Amilcar Cabral included members of the 'intelligentsia' in his definition of petit bourgeoisie. Speaking about them in the context of colonial Portugese Guine, he said:
'In order not to betray [the objectives of the national liberation], the petty bourgeoisie has only one choice... The revolutionary petty bourgeois must be capable of comitting suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspiration of the the people to which they belong. The alternative - to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class - constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle. The positive solution in favor of the revolution depends on what Fidel Castro recently correctly called *the development of revolutionary consciousness*. ('The Weapon of Theory,' _Revolution in Guinea_, Monthly Review, 1969, p. 110)
There is more than a bit of irony in AC's notion of 'class suicide' - a rejection of bourgeois temptations which he believed had 'natural' appeal for those in the 'liberal professions.' That Cabral did not offer any convincing economic reasons for why a group of intellectuals would constitute themselves as an intelligentsia of the working class (actually a working class in formation in Guinea-Bissau & Cape Verde) suggests that he saw the choice as both a moral one and one of individual reflection. Perhaps only optimism on his part sustained a perspective for which there were few actual cases. Of course, optimism is a political weapon and not a scientific method.
In any event, Cabral's characterization of the intellectuals' other option remains prescient: they can only become the intelligentsia of capital, the bureaucracy, neocolonialism, the status quo. They can't free themselves from an objective reality: as a service class (not directly involved in the process of production), they do not have the economic bases to take over power for themselves. Michael Hoover