In the 1930s, left intellectuals were involved in worker
education and writing books like Mathematics for the Millions. They
considered it an ordinary, minimal responsibility of privileged people
to help others who’d been deprived of formal education to enter into
high culture.
Today’s counterparts of these 1930s left intellectuals are telling
people, You don’t have to know anything. It’s all junk, a power
play, a white male conspiracy. Forget about rationality and
science. In other words, put those tools in the hands of your
enemies. Let them monopolize everything that works and makes
sense.
Plenty of very honorable left intellectuals think this tendency is
liberatory, but I think they’re wrong. A lot of personal
correspondence on related topics between me and my close, valued
old friend Marc Raskin has been published in a book of his. There
were similar interchanges in Z Papers in 1992–93, both with Marc
and a lot of other people with whom I basically feel in sympathy, but
with whom I differ very sharply on this issue.
Excommunicated by the illuminati
You’ve long been excommunicated, if I can use that word, not only
from the mass media but also from the “illuminati” circles of the
Upper West Side [of Manhattan] and their publications, like the
New York Review of Books [often referred to simply as the New
York Review].
It has nothing to do with me.What happened?
T he New York Review started in 1964. From about 1967 to
about 1971, as political engagement grew among young intellectuals,
it was open to dissident analysis and commentary from people like
Peter Dale Scott, Franz Schurmann, Paul Lauter, Florence Howe
and myself.