Yoshie Furuhashi
Fri, 15 Dec 2000 13:57:30 -0800
Lou: > >>If you run into any of these people, you can put a hungry wolverine in >>>their underwear for me. >> >>There is no shortage of workerists here, on LBO-talk, & on your list, >>from you to Wojtek who otherwise have little in common. >>Intellectuals' love-hate relationship with being intellectuals, which >>unfortunately emerges as contempt toward other intellectuals & >>workerism that turns off manual laborers from socialism. > >My general attitude toward intellectuals is positive if you mean by this >people who read and think and write without being paid for it. Those are >the only intellectuals who count in my book. The so-called "organic >intellectuals". Yes, you do have _great love_ for culture & intellectuals (evident for instance in a great number of books, films, etc. that you have wonderfully reviewed for us here & elsewhere), but as I said, in your & many other intellectuals' cases, there exists a constant oscillation between ineradicable love & irrepressible hatred. For instance, when you have disagreements with other posters, "intellectual-baiting" inevitably surfaces in your posts, which I think is uncalled-for & unproductive, as it prevents us from focusing upon essential questions at stake in debates. It's a poison pill for serious political discussion. You just have to accept that you _are_ an intellectual (in your line of work as well as in your recreational interest) & deal with it, since it makes you neither better nor worse than other leftist intellectuals, to say nothing of manual laborers like my parents. So should all intellectual workers -- we are neither better nor worse than manual laborers. Yoshie