Posted 2:18 PM by Miguel
A heads up on some vocabulary you need to know (hint, hint) for Thursday:
• ideological superstructure
• material forces of production
• social forces of production
• alienation
• dialectical materialism
• slave-master dialectic
• immiseration of the proletariat
• dictatorship of the proletariat
• class consciousness

Also, we will discuss the paper in more detail on Tuesday. Be prepared w/ questions. By now you should've already started (it's due in about 2-3 weeks).

Posted 12:18 PM by Miguel
A few comments on today's class discussion. Socialism-Marxism is very different from liberalism and conservatism. Those two are easier to understand because they are staples of American political discourse. But socialism is not. But you have to understand socialism by the end of the semester. And you can't understand it fully if you try to keep knocking down the general argument w/o fully appreciating.

Try to believe in Marxism when you read it. Try to understand it from his point of view. After all, Marx wasn't just some schmuck. He had a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Berlin (no small feat in his days) and was one of the founders of modern Sociology and Political Science and a large school in Economics. Bottom line: Marx was a very smart guy, not some crazy crackpot.

You have to also realize that you were raised to be a liberal. Whether you want to be one or not, should be your choice. But the choice has been made for you by, among other things, your educational system (something Marx points out). It's very difficult for us to believe that in the past century tens of millions of people willingly gave their lives to defend socialism.

For the next few classes we will dissect socialism (most of which are Marxist derivatives). The ideology of socialism is, unlike liberalism or conservatism, extremely complex and requires an entire vocabulary you are going to have to learn. Be sure you are familiar w/ the terms. The whole Marxist argument is built as an interlocking structure of logical arguments. You can attack any single one, but if you haven't accounted for the others, you're just tilting at windmills. This is not to say that Marxism doesn't have flaws ... but even modern liberals and many conservatives are willing to conceded that Marx was correct in many aspects.

Even many fascists will go so far. After all, most fascist parties were founded by pseudo- or ex-Marxists. Mussolini was a leader in the Italian Socialist party (he was editor of its major newspaper) before he formed the Fascist Party. Hitler's party was consciously named the National Socialist German Worker's Party (Nazi for short). We will get to their arguments in a few weeks.