverty and the rejection of "materialism." They don't want revolution. They want a living wage, a decent life for their families, and access to consumer goods.

Marx himself was appalled at the British working class--they were as conservative and as entranced by property as the "bourgeoisie" he had set out to fight. It became plain very early that if the Communists relied on the working class, Communism would never be any more than a pipe dream.

Marx's solution was simple: the workers were revolutionary, but they didn't know it yet. They couldn't see clearly what their interests were. For that, they needed people like...people like...well, people like Marx himself, intellectuals who had achieved revolutionary consciousness and could therefore steer the working class to their own destiny.

In spite of the rhetoric sometimes put out for public consumption, the driving force of Marxism is not the "proletariat" or the "people," it's the intellectuals. It's intellectuals who have the power to define what is and is not a revolutionary idea, and who does and does not exhibit revolutionary consciousness. Intellectuals will be indispensable, and in power, as long as the workers insist on being satisfied with seniority raises, houses in Levittown, and pick-up trucks with custom yellow paint jobs.

When a Marxist says "power to the people," he isn't talking about actual people. In fact, so few actual people want what Marxists want them to want that the emergence of even one or two who fit the category becomes cause for universal acclaim and celebration. That's how so many earnest people, including the entire Nobel Peace Prize award committee, got taken in by the fabricated "memoirs" of Rigoberta Menchu. That's why the pages of Ms. are full of bright pictures of women's collective art projects in Central America and women's collective farming projects in Zimbabwe. It takes no time at all to realize that Marxists and their intellectual offspring have no use for actual people in general, and only one use for "actual people" who do want what they're supposed to want. They treat them like pets.

Capitalism, on the other hand--especially the free-wheeling form of capitalism on offer these days in the US--is more than happy to let all those actual people have what they want, without worrying much about their consciousnesses, or even about "good taste" and "intellectual values." Given the choice, not only do actual people not choose Marxism, or "progressive" politics, or "authentic" art forms like peasant mud sculptures and traditional tribal music, they turn NASCAR race car drivers, professional wrestlers, and right-wing talk radio hosts into multi-millionaires. They don't shudder and reject "corporate" entertainment. They wait in line overnight for the chance to see the very first performance of the latest Star Wars movie. They don't spurn "consumerism." They turn "Shop Till You Drop" into the unofficial national motto.

Every once in a while, learned op-ed writers for The New York Times and The Washington Post decry what they deem is the monolithic conservatism of the American mainstream media and the "silencing" of "other voices" with "divergent views." They must not be paying attention. The American media is full of "other voices." With huge gaping blocks of air time to fill, in a market where laws do not limit the number of competing stations in the market, the result is inevitably the willy-nilly presentation of as many discordant voices as possible. Conflict captures market share. Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal have all had their chance--in Vidal's case, several chances--to put their anti-American case to the American public on the most major of the major television operations. So have other intellectuals with other discordant views, from Catharine MacKinnon to Michael Moore. The problem is not that they don't get a chance to be heard, but that nobody takes them seriously.

Intellectuals in America speak out on the issues just as often and as loudly as intellectuals in any other country, and their views are presented to the country just as often as the views of intellectuals in any other country, but in a society where their views are not enforced in any way, and not privileged almost at all, not much of anybody is listening. Outside of college campuses and a few left-leaning foundations, it's hard to find anybody in America who cares what "most educated people" think, or are supposed to think. It's hard to find anybody who even cares what the major media thinks. When the content on CBS and NBC and CNN goes off in a direction they can't support, actual people ditch the majors for niche-marketed opinion writers more to their liking. That's why Rush Limbaugh is a rich man. That's why Matt Drudge is famous. That's why an entire network of successful "Christian conservative" media has grown up and entrenched itself in less than thirty years. That's why Fox News exists in the first place. Intellectuals aren't being vilified in America, most of the time. They're just being ignored.

One thing has become increasingly clear to intellectuals in America since Ronald Reagan was elected over their vociferous objections in 1980: as long as capitalism survives, their claims to respect and deference are a lost cause. If actual people are allowed to think that their own opinions are just as good as the opinions of experts, if they're allowed to refuse to follow expert advice, if they're allowed to choose what they think is best for themselves--under those circumstances, the status of credentialed professionals in the humanities and social sciences, whether intellectuals in name or only members of the "knowledge professions," will sink to zero.

The real surprise is that it hasn't done so already.

Intellectuals love Marx because they have to love Marx--he's the only game in town if they're going to survive with their status intact. They hate America because America is the living embodiment of the thing they fear most, the day in which their credentials, their curricula vitae, and their expertise will count for nothing at all.

(And now, finally, the last part, 5)

Copyright © 2003 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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