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To: TEACHSOC@maple.lemoyne.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: Teaching Marx
Cc: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
I have taught marxist social theory for two decades or more to
several thousand students.  And I teach sections on marxian theory
in every course I offer from social problems to criminology to racism
to gender relations to social psycholiogy and to the philosophy of science
and the sociology of knowledge.

I have to say that Marx is a revelation for most students...and a
powerful intellectual tool with which to understand how the social
life world in which they live, learn, love and work is distorted
by class relations.

While it is true that students come into a course with pre-set under-
standings of Marx, of socialism, of communism and of radical consciousness
in general, there are some things one may do to unfreeze
these pre-judgments and allow students to take another look.

This is what I do to that purpose:

  1.  I make sure that I begin with the positivities of capitalism.
        US students benefit greatly from their position in both the
        national and the international stratification of wealth and
        power...it is little use to say that capitalism is
unreservedly evil.

  2.  Then I set the many negativities of class stratification side
        by side with those positive consequences of capitalism.  
        Students are able to see that many of the virtues of
capitalism transform into negativities for others.

        That capitalism is the most productive economic system in
        human history thus is put into larger perspective with the
effects that profit-making and taking have upon pollution,            upon
depletion of raw materials, upon the displacement of 
        human value by market value.

  3.  I concede with easy acceptance the negativities of bureaucratic
        socialism of the sort they see and saw in Eastern Europe.
Then I set those negative qualities against many of the 
        gains for women, for workers, for students, for ethnic minor-
        ities in various countries which try and tried bureaucratic
        socialism.

  4.  Then I talk about other forms/models of worker ownership and
        worker control of the means of production as well as other
        places where socialism is tried and works better than in the
        old Soviet Union.  Italian cities, the Mondragon co-ops in
        Spain, Kerala State in India as well as Cuba offer hope for
        a better socialism than we have so far seen.

  5.  One must never reify Marx and turn him into deity...as so often
        I see in the CLASS network of which I am member.  Marx is
        dead.  We are not.  If Marx were alive, he would 'read' with
        his great genius, the many changes in the world today; he
        would contemplate the many changes in the philosophy of 
        science; he would consider the many postmodernisms which now
        lay before us like a strange and unknown forest...and he would
        offer us guide...would warn us away from those which defeat
        the enquiring spirit which marked so well his work in the
        last century.

  6.  Finally, those of us who teach Marx must honor the readings
        and teachings of those who look at patriarchy and see an
        oppression far older than capitalism, feudalism or bureau-
        cratic socialism.  Those who look at the structure of age
        grades and see both young and old discarded as surplus to
        the human project are our good colleagues in the pursuit of
        social justice.  Those who look at gender relations and see
        dozens, hundreds, thousands of patterns rather than the
        binary gendering now presented as natural and normal...these
        are also our close colleagues and partners in pursuit of
        social life worlds of our own making...as was the larger
        task to which Marx set himself.

  Students don't need gods to worship...they need ideas with
        which to know and to work.  Marx remains most helpful to that
        purpose...as do we all who look at society and see structures
        of domination which make us, all, smaller than need we be.

                                                        TR Young        
               


        
TR Young
Sociology
U/Vermont
TR.Young@uvm.edu