Comradeship // Freechat

All degrees mainly teach liberal nonsense. This includes law, STEM subjects, even medicine. Almost none of them challenge or ever explain political economy. And learning anything in an isolated way will lead to error and an inability to understand or resolve problems.

But let me clarify something: everyone should get a degree if they can, and become as highly educated as possible. The subject doesn't really matter.

If one pays attention and uses the time wisely, a degree creates the space for you to teach yourself anything you like. If you develop the knack, you'll even be rewarded for it. See Bertell Ollman's How to Take an Exam and Remake the World for some advice on how to achieve this: https://archive.org/details/howtotakeexamrem00ollm

The trick is to treat things seriously. Don't be a liberal student. And I mean that in every sense of the word. If all you do on any degree is read what you're given to read (mainly textbooks, extracts, and summaries), you will absorb the bourgeois education as intended.

If you accept the lesson of Kwame Ture, you'll fair much better (regardless of any politics that you include in assessments—which I cannot generally recommend). See this video of Ture speaking at a university: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c6ZWJT3B3r0&pp. (If you like that one, you'll also enjoy https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bN8oq7lF9FA&pp.)

This interview with Michael Hudson will be illuminating for you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hH9pzzIIEj4&pp. If he hadn't studied classical economics, we'd have never had Super Imperialism or his sharp insights into the rise of China and decline of the US. He could predict what he predicted because he paid attention and went beyond what was taught.

Note, however, that Hudson changed his PhD thesis just to pass the exam, even though he knew it was incorrect – because the examiners refused to accept what was not in the orthodox textbooks. How did Hudson learn the truth? His mentor agreed to mentor him if he read every source cited in Marx's (IIRC) Theories of Surplus Value. That is: he gave himself the best classical liberal economics education that he could (from a Marxist perspective and in order to better understand Marx, of course).

To be a conscious student also requires understanding how bourgeois education will be anti-communist when it appears to give fair treatment to Marxists and AES, often in the name of 'balance'. For a glimpse into how publishing fetters the truth – and so to understand what to look for – see Grover Furr's talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccmj2Lj5jB0&pp. And remember Michael Parenti's warning: to think and write unorthodox thoughts, you must swim against the orthodox stream; you will be held to a much higher standard than everyone else, so you must be better than everyone else.

Lenin, too, started as a lawyer. The working class must be as skilled as possible if it is to govern. And that requires an education. At the moment, the only option is a bourgeois education. Unless you can go to a School of Marxism in China or maybe Medical School in Cuba. We cannot create a 'principled' anti-intellectualism that does the work of the ruling class for it, i.e. deters the working class from higher education, leaving us without the skills, knowledge, and credentials to (a) do what we can in the meantime and (b) step up when history needs us.

I mean to encourage you. If what I've said is off-putting at all, know that your job is to get the education and the qualification while teaching yourself. Your job is not to proselytise the academics or your peers (although you may find like minded peers during your studies). So you don't have to hold yourself out as a pariah in front of the university or in your assessments. In that respect, you just need to give the answers that get the marks, almost regardless of your personal beliefs.

Get a degree!