Why are so many young people so open to socialism? It’s a real mystery.
UC Santa Cruz ‘History of Consciousness’ program features multitude of Marxist courses, including class on ‘Ecological Marxism’
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) features a high concentration of Marxist and anti-capitalist courses in one of its graduate programs, as well as in several other departments.
History of Consciousness is an “interdisciplinary graduate program” that purports to promote “problem-driven research vital to new forms of knowledge and intelligibility and to meet the challenges of imagining new modes of scholarship for the arts, social sciences, and humanities,” according to the school’s webpage.
A look at the program’s course offerings, however, reveals a large number of courses promoting Marxist ideology, such as “Introduction to Marxism,” in which students are introduced “to the thought of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers working in the Marxist tradition.”
The course also investigates “the specific nature of gendered oppression and exploitation under capitalism” and how Marx’s writings can be used “to make sense of our ecological crisis at present.”
The intersection of Marxism and ecology is further explored in “Ecological Marxism.”
“This class introduces Marx’s fundamental ideas about labor, nature, and capital, with a focus on the ecological dimensions of his thinking,” the course description states. “It also examines current Marxist perspectives on ecological crisis and their convergence with ecofeminist, anti-colonial, and Indigenous standpoints.”
Other courses also study feminism and colonialism as they pertain to Marxist thinking, such as “Marxism and Feminism,” which “Introduces the foundation of Marxism and feminist-Marxist critique while examining the international feminist struggle historically from the origins of capitalism to the present moment.”
The school offers another course of the same name in the Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies Departments. That course “[e]xplores critically the intersections and crisis points between feminism and Marxism as bodies of thought, theoretical formations, and forms of historical inquiry.”
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