One of the defining characteristics of cults is their insistence that they - and only they - have access to some Great Truth.
Sometimes they differentiate themselves from the outside world by making the Truth a secret - forbidding their members to tell outsiders about it. The cult of Pythagoras supposedly did this with the irrational value of Pi, though in their case it was a Truth they feared as well as revered. In this case the Truth was also true, though that isn't the important thing historically.
The Great Truth is of course usually a falsehood, and not actually the secret the cult tell themselves is it. The notions from scientology of Xenu and thetans are obviously not factual, and are common knowledge. Only members have to pay to be told.
There's another possibility: that the Great Truth is indeed true, but a commonplace triviality, dressed up in obscuring new words and the constantly repeated insistence that outsiders can't see it, or refuse to see it. Indeed, they claim the political structure of the world outside the cult is designed to obscure it.
Alfred Lawson dressed up the easier notions of relativity - the relation between motion and frame of reference - as "zig-zag and swirl". He also wrote impenetrable books on how "scientists" were too stupid to understand "his" insight into how things move.
Marxists have the same attitude.
In an article called On Teaching Marxism, Bertell Ollman writes:
"The dialectic is the only adequate means of thinking (and therefore, too, of examining and presenting) the changes and interactions that make up so large a part of the real world."
A few paragraphs later:
"Unlike bourgeois social scientists, who try to relate and put into motion what they conceive of as logically independent and essentially static factors, Marx assumes movement and interconnectedness and sets out to examine why some social forms appear to be fixed and independent."
The same tired old strawman - "we have the special knowledge, no one else does, and it consists in recognising something screamingly obvious, which no one else can see". Ollman paints mainstream academia as incapable of comprehending that different disciplines overlap because the distinctions between them are matters of convenience, not eternally fixed and inevitable.
Everyone knows that chemistry and biology blur into each other, with organic chemistry, molecular biology, enzymology and other subfields differentiating the overlap - and obviously overlapping with each other also. No one would deny that some philosophical works tend to be read as works of literature (eg. Hobbs' Leviathan, Rousseau's Confessions), and vice versa (eg. Alice in Wonderland, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence).
Leviathan is also part of political science, and Alice in Wonderland is used by linguists - who would be very surprised to be informed otherwise by a marxist colleague.
If marxist academics can't combat the mainstream without caricaturing it, then the problem is either in academia, or marxism.
Darwinism, for instance, is the only theory of its kind to have any credibility, not just because of the mountain of evidence, but because almost every single attack on Darwinism is a strawman - failing to get to grips with the real theory. If marxists can produce nothing but strawmen, then they should join the creationists and inventors of perpetual motion machines.
Note that I say "marxists", not "marxism". I'm sure marxists can produce rigorous, engaged critiques of every aspect of bourgeois society. Occasionally they do so, but too few, and too rarely.
When a cult has a secret Great Truth, the content of the secret is irrelevant. It doesn't affect the running of the cult - though it's probably used to justify the way the cult is run. It doesn't serve to enlighten members, though it does make them feel enlightened.
It's there to be the thing which marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders - cult members and the enemies outside the group. Marxism has long become too much like a cult.
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