[lbo-talk] WBAI

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Tue May 3 00:12:57 PDT 2011


At 11:05 PM 5/2/2011, Michael Pollak wrote:


>>So Doug, hasn't anyone over there ever thought of using some of
>>that donation money to spring for a copy of Strunk and White?
>
>Elitist pig :-)
>
>Michael

One of my ancestors must have been with an elephant in the woodshed because your post brought this from Doug to mind. Thanks be to Jordan for making the archives so easily searchable:

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-April/006960.html

This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be honest, appealing - aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and a radically egalitarian doctrine. Marx himself made few compromises to appeal to a popular audience; even the Manifesto requires the reading skills of a high-school graduate (according to Microsoft Word's grammar checker, which recommends documents aspire to the 7th or 8th grade level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural expectations for the working class - they wanted proletarians to assimilate the best of bourgeois culture. In fact, raising the cultural level of the working class seemed central to their revolutionary project. That didn't last through the 1920s. That's never been too big a part of the American left, has it? My Pacifica colleagues mostly frown on anything that smacks of elitism.

Doug



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