Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)


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The New York Intellectuals, the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and the Crisis of Public Intellectuals / Manuel Yang

 

Abstract: For too long now the very notion of a public intellectual relies on a missionary model, of going out to the masses with a view to enlightening them. The essay analyzes past and present praxis which would abolish this approach altogether, based on close readings of the experiences of the New York Intellectuals and the Forest-Johnson Tendency.

 

Problem of Defining the New York Intellectuals

<1> The very definition of what constitutes the amorphous group of thinkers, writers, scholars, and ideologues called the "New York Intellectuals" has never been entirely clear.  There is certainly no definition that is sufficiently comprehensive and meaningfully precise to please all those weighing in on the debate.  Alan Wald's singularly original contribution has critically reshaped the framework of this debate in explicitly political terms, in contrast to his predecessors' depoliticized definitions based on ethnicity, literary sensibility, and/or affiliation to a particular magazine:

Regrettably, scholars, biographers, and literary critics have missed entirely the centrality of this political phase [Trotskyism] in their continuing efforts to analyze and assess the New York intellectuals.  Instead, most of the studies to date are brief and vague about the revolutionary politics of the group, according disproportionate attention to important but secondary issues such as Jewish immigrant origins and literary tastes. . .The more typical misreading of the evolution of the New York intellectuals determines membership in the circle by the extent of their involvement in Partisan Review.  My own contention is that the New York intellectuals must be understood as an outgrowth of the tradition of the anti-Stalinist left as it passed through an excruciatingly difficult political period (Wald, 1987, p. 6-7).
Wald's reorientation of the study of New York intellectuals in terms of their respective engagement with the politics of the "anti-Stalinist left" has the audacious virtue of ideological clarity, enabling the students of these homegrown American public intellectuals to anchor the latter's origin and development on a politically significant common denominator.  At the same time, such an ideologically grounded definition tends to underscore the historically limited relevance of the New York intellectuals outside the paradigm of Cold War politics. 

<2> It is true that Wald argues against such historical irrelevance on the grounds that "a failure to understand the nature of the Soviet Union . . . has led to catastrophes on the radical left – disorientation and deradicalization" while "the same basic type of revolution, with a majority of peasants in an economically underdeveloped country and a leadership professing Leninism, keeps recurring to this day" (23).  However, from the vantage point of two decades following the publication of his widely influential book, Wald's point about the continuing relevance of the "Russian question" seems even more anachronistic.  For one thing, the Soviet Union and the East European Communist bloc have collapsed and been subsumed under the destructive effects of capitalist liberalization, xenophobic nationalism, and political corruption.  For another, the subsequent emergence of international "anti-globalization" movement against neoliberal capitalism has not drawn their anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist values from either Leninism or Trotskyism but from indigenous and peasant struggles to secure common control over land, water, and other practices of subsistence economy, along with anarchist and other radical libertarian traditions sympathetic to such struggles from below.            

<3> To locate "anti-Stalinism" per se as the central motif of the New York intellectuals is then tantamount to reviving the kind of political binary opposition (East/West, Communist/Capitalist, Stalinism/Trotskyism, etc.) that in part facilitated the "disorientation and deradicalization" of many New York intellectuals in the first place, from their initial Trotskyist commitments to various forms of meliorist politics in defense of the status quo.  After all, as we have witnessed in the recent "anti-globalization" movement, anti-Stalinism, broadly understood, is hardly a position peculiar to Trotskyism and, even during the height of the Cold War, there were distinctly libertarian heresies on the margin of the "New York intellectuals", such as those represented by Dwight MacDonald, C. Wright Mills, Dorothy Day, and A.J. Muste.  Indeed these latter figures, who maintained their principled radical stance to the end, raise the question as to why even such a broadly conceived term as "anti-Stalinism" or even the narrower "Trotskyism" should be conceived as a way of critically defining the New York intellectuals.

<4> The critical vantage point of "anti-Stalinism" is the relationship to the Soviet Union, but this ought to have been, pace Wald, an irrelevant concern for responsible intellectuals in the United States during the Cold War.  As Noam Chomsky, who avidly read Dwight MacDonald's independent radical journal Politics in his youth, noted: "The responsibility of Western intellectuals has been to tell the truth about the 'shaming of the West' to a Western audience, who can act to terminate the crimes effectively, easily and quickly" (60).  In other words, the crimes or political fortunes of the Stalinist system may have been interesting matters to study for U.S. public intellectuals, but, morally, such concerns signified nothing.  Indeed to the extent that a focus on the crimes of the enemy state were used to justify or turn a blind eye to the crimes of one's own state, it was actually a morally culpable act, analogous to the Soviet intelligentsia's defense of the USSR's repression and crimes against its own population (and more cowardly in the case of the U.S. anticommunist intellectuals because even at the height of McCarthyism they did not face, unlike their counterparts in the Soviet Union, incarceration in labor camps and execution).  

<5> Moreover, to define revolutionary tradition solely in terms of an opposing ideology, particularly one whose official state apparatus has almost completely disintegrated, or, for that matter, purely in terms of ideological positions taken toward this or that political issue, seems to me yet another refashioning of the fatal intellectual flaw that marred the apostate New York intellectuals.  This was the flaw of abstract intellectualizing that sought to enlighten public consciousness while being entirely disconnected from the self-activity of the working class.  In this respect, it matters little whether the New York intellectuals were anti-Stalinists or became Cold War liberals/conservatives.  Regardless of whatever occurred on the road to their respective political Damascus, their "conversion" or "apostasy" was insignificant in difference from their pre-conversion/apostate state, except in terms of ideological content or certain discursive manner of self-representation: whether as anti-Stalinist revolutionary vanguards or as anti-Stalinist Cold Warriors, they equally failed to absorb into what they thought and said the lived experience of the multifold U.S. and global working class.  To the extent that they spoke on behalf of workers, this was done merely as nominal postures to be assumed or discarded depending on the degree of leverage it could give them, in the words of a highly laudatory book on the New York intellectuals, to "advise presidents, hold endowed chairs at America's distinguished universities, write for the most prestigious journals, win the best prizes, and fill the card catalogues with works by and about themselves" (Bloom, 389).

<6> What was then the virtue of the New York intellectuals?  One critically evenhanded assessment was given by Russell Jacoby: "they are best - most convincing, articulate, observant - when they are discussing their own lives, but the compelling theoretical works by New York intellectuals are in short supply. . .precisely because of their immigrant past and fragile situation, New York intellectuals specialize in the self; theirs is the home of psychoanalysis, the personal essay, the memoir, the letter to the editor" (102-103).  The premise of Jacoby's evaluation is however problematic.  This is the premise that valorizes the need for public intellectuals, "an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one" and committed "not simply to a professional or private domain [as exemplified in the "New Left professors" who publish academically specialized writings that no lay reader would read] but to a public world – and a public language, the vernacular" (235).  This premise is problematic because it is apparent that, when we follow Jacoby's own critical assessment of the New York intellectuals, the fact of their being public intellectuals did not keep them from producing theoretically mediocre work nor, more importantly, from thirsting after power and influence in the form of academic distinction and intimacy with elite institutions [1].

<7> Furthermore, the idea of the public intellectual as "an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one" is meaningless self-acclamation, on the par with the idea of the proletariat as a bearer of revolutionary virtue or the capitalist as an agent of dynamic economic innovation.  A class, occupation, or identity always changes historically - which Jacoby has in part ably traced for American intellectuals' coming of age during the 1930s and after - and any attempt to evaluate its quality on the basis of an idealized standard outside of its class and historical context begs the question as to how such a standard ("public intellectuals") came to be valorized in the first place.  The evaluators, in short, will themselves have to be evaluated.

<8> One means of evaluating the notion of "public intellectuals" is to ask obvious questions about the relationship such intellectuals have had to the public they are addressing, the composition of this public, the purpose of their address, and how they themselves perceive this relationship.  A rigorous examination along this line is necessary because "public" is a vague term no less than "intellectual" and, in that vagueness, all kinds of ideological slippages and intellectual bad faiths are liable to occur.  An example of such slippage and bad faith is cited by John B. Judis in regards to those Trotskyist New York intellectuals who became stalwart neoconservatives:

The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class.

The neoconservatives also got their conception of intellectual and political work from their socialist past. They did not draw the kind of rigid distinction between theory and practice that many academics and politicians do. Instead they saw theory as a form of political combat and politics as an endeavor that should be informed by theory. They saw themselves as a cadre in a cause rather than as strictly independent intellectuals. And they were willing to use theory as a partisan weapon.

Together, the legacy of nsc-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a kind of apocalyptic thinking. The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left (Judis).   

This is not to question the revolutionary authenticity of Trotskyism or to make a generalized critique of Marxism as insufficiently concerned with morality and too much with strategy (such discussions, no less than a broad, ill-defined discussion about public intellectuals, yield very little insight).  For the serviceability Trotskyism offered the anticommunist Cold War realpolitik in this particular instance is less a reflection of the defects of Trotsky's ideas than yet another confirmation of a common-held fallacy concerning the independent nature of intellectual work: to think that intellectuals live by ideas alone, as did the New York intellectuals who made their seamless metamorphosis from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other extreme, makes those ideas keenly vulnerable to institutionalization within the ruling power structure.  However, as noted earlier, the question is not merely one of maintaining or forsaking allegiance to the principles of the radical anti-Stalinist left.  It is to realize that such principles by and of themselves mean very little, for they signify nothing more than a particular choice of a dish listed in a menu of varying ideological positions.  Not only can you not eat the menu but the dishes need to be cooked by real workers in the kitchen. 


Working-Class Intellectuals vs. Public Intellectuals: The Case of the Johnson-Forest Tendency 

<10> In 1956, the year of the Hungarian workers' uprising against their bureaucratic state-communist rulers, C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist who mentored the leaders of the African national liberation movement, wrote a pamphlet entitled Every Cook Can Govern.  James summarily noted how "intellectuals like Plato and Aristotle detested the system" of direct democracy and how "Socrates thought that government should be by experts and not by the common people."  He was careful to distinguish his and his comrades' views from this anti-democratic tradition of the Western classical intellectuals, arguing that "the larger the modern community, the more imperative it is for it to govern itself by the principle of direct democracy" if it were to avert the fate of "vast and ever-growing bureaucracy" (James).    

<11> James was a leading member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT), a small offshoot group of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which broke with Trotskyism on the basis of their empirically grounded critique of the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism.  Although splitting up a year before the Hungarian Revolution, the JFT's intellectual and political legacy, including the question of the intellectuals' relationship to their public, is of great global significance, comparable and in many ways superior to the most exemplary Western Marxist works of the period.  As Paul Buhle, a James biographer and historian of the U.S. Left, has commented - vis-à-vis the JFT's 1950 seminal document State Capitalism and World Revolution - "The insight here takes us from the world of Trotsky, Stalin and Norman Thomas to the world of the New Left, Black Power, and Polish Solidarity" (James, Dunayevskaya, and Lee, xii).

<12> As it is implicit in the pamphlet Every Cook Can Govern – hardly James's most impressive piece of writing - what made possible the JFT's stellar intellectual perspective and energy was their emphasis on the "direct democracy" of the actually existing working class, as they concretely struggled day-to-day through the micropolitics of slow-downs, absenteeism, strikes and other myriad forms of reducing or refusing alienated work under the tyranny of liberal capitalist or Communist bureaucratic labor-discipline.  This attitude of enriching one's intellectuality through concrete working-class experience at the point of production is in sharp contrast to many of the New York intellectuals.  The latter's disconnect from working-class experiences was already present even during their younger days as committed Trotskyists, when what mattered were not concrete struggles of the workers among their respective family members and throughout the United States, of Russian proletarians and peasants, or of their own experience of labor, but secondhand Marxist-Leninist ideas about such struggles.

<13> This process of reification - valuing the idea over its source, over what it stands for - Marx called "idealism", and this is why it is no paradox that "materialism", whether it takes the historical, dialectical, or any other form, could also fall into this idealist fallacy.  The Achilles' heel of the New York intellectuals' project - a fatal defect not particularly unique to them to be sure but shared by many intellectual, political, cultural, and religious traditions - was thus to mistake conceptual mastery for mastery over social and historical reality.  Such a tendency of intellectuals to assume that they are best equipped to understand, represent, and therefore guide reality can only be kept in check by their becoming aware of the limits of their own intellectuality.  And these limits cannot be discerned unless the material labor of everyday life, including their own, enter and argue with, so to speak, their thinking.

<14> This the New York intellectuals failed to do, and one of the insidious general effects of this "choice" was to help prevaricate honest and fundamental discussions on race, class, and Keynesian capitalism during the Cold War.  On the question of race and the Southern apartheid system, such divorce of experience and intellectuality made U.S. public intellectuals blatant colluders in discouraging radical social change and, obversely, maintaining the Jim Crow status quo:

Throughout the 1950s, the dialogue on race that intellectuals conducted in public - in magazines and books intended for readers outside academia - seemed muffled, repressed.  Whether black or white, from the South or the North, intellectuals who spoke to the hour - individual allowed by editors to speak to the hour - spoke with restraint.  Behind the bland talk lay whole forbidden realms of ideas.  Southerners who made plain their support for desegregation were asking for trouble. . .Even in the North, advocating racial change could provoke Red-baiting – allegations that support for desegregation was communist inspired . . . Outside a few left-wing journals, intellectuals and their editors alike contained the discussion safely within faith in capitalist democracy.  The very name that would be given the movement under way - the "civil rights movement" (not, for instance, "the movement for racial equality") - thus contained it (Polsgrove xix).

Among the "few left-wing intellectuals" were of course the JFT and, even among these few, they stood out because their opposition to racism in the United States was not only limited to desegregation but seamlessly interwoven with their fundamental critique of "capitalist democracy", alongside of their no less potent critique of Soviet "state capitalism", from the perspective of working-class self-activity.  This perspective of proletarian "self-activity", a term which their collective work made famous, also informed the revolutionary work that each leading member of the JFT undertook, whether it was C.L.R. James on Afro-Caribbean liberation, American civilization, and the "Negro Question" among U.S. workers; Raya Dunayevskaya on Marxist humanism, philosophy of dialectics, and feminism; James Boggs on automation and black worker militancy; Grace Lee Boggs on anti-racist community activism; or Martin Glaberman on the U.S. industrial working class.

<15> There is of course not much point in indicating the superiority of the JFT's intellectual and political legacy in relation to the New York intellectuals if we do not critically study their works on our own and extract from them, if not the "rational kernel", the historically relevant "kernel" for the times in which we live, reexamining the contemporary crisis of public intellectuals in relation to the actually existing working-class struggles and experiences.  After all, the very idea of intellectuality and the social conditions of "public intellectuals" have undergone discernible changes in the last fifty years.  The civil rights movement, the New Left, and black power struggles, to name only three U.S. social movements that the JFT influenced, have radically democratized the social practice of intellectuality - for example, by valorizing civil disobedience, participatory democracy, and autonomous, anti-capitalist struggle within the ghetto, respectively - and in the process exposed the ideological and political limits of "public intellectuals" who blunted their critical function at the service of the Cold War military-industry complex  The fragmentation and institutional incorporation of these movements under the capitalist counteroffensive of post-Keynesian policy-reformulation (a set of crisis-management policies that have been dubbed Trilateralism, supply-side economics, neoliberalism, etc., through its various reincarnations in the last thirty-some years) whose full consequences we are still living through, have in turn thrown the very idea of "public intellectuals" into crisis.  The question that thus confronts us - when the crisis of US-dominated neoliberal capitalism has furthered deepened due to the recklessly warmongering strategy of the Bush administration in the Middle East and their continuing rollback of even workers' traditional rights of business unionist social contract - is whether the critical idea of "public intellectuals" is at all sustainable, when they have become synonymous with paid consultants to corporations, governmental agencies, and NGOs, in short, as ideological managers of the ruling class.    

Yoshimoto Taka'aki and the Historical Crisis of Public Intellectuals

<16> Apart from its complacent vagueness and disengagement from the material labor of the public it addresses, the reason why the notion of "public intellectuals" is untenable is decidedly historical. For today it is no longer possible to characterize the anti-capitalist intellectual as "a portion of the bourgeoisie that goes over to the proletariat . . . in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending the historical movement," as Marx did in mid-nineteenth-century Europe (64).  However, a number of leading figures in the international New Left had fallen into this conceptual trap. 

<17> Faced with the institutionalization of industrial workers under business unionism and emergence of corporately conformist white-collar workers in the 1950s, C. Wright Mills, for example, dismissed the classical Marxist commitment to the industrial proletariat as "labor metaphysics" and invested the independent intellectual with the task of inculcating visions of social transformation among the public: "I don't think it's too much to say that a political intellectual is a person who demands of himself clear statements of policy" and do not abdicate "the carrying out of protest and the debating of alternatives to the stupid policies and lack of policies of the power elite in the United States," equating the latter refusal of abdication with "the making of history" (277).  Jean-Paul Sartre deemed the role of genuine intellectuals - as opposed to the "technicians of practical knowledge" who function as ideological taskmasters of the ruling class - to consist in "perpetual self-criticism" and "a concrete and unconditioned alignment with the actions of the underprivileged classes."  He defined the intellectuals' class identity as one "integrated into the middle classes through their work, their salary and their standard of living" and their task to "help the proletariat achieve its own self-consciousness" by grasping "the historical singularity of the proletariat with universal methods (historical research, structural analysis, dialectics) and its strivings towards universalization in their particularity (as they issue from a singular history and preserve it to the very extent that they call for the incarnation of a revolution)" [original emphases] (257; 259-261).  Whether as "alternative policymakers" or aides in raising proletarian self-consciousness, the intellectual is here viewed as an "enlightener", albeit against the power elites and bourgeoisie.   

<18> A variation on the theme of the intellectual as an enlightener of the general population is the basis for contemporary nostalgia for "public intellectuals", whether the latter be figures such as Mills and Sartre or the 1930s and 40s New York intellectuals.  Putting aside the individual merit of these writers and thinkers, it must be conceded that their general defect lay in their consistent incapacity to see the proletariat or the general population as anything but an object of their edification (and, in this sense, they were indistinguishable from their liberal capitalist counterparts, such as Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, and Edward Bernays in their conception of the intellectual as a source of public consensus and propaganda).  Especially after the historical emergence and consolidation of state capitalist "massification" through compulsory secondary education, corporate mass media, and Fordist industrial work-discipline from the 1930s to the 1960s, this classical eighteenth and nineteenth-century view of the intellectual as an enlightener or consensus engineer of the public sphere however had become obsolescent, both materially and politically.

<19> After the leading postwar thinker Yoshimoto Taka'aki and his comrades in the Japanese New Left, we may term this historical invalidation of the "classical intellectual" as the "end of the myth of the vanguard."  Breaking away from the majority of the Japanese Left's vanguardist conception of intellectuals - in which the consciousness of the proletariat or the people was viewed as an object to be given proper uplift through education and enlightenment – Yoshimoto posited a theory of the "original image of the masses" (taishū no genzō).  This theory defined the intellectual's responsibility as one of ceaselessly channeling the historically shifting popular consciousness into the field of his or her thinking and to make this the basis of his or her intellectual projects and undertakings.  Antonio Gramsci posed a similar conception of the popular intellectual in his notion of the "organic intellectual" during the era of classical fascism in the 1930s, but Yoshimoto went further in dissolving even the residually vanguardist function implicit in the term "organic intellectual" by rupturing the primacy the latter still attached to establishing links with the party and programmatic - albeit "organically" derived - framework such an intellectual would place upon the proletariat.  From Yoshimoto's perspective - publicly fleshed out for the first time in his polemical debates with Japanese Communist Party intellectuals over the issue of wartime responsibility, politics, and literature in the 1950s - the failure of the Japanese Left stemmed from their effort to impose a Western form of enlightened modernity, whether through bourgeois liberalism or Marxist-Leninist socialism. 

<20> Fully developing these ideas through his theoretical investigation of literary language and origins of the Japanese state - culminating, respectively, in Gengo ni totte bi towa nanika [What Is Beauty for Language?] (1965) and Kyōdō gensō ron [Theory of Communal Illusion] (1968) - Yoshimoto asserted the sterility of ostensibly political demands that the prewar and postwar Left intellectuals placed on literary practice, the need for exploring the internal structure of language in terms of indigenously communal forms of ideology and practice, and the illusion of the state-form as the central fulcrum through which these issues had to be worked out politically.  During the 1959-60 anti-Ampo (US-Japan Mutual Security pact) struggle, whose historically epochal mass demonstrations were largely organized by the Zengakuren students whom the JCP and its fellow traveling intellectuals denounced as "Trotskyist provocateurs", Yoshimoto firmly sided with the students - at the same time criticizing their residual vanguardism - while attending the demos.  Such political independence earned Yoshimoto and his colleagues a blackout from the mainstream Left organs of opinion and communication, forcing them to publicize their views through a privately mimeographed journal Shikō, which became a canonical point of reference for the emergent radical non-sectarian elements of the Japanese New Left.

<21> The gist of Yoshimoto's conception of the "intellectual" was - contra Marx of the Manifesto and Sartre - to define the intellectual not as a floating petty-bourgeois subject vacillating between the bourgeoisie and the working class but to assert his or her autonomy from both, understanding the content of this autonomy as one of making conscious and thinking through the everyday unconscious activities of the subaltern, the proletariat, the masses.  Moreover, Yoshimoto sought to dissolve the traditionally accorded privileges and elitism of the classical intellectual not by subordinating his or her function to the interests of the popular class, as Sartre proposed in his call for intellectuals to enter the factory and as Maoism crudely attempted in forcing intellectuals into physical labor, but by seeking to disintegrate the privileged function of the "intellect" through the process of making the quotidian, non-intellectual livelihoods, gestures, and movements of popular activities and consciousness its perpetual point of reference and redefinition.  Because the totality of such popular activities always underwent changes, the function of the intellectual lay in absorbing these changes not to categorize them within a preexisting map of abstractions but, with their help, to continuously rewrite the map itself. 

<22> Rereading the fourteenth-century Shin Buddhist monk Shinran in Saigo no Shinran [The Last Shinran] (1976) as a preeminent figure who disintegrated the Buddhist religion by pushing its doctrinal and ideological limits through what the Japanese peasants and plebeians did in their daily lives, Yoshimoto considered the ultimate purpose of intellectual activity to be its self-dissolution, by way of unceasingly rethinking its ideas thorough the historically changing reality of contemporary plebeians and peasants.  What this implied in postwar intellectual life was to oppose and dispel the remaining religious illusions that the secular intellectual traditions, particularly those that fictively opposed the system, such as politically correct progressives, Marxists, and democratic liberals, still maintained within themselves.  Fundamentally rethinking Marx and Shinran to this end, Yoshimoto asserted that the struggles Marx and Engels fought against the Young Hegelians had to be re-fought under other categories, figurations, and movements.

<23> Both Yoshimoto and the Johnson-Forest Tendency found in the early Marx, particularly of the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, theoretical sustenance for their bottom-up reconstruction of "intellectuality" through lived working-class and popular experiences with which they found themselves directly engaged.  Although many of the aforementioned JFT members remained Marxist even after their breakup and in pursuit of their particular political trajectory (with the exception of James and Grace Lee Boggs), their attitude toward Marx was not one of worshipful biblical exegesis, searching in Marx's writings the primary source for justifying their emphasis on proletarian alienation and self-activity or class analysis of the U.S. and Soviet state capitalist systems.  Yoshimoto, who consistently rejected the appellation of a "Marxist" and preferred the term "Marukusu-sha" (literally "Marx-person"), saw in the early Marx possibilities of reading the contemporary present that the historical Marx never developed; therefore, our task was not to follow or emulate Marx but to do for our times what Marx did for his.

<24> Here then is another important lesson that both the JFT and Yoshimoto can offer us in facing the current crisis of "public intellectuals".  Part of the elitism or vanguardism that afflicts the majority of intellectuals, public or otherwise, is their reifying function vis-à-vis their predecessors, to crown them with canonical (or, its inverse, demonized) aura and perpetuate an intellectual "myth of the vanguard", universalizing the function of intellectuals as arbiters or representative articulators of public or working-class interests.  Such a process of reification de-historicizes ideas and makes it appear that such ideas are actual agents that shape history.  In contrast, Yoshimoto and the JFT put the intellectual process right-side up: it was historical, material everyday reality and social relationships that defined ideas, not the other way around.  In concrete terms, this means you had to become aware of the ways in which your ideas and those of your predecessors and contemporaries are limited by historical and personal experiences and, because of this, they are also subject to change, reinterpretation, and even obsolescence as times and their accompanying social subjects changed.               
 

Conclusion

<25> I suspect that that the project of defining and constituting "public intellectuals" - a peculiarly twentieth-century cultural phenomenon in "late capitalism" whose echoes we are still deciphering today - is an ideological attempt on the part of well-meaning, even radical, critics of established institutions to restore their status and influence when, alongside of art, intellectual life has progressively fallen under the sway of market imperatives dictated by corporate capital.  The exponential expansion of the public relations industry - originally formulated to contain working-class struggle in the teens and twenties, not coincidentally concomitant with the rise of "managerial science" in academia - over the last century and the increasing corporatization of the university in the last thirty years are both glaring symptoms of this trend that would make intellectuals into nothing more than a mouthpiece for the ruling class, a "universal lobbyist" or a "PR factotum".  However to mourn for the "good old days" of intransigent "public intellectuals" who spoke truth to power is not only anachronistic, sustaining the myth of independent heroism that never existed in the first place (the intelligentsia, or intellectuals as a set group, have almost always spoke on behalf of an existing or ascendant ruling class) [2].  It also courts the grand ideological illusion that it is intellectuals who enlighten and transform the public while it is, in fact, they who are made and transformed by the various movements and class forces that constitute the public.   

<26> We also need to consider the social conditions in which intellectuals and many of the traditionally white-collar professions find themselves today, conditions of part-time and adjunct status, lowering salary, deracinated benefits, and stricter imposition of cookie-cutter quantified measurement of cost-benefit analysis in evaluating productivity that make the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar workers, intellectuals and menial workers more and more difficult.  Proletarianization is literally spreading apace across the swath of the population in the industrial North, and we must take account of this in rethinking the class relation of our intellectual work.  In the wake of the successful cooperation between the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS) in Iowa Carl Rosen, president of the UE Western Region, noted:

Of course, graduate employees and faculty - of all types - are workers and part of the working class: They receive a paycheck from an employer and the employer can make the rules for their work and decide to terminate their jobs, and their pay, independent of the individual desire of the worker . . .

Just because academic workers have many years of higher education under their belt does not change their position as part of the working class.  Even medical doctors, especially those who receive a salary from hospitals or HMOs, are increasingly recognizing their employer-employee relationship and responding with true unionization; they are coming to realize that their traditional professional organizations were designed more to limit competition than to protect their interests against a corporatized, profit-driven employer.  The argument some universities make - that graduate employees are apprentices and therefore not eligible for unions - has no merit: apprentices in the building trades are members of their unions and produce value for their employer so long as they do something of value for that employer and as such are workers, regardless of their degree status (Rosen 192-193). 

At a particular conjuncture such as this, when neoliberal capitalism is proletarinizing even those forms of labor that were traditionally protected from corporate enclosure, our response should not be one of ideologically bankrupt nostalgia for "public intellectuals".  As we have seen with the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Yoshimoto Taka'aki, their concern was not - in direct contrast with many of the New York intellectuals - with perpetuating and expanding their privilege in the name of liberating the working class or opposing Communism at the service of Democracy; instead they sought to continuously reexamine theory, ideas, the very intellectual grounds on which they stood with their own real, flesh-and-blood experiences and those of the working class with whom they struggled and argued.  Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with particular judgments they had made at this or that particular point in time, this fundamental attitude I believe is a most salutary one, which could keep us honest and prevent us from getting infected by, in Bob Dylan's phrase, "the disease of conceit".    

 

Works Cited

Buhle, Paul. "Introduction." C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee, State Capitalism and World Revolution. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. 

Chomsky, Noam. "Writers and Intellectual Responsibility." Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order. Boston: South End Press, 1996.

Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals. New York: Basic Books, 1987. 

James, C.L.R. Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece: Its Meaning for Today. Marxists.org. 1 May 2007.  

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Notes

[1] Norman Podhoretz's Making It, a vulgarly self-congratulatory memoir of self-made intellectual success story, is instructive, just by its title, in summarizing this ethos of the New York intellectuals who were seeking, many of them from working-class Jewish background, assimilation into upper echelons of the American cultural mainstream.  The book also showcases not only that New York intellectuals could be mediocre theorists but also, pace Jacoby, unconvincing, inarticulate, and egotistically blinkered memoirists. [^]

[2] This is not to say "speaking to truth to power" is a morally commendable act.  As Chomsky puts it succinctly: "To speak truth to power is not a particularly honorable vocation.  One should seek out an audience that matters –- and furthermore (another important qualification), it should be seen as an audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively.  We should note be speaking to, but with" (61). [^]

 

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