Organic working-class intellectuals link production roles to political direction

Evidence

The organic intellectuals of the working class are defined on the one hand by their role in production and in the organisation of work and on the other by their “directive” political role, focused on the Party. It is through this assumption of conscious responsibility, aided by absorption of ideas and personnel from the more advanced bourgeois intellectual strata, that the proletariat can escape from defensive corporatism and economism and advance towards hegemony. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 248

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘organic intellectuals of the working class’ as doubly defined by production role and directive political role.
• XREF: Connects forward to how Islamophobia scholars will use Gramsci’s organic/traditional intellectual distinction to analyze who gets to speak for Muslim communities. — connects to: Proletariat and intellectuals need each other mutually for revolution — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 266; Factory councils were designed to fuse economics and politics in proletarian self-government — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 534; Organic intellectuals form metonymic collectivities across class rather than shared identity — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2236