File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0102, message 19


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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