Yoshie,
Is Bob Moses, of SNCC fame, and intellectual? Was Malcolm X? Was Septima Clark? Was Myles Horton? Was Ella Baker? Just to name a few from the Civil Rights movement. I could name many more. I don't name people such as Martin Luther King, and the group of Civil Rights activists at Fisk University in Nashville, such as James Lawson, Diane Nash, James Bevel, because it is so obvious that they are intellectuals. By any reading of Gramsci they are also organic intellectuals.
Or take other U.S. intellectuals, such as Walter Reuther or any other union leader for that matter. Or take our own Jim Straub. As far as I am concerned he is an intellectual.
On Chomsky:
There is nothing wrong with being "anti-intellectual" as a class, as long as you mean being anti-intelligentsia, which is what Chomsky always means. I take being anti-intelligentsia as simply another way of being anti-institutional priesthoods. The intelligentsia, the modern "technical intellectual" is often put into the place of the priestly caste of other times.
On the other hand, when asked about intellectuals he admires, Chomsky has often pointed to the likes of Fred Hampton, Rosa Luxembourg and the six Jesuits murdered in El Salvador on 16 Nov. 1989. He always points out the difference between these kinds of intellectuals and the Henry Kissingers and Thomas Friedmans. And of course( what I am calling, not Chomsky) the "technical intellectuals", who can either remain "apolitical" or ally themselves with the oppressors or the oppressed. That Chomsky would like to see more Fred Hampton type intellectuals than Foucault type intellectuals is a given for him and is implicit in his definition of "intellectual." He even says similar things about himself.
One more thing. Chomsky is decidedly pro "intelligence", pro intellect. He believes people should teach themselves about the world, and that the best way to learn is by cooperating with others. It is possible to be pro-intellect and anti-intelligentsia. Being anti-intelligentsia is in any political circumstance a healthy thing in our society. The problem is not "anti-intellectualism" in American society, it is the lack of political movements and institutions where an "anti-intelligentsia" political "consciousness" can be a tool for collective learning and taking economic-political control of our lives.
Jerry Monaco
>
> In other words, American intellectuals are the antithesis of "organic
> intellectuals" as defined by Gramsci:
>
> The working class, like the bourgeoisie before it,
> is capable of developing from within its ranks
> its own organic intellectuals, and the function of
> the political party, whether mass or vanguard,
> is that of channelling the activity of these organic intellectuals
> and providing a link between the class and certain sections
> of the traditional intelligentsia. The organic intellectuals of
> the working class are defined on the one hand by their role
> in production and in the organisation of work and on the other
> by their "directive" political role, focused on the Party.
> It is through this assumption of conscious responsibility,
> aided by absorption of ideas and personnel from
> the more advanced bourgeois intellectual strata,
> that the proletariat can escape from defensive corporatism
> and economism and advance towards hegemony
> ("The Intellectuals," _Prison Notebooks_, 1949/1971,
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/editions/spn/problems/intellectuals.htm>).
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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>