Organic Intellectuals

Philosophy and Religion, Part 9a

Organic Intellectuals

Father Joe Falkiner (featured in yesterday’s post) also mentions Gramsci, and organic intellectuals. The main item today in this penultimate part of our current course has the long title: “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies: From Organic to Committed Intellectuals or Critical Pedagogy, Commitment, and Praxis”. It is by Gustavo Fischman and Peter McLaren, who are present-day exponents of Critical Pedagogy, or in other words what is referred to by Joe Falkiner as “the educational methods of Paulo Friere”.

The McLaren/Fischman article immediately starts to grapple with “the notion of teachers as transformative intellectuals”. We are back with Cyril Smith’s problem with Lenin – the problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of “outside agitators” – and the problem of Marx's aim of “development of communist consciousness on a mass scale” (which Cyril Smith somehow managed to simultaneously approve of).

How are you going to make revolution, if the maker of revolution must be the masses, and not yourself?

Alternatively, if you had a method of educating the masses, what else would you need in the way of revolution? Is there any difference between politics and political education? Or is it a trinity that is at the same time a unity, namely: Educate, Organise, Mobilise?

Paulo Freire concentrated his intellectual fire on the single most practical priority, which at the same time requires the deepest philosophical clarity, and called it “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.

Fischman and McLaren make clear, by reference to Gramsci, that such a Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a direct form of class struggle. It is a direct confrontation with the interests of the bourgeois state. It is an open contradiction of the bourgeois class dictatorship as applied through state-led education as well as through the instructive function of the judiciary.

The authors note that Gramsci is often misappropriated (see also CU). They write: “Because Gramsci identified civil society as an arena used by the ruling class to exert its hegemony over the society, the struggle for Gramsci was not to transform civil society but rather, as Holst points out, ‘to build proletarian hegemony’.” That is, proletarian ascendancy, also known as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fischman and McLaren are rejecting the view of “hegemony” as a “Third Way” that could by-pass revolutionary confrontation.

After discussing Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, and as if to answer Cyril Smith’s doubts, they quote Gramsci as follows:

“Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the construction of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organizers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of ‘specialized’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas.”

Fischman and McLaren go on to argue for the “committed intellectual”, with “an unwavering commitment to the struggle against injustice”. What is the difference between a committed intellectual and a communist party member? No difference at all! In that sense, what McLaren and Fischman have managed to do is to compose a very elegant justification of the vanguard party, rooted in the most profound philosophy.

Illustration: “Question Everything!” – the sometime logo of the Communist University of London

Please download and read this text:

Organic Intellectuals, 2005, McLaren and Fischman (10053 words)

Further reading:

Liberation Theology, 2006, Falkiner, L & C Boff (5590 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [438]	Development, Rural and Urban	5/10	18 August 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	11/33	18 August 2010
CU [2806]	Philosophy and Religion	9/10	19 August 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

Liberation Theology

Philosophy and Religion, Part 9

Liberation Theology

In the last third of the 20^th Century a phenomenon arose that recalled Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, where Marx said:

“…the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.”

And:

“The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

In other words the criticism of religion was only a starting-point and not the main business. The main business is the restoration of humanity to itself, not so much from out of the clutches of the religious clerics, but more so from the under the boot of the bourgeoisie. The struggle begins, not so much against religion, but within religion.

And so it came to pass that in the 1960s there arose, within and among the ranks of the religious, a movement which had all the essential aims that Marx had. This was Liberation Theology. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in particular recognised it for what it was, and suppressed it. The hierarchy of the Protestant denominations saw it for what it was, and co-opted and neutered its remnants, revising the “base community” idea into the sectarian “basic Christian community”, and thereby reversing the liberation that Liberation Theology had brought. But in the mean time it had a life and it left a legacy.

Father Joe Falkiner used sometimes to attend the Communist University. The main attached/linked item today begins with an article of his from 2006 on Liberation Theology and Scripture, and continues with a short history of Liberation Theology from two more of its well-known practitioners, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff.

Father Joe quickly mentions that Liberation Theology “often used the educational methods of Paulo Friere”, and that they used original scriptural texts, just as the Communist University uses mainly original texts, and preferably not second-hand commentary or analysis.  Father Joe writes: “… the theology was done jointly by these people in the shantytowns and their priests, not solely by traditional theologians based in seminaries and universities.”

This is what we do with politics, instead of religion, using Paulo Freire’s methods.

We do not have a good picture of Father Joe Falkiner. Instead, the second picture is of Bartolomé de las Casas, a member of the same order (Order of Preachers) as Father Joe.

Please download and read this text:

Liberation Theology, 2006, Falkiner, L and C Boff (5590 words)

Further reading:

Organic Intellectuals, 2005, McLaren and Fischman (10053 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [438]	Development, Rural and Urban	5/10	18 August 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	11/33	18 August 2010
CU [2806]	Philosophy and Religion	8/10	17 August 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

Anti-Fascism of the World Cup

On Soccer and Bullfighting

Vicente Navarro, Counterpunch, 18 August 2010

I enjoy watching soccer. I used to play it in my youth in Spain, as do millions of Spanish youngsters. It is the most popular game in the country, particularly in working-class neighbourhoods. But soccer also has a political meaning in Spain that, for the most part, was missed in the international reporting on the World Cup in South Africa.

Under Franco’s dictatorship, one of the cruellest in twentieth-century Europe (for every political assassination in Mussolini’s Italy, there were 10,000 such assassinations in Franco’s Spain), the only place where Spaniards could express their feelings in public was at soccer matches. In Catalonia, a region that was particularly repressed because of its left-wing leanings and its support for the democratically elected Popular Front during the years of the Republic, the most popular soccer club was the Barcelona club – popularly referred to in Catalan (a language forbidden immediately following the fascist coup) as “el Barça.” This was more than a soccer club. It was the rallying point for the democratic forces, not only in Catalonia but in other parts of Spain, in the struggle against fascism. The matches between Barça and the Royal Soccer Club of Madrid (favored by the Franco regime) were electrifying. When Barça won a game, the numbers of police on the streets of Barcelona would be tripled to repress the popular joy.

When democracy was re-established, the transition took place in conditions very favourable to the conservative, pro-fascist forces. The electoral law was clearly skewed to discriminate against the progressive regions of Spain. For example, in Soria, a very conservative region, only 30,000 votes are needed to elect a member of the Spanish parliament. In Barcelona, 150,000 votes are needed. The state apparatus, led by the king (whom Franco appointed as his successor), remained in fascist hands. But through left-wing pressure and (illegal) workers’ strikes, Catalonia was able to obtain some limited self-government. Then in 2007, a Catalan Constitution giving broad powers to the government of Catalonia was approved by the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and in a referendum by the Catalan population.

This was unacceptable to the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), successor to the fascist apparatus and presided over by Fraga Iribarne, a former minister in Franco’s government. The PP set out to stop adoption of the Catalan Constitution and took the matter to the nation’s Constitutional Court. This Court is loaded with judges from the Franco years, most of whom had to swear loyalty to the fascist regime. It took the judges four years to decide on the constitutionality of the new Catalan Constitution, and when they did this year, they vetoed many of its important provisions – including the use of Catalan as the preferred language in Catalonia. They justified this on the basis of the “need to keep Spain united,” which is the same slogan used during the 1936 coup that destroyed the Republic and repressed Catalan identity. The Court decision was a clear provocation to the Catalan people. Five days later, one and a half million Catalans took to the streets of Barcelona in protest.

This, then, was the background to the World Cup in South Africa. The Spanish team won, and, understandably, the Spanish people went wild. The PP tried to tout this expression of joy as an indicator of Spanish patriotism, at odds with Catalan calls for autonomy. The problem with this scenario, however, is that five of the players on the Spanish soccer team were from Barça, and all eight goals by the Spanish team during the World Cup series were made by players from the Barcelona club – the symbol of Catalan identity. When the Spanish team celebrated their victory, the players carried not only Spanish flags but Catalan flags. In reality, without the Barça players, Spain would not have won the World Cup.

In Catalonia, as people celebrated the victory, some Spanish flags were waved, but fewer than in the rest of Spain. The Spanish flag is the monarchical flag, and pro-monarchy feeling is not very strong in Catalonia. For many Catalans, as well as many other Spaniards, the true Spanish flag is the red, gold, and violet flag of the Republic, not the red, gold, and red of Spain under the monarchy and under Franco. The Spanish government tried to use the soccer victory as a way of promoting the Spanish flag, which the left has never considered its own.

Where does bullfighting enter into this story? The Catalan revenge for the Constitutional Court’s decision on the new Constitution came when the parliament of Catalonia voted, in late July, to ban bullfighting, which is considered by the Spanish right wing as the “national fiesta” in the rest of Spain and as important to the national identity.  The initiative was led by animal rights groups, but there’s no doubt that the anger of large numbers of Catalans toward the Spanish right-wing and the institutions of the Spanish state, and especially the Constitutional Court, played a major role in the ban on bullfighting in Catalonia. Just weeks before, the press had published photographs of three members of the Court enjoying a bullfight. That did it. Within days, the Catalan parliament’s ban on bullfighting was passed.  None of the above was published in the press of the U.S.

Vicente Navarro, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins University and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Services. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions with which he is affiliated. Dr Navarro can be reached at vnavarro@jhsph.edu

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro08182010.html

Go to UJ Bunting Road tomorrow, not Doornfontein

Solidarity Forever!

The Communist University recommends that you proceed to UJ Bunting Road tomorrow afternoon to attend the Moses Kotane Memorial Lecture. Please see the notice and map, both given below).

This means that the Communist University will not be taking place as previously advertised, in the UJ Doornfontein Campus tomorrow evening.

The opportunity to hear these two leading comrades, and the conjuncture of mass working-class action in the form of the Public Service strike and the Car Workers’ strike, means that it makes more proletarian vanguard sense to mobilise for a good attendance at the YCL event the same evening.

Therefore, comrades, instead of coming to the CU, please go to the following event:

Moses Kotane Memorial Lecture

To be addressed by the SACP DGS and the YCLSA DNS

At UJ, Bunting Road, Johannesburg

The Young Communist League in the Linda Jabane District (Johannesburg District) will hold a memorial lecture in the Memory of Cde. Moses Kotane.   Comrade Kotane was one of South Africa`s greatest Communist revolutionaries. He gave an indigenous meaning to the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism and through his life won a place as one of the most outstanding working class and national leaders of our country.

Details of the Memorial lecture:

• DATE: 19 August 2010
• TIME: 16h30
• VENUE: University of Johannesburg (Bunting Road) - Auckland Park - B Red 20

Speakers:

The memorial lecture will be delivered by the Deputy National Secretary of the YCLSA  Cde. Khaye Nkwanyana, together with the Deputy General Secretary of the SACP, Cde. Jeremy Cronin.

For more information

Contact

Happy (District Secretary of Linda Jabane) 079 534 1530

Or

Gugu Ndima 076 783 1516

National Spokesperson  

Be Red!

Who decides?

Philosophy and Religion, Part 8c

 Who decides?

This is a course on Philosophy and Religion. In Part 8, so far, we have looked at three chapters of Paulo Friere’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, with Chapter 1 of that book being taken as the default discussion text for study-circle purposes.

Although “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is on the face of it a book about education, yet what we have found is that the author has felt himself compelled to reach down to the very foundations of philosophy so as to find a firm ground upon which to rest his educational theories. In the process, Freire enriches the literature of philosophy, as well as that of education, by re-stating the dialectics of the Subject and the Object, using it to illuminate education, and as a return gift to philosophy, providing an object lesson in the meaning of philosophy.

That is a good illustration of what philosophy is for. Similarly, in the world of urbanism and housing, philosophy is an absolutely practical necessity, and although the fields are different, yet the philosophy applied remains much the same.

John Turner, author of “Housing by People” (see the linked chapters below), was preoccupied with the same problem as Freire. In his case he problematised it as a relationship of “paternalism and filialism”, which is immediately recognisable as the very opposite of the “co-intent Subjects” proposed as a solution by Freire. Turner writes:

“Paternalism and filialism, the modern descendents of attitudes more generally associated by Europeans with the Middle Ages, are still very common attitudes in Britain. These are especially evident in the common assumption that the 'ordinary' citizen or 'layman', is utterly dependent on the 'extraordinary' citizen or the 'professional', who cultivates the mystery of his or her activity in order to increase dependency and professional fees.”

(Paternalism means fatherliness; Fillialism means taking the posture of the son, or child; Tuner means that the state takes a parental role, while the people are infantilised).

Turner’s diagram

The diagram above is from Turner’s “Housing by People”. It shows “who decides” in two different kinds of housing project: the locally self-governing or autonomous one; and the centrally administered or heteronomous type.

Turner is saying that it is not necessary for people to be so autonomous that they must do everything for themselves, like land-owning peasants. Such a life is very hard, cruel, backward, limited and unsocialised. Yet if all decisions are taken out of the hands of individuals, they cease, to that extent, to have “agency”; they cease to be Subjects; they cease to be free; they cease to be human.

In South Africa, with its “RDP Houses”, it is easy to see that nearly all the decisions that affect the people are taken far above their heads. The right-hand part of the above diagram applies, in full. The possibilities for leaving decisive power in the hands of the popular masses, like in the left-hand part of the diagram, have been closed.

Such decisions include the location, demarcation and distribution of houses, their design and building, and the provision of amenities and services. The people who must then live in these houses do so without any of their autonomous culture, except to the extent that it is contained in their living persons.

Karl Marx, in the Manifesto, wrote that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” By that application of philosophy to the field of housing, we can see that what South Africa has executed is something far less than freedom. Even such freedom as could have been available, has been over-run by “heteronomy”.

Please download and read this text:

Housing by People, C1 & 6, Who decides, 1976, Turner (7901 words)

Further reading:

Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 1, 1970, Freire (9382 words)

Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 2, 1970, Freire (5218 words)

Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Chapter 3, 1970, Freire (13444 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [438]	Development, Rural and Urban	5/10	17 August 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	9/33	10 August 2010
CU [2833]	Philosophy and Religion	8/10	16 August 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive