Thus, the answer to Marx's Theses on Feuerbach point is that in the main the educators in capitalism are educated, trained and controlled by the capitalists and their culture of wealth; and those educators must turn out a certain percentage of poor people, for capitalism must have a MASS reserve army of unemployed and poor. And some people must learn to be that way, thus they are enculturated in empoverishment.
Traditions or cultures of anti-intellectualism and know-nothingism arise early in American history. There was a literal Knownothings political party in the early 1800's. There is a tradition of social ostracism of academically "smart" students by average students within schools that is within this culture.
In school grades are on a curve. The curve does not reflect the natural range of academic potentials in the population but rather that there are only an elite minority of slots for higher education. Somebody has to fail because there are a limited number of slots in the culture of wealth. (After all part of the definition of being wealthy is having more money than most people AND HAVING POWER OVER MOST PEOPLE. There is no wealth without poverty by definition.) Anyway, there is tracking in the schools, such that many students are targetted for an empoverished and empoverishing education early on.
This culture of poverty has a dialectical twin: the culture of wealth. With capitalist property relations, this culture of wealth must enforce a culture of poverty on many masses of people for the culture of wealth to continue.
The culture of poverty theory is an empoverished philosophy without its complement the theory of the culture of wealth.
In other words, we need a historical materialist conception of the culture of poverty in its struggle with the culture of wealth.
Charles Brown
>>> Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> 07/14/99 06:33PM >>>
Wojtek,
I was not opposing culture of poverty theories, the many and contradictory variants of which span from Oscar Lewis's to Michael Buroway's contributions. Following Richard Lerner and Richard Lewontin, I was opposing the cultural determinism implicit in Harrison's Appalachia analysis--that is, the doctrine that our cultural heritage passed down by a process of unconscious acculturation is practically inescapable. This doctrine differs only in trivial mechanical detail from biological determinism, the doctrine that we cannot escape our genes. I wanted to suggest what this work had in common with the Bell Curve.
In short, what Harrison does not sufficiently recognize is that human culture is not autonomous but is in constant process of *historical development* by the action of individuals who are, in turn, formed by culture.
What I suggesting here is then better understood in terms of Adorno's critique of Spengler's fatalist conception of culture than in terms of the culture of poverty debates.
> But even more importantly, if you reject the view of
>culture as an inhibitor of progress - then all you are left with is
>sociobiology (or so-so-biology) in explaining social economic inequalities.
It is not a question of rejecting culture but critiquing its autonomisation such that it paradoxically becomes nothing but a variant of vulgar materialist doctrine, critiqued by Marx thusly:
"The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstance and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating."
yours, rakesh