CF Do you think university faculties will accept the sort of outside influence?
GS There will be great resistance and people in the universities are rather despondent because they realise that papers that don’t conform to the prevailing dogma are not accepted by the periodicals which are used to give tenure. So there is a self-perpetuating quality about tenure and the people who are involved in it are pretty despondent about breaking in. I am much more optimistic because I think that this financial crisis has definitely proven that that is unrealistic, that they dogma has lost touch with reality. And I think reality will push its way in, in the form of the students who will not want to study a dogma whose time has passed. It’s like a little bit like Marxist dogma. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring an end to Marxism. There are still Marxists at universities, maybe more in Europe than in America, and eventually they’ll die out, but until then, they will be there. But they may not have any students listening to them.
I think this party explains the collapse of the Marxist left during this capitalist crisis. I mean, they’ve dreamed of such events for decades. Yet, now that it’s here, their response has been almost non-existent. No calls for action, no protests. Nada. This crisis doesn’t fit what the sacred texts say should happen. The unions aren’t marching. The working class – whatever that is – isn’t rising up either (at least not how they think it should be.) In reality, there are stress fractures and rising anger everywhere, but it’s not occurring how Marxism theorizes it should. So, I think, they’re paralyzed into inaction. Plus, especially in the US, no one is listening any way.
As for the free marketeers, their own cherished theories of a marketplace that magically keeps everything in balance and rational without interference from that bad old government lie in rubble.
There’s a lot of that going around lately. Theories in rubble.
Via Infectious Greed