What is a Working-Class Intellectual?

WHAT IS A WORKING-CLASS INTELLECTUAL?

Larry Busk and Billy GoehringUniversity of Oregon

“Working-class intellectual”—the term has a peculiar ring to it,

paradoxical and even bordering on the oxymoronic, like

“calculated error” or “conspicuous absence.” What it names is

indeed a paradoxical and almost oxymoronic circumstance, though

its significance is more than semantic. Both components are

political categories, and so their combination is a paradox of a

political nature. The purpose of this essay is to develop an

understanding of the antinomial but politically important meaning

of this curious-sounding conjunction. This will first require

accounts of “intellectual” and “working-class” as individual

terms.

A methodological note is necessary before proceeding: If we

take up the question of the working-class intellectual, it is

only as self narration and self disclosure. We regard the intellectual

and the working-class not from the vantage point of detached or

aloof observers, but from the inside looking out—that is, not

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only as objects but also as subjects. Our perspective will not

encompass a vision of “the intellectual” or “the working-class” as

some immutable essence. Every gesture will instead be a

shibboleth for the intellectual and/or the working-class of a

particular time and place, bounded by a specific situation and

confronted by problems that are indeclinably historical problems.

I: What is an intellectual?

One is an intellectual by virtue of one’s difference from

other people, from others who are not intellectuals. By itself

this does not mean much, as it is also a criterion whereby we

could define any quality or appellation; one is a mathematician

by distinction from others who are not mathematicians, one is

left-handed by distinction from others who are not left-handed,

and so on. But “intellectual” is a label of a singular kind. One

is not an intellectual by birth, by training, or by pedigree. It

is a mistake also to equate the intellectual with the “person of

above average intelligence,” as this does not capture its unique

signification. The intellectual's difference (from non-

intellectuals) is her defining feature, prior to any positive

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determinations. We could therefore say that one is an

intellectual by situation. But what is this situation?

In his famous notes on the subject, Gramsci resisted the

notion that intellectuals constitute an autonomous social

category independent of the prevailing socio-economic system. The

intellectual, in one sense, is one who fulfills the societal

function of the intellectual. These may be of the “traditional”

(i.e. vocational) or the “organic” kind; the latter emerge

“spontaneously” from socio-economic formations to articulate the

ideology of their particular class. In another sense, everyone is

an intellectual insofar as they exercise intellect at certain

times and to a certain degree.1 This understanding, however, does

not account for the unique position indicative of today's

intellectual. Those who “serve the societal function of the

intellectual” in Gramsci’s “traditional” sense would include

technicians, accountants, and engineers, and this conception does

not coincide with the way in which the word is taken up in

contemporary parlance. This is not to say that the present essay

1 See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. QuintinHoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5-14.

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is content to conceive of the intellectual only in a colloquial

or dictionary sense, but it is clear that when we say

“intellectual” today we do not mean a certain social role, an

occupation (even if it be a university professor), or a function,

nor do we mean an expression of the position of a certain class

(more on this later). More dissonant still is the conception

according to which “[a]ll men are intellectuals…but not all men

have in society the function of intellectuals.”2 What

“intellectual” names now is a condition and not, as Gramsci speaks

of it, an activity performed by some vocationally and by all

occasionally. A list of “intellectual activities” will not lead

us to a satisfactory account of what it means to be an

intellectual. This view does not necessarily commit us to a pre-

Gramscian account of the intellectual as an autonomous category

divorced from socio-economic formations; it means only that the

term denotes a particular circumstance in the midst of these

formations. As innovative as his analysis is, we must go beyond

it to characterize the condition, the situation, that defines the

intellectual today.

2 Ibid, 9.

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We can find no better expression of this condition than one

articulated in Barthes’s Mythologies. “Myth,” for Barthes, is the

kind of discourse wherein a socially constituted, contingent, and

historically determined concept is made to appear as a natural,

necessary, eternal truth. The ambiguities, complexities, and

cultural-historical dimensions of the object of discourse are

erased, and the object emerges in a reified, hypostatized air of

obviousness, immediacy, and self-evidence:

In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: itabolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them thesimplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, withany going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes aworld which is without contradictions because it is withoutdepth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, itestablishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean somethingby themselves.3

Those whom Barthes characterizes as “myth-consumers” mistake the

movements of interpretation represented by myth for concrete

realities:

[W]hat allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that hedoes not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one.Where there is only an equivalence, he sees a kind of causalprocess […] any semiological system is a system of values; nowthe myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts:myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but asemiological system.4

3 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,1957), 143.4 Ibid, 131.

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The myth-consumer contrasts with what Barthes calls the

“mythologist,” and what we will call the myth-critic, i.e., one

with the inclination to interpret discourse otherwise than that

which the discourse immediately signifies, one who critically

resists the tendencies characteristic of mythology to “immobilize

the world”5 and “transform history into nature,”6 one who rejects

the “insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize

themselves in this image [of the myth], eternal yet bearing a

date, which was built of them one day as if for all time.”7

The myth-critic is the intellectual. An intellectual is one who regards

mythologies as mythologies; a “non-intellectual,” then, is one

for whom the mythologies constitute reality (the myth-consumer).

This allows us to understand the term irrespective of official

intelligence levels, skill, function, or any particular activity.

An intellectual is one who sees through the façade of necessity

as presented by mythological discourse. When the argument is

made, for instance, that “marriage is an unchanging and sacred

concept,” the intellectual knows better. When one appeals to the

5 Ibid, 155.6 Ibid, 129.7 Ibid, 155.

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perennial features of “human nature,” the myth-critic smirks.

While non-intellectuals forcefully cling to so many entrenched

cultural mores, institutions, conceptual frameworks, and

political practices, the intellectual will read or conduct

critical histories and analyses of the same phenomena. The phrase

“X is a social construction” is now a well-worn cliché amongst

intellectuals, but for the non-intellectual X is not a social

construction; it is a force of nature, an elemental aspect of

existence with ontological substance—it is “the way things are”

(examples include “gender,” “family,” “race,” et. al). That which

for the non-intellectual is a sacrosanct quality of human nature

is for the intellectual a particular socio-historical structure,

contingent, ever-changing, and always subject to

reinterpretation.

The way we have presented the distinction above leaves us

open for a possible objection. One might say that the

intellectual or myth-critic is just as beholden to myths as the

consumers who mistake them for immediate qualities of the world,

and that we are all the more blind to our own mythological

horizons insofar as we claim that the intellectual "knows better"

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and is able to see myths for what they "really are." To this we

respond that the intellectual, by virtue of having a critical

regard towards myths and their historical constitution, is well

aware of these horizons, and is for that reason—at least

potentially—open to the possibility of a reflectively self-aware

relation to myth. This possibility is by definition not allowed

to the myth-consumer; thus, the distinction stands, regardless of

the mythological conditions for any critique of mythology.8 The

myth-critic/myth-consumer distinction does not portray the world

as divided in two; both the critic and the consumer share in a

common world of myth. The distinction is made on the basis of the

angle of approach toward the same phenomena.9

8 Cf. Rahel Jaeggi, “Rethinking Ideology,” trans. Eva Engels, in New Waves inPolitical Philosophy, ed. Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 63-86. Jaeggi takes note of a persistent problem in“ideology critique” (which is not the same as Barthes’s “myth criticism,” butis closely related—more on this later): “the problem of asymmetry, theseemingly unavoidably asymmetric relation between those who are subject to anideology and the viewpoint of critique or of the critics who recognize it asideology” (80). Like us, she wants to relinquish the image of theideology/myth critic as having an unobstructed view of objective, non-ideological/mythological reality while maintaining the asymmetrycharacteristic of the critic: “To point out the mechanisms of ‘decontestation’and naturalization obviously requires a break with a perception of oneself andthe world that has become second nature. On the other hand, however, such ahermeneutics of suspicion would still be a hermeneutics” (ibid). 9 Barthes himself considers a form of this objection. We can only point thereader to his interesting and complex response in Barthes, 12.

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The condition that defines the intellectual, then, is the

condition of not being at home in the prevailing mythologies, of

being unable to reconcile oneself with the discourse of

necessity, “human nature,” and “the way things are.” The

intellectual thus embodies a condition of alienation. Barthes was

well aware of this consequence: “The mythologist cuts himself off

from all the myth-consumers, and this is no small matter.”10 This

“cutting off” does not mean that the myth-critic becomes a

hermit, ceasing all intercourse with the world and withdrawing

into some circumscribed sphere of interiority. She must still

engage in a concrete way not only with particular myth-consumers,

but also with a world bounded by the horizon of particular myths.

The alienation embodied by the intellectual, the severance that

Barthes speaks of, consists of the disinclination to recognize

such a bounded horizon on its own terms, to accept this

engagement as a static given. While the myth-consumer lives the

world as a matter of course, the myth-critic lives it in

conscious and articulate discontent. That historically speaking

intellectuals have tended toward misanthropy is therefore no

10 Ibid, 156.

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great accident. It is also not surprising that they typically

fall on the progressive side politically.11

There are other ways of conceiving the situation of the

intellectual that amount to different articulations of the same

social condition: when Arendt, for example, characterizes

“thinking” as a dialectical, Socratic activity distinct from the

intelligent processing of information and technical know-how, an

activity that “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect

on all established criteria, values, measurements of good and

evil”—in short, the practice of undermining “frozen thoughts.”12

Thinking is not only a “destructive” confrontation with such

thoughts, but also with the condition of “thoughtlessness” that

maintains and engenders them by “shielding people from the

dangers of examination [and] teach[ing] them to hold fast to

whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time

in a given society.”13 The moments of alienation and misanthropy

are also present in her work, as when she characterizes

“unthinking men” as “sleepwalkers”14 and says that it is “better11 See ibid, 146-147.12 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Volume One (New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1977), 174-175.13 Ibid, 177.14 Ibid, 191.

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to be at odds with the whole world than be at odds with the only

one you are forced to live together with when you have left

company behind.”15 Another coextensive treatment appears in

Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He makes a distinction

here between “intelligence” and “intellect.” Intelligence

involves a practical, predictable manipulation for some narrow,

immediate end, while intellect is “critical, creative, and

contemplative.” In other words: “Whereas intelligence seeks to

grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders,

wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize

the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect

evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations

as a whole.”16 Both Hofstadter’s “intellect” and Arendt’s

“thinking” turn upon a posture or orientation that problematizes

the foundations of a certain discourse and refuses to acknowledge

the unambiguous “givenness” of a given interpretation. Neither

thinking nor intellect will countenance the hypostatization

necessary for myth, and thus the Arendtian “thinker” and the

15 Ibid, 188.16 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1966), 25.

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“intellectual” in Hofstadter’s sense are also myth-critics. The

latter’s work, which is of course an account of “anti-

intellectualism,” also underscores the extent to which intellect

is forced to exist in spite of and over against a more general state of

affairs—as Barthes would have it, the extent to which it must be

“cut off,” or as we would have it, the extent to which it

embodies a condition of alienation. It is the condition of being a “thinker”

or a practitioner of “intellect” in a larger context of thoughtlessness (or even

“intelligence”)—of being awake among the sleepwalkers—that defines the intellectual,

and not the activity of thinking or the exercise of “intellect” as such. Likewise, it is

not simply the act of myth-criticism that we were concerned with

above, but the situation of being a myth-critic in a world

animated by myth. We will cite one more expression of this

situation, by Zourabichvili glossing Deleuze:

To the good wills that attempt to give sense to the present, thethinker opposes an exigency that appears to be both more modestand more formal: to think otherwise. Which does not mean thatthought has no relation to the times, to their miseries and theirurgencies; but this relation is not what we take it to be. Tothink is to think otherwise. We think only otherwise.17

17 François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons,eds. Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2012), 64.

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To return to Hofstadter for a moment, we wonder if his

diagnosis of “anti-intellectualism” fully captures the present

cultural atmosphere. Our situation is perhaps better

characterized as non-intellectualism. There is no grand McCarthyist

campaign against the intellectual. Its figure is simply absent

from all forms of popular media, all mainstream political

discourse, and from visible social space in general. It is true

that intellectuals are, and always have been, in the minority;

they have been a violently persecuted minority more than once.

Today, however, their marginalization does not consist in

persecution or repression (in the “developed world,” that is),

but in the conspicuous lack of any available room for expression,

in a forced absence that is brought to bear in an unspoken

stenosis rather than any official persona non grata decree. The

intellectual constitutes an “other” for the prevailing system not

as a “marked object” but only insofar as she has undergone what

Barthes calls the process of “ex-nomination.”18 “Public

intellectual” has thereby become an absurd and painful oxymoron.

The condition of alienation that characterizes the intellectual

18 Barthes, 138.

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is thus intramural: the myth-critic is alienated from the myth-

consumers, but myth-consumers are not alienated from the myth-

critic.

In his conveniently neglected Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y

Gasset reminds us that the non-intellectual outnumbers the

intellectual by a vast margin, and that the former is firmly in

control of society—a “brutal empire of the masses,”19 as he puts

it. This fact is often forgotten in academic discourse; we said a

few pages ago that Gramsci’s notes on the intellectual are

“famous”—but famous among whom? Intellectuals exist only in a

world crowded by non-intellectuals, who are not always sure what

the former are up to (if they are aware they exist at all). This

situation is luminously obvious today, as gallons of intellectual

ink are spilled over matters about which the general public (in

every case this term is a sign for “the non-intellectual masses”)

is either largely ignorant or largely apathetic. We do not mean

to point out here the esotericism of, say, knot theory or the

history of Phoenician seafaring; we have in mind the critical

turn the humanities have taken in recent decades. Think of the

19 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. anonymous (New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1964), 19.

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(relative) explosion of second and third wave feminist theory,

de-and-post-colonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory,

radical environmentalism, “critical genealogy,” “identity

politics,” along with critiques of “power relations” and

“consumerism” and “anthropocentrism” and so on.20 Yet the shrill,

booming course of contemporary politics and culture has followed

along its predictably destructive path despite the voracious

disapproval of a handful of barely audible intellectuals who

write only for each other.21 There is consequently a creeping

sense among us that we are not doing anything with worthwhile

effect, that it is not possible today to do anything with

worthwhile effect.22 Perhaps Marcus Aurelius was right: “Even if

you burst with indignation, they will still carry on

regardless.”23

20 This is not to say that the intellectual must be an academic or thatintellectual discourse is limited to academic discourse.21 Cf. Bruno Latour: “The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, butover a desert.” See “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Factto Matters of Concern,” in Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004), 239.22 Cf. C. Wright Mills: “In the world of today the more [the intellectual’s]knowledge of affairs grows, the less impact his thinking seems to have. If hegrows more frustrated as his knowledge increases, it seems that knowledgeleads to powerlessness. He comes to feel helpless in the fundamental sensethat he cannot control what he is able to foresee.” See White Collar: The AmericanMiddle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 157.23 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (London: Penguin Books,2006), 72 (Book 8, section 4).

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We have sketched here an understanding of the intellectual

as the embodiment of a certain condition, rather than a

particular position, vocation, or function. The condition is that

of Barthes’s mythologist (which we have called the myth-critic),

one who confronts mythologies as mythologies, and who in so doing

“thinks” with Arendt and exercises “intellect” with Hofstadter.

The consequence of this confrontation is a certain alienation

from the prevailing mythological world and from those for whom

this world constitutes a bounded totality. This alienation is not

only a subjective temperament or an introspective melancholy,

however, as the intellectual is also prey to a non-intellectual

marginalization and ex-nomination, and must exist in the midst of

a culture, a politics, and a society dominated by non-

intellectuals. Again, it is this form of existence that makes one

an intellectual and not the activity that generates this form.

Many intellectuals are content (or even delighted) with

their position of “enlightened superiority” over “the masses,”

even at the price of alienation. This orientation may have been

defensible in certain historical situations, when the condition

and therefore the meaning of the intellectual were different.

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Now, the intellectual can no longer accept this distinction as a

privilege but must bear it as a burden, not only because “the

masses” have the power and the means to destroy the very fabric

of life as we know it, but also because (and here we return to

Gramsci), if the intellectual is to be self-respecting, she must

eventually come before the question of class antagonism. This will

be taken up in the following sections of this essay, and will

allow us to see more clearly the political significance of the

intellectual. For now, suffice it to say this: We look forward to

a time when intellectuals will no longer be an alienated

minority, no longer a small group of people characterized by

their difference from others. In this case the term

“intellectual” would, of course, lose its particular

signification. Today we are intellectuals. We hope we shall not

have to be so much longer.

II: What is Working-Class?

Clarifying what is meant by “working-class” is certainly

requisite for the purposes of our project if we are to specify

the character and role of the working-class intellectual. But a

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definition of class and of working-class is required, not only

because we wish to adjoin “working-class” to “intellectual” and

distinguish the working-class intellectual from other species of

intellectual, but also because the political consequences to be

drawn from the notion of class remain ambiguous so long as this

notion remains ambiguous. From a Marxist perspective, we are

concerned with class and with the working-class because we are

“concerned with social change,” because the “problem of how you

define and how you view the working class is the problem of

whether the working class is a viable instrument for social

change.”24 What is class? It is not a series of different

vocations or forms of labor, although it might involve these. It

is not a defined range of income, or the access or lack thereof

to political and economic opportunities, although these are often

the consequences of one’s belonging to this or that social class.

If the working-class is defined in terms of vocation or in terms

of income, we run the risk of getting caught in interminable

24 Martin Glaberman, "Marxist Views of the Working Class: Lecture from MarxistInstitute in Toronto, September 17, 1974,” accessed February 1st, 2014, https://www.marxists.org/archive/glaberman/1974/09/wclass.htm

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controversy over exceptional cases.25 The face of labor changes:

employment rates fluctuate, the kind of work available changes,

and certain forms of labor make more or less money. The people

change, the work changes—the content comprising this or that social

class might change—but class division as such withstands these

variable elements. In fact, “class division” is a redundancy in

terms; class is division. What is this division? To what does it

refer?

We shall first of all specify the order of operations with

regard to this division. As a position concerning one’s practices

and subjective identification, working-class mobilizes different

elements and aspects of social, political, and economic life

without being instituted by these elements and aspects. Being or

being associated with the working-class may suggest that one

drinks beer rather than wine, but drinking beer does not make one

working-class. Renting rather than owning one’s home, writing

25 “The classic sociological definition is one of income, $10,000 to $15,000is lower middle class, $15,000 to $20,000 is upper middle class, and so on.That is, of course, very neat—it takes care of everybody; nobody is left out;everybody belongs to some class. But in real life there are a lot of marginalpeople. In which class is the guy who runs a gas station, puts in 80 hours aweek, pumps gas, gets his hands dirty, but also employs half a dozen peopleand makes a profit? If you really have to define everybody, then you are notin the business of making revolutions, you are in the business of definingpeople.” See ibid.

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with a Bic rather than a Montblanc, wearing a blue rather than

white collar—these are not qualifying criteria as much as they

are indices of class. Their oppositional character, their

distinction as belonging to the working-class, is inaugurated in

class division. There is nothing inherently working class about

beer; there is nothing in drinking beer that makes it contrary to

drinking wine in considerations of class. Social antagonism,

class struggle, precedes the names and practices that it

determines.

Class division is first and foremost a differential

relationship, and this accounts for its shifting borders and the

protean nature of its determinations, with regard to the material

conditions and practices of those groups and individuals that

class division determines. This differential relation between

members of society, owing to hierarchizing social institutions

and the autokinetic forces of capitalism, has a further

consequence for thinking about society and belonging to it. If

class division is not instituted on the basis of the discrete

identities and practices of the members of society, it is because

these members are of the same society. There are no separate

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worlds or pre-existent types of people—if class division precedes

its determinations, then no one is naturally working-class or

bourgeois, and there is not a world for workers on the one hand

and a world for the bourgeoisie on the other. Rather, because

class is a differential relation, different members of society

conceive of society and of each other differently depending on

their position within society. This position or situation in which

members of society find themselves—as working-class or otherwise—

thus determines their practice and its oppositional character vis

à vis other positions or situations and practices; their class

mobilizes a particular set of vocations, values, merchandise,

lifestyles, and territories, and these elements are articulated

as contrary to other sets of vocations, etc.

The differential and differentiating force of class

division, as well as the consequences it brings to bear on our

analysis, is demonstrated by Lévi-Strauss in his famous

commentary on Radin’s work with the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), a Great

Lakes tribe. The Ho-Chunk were then composed of two exogamous

clans or moieties: they were thus divided into “those who are

above,” and “those who are on earth.” Radin, investigating the

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influence of this division on the structure of the village and

the larger Ho-Chunk community, “noted a curious discrepancy among

the answers of the old people who were his informants.”26 When

asked about the layout of the village and its makeup, the

informants from the “upper” moiety claimed that the village was

arranged in a large circle that was cut in half between the upper

and lower moieties. Those from the lower moiety, however, denied

this view, and claimed that the chiefs of the moieties were

lodged in the center of the village, with the other village

members living on the periphery.

This discrepancy would have led anthropologists before Lévi-

Strauss to posit a “dual organization,” which Lévi-Strauss

vigorously denied. One problem lies in our approach to the

discrepancy in village plans; Radin was less interested in the

discrepancy itself than he was in the actual layout of the village

—he regretted that he could not get a more “objective” view of

the village’s structure so as to get a clearer insight into the

influence of moiety division on Ho-Chunk society. For Lévi-

26 Claude Lévis-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and BrookeGrundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 133.

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Strauss, however, it is not a question of determining which

moiety has the more accurate view of the village:

[The versions of the village’s layout] may also correspond to twodifferent ways of describing one organization too complex to beformalized by means of a single model, so that the members ofeach moiety would tend to conceptualize it one way rather thanthe other, depending upon their position in the social structure.For even in such an apparently symmetrical type of socialstructure as dual organization, the relationship between moietiesis never as static, or as fully reciprocal, as one might tend toimagine.27

The beliefs of each group with regard to the village’s

organization result from its division. The discrepancy in belief

does not pre-exist the social structure that positions the tribe

members who find themselves at various distances from each other.

If one is after the influence of this division on Ho-Chunk

society, one simply misses the point if one dismisses this

discrepancy in favor of some “truer,” less biased account. The

true account of this division’s influence lies precisely in the

discrepancy of accounts itself.

Imagine a small town in the heartland of America, dominated

by a large, sprawling family: the Bonnets. Like the Ho-Chunk,

this family is divided into two moieties. The Bonnets on one side

of town are more in line with what we would consider “bourgeois”—27 Ibid, 135f.

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their children are more educated, they earn salaries and not

wages, and they spare no expense to maintain their well-manicured

lawns. They pronounce their surname by Francophone standards:

Boh-ney. The other Bonnets are stereotypically working-class. In

contrast to the more upscale Bonnets, their children may not

graduate from high school, they live paycheck to paycheck, and

more than a few of them reside in trailers and housing projects.

These Bonnets pronounce their name as spelled: Bon-net. If we want

to trace the division between groups of Bonnets and its influence

on their practices and material conditions, we would, with Radin

and his work on the Ho-Chunk, miss the point if we were to

inquire after the real pronunciation of “Bonnet.” The discrepancy

in pronunciation results from the Bonnets’ position in society,

from their being determined by class division.

What is the working class, then? We might define them as

those who sell their labor and who do not own the means of

production. We might define them as those who, in our society,

lack certain specifiable advantages and avenues for social

mobility. It hardly matters—the least we can say is that they are

determined by social antagonism, and that they are opposed to

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what one might call the “bourgeoisie.” We can say that they are,

in whatever sense of the term, dispossessed; they are

distinguished from the bourgeoisie, not owing to any orthodox

Marxian analysis, but because they are lacking in social,

political, and economic currency, and because this discrepancy is

a necessary consequence of certain politico-material relations.

If talking about our backgrounds—our childhoods, our old

neighborhoods, the vocations of our parents—makes us or our

colleagues uncomfortable, if such exchanges become awkward or

unpleasant, it is owing to the fact of class division that

precedes or determines our background and our conversations. Your

parents are doctors or lawyers; you spent your childhood

travelling Europe; several members of your extended family have

earned doctoral degrees in various fields. Our parents are gas

station attendants; we went to failing and underfunded school

districts; we were the first in our family to go to college (and

will likely spend our lives explaining to our loved ones what

“going to college” really means). As we pointed out, there is

nothing inherently working-class about any of these parts of our

background—but working-class names a determinate position in our

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society, a position determined by forces of alienation, and it

thus takes on its oppositional character. Without this

differential or oppositional character, the term “working-class”

would, to be sure, lose its distinctive meaning. Today we are

working-class. We hope we shall not have to be so much longer.

III: What is a Working-Class Intellectual?

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the son of a ribbon-maker. This

is how the baron, Freiherr von Militz, found him: a pious young

boy who could recite the preacher’s sermon when von Militz had

arrived late to church, a provincial with a thick Lusatian accent

with whom the baron was so impressed that he was moved to pay for

his schooling. Had the baron arrived to the service on time, the

philosopher would likely have become a ribbon-maker like his

father, or, with some luck, gone on to serve as a clergyman.

While the differences between Fichte’s situation and our own

are such that we cannot justifiably call him working-class (or

intellectual), he understood all too well his impossible

predicament as an academic from pious, provincial, ribbon-making

stock. Impossible because, in his context, leading a learned life

26

was typically predicated on having certain material means, a

certain social rank, a certain modus vivendi, all of which were

absent in Fichte’s own background. In spending a majority of his

life reinventing himself in a newfound bourgeois, academic

milieu, Fichte more or less covered all traces of his past. In

1794 he begrudgingly agreed to sponsor his brother’s education,

although he refused to let young Samuel Gotthelf stay at his

home; he worried that his brother’s tutelage had started too

late, that his peasant manners and bucolic accent would not only

bar acclimation to life at Jena, but that they would betray

Fichte’s own origins to his friends and colleagues. Fichte soon

sent his brother packing—Samuel Gotthelf was a painful reminder

of the life he had hoped to repress, and it was unbearable to

live in both worlds at once.28

Most intellectuals have their origins in the bourgeois

classes. This is not an accident but the result of various

factors that we cannot discuss exhaustively. We may, however,

28 For a more detailed discussion of this experiment, and Fichte’s upbringingmore generally, see Anthony J. LaVopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154.

27

point to one: adopting an intellectual orientation is aided,

though by no means guaranteed, by a relative degree of affluence

and leisure time. The intellectual with origins in the working-

class is therefore (at least initially) in something of a

precarious position, with all of the inclination for intellectual

development but none of the room. We have said that being an

intellectual does not depend on the possessing of certain facts

or on this or that pedigree; nevertheless a sustained exposure to

myth-critical perspectives (as well as the time and space to

reflect on them) will obviously increase the likelihood of one

becoming a myth-critic, along with the ease and appeal of this

development. For this reason and others, intellectuals tend to

concentrate in the bourgeois classes and tend to be sparse in the

working-class (which is not to claim that intellectuals

constitute a majority even in the former).29 This is why, as we

noted at the outset, the very term “working-class intellectual”

strikes as nigh-oxymoronic.

Where does this situation leave working-class intellectuals?

As long as they are working-class they will be incongruous, on

29 Likewise, though intellectuals tend to congregate in academia, thecategories “intellectual” and “academic” are not mutually inclusive.

28

the basis of class antagonism, with intellectuals, and as long as

they are intellectuals they will be incongruous, as a consequence

of their relationship to mythology, with the working-class. Of

course, there is more than one working-class intellectual, and so

it is not as though this incongruity is total; one may encounter

others with working-class backgrounds among intellectuals or

other intellectuals among the working-class. But as a general

tendency working-class intellectuals live a condition of social

homelessness, not quite belonging in either mythological working-

class discourse or in myth-critical bourgeois discourse. They are

distanced from the former the moment they become conscious of

their condition as myth-critics, and they are removed from the

latter inasmuch as they have learned it as a second language. This

compounds the condition of alienation already indicative of the

intellectual, as this Janus-like figure is cut off from both

myth-consumers and most other myth-critics. She must change

dispositions depending on what company she keeps—now

intellectual, then working-class, concealing one complexion when

the other is necessary. And we cannot ask, with Hawthorne, which

29

“face” is the “true.”30 She is really the former and really the

latter. The working-class intellectual is therefore doubly

alienated, from the mythological discourse most characteristic of

her class and also from the class in which the phrase

“mythological discourse” has its origin and its currency.

“Working-class intellectual” is something of a contradiction in

terms that exists nevertheless.

As a brief literary excursus, we will point to Kafka’s

“Report to an Academy.” The story is told as a monologue

delivered by a chimpanzee, Rotpeter, who has learned successfully

to imitate human characteristics and language; he explains to his

audience how he came to participate in the human world,

describing his training and his humanization process as “the line

an erstwhile ape has had to follow in entering and establishing

himself in the world of men.”31 The working-class intellectual is

not unlike Rotpeter. Like him she has been forced, to a certain

extent, to leave behind the world of her origin in order to

conform to the expectations of another (that the monologue is

30 See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1994),147-148.31 Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in TheComplete Stories, ed, Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 251.

30

delivered to an academy is appropriate). The crude turns of

phrase and coarse humor so indicative of the working-class are

not welcome in intellectual circles, nor are so many mythologies

that the former holds dear. Just as the ape learns to smoke a

pipe and drink schnapps, the working-class intellectual learns to

form complex sentences, to use feminine pronouns as generic, and

to make references to Kafka. But just as Rotpeter is nevertheless

not human, the working-class intellectual remains working-class

(at least for a time—more on this shortly). Yet at the same time,

her newfound intellectual vocabulary obscures her relation to her

origins—she conceives of “the working-class” in terms that are

largely excluded from it. Rotpeter laments: “What I felt then as

an ape I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I

misrepresent it…”32 Kafka’s character is in the ridiculous,

contradictory position of a simian who speaks and acts as a

human, not quite belonging anymore to either species,

incomprehensible to his fellow apes and unable to find himself in

his fellow men. The working-class intellectual, likewise, bears

the unmistakable mark of a certain class but can no longer be at

32 Ibid, 253.

31

home in it; such is the twofold character of her alienation, the

living contradiction of her position.

This living contradiction has consequences that go beyond

any subjective condition of alienation, and it is these

consequences that interest us for the conclusion of this essay.

As the working-class intellectual becomes more and more absorbed

in her new haute milieu, she will not fail to notice a certain

phenomenon: the myth-criticism of the bourgeois intellectual is

content to rest at the level of mythological discourse, and does

not orient itself toward the antagonistic social and material

relations that both sustain and are sustained by this discourse.

The bourgeois intellectual criticizes myth, but does not go

further in asking why myth is a political necessity; she (not

incorrectly) points out that certain forms of discourse are

historically conditioned, but does not ask what these conditions

are. This brings us to a moment that has been in the background

of our considerations so far: the critique of ideology.

Does ideology critique differ from myth-criticism? If so, in

what way and to what degree? It is a commonplace mistake to

assume that ideology critique is simply a matter of taking

32

inventory of mystified perceptions of reality, of correcting

“false consciousness” or the like. This is certainly a necessary

aspect of it; the radical movement, however, lies not in the

unmasking of obscured relations but in the analysis of the

politico-material reality that necessitates the “masking” in the

first place—not only the conditions that are concealed, but why

they are concealed. Let us look at the classic example of

“reification.” The first moment of ideology critique points out

that, in our historical context, concrete relations between

people take on the “fantastic appearance” of abstract relations

between things. This is the moment of false consciousness. The

second moment of the critique of ideology recognizes that a

recognition of the “socially conditioned” nature of material

relations does not in itself address the reality or necessity of

these relations. In the prevailing economic situation, concrete

relations between people “really are,” in a sense, relations

between things. Hence Adorno’s oft-referenced observation that

ideology is “both true and false.”33 It does not suffice,

therefore, to effect a change in our conscious orientation toward

33 See Jaeggi, 66.

33

a phenomenon like “reification” in order to remove its illusive

character (and its dangerous consequences). Ideology is, in

another familiar trope, “necessarily false.”34 In other words, we do

not experience reification merely because we possess some “wrong

idea,” but insofar as reification is a necessary result of a

particular set of economic-political-material processes. To put

all the cards on the table: the reproduction of capitalism needs

reification, and so we cannot address the “false consciousness”

of this phenomenon without addressing the “false reality” of

which it is the insidious but necessary expression.35

Myth criticism, which exposes the historical and social

contingency of discourse that is taken for a-historical natural

necessity, is therefore a necessary but not sufficient condition

for ideology critique. It is the first moment referred to above

and does not necessarily advance to the second. All ideology

critique includes myth criticism, but not all myth criticism

includes ideology critique. To make this clearer, we should

consider as a further example the myth-critical analysis of

34 See Ibid, 68.35 The content-oriented understanding of “ideology” offered here is by nomeans the only one possible. See Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York:Verso, 1994).

34

money. The myth-critic who is not interested in ideology critique

will point out that money is only a “social construction,” that

it has value only on this basis, and that the difference between

“wealth” and “poverty” is nothing natural but only the result of

certain relations, institutions, a certain historical situation,

and so on. Very well, the critic of ideology will say, but this

“social construction” still constitutes the difference between

eating lunch and going hungry; it still determines the horizons

of one’s life in a violent way. It has radical material reality

even if it is the result of certain relations and historical

contingencies. Recognizing myths as myths, while enough to make

one an intellectual, does not by itself address the “reality” of

myth. The essential moment is not a transformation of our

conscious orientation toward mythology (although, again, this is

an important aspect), but the recognition of the need for a

transformation of the material conditions the reproduction and

legitimization of which necessitate mythology in the first

place.36

36 Although we make use of his articulation of myth-criticism, we by no meanscount Barthes among those who practice it while neglecting the critique ofideology.

35

What the working-class intellectual finds when she

encounters the world of bourgeois intellectuals is,

overwhelmingly if not totally, myth-criticism without reference

to the material antagonisms that underpin and are underpinned by

mythologies, i.e., the first step of ideology critique without

the decisive second moment. This raises some questions: are all

working-class intellectuals necessarily also critics of ideology?

And are all bourgeois intellectuals necessarily limited to myth-

critical discourse? By no means. We are not interested in making

global claims based on ironclad causal explanations. Rather than

speaking of the “ability” or “possibility” of bourgeois and/or

working-class intellectuals to be this or that, we will instead

speak of “inclinations,” which are visible and manifest without

being rigid determinations. We say that bourgeois intellectual

discourse is inclined to rest at the level of mythology without

confronting its underlying material conditions (i.e., without

proceeding to a critique of ideology), while the perspective of

the working-class intellectual, because of its unique

circumstance, is inclined to examine these conditions insofar as

they are at the root of the antagonism it embodies.

36

We must then consider why the bourgeois intellectual is

hesitant to address the conditions of possibility of the

obfuscating nature of mythology, why the question of myth’s

material conditions does not occur to her. Whence such a

disinclination? The unlikeliness of the bourgeois intellectual to

address these concerns is related (though not reducible) to her

belonging to or being associated with the bourgeois classes. If,

as we saw with Lévi-Strauss, class is the determination of

practice and identity by virtue of one’s position in a social

structure, if class always refers to class division, to an

antagonism that finds formal expression in the praxis of the

peoples caught up in this antagonism, then it should come as no

surprise that the bourgeois intellectual is less apt to notice

class. The “upper” portion of the Ho-Chunk imagined their village

to be segregated but not opposed—simply divided in half according

to the lay of the land—whereas the “lower” Ho-Chunk moiety

recognized a hierarchical organizing principle, with lower

members circling the upper members at the center of the village.

Mutatis mutandis, the bourgeois intellectual does not recognize the

division in class division. This species of myth-critic may

37

recognize that the discursive practices of the working-class—the

various material and cultural elements invoked by the term

working-class—are socially conditioned and historically contingent,

but she is disinclined to recognize class division or social

antagonism as the determining factor in mythology. For the

bourgeois myth-critic, this division is itself mythological, and

thus she concludes that myth-criticism culminates at the level of

discourse. Since she is not in the precarious situation of the

working-class intellectual, the bourgeois intellectual is not

confronted by the reality of class and class division, and is

thus not inclined to inquire after the politico-material

conditions of myth.

When myth-criticism culminates in discourse, meaning becomes

the ultimate bearer of emancipatory potential.37 Not yet

37 We might recall Verena Andermatt Conley’s depiction of Hélène Cixous’spresence at The University of Paris at Vincennes, as quoted by Toril Moi:“Cixous used to enter the complex in a dazzling ermine coat whose capitalworth most probably surpassed the means of many in the classroom. Herproxemics marked a progressive use of repression. As a replica of Bataille’sevocation of Aztec ceremony, she surged from the context of the cheaplyreinforced concrete of classroom shelters. She then became a surplus value anda zero-degree term, the sovereign center of a decorous, eminently caressivebody where her politics splintered those of an archaic scene in which the kingwould have his wives circulate around him.” We are unsure what this means—which may betray our working-class backgrounds—but it remains clear thatConley obfuscates the fact that lecturing in an ermine coat reflects certainpolitico-material conditions and attitudes toward class. The bourgeoisintellectual is willing to forgive such an extravagant display of personal

38

concerned with real social and material conditions of freedom and

of un-freedom, the bourgeois intellectual is content to worry

over how we talk about freedom. She is concerned about how to

reconceive or reinterpret our current practices such that they no

longer appear as reinforcements or reinstantiations of the

prevailing system, but as subtle “disruptions” of it, instead of

how to change the prevailing system and with it our current

practices in a concrete way.38 It becomes a question of the role

of poetic language in politics rather than the role of the

political in poetry. The only violence it knows is “violence to

the text.” This kind of myth-criticism is thus only nominal and

conceals the same conditions upon which its object depends; it

mistakes the mythological product for the mythological process.

wealth, transforming it into a transgressive and revolutionary gesture that“splinters” the politics of an “archaic scene.” Moi sardonically remarks,“Ermine as emancipation: it is odd that the women of the Third World have beenso ludicrously slow to take up Cixous’s sartorial strategy.” See Moi’s SexualTextual Politics (London: Routledge, 1985), 125f. 38 Cf. David Harvey: “What remains of the radical left now operates largelyoutside of any institutional or organized oppositional channels, in the hopethat small-scale actions and local activism can ultimately add up to some kindof satisfactory macro alternative. This left, which strangely echoes alibertarian and even neoliberal ethic of anti-statism, is nurturedintellectually by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and all those who havereassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largelyincomprehensible post-structuralism that favours identity politics and eschewsclass analysis.” See Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2014), xii-xiii.

39

Insofar as it obscures the same material antagonisms obscured by mythological

discourse, bourgeois myth-criticism serves, despite itself, to reinscribe the very

mythology it sought to critique.

A perfect example of this disinclination on the part of

bourgeois intellectuals can be found in a familiar codicil that

accompanies much of their academic work. They say that they will

treat their subject matter with reference to “considerations of

race, gender, and class.” What they mean, of course, is

“considerations of race and gender”—the third term is, almost

always, conveniently neglected. This is not only because “class”

is an ill-defined category today, but because bourgeois

intellectual discourse is sufficiently insulated from the

necessity of defining it at all. We do not mean to discount the

momentousness of critical race and gender theory; we want only to

highlight what is elided when these discourses are not situated

in terms of the material relations of which they are inextricably

a part. It is interesting to consider the ways in which “class”

differs from “race” and “gender” (or “sexuality” or “ability”)

qua category. “Hierarchy” is the typical focal point of this kind

of critical discourse; the problem, for most if not all critics,

40

is not “race” or “gender” as such, but the fact that there is a

system of hierarchical dichotomies in place (man over and against

woman, white over and against non-white, and so on). It is

possible to imagine a plurality of races and genders without the

accompanying relations of domination and power. This kind of

analysis does not work for the category of class, however. We

cannot imagine “a plurality of classes” with no hierarchical

power relations, as in this case the division would make no

sense. Taking a critical, non-hierarchical stance on

“considerations of class” would be nothing less than a commitment

to the dissolution of class as such, and this is not something

with which bourgeois intellectuals are inclined to concern

themselves.

If the working-class non-intellectual is disinclined to

recognize mythology as mythology, and if the bourgeois

intellectual recognizes mythology but is disinclined to confront

the social and material conditions which sustain and are

sustained by it, should we then see the working-class

intellectual as the necessary supplement, compensating for what

the others lack? It is true that, insofar as she is an

41

intellectual, the working-class intellectual will critique

mythological discourse which attempts to make a contingent social

relation into an immutable natural reality, while insofar as she

is working-class, she is inclined to recognize that these

relations that are “mere social constructions” have material

consequences and conditions that must be addressed if we are to

address their mythological character. We fear, however, that the

working-class intellectual has thus far been presented as a

messianic figure, an epistemological savior who will finally

deliver unto us the “truth” necessarily mystified heretofore.

This is not the image we have in mind, and we will try to explain

why.

Which map of the Ho-Chunk village was more accurate? Lévi-

Strauss saw that this question is misconstrued; we are likewise

less interested in the “accuracy” of the working-class

intellectual’s perspective than we are in the political

consequences and possibilities of her situation. It is beside the

point as to whether the working-class intellectual has the means

for providing the “true map” of the Ho-Chunk village. Rather, she

is in the position of Lévi-Strauss himself, insofar as she can

42

observe the discrepancy between the village maps. Reconciling the

maps of the upper and lower moieties is immaterial to this

project; it is rather a matter of recognizing the politico-

material antagonism of which the contradictory maps are an

expression. The figure of the working-class intellectual is not

meant to give us a final picture of the essence of our society,

but to instead reveal the material and social conditions by which

our society is organized, by which intellectual and non-

intellectual are opposed, by which bourgeois and working-class

are opposed. The working-class intellectual is thus less a

messianic figure than a looking glass. To rearticulate a point we

made earlier: it is not that other groups are “incapable by

nature” of coming to a similar perspective, but rather that the

situation of the working-class intellectual manifests a

particular inclination for this perspective.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the politically significant

situation of the working-class intellectual, there is an ever-

present danger that she will lapse into the complacency of the

bourgeois intellectual, assimilating not only to the lifestyle

afforded by its avenues but also, and more importantly for us, to

43

its myth-critical discourse. The material comforts it offers are

by extension social, academic comforts. There is no guarantee

that the working-class intellectual will affirm her precarious

situation and maintain the first component of the compound term

that defines her; denying it would remove, to a decisive if not

total extent, the condition of double-alienation characteristic

of this position, even if it does not remove the alienated

situation of the intellectual in general. This is why the

political momentousness of this figure is never more than a

possibility. The working-class intellectual may become a

bourgeois intellectual. Rotpeter may become human; James Gatz may

become Jay Gatsby. To do this would be to jettison the politico-

material dimension of the working-class intellectual’s moment of

critique, to bypass the “living contradiction” in the movement

from one of the poles of this antinomy to the other. Kafka’s

story can once again help us understand the dialectics of the

situation. In his report, Rotpeter insists again and again that

his assimilation to the human world was only a “way out” (of his

cage), and he deliberately avoids the use of the word “freedom”

44

in describing the attractions of this new world.39 Likewise, the

world of bourgeois intellectual discourse may offer “a way out”

for the working-class intellectual, a release from both the harsh

material situation of her origins and from the necessity of

thinking about it. It may also appear at first that the move to

this myth-criticism offers a kind of freedom, i.e., freedom from

mythology. But we have seen that it does not do this; the myth-

criticism that does not orient itself toward the “harsh material

situation” determining and determined by mythology (in our terms,

myth-criticism without ideology critique) only serves to confirm

and reinforce mythology. Rotpeter knows better than to associate

his new domain with freedom: “I repeat: there was no attraction

for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I

needed a way out, and for no other reason.”40 Assimilation, for

the working-class intellectual just as for Kafka’s ape, however

much it may be a way out, also forfeits the possibility of

freedom.

All of the distinctions we have drawn in this essay—

intellectual and non-intellectual, working-class and bourgeois,

39 Kafka, 253.40 Ibid, 257.

45

myth-criticism and ideology critique—have their relevance in the

context of what Marcuse calls “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable,

democratic unfreedom”41—or, if one prefers Adorno, in “the open

air prison which the world is becoming.”42 The transition to

another, better form of life will not come about naturally or

spontaneously. As Barthes has it, we are not “in a Moses-like

situation”; we “cannot see the promised land […] tomorrow’s

positivity is entirely hidden by today’s negativity.”43 Positive

transformation depends on the way in which we confront and take

responsibility for the present situation in all of its urgency

and calamity. The time when any of us could be innocent

spectators has long past. For this reason, the categories laid

out here take on political significance and cannot be counted

only as philosophical niceties.

A necessary first step is to refuse to accept mythological

discourse on its own terms, and to embody the condition of

alienation that is the inevitable—though perhaps only temporary—

result of this refusal, to “think otherwise.” Myth is

41 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 1.42 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MITPress, 1967), 34.43 Barthes, 157.

46

“depoliticized speech,”44 and the myth-critic’s task is to re-

politicize it. The intellectual is a problem for political

stability simply by existing, as a natural enemy of the empire of

domination and dissimulation is one who sees through it, one who

knows its history, its purpose, its methods. In a cultural order

defined by non-intellectualism, the intellectual represents a

sickness that could be threatening if left untreated. “There are

no dangerous thoughts,” Arendt says, “thinking itself is

dangerous.”45 But the dangerous quality of the intellectual,

which is based on her anomalous relation to mythology, is

neutralized so long as her myth-criticism remains at the level of

discourse, declining the analysis of politico-material relations

and class division (i.e., so long as it is bourgeois myth-

criticism and not ideology critique). This, by force of

circumstance, is the predilection of most intellectuals. The

momentous significance of the working-class intellectual lies in her

condition of double-alienation—an anomaly as all other

intellectuals are with regard to mythology, but an anomaly also

44 Barthes, 143. 45 Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Social Research 38, no. 3(1971), 435.

47

among most other intellectuals, as she (at least initially)

cannot elide the category of class antagonism but lives it. She

finds herself neither in mythology nor in innocuous bourgeois

myth-criticism, and her possible effect depends upon maintaining

in a visible way this homelessness, this incongruity, this dual-

anomaly. At this moment, the intellectual once again becomes a

problem for the prevailing system of unfreedom. She becomes, in

fact, its bad dream, its logical but unexpected result, and but

for articulation, exposure, and influence, the “sickness” that

the intellectual represents may spread to the whole body. What we

speak of here, to borrow a frame from Sartre, is “not a future

moment” but, for those of us “exiled in an unlivable present, the

sudden discovery of a future.”46 The possibility of realizing

this future turns on a recognition and affirmation of the

condition of the working-class intellectual, on pronouncing that

paradoxical term with a peculiar ring.

If a new form of life did emerge, the categories

“intellectual” and “working-class” would lose their meaning.

There would no longer be an alienated contingent of myth-critics

46 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace, trans. Martha H. Fletcher and JohnR. Kleinschmidt (New York: George Braziller: 1968), 86.

48

in a world of myth-consumption, and no longer groups of people

defined according to class division and social antagonism. The

culmination of the project of the working-class intellectual is

simultaneously the dissolution of her condition as such. This

task cannot be accomplished by a few dedicated crusaders alone,

and the present essay is nothing more than an indication of

possibility—like Rotpeter, we have only made a report.

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