On US education I remember in 8th grade the one thing I learned about Marx was one paragraph and was basically just “he wrote the Communist Manifesto and believed that history was a cycle of conflicts between classes.” And I was just like “Well what is communism? Isn’t that going to be important going forward?” I guess it wasn’t and I never learned what Communism/Socialism actually is or what the USSR did beyond “be authoritarian” until I was an adult.
You probably didn’t actually learn what capitalism is either until later, given that Marx is the most comprehensive breakdown of how capitalism functions, so much so that even the economics courses at universities use Marx for that part.
The intentional avoidance of teaching how the system works is essential to making sure people don’t question it. You don’t want your workers knowing how it works, merely accepting it. Understanding how it works is reserved for the ruling class.
I remember I took economics 101 in college. The professor was explaining how growth is required for capitalism. Even as clueless I was back then, I raised my hand and said well nothing can keep growing forever, what happens then? He told me that would be a long time from now and to not worry about it.
Same. In the American education and political system it was really hard to encounter any anticapitalist critique until after 2016 when the Bernie campaign turned a lot of people on to the idea and it started getting talked about again (and even now it’s only brought up very occasionally outside of fringe websites like ours).
I tended to have communism/socialism condescendingly poopooed as “well-meaning” but “never really working because human nature”.
Anyways, time to learn about the french revolution and the reign of terror, which in no way should be viewed as an indictment of liberal revolutions the way the red terror does for socialism.
You probably didn’t actually learn what capitalism is either until later, given that Marx is the most comprehensive breakdown of how capitalism functions, so much so that even the economics courses at universities use Marx for that part.
The intentional avoidance of teaching how the system works is essential to making sure people don’t question it. You don’t want your workers knowing how it works, merely accepting it. Understanding how it works is reserved for the ruling class.
I remember I took economics 101 in college. The professor was explaining how growth is required for capitalism. Even as clueless I was back then, I raised my hand and said well nothing can keep growing forever, what happens then? He told me that would be a long time from now and to not worry about it.
and they wonder why young people uniformly hate corporations and what they’ve done to the environment
Same. In the American education and political system it was really hard to encounter any anticapitalist critique until after 2016 when the Bernie campaign turned a lot of people on to the idea and it started getting talked about again (and even now it’s only brought up very occasionally outside of fringe websites like ours).
I tended to have communism/socialism condescendingly poopooed as “well-meaning” but “never really working because human nature”.
Anyways, time to learn about the french revolution and the reign of terror, which in no way should be viewed as an indictment of liberal revolutions the way the red terror does for socialism.
I remember almost my exact words when I was in high school “communism has a lot of valid criticisms about capitalism but their solutions didn’t work”