What Gramsci Taught Us About Intellectuals
Vijay Prashad
In his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx (1818-1883) wrote a line that has since become justly celebrated: the philosophers have till now only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it. What Marx meant was plain – that intellectuals of his day busied themselves with the interpretation of the human story, whereas the inequalities of capitalism had made it impossible not to desire to change what they had learned. This was a lesson that gripped the generations after Marx, as intellectuals from different class backgrounds and different nationalities turned to their societies to learn about them and to transform them. The emancipatory intellectual had arrived.
But, this kind of intellectual thought – whether academic or artistic – was in the minority. Most intellectuals did not throw themselves into the emancipatory movement. The lure of older commitments – to social hierarchy, to money and to god – was not easy to avoid. Marx’s comment was towards those intellectuals who saw themselves as autonomous from institutional investments, who believed that their work was untouched by the messiness of the world’s entanglements. They wrote about the world but saw themselves – godlike – as above the very contradictions of the world. Such a posture of detachment was simply not possible. Intellectuals lived in the world, were rooted in world, had their own class habits and their own class instincts.
The very best of these intellectuals wanted to understand the world, to draw historical or trans-historical explanations for what they saw around them. But, most of them in Marx’s time and in our own time, wrote of the world without a sense of how to transform what they observed. Theirs were texts of interpretation, texts that began with an attitude towards reality that suggested its intractable nature. Even those who sensed a problem and wanted to change things did not necessarily study reality in motion, reality with the possibility of transformation. To take this stance, Marx suggested in that key sentence, is to believe fundamentally in the possibility of change and to trace within the present the tracks towards an emancipated future.
Permanent Persuader
A half century later, the Italian Communist militant Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) returned to the theme of the emancipatory intellectual. Gramsci was clear that there was not one kind but many kinds of intellectuals. Intellectual activity could not be assumed to lead inexorably towards fealty to socialism. Most intellectuals – Gramsci noted – either were averse to any change or did not see themselves as either conservative or emancipatory but as technical thinkers. To this end, Gramsci offers a useful set of distinctions between organic intellectuals, traditional intellect and intellectuals of a new type.
Intellectuals are not a class by themselves. They are rooted in the class from which they emerge; they develop commitments either to their class of origin or they develop new commitments to different classes. Gramsci, writing in prison, is clear on this point: ‘Every social group born on the terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production creates itself together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which gives it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic, but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizer of a new culture, of a new legal order, etc.’
Each class, therefore, produces its intellectuals. The capitalist class requires the neo-liberal economist (‘specialist in political economy’) and the advertising executive (‘the organiser of a new culture’). Each of these intellectuals put themselves forward as neutral, as beyond class, as scientists of reality. But, in fact, they are governed by a certain class position, a certain view of the world that is shaped by the interests and needs of the capitalist class. It is the capitalist economist who will, for example, insist that hunger in the world is a result of scarcity; this economist would not like to acknowledge the fact that the world produces 150% of food requirements. The peasantry has its own intellectuals – farmers who understand crop disease and weather, who are consulted by other farmers about mishaps on the field or for advice about irrigation. These are intellectuals of the peasantry. Each intellectual is organic to his or her class. These are organic intellectuals. These intellectuals, Gramsci noted, give ‘homogeneity and awareness of its own function’ to their respective classes.
It is, however, the intellectual of the dominant classes who is able to establish their views of social life as universal views. They are able to conceal their class bias through the pretensions of a social science, establish categories and concepts that appear pure rather than congealed in the interests of the dominant classes. In mainstream economics, for instance, scarcity is the concept that shapes the discipline. If scarcity is the main concept, then the discipline asks the next question: how to best distribute scarce goods, for which the answer is ‘the market’. But even this ‘market’ is not a neutral term. It conceals within itself that the market is shaped by social structure, by those who are powerful enough to define the market. ‘Market choices’ mean, for instance, that those who are hungry but who have no money should not be permitted to eat. Markets, say the mainstream economists, set prices and prices are the best way to allocate scare resources. This is seen as a neutral proposition, when in fact this is a view of the intellectuals who are organic to the dominant classes.
Other intellectuals, who are rooted in the world view of other classes such as the peasantry, might ask: how can it be that those who farm produce cannot eat the food? How is it that the world produces more than hunger desires? What happens to the rest of the food? Why do governments destroy it before it is allowed to feed the hungry? These are questions outside the pretensions of the intellectual world created by those intellectuals who have adopted the class perspective of the elite bloc.
The intellectual of the peasantry is not taken as seriously as the intellectual of the capitalist class. In each social formation, the dominant class determines what is logical and is seen as true. Therefore, the intellectuals of the dominant class are seen as the real intellectuals, as the traditional intellectuals. The economist and the advertising executive are the traditional intellectuals of the order, but so too are those who are vestiges of the older era, such as priests and landlords.
For Gramsci, neither the organic nor the traditional intellectuals are inherently conservative or radical. Typically, traditional intellectuals – being rooted in their dominant class – are conservative and against systemic change that would rattle the social order. Organic intellectuals of different classes are often governed by the mode of thought produced by traditional intellectuals so that they too are often conservative and are not enthusiastic about change. This reflects Marx and Engels’ comment in The German Ideology, ‘the ruling idea of the age are the ideas of the ruling class’.
However, there are some organic intellectuals of the working people who see the conditions of their class, interpret them against the ruling ideas and produce a radical understanding of the world. Their views emerge but might dissipate unless they are rooted in a social or political movement, preferably in a political party of some kind. Gramsci calls these intellectuals the new intellectuals, those who throw themselves into ‘active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, permanent persuader’. The permanent persuader, the new intellectual, Gramsci notes, is the person who is devoted to working to alleviate the grievances of the people, to elaborate popular consciousness, to push the suffocating narrowness of thought outwards and make more and more space for popular struggles to sustain themselves and win. These new intellectuals are not necessarily Marxists, but they are certainly invested in the struggles of the key classes of the people, and they are certainly clear about the need to fight to build a post-capitalist society.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is an executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.
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