> >Marxists have, in a sense, lost in history (for now and getting them to admit
> >it might be very hard), yet their ideology still dominates historical
> >scholarship.
>
> Why has socialism always been such a darling of academia? I never
> understood the apparent need for otherwise learned people to denigrate the
> society that empowered them to achieve their positions..
This dawned on me very recently thanks to Michael Lorrey's elucidating
point about subjective truth and contract law.
These days, it seems like most academia has all but completely accepted
post-structuralist thinking, a philosophy which is completely hostile to
absolute truth. It's impossible to have a society bound by contracts when
a text has infinite meaning.
Also, note that you find most professors in universities, not
corporations. They are funded with public money as a public good most of
the time. So while it is capitalism that has created this public money,
in the eyes of professors, the only reason they don't have more money is
because the greedy capitalists won't give it to them.
Why authoritarian socialism rather than direct anarcho-socialism? Most
socialists believe that we can't get straight to anarcho-socialism; that
society isn't ready to live like that yet. In order to fix this, they
need to be taught. They need authoritarian socialism to teach them how to
think, how to work and how to live together without greed. Once that
happens, you dump authoritarian socialism and live forever in utopia.
Why don't they see the failings of this system? Well, many of them DO see
that authoritarian socialism doesn't just "fade away" as Marx put it; this
is the reason why they are now so critical of the former USSR, but still
gung-ho for socialism: The USSR was doing it wrong, even if it had the
right idea in mind. Meanwhile, they CANNOT be dissuaded from socialism
while they maintain that reality is fundamentally a subjective
experience, and that a text's meaning is formulated within the mind of the
reader, having no objective meaning, and thus being unenforceable as law.