My own two cents on this. I'm headed back to Haiti on Monday. Haitians
ate 70% illiterate. Yet their political sophistication and lack of
susceptibility to capitalist propaganda puts educated American workers to
shame. One, they are not busy. Unemployment is also at around 70%. Two,
with electricity not widely available, they are not hypnotized by
television "news." Three, their society is not atomized like ours, and
politics is a huge part of public discourse.
So education (which is often a form of deep indoctrination) does not
conscientize workers.
The Party I associate with in Haiti, the National Popular Party (PPN)
[Sorry, Tahir (-:], holds theory to be central, but applies it and subjects
it to developing conditions. Their connection to the masses, which is
strong, is in their articulation of fundamental demands--sovereignty, land,
lowered rents, "justice" for the thugs under the protection of the hegemon.
Stan
At 08:51 AM 1/11/01 -0000, you wrote:
>>Well, Lenin did write the following:
>>
>> 'We have said that there could not have been social democratic
consciousness
>> among the workers. It would have had to be brought to them from without.
>> The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by
>> its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness ... The
>> theory of socialism, however. grew out ofd the philosophical, historical
and
>> economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied
>> classes, by intellectuals.' (*Works*, vol. 5, p 375)
>>
>> Which rather ignores the unprecedented level of education and critical
>> capacity of today's workers, and also seems to me a rather one-sided notion
>> of praxis.
>
>It's not self-evident that today's workers are more militant, better
informed, more
>socially aware or have a better understanding of the inner dynamics of
capitalism
>and of what must be done to end it, than did workers in Germany or England
or Russia
>in the 1900s, or in Chicago or elsehwre in the US for that matter. I don't
think we
>should be patronising. And Lenin's point is the simpel one that workers
are too busy
>surviving to have much chance to educate themselves in political theory.
The work
>has to be done by others with more time and opportunity, and they by
definition are
>not workers. This lesson was being thoroughly learnt by the masters of the
mass
>media and mass education just at the time when the left was forgetting it,
which has
>resulted in the dumbing down of today's workers.
>
>Mark
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
>
"I am not a Marxist."
-Karl Marx
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
"Am I to be cursed forever with becoming
somebody else on the way to myself?
-Audre Lorde
_______________________________________________
Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
