INTELLECTUALS, reason & al.

[Ralph Dumain]

As I said in my response to Broad, I've not had a chance to respond to the
flurry of recent posts.  At first I was unsure of what to say about Jim
Jaszewski's (I recognize this name from sonewhere!) initial intervention on
my behalf.  Although I was not acting as a spokesman for the activist
community, it seems Jim decided to make common cause with me precisely on
the point that there is a difference between writing about something from a
safe distance--in this case lumpen black bullshit--and acting as apologist
for said nonsense from a safe distance.  In this Jim is correct: for me it
is not an academic matter.  In fact, this business came up yesterday, less
than a day after my return to Washington.  I discuss this stuff on a regular
basis with black folks, non-intellectuals, who are of my generation and are
horrified by the ignorant and out-of-control behavior among the younger
generation, who have not learned any basic common sense of how to act.  I
have no problem expressing myself with complete frankness and they agree
completely.  DC is a pain in the ass: you get it from the white ruling class
and also from the black bourgeoisie and bureaucrats all the way down to the
black underclass.  Backassward southern Bible Belt land-filled swamp full of
dumbass tired old old stankin' steamin' shit.  The only people I can't talk
to about it are the white left and a few black academics of the younger
generation, the type of pathetic hypocrites who utter politically correct
foolishness about gender for show (which they don't bother to apply to their
own intimate relationships with women) and five minutes later force me to
listen to their niggaz-bitches-hoes rap shit on the stereo.

Now, on to Jim's latest post:

At 11:11 AM 7/29/97 -0400, Jim W. Jaszewski wrote:

>kenneth.mackendrick wrote:
>
>> Liberation theology, via Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Gustavo Gutierrez,
or >>Paulo Freire, argues that one must give theoretical and practice
privilege to >>the poor.

>I have always liked many elements of what Freire writes (the teachin'
>stuff, of course), but I have always considered that there is far too
>much 'eclecticism' going on here and elsewhere (a common vice of
>idealist thinkers) -- especially in Liberation Theology -- and not
>enough hard-nosed 'synthesis' of any useful elements into our common(?)
>marxist framework (all complications anticipated, hopefully!!)

I should reply to the relevant poster(s) directly, but let me just say I
think liberation theology is a dishonest crock, another Stalinist trick of
intellectuals.  I'll choke first before I grant any epistemological
privilege to illiterate peasants.  I used to live with a number of them in
the Adams-Morgan/Mt. Pleasant area, and watching them get piss drunk,
urinate in public, and harass any female that walks by, disinclines me to
grant them an epistemological license-to-kill.  What childish, dishonest
nonsense!

I think Freire is useless in the context of the urban USA.

Jim quotes somebody:

>>  Since "the poor" or "the working
>> class" are interpreted to have greater insight into human suffering -
they >>are epistemologically given superior status in terms of decision
making and
>>policy generation.  So the rational conclusion, since poverty becomes a
>> position of privilege, is that the system which generates poverty MUST be
>>maintained.  Now 
>> this is not what Gutierrez and friends are fighting for - but theoretically
>>they have
>> written a powerful critique of one ideology and simply replaced it with
>>another (ideology in the marxian sense).

Right on!  Jim, why do you object to this?

Retunring to JIm's own thoughts:

> Asking/demanding that intellectuals work CLOSELY with the
>people they are SUPPOSED to be working FOR does *NOT* imply ANY
>assumption that: non-intellectuals -- workers -- have any 'greater
>insight' than intellectuals. It's just that they *DO HAVE insights* of
>sorts the intellectuals are SUPPOSED to take into account, but often
>don't -- as often as not a result of not being in CONSTANT contact with
>these people, even unto a daily basis 

Up to this point JIm and I seem to be talking about the same thing.

>(Party work comes to mind...) The
>other side of this coin is that it is the intellectuals' _JOB_ to
>QUICKLY and SUCCINCTLY *PASS ON* to the workers the insights and
>information they have acquired as a result of this particular division
>of labor -- thus helping their more manually-laboring comrades to rise
>above their present state of 'common sense' and 'home-spun wisdom', and
>thus achieve a state of marxist nirvana along with their more cerebral
>comrades...    ;>

Aside from the business about party work, which I would not want to impose
on anyone not cut out to do this sort of thing, I think I agree with Jim
about this as a general ideal.  In practice, it is very difficult to pass
along said insights and information.  THank goodness I have not had to do
manual wage labor for more than two decades.  When I did, I would have
risked life and limb had I dared to open my mouth.  The essential point is
valid, that the isolation of the thinker from the toiler ultimately cripples
both.

>Seems like a perfectly dialectical relationship to me. Are we not
>supposed to have a Better Thing than what the bourgeoisie have going??
>We sure don't now! Bourgeois (i.e.: Actually Existing) Academe is
>TERMINALLY one-way and hierarchical, and is NOT THE MODEL ANY MARXIST
>SCHOLAR SHOULD BE FOLLOWING. PERIOD. This 'discussion' proves that to
>me. I do not see that many academics trying very hard to reach those who
>do not speak the 'same vocabulary'. I see much more the resentment of
>some unwanted intrusion,

Excellent point.

>What's so hard to understand here?? Maybe I took another big chance,
>jumping into a discussion I had not followed -- but it is INDEED clear
>(to me anyway) that the 'intellectual worker' who called Dumain onto the
>carpet simply did _not_ understand what Dumain was saying. It is that
>simple. Being an 'intellectual worker', he *needs* to show that he
>understands what he replying to, more so than a non-academic such as
>Dumain needs to.

Hence the harshness of my own responses to professaionlly trained yet
egregiously inattentive readers!

>Perhaps those who brought this Frankfurt School List into being and
>nothingness had the (perhaps unconscious) intention of making it into,
>and keeping it, an 'academics-only' backchannel

Though this not may be the concsious intention, I have found that the
Frankfurt School is a refuge for self-doubting liberals whose main goal is
to wallow in their own helplessness and alienation, but I have learned not
to blame the FRankfurters themselves for this.  Except that I refuse to
waste my time with Habermas, and I have even less trcuk with his followers.
Aginast my own earlier prejudices, I have learned a great deal of respect
for Adorno as a thinker, as an intellectual not afraid to be an
intellectual, in spite of his own anti-political stance.  The point is to
use these people's ideas and find a way of translating them into
contemporary conditions.  This is what I meant, Ken, in referrrgin to epople
who know where they are going and what they are trying to accomplish.  I
find it interesting that virtually all the people I know who are studying
Hegel, Adorno, etc., with the aim of putting these ideas to some use, beyond
the mere reproduction of scholarly accuracy, are West Indians and Africans!
Perhaps these people, unlike Euporeans and white Americans, have a future or
at least are compelled to strive for a future.

> -- but this then begs
>the bigger question: SHOULD 'marxist' intellectuals be shutting
>themselves AND their research off from their prole-comrades simply
>because this is the usual practice in BOURGEOIS Academe?? Are we not
>trying to create a BETTER way of doing things?? Something with a
>democratic content a quantum leap above that already existing??

Excellent point.  First step: learn how to listen.  It is shocking:
academics won't listen, they won't!

>That many of the intellectual workers writing in these Lists are
>CLEARLY *completely* unconnected to ANY organization of the working
>class is proof enough to me that it is THEY who have MUCH to answer for

I don't think they have to answer for lack of connectin to working class
_organizations_, at least not any more than workers have to answer for
failing to organize themsleves.  But intellectuals do have to answer for
their cavalier approach to their own expertise.  If they really believed in
the life of the mind, as I do as a person trapped in mindlessness, they
would feel to the bone what is at stake in the struggle for the human mind.
William Blake understood this.  Richard Wright understood it.  Young grad
students are being brainwashed into worshipping ignorance and attacking the
Enlightenment, and so are being converted into useless people.

>One reason I never finished a degree. But let me state CLEARLY here
>that I am not against university education -- I want it for *EVERYBODY*,
>I want it *FREE* and I want it ** N O W !! **     :>

Amen!