DSA – Empty Hands History

Socializing Truth: Marxism, Gramsci, and Intellectual Struggle

It is common for our DSA chapter to lament our over-abundance of “intellectuals,” given our location in a university town. This lamentation often produces paralysis rather than action. What might it mean to embrace the role of Marxist intellectuals and engage in local struggle from that position? The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned and killed by Mussolini’s fascist regime, provides useful tools for us to address this question and sharpen our political practice.

In last night’s DSA Marxist Reading Group, we discussed Gramsci’s essays “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism” and “The Formation of Intellectuals,” from the Prison Notebooks. In these essays, he lays out the role of Marxist intellectuals: to combat capitalist “common sense,” produce “good sense,” and socialize and propagate truth to make it a basis for action. This can only be done by active “new intellectuals” through sustained contact with the people.

Here are key concepts from the texts:

Common sense: the received ideas and norms of society, “borrowed conceptions” of the world that render people subordinate to the capitalist social order. These are the ideas of the ruling class. The social function of intellectuals is to reproduce this common sense through institutions including schools, churches, media, etc.

Ideology: common sense functions as an ideology, i.e., “a world view showing itself implicitly in art, law, economic activity and in all the manifestations of individual and collective life.”

Hegemony: the dominance of capitalism through reproduction of its “common sense” to convince the masses that the current system is natural and beneficial to all. “The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the direction imprinted on social life by the fundamental ruling class, a consent which comes into existence ‘historically’ from the ‘prestige’ (and hence from the trust) accruing to the ruling class from its position and its function in the world of production.”

Organic intellectuals: these are the “natural” intellectuals who reproduce common sense. They are connected with the masses and play important social roles in producing and reproducing ideology. Capitalism has organic intellectuals of its own, for “the capitalist entrepreneur creates with himself the industrial technician, the political economist, the organizer of a new culture, of a new law, etc.” The socialist movement must develop its own organic intellectuals who will produce the new common sense of a new social bloc.

“Organic quality of thought and cultural solidarity could only have been brought about if there had existed between the intellectuals and the simple people that unity which there should have been between theory and practice; if, that is, the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those masses, if they had elaborated and made coherent the principles and problems which those masses posed by their practical activity, in this way constituting a cultural and social bloc.”

Good sense: the role of intellectuals is not to “discover” abstract truths but rather to criticize common sense and “socialize” and propagate truth in order to make it the basis for lived action. This is the production of what Gramsci sometimes calls “good sense.”

The new intellectual: a person of action who unites theory and practice (not a disconnected academic). “The mode of existence of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, the external and momentary arousing of sentiments and passions, but must consist of being actively involved in practical life, as a builder, an organizer, ‘permanently persuasive’ because he is not purely an orator.”

Creation of intellectual cadres: The new intellectuals cannot act alone. We must collectively develop our analysis and unite theory with practice. This is the role of the Marxist Reading Group and the Socialist Night School. “Critical self-consciousness signifies historically and politically the creation of intellectual cadres: a human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself and does not become independent ‘by itself,’ without organizing itself (in a broad sense) and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is, without organizers and leaders, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus distinguishing itself concretely in a stratum of people who ‘specialize’ in its conceptual and philosophical elaboration.”

Role of the party: “We must emphasize the importance and significance which the political parties have in the modern world in the elaboration and propagation of conceptions of the world, inasmuch as they elaborate an ethic and a policy suited to themselves, that is, they act almost as historical ‘experimenters’ with these conceptions. . . the parties are the elaborators of new integrated and all-embracing intellectual systems, in other words the annealing agents of the unity of theory and practice in the sense of real historical process.”

Lessons from the example of intellectual/cultural struggle within religion:

“Certain essentials are deducible from this for every cultural movement which aims to replace common sense and the former conceptions of the world in general: (1) never tire of repeating its arguments (changing the literal form): repetition is the most effective didactic mean of influencing the popular mind; (2) work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-widening strata of the people, that is, by giving personality to the amorphous element of the masses, which means working to produce cadres of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses though remaining in contact with them and becoming ‘the stay of the corset.’ This second necessity, if satisfied, is the one which really changes the ‘ideological panorama’ of an age.”

Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School

I’m taking a seminar on Public Humanities to inform my own public history work, particularly my approach to oral history projects and public events. For the first session, one of our readings—Robyn Schroeder, “The Rise of the Public Humanists (2021)—traces the history of Public Humanities as a concept to its birth in the 1980s. Since then, Schroeder reflects, there have been two somewhat distinct models of public humanities: vertical and horizontal. After giving brief summaries of the differences, this post reflects on my own research as well as my political education work with DSA. I conclude that Ithaca DSA’s approach to our Socialist Night School is exemplary of a horizontal, dialogical approach to collective knowledge production.

In her article on the public humanities, Schroeder explains that the “vertical” model promotes a “one-way flow of knowledge from the university to the public (15).” This is informed by a laudable desire to break down the barrier between the academic and public realms by sharing knowledge. The model is problematic, however, because it assumes that only academics have access to real knowledge and that the public is simply an empty receptacle waiting to be filled.

A horizontal model, on the other hand, takes a more dialogical and collaborative approach to public scholarship. It, too, seeks to break down the barriers between academia and the public, but does so in a way that avoids reifying the position of the university as the ultimate source of knowledge. Practitioners of this model seek to engage with communities to design and implement projects together with the ultimate goal of both advancing scholarly knowledge and providing real benefit to the community.

Naturally, I would like for my own work to follow the second model. Yet for me the lines appear more blurred, as I straddle the line between academia and the “community” that I study—that is to say, the radical left. My dissertation aims to be the book on late 20^th century anarchist history that I would like to read, and which I think will be useful for my “own” community. It is based in large part on extensive oral history interviews and I am in constant dialogue and collaboration with others on the left, both within and outside of the academy. I hope that this public humanities seminar will provide me with more tools to further develop my approach.

In any case, Schroeder’s article made me reflect as well on the public programming I help to run through Ithaca DSA’s political education working group. I think that this programming, which includes an internal Marxist reading group and a public-facing monthly Socialist Night School, follows the horizontal model of dialogic, collaborative education and knowledge production.

Although I personally designed the syllabus for our Marxist reading group, it is based on ongoing conversations in the group about what we want to read. Given my own background in the material and my experience teaching it in a college setting, I inevitably play somewhat of a “teacher” role in the group. But we structurally decenter my role by rotating co-facilitation of the meetings and by organizing discussion in rounds so that everyone has equal chance to speak. For the coming year, we are planning a series of mini-units on various topics which will each be designed and implemented by different members of the group.

Our Socialist Night School meets monthly to provide public education and discussion about radical politics. The education is self-consciously dialogical and democratically oriented. Each month, we collectively decide on a new topic and choose two or three short readings, usually including a video, that attendees are encouraged but not required to read. We then develop discussion questions to guide the conversation. The night school meetings themselves, which usually attract between twenty to forty participants, center collective discussion in small groups. Each session begins with a short introduction before we turn to an invited speaker to give a ten to fifteen minute informal talk. The remainder of the event is dedicated to discussion.

Discussions take place in breakout rooms of around four to six participants, each of which has a DSA member facilitating it. The discussions, which are structured in rounds so that everyone has a chance to contribute to each topic, often lead to vibrant personal and intellectual exchange. Indeed, they are crucial sites of collective knowledge production for the local Ithaca left, especially when they enable intergenerational exchange of experiences. After these breakout rooms are finished, we come back together to share out from the discussions and collectively reflect on what we have learned. We end by explicitly addressing how to apply lessons from the reading and discussion to our political work in Ithaca.

Rather than a vertical one-way flow of knowledge from the university to “the public,” the Socialist Night Schools exemplify the horizontal co-production and distribution of knowledge. This is a question of good teaching pedagogy just as much as it is one of Public Humanities as a discipline. Of course, the ultimate goal of the Socialist Night School is to collectively educate ourselves and to strategize about how to build a truly free and democratic world, beginning locally in our own communities. This is a project to which I remain fully committed.

Reflections on Defeat and Disorientation: Nine Years on the Left

I have been feeling very politically unstable and unsure lately. Experiencing several projects fall apart in the past couple years as I struggled to hold them together while immersed in my PhD really took a toll on me. I’m currently teaching a course on anarchism to a class of 18-year-old freshmen—my age when I first got involved in radical politics with Occupy Boston—so I’ve been reflecting on that time period. During Occupy the possibilities seemed endless and I was convinced of the rightness of our approach and the imminence of change. Now I feel cautious, a bit bitter, and so unsure of what the correct political approach is. My optimism has been tempered by almost nine years of defeats, by countless hours poured into campaigns and projects of many kinds, often with barely anything to show for it.

I generally maintain an anti-state left orientation, but I simply do not know how to get from where we are to the world I want to see. My growing disillusionment came to an inflection point last fall. The anarchist projects to which I had dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy for the previous two years—Food Not Bombs and an infoshop we named the Antidote—had fallen apart, in part due to a lack of structure and unwillingness to have serious conversations about politics and strategy. An attempt to establish a local version of Cooperation Jackson likewise collapsed. Bitter from the latest setback, I felt incapable of mustering the energy to co-found yet another organization. Although I flirted with the idea of founding a Black Rose chapter, what I wanted was simply to join a national organization with an established structure and plug into the work they were doing.

In light of this disorientation, and in the context of living in a relatively small town without many options for a political home, I joined DSA. Yet I quickly discovered that our DSA chapter suffered the same basic problem as the anarchist groups I had left: an aversion to real conversations about our politics, our goals, and our strategy. Months into my involvement, the truth set in: I had nothing in common with the people in my chapter. I disagreed with their politics, though I was willing to accept this. We did not have a shared cultural understanding, as I had with the punk-adjacent anarchist crowd. I came away from every meeting more frustrated than the last. Worst of all, we barely even did anything political. I began to see the organizational structure as an impediment to taking action. A week ago, I finally decided that I was done. This experience has driven home a simple point to me: if you want to take action, then you need to find a few friends and comrades wherever you can, link up with others with similar ideas and affinities, and take action together. You may find these people in your local DSA chapter or you may not.

I don’t currently have the capacity to help found yet another small organization and struggle to keep it together—if that would even be possible in the context of coronavirus. So I try to take a step back, focus on my studies and their political implications, teach my class on anarchism, and regroup. Yet I am wracked by feelings of political impotence and frustrated by inaction. The relative success of the Bernie campaign was of course a spot of hope in all this, as is the burgeoning climate justice movement led by young people. But in some ways it all feels too little, too late (particularly after Bernie’s defeat) and I don’t have the patience for the long hours of strategic discussion to produce the reorientations that we desperately need. Instead, I read for hours each day desperately searching for lessons from those who came before.

In this context, I found resonance in a piece by Nietzsche that I recently read “On The Use and Abuse of History For Life.” “To be sure, we need history […] we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action […] We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life.” So I ask myself: how can I work to put history into the service of life? Perhaps this question will help reorient me in a disoriented time. I want—I need—to rediscover a new sense of possibility and a new mode of political engagement. Maybe then I will recover my previous faith in our collective project of building a new world.

This post is by nature quite melancholic. But as I survey the last nine years I am also struck by how much I have learned and grown since my days in Occupy Boston. In many ways I am now much better equipped to contribute to radical projects. Yet I have also calcified and have brought a certain bitterness to my recent activities. As I struggle to correct the course, I am reminded of the way that CrimethInc. ended their somewhat satirical but very earnest 2006 CrimethInc. Shareholder Report: An Incomplete Report on and Critical Analysis of the Past Decade of Activity: OUTDO US! OUTDO US! OUTDO US!

I wrote most of this before the coronavirus crisis really hit. The crisis has produced a widespread disorientation and the left has struggled to respond. But in the mutual aid networks and beyond, we see glimpses of the new world struggling to be born.