It is common for our DSA chapter to lament our over-abundance of “intellectuals,” given our location in a university town. This lamentation often produces paralysis rather than action. What might it mean to embrace the role of Marxist intellectuals and engage in local struggle from that position? The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned and killed by Mussolini’s fascist regime, provides useful tools for us to address this question and sharpen our political practice.
In last night’s DSA Marxist Reading Group, we discussed Gramsci’s essays “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism” and “The Formation of Intellectuals,” from the Prison Notebooks. In these essays, he lays out the role of Marxist intellectuals: to combat capitalist “common sense,” produce “good sense,” and socialize and propagate truth to make it a basis for action. This can only be done by active “new intellectuals” through sustained contact with the people.
Here are key concepts from the texts:
Common sense: the received ideas and norms of society, “borrowed conceptions” of the world that render people subordinate to the capitalist social order. These are the ideas of the ruling class. The social function of intellectuals is to reproduce this common sense through institutions including schools, churches, media, etc.
Ideology: common sense functions as an ideology, i.e., “a world view showing itself implicitly in art, law, economic activity and in all the manifestations of individual and collective life.”
Hegemony: the dominance of capitalism through reproduction of its “common sense” to convince the masses that the current system is natural and beneficial to all. “The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the direction imprinted on social life by the fundamental ruling class, a consent which comes into existence ‘historically’ from the ‘prestige’ (and hence from the trust) accruing to the ruling class from its position and its function in the world of production.”
Organic intellectuals: these are the “natural” intellectuals who reproduce common sense. They are connected with the masses and play important social roles in producing and reproducing ideology. Capitalism has organic intellectuals of its own, for “the capitalist entrepreneur creates with himself the industrial technician, the political economist, the organizer of a new culture, of a new law, etc.” The socialist movement must develop its own organic intellectuals who will produce the new common sense of a new social bloc.
“Organic quality of thought and cultural solidarity could only have been brought about if there had existed between the intellectuals and the simple people that unity which there should have been between theory and practice; if, that is, the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those masses, if they had elaborated and made coherent the principles and problems which those masses posed by their practical activity, in this way constituting a cultural and social bloc.”
Good sense: the role of intellectuals is not to “discover” abstract truths but rather to criticize common sense and “socialize” and propagate truth in order to make it the basis for lived action. This is the production of what Gramsci sometimes calls “good sense.”
The new intellectual: a person of action who unites theory and practice (not a disconnected academic). “The mode of existence of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, the external and momentary arousing of sentiments and passions, but must consist of being actively involved in practical life, as a builder, an organizer, ‘permanently persuasive’ because he is not purely an orator.”
Creation of intellectual cadres: The new intellectuals cannot act alone. We must collectively develop our analysis and unite theory with practice. This is the role of the Marxist Reading Group and the Socialist Night School. “Critical self-consciousness signifies historically and politically the creation of intellectual cadres: a human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself and does not become independent ‘by itself,’ without organizing itself (in a broad sense) and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is, without organizers and leaders, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus distinguishing itself concretely in a stratum of people who ‘specialize’ in its conceptual and philosophical elaboration.”
Role of the party: “We must emphasize the importance and significance which the political parties have in the modern world in the elaboration and propagation of conceptions of the world, inasmuch as they elaborate an ethic and a policy suited to themselves, that is, they act almost as historical ‘experimenters’ with these conceptions. . . the parties are the elaborators of new integrated and all-embracing intellectual systems, in other words the annealing agents of the unity of theory and practice in the sense of real historical process.”
Lessons from the example of intellectual/cultural struggle within religion:
“Certain essentials are deducible from this for every cultural movement which aims to replace common sense and the former conceptions of the world in general: (1) never tire of repeating its arguments (changing the literal form): repetition is the most effective didactic mean of influencing the popular mind; (2) work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-widening strata of the people, that is, by giving personality to the amorphous element of the masses, which means working to produce cadres of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses though remaining in contact with them and becoming ‘the stay of the corset.’ This second necessity, if satisfied, is the one which really changes the ‘ideological panorama’ of an age.”
