Many things draw attention in the interview conducted by Xavier Arguello, director of the magazine Nicaráuac (first issue, May–June 1980), with Commander Jaime Wheelock, Nicaraguan Minister of Agricultural Development, Director of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, and member of the national leadership of the Sandinista Front. For example (p. 61):
A: Ordinarily, the small landowner of a minifundio has been considered politically reactionary. Does this concept apply to the Nicaraguan minifundista peasant?
W: No, absolutely not. Why would they be reactionary?
A: Because they cling to their small property.
W: That does not mean they are reactionary.
This critical independence in the face of what is politically correct manifests throughout the interview. Without diminishing his merits, it is worth noting that it is easier to manifest when one has reached power than when one lives in fear of what academic colleagues or students might say. An aspiring theoretical revolutionary has to say that attachment to small property is reactionary, lest they be booed. Commander Wheelock, weapons in hand, is not someone to be booed.
When Commander Castro came to Mexico, he said that the population explosion was a major problem, that "Mexico has had a population explosion for more than 30 years and, of course, that works against the economic resources available to a country." (El Día, May 20, 1979). Not a single aspiring theoretical revolutionary uttered a peep. But the booing over this opinion (had it come from other lips) is well known. It would be called a "veiled, or cynical, recommendation of the neo-fascist practice of genocide"; a "futurological foolishness of the neo-Malthusians" who fail to realize "that the birth of children is not the problem, that the problem stems from the boom of multinational or transnational companies, and from the crisis of dependent and imperialist capitalism" (Pablo González Casanova, "El futuro inmediato de la sociedad y el Estado", Nueva Política 2, April–June 1976). But what aspiring theoretical revolutionary would have called Castro a neo-fascist?
If material conditions determine consciousness, what do we expect a theorist threatened in their prestige, who has a position to defend against those who covet their vacancy, to say (and even sincerely believe)? If they leave the slightest gap to their left, they will be attacked right there. They have to accommodate themselves to the left of the left of the left. They have to close off any possibility of being overtaken by the surge of theorists more revolutionary than anyone.
To say (and even believe) that material conditions determine consciousness places them in a contradiction. How can they have a non-bourgeois consciousness under bourgeois material conditions (house, car, maid, positions, above-average income, foreign travel)?
But consciousness is not so simple. It cannot be reduced to material conditions (which matter, without a doubt). Consciousness has vested interests: things of which it is convenient or inconvenient to be aware. But they are not so simple, nor necessarily insurmountable.
The doxa against which Socrates fought (conventional opinions, unthought, unconscious, simply repeated thoughts) is not a class phenomenon, though it varies according to the medium. What is considered common knowledge in popular wisdom is usually not the same as in university wisdom. When doxa becomes dogma, the resulting dogmatism varies depending on whether it is supported by a peasant tradition, an army, a church, a group of fans, a scientific sect, a party, or a powerful advertiser.
Saul Steinberg, The Inspector, 1973.
In the case of aspiring theoretical revolutionaries (or, at least, those wishing not to be booed), theoretical consciousness has obvious vested interests. But setting aside hypocrisy, cynicism, and demagoguery; setting aside theoretical Tartuffes, who for this analysis matter less than theoretical Gesticulators (those carried away by thoughts they haven't stopped to think through), it must be said that the most serious thing of all, and what makes false consciousness possible, is that conventional theorists are conventional living beings: they do not connect their readings and experiences. They do not root them in their own lives. They do not feel the need to make them square before their own reader, actor, author, witness, subject self. They live them disconnectedly. They can be happy in the most conventional theories and descend from the theoretical empyrean to the most conventional daily life, equally happy, even if things do not add up.
A researcher repeats the conventional platitude that Mexico's number one problem is unemployment. Furthermore, they reel off the theoretical discourse that, according to them, explains that Terrible Fact. But over drinks, they spout the daily, equally conventional discourse about how impossible it has become to get maids. And they live both things calmly: they do not see the problem that they do not add up. They have read about peasants, but they have them at home and do not talk to them. They have read about 53% unemployment, about the "reserve army of labor," about the crisis of dependent capitalism; but they have the opposing facts at home and do not see the theoretical problem. Although they get paid to produce economic, political, sociological, and historical theory, their true passion is not to understand, but to climb.
Which has consequences. First, on personal integrity, understood not in a moralistic way, but a practical one: lack of integrity disintegrates. A person who lacks a good degree of integration among their acts, memory, imagination, and purposes is practically less: less master of themselves, less the author of their acts and approaches, less free, less alive. We are all conventional in that which we have never taken seriously, which we have not vividly connected with the rest of our lives. But not taking seriously the things to which we dedicate ourselves has consequences for personal integrity.
It also has consequences for the production of theories, which is not alien to the practical world of theory production: the world of budgets, classes, conferences, laboratories, travel, salary scales, buildings, regulations, publications, schedules, interviews, manifestos, consultancies, springboards to political and administrative careers, businesses, parties, unions, cooperatives, governments, international organizations. When the passion to understand is subordinated to the passion to climb, it is to be expected that the production of theories serves climbing more than understanding. And it is also to be expected that production will be scarce and unoriginal. Ready-made ideas are not only cheaper; they have a ready-made market. Just as it is easier to reproduce Coca-Cola than to create a good original product, it is easier to reproduce ready-made anti-Coca-Cola ideas than to create a good original theory.
When academics reach power, the practical consequences of theoretical Gesticulators enter public administration. The opinions of the academic rabble (the things taken for granted, circulating with the authority of being repeated in university circles—that is: ready-made, received, unthought ideas that circulate because they are uncriticized, because they are not taken theoretically seriously) are taken seriously for practical purposes.
In that same Nicaráuac interview, Wheelock says: "I think it will take about two years to fully know the accidents that occur in the country. We thought, for example, that there was going to be a huge number of unemployed workers, by the tens of thousands, yet there haven't been so many. We've even experienced a drop in cotton production" (due to a lack of pickers).
In a desperate situation where Nicaragua urgently needed cotton foreign currency, the national official responsible for securing it failed to foresee a potential labor shortage. And why didn't he foresee it? Because in academic circles (and what greater authority) it is a known fact that under dependent capitalism the reserve army is massive: labor cannot possibly be lacking.
In daily life, it is not hard to meet braceros or relatives of middle-class braceros who go to look for work in the United States to build savings: to exert themselves intensely, spend as little as possible, and return to set up a small business or put money into the family business. Even if the amounts seem ridiculous to a university researcher, this is a process of capital formation. But the fact does not fit into conventional theories. Braceros are supposed to be starving peasants: the hordes of the reserve army that can't take it anymore and cross the border.
The vested interests of theoretical consciousness filter out the facts of daily experience that would force a reconsideration of conventional theories: they leave them in the peripheral vision, like a kind of unconscious nuisance, a cognitive dissonance to be avoided rather than used to face the problem head-on.
It is remarkable that the National Center for Labor Information and Statistics, against all conventional expectations, recently discovered in a vast survey that 75% of Mexican braceros going to the United States had jobs in Mexico and an above-average level of schooling. However, despite these results being prominently published on the front page of unomásuno (March 6, 1981), it will not be difficult to document over the coming years how many prominent academics will keep repeating the same old thing.
Ready-made ideas may or may not suit this or that interest, but they always suit one interest of consciousness: not having to rethink everything. Something otherwise reasonable, comfortable, convenient, allowing one to converse within conventions. The bad thing about this coming around to the same thing is that it rejects the possibility of learning about anything that cannot be integrated into it, anything that demands a rethinking.
A study is published on The Grain Complex in Mexico. If published by the bad guys, we already know what they're going to say. If published by the good guys, we also know what they're going to say. Meaning that, either way, the research was useless: we already knew what there was to know. Which is to dismiss the authors, even if we shower them with praise, and to dismiss ourselves: rejecting in advance any possible discovery that forces a rethinking of ready-made ideas.
This explains a letter from David Barkin and Blanca Suárez to unomásuno (October 8, 1980) that begins:
We were very pleased to see the report on our recent book El complejo de los granos en México, published on September 29. However, we consider it pertinent to make a few clarifications, even with some delay due to having been out of town. Perhaps the most important comment revolves around our finding that it is NOT [underlined by the authors] the direct control of transnational capital that characterizes grain production in Mexico.
The finding does not fit what is expected of researchers on the good side, but rather the bad side. This produces dissonance with reader expectations, leading them to read the opposite of what is written. That is why the report on the study does not report the finding: it reports what was perfectly well known without doing any study at all. This implies a reader who knows in advance that Barkin and Suárez are on the good side, where it is known in advance that transnationals directly control grain production in Mexico. If the reader did not know which side the authors were on (for example: if they read the study in another country, or if the study were the first one they presented), their reading would be simpler; they wouldn't read the opposite of what the authors write: they would read that they are on the opposite side. Thus, they would have no cognitive problems.
Needless to say, if Barkin and Suárez kept finding things that are inconvenient, we wouldn't allow them the resulting discomfort: we would end up discovering that they became reactionaries, or that they always were. Therefore, it is best for them to avoid any research that might lead to such findings and, if they stumble upon them despite everything, to dose them prudently, or learn to present them in a way that confirms, rather than disturbs, good consciences.
How much do these bows to what good consciences might say cost? In personal integrity, in theoretical creativity, in the administration of the country. How much does it cost for the doxa of the academic rabble to circulate as if it were authentic knowledge?
The most charming thing about the academic rabble is that it despises vulgarity. Unlike the traditional rabble, which takes pleasure in the well-known, which has the innocence to believe in received opinions shared by the majority, the academic rabble takes no pleasure in its own vulgarity. It does not realize that the ready-made, received, unthought ideas circulating with the authority of university circles are the very same thing it despises in other circles. Its vested interests, its false consciousness, prevent it from discovering how bad what it thinks it knows actually tastes; to what extent it is innocent and conformist.
The most charming thing about the academic rabble is that, unlike the traditional rabble, it does not know it is rabble.
[From Vuelta 54, May 1981, DLLAP. Translated by Ignacio Oliden].
Gabriel Zaid was born in Monterrey, N. L., on January 24, 1934. He is one of the most provocative and uncategorizable figures in contemporary Ibero-American culture. He studied mechanical engineering, and ever since his thesis on the publishing industry, he has shown a singular ability to read texts, events, and processes through a unique lens that eludes easy dichotomies. He was a contributor to journals such as Diálogos, México en la Cultura, Revista de Bellas Artes, Plural, Vuelta, El Gallo Ilustrado, Revista de la Universidad de México, and Contenido. He currently writes for the magazine Letras Libres and the newspaper Reforma, among other publications. He was also a member of the editorial board of Vuelta (1976–1992). Some of his poetry collections include Fábula de Narciso y Ariadna (1958), Seguimiento (1964), Campo nudista (1969), Práctica mortal (1973), Cuestionario (1976), Sonetos y canciones (1992), Reloj de sol (1995), and La claridad furiosa (2019). His poems have been set to music by Fabio Morábito (1980), Braulio Hornedo (1980, 1999, 2023), Tage Nielsen (1982), Carmen Leñero (1997), Jorge Vidales (1998, 2007), Leticia Servín (1999), Georgina Ramírez Espíndola (2012), Jeff M. Brown (2014), Julián Herbert (2015), Rogelio Guedea (2018), and Pilar Horner (2021). As an essayist, his published works include La máquina de cantar (1967), Los demasiados libros (1972), Leer poesía (1972), Cómo leer en bicicleta (1975), El progreso improductivo (1979), La poesía en la práctica (1985), La economía presidencial (1987), De los libros al poder (1988), Adiós al PRI (1995), Tres poetas católicos (1997), Empresarios oprimidos (2009), Dinero para la cultura (2013), El secreto de la fama (2009), Cronología del progreso (2016), Mil palabras (2018), and El poder corrompe (2019), among others. His work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Slovenian, Dutch, Serbian, and Estonian. El Colegio Nacional has published six volumes of his collected works.
