[lbo-talk] Re: stupid americans?

snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Mon Sep 27 10:16:20 PDT 2004


At 11:39 AM 9/27/2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
>T Fast wrote:
>
>>What's true for a population need not be true for any single observation.
>>Maybe you are all quite smart but collectively very dumb (the fallacy of
>>composition works in both directions).
>
>I can accept this. I gotta say, though, that watching Americans denounce
>Americans as stupid and greedy has pretty much cured me of the practice.
>
>Doug

Yeah, but it's more important than this. If you want to increase your ranks, you need to ask why some are enlightened and why others aren't. If your position is that it's unanswerable and a mystery, then we really have very little to guide us.

If we believe that some folks are just born smarter, then this implies a certain set of political practices. Anything else--like trying to educate people who are never going to get it anyway--is a waste of time.

Is it rooted in social and political practice--in the conditions of one's labor? If it is, then that means you would engage in efforts most likely to advance your agenda and expand the ranks. Lenin surmised that the revolution had to be led by the vanguard b/c he mostly believed that manual laborers could never get beyond "trade union consciousness" because the conditions of their daily labor blocked their ability to become more radical.

Social and political theorists have wrestled with these issues for quite some time. You can see how it informs all kinds of political practice on the ground, today, even though many people don't have a clue _why_ they're doing what they do. What some have derisively called "third worldism" tends to have roots in a kind of identitarian political theory and identity politics that suggested that only the most oppressed could become the revolutionary subject of history. Give up on Detroit autoworkers, 'cause they're reactionary assholes who are just too identified with the U.S. elite to ever be on the right side of history. Whether people have ever read theory that pretty much states this, or simply feel it in their gut, doesn't matter. I think it's clear that there are folks here who've unabashedly expressed the view.

Sorry, must get back to cleaning up after hurricane. A tornado (AKA five teens) was in my house yesterday. :)

Kelley

"We're in a fucking stagmire."

--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'



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