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

Dissenting Wren dissentingwren at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 15 12:54:39 PST 2010


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 ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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