On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 10:59:34 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes:
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>The problem or puzzle that this whole issue is trying to get around is
>the gap in consciousness of the working class that is the result of
>the ancient antagonism between mental and physical labor must not be
>allowed to prevent the working class from carrying out its historic
>mission. So, there has to be an ongoing part of the revolutionary
>process that makes up for this gap, a rapid transfer of the important
>elements of consciousness that communist intellectuals such as Marx
>and Engels became conscious of first because they are in the
>intellectual section of the division of labor to masses of people. The
>working class must be made class and socialist conscious. The idea is
>not a permanent petit bourgeois composition to the party. Actually
>carrying this out in fact is frought with all the difficulties that
>subsequent history has demonstrated and all that one might expect from
>any trial and error process, including enormous failure, as has been
>reached at this point in the strug!
>gle for this.
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>Lenin never promised you a rose garden.
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>this would be to render null and void, as
>lenin did, the insistence that only the working class can emancipate
>themselves. and, nor do they say that the communists are the
>leadership
>of the class as a whole, they say they are a "section which pushes
>forward all others", and the difference in the practical implications
>of
>the two can be, and has been, immense.
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>Charles: If the class has leaders at all, would they be leaders of
>"part of the class" ? Of course , leaders of the class means leaders
>of the class as a whole. Otherwise you invite a disunity that is
>exactly the key to the tiny elite of the ruling class continuing to
>rule over the working class: divide and rule.
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>You don't think the class should have leaders, petit bourgeois
>intellectuals or otherwise.
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>you accused me of slandering vlad when i wrote of his theory of the
>party. here's the citation again: "The history of all countries shows
>that the working class, *exclusively by its own effort* is able to
>develop *only* trade-union consciousness... The Theory of Socialism,
>however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic
>theories
>elaborated by *educated representatives of the propertied classes, by
>intellectuals*... in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social
>Democracy arose *altogether independently* of the spontaneous growth
>of
>the working class movement; it arose as a *natural and inevitable
>outcome of the development of thought* amongst the revolutionary
>socialist intelligentsia" (my emphases).
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>Charles: So what ? The passage you quote does not support your
>characterizations of Lenin in your previous posts. You have not
>refuted the idea that full socialist consciousness cannot be
>spontaneously developed by the working class without it being brought
>to the working class by intellectuals such as Marx, Engels and Lenin.
>Seems to me that Lenin did a good job of that. Marx and Engels did not
>do a better job of that than Lenin, as your whole argument implies
>when you claim Marx and Engels had a different, better, more
>democratic, non-intellectual theory of the Party than Lenin. I say
>Lenin followed Marx and Engels teachings on the Party, a locus of
>interaction between intellectuals and workers, and creatively
>developed them (the opposite of a dogmatic approach) ,and was more
>successful than they in making masses of workers working class and
>socialist conscious, not only in Russia, but all around the world.
>Given this, your whole rap about Lenin having an elitist version and!
> practice of the Party is slanderous.
>
The issue of bringing together intellectuals and workers in the revolutionary movement was also addressed by Gramsci with his proposals for creating what he called organic intellectuals within the working class. In that way he thought that the politically debilitating effects (for the working class) due to the ancient antagonism between mental and physical labor could be overcome or at least alleviated. Organic intellectuals were to be distinguished from what he called the traditional intellectuals who tend to regard themselves as constituting a separate class - thus manifesting an unreal detachment that is manifested in idealist philosophy. Organic intellectuals on the contrary see themselves as the thinking part
of the class from which they come from. Any progressive social class requires organic intellectuals for organizing a new social order. Thus Gramsci regarded the 18th century philosophes as constituting the organic intellectuals of the rising bourgeoisie. In his view if the proletariat was to seize political power and create a new social order it would likewise require its own organic intellectuals. And Gramsci saw the creation and nurturing of such a stratum a primary objective of the workers movement. Gramsci defined the term intellectual very widely so as to encompass not just mere talkers or scribblers but to include all those who have "organizational function in the wide sense. . ."
Therefore, it seems apparent that for Gramsci it was not sufficient that intellectuals like Marx or Kautsky or Lenin bring a socialist consciousness to the working class. Such a consciousness could not be expected to take root within the working class without the development or organic intellectuals within the working class.
Jim F.
>Charles Brown
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