Philosophy, Religion and Class Struggle, Part 9a
Peter McLaren and Gustavo Fischman
Organic Intellectuals
Father Joe
Falkiner (featured in the previous course 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 cadre? 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.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Organic Intellectuals, 2005, McLaren and Fischman.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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