Chris Hartman writes:
>> Now that I think about it, your classroom experiences with the "Greed
is Good" phrase describe my attempts to talk economics with people as
well. Were you attempting to politicize your students, and if so, how did
you deal with this problem?<<
Actually, no. Both my political theory and my political experience dictate that radicalization independently of ongoing political activity in some sort of mass struggle simply doesn't work. Hence I have always thought of myself as a "radical who earns a living by teaching" (on the model of a radical who works in a factory or a radical who flips burgers for a radical who etc) rather than as a "radical teacher."
BUT NUMER ONE, two points: (1) every worker under the capitalist system has a (usually unacknowledged and ineffectual) right to make his/her job as pleasant (or at least less unpleasant) as possible; (2) I assume the word "professor" means "he/she who professes the truth.
Since the life of the working class *is* "the truth," and since it is more fun to teach literature as a social activity than to emulate Cleanth Brooks (which is the core skill that my grad school education provided) my teaching would "look like" an attempt to teach marxism. But unless (as did every so often happen) students came to my office specifically to talk politics, I never hallucinated myself into believing that the work of individual teachers in the classroom was of any political importance.
Theory and propaganda (2d international/Lenin definition) simply do not make recruits to political activity. Political activity opens people up to theory and propaganda.
BUT NUMBER TWO: Though classroom practice cannot have a significant impact on the politics of the students, *for the teacher* classroom practice may help him/her (the teacher) to a more profound understanding of bourgeois ideology as embodied in the working class itself and on the agitational style which can begin to break through that ideology. For nearly 30 years my reading of the press as well as of radical literature was always with part of my mind focused on the question, "How could this be used in the classroom?" That actually became both a rehearsal for and the practice of responding to the flood of information (whether in the WSJ or lbo-talk) in terms of how it would fit into daily political practice.
In my teaching practice there was one exception to this practice of the radical with a teaching job rather than radical teacher; in teaching my favorite book, Plato's *Republic* (Cornford translation) in a class misnamed (over my objections) world literature, I would every two or three days spend a minute or two making an announcement roughly as follows: IF any of you ever find yourself in an anti-boss, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, etc. struggle, THEN you might reasonably remember the *Republic* as embodying the world view of THE ENEMY. In the early 70s before the political climate changed so deeply, this slogan of "Know your enemy by reading *The Republic*" did click as it were with a sprinkling of black students and women. Whether any of them held on to it later I do not know.
Carrol