>Actually it's not at stake. I've seen talented people brought
>out of the underclass since I was old enough to know what was
>going on. Each time, everyone was astounded. The bureaucrats
>and professors patted themselves on the back, and the saved
>were then given jobs like real people, often displacing other
>slightly less marginal types, and 90 or 95 or 99 percent of
>the communities they came from were ignored and forgotten. Or
>am I wrong? Are the ghettoes and trailer parks seething with
>the arts and letters after all these years?
>
>Gordon wrote:
>>> Whatever the poor were given, it was not autonomy.
>
>Yoshie Furuhashi:
>> What is your idea of "autonomy" if it can be "given" to the poor?
>
>When Castro took over Cuba, I've been told, most of the
>population couldn't read. So he started a literacy program,
>but it wasn't just professional teachers and dumb students
>haled in out of the cane fields. One of the principles was
>"each one, teach another". So the program was self-sustaining.
>Whatever Castro's faults and errors may have been, in this
>case he was imparting a little autonomy to the folk, instead
>of handing them the enthusiast of slavery Aristotle excusing
>the slavemaster Tom Jefferson over the centuries. In effect,
>he was giving them back what they would have had if it hadn't
>been robbed from them.
>
>> >Where's the revolution?
>
>> Why expect a revolution at the end of a course in the introduction to
>> the humanities?
>
>The fact of the poor, the fact of class and class war, cry
>out for revolution, do they not? What kind of humanities don't
>respond to it?
Reading books in itself doesn't make a revolution happen, but _not_ reading books doesn't make it happen _either_. As for the facts of poverty, class, & class war, facts don't speak for themselves -- hence the need for theory, more specifically Marxism.
Knowledge (which is impotent in itself) _becomes_ a weapon in the hands of organizers in political struggles. I thought that John Lacny's post made that clear to everyone (who read it).
Yoshie