[lbo-talk] Back and forth

Chuck Grimes cagrimes42 at gmail.com
Tue Aug 21 19:34:30 PDT 2012


I guess me or somebody else will have to read Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class and find out what exactly he means.

For my own experience, I was required to take apprenticeship night school classes to get journeyman status in the Carpenters Union. I got no training in these classes and it pissed me off. There were subjects I needed to know that were not being taught like how to read blueprints. The `teacher' handed out booklets to study and then sat at his desk and read the newspaper or a paperback. The class was held in a highschool woodshop with all the power tools to make really nice projects. We were forbidden to use them. I could have been making cabinets, furniture, and a lot of stuff I could use around the house.

The subjects in the booklets (which we had to buy) covered material I had already learned on the job. So I stopped going. My attendence record got me in trouble and I got a summons from the downtown local with a date and time, with a note if I didn't show, I was out of the union.

I showed up and tried to explain what was wrong with the classes. The union representative's reaction was ice cold. Go along and show up or we are throwing you out.

I felt robbed. I later decided the unions were part of the de-skilling process, not to mention their discrimination practices.

As for grad school, it was pretty much the same problem. Where were the perspective classes, all the techniques that I so admired in painting. where were the courses in the actual craft of painting---really simple stuff like how to set up a palette and coordinate a set of colors, all the brush techniques, how to make oil mediums, varnishes, safety practices. Nada. I was supposed to learn all that on my own time.

The depth of what was missing was phenomenal. Art history was really pathetic. Later I discovered at least one reason was the complete erasure of a philosophy of art that would ground work in real societies with their own concepts of craft and meaning.

I learned a lot of all this after school and after union days on my own and it gave me a revolutionary sense of the world. It was like being free for the first time in my life.

When I finally started in with Marx I seemed to discover systems I already knew from the inside. And tonight finishing up Trotsky's My Life---because the workers can run things without the damned bosses and all the other nonsense of command and control. Workers learn from workers and from the use of their tools and work experience.

I learned how to build from the jobs we had remodeling old buildings that dated from the Wm. Randolph Hearst days. I could see my grandfather's generation knew more than I did---it was right there in the buildings themselves that I tore down to install `modern' interiors. .

It even gets down to how to do scholarship and publishing, which is part of what Trotsky teaches... He was constantly opening newspapers, finding printing presses, writing articles, distributing pamphlets and so forth. He was a journalist and newspaper man by trade.

I am sure this all sounds beside the point. You don't know you've been robbed, because you've never seen what is now missing. What is missing are the means of production. Which reminds me, I learned graphic design or the publishing production system on my own. It was supposed to be taught in a series of art school courses I never took. It is apparent by looking at current books, none of the basic design skills are taught because they are missing in the printed text.

CG

PS. Sorry to rant



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