Joshua Murray is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus on corporate elites, campaign finance, social movements, and class conflict. He is the author of Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete (with Michael Schwartz) published in 2019, as well as numerous scholarly articles published in academic journals including The American Journal of Sociology and Social Problems. He also authored commentaries published in the Washington Post, The Conversation, and other prominent outlets. Winner of the Jeffery Nordhaus Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, Joshua is described as a kind and caring teacher who excels in facilitating class debate and discussion.

1. I see you affiliate with the Marxist section of the ASA and that your paper on the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike received the American Sociological Association’s Marxist Sociology section award for best scholarly article. Do you still identify as a Marxist?

I’ve had an interesting journey. 

My PhD advisor was Michael Schwartz, as you know, and he’s a Marxist (specifically a Maoist). I was never an avowed Marxist or believer in Communism, but I was very friendly to them. I have always had (and still do) an interest and concern with concentrated political and economic power undermining Democracy. I cited Marx and Marxists, used Marxist concepts, and won a Marxist section paper award. I did the thing where I treated Marxist analysis of capitalism as separate from the political project of communism. I believed that the failures of communism in practice were separate from Marxist analysis. 

Then a few things started chipping away at my leftist views.

First, I had kids- a boy and a girl. I saw that boys and girls are extremely different even as babies. I saw the incredible influence of genetics, the way my daughter stands with her hands in her hips just like her granny. This chipped away at blank slate ideas I had accepted. 

Then Trump got elected in 2016 and I witnessed incredibly unfair media coverage, and colleagues and leftist friends reversing position on things based on Trump’s position. For decades leftists were against global free trade. Trump came out against global free trade agreements and all of the sudden my left leaning colleagues were all in favor of global free trade. This happened so often it created evidentiary space in my mind to question the claims of the left (which I had fallen into blindly accepting, while bending over backwards to question right wing claims). 

Then I took over as the Director of Graduate Studies for Vanderbilt Sociology in 2021.

I gave professionalization seminars to our grad students as part of my position. 

One seminar I gave was on Work-Life Balance. I argued that scholars who have an outside life to balance their work life out, are more productive and healthy. I gave examples of my family and children. Then I talked about the importance of saying no to things as a prerequisite to intentional use of time, which is necessary to have a proper work life balance. 

The students, mobilized by a radical Marxist student, went to my chair and complained that they felt unsafe because they felt I was advising them to get married and have kids, and that all my points were about agency and overlook power relations and structure. I won the argument with my chair and pointed out how ridiculous the complaints were (how would a focus on structural causes of work life imbalance help them in a professionalization seminar?). But, it struck me that the student had faithfully applied Marxist and standard leftist/Sociological thinking. If it led to such stupid complaints, perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with the ideas.

Then I got tapped to teach undergraduate theory. I decided because of these past experiences, that it was important to provide ideological balance and use it to teach students how to think, rather than what to think. I paired theorists that disagreed together: Marx with Friedman, Dubois with Washington, Piven with Parsons, etc. Then I led students through the theories in a way that we tried to identify first the causal models the theorists were laying out, and then identify the underlying assumptions of their theories based on the internal logic of the models. We never tried to say one theory was better than another, just thought about how we could empirically test these competing assumptions once they were identified.

Anyways, as part of teaching this I, for the first time really discovered the foundational assumptions of Marx’s analysis. It was immediately apparent that (1) I think those assumptions are wrong, and (2) if I assumed that the opposite of each assumptions was true and communism was put in place, the expected outcome would be exactly what happened historically. This convinced me that the political program of Marxism is not separate from the analysis, and the analysis is faulty. 

So, I no longer identify with Marxism, although I once did. I also believe that the core assumptions of Sociology are the same as the core assumptions of Marxism.