>Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>>I'll be interested in seeing the piece, but where are the intellectuals
>>embedded in the movement? Why aren't they there asking those questions in an
>>organic way and promoting a discussion on such matters in a manner that
>>addresses the needs of those activists?
>
>DH:
>As you'll see in the piece, we've all tried that, and gotten shot
>down. One incident in my personal experience. I was on a panel with
>an activist lawyer who was touting the importance of encouraging
>small business development in NYC. When I pointed out, as I often do,
>that small businesses pay less, offer fewer fringe benefits, are more
>dangerous places to work, and are harder to organize than large
>businesses, this was dismissed as "the paralysis of analysis." The
>point, you see, is to do, not to think.
I'll take a look at the article. In the above example the lawyer is baiting you for having an analysis at all when he or she really just has an analysis that conflicts with yours. The only reason it plays, of course, is that there IS a lot of movement anti-intellectualism. And truly it exists, as an activist, I'll fess up, I have a strain of it. (But is that just a reflection of general U.S. anti-intellectualism?)
What causes it? I'm in a southern town with a big public university, the profs and grad assistants that speak up don't get contracts, don't get tenure, or if tenured are driven out. If you support activist students, you get attacked for unprofessionalism (meaning, have you thought about changing your profession?). If you use a Marxist critique, it better be about literature or culture. This means that (employed) professors sound pretty damn obscure. We had an "anti-war" panel here a few months after 9-11 with various profs, and no one could say a clear sentence, not because they can't communicate, but out of fear. Activists listen to this and it's not clarifying, and their reaction is, 'study, bah, what we need is action.'
Don't even get me started on the corporate foundation-funded liberal thinktanks. Talk about giving analysis a bad name. And these same foundations give grants only for action action action when they fund 'grassroots' groups, completing the break. Union-funded thinktanking is better, it being dues money and all. Contrast the Green Party program criticized earlier with the Labor Party program (http://www.thelaborparty.org) and you'll see what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, I'm all for all of us being 'intellectuals' or better yet, theorists. And in feminism, at least, we do analyze our experiences and build our theory based on that. But I'd define intellectual for the moment as someone who gets paid to study, since in my experience, when you're leading in a movement--day to day operations and organizing--the requirements and deadlines of that work shove study to the back burner and sometimes right off the stove.
Jenny Brown