Adam Smith and Karl Marx

Imagine for a moment what those two minds might have had to say to one another...
and then think for a moment what my brain went through today trying to follow Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" with a historical intro (intro to "classical") Marxism. I wish we could've talked about Smith's view on Monopolies, but we didn't have time. I wish we could've discussed what Marx actually said about religion and especially about his warning against replacing the capitalist/individualism with "society" as the oppressor. But we didn't. I wish we could've expanded upon this crazy "soulless" entity that is a multi-national corporation and its relationship to capitalism in relation to Smith but we didn't have time, nor was that the point of the class. What I often wonder most is why we can't let these theorists speak for themselves? Why do we (and why must we be encouraged to) assign value judgments and try to impose/impart someone else's "wisdom" on "their words"? I want to hear Marx for himself. I want to hear Smith. I want to hear them divorced of my or anyone else's interpretation, particularly that of a textbook writer bent on either glorifying or demonizing certain said positions. In all honesty, the soc theory text we used did not (to my tired mind) glorify or demonize Marx and the pathetic excerpt in my "Enlightenment Reader" on Smith offered too little to really judge anything of value. But I can't take afford to spend the rest of my life in college taking courses to try to better understand economics so that I can actually make sense of Smith anymore than I can afford to major in anthropology, philosophy, and history to make heads and tails of Marx. So what do you do then with the theory when it is taken out of context and thrown into a book of excerpts? What do you do when a theory is put into a context with which you are not familiar and thus even less able to grasp it? My one complaint with Arendt's book thusfar is that she uses so much Latin and references to the classical theory of Augustine that I feel I need a course on classical theory or at least a "reader" a translator and lots of caffeine to keep up. I really want a dialogue with Arendt and Marx and Smith but I am not sure how to get that if I'm basing all of my understanding of them (if you want to call it that) on the "understanding/interpretations" of others. Why not go to the source, to the authors themselves and then use these "readers" to build upon the foundation and let a critical dialogue unfold from there? I am not by any means criticizing professors in this or their preferred teaching style or even book choices. What I am questioning is the logic of class structures that really could be far more effective if spread over two semesters. If not economized. McDonaldized. I really just think that for me to even come close to understanding Marx or Smith, I need to step back from my worldview and into theirs long enough to see the world through their eyes and in their words. We are encouraged to do this in some classes but not in others. In some courses you are expected to engage the material and in others, the material is simply laid out in front of you to be memorized and recited on an exam later. I don't know how I can understand any of these works terribly well by feeding my brain the fast food version (convenience store version) of the theories. It would be nice if we could actually discuss their views in depth (AND CONTEXT) without it having to be based on whether or not we disagree with them. One thing that struck me about reading what the text quoted from Marx is how easy it is and how often he has been misinterpreted and thus, misunderstood, manipulated, demonized and misquoted. This thought always returns me, rather uncomfortably, to something Hitler said, "What good fortune for governments that men don't think." My Com 101 teacher was the first to use that quote in a class, largely to shock people not by what Hitler said, but by omitting everything but the words "MEN DON'T THINK" and asking people who they thought might've said that. You'd be amazed how many women laughed and how many people suggested that women might've said it. When she revealed the rest of the quote, people were stunned both by the context and by the speaker so in short, I simply wish for what may seem silly and hopeless at the undergrad level... that we be given more time and more opportunity to actually engage these theorists that still shape our world today, not to be fed from the hand of one paid to interpret them but from they themselves. I do not think students are really too inept to be able to read these texts and that with the guidance of a decent professor, would they fall short of accomplishing what theory is intended to do: call for pause, reflection, engagement and action/implementation. What is the point of it otherwise if not to reaffirm the belief held by those "time-card punchers" (students who really don't want anything from a class except a grade and a degree at the end) that the purpose of university is not to grapple with anything but rather to get a degree and then a "real job"? Maybe this is useless complaining on my part. I sat in a class today of a teacher I respect highly for the fact that she teaches in seminar style, only to listen to another student complain "I didn't pay $3,000 to sit in a fucking circle." This student sat out and refused to participate perhaps as a tool of protest, which struck me as funny, how we can protest anything really if we set our minds to doing so. Is it appropriate to say hey, can't we discuss this? I mean authors pick some of those wildest quotes from the theorists and present them as the culminating threads of their theories (which I find rather problematic) but with Marx's quotes I saw something I hadn't read in him before. This, to me, was the unrepresented Marx. The Marx that perhaps could've sat down and challenged Smith on his the simplicity of his assumptions. When I read these words, I felt as though Marx could've said this today, right now, right here. He could've sat right here and said this same thing as so many are doing. Whether or not you fall on the side of Marx or Smith their social criticisms do deserve to be weighed against history and the present for the sake of the future. I still think though (as I seem to be repeating) that we could appreciate or even argue with so much more of their theories/criticisms if we were exposed to them in their OWN words and allowed/encouraged to engage them in a dialogue that seeks not to simply discredit them or even affirm them but rather reflecting upon them critically, as students are supposed to be learning to do.

I suppose I don't understand the idea of a pedagogy that is more "traditional" in that students are simply to read to the point of recitation without actually LEARNING anything other than how much they hate such and such said teaching style or this book or that chair. It seems sad and silly to reduce the wonderful environment and opportunities that higher ed affords to a mechanistic assembly line designed to spit out students into respective categories of assimilation, privilege, productivity and waste. This is especially annoying when you think about HOW EXPENSIVE higher education is and how most of us (me included) are going to have to pay the government back for the opportunity to be categorized. Today the provost commented about how we must convince the community of the importance of investing in BSU students. I think you have to go beyond that. I think you have to convince people that learning for its own sake has value, that a degree should at least be of equal or greater value to the amount of money spent in earning it, and that the quality of students reflects every budget cut, every crammed class, ever overworked and underpaid faculty member and every damn technological "advance" just as well as it reflects every ambition and moment of energy spent in this dialogue we call education. It is a cooperative in that way that however much we put in must be matched by the willingness and the enthusiastic support of a structure that truly does pride itself on providing the best educational opportunities/atmosphere. You can't have that by cutting salaries while raising student fees. Nor will you get it by skimping on the quality of undergraduate education in favor of instituting master's programs. Those students who are pushed through will not make it through grad school, will they? Those professors who are pushed to do so (at least those who actually care) won't appreciate being turned into a commodity either. Isn't it funny how it always comes back to the root problem of individuals having to sell their labor for far less than their work is worth? I know there are many structural problems with the system of education and I'm sure no non-ivy league college is immune to them just as in many of the k-12 public schools. So perhaps my critique of this is all unfounded and I'm really overtired and have read too much today. Perhaps because I am only a student I have no real clue about these things work and why they do, as they seem to. Perhaps I am trying to apply Marxist theory in some deluded manner at almost two in the morning to a situation that I simply cannot understand as I am only a junior at an underfunded State University. I hope for my friend that she does not graduate this University thinking it failed her and that my graduate friend does not continue feeling all of her hard work has been a waste. That would undoubtedly be the greater tragedy in this mechanistic overhaul of higher ed. This is also where I feel that for me at least the two paths of Marx and Smith converge in relationship to today.

"One day you will see clearly:
you've been knocking on a door without a house.
You've been waiting, shivering, yelling
words of badly concealed and excessive hope.
Where you saw a house, there'll just be another side.

One day you will see clearly:
there is no one on the other side,
except-as ever-the jubilant ocean
which won't shatter
ceramically like a dream
when you and I shatter." --from Kapka Kassabova's poem
"The Door: anticipation of wisdom" (anthologized in "Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times" pg 70)

"we make our own gravity to give weight to things
and then things fall and they break
and gravity sings"--Ani (from "Hour follows hour")


Peace.