[lbo-talk] WBAI

[Carrol Cox]

At any given time, and no matter how "working class" is defined, there 
exist workers who have the reading & critical skills of your avaerage 
Ph.D. in sociology. (The brother of oneof mygrad school friends was 
working on his Ph.D in sociology at the University of Chicago. When he 
got the degree it woud be the first certificate he had ever earned. He 
had not even graduated from grade school. My grandfather learned to read 
and do arithmetic  from my grandmother after they were married. (He had 
supported himself from the age of 9. Clearly , had he ended up in a 
workers' study group, he would have done fine, since in many such groups 
the reading is done aloud.

That said, Marx wrote Capital for those who were   good readers and 
willing to work like hell to make sense of it.

Marx was not an egalitarian of course; e atrtacks egalitarianism at 
several points in his woriting. But this too is irrelevant. "Marxism" is 
made to cover too many different questions. "Marxist Politics" is an 
utterly confusing term, and should never have been used, but of course 
we are caught with it now and have to go on using it and then trying to 
explain what it means in a given context. When you ask, "Who reads 
_Capital_, you are not asking a question about Marx but about politics, 
and there are no questions aboaut politics that can be answered in the 
abstract. hencee the question of Who reads Marx is a pseudo question. 
Answers to it do not contribute to the anti-capitalist movement (and 
that is what we should call what is usually called "Marxism." 
Egalitarianism is a bourgeois doctrine. (And "elitism" is a silly bit of 
liberal  jargon which confuses any conversation in which it is used.

And most of those who make the anti-capitalist revolution (including 
most of the leaders) will not be "Marxists -- which in no way detracts 
from the essential contributions of Marx and "Marxists" to that revoluton.

Carrol