Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or, how to turn Normal People into Leftists

Seen the movie?  Now enjoy it in 3-D!

Well no, I’m not exactly claiming that your friends are being steadily replaced by zombies from outer space hatched from gigantic zucchinis.  None the less, something is definitely going on.   It is often revealed in the most ordinary of encounters.  Of course I don’t recommend dangerous inquiries.  Today we all know that complementing a woman on her good looks or remarking on the weather are inherently political topics.  Let’s just say, for example, you ask someone,

“How do you think the brackets in the College Basketball finals will work out?”

You may get, “The dialectical forces implicit in late capitalism will enable the proletariat to seize the commanding heights of socio-political dissemination.”

Or, desperate in search of an ice-breaker, you pipe up,”I like yogurt, what about you?”

Response?  “If it were up to me I would take the Bulgarian line on everything.  The Stalinists failed because they fell into a reactionary respect for national self-determination.  Zinoviev was right, all of Eastern and Central Europe should have been directly incorporated into the Soviet Union.”

Or, thinking that being trendy will get you somewhere, you venture, “Do you like the most recent album by Bruno Mars?”

“No, his most radical work is found only in the Grundrissa!  Later work such as the second and third volumes of Kapital were already infected by the bourgeois economics exemplified by Ricardo.  Genuine radicals will skip from the youthful essays directly into the Gramchian corpus in order to elucidate fault lines in the cultural meta-structure.”

Ok, sure, I’m exaggerating!

Worse, I’m cribbing from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where he lampoons the tendency of every layperson of the era to put on theological airs.  Moreover, since I reside in a college town the leftward drift is more apparent.  But don’t get apathetic about the leftward-ho tendency of the present, since the politically conservative to moderate educator is today’s “canary in the mine-shaft.”

They came for the teachers and the guest lecturers and I did nothing….

None the less, despite my motto “Ideas have Consequences,” I want to briefly play the Marxist.  Ideas alone don’t have legs.  They are embedded in and transmitted through an institutional context.  It isn’t just bad ideas and bad teachers which are raising a generation of leftists.  There are other factors at work too, factors which the left knows about and you should too.  Yes, it has to do with education…but in a very different sense.

How to mass-produce a generation of leftists

This might not be the only or even the main causal chain, but it is of major significance any way you look at it.  By the numbers…

1. Hire more university administrators and non-teaching staff, invest in elaborate infrastructure, increase tuition exponentially.  (N.B.: At the risk of extending the causal chain back ad infinitum, the attractiveness of this “industrialization” of education was stimulated by the expenses incurred by the tenure system and teacher unionization.)
2. Make student loans available and the default option in financing the impossibly expensive university experience.
3. Continue to promote the idea that a university degree is essential to getting ahead in the world even as an increasing number of graduates fail to find jobs in the workforce.
4. Cultivate an ever larger debtor class among graduates who owe money for their college financing while not being able to make ends meet.
5. Moot about the idea of debt forgiveness.
6. Change the idea of debt forgiveness from a proposal (if a left administration were in power) to a demand (if a conservative administration is in power).
7. Obfuscate the fact that the college loan system was a progressive idea that failed, emphasize that it involves “money” and hence is symptomatic of late capitalist decadence.

Note that during the campus protest movement of the 1960s the students were motivated by idealistic devotion to causes: i.e., Pacifism, civil rights, drug normalization/legalization etc..  However the left never was able to capitalize on these movements because the idea of turning the United States into a Soviet republic was so obviously against the practical interests of most people looking to graduate from an American university.

What has changed between 1967 and 2017 is that socialism is now arguably in the “class interests” of prospective (indebted) college graduates.  However the moot point is that this was not the determined outcome of impersonal economic forces a.k.a. “the dialectical contradictions of late capitalism.”  Rather, it is a crisis which has been deliberately engineered by the self-styled progressive forces in education and public finance, to create a debtor class.  (And by the way, isn’t it interesting how central bankers and leftists think along more or less the same lines?)

So the next time it’s necessary to buttonhole a stranger with the standard inquiry,  “What time is  it?”  you have the right to be amused if they reply, “Time is a function of labor multiplied by material costs when expressed as an inverse of objective material value.”

But if they go on to say, “…and soon it will be the centennial of the October Revolution.  It has taken us bourgeois Americans a hundred years to catch up to the heroic vision of Lenin,”  please remember the adage, fooled once, shame on you, fooled twice, shame on me.

There are no “iron laws of history.”  The would be world-controllers are just making history up as they go along, to suit their fancy.  That is to say, they are changing the cosmetic surface of reality.  The core of reality is controlled by Someone Else, but they don’t want to think too deeply about that.

And what about you and me?  Are we just passively watching as the alien zombies hatch out of their giant zucchinis?  Could it be that we are watching the man in the mirror?

Gottcha!!!

Or we could wake up and do something….

 

Blessings,

Mark Sunwall