Berkeley hosts 'The Right to Be Lazy: Shifts in Marxist Thought' class for credit

The University of California, Berkeley is offering a course, titled, “The Right to be Lazy: Shifts in Marxist Thought.”

The fall 2019 course is part of UC Berkeley’s DeCal program, consisting of student-taught, but faculty-approved courses.

"Nobody can dispute the fact that if a DeCal class with a right-leaning curriculum was ever proposed, it would be promptly rejected"

“Marx’s ideas were taken up by revolutionaries around the globe from the anticolonial militants in Africa and Latin America to those blockading the streets of Paris in 1968 and Italy in the 1970s,” the course description reads. “We will find in each struggle a Marxism specific to its historical and geographic context, reflected in the various stages of capitalist development. By studying these struggles and the creative responses to conditions they faced, we will try to better understand what it means to be anticapitalist, what are the basic categories of capital, and questions of the revolutionary subject.”

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Campus Reform reached out to student instructors for comment but did not receive comment in time for publication.

"Each of us has the right to be lazy, but none of us has the right to the rewards of someone else’s hard work,” Capitalism.com founder and CEO Ryan Daniel Moran told Campus Reform. “Anticapitalist ideas are rooted in entitlement, which is one of the dangers of today’s society. I hope the students at Berkeley are taught the ineffectiveness of Marx’s ideas; if you want to create change, it starts with you."

Campus Reform also spoke with the Berkeley College Republicans about the offering.

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"We do not oppose teaching divergent subjects in DeCal classes at UC Berkeley,” the chapter said. “However, nobody can dispute the fact that if a DeCal class with a right-leaning curriculum was ever proposed, it would be promptly rejected. Colleges should be dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity and an important part of that is giving adequate space to conservative views, even if they are unpopular with the larger campus community."

UC-Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof previously commented to Campus Reform on the DeCal program, more generally, saying, "the campus administration has no connection to or control over these [course] offerings."Mogulof referred Campus Reform to the academic senate, which approves these courses. The academic senate has not returned Campus Reform's request for comment.

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