Political parties function as laboratories unifying theory and practice into new intelligentsias.

Evidence

One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their historical “laboratory”. The parties recruit individuals out of the working mass, and the selection is made on practical and theoretical criteria at the same time. The relation between theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and totalitarian intelligentsias 408 and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1203

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines parties as historical laboratories and crucibles of organic intelligentsias — a core mechanism concept in the toolkit.
• XREF: The organic-intellectual concept will be presupposed in later Islamophobia analyses of who produces and diffuses hegemonic representations of Muslims.
• SEED: Potential angle: how think tanks and advocacy organizations serve as the modern ‘laboratories’ elaborating the ethics and politics of secularist or anti-Islam narratives.