Marxist intellectuals historically emerged from intermediary classes rather than the people.

Evidence

Something similar has happened up to now with the philosophy of praxis. The great intellectuals formed on the terrain of this philosophy, besides being few in number, were not linked with the people, they did not emerge from the people, but were the expression of traditional intermediary classes, to which they returned at the great “turning points” of history. Some remained, but rather to subject the new conception to a systematic revision than to advance its autonomous development. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1411

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds forward to arguments about who authenticates a liberation discourse — directly relevant to Islamophobia scholarship on native informants and credentialed intermediaries. — connects to: Theorists who later dominated academia came from the movement’s margins, not its activists. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 269