America’s Battle Over The Intellectual with Daniel Tutt

What if America’s “anti-intellectualism” isn’t a decline in smarts but a culture built to distrust theory? We trace that paradox from Puritan moral rigor and pragmatist “cash value” truths to the postwar professional class that speaks in a neutral tone while hiding its class origins. With Hofstadter, Lasch, and Gouldner as our guides, we unpack how speech codes, funding models, and media ecosystems shape who gets to be an “intellectual” and whose knowledge counts.

We dig into Lasch’s portraits of turn‑of‑the‑century radicals—Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Lincoln Steffens—showing how bohemia, policy reform, and romantic revolt often masked a middle‑class distance from worker life. Hofstadter helps explain why theory gets cast as elitist, how evangelical charisma and “common sense” produce a populism that can slip into conspiracy, and why so many bright people end up suspicious of abstraction. Then Gouldner reframes the post‑WWII landscape: a technical‑professional new class whose legitimacy depends on universality, even as its language quietly excludes working‑class speech and experience.

From there, we get practical. We compare elite “neutrality” to the hard realities of endowments and medical revenue, and we explore what counter‑publics look like now: labor clubs that teach Robert’s Rules and strike strategy alongside Marx, Bourdieu, and Joe Burns. We talk code‑switching without erasing origins, and we sketch ways to build worker‑centered study that doesn’t pander—spaces where rigor and relevance live together. Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” still matters here: every worker thinks and theorizes, with or without credentials.

If this resonates, help us grow the counter‑public: subscribe, share the episode with a friend who loves big ideas, and leave a review with one question you want us to tackle next.

 These are the primary readings we discuss:

-The American Intellectual Elite by Charles Kadushin
- Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter 
- The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as Social Type by Christopher Lasch 
- The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class  by Alvin Gouldner
-  The Missing Generation: Academics and the Communist Party from the
Depression to the Cold War by Ellen Schrecker

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Setting The Stage: Intellectuals In America

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Hello and welcome to Varn Vlog and Emancipations, because I think this might end up being around on both channels. Um, and I'm here with uh friend of the show, my personal friend Daniel Tutt. Um, and uh we are talking about um the development of intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, and public intellectuals in American life. Uh, we were having a private discussion in response to my other personal friend and friend of the show, Ross Wolfe, um uh in his piece on Listerna. We're not gonna go into that today because Daniel will have a chance to respond to Ross, I think, directly soon enough. Um and uh Daniel was encouraging me to look at the the way in which intellectuals are all at crossroads, um, regardless of what tendency that you're that you think that you belong to, um and where the incompleteness is. And um uh what we won't go into specifics, um, but this is actually very important for what we're talking about today, um, because it even though you and I were talking about some European context, we have to deal with like the American vision of intellectuals, and um, we're gonna be referring to Taurus books today. We might refer to some articles by Orwell and James Burnham, which will also mean I'll have to refer to like Burnham's primary text. So that'll be up, but just so people can keep up, and we will post this under the show notes, I'm sure. Uh, we are gonna be mentioning um Anti-Intellectualism and American Life by Richard Hofstetter, the liberal classic. Um, we will also be talking about um the intellectual elite, which is more pure sociology work from Charles uh Caduson. Um we will mention uh uh The New Radicalism uh by Christopher Lash in the early lash period of analysis uh of American Records, and I uh will probably also be bringing up his dissertation, which is America uh American Liberals in the Russian Revolution, which is a book that I did not think was important until very re until about two years ago, and now

The Reading List And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_02 3:17

think is actually crucial to understanding the first four books that Lash wrote, um, including the one we're talking about today. And then we will be talking about Alvin W. Gouldner's The Future Intellectuals in the Rise of the New Class, a very underread book. Um, I think Gouldner's known in general circles for the Crisis of Sociology book, and I think he's known in Marxist circles for the two Marxism book, which I say I think he's known for that. I don't think many people have read that book, um, but I do think he's known for it. Um, because that book is is fascinating and kind of strange, but but also just like so bold and wild and just like in your face.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

I mean, yeah, you know, he he's he holds nothing back, literally holds nothing back, which is great in a certain way, very cathartic to read him, I think.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

I mean, it is nice also for someone to read someone who basically wants to do Marxist analysis to Marxism in a way that maybe doesn't make anybody look particularly good. But yeah, it's it was a pretty bold book. There's things in it that like his reading of of Maoism uh is there's a lot of stuff in there that I think is problematic, not because he's only dealing with official sources available in English in the 60s and early 70s. Um and I do think we have to take that into account when we talk about it. Right. Um but so we're talking about that today. Um, we're which I guess is this is my answer to uh what I talk about when I say that there's a ration, even though I reject PMC as a class category, I think there is a rational core to that analysis, and that rational core is here we're talking about today. But we do also have to deal with American intellectualism and anti-intellectualism because I I think what I got from these readings is they're actually coin the the two sides of a similar coin about the construction uh American class identity.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Um that's very that's very wise observation. I I was thinking the same thing, and Lash concludes his his book, uh The New Radicalism in America from an anal historical analysis, I think, from the 1870s up to World War One, actually really focused on World War I, but he actually extends it up to the early 60s. So it's a very pretty pretty broad study, and

Lash’s Case Studies And Liberal Limits

SPEAKER_00 5:57

there's a series of case studies of uh various uh Gilded Age intellectuals like Lincoln Stephens, um Jane Adams, uh Randolph Bourne, and each case study of these intellectuals are very interesting in the sense that most of them are incapable of escaping what you might call a sort of terminal liberalism amongst the intelligentsia. But these intellectuals that he studies, I think he's drawn to them because they experience an acute sense of alienation from their fellow intellectuals. And this acute alienation creates a kind of romantic isolation in their life, in their in their work. And this often leads to a type of mental breakdown, maybe you could even say a type of psychosis in some cases, or a kind of thirst for uh the extremes, for hyperbolic conceptions of power, um, or for a kind of peer retreat into a type of um sexual ecstasy or extreme bohemianism. So the first thing to note is that kind of radical intellectuals uh pre-World War I uh were all over the map ideologically. And I think part of that is the case because um unlike Europe, intellectuals in the United States have really not had the same codified class dynamics at work. And the the epistemologies of American intellectuals are very unique. It's a kind of combination of Puritan spirituality, mostly with New England liberalism and informed by a type of philosophical pragmatism. I would characterize some of its main currents. Of course, we also have the transcendentalists. But if you look at, like, say, the American Republican tradition that was at the heart of the anti-slavery movement, which incidentally fused with um American Marxism and the first international, one of the interesting things about the ideological composition of a lot of the American intellectuals that were at the vanguard of abolition, of the abolition movement. And then once the Civil War was over, they set their sights on labor, right? And then they had to interact with socialists and Marxists. That was not a copacetic or friendly interaction, by the way. And so if you study that period, you know, one of the things you'll learn is the notion that um spiritualism was one of the dominant forms of religiosity of American intellectuals. And spiritualism held this uh philosophy of perfectionism, and so there was intrinsic to a lot of American intelligentsia this idea of a type of puritanical antinomianism. So they are um putting forward a kind of radicalism that cannot escape this kind of charismatic Puritan milieu. And so, in a certain way, you almost need a little bit of Max Weber, I think, to understand the notion of what Weber develops as the charismatic personality. I think we see that a lot in American intellectual life, right? So, like in Europe, we know that the epistemology after the French Revolution of what's called the ideologues, the kind of class after Napoleon uh that would assume administrative bureaucratic power was basically positivism, you know, and positivism was unique because it's not necessarily saying that the intellectual has a moral task to impute morality to the masses, but rather that the epistemology of intellectuals should be based on kind of empiricism, scientific, kind of cold and somewhat um objective, objective knowledge, right? And one of the things that's very interesting, speaking of socialism, of course, is that San Simon is one of I think the most important early breaks in Europe from this strong positivist tradition. And San Simone really tries to create uh the first what you might call vulgar assault on what we now call the PMC. This kind of positivist, you know, the philosopher of uh philosopher Comte, this this sort of uh early French thinker. So uh in in in a certain sense, utopian socialism tries to uh create a new class of intellectuals who would themselves be hostile to intellectuals. So in a certain way it becomes the first like vibrant uh sparring match internal to intellectuals. And that I think is sort of an interesting dialectic that we've seen, that socialism has pierced into the sort of underbelly of sort of liberal uh intellectual elite. The way that that plays out in America is interesting, of course, because most socialism, I think, was on the one hand in the late 19th century, tied to itself a utopian project. But that utopian project was not necessarily imbued within the intelligentsia at the major Ivy League universities or anything like that. It was much more rural and it was much more agrarian. And itself, while it leaned on theory, while it leaned eventually on like Marxism and things like that, as Andrew Hartman articulates in his book on Marx in America, there was also a very strong anti-intellectual uh trend uh within American socialism, all throughout the Debs period as well, right? So what you end up getting is sort of renegade intellectuals, and I think these are the figures that Lash is drawn to, right? That are not necessarily socialistic, but they're very bohemian. And they're very um, he talks a lot about like D.H. Lawrence has a huge influence on American intellectuals for this notion of a conception of alienation from middle class bourgeois mores. And of course, most, if not all, of the intellectuals he's studying are themselves children of the middle class, right? So what they're talking about is a type of anome that's internal to their own class. And to the extent that they have a dedication to worker emancipation, it's actually quite rare, right? And um, but that doesn't that doesn't take away from what they were able to achieve. Um, you know, this whole tradition of Fabian socialism, of the Genteel reformers. They would conceive of what they're capable of achieving through policies, right? Very specific policies, not necessarily revolutionaries, right? So Lash is interested in that kind of tradition. And in a way, I don't know if you read this in Lash too, but he almost has a suspicion about revolutionary intellectuals. And I always wondered that maybe Lash's prescription for intellectuals is that intellectuals be uh granted the leisure to just be intellectuals, right, and not pontificate about extra moral prescriptions. Because I have the sense that Lash, while

Puritan Roots, Pragmatism, And Anti-Theory

SPEAKER_00 13:17

he does have a commitment to revolution, he does also have a skepticism that intellectuals can reflect like the class interests of the masses. He has a fundamental skepticism about that, right? And that's a that's a healthy, I think that's a very healthy skepticism, of course. I embrace that skepticism. But what it leads to is a type of cynicism, and maybe you could call it an unavoidable cynicism, right? Which is something I think we're gonna talk about a lot in this series. Where once we get to the new class, one of the things that Goldner points out is that part of the ideology of the new class, and the new class is defined as uh a very, very distinct uh professional, uh, technical um class that emerges after World War II and which has completely reconfigured the uh sort of discourse and sort of educational milieu inhabitus of intellectual life from anything we've experienced prior to that, which is why he argues that yes, indeed, we should call this a class. And he talks a lot about the Rentier status of how they relate to capital and the means of production, and he makes a pretty rigorous account for absolutely declaring the new class as a class in a Marxist way, by the way. But one of the things he says is that the uh ideology, the worldview of the new class, its mode of of speech, uh has this paradox attached to it, whereby speech utterances are themselves detached from social position. And so he says that it creates a milieu, right, in which class origins are not permitted to be spoken of. Right. And that's a very interesting dynamic in which when we study intellectuals, there's a sort of um poverty, I mean quantitative poverty, um deprivation of intellectuals from working class backgrounds, in part because intellectuals from working class backgrounds, when they have to enter this space, have to follow the speech codes of that space. And that space's speech codes don't really have the means or the desire to recognize that as a relevant point of difference or contrast, right? So there's a kind of like fake equality that emerges there, and a kind of disavowal of a certain way. So that's something we're gonna talk about, right? But I think that Lash's studies and Hofstadter's studies are super interesting because the other thing that what what we mean by the anti-intellectualism of intellectuals, what does that mean? What Lash means by that, and what Hofstadter means by that, is the rejection of theory, right? Yeah, and this goes back to the kind of general pragmatist ground and this this this idea of a very particular pragmatist idea of common sense that intellectuals work with, which which Hofstadter spends many chapters talking about the role of evangelicalism and the way that the um charisma of evangelical leadership is not only hostile to theory, they are hostile to any imposition of knowledge that would be outside of the common man's purview. Right. So it becomes like I would say deeply reactionary, in fact, right? Um and that that that becomes uh uh that leads a lot of intellectuals into an inevitable embrace of populism. And here I would define populism as the sort of celebration of the wisdom of the common man, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:03

Which incidentally Christopher Lash embraces, yeah, is is guilty of by the end of his life, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Um you you but you I think you could see it coming the whole the whole time. I mean, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:16

I I agree with you, but although it's interesting that it takes the true and only heaven for it to show up as an unproblematic impulse because uh I mean I I really do take the uh the Takoon article about his frustrations with the left and right in America during the Reagan era. Uh it's in Takoon one, it's the why it's the the the the left-wing critique of the left where he's arguing with um Lillian Rubin, and I forget there's some Trotskyist he's arguing with who was so obnoxious, even though I've forgotten his name. Um but uh you can see him fluttering, trying to find something to root a workerist mentality in the United States with. Um he is at first uh interested in Sloma Verney and Charles Taylor and Lester McIntyre and like the beginnings of what we now call communitarianism. But for some reason that is not entirely clear to me, actually, in his published work, um, he decides to reject that. Uh, but if you go back to early Lash, I mean the Lash of the book that came around uh just after this one, which is uh World A World of Nations, which is um a precursor to the agony of the American Left, or no, it's post-agony of American Left, it's kind of a sequel. Um he is very skeptical of populism for not understanding working class culture, and he actually accuses it as it degrades of reducing itself to conspiracy thinking. But by the late 80s, he doesn't really seem to think there's another way around it. Yeah. Um, and I find that I find that uh fascinating. Uh to to bring up another thing you talked about with the pragmatist, uh, you know, I I keep on bringing books up that we didn't actually read for this, but I do think it's important. And I mentioned to it to you in a private conversation we had a couple days ago, um, that Louis Monan's um like kind of popular history book uh on the relationship between the uh New England um Unitarians, the the Puritans, and then later on that the way that manifests in the split between the transcendentalist and the pragmatist is actually really crucial here for understanding why there was such a thorough rejection of theory and the figures that emerge around that. And I do think William James's sort of 19th-century Pietist, you know, Protestantism, as much as uh we Marxists would like to ignore that as you know, and just talk about his class position, which was also kind of interestingly hot bourgeoisie, uh, but um that that does play a key role in his you know cash value theory of knowledge,

Utopian Socialism Versus Positivist Elites

SPEAKER_02 20:17

and that uh whereas some of the early quote pragmatist uh were more inf like uh Charles Sanders um Peirce were way more into Hegel, way more in the theory, and actually rejected the way pragmatism went for that reason. And I do think that if you read that in correspondence with what Lash is talking about, you can kind of see both the religious and the class background because because one of the things that Lash keeps on pointing out is these were bohemians, they they weren't children of the laboring classes. Now, I use that because Lash's definition of working class is not exactly mine. Um, he would talk about like rural farmers in um an upstate New England and sharecroppers as working class. And I just think that's actually for a Marxist, that's kind of a hard category problem. Where do we put those people? Um uh and the the only thing that makes that clear to me in all of his work, the only time where I did like figure out where Lash's definition of class actually is, is in an essay he wrote on Mormonism, where he saw uh early Mormonism pre-Brigham Young as a manifestation of of New England working class people. And I was like, but most of those people by a Marxist standard are either uh almost peasantry or they're outright lumping. Yeah, they're not yeah, you know, so so Lash has a different definition from me, but that's not obvious unless except in like one essay where he actually spells out but by kind of accident who he thinks working class people were in the 18th and 19th century.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Yeah. So that's that's that's very interesting. I I would want to throw um Brian Lloyd's study of uh second international American Marxism and its interaction with Dewey and James. Uh it's a it's a probably one of the most interesting PhD dissertations I've ever read. Uh this this scholar Brian Lloyd has abandoned Marxism, but I emailed correspondence with him and I wrote a long review on Cosmonaut of this particular book, and I'll throw it in the mix because I think it's super relevant. Look, the basic conclusion is that what James and Dewey allowed for American Marxist theoreticians um to do um was to effectively um, and this is in the second international period, so we're talking like pre-World War I. Um, we're talking about um a number of thinkers who have kind of been lost to history a little bit, like the kind of um John Reed affiliate theoreticians, many of whom like their names, even I'm escaped, their names are not immediately coming to mind. But what Lloyd points out is that basically what Dewey allowed for uh them to do was to basically abandon all of these sort of central Marxist categories, which were based on almost like um like a kind of a di a completely different epistemology, which would be um grounded on a type of uh worldview of a scientific, like so the whole basis of scientific socialism, once it becomes infused with pragmatism, allows for these Marxists basically to create very strange revisionist propositions. And he gives like a case study, like a kind of example, where the IWW began to um use Jamesian theories and uh I'm sorry, Dewey and theories of evolution and adaptation, this whole theory in Dewey of adaptation, to their analysis of class position. And he says that a lot of the theoricians behind the IWW uh began to make an argument about a in a paradoxical way, perhaps, that class uh occupation uh matters such to such an extent that there is no militancy possible outside of a very narrow industrial working class. And therefore, the only militancy that must be prioritized by socialists is this pocket of workers. Now, of course, the natural conclusion from that was there's a complete rejection of black workers, there's a complete rejection of immigrant workers. And so what he's trying to say is that pragmatism, in its own um kind of fetish for the immediacy of the present and so on, uh ended up basically abandoning the core kind of realist basis of Marxist uh uh scientific socialism. And I found that to be very, very powerful. I suppose the other question here is that a lot of the intellectuals that we know about, first of all, if we look at Charles Kuducian's study, which is like a survey empirical study of 20th century intellectuals, uh if we're talking

American Socialism’s Anti-Intellectual Streak

SPEAKER_00 25:27

about a very small number of people, at any time at any given time we're talking about 2,500 people, right? These are the kind of tastemakers, the primary essayists, the primary academicians. Most of them are academics. 95% of them vote Democrat, and we're talking early 20th century all the way up, right? And there's a sort of homogeneity of their worldview, homogeneity also of their class orientation in a certain way. But that homogeneity is not necessarily tied to some kind of ancient regime or some aristocracy. It's more of like a cultural capital that's generated through inclusion in the club in a certain way, in this, in this space. And of course, one of the other case studies that Lash points out is this very interesting schism between socialists and liberals at the time of World War I, in which you had a lot of liberals for the longest, for many decades, professing a profound critique of US foreign policy, of against nationalism. And Lash is saying, wait a second, how did you turn on a dime in the run up to World War I, only in a few years, and become ardent militarists, right? And this is a motif that Lash sees a lot. And he even points out, like later, when JFK comes into power, Norman Mailer, one of the most celebrated kind of quasi-leftist Bohemian intellectuals novelist, he latched onto Kennedy and he was like a mouthpiece for Kennedy, right? So that's another common thing, is there's actually radical intellectuals, their radicality does not dissuade them from having total complicity with uh, and that's actually why after Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, uh intellectuals have subsequently found a kind of solidarity with a certain strain of the upper bourgeoisie of the of the ruling class. It has never been seen as necessarily problematic, right? So, I mean, you know, that that that's I think the uh the thing. And if the funny thing is when Lash wrote this book, by the way, do you know what else he was studying? Uh the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

Oh, you know, yes, I do remember that. Because that also comes up in World of Nations where he outs where he outs that and points out that it was uh an OSS slash CAA front, and we now know that that was an OSS not uh the slash CA front. And this is an interesting thing because there's gonna be people that we reference that come up uh over and over again. I mean, for example, uh uh um Lincoln Steffens uh is this weird figure who um is also an influence on someone like John Reed in the second international. I mean, he um uh Randolph Bourne uh comes up over and over again. John Dewey, and I can tell you in the work of Lash, John Dewey is one figure he who he consistently hates his entire life. Like um, and one of the things is his stances on both the Russian Revolution and and the and World War I, and then he basically says his you know concessions to socialism in the FDR administration and before are we shouldn't take really in that good a faith. Um you know, uh, I think about, for example, um, for those of you who don't know, Dewey the the the pragmatist liberal and the pragmatist progressive strain of American liberalism joining with socialists is actually the origins of the nation magazine. Like it that's really where it comes from.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Um and you mean the new republic, the new republic.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Oh, it's the new republic?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

I mean the republic the new re so yes, so the new republic has its origin in this reactionary fusion of like Walter Littman with former liberal socialists, and again, in the background is this epistemology of pragmatism, which I think is sort of premised on this sort of embrace of the of the ever-changing immediacy of the situation, right? So there is a kind of inbuilt capitulation to opportunism from a Marxist point of view when one adopts a sort of pragmatist worldview, I would argue, right? Um and as such, so for like what does that actually mean? Well, what that means is that they can quite easily derive a conception of American public opinion, and this is why Walter Lippmann uh is so huge on um kind of granting such power to public opinion, right? Um, but but keep in mind Littmann himself was attending all of these debates with leading socialist thinkers, and he's in this milieu, and he's saying, Well, effectively I am something like a liberal socialist. But once World War I comes into through the mix, um uh they betray, they betray uh their their their anti war positions. And they end up kind of codifying a new project. And one of the things that's very important, of course, is that socialist, one of the challenges with socialist intellectual

New Class Theory: Gouldner’s Intervention

SPEAKER_00 30:57

life is that it has always consistently lacked a strong financial class alliance. Like it's extremely hard for socialist publications. I mean, truly socialist publications. Like in this era, it was the it was the masses. The masses magazine was the biggest socialist public. And it had a big distribution, I think uh well over uh 300,000 uh subscriptions, if I'm not mistaken, something in that range. But you know, um the after World War I, the new republic codifies a progressive liberalism, and no longer is socialism even flirted with, right? And I think that in many ways, that's actually probably a blessing for socialists that that occurred in a certain way. Um, it will certainly set up uh a new, a new, a whole new set of dynamics and new challenges. The Great Depression itself birthed, as I think Andrew Hartman nicely points out, a huge, huge blossoming of autodidactic socialist activity, much of which is lost to us in history. Much of those works by working class socialist thinkers, some of which may have actually been supported uh by Russia, by the Comintern, um, and various forms of Stalinist activity in America. That's something that I find very interesting. But also, there's sort of a deficit of our understanding of that history. I feel like a lot of socialist historians should be studying that more. If indeed Hartman is right, that the heyday of actual publications on socialist uh and Marxist theory happens in response to the Great Depression. That would be interesting to look at. But but yeah, I mean, I mean, the new republic is is sort of a tragic thing in my view. Um as is World War One.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Well, yeah. I mean, in the the reason why I was thinking the nation, I mean, the nation comes out of the Liberator in like 1864, 65, something like that. Right. But the nation as we know it came from a merger uh that almost happened um when there was an overlap with the new republic's uh editorial group in the 40s and 50s. And um they they almost combined the publication and and called it the nation and new republic. Oh wow. Uh but this didn't happen. Um and the New Republic took it as an opportunity to move even more right wing uh in the 60s, 70s and up into the 80s, and probably uh it goes back and forth between left liberal and right liberal in the 90s and aughts and aught teens, but you know that that history is clearly there. Um I find all this very fascinating to me because uh I mean you have to ask yourself a question, and you brought it up, like even in the early 20th century, these radical intellectuals were often affiliated with the Democratic Party, and definitely after Wilson, but that's not actually all that obvious from a standpoint of American even radical historical tradition. The home of the radicals in the 19th century was the was Lincoln's GOP. Um, the Democratic Party was a coalitional revancheist party that was barely a bourgeois party, yeah. Um, and it was this uh a weird set of historical events and uh that was removed from this New England context. And I think we do have to like look at that. If you look at the People's Party and the Progressive Party in the 19th century, had a sharecropper basis, it becomes, you know, with the knights of labor, sort of the beginnings of left progressivism and also American, like we might call local or indigenous socialism.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Um, I hesitate to use indigenous for obvious reasons, but um well, I was saying the democratic consolidation is largely a post a post-New Deal phenomenon, according to Kadushin's study of elites in America, which I think he only really had available from like the actually technically the 50s up through the 70s. But he spent his whole life studying intellectuals, and I would just recommend people read Charles Kadushin's work. It's like the most in-depth uh analysis of the American intellectual class as a social type, etc. etc. So, but but I think I think to clarify, yeah, the Democrat Association is concrete after FDR.

SPEAKER_02 35:45

I would agree with that, but I would say it begins as soon as the populist party dissolves and joins the Democratic Party with um with William Jennings Bryant, yeah, and uh in the late 19th century. And something I mean, Wilson is a weird figure. I mean, I will say American liberals are finally admitting he's a reactionary because during the early part of my life they would not admit that there was all this like League of Nations love and and this, that, and the other, and I've hated Wilson my entire life.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

I I would even I would even I would even suggest that up until Obama, right, we have a long tradition of radical intellectuals with very, very, very few exceptions. And this is something that Goldner gets into, right, even in his critique of Chomsky. Because part of the reason why Chomsky is so fascinating is because he is actually one of the core exceptions, but the vast majority of intellectuals would and did frequent or have some relationship to the White House, right? I'm talking about like the elite strata of intellectuals in America, right? And that's kind of like a consistent through line. There's a there's a type of disinterest in power that is,

Speech Codes, Class Origins, And Disavowal

SPEAKER_00 37:07

I think, part of the American intellectual elite that allows for a lot of uh uncritical uh and this, you know, this is something that I think um has really ended recently, only very only very recently, right? I mean, the rise of a figure like Trump, in my view, makes something like that kind of congenial uh openness much less, much less possible. But I mean, I'm thinking here, like even but I mean, if you think of like uh Howard Zinn, Edward Saeed, and Noam Chomsky, say in the 1990s, they were probably some of the only elite intellectuals who would uh not see this same kind of relationality to the executive branch or to like there tends to be a type of, I think Lash is right, naive embrace of American nationalism is what I'm trying to say amongst the intellectual class. And that's sort of a paradox because it it points to the impossibility for truly radical intellectual activity to occur within the most sanctioned and recognizable elite spaces of intellectual life in America. Those spaces are themselves deeply problematic, I think, in a certain way. They have what Chomsky calls the Mandarin complex, you know, this idea. And uh it becomes a caste, it becomes a priestly caste, a secular priestly caste. And in a way, it has always been this way. With these exceptions, like the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, World War One, World War II actually only just concretized the uh well, it made it birthed the new class. I think we should never forget that. It birthed the new class as a very new technical, scientific, professionalized class that now has like a more entrenched power base. But before, um it was very much this kind of cloistered caste in a certain way. And uh so I don't know, like it's uh there's something like that's an impediment to socialism with that reality. Lash, the fact that Lash is a part of the inner circle there, but it's uh a major dissident, should never be far from our appreciation for him. I think it's one of the things that's best about him. The fact that he was calling out the Congress for cultural freedom, the fact that he is critical of this secular priest priest class, right? Even though he's benefiting from it a certain way.

SPEAKER_02 39:50

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

I mean and his family was a part of it too, because his mother was the first woman in America to receive a PhD in philosophy.

SPEAKER_02 40:00

Right. I mean, lash is sort of early 20th century American uh intellectual gentry. Um like there's no way around that, and I both deeply appreciate his love of the working class, despite that, because that was not common, particularly in the 50s and 60s, of that of that social strata. Um, but also at times it was when I like sometimes take what Lash refers to as working class with a grain of salt, because I'm like, you don't really know what you're talking about in regards to them sometimes. Like um uh, but it's it's admirable, particularly. I mean, it's really admirable in the 1980s when you know we all people will make a whole lot of hey of Maoist turning on the working class, right? Um, and in the 80s with labor aristocracy theory, as is something you and I were talking about at the time. And it really kind of started in the late 70s as the new communist movement started to really fizzle out. Um, Jay Sakai is a product of that, if we are to believe his own story.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

Um then he creates a whole historiography to confirm it, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Right, right. W where he reads race as nation and nation as as class proxy, and you know, off to the racist from there.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

You gotta you gotta love those um highly presentist kind of historiographical uh uh efforts. You see a lot of that in the period of the new left, right? It's a very it's a very curious thing, which I think should be avoided at all costs. I mean, please go on.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

Yeah, I mean it is it is interesting to me, but one of the things you see in the 80s, um, and we can get back to the origins here, but it's really like deeply rooted um in the problems we're talking about in the early 20th century, is like even most of the Trotskyist groups are basically calling American working class rubes who just have false consciousness. And you see this over and over and over again from publications from that time period. You will notice today, even if you still meet the rare example of an actual Trotskyist as they are a very dying breed, um uh you know, most of them have liquidated themselves into the DSA and become something else. Um, but you will notice today that there's very little talk of Trotskyist writing from that time period, because I think most people are embarrassed about it because of how you know almost anti-workers a lot of the mainstream of it was. Um so I I find that very fascinating because we see this in American

Populism’s Appeal And Its Traps

SPEAKER_02 42:47

progressive life over and over again, and with socialists. I mean, uh, you know, the most famous example of it is what happens with uh uh the partisan review, which more or less becomes commentary magazine, which uh you know today becomes like the weekly standard and the uh which is no longer existent, and the bulwark, which are like you know, conservative resistance neouns. Um but they are part of this New York intellectual society, which actually comes out of this New England intellectual thing, which does have a direct line to the various religious groups. And I think Lash's insight about Mormonism aside, I mean, I think he gets the class analysis wrong, but he is right that like one of the reasons why the new why why the burntover district is what it is, is because that does not speak to the laboring classes' life in upper New England. Um and that's where you get the Millerites, that's where you get the Davidians, that's when you get the Shakers, that's when you get the Mormons, that's when you get the Seven Day Adventists. They all come out of a strip of upstate New York um that is responding to what had been an established uh kind of intellectual pedigree of New England Protestantism, be it Unitarian, are Presbyterian slash Puritan. Um, and so I do think, you know, despite my critique of Lash being kind of sloppy with the category of working class, that there's some truth to that. Um, and uh another thing that I think we have to look at, because this is also important to a Hofsetter, we can get to it in a minute, but um is you know the the evangelicalism of all this and where that comes from and what it is responding to in American life. But uh Mark uh uh Mark A. Knoll wrote a book uh called I believe it's uh um The Evangelical Mind, um, which talks about um even from the standards of evangelicalism, like so you look at the standards of someone like uh um sinners in the hand of the angry god guy. My memory is fading me. Uh hold on. Um Jonathan Edwards, the the Puritan theologian. That that you by the time of the second great awakening, you start seeing this this this there was an intellectual tradition there that is degrading rapidly, um, and really degrades once industrialization kicks in. So I I don't want to sound like a total culturalist, I do think political economy is is shaping where this is going, uh, because so much of this intellectualism was kind of based on a D-classe yeoman planter that is almost like proto-bourgeois or in between bourgeois and non-bourgeois. And we also have to remind ourselves of industrial conditions in the United States. I mean, we we talk about the heyday of like labor activism and mines, but the way company towns worked though by Marxist definition, those miners were not even proletarianized, they were basically serfs, yeah. Um, so we have this strange dynamic of the of the 19th century American class matrix that doesn't really map on to Europe, and our intellectuals. I mean, I think maybe we we should talk about what the analectia was in like Russia and Europe for contrast, because it might make this a little bit easier to talk about, yeah. Um, because who was the intellectual in Russia? Like when when Lenin mentions the intellect, he's not talking about college professors. I mean, he's talking about stipend states functionaries of which half his family was from, yeah. Um uh who were who were not bourgeois and they weren't aristocratic, but they had a direct tie in to the state via state patronage of the czar, right? Like, and they had direct functions to that. Um, and then you had aristocratic intellectuals, which I don't think Lenin would have seen as the same thing, like Tolstoy, who were were effectively de classe.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

Um, I think I think that's very fascinating. I I tried to intimate it before with in in Europe after the revolution, the French Revolution, you have emerged what's called the ideologues, and this was a very kind of uh initial intelligentsia, what we call the intelligent state intelligentsia. And the but what's very notable about them, according to Goldner, is that actually their objective was not to impute respectability of the class, it was not to impute morality, it was not to um make a case for the bourgeoisie. No, it was actually to be good stewards of the functional administration of society as a neutral scientific object, right? In other words, the origin of the intelligentsia had no presupposition to a possible class conflict internal to itself. It would be the 1830s socialist movement that would start an alternative intelligentsia that sparked the internal rifts and social conflict and internal to the intellectual class, right? And I think that's something that's replicated, right? So even um Goldner talks about, for example, how critical theory in the Habermasian vein, in his theory of you know, the public sphere, was meant to be, and this is very charitable to Habermas, we don't really see him that way often, was meant to be a moral direction that the professional class could go other than purely technocratic professionalism, the key word being moral, right? In other words, that critical theorists also had a kind of like cultural moral revolution that they wanted to spark, right? Now, Lash and Hofstadter show that most of the time in the 19th century, the American intelligentsia was only capable of a much more limited form of self-preservation of their class. Keep in mind, the origin of intelligentsia is not born in class consciousness of itself. That comes later, right? That comes, that comes once in the contradictions of industrial capitalism really start to uh embellish. And so I think that's an essential point. Now, as it pertains to evangelicalism, I love that point of the of the fact that what we're dealing with here are kind of rote communities of intellectual uh uh ecosystems that are not necessarily sanctioned by the high um Ivy League New England established intelligentsia. But they then develop their own, I don't know, robust systems of thought, some of which we can see in hindsight

Dewey, Lippmann, And Liberal Realignments

SPEAKER_00 50:18

as quite rigorous or quite autodidactic, right? And I think that those are um very fascinating. But also where we do see class conflict is in those communities, because Hofstadter shows time and again the charismatic evangelical leader tends to be trained from the Ivy Leagues, but then they go out and they begin a religious movement, which forms a kind of whole worldview that's in opposition to the illiberal elite, right?

SPEAKER_01 50:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

That's very that's very common. And um I find that very interesting. I mean, even and something disavowed, like like even like a simple example today would be would be Bannonism. I mean, Steve Bannon is fundamentally Harvard Business School, yeah. Right, and then formulates uh an ideology which is in uh uh sort of direct up hostile opposition to that globalist world from which he is trained. Uh and might I add, uh this goes back to the neutrality of the American intelligentsia. Bannon Bannon can then come back and kind of speak in this neutral space of the Ivy League because the real world doesn't happen there. Right? It's a simulated artificial world, right? For the kind of neutral production of of of uh intellectuals in a certain sense. So it its system, therefore, is efficient the more neutral it is. Of course, I think from a Marxist point of view that neutralism is a facade, right? It's a kind of fetish, but it's a necessary fetish. It's absolutely necessary. What I would wonder, what I would wonder, right, and I think this is a true question for us to think about, is how does one use quote unquote, like Audre Lorde, you know, the master's tools against the master? Because I'm not so anti-elitist and autodidactic, even though I am, but I'm not that much so, where I'm going to say to my children or to my comrades and my friends, don't go to Harvard. I'm not going to say that. Because I I would insist that despite all of this kind of fake neutral receptacle for the cultivation of the American leadership and uh intellectual class and so on, the fact that it is always this transparent reflection of the status quo, evidenced by the fact that they eliminate DEI just like that. It's a pure immediate opportunism in all things, right? Um, that would be a real question, right? Which is how does one cultivate a strong antagonistic relationship to this reality of these institutions that perpetuate intellectual life and all of the flaws that come with that, while also benefiting from the fact that those are true sources for the cultivation of knowledge?

SPEAKER_02 53:20

You and I are are in some ways key points to this because we both have uh, I would say uh blue-collar and even in my case, quasi-lump in working class origins, like um, you know, my father was a literal com man, um, and my stepfather was a mechanic. Uh but because of this particular situation of the 90s, because the kinds of things that Barbara Ehrenreich was talking about in the 60s, about exp about the you know, the professionals expanding to gather more force, and you know, and stuff you might even read of in like standard economics about like credentialing being used as a way just to whittle down uh application bases, etc. People like you and me were talked into going into higher ed, uh, and it, you know, and no one would have done that, um in the but definitely not before the GI Bill, and probably not much after, even. Um and so I I I do think that that's an interesting that puts us in an interesting position because I I'm also autodidactic. I was I was taught like two Marxist texts in college, uh, only one of them by Marx, the other was by Al Tusser, uh, and then a bunch of post-Marxist stuff. Um, and I was taught critical theory would narrow a mention of its relationship to socialism, yeah. Um you know, like like in a very real sense, like you know, and this would be where, like, like for all my critiques of someone like Everett Wacky, I agree with him that like critical theory was denuded of its radical core in the 70s, um uh actively so by both business and government um uh involvement. Um uh I and I do think that yeah, this leads us in a weird place, though, because even in Europe, there's a realization that the socialists were not, by and large, of directly the working class. Marx talked about it. Uh, it was a major existential problem for the European second international. They also began to, with a different theoretical backward uh uh bulwark, either Hilfolding or Bernstein, depending on the time period, uh, focus narrowly only on the industrial working class, um, and not even always that, depending, like I said, depending on the time period you're looking at. Um, but in America, this seemed far more weirdly acute, um, in that we didn't have a socialist tradition. Our intellectual also does, I mean, if you look at product uh pure origins, does have a more real claim to be not from the European aristocracy in any way. Um uh although uh if you look at you know studies of American elites in general and see Rhett Mills is actually quite useful on this, you do see that there's a core New England family thing that only recently broke down. I've talked about how how even Obama through his mom is tied into that, but the Trump is Trumps are not, Reagan was not. Believe it or not, a lot of these, like what we might call spectacular figures in the GOP post-1970s, and I say spectacular because they come out of media, um uh are not products of that all American system. Uh Clinton is also not really a product of it, Jimmy Carter wasn't a product of it, yeah. But but most of the American establishment outside of the

Magazines, Money, And State Patronage

SPEAKER_02 57:07

Kennedys part of that are, and so you know, American class analysis is actually, I mean, it becomes a problem for the new left because they want an answer to James Burnham. And I guess this is Goldner is also an attempt at that. But Aaron Reich, yeah, and the Aaron Reich's PMC theory was an attempt at that, it was an attempt to like answer the James Burnham I elite problem, which basically said uh the working class does not matter. This is a matter of the circulation of competing elites. Um, the elites are managers of capital, they're not the owners anymore. Um the owners have largely absconded from public life. You know, uh Burnham doesn't argue because they could. I mean, he seems to argue it's the technical complexity of industry, but later on, the argument is like they just have enough capital, they don't really have to participate in anything. Yeah, um, that's like what Peter Turchin would argue. Um now you might go, well, that sounds true. What people miss is it actually was a right-wing argument because the assumption was you can't do anything about this other than cultivate a counter-elite. So from Burnham to say Sam Francis, the American Palo Conservative and almost white nationalist, uh, to Peter Turchin, uh, who is not endorsing this in like a normative way, he's just describing it in his own mind. But there's this idea that American intellectuals have an anti-like use uh the anti-intellectualism of the population to basically just propose counter-elites all the time, and they would say, like, Trump is a counter-elite, he's not a non-elite. Bush was a counter-elite too, yeah, from a different sector, and truly elite, and the sector he also comes from this like hot bourgeois quasi-aristocracy from New England ultimately, um, uh, etc. etc. etc. Like you can see these play out, right? Um, what is interesting, I think, to get into the radical intellectuals and anti-intellectualism is on both sides, I think you see this appeal to the popular, but that's cynical. I mean, I didn't I think I think we can say it's cynical, like just straight up.

SPEAKER_00 59:23

Uh pandering, pandering, right? Kind of yeah, condescension, kind of condescension, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah, right, because both sides of the American political divide in the elite sector do it.

SPEAKER_00 59:34

Yeah, yeah, like well, I think you know, one of the things I would want to introduce here about the class dynamic that we'll talk about, I think, in future episodes of this series, is is the work of a very interesting sociolinguist, Basel Bernstein. And he has this idea of um language and class codes, where he puts forward this argument of this notion that um mostly through um strong ethnographic studies and anthropological studies of middle and working class people in the United States, that he he saw uh speech codes that would develop into two positional positionalities, one he called restricted codes and one he called elaborated codes. And he argued that the middle class was an elaborated code of speech, which primed middle class children for entry into the new class, for entry into professional life, because the emphasis was on individuality and was on a kind of universal positional of your utterance. Whereas the working class Mode of uh speech was um defined by designated roles and ultimately defined more through a type of familial division of labor internal to the working class family, where things were much more in place and much more on the side of particularity. So it's a classic theme of the cultivation of the bourgeois individual and the introduction of them into this some kind of sphere of universal discovery and singularity of themselves. Now, one of the things I didn't mention is Hegel had this idea that the intelligentsia should be what he called a universal class. Right. Now, the speech codes of a universal class, ideally, in an egalitarian sense, are meant to be exchanged in such a way that I can utter a truth statement or proposition, and you're not gonna judge that proposition by my social role. You're not, in other words, you're not gonna be classist on me, you're not gonna be racist on me, you're not gonna judge me by my particularity. But Basel Bernstein's argument is that the working class still sees the world through these particularities, and they do struggle to sort of inhabit this universalism, which is ultimately, I think, from Marx's standpoint, itself a particular, which is a whole other argument we could make. But you see the point. So uh I think it's a brilliant point, right? Now, what's interesting about this is that in the 90s, after Stuart Hall, Bernstein's argument kind of got thrown into um a lot of thinking on race and um code switching, which you hear a lot on like NPR and is very hip, you know, this idea of third culture kids or people born or that have to live in multiple cultural, ethnic, or racial identities. But initially, this was grounded in a strong class division just as a framework. And I think that, you know, someone like Goldner is basically saying that the new class is in a class war conflict with elements internal to itself, namely the old class. And the old class was defined on this like kind of gentry, respectability, uh, don't shake the boat, kind of uh we are destined to be the intelligentsia. But the new class is based on the ideals of meritocracy

Academia’s Neutrality Myth And Power

SPEAKER_00 1:03:17

and fairness and universal inclusion. Uh, but the ethos that it imbues is what Goldner calls professionalism, right? And this creates its own restricted code, right? And I think this is a way, what he gives us is a way to understand a problematic that we still see to this day, which is that um the intelligentsia effectively uh acts the part of a moral arbiter of social ills, social problems. Uh but they alienate working class subjects because the way that they go about doing that is formed in a vernacular that sees itself as universal, but which I think working class subjects see it as hugely particular to their class position. And therefore, when they speak, there's not a conscious awareness actually of their social position. So the whole Hegelian idea of the universal class like can't work unless you acknowledge that. And then that's a question I think of like, okay, well, what are the mechanisms by which people can acknowledge that? I'll just give you a little anecdote. I just had this guy on my show, Emancipations, um, Michael Barrett, foremost American experts on Foucault. And he's like um exhausted with professional hypocrisy, and he teaches you know, heart of Appalachia. And he's like, I'm an academic, I'm from a very like whatever, privileged quote unquote background, and I think that we need to start acknowledging these things straight out the gate, and like he's had enough. And I was like, you know, that's really cool, man. You know, thank you for saying that. That's actually rare. That's nothing new, though. I think what you're pointing to is the question of like how the intellectual there there is like a kind of I don't want to say authenticity, but there is a moral dimension there, right? In which because you have these contradictory dynamics, right? You have the Ivy League system, which sees itself as neutral when it's not, you have this pressure for the universal speech dynamic I just mentioned, right? You have all of these dynamics that want you to disavow material realities. So it's like very easy to disavow them, but you have to sort of ask like, what are the mechanisms that would compel intellectuals to not disavow them? Now, here I think Adolph Reed, Vivek Chiber, and Catherine Liu are trying to develop a practice for intellectuals to kind of break from this fake neutrality of the PMC, right? And I admire them for doing that. I think it's useful. I'd like to see them grow, like beyond just a cult, or not a cult, but like this narrow club of a segregated group, you know, uh that's in in war with this other segregated group, right? I'd like to see that grow. But perhaps that's one of the things we want to like pinpoint, you know. Does that make sense? Like, how could we equip intellectuals with the awareness of these dynamics that they don't see? Because this when we when we talk about Bourdieu, it's one of Bourdieu's main points is that intellectuals are blinded to a lot of social reality, which is a paradox because they're supposed to be the stewards of opening people's eyes to social reality.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:53

Right, right. But I mean, like the very nature of their institutions would become untenable if they were open. I mean, like, like if you well, I mean, like we talk about the Ivy League, like like you and I are both like I value the knowledge of elite universities, but I also realize not just in their sorting function in society, which they definitely have, like the idea that the Ivy League is there to empower a merocratic class is laughable, given how much of its of its uh acceptance is based on legacy admissions. But even beyond that, uh, what are their major sources of money? Uh medical and endowments. The endowments are mostly landholding, so they're actually uh making property values and increasing rents on the working class. Um almost in a medieval-like situation, ironically. Uh, I would not say it is neo-feudal because it's still being traded as commodities in the market, but I I see why someone might think that. And then um, and then the medical thing, which is literally parasitic on every class in society at this point, and so how else you as an intellectual in those institutions valuing the knowledge you want to you want to value, look at those functions of the institutions, which are some of the prime inequality generators in society, which also speak the language that you've been trained to speak. And this is like one of the reasons why people will often misidentify working class cultural codes as conservative.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:20

Um, yes, um, because they pick this up as both class instantiated and also a dishonest disavow of your class, like, like, you know, if you if you are a haughty asshole, uh, but you like, you know, for working class person, you help them access this legal thing, you are more useful for them than someone who is pushing speech codes. Like uh they might hate both sides of that, but at least one side has utility because it does open up certain doors. I I your point about Stuart Hall, and you know, Stuart Hall was a you know uh uh Caribbean descent, I'm maybe born, but I know descent, uh British Marxist. Uh his Marxism has been stripped out of most of his work.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:09

Um the I I talked about when I used to talk about code switching, I've been teaching code switching and and pedagogy since about 2005.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:18

You really have to because it affects so many people, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:21

I'm like, I'm like, okay, you know, like basically I'm like, you have to learn how to put your white voice on, but also you have to learn how to put your middle class and upper middle class voice on. It's not just race.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

Oh, yeah. Um, oh yeah. But the thing is, is that that but what just want to say one thing. This goes back to Lash's studies of intellectuals, and this is kind of frustrating for any Marxist that's like read the 1844 manuscripts, but I think we should be honest, which is most intellectuals relish, I would say, almost a perverse enjoyment from code switching, meaning that, and I think you you can attest to it as well. I can attest to it, and we should be honest. Code switching brings you into the state of subjectivity that we know is like liminal, right? And there's actually something

Code Switching, Class, And Access

SPEAKER_00 1:10:08

um uh in enjoy not enjoyable, but like perhaps even spiritually challenging and enriching in that. Um, it it does enrich you as a fee as a person in the same way that travel enriches you, in the same way that you know new experiences enrich you. But this is a kind of um of reality, but it also is usually theorized, this is my main point, as alienating. And I would actually argue that uh that is that can be most definitely alienating, but it can also be, and I think must be something that we really study and carefully work through. Because if we're not capable of understanding how to inhabit these the the multiplicity of of these different registers of social experience, we're not gonna be able to communicate to the type of subjects that A, need the communication, or B, we need them for our project, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:10

Uh it makes total sense. I mean, one of the biggest critiques, uh and in fact, I know it's a big critique of you too. Um, I want to use us as case examples, is that I will redefine stuff in common terms for for any audience. So I have an audience that's an uneducated. Um, I'm always surprised that I do, actually, because I do have people who are even formally educated, but are not formally educated in humanities who just go, I don't understand what the hell you're saying. Like, right, you know, like sure. Um, whereas I have working class people who who will understand it. I'm not saying that because most working class people hear the way I talk and they go, What are you, college boy? Like, like at the same time, um, you and I, from origins reasons, and this is gonna come up in some of our later discussions about the tension between origins and practice in class, right? But for origins reasons, can definitely co-switch to speak working class, but I don't tend to do it as much as some other people. I mean, one of the things that you you mentioned about Lou uh Reed, um Walter, Walter Ben Michaels from a non-Marxist perspective. Uh, who else did you mention? Um Chiber. Chiber. Um, is that they are speaking to um they're they're speaking, they're trying to generate class traders within the PMC. Right, correct.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:36

And that means that they don't often prioritize, especially this is true, I think, with Reed to some extent. I'd like to see him do it more. They don't see as viable uh the cultivation of like autodidactic, um, non-academic activity.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:59

Right. Well, yeah, my my critique of of Lou when I critiqued her book, The Virtue Hoarders, was like she actually has uh hankering for when she sees the PMC as virtuous towards the work class, which is the period of high Fordism in the 1950s, and then she also has a hankering for that the working class, uh the working class being able to control and merge with intellectuals, which is what you see in the Cultural Revolution, uh uh in practice in the what we might call the communal period in the 1970s in China, and and then the developments that come out of that and like class collaboration, and I'm not you I normally use that as a slur, but I mean here just objectively, in China, where like working class people do feel like they can you know tell intellectuals directly to go fuck themselves, at least in the older generations, that may not be true in the future. Michael Sandel studies in modern China actually indicate it might not be, but um, that least for the people who went through that period in the 1970s, that because of the common experience, but even Chinese intellectuals present that period as a national tragedy, right? Because they were rustificated. And what did rustification mean? It did not mean they were worked to death. Some of them were, I'm not saying that never happened, but what it meant is they had to go into rural areas and join with peasant communities, and the idea was that they skilled each other, that the gap in skills would would level between practical skills from the peasant community for the peasant and proletarian communities and historical knowledge from these, you know, intellectual who in the Confucian system were effectively a separate class going back several thousand years. Um, they were not quite aristocrats, but they weren't quite not, and that have been maintained according to the theorists of the cultural revolution and even communist practice around education. Now, we could talk about the problems, the ultra-leftism of all that. We can talk about all the tragedies of the cultural of the early parts of the cultural revolution, those are all real, but that theory is interesting to me because it's like it's one of the actual attempts to skill the working class. Um, you know, one of the things that I always talk about why the purges got so out of uh control, and I get this from Jay Author Geddes and Sheila Fitzpatrick, and as in the Soviet Union, is you very much need it. Lenin and Stalin very much needed the expertise of the of the former intellectual and the early and the de bourgeoisied early bourgeoisie in Russia to build their infrastructure. Um, and they needed them to train a class of basically working class apparatus, a la Khrushchev, to do the same things, and they did that. But but the problem that you had is the only way to control them uh in that system was basically straight up violence. Um, you know, and it at least and the violence, the level of violence needed to do that, unleashed violence in general society, and the purges uh, you know, and the use of China get out of control um in the late 30s. Uh, that's you know, that at least that's the theory from Fitzpatrick and Geatha Geddes, who uh uh are uh you know not Marxist-Linus by any stretch of the imagination, but also not anti-communist. So um I think that this is interesting because the American system has a its way of controlling these intellectuals has been to allow them to set speech codes, which which alienates most of society.

Working With And Against Institutions

SPEAKER_02 1:16:47

I mean, we have to admit that like when people complain about wokeism, part of what makes people mad, I think, um, you know, when I would talk to like my my grandfather, who was uh brickmaker, um and he was a Democrat his own whole life, so uh but he like hated uh radical intellectuals, like profoundly hated them. Um and uh he would would talk about this in terms of like, well, they're always talking about stuff, but you know, my church does more for the poor that are uh you know than any of these people since FDR. Now he was a big FDR guy, um, he loved FDR, but that was his concern. He's just like, oh, you talk all this great game, but you get mad when I say colored and not black at the time or African-American at that time. Um, you know, but you like you don't have an answer for like these poor black communities here because the way we refer to them doesn't change anything, and he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, so this was just something that that was inculcated in me from his values early on, is like being very frustrated with that class, and then my my um my stepfather, who I mentioned was a mechanic, um, and uh, you know, I'm being very autobrical here, but kind of using this to like illustrate some of your points. Um uh but he was actually from his his class background was elite. He had he had his his uh father had been disinherited, um for whatever reasons lost a lot of family wealth and being ill in the 1960s and 70s, he died young, and then my father resented that and actively chose to take a blue-collar job. Um uh, which again actually belies some of what you're talking about, though, because he could choose to do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:51

Um now my mom came from Georgia sharecroppers, so like um, and my and my biological father was was from a mixed uh Jewish and Protestant family um that uh had no money, and you know, uh so uh they had a lot of access to education, actually, but they had no wealth, and they had been also farmers primarily during the 19th century. I bring this up because we don't look at this that much when we talk about people's class positions today, like what are these class lineages? What are what do they say? And um there's a lot of inculcated attitudes that you have in inculcated speech codes, like like if I'm mad, the way I talk, if I'm mad, um betrays a blue-collar origin. Like I've talked about it as like a shibolift that like like I can move all like I have this you know code switching ability, I can move up and down the class codes pretty easily, but there are certain things that if you get me riled up about, I sound like where I'm from, and uh I find that interesting because this theory of the new class as a universal class is kind of yeah, not quite. I mean, like Lash makes this this important distinction. These intellectuals are not bourgeoisie, but the fail-sun stereotype really does apply all the way back to the 19th century, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:33

Like they're the children of the bourgeoisie that also don't totally have to work, or they can pursue work that you know pays less than you would imagine, such as I mean, in the 19th century and in the early 20th, anything touching a university is exchanging social status for money because you're not making a lot of money, uh, but you do have a lot of prestige from this. And uh Jane Adams charities and and stuff, he she he talks a lot about that, right? Uh the Bohemian lifestyles you see around Randolph Bourne. Um, that these are made possible because these people are not really from the working class, but they're not bourgeois either, even though their origins are from there. Um and then later on, I mean, by the 19th, by the time you have the new class, we have to admit that this is actually coming out of basically cold war level patronage by the bourgeoisie and the state to create a buffer for people to compete with the Soviet Union. Like this is another point Louis Benam makes in a different book, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:39

100%. Yeah, I think after World War II, the the last book and the Hofstetter book are interesting because they're in a way the the richest content is this pre-World War II milieu of where intellectuals as a social type kind of refers to the intellectual becoming paradigmactic of a of a kind of singular vision of freedom or a kind of uh liberation, but it's always tends to be quite idiosyncratic, not necessarily collectivist, not necessarily tied to ideology, very much bound up with individualism. So the intellectual becomes not a steward of like state maintenance as they would be after World War II, but they become almost like a um cultural personification of values, right? And this is this is exactly what happened during the the Gilded Age and the rise of extreme inequality, is that most intellectuals uh were were what they call the genteel reformers, right? So their main objective was not necessarily to propose radical or progressive social reforms, but to kind of maintain a nostalgic uh compact of society, to kind of keep the status quo in place. I think that in moments of um crisis, intellectuals become after World War II, especially in the Cold War uh period, they become stewards of some type of state maintenance. So their

Decadence, Professionalism, And Crisis

SPEAKER_00 1:23:18

their whole the whole cultural index of intellectuals becomes much more vibrant outside of state-sanctioned intellectual life. And that is what the new left brought about. That is what a lot of 60s Bohemia brought about, that kind of Dionysian radical awakening, right? Uh sexual revolution was itself also a revolt against the stoltification of the professional new class, I think it must be said. It wasn't as if the professional new class were necessarily at the vanguard of the 60s. I don't think we should forget that. And I also think that the new class has always had a very tenuous relationship to actual socialist activity. So they've always been kind of the enemy, I think is what I'm trying to get at. And I don't think that um, but the problem now is that they have such an oversized power on shaping kind of the worldview and the ideology of people that such that when you code switch, you now code switch if you've been trained in one of these institutions in that linguistic thing. Now it just so happens that, like right now, in this moment in time in 2025, that worldview seems to be being deconstructed or destroyed, right? It seems to be um, but I think that the structural imperatives of the system will necessitate for its modification, and that modification likely will be, you know, probably a reproduction of something very close to what it was, right? Um what it was in the 50s. I mean, like I you I would actually say that I I doubt that um a post-Trumpist PMC, like the progressive left PMC, is going to reasonably be capable of the type of reform that Reed, Lou, and Chiber want. Like they actually may be a little bit too idealist at the end of the day, if we are right that they're setting their sights on the reform of the PMC. Maybe that's a fool's errand. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:28

I don't think they would. I mean, maybe uh Chiber and um and uh uh Reed are aware of it. Uh I'm not sure that Katherine Liu totally is. I mean, the way Katherine Lou talks about the working class is uh very valorizing, um, but also how to remove, you know, um and you know one of the ironies of people who have blue-collar origins. I mean, you and you and I probably I I can't speak for you here, but I know I have pop with it, is that we are often inculcated by our cultural norms when we touch the academy for quote progressive reasons to turn against our working class origins. Um not just in the sense that like we flatten them out, like we view uh we are led to view a lot of our working class origins as uh debased and quasi-lumpin. Now, uh if you come up into the bourgeoisie from that, you're likely to do that too. The one thing I will say though is it is also a tendency of these academics to idealize the working class when they talk about them, um, to not admit you know, partial lumpinization of the working class or the cultural deleteriousness of deindustrialization. And uh Late Lash, not in the book that we read, but Late Lash actually talks about conservatives being able to successfully leverage this because they quote speak to actual problems working class people have, whereas this he doesn't put it in the way that you put it, and I don't think he would recognize it as such, but I think it actually helps the phenomena he was describing. There's he complains that the that the new elites just deny that those things exist. Like there's not a crisis in education, there's not uh um and if you look at that as an extension of the strategy to to achieve equality by flattening out differences in abstract, but not but equality being made in the kind of worse liberal sense, totally abstract. Like, you know, the idea, for example, that like we meet racial quotas in universities, even if most of them are like exchanged since from Nigeria, um, or are uh that we can charge even more than we can charge out of state people, um, and who we can work to death and have them like vacation in a semi uh uh a semi-proletarian environment for four years or six years or eight years. Um uh but but we are meeting this you know notion to to bring equality to this elite, right? Um people who actually study, I mean, like the way higher education has worked, like there's been a lot of uh since this accelerated with DI initiatives, and this is why I'm like very hesitant to pretend that D and I initiatives are the same thing as civil rights from either the liberal or the conservative side, you actually saw uh less working class and and lump and black students make it into the academy. You saw less economic diversity across the board, right? Um and this is only, you know, I mean, the the ironically, the the decisions by um the Trump administration are actually likely to accelerate that, but now they won't have the justification of this neutral new class. Um in some ways, if you were to read uh if you want to understand Bananism, you know, I would tell you to read Sam Francis, uh, where he points out that he they don't want to create, they don't want to get rid of the PMC, they want a different PMC. Um uh and you know uh the only the only solstice we might have to take is that these cultural institutions are such in decline that maybe like for example, uh there has been a reactionary centrist slash conservation of a lot of the news, you know, uh uh under Trump. We've we've we can we can say we've seen this Barry Weiss uh be coming in for CBS, uh um uh the bulwark uh being more and more an MSNBC, even and you know, former neocons. Um uh well, what does that mean? You know, uh in the context of this kind of class thing that we're talking about right now and anti-intellectualism.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:07

Yeah. Um I mean, I would say go ahead. Oh, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say uh it's remarkable. Okay, so I think a couple of things here. In the sweep of my life, I have seen things evolve to the point where you're mentioning Lash's observation of the 80s of this kind of celebratory meritocratic liberal

Managing Intellectuals: Lenin To Mao

SPEAKER_00 1:30:27

vision of universal class ascendancy and through hard work and so on, without any recognition of economic uh disadvantage or class positions and um realities, and so on. But uh in a post 2008 world, it took maybe. About 10 years since the great economic crash, in order for liberal institutions to be full of people who are of a split mind about class and inequality. And I think that this still remains within academia a huge debate. People that are willing to acknowledge the class reality and people that are not. A huge reason why many middle class academics don't acknowledge class is I would contend that they maintain a kind of neo-Darwinist realism whereby they do want to affirm that the professional class are born with certain aptitudes, right? Like Bernstein, uh Basel Bernstein, who wrote this book on language and class codes, the biggest controversy with this book was that people interpreted it through that kind of lens, right? They interpreted it as actually he's wrong, really, because what we're talking about is a kind of genetic defect of skill and inborn capacity to, because a lot of stuff he's doing is like test taking and like monitoring like linguistic capacity and memorization and shit like that. And um, so he he always thought that was like an abusive interpretation on his work, right? He always saw it as like this open-ended model for that's meant for um further application and study, but a lot of people wanted to close it down. So I think there's a lot of in the post-2008 context, a lot of middle class people who experienced profound um downward mobility that uh created this acute exclusion of the working class because the standards of inclusion at these institutions is now becoming almost and has become has been almost the reserve of this like radical meritocratic ideology only for the middle class. To the extent that you have a few outliers uh that make it in somehow by chance, by grace, well, maybe we could just attribute that to some Protestant theory of predestination and be done with it. But to the extent you have a Marxist analysis that's wanting to ground things on a deeper economic analysis of the situation, most intellectuals and most professionals are going to see that as uh something they do not want to hear. There's this guy on Twitter, Sam Hasselby, uh, who is a product of like Harvard and Ivy League, and he's a professor somewhere in the Midwest, I believe. He's a very interesting figure. He's the editor at Ion Magazine, and he's dedicated his whole Twitter account to a constant assault on the refusal of economic class issues within the Ivy League. And he has found this massive contingent of people that absolutely hate him for pointing these things out. But he doesn't stop. And this is like the all that he does, right? And so I think that this notion of class traders is necessary. What I worry about, I think, in general, is this idea that are we having too much of a realist view on the on this class, whereby maybe what's needed is a little bit more of what the early socialists did. Not saying like San Simonism, but maybe a little bit of it, right? Insofar as um, yes, we rely on this, the services of the profound um knowledge hubs that these institutions offer, but we're not somehow fatalistically reliant on them. Because when you get fatalistically reliant on them, you have a hard time of not reifying their own hierarchical realities in a certain way. And I'm I always want to avoid that. That's why I find it as a teacher so much more um interesting to work in in non-elite spaces, like so much more vibrant, it's so much more in touch with um a type of knowledge transmission that's of a completely different order and urgency and practicality in a certain way. And um, but moreover, I would say like you and I are unique because of our background, but I think that comes with a danger that you're always careful to point out of what we call class fet, what we might call class fetishization. But I don't think working class people are succumbed to class fetishization as much.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:27

I don't think they are either.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:28

It just doesn't make sense, it doesn't, it wouldn't logically compute to to sort of I mean it would be very narcissistic, and I suppose that's possible, but it would be pathological if you're fetishizing your own personal experience like that, uh, you know, and um and also because these these realities are extremely contradictory, and they're also brutal, right? They're also brutal, and they're also unto themselves like habitus that are actually devoid of a coherent habitus. So the irony is that you need some basic provisional resources to create a habitus, like a shared worldview, where you can organize. So, therefore, the working class now needs uh some relationality to these middle class institutions as a survival mechanism. That's without question. I guess the question is how much are we willing to go without building alternative institutions and alternative mechanisms and means for educating people that have been left behind? I think that's the key question. More resources need to be funneled into that. And I think it does matter where your money comes from if you're actually doing that. Absolutely. The fact that you and I don't have any grants or support like that, but are purely mod very modestly funded by our listeners is probably a very good thing in terms of keeping things down to earth. Um, I've seen what can happen when that outside funding comes in. I also have seen a lot of leftists maybe misjudge or be very hyperbolic about certain people that, like, oh, if they get funding, they're they're fundamentally compromised. I'm not

Why The U.S. Is Anti-Intellectual

SPEAKER_00 1:37:17

sure that's always the case. Um, we don't need to get into case studies and examples of that, but I do think that inevitably getting resources is going to be something that we'll have to do. Um how do you feel about that out of curiosity?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:34

Well, this is this has been a big issue for me for for a long time. When I was first attracted to the base building tendency, probably uh in like 2014, um, out of the contradictions of what I saw as uh the kind of intransic negative intransience of what I was experiencing with post-occupy left communism, the I do not mean this as an insult to schizophrenic people, but the the but the nearly schizo relationality of anarchism to reform and revolution, on one hand, they were encouraging people to basically be normal democratic reformists, on the other hand, uh, and this was a particular period of anarchism, I will say that it's the Graber, Chomsky dominant period, but uh I was responding to all of that. Um, and my response was to a lot of the base builders is you're gonna need institutions um and leverage that you're gonna have to get from somewhere. Uh I would rather get it from workers' institutions like unions, even though I do see them as degraded institutions. Actually, I mean this is something that I talk a lot about, but I refuse to be to take the left com the traditional uh council communists uh are certain left Trotskyists like the uh the S the Socialist Equity Party, uh, who just like we don't deal with former unions because of the you know the labor aristocracy of their leadership. But I'm like, well, they do we we we do have labor aristocracy and the leadership, but honestly, those are the only working class organs that exist with any resources.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:13

Like um, I think I think it's also it's also not accurate to say that there's a transitive relationship between okay, so like I think that the professional class has this ideology, which in this wonderful book, uh The Society of Singularities, I I I lent it to you a few months ago. And one of the arguments of that book is that one way we can understand professional class ideology is that it's incumbent upon you as a professional to have a kind of transitive, like meaning, meaning that a kind of causal uh reflective theory almost that what you do defines not only you as a wage laborer, as a salaried employer, but that it also defines you as a self, right? As some like full singular completion. And I would say that the post-2008 contradictions of the professional world are so immense that that transitivity is totally collapsed, which is probably a good thing. Meaning that very few academics even can be taken seriously if they fully identify with their job in a non-contradictory way. I mean, I I work uh to get a paycheck in media, but I don't talk about it much because I don't see that work as something that defines me. Like it's it's something that I do for work, but it's not anything more than that. And I don't I insist that it not be more than that, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:40:43

I I am like that with education, and people ask me why I don't talk about more about education on the show. And I'm like, well, I I do really care about it in the abstract, but like my my day job is my day job.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:55

Exactly, right? And I think that's uh important also for workers, too, because if we are gonna build up a worker intelligentsia, let's say, that will be a reality that workers will also have to face, right? Which is you're going to be fighting for free time to do this kind of work. And yes, that is going to be a struggle, but if you believe in it, you believe in it and you'll make the time. You will find the time to achieve it, uh, in my view. Um, not all the time, but you know, it's it's part of of uh what motivates you, what drives you. So uh, but I think we should reject that kind of that kind of professional uh pressure in a certain way. I mean, and that's not to take away from the fact that people get great jobs and they're pride of that, they have pride in that, that's fine with me, right? But I'm very wary of people that want to become cheerleaders for these institutions, which are in a chronic crisis. These institutions are in a chronic crisis, and I think that that chronic crisis doesn't mean that they're going to collapse, but they're riddled with holes and inconsistencies and and um decadence. It's a whole kind of concept of decadence that I think is valid. Although your your conception of decadence, I I was thinking is very close to Lukac's theory of decadence from destruction of reason. It might be one of the reasons you like that book.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:26

Yeah, I've come over to that book the more I've the more upset with it. I don't even know, I don't like its positive citations of the lysian code.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:33

There's stuff I don't like about it, but like that's hard to think of that's very small.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:36

That's a very tiny part of the book.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:39

Like okay, look, look, he Lukac did a a few of these things, and I'll I'll be very critical of him. I'll give you another example of things I don't like that he did. In his book on European realism, which he wrote during his uh Stalinist period, which is was not always like this, in his study of Gorky, at the end of his study of Gorky, he says uh Gorky should be celebrated because Gorky gave us the realest uh justification for the purging of Kulaks. Right? It's like a direct like he gorky uh why because Gorky's uh novels revealed the brutality of uh their act actions as a class. And so it's this vulgar Stalin uh Stalinist theory of class um as a social being, as a category of social being, which is not willing to discriminate uh across the entirety of that class, which then basically sanctions a type of violence towards this class, which I'm not which I don't think is Marxist. I think that is an abuse of the Marxist theory of class to because it

Bohemianism Then And Now

SPEAKER_00 1:43:57

if you follow down that line, you are you are opening up Pandora's box to what is what could be genocidal violence.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:06

I mean right, at least in one case was um, and I'm not even talking about the USSR in this case, I'm talking about the Khmer Rouge.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:14

But like it's close to that, right? But he had to throw some of these these points in, I think, to follow the um, you know, the the the official uh nomenclatura and the the the kind of uh uh general party line. Um keeping in mind also that Lukos is also I mean, there's a famous story once where um Lukosh is at home having supper with his wife, they get a knock on the door, it's a state vehicle, and he is demanded to enter into this state vehicle, it's totally blacked out. They throw him onto a plane, and he is assuming that he's going to a gulag, he kisses his wife goodbye, it's over. When he lands at the destination, it is a gulag, but he has been assigned to be a professor to captured Nazi generals from the Battle of Stalingrad in order to teach them German literature, and and then once he learned that he said he almost fell over, he almost fainted. He thought he was gonna be killed, but that was the world in which they lived. I mean, it's this constant unknown dimension, and he exiled multiple times.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:32

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we have to like we I think actually the Stalem period is an important thing to deal with when you're dealing with like because the control of the uh of the new class, the managerial class, uh whatever is a central problem for Marxist Leninism. Um, it comes up over and over again, it's handled different ways, it's handled the purges, it's hand uh the red terror is not about that, but but the purges really kind of are. Um the uh uh the excesses of the cultural revolution are about that. Although, ironically, I mean the one of the things you can say about the Maoists is they actually did not tend to kill comrades, uh, at least not state-sanctioned violence. There was a lot of shame and due suicide, like an amazing amount of shame and due suicide, but uh, and a lot of uh you know, like what happened to Lu Xiaoqi, and uh uh I I wouldn't sanction, but even then they didn't, you know, Dung survived. Uh uh, you know, Lu Xiao Qi was not murdered by the state. I mean, at least not directly, he was not given his diabetic medication, which hastened his death. Um, but uh I say this not to like humanize you know things that I think were world historic mistakes and tragedies, but I I do think we have to understand that the intellectuals as a class are a problem for frankly, not just Marxist or the bourgeoisie, they're a problem for most societies, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:13

The um yeah, um I think that's true, and that that's why I'm very drawn to the work of Garon Terborn, not somebody that's on our kind of main reading list for today.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:24

I like his work though. Uh it's funny.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:26

I like his work a lot too because he's really focused on um reconceptualizing the dictatorship of the proletariat in the wake of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the 1970s, and he he puts forward a really nice argument, which is can you can you think of a reorganization of the professional class through the the just sort of the sublation of the division between mental and manual labor? And what he argues is for a kind of lottery system in which um um manual laborers are kind of conscripted into professional class positions and vice versa, which is slightly different than what you were talking about as what happened.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:15

Um yeah, that was that was total rustification, but I that's totally different, yeah. But sortition is the way to handle this. I mean, just be like, okay, yeah, we're just we're gonna move people around and right. Also, we'll do this at regular intervals, probably, so that so that nobody's just like stuck by unfair fate if they're bad at something.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:36

Well, that but also he then hints at a reformation of the system of meritocracy towards a recognition system based upon collective contribution to this process, which is not reducible to party allegiance. Because one of the things I think that Leninism, even in its Maoist versions and so on, if we think about Mao as a child of Lenin, which I think we should always think of him that way, uh, is that you know, there was a fetish of the centralized party.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:09

And that has to be rethought completely. And I think Terreborn in his work gives us the means to do that in a certain way, which still maintains a democratic system where it's not a one-party, not a one-party system, but that there is a worker-based uh sort of uh civil society correspondence to civil servants. So civil the whole idea of the civil servants uh become kind of like the new intelligentsia, but that is not the the reserve of an elite intellectual laboring class alone, right? That that is variegated and differentiated and sorted differently. I think that's that's one way to think about how it might have to be reorganized, but but I think you know, we might want to return to this thread of these of these main texts and and ask like the main one of the main questions, which is why is America into anti-intellectual? Is this a cliche to say this? Is this uh like how precisely are we to understand the mechanisms of what makes us anti-intellectual?

Building Counter-Publics And Worker Study

SPEAKER_00 1:50:28

And I think we've we've hit some good points, right? We've hit the pragmatist point, we hit the Puritan point, the evangelical point, the weird geographic specificity of New England and the Ivy League dynamic and its pseudo-neutral sphere. Um, I would argue that probably a lot of this should be thought vis-a-vis um the urban-rural divide, which obviously in our own time has changed very, very dramatically, but historically that has remained a very constant source of this. Where you have intellectual pockets emerge in cities. And of course, the New York intellectuals are a group that we didn't mention, but they become a very interesting phenomenon that Russell Jacobi, who we'll talk about in future episodes, really focuses a lot on. Why? Because what you get there is something even more rigorous and compelling, and this is very much Bolshevik, Bolshevism here is the reason for this, and this is what I love about Bolshevism is that the New York intellectuals created something so magnetic and so qualitatively compelling as a liberatory intellectual enterprise that was not necessarily reliant on the elite university system. Yeah, they didn't need it, they didn't need it, right? So that then becomes the incubatory kind of historical model, I think, of and that's why I'm so interested in Alan Wald's work on both on uh Bohemian intellectuals. Because again, when Wald talks about Bohemian intellectuals, the mere idea of the Bohemian intellectual after World War II is the hipster, the beat, this kind of um navel-gazing, almost quasi-narcissistic subject, right? That's very like a fad, very stylistic, and all of that. But Wald shows that American bohemianism has a much richer history that's like embedded in working class lifestyles, and it's very like this organic autodidacticism. There's um so there's a lot more uh that transcends uh and and then I think it has its sort of pinnacle um in the New York intellectual scene, which, and this kind of goes to Lash's book that you wanted to talk about, for a while had the possibility um until Stalinism came about to do what the Bolsheviks did in Russia at in terms of the creation of a bohemian mode of worker culture, etc. But that was kind of stopped. That was sort of it was sort of, I think, the red scare that really prevented the full blossoming of that. So it really only expressed itself in partial form, I would argue, right? But even Burnham himself was a part of this kind of uh vibrant public, I would call it a counter-public. That's a big concept that I like a lot. It's kind of like a um a rival to the dominant public sphere, but creates a sort of alternative set of currents that the public sphere has to contend with. Becomes like a a cultural force that's sort of like a counter hedge counterhegemonic force. I think that's the kind of activity that that I think is so uh unique. Um so I mean, again, it's uh there's many shades of bohemianism. I know like I've had a lot of debates with leftists who hate the mere idea of bohemianism. I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are of it. I have had my bohemian periods in my life, um, largely through poetry and through um, you know, a kind of uh that limb that that notion of liminality where you are kind of like subordinated to like a shitty job, but you're moonlighting in your dreaming to be something much more than that. And bohemianism is like the inhabitation of that liminal space. It's like that kind of liberatory feeling that comes with trying to write, trying to make a project for yourself, etc. So I think it's like maybe um, I don't know how you think of bohemianism, or if you think that it is um a degraded form of cultural expression, or even if it's I don't even know if it exists anymore. I don't even know if it's like a viable category today. What would you say?

SPEAKER_02 1:55:10

I would say that that uh the bohemian as a as a category is a lot less possible. I say this because I work in poetry too. It's one of my, you know, I'm trained in it, it's one of my other jobs. Um, I guess it's a job, it doesn't feel like a job these days. Um but um uh like for example, um there was a time when you went to AWP or to the New Orleans Poetry Festival, those are kind of the big two that I've been to at different points in my life, uh, where there was divisions between like the slam poets and the bohemian underground poets and the academic poets, right? There's strong divisions between them. And in fact, at AWP, you probably wouldn't see two of those categories. Um today, while there are people who maintain that, usually secondary teachers, um, they don't that doesn't exist anymore because there's but the bohemia was what the bohemia as people think of it as mid-century is a product of relatively cheap for social uh housing,

Gramsci’s Organic Intellectual Today

SPEAKER_02 1:56:17

not social all the time, but at least it was there. Um, the relative ease of getting jobs uh in a relatively high profit economy, um, even if they were shitty jobs of which you can opt out, but you could probably find something, right? Um, a total lack of a surveillance state uh of in or well, there was a surveillance state, but it was very weak. Um these things aren't really possible today, and I think also the fallout from some of their consequences in the 80s and 90s, uh, or maybe even in the 60s and 70s, has become a lot more apparent to people. Like we've gone through two rounds of like, you know, bohemians dying at 33 because they drank themselves to death or did heroin. Um, and I find that interesting. I can tell you I flirted with it in my late teens. Um uh I actually thought it was part of the left-wing soul culture because of the relationship to public rock and anarchism. Um, I was in high school, I didn't know better. Uh, and that led me to like live in squats. Well, I didn't have a trust fund or a family to fall back on, so that ended up with me being actually really for real, real homeless for a couple months, um, which kind of turned me against it. Um, but uh I have as I've aged, I have seen, you know, um maybe this is like a vulgar dialectical like uh sublation in my mind, but like I have, you know, my kind of working class, like, oh, I see all these broken families, so of course I have conservative views on families because I see all these broken ones um all the time, etc. etc. etc. Um, and people like, oh, what I'm like, yeah, working class people were more way more affected by the dissolution of families. It's a myth that it really like that it was as hard on upper middle class families. In fact, it made families like almost a luxury lifestyle good. Um uh my uh my stance is like some of the liberation of Bohemian lifestyle should be available to everyone, right? But but as a way of living, it's always frustrated me. Uh I am I am uh married to uh to a uh you know um uh someone who I would say is unquestionably on the lower rungs of of the professional class. Uh she's a researcher, she has ties to universities, but no former clout. She, you know, she's not uh she's not faculty, um, but you know, she's got a more stable pay than like an adjunct professor, et cetera, et cetera. And for a while she was really attracted to that. She's like, oh, look at these, you know, people who live in these houses and they choose the left style of poverty. And then I would always ask her, like, but what's the class origins of these people?

SPEAKER_00 1:59:18

Yeah, totally. I guess, I guess that's the question, right? Which is the neoliberal era has usurped or taken away this um possibility and the contradictions of inhabitant, then inevitably lead into a kind of lifestylism and therefore into uh the same problem that the PMC has, which is to inhabit that space, you kind of got to disavow the material realities that allowed you to be there in the first place. But at the same time, they index a field of, I think, like desire for creative leisure and this impulse to creative productivity, which I never want to abandon as a necessary right of all citizens, right? Uh in other words, this um uh uh this this this kind of uh experience itself can shape one for life insofar as it uh inculcates you into a love for intellectual activity. And this kind of goes back to something that I think in future episodes we should talk about, and I want to talk about because somebody was looking at our our kind of reading list for this series, and they're like, Where's Gramsci? And like, that's a good question. Where is Gramsci? Because Gramsci's debate with Althusser over the organic intellectual should be something we discuss. Meaning, like, I'm of the view that something like the organic intellectual intellectual Organic intellectual is still a category today, in fact. And it would behoove us to specify what that looks like today. Despite all of these impositions of the uh, you know, the neoliberal hellscape that we inhabit. The question for me is like, well, why is it that when people start labor clubs, the content of what they talk about at these so-called labor clubs are still theoretical books and ideas? Like it's the same thing I've told you about with like what Zizek told me, which is like you realize my most most purchased books are always my most technical books, right? They're not the intros, right? What that indicates to me is that um there's a great repression of intellectual engagement, but that repression conceals uh a universal desire for it, and I would never want to pander to that desire. The question is yeah, we don't need to lead a bohemian lifestyle to do it because it's not realizable and it ends up becoming a D-Class A performativity, hipsterism. But still, nonetheless, uh there may be a way in which some forms of outlaw access to intellectual activity. We need to think of ways in which that can actually transpire, where that can where that can come about. And also honoring the fact that people are liberated through intellectual engagement, that there is a form of um, that intellect has a type of itself intrinsic liberatory potential. I wouldn't say emancipatory, but I think it is valid to say that, like in Lash's studies, yeah, these intellectuals are creating paradigms of forms of self-liberation, right? And all of that

Closing: Next Up, Bourdieu And Class

SPEAKER_00 2:02:47

is something that needs to it is susstunted in our culture. And um how do I guess how do you think the construction of spheres of society where that kind of activity can be more authentically processed? That's the question to me, given how rare it is. How rare is it in any American city that you have like people discussing ideas that truly that people truly want to discuss?

SPEAKER_02 2:03:13

Yeah, well, this is an interesting problem because on one hand, you and I are both involved in relatively flee, relatively I'm not because we both have patrons, we're not completely demonetized, but we're not we're not monetized by ad sponsors. Uh are you're not at all. I only am in the free podcast and only to other podcasts, and really as exchange for for reduction in my bi hosting fees. But um uh I think about this a lot because on one hand, the intellectual end of this is readily available right now. I mean, like I can find there's a lot of AI sloping direct on YouTube, but I can find stuff on you, I can find still good quality scholarship on YouTube that I would in the 1990s would have had to have gone to an Ivy League school to ever even begin absolutely. Yeah, um at the same time, the other important parts of this are harder to get, and by that I mean like the physical community, the um the the moving the paratrocial into the social so there is a repres a like reciprocity in relations, a physical understanding of class. Um, because class class is more, I mean, gender and race are also more than identities, too, if we're complete frank, but class is more than just an identity that you have because of something that's happened to you or where you were born. And in fact, when we talk about Bardie, we're gonna talk about uh that it it's several things really, and like it that is what there is a fairness to the critique of Marxism as not dealing with the other sociological elements of class enough. Like, like I actually do think that's a fair critique of like like uh I don't share Badu's personal uh uh uh I don't share Badou's um total insistence on class origins, but I I do think that like the habitas of class, the habits that weren't incrementated as uh when we are socialized, um the the way that it affects our psychological models, the way uh I mean, even I would even say like psychoanalysis is different between classes. Um the the this is uh this has to be experienced in a reciprocal way to be truly understood. It cannot be just experienced parasocially, right? Um and I I think about that even in my own life. Like um, I talked about this a lot. When I was when I was truly working class, I had no idea who the rich and the the bourgeoisie really were. I mean, like who I thought were my enemies were like managers and the like the part of the PMC who I could actually get access to from the standpoint of a person whose family made, you know, uh in the early 90s $35,000 a year, which was still above poverty line, but was pretty low. Um, you know, I would go to someone who's who was a moderately successful professor in central Georgia, which is not like an elite professor at all, and it would still it would still read to me as wealth. Now, um according to liberal class class dynamics, we were in the same class, even right. Like um, I'm above the poverty line, they're below at the thing like they're they're below at the same like 150,000 hundred uh 150,000 a year, uh, which you know today would be 250,000 a year, whatever the poverty line's probably I'd still be above it, uh even back then. Um, and I'd say that because when I actually encountered the real bourgeoisie, the elite bourgeoisie, it was mind-boggled.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:55

Yeah, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:56

Like, and I mean, I was in some ways because I taught their kids, I was trained by them in certain ways, I was helped by them. I I know them in a way now that I did not in the past, yeah. And and even though I still perceive them as a class, as my enemy, like like absolutely, um, I had to know them to understand them, and I could not build that understanding parasocially, like uh Yeah, that's valid.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:25

Well, that that that reminds me last night I went out uh to like this art opening and I met a guy who listens to the Varn vlog, and he also runs a comic book shop, and so I'm walking home with him from this event, and he's like talking about, yeah, Varn was talking about this, and Varn was talking about that, and then I'm talking to him, I'm like, hey, you know, we should do a podcast at your comic book shop, and so now we're planning it, but uh, but it's true, and I think that my appeal to Bohemianism would be something like the enactment of local. I think that 20th century bohemianism had a very ambitious agenda, which was you know, through our revolt uh going against regulated, instrumentalized bourgeois forms of the family and cultural association and challenging hierarchy, that this is an intrinsically political act. But the irony, of course, is that if you follow this line of like how you know the counterculture has been somewhat absorbed, capitalism somewhat absorbed its demands, you then have to sort of recognize that bohemianism itself is must be completely reconceptualized. So maybe it's not even the right concept. Maybe we're like post-Bohemian. Uh, maybe it's not even valid to raise it, but still nonetheless, you're right. This tactile physical community building is an is a necessity. And I would say every listener to your program, I don't know if they should start a chapter or if there should be some type of uh I don't know. That is always like one temptation in a certain way, knowing full well that what we're doing is not directly political. This is not like some this is purely educational, right? It's a kind of but still, I mean, I think from that you'd have to ask, like, it certainly has political ramifications. It certainly can be instructive for pre-political organizing, et cetera, et cetera. But but I think, yeah, but I mean, again, going back to the main thread, America is both structurally fatally anti-intellectual as well as hyper-intellectual. And I would argue that the hyper-intellectualism is largely suppressed, very much under the surface, and maybe it just doesn't have the kind of mechanisms for outlet that that it needs, you know, in a certain way. Because most of the channels by which people can engage in intellectual activities, it has to be through these credentialized outlets. And those spaces are so securitized, so segregated, where it's literally like the official ideology is like you think if you're on the inside, if you're on the outside, you don't. And that's like the cold re realism of a lot of these elite spaces, to be honest. I've felt that myself, I've felt that alienation myself. And um, it's only propelled me to create alternative ways to learn, but it's a fight to find those alternative ways to learn. Yeah, you're right, it's easier in the age of the internet, but it's still a fucking struggle. It's still very hard to do. And um, I suppose maybe there needs to be some camaraderie and solidarity in that recognition that people that are wanting to do autodidactic learning are struggling, you know, and that there could be support given to that in some way. Um, so I don't know. I mean, but would you, I guess, you know, in our closing time, would you agree with the Hofstadter diagnosis about this anti-intellectual spirit in America? Because in a certain way, you don't want to fully embrace it because then it becomes a fate accompli, like a kind of oh yeah, uh such as is such as it's always been kind of thing. Um because I was even looking at um Sean KP's labor club thing in New York, and they get together, and my understanding of the content of what they talk about, they still talk about a lot of intellectual things.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:47

Absolutely. I mean, it's not that I mean it's it's not I'm involved with something similar here in in Utah. I I might want to go into too much of it. It's a worker center, it's it's it's it does have some formal affiliations with with formal unions, but uh half of what we do is you know supporting labor actions, um uh coordinating when the labor leadership won't coordinate. So we do you know actively union political stuff within the purview of the law, um, but we also uh you know engage in uh two two kind of two actually somewhat divergent educational tracks. One is like how to use Robert Rules of Order so that you don't get dominated by some bourgeois fuck when you're in you are um in a union meeting or in a town hall, um, but then we also do like labor theory, labor history, highly theoretical stuff, Badu, Marx, Ingalls, uh Joe Burns. Um uh we talk about the good and bad parts of Mac Levy. Um, so it is highly theoretical, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:13:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 2:13:03

Um, and this happens mostly in person, you know. Um it's actually similar to the uh to the independent labor clubs, except that we do have more ties to formal unions, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:13:20

Um uh but uh I I guess I guess I just think that that you know that maxim of the first international in its codified original the thrust of its original principles back, I think when its technical name was the International Working Man's Association, and then it subsequently changes, um is something to paraphrase like the act of emancipation is always like it does always emerge with a self, a self-affirmation, right? So there is, I think, the affirmation that uh each subject has is again going back to this Gramscian idea, which is very universally applied, every worker is also an intellectual. And I don't want to say that in some ultra-abstract idealist sense, but I would want to say that on a more like practical, granular, particular level. Some people may it's it's kind of a spectrum at that point. Some people may have more proclivity to it, but there's I think a baseline in it, right? That's that, and people contribute different things to intellectual discourse. But I I'm very I guess what I'm trying to say is that one of the things that we haven't mentioned is the definition of an intellectual is itself so ensnared with the with the exit existing division of mental labor that like there's so little room to navigate social position outside of credentialed, codified official definition of intellectuals, that I'm almost more drawn to this Gramscian idea that every worker is an intellectual. And I don't think that that's like a foolish or outlandish claim to make. Um, because in order to actually become engaged as a socialist, I do think it's necessary to steep yourself to some extent in the tradition. Theory then in that case becomes mandatory. And in that sense, uh the socialist project is intrinsically intellectual. It's like fundamentally so. Um but not in some snooty that's not like an immediate self-reflection of the category of intellectual as we know it. Perhaps it's something different. And I don't even know if that exactly makes sense. It's just something more free form that I'm just sort of blurting out right now. But um it's something we can debate later, you know, this question of the organic intellectual, because I do think that it's so different today from how it was in the 20th century. Um, so I'll leave you with that.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:12

I think that's a good point to come back. Uh uh, we'll make a list on the show notes of the books that we said were key. Yeah. Um, and maybe even some of the other ones that we mentioned. Um uh I know that uh the one of the great one of the great uh uh complaints, and I think this may have been lobbed at you too, is uh we are the socialists that tell everybody to read everything.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:43

Like yeah, I get that a lot.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:46

Yeah, it's like you know, yeah, here's 27 books you need to read by next week.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:51

But uh but how many goddamn books you need me to read? I know we should probably not say it like, oh, you have to do this.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:58

No, no, you don't you don't have to do it, but we will make it available for you as an optional curriculum for for you and uh um to to make your if you so choose. I think that's actually my what I always say to that is like I'm not here to tell you guys you have to read everything I read, I'm here to say that this is a curriculum you could pursue if you were interested in this area, and um I I I do think, however, dealing with the crisis because you know the the big cliche you'll hear right now, even from people on the left, is like, oh, we live in idiocracy. And I'm like, we actually don't. I mean, that movie's about eugenics for one thing, but um uh but also there is a way in which um I agree with you that if we say America's inherently anti-intellectual, it's a fit of complain. If we if we deny it, we're being naive. I used to try to deny it because there's anti-intellectual tendencies everywhere I've ever been on earth, and I've been I've been you know on four continents at this point. Um but there does seem to be something about the incentive the incentivization of American intellectuals to be anti-intellectual that is a little, and this is that's the irony is very highly intellectual people in the United States still have very anti-intellectual attitudes.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:20

That's right, that's exactly right, right? And I think a lot of that is caused from their vulgar capitalist realism in the sense that they insist upon a conception of the world, which I think is basically about a spontaneous conception of the division of labor, whereby an intellectual is a small caste of people designated to do this work. They check in and they check out, just like a worker does. It's very liberal, it's a very repressive liberal idea. But other than that, uh anyone else that would aspire to maybe is kind of a pretender. So they have a people tend to have a very difficult time thinking about a type of intellectual enterprise that would be in defiance to existing division of labor. Um, I mean, that's something I've dealt with my whole life. Um, and that's actually an interesting thing you say that people fetish work, or I wouldn't even say that. I think actually people in elite academic spaces have an inbuilt hostility to people thinking outside of that lane, like stay in your lane, right? Yeah, that yeah, the the stay in your lane logic is very it's huge and it's pernicious, and I I feel as if I've been fighting it my whole life.

SPEAKER_02 2:19:48

Well, i you see this in the distinction between classism and class warriorism, like but but that like liberals will occasionally mention that classism is a problem. I sometimes say classism is a problem too, but classism is not what politically motivates me. I'm not here just to get the dignity of of whatever class I belong to, whatever class I was born in. I am also here because I think like I mean, I one, I want to end class society, that's more than a dignity issue. And two, um, I don't think well, I do think workers' dignity is important, uh, and sometimes Marxists have historically like not gotten this. I don't think that they just want to be like, oh, you know, if all we have to do is give you the appropriate praise in society for what you do, and things will get better. And sometimes that liberal conception is just that. It's you know, like, but but stay in your lane, like you're still fixing my car, right? Like, you're still doing this very clear role of production, and you still have limited accumulation, and and that's not gonna change, but I am gonna treat you better and not talk shit about you, like yeah, that's that's a very interesting point, which is working class subjectivity.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:08

If you truly want to face it at the at the granular level of its own internal contradictions, the idea of reaffirming its desire for stability is itself kind of a misnomer because you often can't see the structural basis of its fundamental instability. So, what actually would it mean to give, to grant dignity? It would actually imply, and this is why I think the working class still could be called the proletariat, because in order to alleviate the condition of today's working class, it would mean something more revolutionary than just saying, Oh, let me make you a little bit happier with what you do. Because the truth of the working class condition is that that wouldn't be adequate. It wouldn't, it wouldn't make sense to say that because it's an over-determined contradiction, right? Right. You could maybe say that at one point about the industrial proletariat, you know? Like you go to those old towns in West Virginia that used to have some glory. Uh like now it's uh such a level of fragmentation that is set in that it's it's difficult to even wax nostalgic, especially now when we get into like multi-generations so far removed from the industrial proletarian experience, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:22:34

Two, three, sometimes four generations.

SPEAKER_00 2:22:37

Yeah, you know what I mean? It's um it's wild. I mean, we are we are the last generation which has oral histories, tactile in person of the of the generation that lived through the second world war, right? We are the last ones.

SPEAKER_02 2:22:54

Um I mean, my grandfather was one of those people, and he's now very dead. So right, um, but it's just uh I I remember realizing that we'd almost lost everyone from the first world war like 20 years ago. I guess that was like 20 out of the you know, and then realizing like, oh, there's not many World War II survivors left. And I will also say for most Americans, and maybe this is also anti-intellectual in a way, the 20th century for them is 1950 to 19 to 1999. Like it is not, I mean, maybe, maybe 1945, but the New Deal and the like the 1920s, oh my god, it seems like a completely different universe than most people.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:36

Oh no, totally. I think I think the Keynesian welfare state is like a tabula rasa for most people, and there's a great forgetting uh that that that that takes place there. But um, yeah, in fact, my grandfather uh fought in the first world war, and I have his periscope right behind me on my bookshelf from trench warfare, where he had a double mirror where you look in the bottom and then it reflects up to the top so you can see above the trench. It's one of my favorite possessions. I think I showed it to you when you came to my place. Yeah, you did. Uh it's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:24:10

But it is it is it is strange. My other grandfather was uh fighter in the Korean War, which is uh much more much less heroic in adventure, but nonetheless, um I don't even know if I would call World War One heroic. I would not actually, but but it's not like these people chose that. Um they were all drafted. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:31

That's the other thing, is that World War I generation had a deeply repressed politicization over that event, whereby um my grandfather was deeply radicalized by it, but had I think no adequate channels to express his discontent from it, right? So um, anyways.

SPEAKER_02 2:24:57

Well, I I do think uh this is a good place to stop. We'll we will make these resources available to you. I hope that you guys pick up from these case studies uh something because there's a reason why we're doing them. Um uh I know that we were kind of all over the place with the case studies today, but uh when we talk about Burdu, which I believe will be our next episode, there'll be a lot more to talk about because you know we're going we're going after homo academicist uh and also distinction, but we have to get into uh you know Badou's model of class and his. I mean, I feel like Burdu is uh is one of these radicals who've been made safe by liberals, uh denuding him of I mean yeah, because uh because a lot of it like liberals will talk about like cultural and social capital and things, but they don't really get all the implications of class symbolic violence, habitas, and I mean, I mean I would actually think Bardew's implications for intellectuals are harsher than mine.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:01

Um, so extremely so no, no. I mean it's a uh I mean there's uh Schadenfreude in the fact that he's the number one most cited intellectual, because that's like wow, okay. Uh that tells you a lot, you know. Um, and uh no, it's it's very rich though, and I think it'll be it'll be good to unearth this because it's also a way of seeing social reality that's very, very, very singular and very um systematic, it's comprehensive. I mean, he's a systematic thinker, right? So um he gives you uh uh an idea of what he calls symbolic misrecognition, which he claims is structural. So not only does he give you a sense of how habitus shapes your worldview, but he also gives you a sense of how there's like a structural deceit in every habitus, like a blind spot, and he helps you locate that. So it's an extremely, extremely robust and interesting uh philosophical approach, so well sociological, but he also wrote a great book on philosophy, this book on Heidegger, which I'll send you and we can discuss that as well. Uh, it's one of his best books, actually. And he wrote a great book on Pascal, so he has written a lot on philosophy. He's a huge critic of post structuralism. He's actually a huge critic of French theory, even though he's a French philosopher. Um so that'll be a good one.