[lbo-talk] Professor Lisa at Tortilla Flats

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Doug:
> This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be honest, appealing
> - aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and a 
> radically egalitarian doctrine. Marx himself made few 
> compromises to appeal to a popular audience; even the 
> Manifesto requires the reading skills of a high-school 
> graduate (according to Microsoft Word's grammar checker, 
> which recommends documents aspire to the 7th or 8th grade 
> level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural expectations for 
> the working class - they wanted proletarians to assimilate 
> the best of bourgeois culture. In fact, raising the cultural 
> level of the working class seemed central to their 
> revolutionary project. That didn't last through the 1920s. 
> That's never been too big a part of the American left, has 
> it? My Pacifica colleagues mostly frown on anything that 
> smacks of elitism.

"Classical" Marxism had an unmistakable Aristotelian touch - the concept of
good society as one allowing the full actualization of human potential  -
hence its uplifting drift.  AFIK, the US left, by contrast, has an
unmistakable populist and anti-intellectual touch - that the people already
know the best (which they learned in the kindergarten, as the popular
leftist slogan goes) and a good society is one that re-connects the
pie-in-the-sky cultural elites with the masses - hence its downward drift,
especially in the realm of culture.

Wojtek