In a speech given at the November 2006 "Restoration Weekend" in Florida, David Horowitz offered a comprehensive overview of the political indoctrination now found on university campuses. He reports on the progress that the "Academic Bill of Rights" is making across the nation. It's a liberal approach to education that eschews tyrannical indoctrination. In the course of his address, Horowitz mentions the Marxist approach so common on campuses today:
At every university I go to, I ask, “Are you taught that there are race, sex, and class hierarchies?” The hands always go up because that is what they are taught. It’s an idea derived from the Communist Manifesto. If you
haven’t read the Manifesto, it means you haven’t been at a university in 30 years because students have to read the Communist Manifesto, though they’ve never even heard of Hayek or von Mises, who had more insight into capitalist societies in their little fingers than Marx had in his entire being.
If you remember the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, it says that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. It goes on to talk about nobles and plebians, aristocrats and the serfs, slave masters and slaves throughout history. Then, Marx adds, there’s the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
In other words the idea of hierarchies is to back up a call to civil war. That’s what the Communist Manifesto is about. It’s an incitement to civil war. What you and I see as a democratic system with a lot of social mobility, Marx saw as a hierarchical system identical to slavery. That’s why he called workers “wage slaves.” That’s why to him, revolution in modern democracies was necessary.
Marx’s view makes up the standard curriculum in our universities today. My response is, “Well, if you believe in race, class, and gender hierarchies, where do you place Oprah Winfrey in your hierarchies?” She is the richest woman in America. She is also the great-great-granddaughter of a slave, the great-granddaughter of a sharecropper, a sexually abused child and a woman with a weight problem.
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