I am in higher level education in the public university system. I used to view academia as a source of hope in society, and perhaps a progressive institution in someways, or some kind of source of hope with their supposed focus on science and research. After some years here, this “image” I had of academia has been shattered.
What are your perceptions of academia and research institutions, as Marxists?
There was a time when academia was heavily socialist until the early 70s or so in the West. It’s the one institution that needs to be brought back to our side before a revolution can succeed. Feudal, liberal, and fascist governments were afraid of universities until recent times when it got defanged.
I don’t see how that will be possible.
Learning, thinking, and research often leads to communism as a natural endpoint regardless of discipline. I’ll admit that we don’t have a theoretical basis on how to make universities centers of socialism once again, but it’s inevitable that it will happen due to the nature of the institution itself.
It’s the same as the solution to everything else. Workers need to organise. Including workers in HE. It’s a dialectic. Once an organised/ing HE sector sees others organising, they’ll start to ask questions and those who keep their eyes open will feel empowered to arrive at the conclusions that material reality is pointing towards.
The institutions will be easy enough to dupe because in the short term, they will be hopeful at the fame and public support that their radical academics bring to the college/university.
Then it’s a question of whether the other organising workers are achieving enough to support their radical academics so they don’t get targeted and fired. And whether those academics start to include the working class in their institutions (or continue to gatekeep).
I don’t see it as one coming before the other. They’ve both got to happen at the same time. Mental conceptions can only progress so far under given relations and forces of production and vice versa. If the academics aren’t there to push the mental conceptions of the possible, the workers who aren’t paid to think in big pictures will struggle to conceive of the new world.
It’s not impossible to have a revolution without an academy. But the revolution needs theorists and most of those are academics. They just need to be brought back down to earth, which will happen once enough other workers organise.