[lbo-talk] Noam on intellectuals

[Jerry Monaco]

On 2/12/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/12/07, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> One of the essential features of American identity is anticommunism
> and the kind of anti-intellectualism that comes with it, and Black
> communities have never adopted _that_ American identity wholesale.
>
> I said that, in the absence of the "political context where organic
> intellectuals of the class, other workers, and traditional
> intellectuals can meet regularly and work together" in the USA,
> "religious institutions come close to providing a substitute for what
> Gramsci had in mind."  It's significant that the most influential
> Black intellectuals, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, were both
> religious intellectuals (Christianity for MLK, Islam for Malcolm).
>
> > 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.
>
> As far as organized labor is concerned, the quintessential organic
> intellectual of it today is Andy Stern, not Reuther or Straub.  What
> does that say?
> --
> Yoshie

I agree with you completely and I don't have an answer to your final question.

I only wish to point out that many of the activists of the civil
rights movement were not "religious" in the sense of being
institutionally connected to a church.  This was certainly true of
Septima Clark and Ella Baker.  What they came out of was Myles
Horton's "Highlander Folk School" which was originally set up in Tenn.
to train CIO union organizers.  (On the other hand Horton was trained
as a theology student, so often the religious connection is there in
the background of all U.S. political movements.)

I just want to point out that it is a simple fact of our society that
the kind of "organic intellectuals" of the oppressed that we are
talking about we usually don't hear about until they are assassinated
or targeted for persecution.

The problem I think is more basic.  There may be hundreds of Septima
Clarks in the world or Jim Straubs, but there is no "overall" class
_and_ (inter)national institutions where they can cooperate, share,
flourish.

Jerry