Re: activism and academia

>This thread reminds me of Gramsci's category of "organic intellectuals."
>
>The people who are best positioned to carry out analysis for movement
>strategy are activists in the movement.  Some of them, however, develop
>this capacity and role more than others, sometimes translating analysis
>and theory for the movement's own purposes, and sometimes generating their
>own.
>
>A more recent development of this line of thinking is:
>
>Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison.  1991.  Social Movements:  A Cognitive
>       Approach.  University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press.
>
>Eyerman and Jamison analyze movement intellectuals, but they also analyze
>movements as cognitive praxis -- a process that subsumes the more
>specialized role of certain individuals.
>
>RH

I don't know why I find this thread so amusing. I am a 55 year old computer
programmer who spent 11 years in the Trotskyist movement from 1967 to 1978.
Then from 1981 to 1990 I was involved in Central America and Southern
Africa solidarity, mostly with the goal of sending computer experts
overseas in a kind of radical version of the Peace Corps.

It has only been over the past 10 years while working at Columbia
University and having access to the Internet from 9 to 5 as part of my job
that I have become aware of "theory". For 23 years, when I was an activist,
all of my ideas were tightly coupled to my activity. So for example in the
1960s and 70s I read Bernard Fall, Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano and party
literature since I had a need to speak at meetings and write leaflets on
the topic of Vietnam, Latin America or the Mideast.

So you can imagine my astonishment when I began rubbing shoulders on
leftwing mailing lists on the Internet with "Marxist" professors whose
entire career revolved around the transformation problem, wedding Marx to
Nietzsche or Heidegger, wedding Marx to British analytical philosophy,
explaining the rise of Great Britain on the basis of 13th century farming,
justifying the spread of foreign investment into the third world on the
basis of Marx's Herald Tribune articles on India, and all sorts of other
peculiar notions. It was like Alice falling into a rabbit hole and
discovering an entirely different dimension.

That is one of the reasons I became pals with Jim Blaut. Despite all his
awards and despite all his published articles, he always felt a stronger
affinity with me and the desperadoes on my mailing list than with academic
Marxists. I used to love to watch him raise hell on PEN-L. God bless him.










Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org