JM: I think you are correct. There was plenty of organizing in all eras. But the question is: Relative to what should we measure this organizing? My answer is, relative to the standing organizations and constant "organizing" activity of the ruling class. The difference between say the 1930s and now is that the ruling class has gained many more permanent and powerful institutions of organization and we have remained generally disorganized.
Our ruling class have first of all the huge standing organizations of government -- executive agencies, legal institutions, bureaucracies army, police, schools, colleges, etc.; national, state, local.
Then they have the massive corporations and businesses, including the organizations that are appendages to those massive corporate institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce, corporate law firms, private security forces, anti-Union legal-shock and awe groups, etc.
Then they have think-tanks, bought and paid for media both for mass consumption and private circulation; lobbying organizations, "philanthropic" institutions, etc.
I can even leave out religious institutions because I tend to agree with Yoshie, some of these are on our side and could be on our side if we had a clearer side to be on.
My point is that these are permanent institutions of the ruling class, that exist at the get-go, and are always organizing, and organizing against the oppressed. They are always forming and reforming, always producing their own organic intellectuals, always providing the context of political debate and economic management, always organizing for the interests of the business classes and making sure that other organizations don't come into existence.
What ever organizing I participated in through the 1980s was often large, it often took place in churches, and union halls, but as far as I can see, none of our organizing ever reached the massive quantity and quality of the organizing that is bought and paid for by our ruling class. And that is the measure of the context.... That is why when you asked the question what provides the "context" my answer was "organizing." I could just as well said "hegemony" I suppose....
On 2/12/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > a lot
> > of the stuff in the New York Review of Books, which he dismisses, is
> > thoughtful and enlightening, too. Yeah, there's tedious crap in the
> > NYRB, too, and the LRB is a lot more fun to read, but you can just
> > skip the crap. And sure there are a lot of hacks and timeservers in
> > the American university system, but that's true of any profession.
>
> I agree completely, and the prof-bashing on this & other lists ticks me
> off royally. But for the record -- I've worked with people from quite a
> few different backgrounds over the years -- and the only people that I
> met who engaged in prof-baiting were people with college training.
> Perhaps the experience of others has been different but that is my
> experience.
>
> Carrol
JM: Well the point is not "prof-baiting" it is analyzing and working against the institutions.
I want to be pithy and say "being anti-intelligentsia is being pro intelligence." But this is not correct without adding "sometimes" and "often" in the proper places.
Their is an anti-intellectualism that is anti-intelligence. Growing up in an Italian-American household I often ran into this among people of my grand parents generation. It was a skepticism of anyone with an education or even anyone who wanted to read.
But I also ran into the other kind of anti-intellectualism that was simply suspicious of "experts" and of authority, but prized learning and self-education. Sometimes these co-exist.
As far as professors are concerned. I am not interested so much in analyzing professors in general, but rather the institutions that we belong to and what they bring us to do. Duncan Kennedy wrote a wonderful pamphlet, slightly influenced by Gramsci and existentialism called "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System". Now he is a star legal "professor" and all but he does not refrain from what you might call "professor bashing" in this book. Only the main point is to analyze law schools and how they fit into our legal institutions and to society at large. A similar "polemic against the system" could be written about all of our educational institutions and about the scholarly journals of all type that are part and parcel of "higher learning." I don't see how such polemics and analyses are anything but pro-educational even though they might be "anti-intelligentsia", to some extent.
Jerry