Returning to the OP: While I feel that bell hooks is a wildly overpraised author, the excerpt in the OP seems innocuous: all she is saying is that students in a classroom are reluctant to express their ideas and opinions if they sense that they will offend the professor or go against the tide of popular opinion in the classroom. In my experience, that tends to be true of any social situation.
Certainly, there is a case to be made that campus leftists are rigid in their intolerance of dissent–for example, shouting down speakers who espouse views they disagree with-- but the OP doesn’t demonstrate that thesis adequately, IMO.
If the collective farm needs five tractors produced for the victory of world socialism to produce 800 bushels of people’s wheat, how many tractors produced for the victory of world socialism does it need to produce 1200 bushels of people’s wheat?
I always figured math was largely non-political, which is part of the reason the East Bloc had so many talented and famous mathematicians.
Curiously enough, somewhere in the relics of my abortive academic career is a paper by a Professor Grigori Mints, on the effects of Stalinist thought on proof theory in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, it’s been more than a decade since I read it,and I followed it only at a remote distance at the time, but the basic theme was that acceptance of certain theorems was required as a basic principle of Stalinist doctrine, and, if you followed these up rigorously, you would arrive at the most demonstrably absurd conclusions (I think a violation of the law of the excluded middle came out of it somewhere)… so, if you knew what was good for you, you didn’t follow them up rigorously.
(The paper was presented at the 1990 Joint International Conference on Proof Theory at Leeds; there was a reason why I was there, but it wasn’t a very good one. Picture a room full of highly talented mathematicians, and, in the middle of it, one poor sad lonely linguistician, listening to the whoosh! of transfinite ordinals passing high over his head, and musing on the unusual smell created by putting a hundred talented mathematicians into a small lecture hall on a hot day…)
Incidentally, I note that your example is riddled with bourgeois capitalist error, in that the answer would appear to be “seven and a half tractors produced for the victory of world socialism”, and it is contradictory to the principles of the glorious people’s thought for “tractors produced for the victory of world socialism” to have a non-integer value. Please present yourself for happy and enjoyable voluntary re-education forthwith.
Ah ha, Citizen Wright. You run the risk of adopting the error of left-deviationism on the tractor question. Perhaps a closer review of Lenin’s “What is to be Done” would be in order. The answer of course is that 1200 bushels could easily be harvested by the five tractors, if that many are indeed required, were it not for counterrevolutionaries and wreckers sabotaging the havests. I urge you to have more diligence in the future when it comes to analyzing the farm situation.
Curses! … hang on … I mean … Imprecations of a general nature untainted by outmoded counter-revolutionary theistic concepts! You’re quite right. I must report immediately to the People’s Humane Correction Facility for a swift and painless re-indoctrination in proper proletarian thinking. See you in twenty-five years (or, with time off for good behaviour, twenty-four years and eleven months).
Hell yeah! I used to have an absolute blast doing this, in one class in particular. It was Development of Latin American Culture, conducted in Spanish, and I was the one non-native speaker in the class. Among other things, we read a lovely book by Eduardo Galeano, a wacked-out Uruguayan Communist, called The Open Veins of Latin America (there’s an English edition if you have the urge, but somehow I’m guessing you don’t). It was basically 500+ well-documented but somewhat rabid pages about how the evil white people have spent 500 years oppressing, murdering, and enslaving the virtuous brown people of Latin America.
Yeah, the Europeans did some incredibly nasty things to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And yeah, some white people do still persecute some brown people. My problem with the class, though, was the professor; every time she talked about the evil white people, she was staring right at me. Finally I got sick of it, and raised my hand to say that since I am of East European Jewish origin, during most of the time period in question, my ancestors had been running from pogroms, so I would appreciate it if she could make her accusations a little more carefully. Her response; “Wow, I never thought of it that way!” and I think she was so wrapped up in her little Puerto Rican Marxist world that she honestly hadn’t. We were the best of friends after that, and continued to correspond for years after I graduated.
If you call the professor on what you feel is his/her B.S., you may find that you are pleasantly surprised by some of the reactions (and from some of the other students as well). If the professor is any good, you shouldn’t be expected to swallow all assigned reading materials hook, line, and sinker. But be prepared to document your claims, or be grilled over the metaphorical coals.
Not to mention those fucking extreme leftists who do the exact same thing as the goddamn extreme rightists. The leftists have the same pompous elitist views, even if the specifics are different. If I have to hear one more time from some fucking far left asshole here on campus (oddly, mostly women) why I’m Satan’s spawn for eating meat and supporting Bush’s foreign policy, I’ll be about ready to cap some asses. And don’t get me started on that whole femiNazi crap.
Remember, the political spectrum is actually a doughnut.
Not everything that is “left” is Marxist, less and less as time goes on. There always was a non-Marxist socialist movement, especially in America and Europe, but it was utterly swamped and undermined by the Marxists, and suffered the same persecution from conservative/reactionary governments as did the Marxists.
Another good example is liberation theology, which, as you may well know, is based on a principle of equality and compassion rooted in Christian ethics. A close cousin is the Catholic Workers movement in America. Indeed, at one time, the entire labor movement in America was demonized by the right as being “Communist”.
Myself, I am on the conservative wing of the extreme left, but have no interest in Marxism whatsoever. It’s postulate that some forces of history are proveable and inevitable is utter booshwa. It is the Tweedledumber to Objectivism, as both are based on an utterly relentless materialism that is alien to the human experience.
The best recent example, to me, is the Sandanistas. They won thier civil war, despite all that humanistic patriots like Ollie North and St. Ronald could do. Then they held an election, lost to a rightist coalition in a fair election, and then turned over the government to the elected right!. You could look it up.
The “correct” Marxist position would be to assert the “dictatorship of the proletariat” above the stated wish of the people. I heartily endorse thier rejection of such dictatorship.
Well Muad. I read the piece you find so offensive. While I don’t know where you go to school or whether you are dealing with a real teacher or some jack-leg grad assistant, I am willing to bet a modest amount of money that you are dealing with a teacher who is full up to his eye balls with students who just sit there like a bunch of mesmerized sheep intent on getting ready to regurgitate every thing that comes out of their professor’s mouth.
Maybe, just maybe, this guy is trying to get you to get off your complacent butt, stand up on your hind legs and say something that is more than parroting back the stuff you have been spoon fed. Go ahead, shake the cobwebs from your under exercised brain and tell your teacher what you are telling us. Ten to one that will be the start of an exchange that might just make you engage in a little critical, and perhaps original, thought. Unlike high school, university is not a place where you are expected to simply accept every thing that comes your way. You are expected to think and analyze and express and expand points of disagreement. If you do rise to the occasion please remember that your first thought is probably not a very good one.
I took two classes on Latin America, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed and earned A’s in…taught by our professor of Latin American History, a 60+ year old white man. The class was directed to everyone, and I was so greatful that I was able to enjoy such studies without being made to feel like a racist-sexist-capitalist-exploiter. Unfortunately, this professor has now retired, and given the recent trend at our university of matching ethnicity of professor to subject matter I expect they will follow the lead of other schools and hire a radical leftist Hispanic to take over. I certainly hope they do not, because that would defeat the goal of teaching a diverse campus about those nations and their people. How many white people of European descent would take a class in which they and their ancestors were attacked on a daily basis?
As for the Marxist rhetoric in that book quoted in the OP, be glad it’s just Marxism. Heck, at least Marxism is modernist. All my professors (outside the philosophy department, of course) were postmodernists. Bad ones. It’s like every arts and sciences department just woke up one day and decided to co-opt the worst popular metaphysical theory of the 20th century and adopt the words and form of that theory into their own field without really understanding it. I had to sit through lectures and read books filled with endless postmodern rhetoric. For cryin’ out loud, pretty much every topic managed to be tied in somehow to “gender construction.” Compared to that, I was thrilled to read Genovese (famed Marxist historian of the Old South, my area of specialty) because at least his ideas acknowledged that there was a such a thing as a real world with true facts about it. Thank goodness I had plenty of philosophy classes, where we could all laugh at postmodern antirealism, shocked that it’s taken seriously in the other departments.
And as for this particular author you quote, I have nothing but disdain for people who turn their name into lower case letters. E. E. Cummings, I’m looking in your direction! I shall now file this author into my folder of mockery.
