I'm a big fan of Russell Jacoby's thesis in THE LAST INTELLECTUALS
>that the opening of the universities to the Left was a largely bad thing,
>in
>that it took them off the street into the cloisters.
-I wasn't aware that the universities ever opened to the left. Maybe very -briefly in the early 1970s. Not before and not since.
Thee are plenty of lefties who went into academia, even today. Most of them, unlike you, just learn to speak in the useless jargon that keeps them insulated from reprisals and irrelevant to movement activists. I admit that I learned the leson early in my grad time -- luckily I had little intention in pursuing academia even then -- when despite the fact I was moving through the program faster than almost everyone in my cohort, I was told that my activist time was seen as a liability since it meant that I obviously wasn't spending enough time on my academic work. Now it was obvious that I was quite welcome in academia as long as my time was spent on properly academic projects, regardless of the politics contained abstractly there. They just had to keep abstract. Now this was an especially left department, Sociology at Berkeley, but I've known plenty of lefties around academia, some who even crank out useful work for activists on occasion, but it's hard for even them to do it systematically given the academic pressures.
>I'm not a big fan of Lenin but at least he understood the basic form of
>intellectual work activists need -- "What is to be Done." Most academic
>work addresses every issue other than that. They explain history, the
>criticize activist leadership. they question "dualities", but they rarely
>lay out step-by-step programs for activists to evaluate.
-This is important work, but it's not the work of an intellectual as I -understand the term. I don't mean to denigrate it, on the contrary, but -policy-wonking is precisely the purview of technical types who may not even -benefit in their activities from being intellectuals.
Policy wonkery is not what I mean. When action is abstracted from political analysis, isolated from other issues, and turned into a "good government" prescription, that's one thing. But what is most needed is the broadest view of analyzing the situation we face, explaining the weaknesses of opponents that can be exploited, and reviewing the battlefield and likely responses to action. That involves often quite abstract and even "European" styles at times, but the question is whether there is a payoff for action at the end.
The classic Marx statement on it all was "The point is not to understand he world but to change it."
-- Nathan Newman