Postmodernism: Materialist?--autodidactic sectarianism

[rdumain@igc.org]

I shall leave the little bitty mice to continue their gnawing criticism, as I round out my thoughts on this more fundamental problem of theory and practice that pervades these discussions.  I'm still in a hurry, which means my prose is going to be awkward, but let's get on with it.

The outsider, forced back upon the resources of autodidaxy, whether a solitary figure or member of some political grouplet, is inherently put into a difficult situation.  At worst, the defensiveness about one's position and isolation from the intellectual community has filled the intellectual graveyard with embittered crackpots.  At best, the situation is unfavorable becuase the lack both of opportunity and experience of intensive and laborious interaction with peers and disciplined development of ideas inderdict the possibility of concretizing and developing whatever general abstract insights the outsider may have accrued into a more elaborated and refined body of thought that can actually contribute productively to world knowledge.
Hence, it's not enough to brag about one's outsider status or greater proximity to the rough and tumble brutality of everyday experience which generally succeeds in stupefying the vast majority of people yoked to its regime.  The autodidact takes upon himself a greater and more arduous intellectual responsibility than anyone else in society, one much harder to fulfill, but still essential as none knows more intimately what is at stake in the struggle for the human mind.  To fulfill this responsibility, such a person must be on guard against his own provincialism as well as the better disguised provincialism of the bourgeois intellectual world.

The Marxist political party is not necessarily a better vehicle for self-development than the lone individual, as it rarely succeeds in accomplishing anything more than the reproduction of its own dogmatism.  I've seen these people at work teaching Marxist philosophy, and they are useless.  Often the materials they work with are useless.  Hence, Jim, the question is not whether millions of people schooled in dialectical materialism have been deluded, but whether they have learned to think at all beyond the obvious and formulaic.  To spit upon the discipline of thought is just another way of spitting on humanity, of just using people as cannon fodder in pursuit of political ambition instead of developing their capacities and their confidence in using and developing them to the fullest.  Socialist sects do not develop their people, they exploit theior alienation and turn them into small, cultist insects.  Instead of becoming universal human beings, they just learn how to be anot!
!
her sort of specialist, albeit a specialist in resentment and incompetence.

I've learned to disengage myself from intellectual necrophiles.  If your biggest worry is how to become an organic intellectual in America, you have already failed, because you've defined exactly the wrong problem for yourself.  I don't attempt to reform such people; I only want to clear them out of my path.

This question of the relation of people to the universe of knowledge and the division of labor has reached a critical stage, as has the destruction and degradation of culture and personality in the new dumbed-down millennium.  It's the question I'm pursuing on my new web site, which is still in a crude, fragemented, and embryonic stage.  But whoever is interested is certainly welcome to check out what's there at <http://www.home.thirdage.com/Education/ralphdavid/index.html>.