Jack Crow’s post, “abandoning the past sometimes allows you to see better the present…” starts off well, but dissolves into a familiar prolier-than-thou appeal to drop “our” preconvictions about revolutions and who should lead them:
The working class, the colonized, the oppressed, the alienated and the poor don’t need theories conjured up in academic discussions, in the coffee houses which line the well paved streets of upper class neighborhoods. They don’t need special vocabularies and essays on superstructure, intersectionality and sociocultural meta-meta critique.
If there’s any socialist cliche that needs abandoning it’s the supposed contradiction between the educated ivory tower intellectual and the oppressed working classes. It’s the leftwing version of the “salt of the earth, white working class man telling it like it is”: only evoked to push through the writer’s own prejudices. Crow wants to have his cake and eat it too, by both putting himself above the “The working class, the colonized, the oppressed, the alienated and the poor” and telling us that he knows what they want.
This sort of rhetorical trick presupposes both that intellectuals cannot be part of the working classes and that the working classes cannot do theory, cannot be intellectuals themselves. This sort of distinction might have made some sense in the nineteenth century, but in today’s world most of us “intellectuals” are just as much wage slaves as your average factory workers are.
Jack Crow very much has a point that reifying dead, white Marxists is counterproductive when it comes to understanding why the Egyptian revolution is happening now, that even Marx himself can be wrong or outdated and that his works at best hands us a tool to help understand the world, not a prefabricated solution. A pity he falls into the same outdated cliches himself at the end of his post.
W.Kasper
February 21, 2011 at 6:35 pmI think you’re being unfair here. I don’t thinks he’s saying that intellectuals can’t be part of the working class (as agency, as revolutionary ‘subject’), so much as they’re an ineffective substitute for it. He’s made points elsewhere that professionalised ‘leftism’ (tenure, media careers etc) has its own inherent compromises. I agree there’s no clear dividing line on who can be ‘intellectual’, but a factory worker doesn’t have access to newspaper columns, publishing houses, BBC interviews etc. It’s not that HE knows what they want, as much as THEY know what they want; and professional intellectuals may not be as necessary to mobilising this ‘consciousness’ as they think they are. Accusations of “prolier than thou” are somewhat cliched, no? Especially in defending theory over experience.
Jack Crow
February 24, 2011 at 11:41 pmI think perhaps you didn’t read what I wrote. I’m okay with that. We’re all human.
I’m not the self-appointed voice of the working class. I’m just a guy who thinks academics don’t speak in ordinary language and that it’s ordinary language, not coded cultural studies speak and professional jargon, which most people use. The folks who specialize in Marxism or syndicalism or whatever aren’t the people who make revolutions…
…Wayne probably has written a defense better than I have. I’m not a fan of “consciousness raising” exercises. People know their material interests. They don’t need professional leftists to tell them what they are.
As for wanting my cake and eating it too – what’s the point of cake if you cannot put it in your mouth, chew it up and swallow it down into your belly?
Martin Wisse
February 26, 2011 at 10:39 amFair enough. I was probably much too uncharitable to your post; as said, I agreed with about ninety percent of it anyway, just got annoyed at the quoted bit above.
CF Oxtrot
February 27, 2011 at 10:42 amAs someone who’s been reading Jack for a pretty long time, I’d say you’re misread his post for the purpose of making a point. The point you make is pretty good, but the example you chose is bad.
If your picture to the upper right is accurate, you’re a white guy too, so that seems to smack of hypocrisy. Though I’m sure that’s not your gig, hypocrisy.
Martin Wisse
February 28, 2011 at 5:54 amThe first I’ll accept, but the hypocrisy you’ll have to explain.