After law school, I hope to be involved in employee and labor law. In college, I was challenged by and increasingly interested in a variety of – how would one say it? – Marixst, Neo-Marxist, materialist, dialectical theoretical writing? Whatever flaws or lapses such thought may have, it seemed true to the experiences I had observed growing up, especially the conflicts that wore most severely on my parents. But to spend my life being a Marxist literary critic seemed like a peripheral solution to the problem. I came to here to take a more outwardly directed, action-based role in the relationship between employees and employers.

-- ScottThurman - 15 Jan 2009

"Whatever flaws or lapses such thought may have"

I hope you won't take this personally, but it's actually a pet peeve of mine that people familiar with Marx's work feel obligated to put up disclaimers like this. I understand the impulse, though, because it's apparently very easy for people to get away with claiming that Marx's theoretical framework provides an overly simplistic and deterministic view of history, although you know that's not true if you've actually read Marx.

I do hope we'll pursue the topic of the practical impact of ideas in greater detail in this course. My sense is that, whatever the sources of our ongoing social problems, you can't claim they're still around because our intelligentsia haven't figured out sufficiently subtle and sophisticated ways of thinking about them.

-- MichaelHolloway - 16 Jan 2009