Theory Camp versus Commie Camp

What can be learned about the trajectory of the cultural turn in Marxism in the United States by analyzing one form that marshaled its arrival-the summer camp?To answer this question, I focus on summer gatherings within and beyond the academy that competed to define Marxist culture and politics in the United States.Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the summer camp and the conference were used by party communists and socialists and academic Marxists for the creation of a political culture and for professional training, while liberal and conservative groups used the same kinds of gatherings seeking to shore up US cultural identification.Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, a conference that took place in Illinois in 1983, was situated at a crossroads between that of the theory camp and that of the party-or union-affiliated camp.The institutional form of this gathering is a watershed for American cultural studies because while its main project was to establish a professional discourse, albeit one that was politically interested (the goal of the theory camp), it persuaded many of its participants-some of whom colloquially and, perhaps, snidely referred to the event as "commie camp"-that it sought to build a political culture (the goal of the party-or union-affiliated camp).The position of the 1983 conference between these two summerlearning models reveals a transposition of strategies adopted by some academic Marxists in their pursuit of cultural study and strategies in pursuit of the establishment of a political culture by the wider American left.These transpositions are familiar now because, as in the 1980s, the left-academic and otherwise-seeks to establish its priorities amid interlocking forms of backlash from capital and the state at large and, more immediately, from trustees, university