Celebrating Marx at Carnegie Mellon University

At a great capitalist founded institution, Communism is being celebrated Red Square style.

Paul Kengor January 8, 2018

Vladimir Lenin was said to have boasted that capitalists would give his communists the rope to hang them. The self-anointed keeper of the Marxist flame, co-namesake of history’s deadliest ideology — Marxism-Leninism — would have chortled at what’s happening at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 2018, this prestigious university, named for two of history’s wealthiest capitalists, freshly infused with a huge quarter-billion-dollar-plus estate gift from industrialist William S. Dietrich II, and where students are hit for $70,000 per year, will be celebrating the birth of Karl Marx.

The year 2018 is Marx’s bicentennial, and his proponents at Carnegie Mellon are not forgetting. Quite the contrary, they are celebrating. And if you think “celebrating” might be too strong of a word, well, go online and watch the inaugural “Marx at 200” lecture (assuming it isn’t scrubbed from the website after this article appears), with opening remarks by the dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Richard Scheines, followed by presentations from faculty members Kathy Newman and David Shumway. A warning: if you’re a Carnegie Mellon student, alumnus, faculty member, board member, or donor who has friends and family that escaped the Iron Curtain, Fidel’s Cuba, Red China, Ceausescu’s Romania, Vietnam, Cambodia, or any other Marxist despotism, you will not be pleased.

Scheines set the tone in his welcoming remarks by repeatedly stating that the purpose of the series is to “celebrate” the birthday of Marx, who he calls “the great man” with “an incredibly optimistic vision.” Dr. Scheines said it was a “pleasure to open the year celebrating Marx’s two-hundredth birthday.” He shared this personal story:

I grew up in the 1960s in a household with open-minded progressive New York parents, but for most of my early years Karl Marx was only known to me as the author of communism — a political idea I knew nothing about but which I nevertheless attached to Joseph Stalin, the Prague Spring, the Iron Curtain and the horror that was the Cultural Revolution in China. And anti-communist propaganda was powerful stuff in the 1960s, and I was predictably a product of it. Nothing in my high school education probed even slightly beneath the surface of an incredibly superficial view of Marx or Marxism…. So, when I took a course in college in 1975 on modern political and economic thought, I was caught completely by surprise when I actually read the great man and some of his followers. Not only was I struck by the nuance and depth and sheer novelty of the arguments but also by the weird optimism of it all.

With respect to Dr. Scheines, I’ve read Marx countless times. I’ve done numerous lectures and books on communism, and I’m currently writing a biography of Marx specifically. I teach a course on Marxism at Grove City College each spring semester. I’ve never detected a whiff of depth in the man and his concepts, let alone optimism. Marx was extraordinarily pessimistic. The only “optimism” might have been his quixotic utopianism.

As for novelty in Marx? Oh, yes. His ideas were novel, alright — to the point of inanity if not insanity. If you haven’t read the Communist Manifesto, do so, and you’ll by shocked by the sheer fantasy and sophistry. It’s an impossible piece of work, obviously doomed for failure. Marx gets wrong not only economics but human nature. It has never ceased to amaze me that his silly ideas could have appealed to anyone, and especially still today after a century (and counting) when the implementation of those ideas generated vast killing fields among completely unrelated and disparate countries and peoples whose only commonality was their attempt to implement Marxism. Wherever Marxism went, it destroyed..........To Read More.....