In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously claimed that the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class.
This assertion has been dismissed by all save for the serious students of history. We’re told that there’s a “marketplace of ideas” in which ideas fairly and freely compete, with the best ones winning. (Ironically, this bourgeois conception of intellectual life is nearly a perfect analogue to the mythical bourgeois conception of capitalism as an economic system in which self-interested actors meet on free and equal grounds; proving, of course, Marx and Engel’s preface to the above quote: intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.
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At any rate, the Marketplace of Ideas myth is slowly crumbling, at least for the time being. Faced with fanatical opposition to their “plans” for health care reform and slightly slowing the pace of catastrophic global warming, a few liberal commentators have had to reveal the dirty secret that monied interests set the intellectual agenda in the United States (and everywhere else, for that matter). Liberal talk radio has gone on the offensive against astroturfing, the corporate bankrolling of supposedly grassroots activist groups. For instance, Rachel Maddow recently reported on the ties between the billionaire David Koch and the “grassroots” Americans for Prosperity and Mother Jones has named ExxonMobil as number one in its dirty dozen of climate change denial, because of the company’s funding for think-tanks that promote climate change denial. (Climate change legislation might threaten ExxonMobil’s profits, which in 2008 were over 45 billion dollars.) And so on and so on.
But money buys more than attention for the handful of conservative astroturf groups. It even sets the agenda in American universities, as this Reuters article from 2008 points out.
April 11 (Bloomberg) — Ayn Rand’s novels of headstrong entrepreneurs’ battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.
The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.
Ayn Rand, of course, is of no use to anyone but angsty teenagers and the small business owners who receive none of the government’s largess and protection — but all of the taxes and regulations. But it gets one wondering just how many intellectual whores in academia have been purchased by successful businessmen (not that these tycoons ought to bother — by and large, academics are merely propagators of the dominant ideas or purveyors of “revolutionary” distractions).
