Philosophy and Religion, 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.
