[lbo-talk] Re: Re: Inorganic Intellectuals and the Mythical Ideal of the

Jim Straub rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com
Mon Jan 15 13:25:41 PST 2007


The problem is not that there is a lack of ideas about how to improve the world; the problem is that the good guys do not have sufficient power or support to bring these things into being, to win battles over them. Leftos being a country apart from their orddinary neighbors is not a problem because it keeps us from the secret and brilliant ideas of the sentimentalized masses, but rather is a problem because none of our goals can be acheived without the support and massed power of millions of people in concrete ways.

I'm as populist or whatever as they come, but I find the sentimentalization of the people and bottom up etc highly annoying. Most of such idealization of workers would be remedied if being a leftist involved ten mandatory hours per week of housecalling random working-class people for organizing conversations.

I used to live on 4th St in Columbus, btw. Definitely proto-american in the sense that wendy's (fast food) originated there, but in terms of political economy of the city, it is structurally a sun-belt city located in the rust belt, has disproportionately white-collar population owing to predominance of insurance and university as town's main industries, and is an overwhelmingly dem city--- while the general US public voters are more split between the two parties.


>
> This is all at a high level of abstraction. What good ideas do the
> American people - a large and almost unimaginably diverse group, I
> know, but I'm thinking of moderately educated people below the
> professional/managerial class - have that are so wonderful that left
> intellectuals fail to acknowledge?
>
> There's an idea on the left that the really good stuff should
> percolate up from below, and the duty of intellectuals is to listen
> and learn from such but I really would love some concrete examples.
> You live in Columbus, Ohio, which is almost by definition the
> prototypical American city, so surely if it's out there, you've heard
> it.
>
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