A responsible contemplation on Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, in a time of crisis, does little more than pave the way to more Marx. An illusory call for the end of the public university does little more than prove a serious lack of such contemplation. The first page of “Communiqué from an Absent Future” laments at the loss of “the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry” (1). But this lamentation forgets itself in history; it assumes that the state university was once an institution created for something more than the nominal gentrification of that region’s middle-class. In the sixties, the student body brushed mightily against the implications of the state-funded university and any “cultured” citizenry produced from those interactions was based in the conflict itself, and never the pedagogy of the institution itself. No, the terms of public education are only more apparent to today’s student body and its faculty. In Marx’s critique of political economy, those relationships explicated in Capital seem to unfold themselves and become more correct as that mode of production expands, itself. In reality, his explication has always been correct; the degree to which others understand it is the degree to which capitalism has made its nature more and more apparent. Such is the relationship between the public university and its student body over the last forty years. Indeed, ten pages later, the author(s) revoke their own sentiments on the public university of yester-year in saying “the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the future needs of capital.” This fundamental misrecognition (although it is a recognition) marks the lack of philosophical rigor behind a general call for anarchism. But CAF does not see this; and in its assumptions it spirals down into the deepest, most cynical and immature anarchism: “At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root” (5). A responsible reading of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach might interpret this phrase more productively: at best, in employing Marx in the most superficial way, one might come to the very outer-limits of change in the abstract before handing in adolescent rhetoric for more a coherent analysis of political economy. Turning to “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune,” Marx makes his sentiments clear against anarchism. After the fall of the Paris Commune, Marx addresses the thirty-three Blanquists scattered across Europe and renounces their approach:
The German Communists are communists, because they clearly see the final goal and work towards it through all intermediate stations and compromises, which are created, not by them, but by historical development. And their goal is the abolition of classes, the inauguration of a society, in which no private property in land and means of production shall exist any longer. The thirty-three, on the other hand, are communists, because they imagine that they can skip intermediate stations and compromises at their sweet will, and if only the trouble begins, as it will soon according to them, and they get a hold of affairs, then Communism will be introduced the day after tomorrow. If this is not immediately possible, then they are not communists. What a simple hearted childishness, which quotes impatience as a convincing argument in support of a theory! (6).
If the author(s) of “Communiqué from an Absent Future” had read more into Marx than the broadest insinuation of upheaval, the call for anarchism as a means to overthrow Capitalism would have indeed appeared as an absurd one to them. Their folly transcends that of the Blanquists, for even they shared a goal for some specific end, whereas the CAF’s approach to the communist state is as philosophically bankrupt as the state university system is charges. Their pamphlet attempts to bypass all reformist movements in the public university system without ever referring to the desired goal: there are no desired goals, and without specific goals, there is only anarchism. Marx clearly states that communism might not always be achieved spontaneously, immediately; he infers that “compromise” through reform is largely necessary. And if reform was necessary in Marx’s era, before capitalism was fully developed, how could it possibly stand to reason that such spontaneous revolution might occur today? Student riots and revolution cannot act towards “communization” if it merely acts towards interruption. Marx did not specify the terms of the revolution versus reformism: but we do not need another would-be Marx with all the rhetoric of revolution without any philosophical content. As Marx aptly states in “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “The fact that Greece had a Scythian among its philosophers did not help the Scythians to make a single step towards Greek culture” (5). The American public university system has reached a specific juncture in capitalism that demands an equally specific treatment of the situation, and blanketed cries for petulant student anarchism will not fill the bill.
