From: Huechroma-AT-aol.com Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 19:10:30 EST Subject: Re: Public Intellectuals In a message dated 2/14/01 5:41:21 AM Eastern Standard Time, hbone-AT-optonline.net writes: << 1) Who are the public intellectuals? Maybe they're like the Abominable Snowman, roaming the forest in theory, but never seen in the flesh. >> Hue and others, I thought you might like to know what Antonio Gramsci thought about intellectuals. He divided intellectuals into two groups: those directly involved in "directing the ideas and aspirations of their class" through hegemony, known as organic intellectuals and the rest, known as traditional intellectuals. Don Smith Following is a rather long quote from "Selections from the Prison Notebooks - Antonio Gramsci". The central argument of Gramsci's essay on the formation of the intellectuals is simple. The notion of "the intellectuals" as a distinct social category independent of class is a myth. All men are potentially intellectuals in the sense of having an intellect and using it, but not all are intellectuals by social function Intellectuals in the fimctional sense fall into two groups. In the first place there are the "traditional" professional intellectuals, literary, scientific and so on, whose position in the interstices of society has a certain inter-class aura about it but derives ultimately from past and present class relations and conceals an attachment to various historical class formations. Secondly, there are the "organic" intellectuals, the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class. These organic intellectuals are distinguished less by their profession, which may be any job characteristic of their class, than by their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong. The implications of this highly original schema bear on all aspects of Gramsci's thought. Philosophically they connect with the proposition (p.323) that "all men are philosophers" and with Gramsci's whole discussion "of the dissemination of philosophical ideas and of ideology within a given culture. They relate to Gramsci's ideas on Education (pp. hrt) in their stress on the democratic character of the intellectual function, but also on the class character of the formation of intellectuals through school. They also underlie his study of history and particularly of the Risorgimento, in that the intellectuals, in the wide sense of the word, are seen by Gramsci as performing an essential mediating function in the struggle of class forces. Most important of all, perhaps, are the implications for the political struggle. Social Democracy, following Kautsky, has tended to see the relationship between workers and intellectuals in the Socialist movement in formal and mechanistic terms, with the intellectuals-refugees from the bourgeois class-providing theory and ideology (and often leadership) for a mass base of non-intellectuals, i.e. workers. This division of labour within the movement was vigorously contested by Lenin, who declares, in What is to be Done, that in the revolutionary party "all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals... must be obliterated". Lenin's attitude to the problem of the intellectuals is closely connected with his theory of the vanguard party, and when he writes about the need for socialist consciousness to be brought to the working class from outside, the agency he foresees for carrying this out is not the traditional intelligentsia but the revolutionary party itself, in which former workers and former professional intellectuals of bourgeois origin have been fused into a single cohesive unit. Gramsci develops this Leninist schema in a new way, relating it to the problems of the working class as a whole. The working class, like the bourgeoisie before it, is capable of developing from within its ranks its own organic intellectuals, and the function of the political party, whether mass or vanguard, is that of channeling the activity of these organic intellectuals and providing a link between the class and certain sections of the traditional intelligentsia. The organic intellectuals of the working class are defined on the one hand by their role in production and in the organisation of work and on the other by their "directive" political role, focused on the Party. It is through this assumption of conscious responsibility, aided by absorption of ideas and personnel from the more advanced bourgeois intellectual strata, that the proletariat can escape from defensive corporatism and economism and advance towards hegemony.
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