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Joseph Buttigieg immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel\u2019s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.<\/p>\n
He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles \u201cthat seek to discuss, elaborate, and\/or extend Marxian theory,\u201d and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.<\/p>\n
In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach of Human Rights Watch, Buttigieg, along with two other authors, refers to \u201cthe Marxist project to which we subscribe.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He also participated in the event.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism\u2019s narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cEquity, environmental consciousness, and racial justice are surely some of the ingredients of a healthy Marxism. Indeed, Marxism\u2019s greatest appeal \u2014 undiminished by the collapse of Communist edifices \u2014 is the imbalances produced by other sociopolitical governing structures,\u201d Buttigieg wrote.<\/p>\n
Pete Buttigieg, an only child, shared a close relationship with his father. In his memoir Shortest Way Home, Pete called his dad a \u201cman of the left, no easy thing on a campus-like Notre Dame\u2019s in the 1980s.\u201d<\/p>\n
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He wrote that while he did not understand his parents\u2019 political discussions as a young child, \u201cthe more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world\u2019s leading scholars of Gramsci.<\/p>\n
Gramsci thought cultural change was critical to dismantling capitalism. Nevertheless, although critical of certain aspects of Bolshevism, Gramsci endorsed Vladimir Lenin\u2019s \u201cmaximalist\u201d politics and identified within the Leninist faction of the Italian communists. He went to Moscow in 1922 as the official representative of the Italian Communist Party and returned home to lead the resistance against Italy\u2019s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, on the orders of Lenin, while his new wife and children stayed in the USSR.<\/p>\n