It’s fair to say that recent events have not treated Marxism very well. Communism as a global ideological force has long since collapsed, replaced by the triumph of global capitalism. Ten years ago, Francis Fukayama took a page out of Marx and Hegel’s book and declared human society to be at the “end of history.” Sept. 11’s events have further cemented Marxism’s death as a viable political philosophy, largely moving the debate from class struggle to cultural struggle as a basis for historical change.
So imagine our malaise when we received the latest work by outspoken Marxist Bertell Ollman in the mail a couple weeks ago. Doesn’t he realize the Unabomber ruined the manifesto as a viable art form? However, this isn’t your typical leftist claptrap. It’s a sight more bizarre than that?Ollman attempts to cloak the claptrap with an easily digestible coating from another literary genre. But instead of looking to such esteemed forms as the pastoral novel or the Petrarchan sonnet, Ollman writes a test prep book: How 2 Take an Exam ? and Remake the World. While political and philosophical treatises have been combined with other literary forms through the years, Animal Farm this is not. Hell, it isn’t even Atlas Shrugged.
For one thing, Ollman doesn’t even attempt to merge these disparate threads until well after the book’s midpoint. You see, in this introduction, he asks us to “make a deal”: “I’ll tell you what you need to know in order to write the best possible exams if you lend an ear to my account of capitalism.” Furthermore, to keep uninterested parties from reading only the test sections or only the Marxism sections, both are printed in the same size and style of type. Hence, there are such juxtapositions as a discussion of the pitfalls of globalization next to a paragraph advising the reader to sleep well the night before an exam.
Throughout How 2 Take an Exam, the feeling persists that while the book attempts to merge “Marx for Dummies” with “Exams for Dummies,” it’s not particularly successful at either. Ollman’s writing has no organization to speak of, instead consisting of a remarkable long string of non sequiturs. Plus, the elegant metaphor is not Ollman’s forte. At one point, Ollman calls Marxism the “science of menus” and compares something to the fact that one cannot order pizza in a Chinese restaurant. He’s in trouble if the reader is tempted to reach for Das Kapital for clarity. The typos are also a little frustrating, even if quotes from “Ernest Hemmingway” and “Eli Weisel” illuminate things nicely. The book is peppered with Ollman’s light wit, which falls squarely in the “friendly uncle” school of humor (unfortunately it’s the married and balding uncle, rather than unemployed and drunken uncle).
Soon enough, as you might suspect, Ollman brings exams and Marxism together, claiming as convincingly as anyone could that they exist only to promote the capitalist system. It’s too bad the reader has to wade through a hundred clich?d pages to get there.
Ollman is part of a waning generation of American leftist intellectuals who built their academic careers on Marxism and other brands of socialism as a political philosophy. After several decades of few accomplishments more notable than providing Ronald Reagan with a convenient target on which to build a political career, they have roundly failed to increase their actual relevance in any meaningful way over the past five decades.
Ollman, though, might just be the most enterprising of the lot. In the late ‘70s, Ollman created a board game, “Class Struggle,” unsuccessfully attempted to market it, and subsequently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times decrying the “big four” of the board game industry. As loath as he may be to admit it, Ollman has some history of enterprise.
So, How 2 Take an Exam might just be a pretty savvy marketing ploy by Ollman and his publisher, designed to sell Marxism to a generation of readers more interested in getting a top grade on the LSAT than fomenting international revolution. Hopefully for them, those doofuses at Barnes & Noble and Borders mistakenly shelve the book in the giant test prep section. Maybe then some misguided and easily influenced young student might pick it up. After all, these are sad times for Marxism, and sad times, it seems, call for sad solutions.
And if you want a dialectical materialist proof of Marxism’s decline, look at it this way: In 1917, Lenin arrived at Finland Station, in the 1950s, Che Guevara took to the Cuban hills, and at the dawn of the 21st century, Bertell Ollman wrote a test prep book. This probably isn’t the course of history old Karl was hoping for.
