[lbo-talk] Gramsci on Intellectuals

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Feb 11 12:06:01 PST 2007


On 2/11/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 1. Probably we're working with too narrow a definition of "intellectul";
> what the term covers needs more discussion. Probably the term should
> cover 25% at least of the u.s working class.

But, in his discussion of organic intellectuals, Gramsci is not talking about some workers who are more formally educated than other workers; he is talking about workers who play political leadership roles as organizers. A worker who is among the least educated of society but becomes, say, a shop steward leading a strike, a leader of an environmental group protesting pollution, a leader of a queer group demanding the equal right to work and marriage, etc., is an organic intellectual. A well-educated worker who is politically inactive isn't.

In Gramsci's opinion, such organic intellectuals of the working class play a mediating role in a political party, linking other workers with traditional intellectuals who come from other classes than the working class and have traditional higher education that destines them to make a business of being intellectuals -- clerics, lawyers, artists, professors, etc. -- and who have knowledge useful to the working class and have also things to learn from them.

What has changed since Gramsci's days is that, today, many of the people who make a business of being intellectuals themselves come from working-class families and remain workers, due to proletarianization of intellectual labor. Still, those intellectual workers tend to come from the high to middle strata of the working class, so the mediating role of organic intellectuals and the political context provided by a political party or (more likely in the case of the USA) a social movement on the Left is necessary.

What's missing in the USA is that political context where organic intellectuals of the class, other workers, and traditional intellectuals can meet regularly and work together. In the absence of enduring political parties and social movements on the Left in the USA, religious institutions come close to providing a substitute for what Gramsci had in mind, but they do not quite suffice, at least for a left-wing purpose here. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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