According to historian and public intellectual Russell Jacoby, Marxist scholarship is alive and well, but it has failed to reach ordinary people. Here is a taste of his Jacobin piece, “American Marxism Got Lost on Campus“:
But specialization also entailed thorny jargon that became endemic in academic Marxism, even a badge of seriousness. One result was that Marxist scholars like Jameson himself and other leftist professors like Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha loomed large in the academy but lacked visibility outside the campus.
Of course, this is not just something that affected Marxist thought. Massification allowed the university’s denizens to subsist solely within its borders; they addressed themselves to colleagues and graduate students.
In an earlier era, American philosophers sought and found an audience outside the campus. William James and John Dewey wrote for and were read by the educated public; Dewey, in fact, taught in China and influenced Chinese educational reform. Today, however, philosophers prosper within departmental confines. A recent listing of the most influential philosophers begins with Sally Haslanger, Daniel Dennett, and Linda Martin Alcoff. How many laypeople could identify their contribution? Their impact remains within the profession.
Academic Marxists from the 1980s to the present have more or less prospered, but in separate fiefdoms. Marxist economists debated the transition to capitalism and the state; Marxist historians debated working-class militancy; Marxist literary critics debated anti-imperialist novels; Marxist feminists debated wages for housework; Marxist anthropologists debated colonialism; Marxist educators debated schooling.
And this:
“…Academic Marxists have pursued their disciplinary studies which, if important, remain insular and technical. In general, they adopted postmodern ideas about social constructionism — the idea that everything is discourse or artifice, including gender. In addition, they stapled to their contribution the label “critical,” a term borrowed from the Frankfurt School.
When the Frankfurt School introduced “critical theory,” it served as a code word for Marxism. As insecure refugees in the United States, they did not want to flaunt their Marxism. With little understanding of its original parameters, American academics attached “critical” to such terms as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical sociology, critical geography, and critical readings.
But where is the Marxism? “Critical race theory,” the most public and successful of these endeavors, shows little evidence of (or interest in) Marxism. It is an ideology of anti-racism.
The postmodern bent of Marxism turns it into a sludge of miscellaneous concepts and issues. A working class vanishes. Take a recent contribution by Kathi Weeks, a Marxist feminist based at Duke University, who has the bona fides that she coedited a volume of Frederic Jameson’s work: “The most useful Marxist work today theorizes capitalism in its historical development as a system best characterized as colonial, settler, racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism.”
This is from a piece in which she counts the number of references to women in the book she is reviewing. “Not only were Marxist feminists missing from the analysis,” only thirteen women were cited in the book. This Marxism has devolved into a string of separate causes and loyalties.
Or consider the writings of the late Erik Olin Wright, a leading Marxist sociologist. His final books, such as How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century and Envisioning Real Utopias, consisted of jerry-rigged categories, vapid diagrams, and thick jargon. He improved Marx with eleven basic criticisms of capitalism. Number five is “Capitalism is inefficient in certain crucial respects.” This is a formula so empty it could just as well as be reversed: “Capitalism is efficient in certain crucial respects.”
And this:
The statement of Daniel Bell from 1952 that American Marxism had moved into the archives of history has proven wrong. From the 1960s to the present, Marxism flourished in various quarters, but mainly on campuses. The three-volume anthology of Marxist scholarship from the 1980s, if updated, would be thirty volumes. And yet Bell’s larger judgement on the weakness of American Marxism may not be so easy to dismiss.
While exemplary Marxist scholarship has been done, much is also narrow, even jargon-filled, destined to be confined to graduate seminars. Apart from the works of the Frankfurt School, which belong more to German than American Marxism, where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship? The possible contenders emerged on the edges of the academy: Monopoly Capital by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, Labor and Monopoly Capital by Harry Braverman, and City of Quartz by Mike Davis.
Read the entire piece here.
I do think Jacoby has it about right. I was at UW-Madison when Olin Wright was at his peak, and it seemed to his group was a little quasi-religious, with their own weekend camps or something, if I remember right. It was sad this his kind of work was popular, at least among some. I do think that kind of Marxism has filtered out through people like AOC, who likely had Marxian profs at BU.