Raise High the Bolshevik Dildo

How far has academia degenerated into Left-liberal indoctrination? The once-inspiring Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provides a case study. MIT has spawned 87 Nobel Prize winners, according to its provost.[1] They include transistor-inventor Bill Shockley (1956), who kick-started Silicon Valley. Other MIT giants include physicists Richard Feynman (1965) and Hans Bethe (1967).

Today MIT, like UCal’s Berkeley campus, is  just another hotbed of liberal  groupthink and intolerance, as the Left completes in long march through academia.

MIT Press a month ago published “Communism for Kids”, a 112-page historico-literary travesty by a person MIT describes as a scholar, Ms Bini Adamczak, 37. She “works” in junk sociology and queer-sexuality theory in Berlin. Her book is a call to arms to kids to bring back Communism, in various idealistic guises of Adamczak’s own invention. No fringe effort, the book is well-ranked on Amazon and a hot seller to librarians.[2]

I predict that our ABC will shortly swoop on Adamczak and give her rostrums galore to preach Communist idealism to Australian kids, parents and superannuated fellow-travellers. She’s tailor made as a Q&A platformer, surpassing even feminist-Muslim Yassmin Abdel-Magied.[3] Michelle Guthrie, have I earned a spotter’s fee?

MIT Press has form.[4] It remains proud of its publication in 2009 of a theft, sabotage and assassination manual called The Coming Insurrection, by an anonymous French anarcho-Left syndicate of graduates calling for “the annihilation of police forces”. Some months earlier, most of the syndicate, now known as the Tarnac 9, had been arrested by French  police, using helicopters and dogs, on charges of having sabotaged electric cables on a high-speed TGV line, disabling 160 trains.[5]

MIT describes its  author of Communism for Kids as a

social theorist and artist who “writes on the past future of revolutions”.

No, I don’t know what that means either. But wait, there’s more. As she puts it in the  book,

“The hope is that the absurdity and unnecessary brutality of capitalist society will leap out to the people of future generations, the same way that the binary gender system or flatness of the earth seems crazy to us today.”

In another must-read essay, she claims to have invented a new sexual word “circlusion” whose meaning she illustrates with the phrase, “Her dick is being circluded.” As she puts it, “O workers of the anus and the mouth, of the vagina and the hand, I say to you: be aufdringlich! [pushy].”[6] The full quote is reproduced in the footnotes below, but the following gush of po-mo prose is worth mentioning in smaller extract as both an indication of Adamczak’s mental mettle and how low MIT has fallen in lending its imprimatur to someone who produces these remarkable insights

Practically everybody has an anus, but somebody who uses theirs sexually – in conjunction with a dildo, penis or hand – becomes a bottom, a sub, somebody passive. Almost everybody can afford a strap-on or a dildo, but a person who uses one sexually, as a rule, counts as a top or a dom – as active… It’s as if making use of these parts would have disempowering effects. Maybe not if they were confronted by a tongue, but definitely so if met with a dildo…

The internet is strangely blank about Adamczak’s personal and career history,[7] but I’d bet my house that she’s never been off the taxpayers’ teat. Her self-description includes,

“Bini Adamczak works (preferably not too much) as an author, performer and visual artist. Like many girls in her position, she dreams about doing something ‘real’ or ‘with her hands’ – for example, to make a revolution.”

Adamczak has no problem with doing away with capitalists, Lenin-fashion. Her book says, “The overcoming of capitalism occurs through juridicial measures and state expropriation of the capitalist class, whereby the nonproductive elements of society are removed and all human beings become workers.” Note that she exempts herself from excessive toil – see para above.

She revels in her own superiority, despising  the “petty bourgeois idea of an integrated working class pacified with homes, televisions and cars…”

The book’s co-translator is Sophie Lewis of Manchester University, whose by-line says she’s “a queer communist and sometimes politics teacher.” Lucky Manchester students! Lewis says finding a publisher in English involved more than three years and 20 rejections, until MIT Press — presumably the bottom-of-the-barrel publisher — came to the rescue with its “beautiful little red and white edition”.

Keith Windschuttle: “You can see the future prospects for the study of Western civilisation at the University of Sydney in the calibre and interests of its rising staff members.”

MIT’s Marc Lowenthal, the acquiring editor  of  Communism for Kids , thinks it hypocritical to criticise Communism without also condemning capitalism “which has brought about colonialism, imperialism, endless wars, and even fascism and national socialism.” He adds, helpfully, “I don’t personally identify as a communist.” MIT Press,  he says, would certainly not publish a book called “Fascism for Kids”, and the interviewer forgot to ask if MIT Press would do a book on Jihad for Kids. As if.

Lowenthal, an anti-Trumper, agrees Stalinism was a horror. He continues,

“But to describe communism as a ‘murderous philosophy’ is simply ignorant, and to then link it to an actual murderous philosophy like fascism is irresponsible.” (My emphasis).

He professes to be amused that people would think an MIT book titled Communism for Kids would be targeted at kids. Even the cutesy drawings are more about feminist gender-bending than kid-fodder,  he says.

This defence tops out my BS-meter. The first two-thirds of the slim volume is written in infantile prose akin to fairy tales, laying out Adamczak’s child-friendly versions of a caring Communist state. As MIT’s gorge-rising blurb says, her tale is “accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening… It all unfolds like a story, with jealous princesses, fancy swords, displaced peasants, mean bosses, and tired workers – not to mention a Ouija board, a talking chair, and a big pot called ‘the state.’ ”

Actually, she twice refers not to a pot but to a “potty”, apt in regard to both insanity and faeces.

For the book’s final third, Adamczak  plunges into tortuous sociological jargon about Communism’s future triumph over immiserating capitalism.

Lowenthal is able to cite her couple of milk-and-water references to Communism’s past failure. But  another book quote supposed to get her off the hook, actually puts her on the hook: “To equate Stalinism and communism is wrong, and just a way of shutting down any radical critique of capitalism.”

I waded through the 110 pages, on Quadrant readers’ behalf, marveling that any tract could be so ignorant and poorly written. Adamczak defines Communism as the system that gets rid of “all the evils people suffer today in our society under capitalism”… Under capitalism, “we have to make things – guns, for example – whether we think they’re stupid or not”.

In her idiotic model of a capitalist economy, all output is from factories, which she simplifies as making  two items – steam irons and (wait for it!) pistols. She has steam irons being made from sheet metal and (wait for it!) nails. In one of her scenarios, those who forge nails into steam irons are rewarded with movie tickets. Some workers become “hungry as hell” and are “trying to turn their irons into a stew, but that’s proving pretty pointless.”

Another of her  versions of Communism[8] involves worker-owned factories where “every morning, the people sit down together in a big circle and discuss how they want to work that day. Each person can choose what they want to do, and everyone is allowed to do everything, except there are no boss persons any more…” The autonomous workers “become much, much smarter”, unlike Adamczak.

The sales revenue goes “into a little potty” to be shared equally among the workers. If there’s not enough money, some workers mooch off to a job at the adjacent pistol factory. I have to keep pinching myself that this tripe bears the imprimatur of MIT Press.

In another Adamczak scenario, the steam iron and pistol factories become wholly automated.

“The people shout, ‘Our whole lives, we’ve been workers. From now on, we’re pleasure seekers!’ Everyone feels rich…When they open their mouths, grape juice pours directly onto their tongues, and roasted pigeons made of tofu fall from the sky…They (the workers) are almost as dumb now as they were before, under capitalism. They all grab hammers and smash everything to little pieces…”

Thereafter they pick wild berries to fend off starvation.

The purported climax of her tale has her doll-like gender-bent cartoon figures coming to life and yelling, “Stop telling our story! We decide what happens next. Because this is our story now, and we’re making history ourselves.” Yeah right, it all makes sense, not.

There follows her score of pages of pseudo-philosophical ranting, e.g.

“If communist criticism aspires to move beyond its habit of bitter negation, then it needs to add a blueprint of desire to its toolbox of analytic scalpels and rhetorical dynamite. It needs to generate desire – communist desire.” 

Her conclusion, such as it is:

“The most effective protection against the return of fascism is not to preserve the world it ostensibly fights, but to create a different [i.e. communist] world.”

One commenter on the Amazon book site writes,

“I grew up in the communism (sic) and believe me, the idea of communism will never work. This idea is based on mass murder. My family didn’t do anything against regime, and this is why they was not killed, just imprisoned and abused every day. The police break into our home every week and made a mess and break our stuff – just for fun. And this is communism.”

The above sounds authentic, but may or may not be true. Another jokes: “Will sell like hotcakes in Venezuela. They need toilet paper.” And one more commenter:

“Really diminishes the efforts of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro. But hey everybody! Let’s give it one more shot; probably won’t devolve into a murderous tyranny this time!”

Tony Thomas’ book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here.