Build Think Tanks of a New Type!
By: Lance Espejo
Rethinking propaganda work, knowledge production, and the role of “intellectuals” in society.
Because the untarnished truth comes from the crucible of struggle.
The Institute for Nationalist Studies celebrates one year of existence as an organization of students, researchers, professors, cultural workers, and inevitably the masses who are for genuine change in Philippine society. It is time to re-examine the role of the “educated” in a society, and ultimately raise challenges and new avenues for breakthroughs for progressive politics.
Chances are, you — dear reader, are an intellectual. And while compared to others, we have more time to read a treatise on the subject matter, I know we are more scanners than readers. Hence, I will cut straight to my points as to what it means to be an intellectual in the 21st century, and what is our role in a given society. A summary shall be provided at the end of the article.
The Intellectual Function
The first question to answer is: who are considered to be intellectuals?
The definitions vary, and each one is grounded on a practical as well as epistemological vision of what these groups of people are. Generally, we have come to define intellectuals as those groups of people whose “profession” is exclusive to “mental labor” — be it students, teachers, health workers, cultural workers, engineers, lawyers, and other sorts of specialists. They are supposed to study abstract ideas about general processes and phenomena in the world, derived from countless experiments, debate, and other forms of research. In short, they are supposed to know and make society know things.
But this viewpoint maintains its opposite — that there are people whose profession does not include any sort of mental labor or do not abstract general concepts from daily life, such as peasants and workers. This cannot be further from the truth, as any one who has immersed themselves with people who are “merely manual laborers” know that these people have a different wisdom; understanding of the world. In the same way chemists may know the chemical properties and reactions happening when a dish is cooked, but only cooks have an intimate form of knowledge with the ingredients and tools they use, which only comes with practical experience. Doesn’t everyone need to know a little bit of everything to function properly?
In the pre-scientific age of early human civilization, such was the case that all types of knowledge production and practice was done and distributed collectively; with experienced people, usually elders who stood as both doctors, scientists, counsellors, and spiritual leaders [Note 1], passing down knowledge to the younger ones. Depending on the development of social labor’s division, an individual had to know some basic medicine, hunting, cooking, handicrafts, animal domestication, and folk history.
The point is, mental labor — the “intellectual’s function” to be repositories of knowledge, was not something exclusive to a group of individuals since the beginning of humanity, while the rest simply labored manually. Simply existing requires knowledge. Therefore, every person has the capacity to abstract knowledge of the world in its different forms.
So what happened? Class stratification happened.
Since class got in the mix, knowledge production has been tied to class
If you look at the “greats”: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and so on, we are taught as if these figures were simply interested in the truth that the everyday man did not concern himself with. This is a one-sided view of the historical fact that the ground on which these “giants” stood was the class struggle.
With the further development of the division of labor, certain sections of the populace were slightly or totally liberated from manual labor, and started busying themselves with abstracting general knowledge of the universe. It is no wonder that among master-slave societies, say in Mesopotamia, it was the priestly class who emerged as intellectuals, being scholars, lawyers, as well as religious leaders. It is most evident in other civilizations how close this class was with the master class, recalling concepts such as god-kings, or the general tie of masters to the divine [Note 2].
The intellectual function started becoming specialized into a group of people when classes emerged. In fact, the intellectual function gained a “class function.”
The section of the populace who were privileged enough to read, learn, experiment, and debate on knowledge who did not immediately concern themselves with food-shelter-clothing, were usually tied to networks of power controlled by the elite. As such, throughout history until the modern age, we have examples of these intellectuals being tied to or belonging to the ruling class [Note 3].
Because of their elitist connections, the section of the populace known as intellectuals were usually there to satisfy the needs of the elite, whether in political, economic, or ethical matters.
Today, we see this in how the educated class, being mostly tied to the elite, have their research influenced by the interests and funding of their patrons. We have examples as well of how the most seemingly life-affirming philosophers-in-word have been used or were actually complicit in anti-people regimes.
All of this gives the elite material gains or maintenance of the masses’ obedience. But even in this age, because the intellectual function can never be fully monopolized by one class, there are those who abstract knowledge that directly or indirectly go against the ruling class. [Note 4]
Just as in the case of earlier times, the elite has its intellectuals today who serve to articulate its interests. The monopoly capitalist class clearly understood this at the onset of the 20th century, that their survival relied on intellectuals who would specialize in mitigating their economies, sabotaging those attempting socialism, and generally keeping the values of capitalism well propagated. Even if centuries of history has confirmed this fact, it was clear at this point that information — in terms of actual empirical data, the form of study, and the way it is disseminated, is a battlefield. [Note 5]
In the process of empirical data gathering and dissemination, we see class struggle in the knowledge production through the proliferation of think tanks and the various political [openly partisan or not] interests which these groups advocate. According to thebestschools.org, the United States has nearly 2000 think tanks — accounting for nearly a third of the total think tanks in the world. These organizations need to gather data, and present it based on their stances, directly or indirectly affecting policy on various levels.
In terms of form of study, we see this in how new sciences and studies have emerged in the 20th century, all with direct or indirect links to certain class interests. Fields like physical anthropology have a history of enabling racism, colonialism, and fascist eugenics in the 19th-20th centuries. Area Studies developed out of the need for America to understand its semi-colonies in the third world, and other perceived threats then such as China and the USSR .
However, intellectuals who were coming from the interest of the oppressed had used some of these fields to interrogate their colonial experience [ex. Araling Pilipino]. Cultural studies was heavily influenced by the need to study everyday living with phenomena in production, taking from different strands of Marxist thought.
The Six Major Intellectual Tasks of any Progressive
There is a reason that from Sun Tzu to Mao Zedong, there is heavy emphasis on knowing the concrete conditions so that one may advance accordingly. When Sun Tzu says, “all warfare is based on deception, “ this means that we cannot out-maneuver an opponent towards victory, if we have no grasp of the situation concretely.
The role of students, researchers and professionals — intellectuals in this classed society, has always been to abstract disparate observations, and articulate potential trajectories of doing things for a particular class interest. However, we have already stated that this intellectual function is not an activity that can only be found in the educated. From this, we can derive six major tasks for any progressive — from academic to the formally uneducated, that deal with intellectual work in a social movement.
Since knowledge production is shown to be always tied to class, without being backed by the funding and or institutionalization of the elite, or conversely, without the support of an organized mass, the ideas of intellectuals have historically been seen to not have a sizable effect. Therefore, the first major task is that for progressive intellectuals, they must embrace their partisanship to the oppressed in word and in deed. We must learn to serve the oppressed while doing work in the academe, or in the slums, the fields, and the factories.
On the other hand, we have noted that there are other ways of knowing the world which the masses know but aren’t taught to us in classrooms. Conversely, the academe has equipped us with advanced tools and methods to study large amounts of data of various scales, as well as a plethora of theories and historical references to help us understand the past and present.
It is from this condition that we propose the second major task: to share tools of data gathering and analysis, to the masses whom the elitist state has deprived education of, and the academically educated who lack the practical knowledge of things .
These two things can only be consummated if the broad masses and the academically educated are dynamically in the same space. This means that the third major task is to organize and get organized. This ties in with the first point of embracing partisanship. To be an activist intellectual means to first be an activist. We are out-organized not outnumbered, hence, organization is a critical task for all of us.
This leaves us with the last set of three major tasks: to study, to propagate, and to advance.
To study, pertains to the already known function of intellectuals — to gather information. As progressives, the only way for us to advance is to know the truth of the matter, to rely on the facts.
Hence, we must study a phenomena or process in all its aspects. We must gather all sorts of information about everyday life, especially of the masses’ whose actual conditions are obscured by the state and whitewashed by its research institutions. Studying something in all its aspects does not equate to looking for that “one essential trait”, but the relationship of all the variables towards each other [are the relationships of people in a given situation synergistic, non-antagonistic, or antagonistic?]. We can only arrive at this analysis if we study it deeply; meaning, we must have a rich amount of data that grounds our understanding of any phenomena. We must handle this with the “knitting of the brows” — serious contemplation and exhaustion of discussion. This means that when analyzing, especially in grouped numbers, we must be on the footing to discuss rather than to impose our interpretation.
What helps us objectify in discussion is if our data and our claims must be verifiable. This means that our system for storing sources should be efficient, our researches are not only evidence-based, but have had sufficient thinking time to process.
Even if we are not researchers in the sense that this is not our profession, everyone has the capacity to do research; because everyday, everyone, even the “uneducated”, observes the world and extrapolates rational thought from it. It is only a matter of directing these energies towards fact-finding that helps improve our internal processes, exposing the plots of the people’s enemies, and convinces the masses of our cause.
We cannot take shortcuts to gathering data, and as activist-researchers, data gathering must not be treated as a one-time deliverable — as if social investigation ends when we have accomplished a questionnaire or other data sheets. Social investigation should be a habit. Whether on ground or in a sea of references, we must always be oriented to gather data, store them, and share them among each other in the most efficient manner.
We should remember that if we want to successfully mobilize the masses, we must first know them, ourselves, and each other. Every great revolutionary leader from the likes of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho, and even Sison, realized that all undertakings of changing society begins with the investigation and class analysis of said society. [Note 6]
It is one thing to acquire quantitatively and qualitatively rich data about a situation. But having acquired rich data, and abstracting it to action points will not do. They must be distributed for the organizing and mobilizing of the people we aim to serve.
It is only when information and theory are embodied that they become useful to a social movement.
But how does information become embodied? It must be well propagated, which is the fifth major task; meaning, it is easily consumable and quantitatively spread to a wide reach of people. Bourgeois institutions, owing to the increased specialization of language, weaponize the form of data so that only those in the know can understand it, or be beguiled by its qualifiers. This cold and dry language of the academe can be beneficial to others, but like our example of cooks and food chemists, there are other ways of intimating information to people.
We researchers are coming from a field with highly specialized language as well as forms of presenting data. We must learn to speak both to those familiar with this way of gathering information, and the greater number of people who aren’t. In this way, the activist-researcher is akin to an artist or designer, who expresses to people a realization drawn up from the real world. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to the use of statistics to make our point, we should use all ways of knowing to make the conditions known.
The most obvious aspect of propagation is that activist intellectuals must strive for their gathered information to be as public as possible. We must go to where the people are — both as a source of information, but also the target of said information. From the masses to the masses. This means going to the most state-abandoned places where the people live, and to exhaust all platforms on ground and online in order to be heard and seen.
Sixth — to advance, requires a critical attitude to ourselves and the enemy in order to develop our practices and knowledge of the world. While we must both study and propagate deeply and broadly, the particular important work that activist intellectuals must do is to advance the knowledge of the mass movement by making the masses grasp their concrete conditions more comprehensively, as well as why and what action must be taken to transcend this to a more egalitarian and progressive society.
In order to advance, we must learn to be critical of the ways data is gathered, construed, & propagated. We must also be skillful in countering the enemy at their own game. When Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels claimed that a repeated lie becomes a truth, it didn’t reflect the actual relativity of truth, rather, it shows how the spread of certain statements construed as various types of information creates effects to how people live their lives. Even the most erudite academic can believe some gossip, regardless of the actual truth.
As activists, and especially as researchers or propagandists, we need to actively combat and expose the distorted facts which the enemy’s of people use to create illusions of normalcy, prosperity, peace, and order. We can all sense that if this country were a house, it is burning and decaying, and so we cannot allow a group of people to keep shouting at us that everything is fine and under control. It is our duty to the people to silence these charlatans with the truth.
We must also be innovative — always seeking to improve on our own ways and viewpoints on different matters, as well as the masses whom we serve. Waging a revolution is not built solely on hopes. It is a science of overhauling the way humanity goes about their lives and how they view the world. As such, in the scientific pursuit of truth for social change, we must be self-aware that we too are coming from our biases, learned habits and practices. We should be quick to assess what isn’t working in our method of leadership and style of work, and actively propose new ways to handle it based on the situation and our desired outcomes.
The wisdom of the past is not meant to be treated as closed “absolute” knowledge, as if all we have to do is “apply” — or plaster the terms and observations of past revolutionary leaders to our present condition and call it a day. The theories and statements which have led successful social movements are snippets of the objective truth of human society still being investigated by our practice as activists today. We know they are objective because they were proven to be the appropriate practice for the particular problems faced before. But because all things have a universal and particular characteristic, there are elements in the past practices and theory which can help us solve our current problems — this is what renders the collective wisdom from successful revolutionaries as universal. It is not because their theory is already completed that they are still relevant. The theoretical contributions of successful revolutionary leaders lies in how their practice was able to clarify to themselves and to us now, what works and what doesn’t for a given problem. But just like the natural sciences, we should treat these theories as guides open to the future. Revolutionary theory does not end with the successful movements of the 20th century.
If we embive the spirit of critically assessing quickly, and the decisive and united implementations of resolutions so that we may develop the struggle, then we will be able to discover a relationship in society — a theory, which explains both the success of the past and provides a solution to the present. This is the scientific way we avoid the bourgeoisie’s egotistic tendency to speculate answers which lead to a one-sided or incomplete revisionist view of a situation, towards political opportunism, and organizational weakness.
Building Think Tanks of a New type
All of this culminates in the notion of a think tank of a new type. We are no longer speaking of think tanks in the common sense of research institutions holed up in university offices, or grand conferences of elite intellectuals. We are proposing that the time has come for the proliferation of organizations whose orientation, structure, and style of work in knowledge production is from the masses and to the masses.
We are calling for serious attention when it comes to knowledge production in the people’s struggle. All mass organizations have always benefitted when it took the habit of social investigation [to study], mass work [to propagate], criticism-&-self-criticism & counter-propaganda work [to advance] seriously. Progressive research institutions can also benefit by being closer to the masses as sources and targets of information.
As the proliferation of think tanks indicates the decisiveness of which the elite want to control information; the toiling masses and those privileged to be educated while still aiming to serve the people, ought to organize together, and build mass-oriented think tanks which can take on many different forms — as research institutions, cultural groups, distributors, mass organizations, unions, book clubs, and all types of socio-civic bodies where information is disseminated, but this time, towards concrete organizing and mobilizing.
Mark Fisher noted that in the same way Sun Tzu’s Art of War is taught in business administration classes as a symptom of capitalism’s war footing, progressives must adopt a war mentality as well. We advocate that this war mentality should be extended beyond mobilization but at the heart of knowledge production itself, because the untarnished truth comes from and serves the struggle.
Notes
[Note 1: It should be noted that religious beliefs then are not like how they are now, where there is a divide between secular and spiritual matters. Religious practices were proto-scientific ways of knowing the world, in the only way our ancestors could, to address problems from agriculture, war strategy, interpersonal harmony, etc.]
[Note 2: It is here, when religion enters class struggle, that this pseudo-scientific way of knowing things is injected with instruments for class suppression such as law, and other disciplining devices.]
[Note 3: In China’s Spring and Autumn as well as Warring States period, the famous struggle of a hundred schools of thought took place as various scholars vied for influence by either gathering followers or by advising key lords. Among the Greeks, Aristotle is famous for being the tutor of conqueror Alexander the Great. The scholastics in Christian medieval Europe, as well as the great polymaths during the Islamic Golden Age were all connected to institutions or rulers who were not only spiritual-cultural powerhouses, but economic assets such as arable land and trade routes. A modern example of this is the Mont Pelerin Society, a collective of elite intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, & Milton Friedman — all highly influential in the academe today, who were responsible for the proliferation of think tanks and policy makers that engineered the neoliberal order we find ourselves today
[Note 4: In the era of slavery and serfdom, given the spiritual spin around everything then, intellectuals articulated the face of exploitation and class struggle in religious millenarian terms and were responsible for slave & peasant uprisings. Examples of indirect opposition include Galileo’s questioning of the Catholic Church’s official astronomical doctrines. For more direct opposition, one recalls theologian Thomas Müntzer, whose opposition to German feudalism was more radical than Martin Luther’s, and was influential in stoking the peasant war of the 1500's.
With the development of large scale manufacture and print media, the decay of feudalism, and the admittance of more of the burgeoning bourgeoisie in royal academic institutions, the bourgeois intellectuals fired up the Enlightenment period which sought to question feudal-aristocrat values, whilst validating bourgeois libertarian ones. New ways of approaching knowledge such as political economy came about, in which posturing as general inquiries into wealth and value, lambasted existing feudal economic policies..
Just as the bourgeois tried to consolidate its position, thinkers for the working class emerged, sprouting all strands of socialist-communist thought. The liberal thought preached by the bourgeoisie was also used by the colonial peoples to articulate their delegitimization of colonialism. It is here that our ilustrados come into play as propagandists, reformers, and revolutionaries.]
[Note 5: It is no wonder that the CIA had a lot of documentary evidence about the Soviet Union, as in full knowledge of how much better it was compared to America, but by knowing the truth, they were able to distort it. The CIA itself, originating as the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] was composed of people belonging to different types of intellectuals. Other sources even identify how the CIA had sponsored thinkers such as Foucault to confuse the left, or even sponsoring cultural activities to counter socialist realism].
[Note 6: If we are to browse the early works of almost all important Marxist revolutionaries, there are articles that provide analysis of their society, from the historical development of its mode of production, political structures, and cultural networks. It is only from this point that they can provide a coherent political program to solve this. They are scientists, not prophets who had relied solely on the wisdom of the past.]
