American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas.

• Author: Stromberg, Joseph R.

By Dario Fernandez-Morera New York: Praeger, 1996. Pp. 204. $71.95.

It is a rare treat to review a book with which one is in nearly complete agreement. Dario Fernandez Morera writes about the prevalence of Marxist and sub-Marxist ideas in American academic life with awareness and concern. Discredited globally (one would have thought), Marxism and its offspring and assigns--the vast May of critical theory, postcolonial studies, sectarian feminism, multiculturalism, structuralism (regular and "post"), and all the postmodernisms--thrive in American universities, where they work to undermine whole disciplines. Like the Old Dope Peddler of the Tom Lehrer song, they do well by doing good. The public notices them only when some egregiously goofy manifestation such as "political correctness" becomes briefly controversial or the butt of well-earned satire. The iceberg goes unseen.

The present work is intended to rescue this important topic from neglect. Fernandez-Morera shows how Marxist ideas unite "practices" and "practitioners" across a range of academic fields. He is able to turn their hideous jargon back on them as he writes of their drive to "unmask" "the evil bourgeois `Other'" while they build Marxist "hegemony" over various fields of study. Through judicious use of quotations, he allows the suspects to convict themselves.

Fernandez-Morera "interrogates his sources"--to use the slightly sinister-sounding phrase of E. P. Thompson--to shed light on such key issues as the Marxists' views about knowledge and truth, about power, ethics, and the evident failure of actually existing socialism. A final critical chapter and a conclusion round out the treatment, which is thorough, if not friendly, throughout. Fernandez-Morera sometimes adds a little suspense by not naming a quoted contemporary writer I found myself leafing ahead to the notes to find which learned weasel had delivered the amazing pronouncement just cited.

Regarding the critical matter of the bases of knowledge, Fernandez-Morera finds that "materialist discourses" (his short term for Marxism and its relatives) affirm "epistemological and ethical collectivism." Big entities such as society and class "construct" the individuals in them. All thought--with the odd exception of "materialist discourse"--is partial and "ideological," merely reflecting the class interests of the parties who produce it. "Truth" is relative, dialectically changeable, a form of "hegemonic discourse" to be deconstructed and unmasked as partial by discoursing materialists with time on their hands.

Fernandez-Morera rightly refers to this doctrine as a form of "polylogism," which, as Ludwig von Mises noted, asserts that the logical structure of the human mind differs from class to class (or race to race). Thus each class, race, or aggregation of people has its own "truth" (waiting to be unmasked?).

Materialist discourse, exempt from the whole knowledge problem, is ready to serve. It does so by looking into the real relations of power that liberalism, conservatism...