Revolution or Barbarism

On Working Class Intellectualism

Morning Comrades.

This might seem like a far stretch but stick with me for few minutes- this will go from the Olympics to Academia to what needs to be done. Ok, I am sure that most of you are aware of the Breakdancing, sorry I will not call breaking no matter what, situation at the Olympics, specifically, the “performance” by the Australian person that to this left me with more questions than answers.

I am far from being able to judge breakdancing but what I saw during Australia’s contribution to the event was so utterly confusing, and has been subject to a slew of ideas since then. For what it is worth, I thought that the routine was beyond awful and left me to think that there had to be a point to it all. As it turns out, Rachel, the person performing is a lecturer at Macquarie University where she received her Bachelors in contemporary music and her PhD in cultural studies and her PhD thesis was on the culture of breakdancing in Sydney and how it relates to gender, with the academic going on to write a handful of journal articles on the topic.

Now, I have always taken my academic life with a massive grain of salt. I’ve always know that it serves no purpose other than my ego, and to be clear, it was my ego that made me pursue and finish my degree(s) - only to prove that a working class pleb like myself could do this and more importantly, I have never equated those degrees with the work that has and needs to be done. However, so much of academic work, not all, but a lot of it, serves no other purposes than upholding a hierachial structure of control, control of discourse, ideas and thoughts that on the one hand shape material realities, the rule of the bourgeoisie and on the other, the maintenance of the status quo. It is additionally, an incredible tool within the capitalists class war by keeping plebs such as myself out of reaching titles that forces them to at least acknowledge us. Granted, degrees can and do offer structure in regards to learning, but for whose benefits and whose class?

The above example illustrates this glasshouse of control most brilliantly. Yet, and this is the important part, anti-intellectualism is the biggest enemy of revolution. The point here is that intellectualism has to serve a purpose other than the upholding of a structure that exist to control us. Furthermore, intellectualism has to exist with consequence, or as others have put it:

“Any theory you got, practice it. And when you parctice it, you make mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory and then it will be corrected theory…A lot of us read and read and read, but we don’t get any practice.”

Fred Hampton

Additionally:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx

With that, let’s get into what a working class intellectualism is and can, should be.