Re: CEP's correction on Intellectuals and the Working Class

[Rubyg580@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 96-04-13 Carlos CEP wrote:

>>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 responded:
>>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 ....

Gina:  Thanks for the correction.  Like I've said before, I'm not a
scholar on these matters.

>    and Lenin said what you say and
>    third, and most importantly .... LENIN, who was smart, promptly
>    realized the inadecquacy of the statement

Gina:  Wow! amazing that you can still  read his mind, him being
dead all these years and all!

>    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? ....

Gina:  How different?  You haven't heard that lots of people still work
that long?  Some are workaholic petty bourgeois, no doubt, but
most are proletarians with more than one job.  Or they can be
auto workers making a good wage with all that semi-mandatory
overtime.

>    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* ...

Gina: Check it out: INSOFAR AS THEY BREAK WITH THEIR OWN
CLASS AND THEIR OWN INTERESTS AS PART OF THAT CLASS,
AND WITH THE IDEOLOGY THAT IS ATTACHED [TO THAT CLASS
POSITION]   How many of the wonderful intellectuals on this list,
including Mr. Carlos CEP, have really done that?

Gina/ Detroit




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