[lbo-talk] Professor Lisa at Tortilla Flats

[Josh Narins]

> 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.

Zizek gets damned for being too theoritical
and Puppet Theatre for being too theatrical

Popular Ignorance Serves the Corporate CEOs!

Teach enough math and science, to a few, and the rest be damned.
What needs America to have more Lit majors to increase profits?
What about Art History majors?
Who educates Americans?
Certainly not the Great Disinformer-in-Chief.
Certainly not Clear Channel.
Certainly not Fox News.
Not CNN.

(I have an idea that I think Libertarians would appreciate, that
suggests that if the average wage of teachers is below the average wage,
then the society will necessarily descend, and that the sexist
relegation of women to teaching and nursing artificially boosted our
results for almost a couple centuries).

I don't educate 6,000,000,000 people, either.

It'd be a nice job, though.