Bureaucratic expansion creates masses of intellectuals justified by politics rather than production

Evidence

In the modern world the category of intellectuals, understood in this sense, has undergone an unprecedented expansion. The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. Hence Loria’s 13 conception of the unproductive “worker” (but unproductive in relation to whom and to what mode of production?), a conception which could in part be justified if one takes account of the fact that these masses exploit their position to take for themselves a large cut out of the national income. Mass formation has standardised individuals both psychologically and in terms of individual qualification and has produced the same phenomena as with other standardised masses: competition which makes necessary organisations for the defence of professions, unemployment, over-production in the schools, emigration, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 283

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s toolkit: how ‘intellectuals’ are politically constituted, which feeds the Islamophobia field’s analysis of knowledge-production elites and state-bureaucratic power.
• DEFINE: Clarifies Gramsci’s expansion of ‘intellectual’ to include bureaucratic functionaries created for political rather than productive purposes.