Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> If the choice is between a bright worker and a stupid scholar, of
> course, I'd rather listen to the bright worker than the stupid
> scholar, but what if the choice is a bright worker and a bright
> scholar? In that case, one doesn't assume that the bright worker is
> more correct on account of his (or her, but too often his) being a
> worker or that the bright scholar is, on account of his (or her, but
> too often his) being a scholar. We should listen to both and evaluate
> ideas on their merits. In addition, workers should acquire more
> formal education, and scholars and workers should share their
> respective knowledge with each other.
Observations:
1. Probably we're working with too narrow a definition of "intellectul"; what the term covers needs more discussion. Probably the term should cover 25% at least of the u.s working class.
2. Something like "leftist self-hate" is at work. As soon as someone becomes a self-conscious leftist he/she immediately counts him/herself out of the world. Carl Oglesby noted long ago that a core premise of red-baiting was that wherever you find a communist, he/she is from somewhere else: always outsiders. And reds and other leftists incorporate this into their own consciousness. Hence endless anxiety of people who are and always were people of how they can unite with the people that they are already united with.
3. Intellectual is not a class term nor is it anevaluative term. A bad intellectual or an ignorant intellectual or an illiterate intellectual is still an intellectual. (Note: I haven't defined the term but am merely pointing out the need to, and that it isn't simple.) There really have been illiterate intellectuals.
4. I'm not sure how useful Gramsci is in discussing working-class intellectuals in the u.s. with its huge working class (probably about 85% of the population) -- which is also a highly literate working class, and is a nation moreover without a socially demarcated intelligentsia. How many people, for example, on e-mail lists regularly sign themselves, Robert Smith, Ph.D. or Joan Abercrombie, LL.D.? Even on specifically academic lists we are apt to refer to a poster by his/her academic title only if we are going to say something nasty.
5. Since most u.s. intellectuals are working class and since the u.s. working-class is fragmented and lacking in class consciousness, many squabbles among worker intellectuals (e.g. between chemists & lit teachers) are seen as squabbles between intellectuals and non/anti-intellectuals when the squabble is really over which group are the 'real' intellectuals. (Both are.)
6. And so forth through a long series of different questions which need to be explored before the questions now under debate here could be intelligently debated.
Carrol