The Ebony Towers still stand

As a political-economic system, Marxism has been totally discredited as a viable ideology. With the sole exception of North Korea, virtually every nation on earth has either rejected it or turned against it. Under the leadership of DengXiao Ping and now Jiang Zemin, China has turned capitalist. Since the early 1990s, Vietnam has pursued market reforms. Soviet Russia collapsed in 1991. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Even Communist Cuba may have eased up considerably on socialism. History has clearly proven that Marxist economics — that the Marxist paradigm — simply does not work.

Yet the liberals at America’s universities still have not given up. American academia is still liberally infused with Marxist propaganda, skillfully adapted for virtually every liberal arts field or department, from sociology to history to political science and beyond.

Indeed, Marxism itself has even been given a new name: “Cultural Studies” in the speech, journalism and communications fields. It has been revamped to conform to modern, politically-correct standards. But it is still essentially the same old folly, neatly packaged for the average unsuspecting college student, who is usually ripe political indoctrination and re-education.

Take media scholar Neil Postman as but one blatant example. Mr. Postman proposes ten principles concerning media technologies. Among these ten principles, he posits the rather Marxist (cultural studies) notion that the benefits of new media technologies are never evenly distributed among the population.

Every new technology, Postman claims, benefits some and harms others, as if technological innovation were some kind of zero sum game, a weapon in class warfare, as it were.

In the newspaper vs. Internet realm, for example, Postman’s “principle” would have us believe that the Internet benefits the rich, since they can afford computers, the newspapers benefit the poor, since newspapers are still relatively inexpensive and discarded issues may even be pilfered — sorry, commandeered — by the homeless population (assuming, of course, that they are even literate).

Greater application of critical thinking skills, however, should expose this misconception — this malignant fallacy. Note, for instance, that the poor in the technologically advanced nations, such as the United States, are far better off than the poor in, say, Bangladesh or Pakistan. Technological advances simply tend to benefit virtually everyone in that society, since technology only enhances productivity and efficiency, resulting in greater output, service and wealth, thereby creating a larger economic pie for even the most destitute members of that society to forage on.

Still, the university Marxists will never acknowledge the facts. Fearful of the real world of merit, logic, competition and commerce, they will always stubbornly cling on to that eternal Marxist delusion, perched up there in their ebony towers, spitting down upon the creative industrious rich who have afforded them their irresponsible safe havens, where theory never meets with reality.