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10/29/2024 Educational Dual Power: Learn the Marxism-Leninism the Academy Will NEVER Teach You! By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now The American political philosopher, Michael Parenti, said that the only thing about regular working people that the ruling class cares about is what they think. The owners of capital spend exuberate amounts of their dearest love – money – on crafting institutions that control how people think, the parameters of acceptable and unacceptable views. Frameworks of thought which facilitate the reproduction of the dominant social relations are proliferated, those which challenge these are silenced. The academy, which fancies itself as the center of free and critical thought, is the locus through which the most advanced forms of capitalist apologetics is derived. This apologetics, as Georgy Lukács described in The Destruction of Reason, doesn’t always have to be direct. In advanced capitalist societies the greatest defenders of the system are not necessarily those who explicitly defend it. Conscious of the crisis-driven character of the system, the capitalist class is competent enough to understand that to sustain its power it must control not only the narrative which champions the dominant order, but also the institutions and discourses which purport to challenge it. Indirect apologetics emerges as the most efficient defense of hegemony. It can take many forms. But in general, it puts forth a critique of the system which is culturalist, transhistorical, and superficial. The grievances people hold are prevented from rising to the level of systematic consciousness, to an awareness of the roots of their individual ills in the capitalist form of life itself. Systemic issues, in turn, are obfuscated as cultural issues or problems of “human nature.” No revolutionary should be naïve enough to think that they will be given the intellectual tools to change the world by the bourgeois academy. It is not in the capitalist academy where we find those ropes Marx and Engels spoke of. At best we might find some yarn, but that is far from sufficient for our purposes. For one to expect the intellectual apparatuses of the dominant order “to be impartial in a wage-slave society,” Lenin aptly tells us, “is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.” The purpose of the academy is to create the officers which lead the army of the capitalist intellectual apparatuses. They are the ones who make sure the boat is not rocked. When they fail, the armed bodies of men, the police, military, etc., appear. What must those of us who seek to radically change our societies do? If for our task of winning the masses we can’t be ideologically trained in the traditional institutions of “higher learning,” we must build our own educational institutions. This is what, in part, dual power is all about. This is what is required to build hegemony for our class. We must construct educational dual power. There is no better example of the metaphorical rope the capitalist sells us than the advances in technology we have seen over the last two decades. Through means such as zoom, a class on Marxism-Leninism taught at night in the midwestern United States can be attended by a revolutionary in New Delhi after feasting on his breakfast chole bhature. This is precisely the opportunity I wish to present to you, dear reader. As the Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist think tank in the U.S., and as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party, I wish to invite you to join my two-part course on Marxism-Leninism. In this course we will learn about the outlook that has been the most successful in challenging the parasitic order of the capitalists. From November to December, and then from January to February 2025, we will study the classics of the 20th century, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao, and provide for ourselves the revolutionary ideological tools the official academy will never give us. This is how, in the modern age, we use the ropes the capitalists sell us. Sign up HERE. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism(2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview(2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo’s Western Marxism (2024) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives October 2024
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