Oh yes, that old, Dumb Blonde routine.
It brought lots of fame and fortune to Marilyn Monroe...but not so
much happiness.
I Q tests are interesting. My spin on them is that they test wide
ranging reading over actual intelligence. And they do change. At 21
I took the feared test and scored 120. When I became blind just prior
to my 30th birthday, I took the test again during my stay at the
Orientation and Training Center for the Blind. I scored 130 that
time. The only difference I could come up with was that I had read
about twice as much as I had read at 21. Let me see, if that is true
and I were to take the test today, I might be over 200. Scary. My
mother's elder brother scored 160, genius level. He spent his life as
a machinist, dreaming of doing something really great, but mostly
drinking, smoking like a chimney, and shouting insults at his wife and
four children. He had a photographic memory, but beyond that he
seemed caught up in his own sense of failure.
When I directed the Orientation and Training Center, I did not use
such tests as i Q tests or psychiatric exams. We did do aptitude
tests and preference test to help some clients decide where they
wanted to direct their talents. But we assumed that all students were
normal, bright individuals who would not be in the program if they did
not want to find their niche in life.
I have known people who scored 100 on their I Q test, and have
achieved their goals and beyond. My dad, a very bright man, worked
for such a person. If wealth were this man's goal, he had been an
over achiever. He snorted his disgust at I Q tests, saying, "They
said I barely hit 100. Shows you what they knew!" I guess what I'm
trying to say is that we should be encouraging people to do the best
with what they've got, rather than become despondent over that which
they do not have.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/19/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The article below reminds me of an incident at the rehabilitation center
I went to after losing my eyesight. It seemed like every day they were
giving me some kind of test and apparently they sneaked in an I Q test
too. Besides that, I had been in touch with them before I quite became
blind and I had been given a test then that, even though they did not
tell me what kind of test it was, I recognized as an I Q test. No one
had ever bothered to tell me at what score I tested though. Finally, one
person was telling me that with my I Q I should be rich and so he
questioned my motivation. There were a couple of things I could have
said, but my curiosity overcame those comments and what I did say was
that so many people at that center kept telling me that they were
impressed with my IQ that I would like to know what it was. He said,
"Let me put it this way. Out of every 100 people you are smarter than 99
of them." He still didn't give me an actual score, but if my figuring
was correct that 99th percentile score works out to an IQ of about 130.
Here is what I perhaps should have said. Your so-called I Q test is not
measuring anything precise in the first place because the concept of I Q
is nebulous and ill defined. The concept assumes that the great variety
of human interests, abilities and goals can all be lumped together into
something called intelligence and then measured like a yard stick can
measure a distance. Unlike the yardstick you get a figure that is
largely meaningless and is likely measuring something other than what
you think it is measuring. In my case, I suspect that what was actually
being measured is the result of my real motivations which are
drastically different from what he assumes that they should be. That is,
I have always been strongly motivated to learn and have always been a
fanatical reader. I expect that history of mine would have some kind of
strong effect on my score on an I Q test. The other thing I could have
said has to do with that question of motivation. I should or could have
said that it is not that I am unmotivated. It is that my motivations are
completely different from your own motivations and what you assume that
my motivations should be and one of the things that do not motivate me
is any strong desire to become rich. After he told me about my
percentile I think I did say something like, if so, it never has done me
any good. And years later I could have said the same thing to someone
else. It was that long lost romantic interest of mine that I finally
located after 25 years. After reminiscing about old times and
concentrating on things that showed me that she held me in rather high
regard I finally asked her what went wrong. Her answer was that I was
too smart for her. Sheesh! If she had told me that nearly three decades
ago I could have done two things. First, I could have told her that she
could be just as so-called smart as I am if she would just do the same
things I had done and, second, I could have played dumb for her.
http://themilitant.com/2016/8024/802450.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 24 June 20, 2016
(feature article)
Are they rich because they’re smart?
Class, privilege and learning under capitalism
BY STEVE CLARK
“The struggle for workers power, and the transformation of property
relations necessary to open the transition to socialism, are possible
only as working people begin transforming ourselves and our attitudes
toward life, work, and each other. Only then will we learn what we’re
capable of becoming.”
Jack Barnes
Questioned during a December 2015 radio interview about the tens of
thousands of workers turning out at rallies for presidential contender
Donald Trump, President Barack Obama chalked this up to the fact that
“blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where
they are no longer getting the same bargain they got when they were
going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck.
“You combine those things,” Obama added, “and it means there is going to
be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified but just
misdirected.”
Only in some make-believe past did factory workers in the United States
ever receive a “bargain.” Workers resisted — and will never stop
resisting — abusive treatment on the job. They joined together ever more
broadly to organize unions, waged strikes against the employers and the
government, and won what they were strong enough to take without
organizing on the political level independently from the bosses’ parties.
What’s most remarkable about Obama’s language, however, is not its
patronizing tone toward “blue collar men.” It’s the fear that exists at
the highest levels of government (and among well-remunerated
“professional” layers) about what’s building up among working people in
cities, towns, and countryside. It’s the fear that is shaking both
parties of the capitalist ruling families.
“There hasn’t been nearly enough blaming of the people most responsible
for [Donald Trump’s] rise: his voters,” writes liberal Washington Post
columnist Charles Lane. These workers, he says, want to “blow the system
to hell.”
Venting in the stronghold of the conservative wing of this
anti-working-class alliance, National Review writer Kevin Williamson
more explicitly and crudely denounces “white working class dysfunction.”
These “downscale communities … deserve to die,” he says. “Economically
they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. … The white
American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose
main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s
speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”
We’re living through the biggest crisis of the capitalist parties in the
lifetime of anyone reading these pages. If anything, the disarray is
greater in the Democratic Party than the Republican. The millions who’ve
flocked to Bernie Sanders’s call, resuscitating “Occupy” in bourgeois
electoral garb, pose an unexpected obstacle to Hillary Clinton’s
anointment as the Democrats’ 2016 candidate, and her election if nominated.
But what is surfacing in the 2016 presidential election is neither
unexpected nor unexplainable. Its roots go back several decades. If you
want to understand it, there’s no better place to start than this book.
Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning
Under Capitalism contains three articles by Jack Barnes, National
Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, taken from talks and reports
he gave to large public audiences between 1995 and 2009. More recent
statistics and subsequent events that shed light on the economic and
social contradictions fueling today’s political upheaval have been taken
into account by incorporating them directly into the text. This spares
readers from the distraction of frequent footnotes and parenthetical
material. The original articles are available in the books indicated in
accompanying source notes.
The growing disorder of the world capitalist system has unfolded with
jumps and starts over the past forty years — since the 1974-75 global
recession, Vietnam War-fueled inflation surges, and “energy” crises of
that time. Those shocks laid the groundwork for the 1987 Wall Street
crash, which — like jittery animals sensing a coming earthquake —
foretold the cumulative effects of the capitalists’ falling profit rates
and contraction of rate of investment in capacity-expanding plant,
equipment, and employment.
In an attempt to postpone a shattering collapse, the US ruling families
and their rivals resorted to a renewed debt spree — this time worldwide,
and even more mammoth than the lending bonanza of the 1980s. They’ve
fought tenaciously to press wages down, enlarge the reserve army of
unemployed labor, intensify speedup on the job at the cost of life and
limb, and make further progress in weakening the unions. They’ve done
everything in their power to foster competition and conflict among
workers. The employers’ hope is to create the conditions necessary to
induce a new wave of capital accumulation and sustained expansion of
production and trade before confronting a rising challenge by the
working class and labor movement to their inhuman system of exploitation.
This book comes off the presses during the eighth year of what
Washington logs as an “economic recovery.” For working people in the US,
from big cities to farming areas, that “upturn” has been marked by
rising rents and home foreclosures, a fall in median household income,
and historic lows in the percentage of workers actually holding a job
(the government’s headline unemployment figures notwithstanding).
Interest rates are at their lowest levels in the history of the
imperialist world. Short-term rates have scraped zero year after year in
the United States, and in parts of capitalist Europe and Japan interest
rates have been pushed into negative territory — a tax on the
bourgeoisie imposed by money capital with the will-o’-the-wisp goal of
somehow facilitating growth. For the working class and lower middle
classes, both zero and negative rates are a ruinous tax on those who
depend on a pension or “savings” account for help to get by.
In short, capitalism is well into a slow-burning global depression.
What’s more, the US rulers have engaged in nonstop wars and military
operations since the turn of the millennium (not to mention the bloody
1991 Gulf War and the first war on European soil since World War II in
the former Yugoslavia during the administrations of George H. W. Bush
and Bill Clinton). Just since September 11, 2001, the presidencies of
Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama have fought wars or
carried out airstrikes, shelling, drone assaults, and Special Forces
operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and
elsewhere.
Hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in these countries have
been killed or maimed by all sides in military conflicts since 2001, and
millions left homeless, hungry, and dispossessed. Nearly 7,000 US
soldiers have died and more than 52,000 have been wounded —
disproportionately young men and women from rural areas and urban
working-class neighborhoods, who’ve faced scandalous neglect on return.
All the above are among the reasons so many working people are coming
out to listen to and vote for Donald Trump. And they explain large
elements of why other workers, even if smaller in number, give a hearing
to Bernie Sanders, as well.
Contrary to the drumbeat in the corporate media, this crisis in the
capitalist parties has nothing to do with a nonexistent rise of racism
within a nonexistent “white working class.” There’s a working class in
the United States. Among other things, these workers are Black, Latino,
Asian, African, and (for now and decades to come) a majority are
Caucasian. More and more are of mixed race as well. Racism and racist
acts have been pushed back as a result of the conquests of the mass,
proletarian-based struggle for Black rights, including among the growing
numbers of working men and women of various skin colors, mother tongues,
and national origins who work together side by side in factories and
other workplaces day in and day out.
“I have never voted, and I’m not here to represent the Republican Party.
Quite frankly, I don’t give a damn about the Republicans,” said former
basketball coach Bobby Knight to tumultuous cheers as he introduced
Trump to some twelve thousand participants in an April 28 rally in
Evansville, Indiana. “I don’t give a damn about the Democrats either.”
At least on these double “don’t give a damns,” Knight echoed the
sentiments of growing millions in the working class and worse-off middle
classes across the United States.
❖
Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? puts a spotlight on the sharpening
class inequalities in the United States, especially the relatively
recent and accelerated expansion of a high-earning professional and
upper middle-class layer in US capitalist society.
This “self-designated ‘enlightened meritocracy’” — of millions, if not
tens of millions, the author says — is composed overwhelmingly of those
pursuing “careers in the universities, the media, ‘think tanks,’ [as
well as] highly paid supervisory personnel, staffers, or attorneys [for]
foundations, ‘advocacy groups,’ NGOs, charities, and other ‘nonprofit’
institutions.”
They are determined “to con the world into accepting the myth that the
economic and social advancement of its members is just reward for their
individual intelligence, education, and ‘service.’ Its members truly
believe that their ‘brightness,’ their ‘quickness,’ their ‘contributions
to public life’ … give them the right to make decisions, to administer
and ‘regulate’ society for the bourgeoisie — on behalf of what they
claim to be the interests of ‘the people,’” an imaginary and classless
“we.”
Just during the week this book was being readied for the presses, two
articles — one in the liberal Washington Post, the other in the
conservative Wall Street Journal — captured to a “T” the spoken or
unspoken class attitudes of many in this meritocratic layer.
“Never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many
consequential decisions for the rest of us,” wrote David Harsanyi in a
May 20 Post column headlined, “We must weed out ignorant Americans from
the electorate.”
Then, two days later in the Journal, Andy Kessler wrote, “Hollywood
movies notwithstanding, capitalism is not about greed. It is a system
that weeds out dumb ideas from smart ones.” It would have been impolitic
for Kessler to come right out and say it’s a system that “weeds out dumb
people from smart people,” but people both “dumb” and “smart” are able
to read.
As Barnes points out, this social layer has a special place in
overseeing one of the shifts that marks the evolution of the US
imperialist state since the closing decades of the twentieth century:
the centralization of powers initially reserved in the US Constitution
to the legislative branch of government (the House of Representatives
and Senate, and their counterparts on the state level) in a more and
more dominant executive branch (the White House and its multiplying
“regulatory” agencies and “administrators”).
There’s no way for the working class to vote or legislate itself to
power, or to the revolutionary expropriation of the propertied ruling
families and the transition to socialism. But the expanding
concentration of power in the hands of the presidency — including the de
facto power to declare wars, and to bypass legislation and debate by
issuing Executive Orders — is dangerous (ultimately a bonapartist
threat) to the interests of workers, working farmers, and the labor
movement.
Today there is even an Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in
the White House, established by Executive Order in 1993 during the
Clinton administration. The agency’s director during Obama’s first term,
Cass Sunstein, coined a term for this aspiration of middle-class
meritocrats to administer and regulate the lives of the unwashed masses,
who can’t be trusted to know what’s in our own interests. He christened
it with a book titled Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth,
and Happiness (that is, getting us to do what they think is “best for
us,” without us having a say or figuring out they’re trying to
manipulate us).
The actual scope of the expansion of the imperialist state is much
greater and more invasive in the lives of working people than just
“nudges,” of course. According to Washington’s own figures, there are
some 510 federal departments and agencies today, none of which are
elected and whose decision making is never seen on CSPAN or anywhere else.
What’s more, under cover of “national security” and “fighting terrorism”
(and now vastly aided by “social media” technologies), the tentacles of
police surveillance at the federal, state, and local levels have
increasingly penetrated every aspect of our lives and eroded hard-won
rights that protect us against the state. This massive snooping has
become an emblem — a hated emblem — of imperialist America the world over.
❖
There is as yet no rising working-class social movement in the United
States in response to assaults on our wages, living conditions, and
political rights. But over the past few years there have been strikes
and resistance to lockouts by members of the United Steelworkers,
Communications Workers of America, Teamsters, farmworkers organizations,
and other unions. Fast-food and other low-paid workers are demanding a
$15 hourly minimum wage.
Tens of thousands have come into the streets to protest police killings
and brutality and demand the arrest and prosecution of the cops
responsible. Workers and their families are raising their voices against
the massive penal system in the US, with its draconian sentences,
brutalizing solitary confinement, and official barbarities. Immigrant
workers and their supporters have organized to speak out against
deportations, E-Verify victimizations, and other indignities. Mounting
attacks on a woman’s right to choose abortion continue to be met with
protests.
Above all, there is growing confidence and openness among workers
everywhere in the United States to discuss and debate the broadest
social and political questions, including the stakes for the working
class in organizing the unorganized and rebuilding our unions as
instruments of solidarity and struggle.
These political opportunities are not an impression from outside the
working class. They’re the practical conclusion from half a decade of
efforts by members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party going
door to door in working-class neighborhoods of all kinds across the
country to talk with and exchange experiences and views with fellow
workers.
The heart of these discussions — whether on a porch, at an apartment
door, at a strike picket or social protest, or life on the job — is
never simply about “issues,” even political questions of great
importance to the working class. It’s about the way forward. It’s about
what Jack Barnes points to in the closing article in this book as
“preparing the working class for the greatest of all battles in the
years ahead — the battle to throw off the self-image the rulers teach
us, and to recognize that we are capable of taking power and organizing
society.”
That’s the conclusion that’s decisive for workers everywhere today. To
act on the necessity, as we gain confidence and experience fighting
alongside each other, for the working class to recognize our humanity,
our capacities, and the traditions our class has forged during well over
a century and half of struggles, including revolutionary battles and
victories. “To broaden our scope,” to discover our “own worth,” as
Malcolm X was always explaining.
“Learning as a lifetime experience,” as the author puts it in these
pages — what better reason to make a socialist revolution? “What better
reason to get rid of the capitalist state and use the workers state to
begin transforming humanity, to begin building human solidarity? And we
have the living example of the Cuban Revolution to show how it’s
possible to start down that road.”
These are the stakes addressed in Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?
Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism.
May 30, 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
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