Intellectuals and the Working Class

[iwp.ilo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (CEP )]

>In a message dated 96-04-12 Ed Dupree wrote:
>
>>   Very interesting and troubling topic--if workers need
intellectuals to
>>bring them theory and political knowledge, how is self-emancipation
>>possible for workers?

    Gina:
>
>I don't think this is an insurmountable contradiction.  I believe it
was Marx
>himself who said that proletarian ideology needs to be brought to the
>proletariat from outside it; it needs to be brought to the proletariat
by
>revolutionary intellectuals. But taking proletarian ideology to the
>proletariat
>is, in a very real sense, taking it "home".

    Carlos:

    Rrrrrinnnnggg!  Gina.... double wrong answer ... Was not Marx, but
    Lenin who first brought it up .... and Lenin said what you say and
    third, and most importantly .... LENIN, who was smart, promptly
    realized the inadecquacy of the statement and changed to something
    of the sort "workers need to become revolutionary professionals to
    be able to grasp the science of revolutionary politics".  But,
    again, was a *material* reason for that at the time: namely,
    workers worked 16-20 hours per day, xis or seven days per week ...
    little time left to read books and have long discussions ....
    Different times ... dialectics, remember? ....

    Theses: "Intellectuals have a very important role to play: that
    of auxiliary research hands and brains of the revolutionary
    movement ... that of teachers, educators and propagandists ... that
    of a shield to combat the "official bourgeois" intelligentzia ...
    but the working class *is the brain, the muscle and the class with
    the means to organize, direct and lead the revolutionary
    movement*... intellectuals are part of the proletariat insofar they
    break with their own class, their own interests as part of that
    class and with the ideology that is attached by the fact that they
    belong and *trained* by that class ... they are part of the working
    class as *its adoptive class* ...




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