"Action Will Be Taken": Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 08 2004 @ 02:27 PM CST

I predict if people feel energized enough to write responses to this, many will say these people are full of shit. I would probably have a year or two ago myself.

I agree with it now since I\'ve changed my own views a bit.

I consider myself part of this problem. I got hyped up on activism, the revolution seemed around the corner, and the only thing that mattered to me was the next big protest. About 3-4 years of my life were based around this idea I had that something incredible was happening and it was only a short period of time before the United States and global capitalism began to crumble. All it took was a larger, more intense protest each time around. Maybe more protests.

For various reasons, I came to the conclusion that what I understood of the world was all that there was and all I needed to know. Not that I stayed away from information, I just stopped challenging and pushing myself intellectually. I had anarchy, the Situationist ideas, and activism. Besides, all the cool activists were primarily focused on projects and social cliques, and intellectualism consisted of reading material by authors/groups that were deemed cool by the social cliques as a whole. Intellectual debate was within the safe actvist or anarchist boundaries.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I got tired of that. The revolution isn\'t happening tomorrow and isn\'t coming through a super-protest organized and composed of cool radicals, teenage punks, neo-hippies, aging liberals, and non-profit groups. Keeping my mind within certain intellectual barriers, and just being intellecutally lazy has done nothing positive for me. So I guess I\'m taking 10 steps back from anarchy/activist-land and challenging and pushing myself again. Maybe when I\'m ready to re-engage myself, I\'ll be a bit more well rounded.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 08 2004 @ 03:01 PM CST

In response to what the first poster stated, \"the revolution isn\'t happening tomorrow,\" I think that\'s actually the defining portion of your response. Perhaps from defeat or discouragement, you\'re interested in a break (one might say resignation). In contrast, I\'d offer that theory, and engaging in it, is useful primarily for making sure revolution comes tomorrow. Theory, and what is useful of it, should be discussed, agreed upon and acted upon. The best theory in my opinion are things like the Autonomist Marxists\' \"class composition\" which provide ammo for real struggles without a whole lot of theoretics (though certain communists do become bogged in terminology and routine).

I like this article\'s rejection of activism, but I think it misses several fundamental points. First off, activism is also a material relation. With the internationalization of capital, refugee groups, migrant groups etc. activists provide a useful lever for capital to judge the desires and outrage of exploited groups. You can see this in World Bank and IMF studies where functionaries judge the material progress of a region and then give that information to the bank. Activists do this in a more autonomous sense, but are really just a free market of mediated dissent. So, the activist as a role is not something simply inhabited or imagined, but has a very real role in the sustenance of capital in these times.

Further, the idea that activists should continue being activists but channel that energy into revolution I find a bit flawed. Revolution is the coming together of all that is seperate, including diverse demands once-recuperated into activist campaigns. In a world where people are once more TAKING their capacity to live, the activist would be viewed as the parasite that they are. From there, we can say that in a pre-revolutionary setting, the activist role is not something that necessarily needs continuation. It is not activists and the struggles they represent that should be bounded together to defeat capitalism (representation, delegation, the state), but instead the components of the struggles mixing and intermingling (the terrain of dissent uniting, the exploited uniting).

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 08 2004 @ 05:45 PM CST

While I think the article is a little ham-handed in its treatment of young people trying to find a way out of this horror show, I basically agree with the content of the criticisms.

Anti-intellectualism is a powerful force in American life and has had an incredibly destructive impact on the left in its entirety. Thats the problem. But what the solution? Railing against anti-intellectualism probably doesn\'t get us much further. What is needed is projects that concretely attempt to bridge the chasm that exists between theory (and theorists) and action (and activists).

We need projects that provide new activists with the analytical tools to begin to critically engage the hard questions that confront our movements and that offer them in a manner in which people will actually be able to grasp them. A very good example of such a project is the School Of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) in the Bay Area. Another is the organizer training program offered by the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. I\'m sure that folk here have their difference with these two groups, but frankly the only criticism that really matters in this context is the criticism of practice.

SOUL in particular combines the popular education methods of Paolo Friere with a curriculum focused on understanding various oppressive systems and organizing methods for confronting them.

This sort of training is crucial in terms of raising the general level of political education and training among activists in the U.S., and it would be great if similar projects existed in every major city in the country. But these sorts of workshop centered trainings are best for 101 and 201 type education. There is a much broader problem of the absence of serious higher level political discussion among activists across different sectors and ideological trends. Without a vibrant culture of such discussion the neccesary critical mass and cross-pollenation needed to produce theory that really addresses the distinct problems that confront 21st century radicalism in the U.S. won\'t be there.

The problem of anti-intellectualism can\'t be solved by individuals. It requires a collective response. But there are things individuals can do to be better contributors to the process.

1. Read the theory and history of social struggles and movements as widely as you can.

2. Read outside your trend. Attempt to really understand what people with different views than yours on the left actually think. Give everybody the benefit of the doubt for hating oppression and wanting to be free. Nobody has a monopoly on that and everybody has something to teach you that you don\'t already know.

3. Tackle the classics as best you can. Old revolutionary theory can seem dry as dust, but almost everything that comes later refers back to disputes from the 19th century or the Russian Revolution. Having a handle on the original material makes it much easier to figure out what later folks were saying and doing.

4. Don\'t draw lines prematurely. Some of what you think today will probably (hopefully) change in the light of future study and experience. Thats called growing. Don\'t make a cartoon out of ideas you haven\'t really studied. Say what you really think but don\'t burn bridges you don\'t have to. There will be plenty of opportunities for that.

5. Keep it real. Connect your course of study to the real questions you are confronting in your work today. Study contemporary issues as well as theory and history. Don\'t get caught up in some fantasy reenactment of an earlier era or make a litmus test of what people think about what happened in Spain half a century ago. Remember, other people aren\'t reading the same books you are. History is important, but so is the present and the future even more so.

6. The facts matter (especially the inconvenient ones). Don\'t be afraid of numbers. Don\'t be afraid of making judgements of truth and falsehood. Don\'t be afraid of facts that seem to suggest that you are wrong.

7. Don\'t be afraid to be wrong. Inevitably you will be. Being wrong is always part of the process of becoming right. Don\'t be afraid to say you don\'t know or don\'t understand something.

8. Ask your oppponents what they read and read it too. Don\'t be afraid of ideological contamination. Have faith in your own critical capacities.

9. Don\'t be overly impressed with clever phrases or poetic imagery. Just because it sounds good doesn\'t mean its true. Unfortunately the best thinkers are not always the best writers. (Though it sure is nice when they are.)

I wish I could say I have always lived by these maxims (or that I always do today). Indeed most of them I came by the hard way by ignoring. But I still think they are the building blocks for a critical engagement with the world and the process of its transformation.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 08 2004 @ 06:04 PM CST

I thought the article had a good premise but then it turned into a covert recruiting poster for radical academics. Henwood and co. never mention the university but isn\'t that the only other source of funding for radical intellectual work after the foundations have been dismissed?

Maybe the problem is less about illuminating know-nothing \"activismists\" but a challenge to the radical intellectual establishment to work with us to create a forum or seed-bed for developing revolutionary inquiry that stands apart from the university.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 08 2004 @ 10:39 PM CST

In my opinion it is precisely this anti-intellectualism that keeps anarchism from becoming a major force in society, it is this kind of thinking which for instance causes many of us to dismiss the very important insights of for instance autonomist Marxists or postmodernists, when these could greatly expand both or critique and practice - the point should not be to denigrate the concept of the intellectual but rather to destroy the system that allows only some of us to be intellectuals, while the rest of us are kept from really exercising our thinking capacities, what we should be working towards is the generalization of the intellectual as part of a larger project of abolising the discrete division of labor that props up the hierarchy of contemporary life.

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