Dennis Perrin:
> They're not so personal (believe me, I can get really personal, and this
> ain't nothin'), but my posts oftentimes are fueled by the anger and
> resentment I feel when I'm being talked down to, that my actual physical
> experience means nothing compared to what some grad student reads in a book
> or fantasizes about. Yoshie is a crass elitist, though she dresses it up in
> faux populist colors (and not very appealing ones, either -- tone deaf and
> color blind, what a combo). She yaks on and on about what working people
> should do, how they should feel, and so on. Most times I ignore it, but
> sometimes it rankles me. As insane as the old PLers were, at least they took
> blue collar jobs in an attempt to link theory to practice, and of course
> recruit a few saps along the way. When Yoshie starts cleaning toilets,
> sweeping stairs and shoveling gravel, then I'll pull back, even though her
> political views are vanguardist in spirit, and an ugly spirit it is.
It makes me feel like the faculty advisor to the freshman debating team -- the _high_school_ freshman debating team -- to say this, but attacking someone personally when their person is not at issue suggests that you can't deal with their ideas. It doesn't work rhetorically except when it's an appeal to some authority, like the prejudices of the majority, that is, it's a symbol of power; or it's terribly witty. But neither of these is operative here.
In any case, you've only deepened the mystery. First of all, _all_ leftists, at least American leftists, are elitists, in the sense that they think they know better than the great mass of America's good citizens how we all should live and what we should do. I certainly do, anyway. Beyond that, I don't see what blue-collar jobs are supposed to do for anyone. I've had quite a few of them, and the only one that was at all enlightening was the U.S. Army Infantry, where I was an NCO. (_There's_ some working-class cred for you!) That was because the guns and the power relations were right out in the open and rubbed in everyone's face every day. It was almost as instructive as a prison in that regard, and the conceptual basis of the deal actually got through to me after awhile, slow as I am.
But generally, as far as I'm concerned, work stinks. (Except, of course, when you're doing something you like or believe in, but I don't mean that kind of work.) It ought to be minimized, not glorified. I'd like to know why you think cleaning toilets as a profession is important to right thinking; in my experience it's pretty opaque. Just about all the people I have known who were involved in that sort of thing, including me, saw only a golden ladder in front of them, inviting them to climb up higher on the wonderful pyramid of Capital, away from the toilets and the other toilet-cleaners.
I hope this toilet & gravel stuff isn't one of those Chairman-Mao "send the pointy-headed intellectuals back to the farm" things?
-- Gordon