The people are politically significant in two senses: abstract and concrete. It's the "people" in the abstract who have sovereignty in the modern imagination about democracy; and it's the best organized faction (of multiple classes and strata) of the "people," led by intellectuals (who used to come exclusively from bourgeois or petit-bourgeois backgrounds but some of whom may now come from humbler class backgrounds, given mass education) whose ideas are rooted in the national and (increasingly) regional popular culture, who make social revolutions in the concrete. If ideas of intellectuals are not rooted in the people's ideas, they are incapable of organizing any sizable faction of the people, let alone making the faction they lead prevail.
On 1/14/07, wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:
> His [Gramsci's] main project was to replace a hegemony of the northern
> proletariat over the traditional intellectuals of the south in the eyes of
> the southern peasantry.
We can no longer think only in terms of class struggles within one nation. Intellectuals of global cafe society -- from Beijing to Buenos Aires, New York to New Delhi, Tokyo to Tehran -- think alike, across national borders, and they have more in common with one another than their less educated countrymen and countrywomen in their respective nations.
On 1/14/07, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> You're... not a marxist?
The mythical ideals of the Marxist tradition -- e.g., "Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" -- are at odds with the best insights and practices of the tradition, and they are also not essential to Marx's theory of capitalism.
> The left has been the mainstream of thought for the black community,
> and in certain regions at certain times (the industrial midwest from
> 36-60s), and the mainstream of thought of the insurgent minority of america
> that was in revolt in the late sixties.
It is possible that, in the USA, the ideas of the Left can only take root in racially oppressed predominantly working-class communities -- especially among Blacks and Latinos -- and whites who matter are only the whites who stand in solidarity with them (perhaps about 30% of the white folks). Then again, it is also possible that, after the partial victory of the civil rights movement and backlash against it -- namely, the war on crimes -- the ideas of the Left will never again matter as much in racially oppressed communities as they once did. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>