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Notes -
I remembered another thought I had about this. Whenever I have a moment to dive back in to some of the things these folks are saying, I'm always struck by how it seems to me that they should be obviously anti-education. At the very least, against any sort of specialized education that is not completely uniformly applied and achieved. I think the crits have abandoned the old Marxist line of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", and that might be one of the biggest dividing lines. Because the conceptual point of education is to improve oneself, in terms of understanding and ability. And if one is improved in such a way, they become unequal and unfair. They may feel like their enhanced understanding and ability provides them more prestige. They may feel more "at home" in places that use/need such specialized understanding/ability.
So all through the discussions of things like affirmative action at Harvard, I often find myself wanting to know why these folks are not staying true to their theory and simply saying that prestigious institutions like Harvard should simply not exist. I vacillate in my theory. Could be that I have, indeed, misunderstood something about their theory. Could be that their theory is a mostly-bullshit veneer of credibility slapped on top of what is really just class/race/etc warfare at its core. Could be that it's pure cognitive dissonance in that they've gained all of their power/prestige by means of taking over academia, so they can't bring themselves to 'deconstruct' their own source of outsized power/prestige.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure they've abandoned "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", because I've asked multiple times if people who are otherwise spouting ideological beliefs that shall not be named are willing to apply this idea to the one area where it is the most likely to succeed - tracking in schooling. Where else do we have such close involvement by parties that are highly invested in accurately assessing a person's ability/need? Parents and teachers are incredibly closely-involved, and they can use a wide variety of assessment methods, methods that are vastly more suitable to the task at hand than we have available for similar assessments in any other realm of life. Where else do we have vast quantities of state dollars committed specifically to providing precisely to the needs of each individual child? If "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is going to work anywhere, it should obviously work best in schools, and I can't interpret that meaning anything other than tracking, identifying those of high ability and asking much of them (with difficult/advanced coursework), as well as those of low ability and providing their needs as best as possible. Yet I cannot find a single person, either an economic Marxist or an ideology-that-shall-not-be-named-ist who is willing to embrace "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
They're way ahead of you. "Why do they go to Harvard, though?" isn't that much of a gocha for people who think society-improving action must be collective. It's on the same level as "if you're in favor of higher taxes, why don't you donate your money to the government?".
I think the slogan was for the workers of the world to unite and slay the capitalists, not that the workers of the world needed to become capitalists in order for their society-improving action to be collective. And at least the people who have a theory that implies that higher taxes are better are willing to say that they're in favor of higher taxes, admitting that it doesn't make sense for them to individually donate their money to the government because of the collective action problem. I would be perfectly happy to just hear people seriously saying that academia is a problem, that it needs to be banished by law, but that due to a collective action problem, they're stuck individually having to game the system. I'm not seeing anyone doing that.
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