> 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.
(Personally, my view is that insights can come from all classes; for example, I think it's very useful to learn lessons from the experiences of capitalists... and I don't only mean that in the sense of "know thine enemy," but rather for directly applying those lessons in certain situations.)
In the management literature of my field, there's a very influential text called _Peopleware_. It explicitly debunks the view that "managers provide all the thinking and the people underneath them just carry out their bidding." (The authors make a possible exception for burger-flipping.) The book illustrates the myriad ways that managers obstruct their employees, to the detriment of profitmaking.
One illustration is the skunkworks project. "Skunkworks implies that the project is hidden away somewhere where it can be done without upper management's knowing what's going on. This happens when people at the lowest levels believe so strongly in the rightness of a product that they refuse to accept management's decision to kill it. [...] The amusing thing is that skunkworks is really just another word for insubordination. Management says no, and the project goes on anyway."
That aside, I also think that the working class is pretty impressive for the amounts of money spent controlling them. (Using techniques ranging from propaganda to the world-beating prison rate.) The public relations industry alone ate up an estimated 9-16% of GDP, last I heard. Withstanding the public is costly.
If you're on Google Video, you might like Patrolling with Sean Kennedy. (Like season 2 episode 6.) I showed it to a friend, and she told me it offered good insights that she wished she knew about earlier. The show comes straight from a working-class background; Sean was a security guard, last I heard.
Another deeper issue is the weird fetishization of theory vs. practice. It's particularly strange to see it among marxists; after all, there was a brilliant marxist work from 1950's USSR which argued against this fetish in the case of mathematics, and I think it applies more broadly. (_Mathematics_, edited by Aleksandrov et al, lauded even in the US.) Maybe Jeff Schmidt's _Disciplined Minds_ talks a bit about the ideology of theory vs. practice among the professional class in the US.
It's not that there's no difference between theory and practice; there is. But there's an interesting relationship between the two, where they frequently feed into each other.
Tayssir