One misapplication of the Gramscian distinction that I have often encountered is that somehow the horny- handed sons and daughters of the working classes have better ideas than middle class people with college degrees because of their social position. I have even written thinks that could be misinterpreted along those lines.
Now, on one hand, it would be blind to fail to acknowledge the tremendous amount of practical knowledge that workers (blue, pink, and lower white-collar) have just in virtue of doing their jobs that cannot really be acquired very easily from books -- Chuck makes this point, but it is also the key insight behind Taylorism and "Scientific Management," which, as Braverman showed in Labor & Monopoly Capital, was all about stripping the working class off that knowledge and monopolizing skill in the professional-managerial classes or in the machines or social structure of production itself. (Just as there is a vast body of folk learning about biology and medicine now be looted and patented by big Pharma and Agribusiness.) But this knowledge, so far as it stays in the minds of the working class, while potentially revolutionary because it is part of the knowledge of how to actually run a society without bosses, is quite obviously not itself a revolutionary, anticapitalist, or even anticorporate consciousness.
So insofar as one looks to the working class as the source of knowledge of _radical ideas about society_, one will not find it here.
(Nor in the cultural achievements mentioned not wholly accurately by, I think, Yoshie -- calling Zora Neale Hurston, a Barnard anthropology MA, anything but the American version of a traditional intellectual in terms of her background, is stretching things -- I also think she was a lifelong Republican. Btw, if one is going to talk jazz in particular, of the first rank greats only Armstrong grew up really poor and relatively untutored -- Ellington, Parker, Gillespie, Miles, and Coltrane were all at least marginally middle class or better off, with proper traditional musical educations. The blues is a different story of course.)
In America, what we have is a society and a sociological division very different from that envisaged by Gramsci. There is an increasingly proletarianized professional-managerial stratum that has been subjected to the processes of scientific management -- just ask anyone in tech. Or medicine. Or an associate in a law firm. These would be the people who correspond to Gramsci's organic intellectuals. Despite stirrings of unhappiness and even self-organization (physician's unions!), they are highly fragmented, individualistic, and generally apolitical, certainly not radical. And we have a working class that has been even more savagely stripped of the artisanal knowledge than even Taylor could have imagined. In place of a decaying landed aristocracy we have a robust multinational capitalist class which, however, even when its sends is scions to Yale and Harvard is not exactly a repository of learning and culture. (See Dubya -- of course the landed aristos of Gramsci's Italy were not exactly cultivated either.) The traditional education that Gramsci's traditional intellectuals had (classics) has disappeared; the corresponding groups are the handful of highbrow defenders of the existing order with social science or legal backgrounds in the think tanks, universities, and such, and their much larger body of vulgar and virtually totally uneducated flacks in the media who parrot the crudest and most simplistic version of their ideas. From Judge Posner's elegant law & economics critiques of government intervention, except against our civil liberties, to Ann Coulter's squawks of "Lies!" and "Treason"
Now, is there any reason to think that the working class or oppressed groups in general are likely to have better and more radical social ideas than middle-class intellectuals? Well, one thing to note is that there is a lot of overlap between the working class and middle class intellectuals, much more than in Gramsci's day. That said, the oppressed position of oppressed groups should, in theory, give them an interest in discovering the truth about the causes of their oppression and formulating alternatives to it. Sometimes it does -- but it's so obvious as almost not needing to be said that the centrifugal forces are very great. AT this point the idea that some effective radical ideas might come from somewhere among the proletarianized middle classes, the traditional working classes, or other oppressed groups, is still a hope at best. I'm not telling anyone here anything she doesn't know. I think Yoshie said this too.
Note: forwarded message attached.
____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091 -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Tayssir John Gabbour" <tayssir.john at googlemail.com> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Inorganic Intellectuals and the Mythical Ideal of the
Marxist Tradition (Re: Moderation) Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:25:24 +0100 Size: 6262 URL: <../attachments/20070115/637a47aa/attachment.eml>