[lbo-talk] "Ruling Class" as Agent?????

[Dissenting Wren]

Difficult conjecture, innit?  The material conditions for a defection of organic 
intellectuals would invariably contaminate the experiment, leaving one to wonder 
which caused what.  (Living standards may not have declined in Eastern Europe, 
for example, but everyone knew that they were far behind Western Europe.)  For 
the paid stooges to defect, you would probably have to have unending economic 
stagnation, a takeover of the Republican Party by the brain-stem brigade, and 
then their seizure of power.  Because, really, these fucks really will swallow 
anything else.  (And maybe even that).  

Then there's this weird phenomenon I've found with my students.  When asked 
outright, I've found that almost all of them are truthers.  When I used to ask 
the question on exams, most of them not only endorsed the notion that capitalism 
is exploitative, but would say that capitalism is more exploitative from 
feudalism (a conclusion they certainly didn't get from me).  They are quite 
willing to endorse a view of universal corruption - the media are lying, the 
government is brutal and corrupt, capitalists are out to fuck you, etc.  But all 
of that lies in a realm of discourse completely cut off from their normal round 
of academic production.  So there seems to be this split consciousness to which 
Zizek has referred: on one level endorsement of a critique as thoroughgoing as 
you might like, joined to resignation or despair (and, to be sure, the potential 
for this critique to move in very disturbing ideological directions).  On 
another, the willingness to produce hegemonic appearances (Jim Scott).  After 
years of trying, I still don't know how to bring their formless critique into 
connection with the notion that meaningful collective action is possible.

----- Original Message ----
From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Wed, December 15, 2010 2:10:34 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] "Ruling Class" as Agent?????

Re: "Isn't the US at the stage where
social practices so thoroughly reproduce the ideology, saturate the social
system with it, and make it not just orthodoxy but doxa, that the overt role
of
organic intellectuals is secondary? "

[WS:]  It seems so, indeed.  But I wonder what would happen if (and that is
an unlikely counterfactual) these secondary organic intellectuals ceased to
do their work for the system?  How long would the system run without turning
into outright repression?

The only approximation of that counter-factual comes from my own personal
experience in Eastern Europe in the 1970s - at certain point just after 1968
the increasing number of organic intellectuals of the ruling class became
less and less cooperative in maintaining the system and things went downhill
for the elite rather quickly, even though living standards generally
improved.  I am of course well aware of alternative explanations (the rising
expectations aka the J-curve theory) - but I wonder how much the slow
defection of their organic intellectuals (cf. Leszek Kolakowski) played a
role in the process.

Just a conjecture.

Wojtek
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