Traditional intellectuals can retain political dominance through an independent economic base

Evidence

The Prussian Junkers resemble a priestly-military caste, with a virtual monopoly of directive-organisational functions in political society, but possessing at the same time an economic base of its own and so not exclusively dependent on the liberality of the dominant economic group. Furthermore, unlike the English landowning aristocracy, the Junkers constituted the officer class of a large standing army, which gave them solid organisational cadres favouring the preservation of an esprit de corps and of their political monopoly. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 307

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s concept of ‘traditional intellectuals’ as a distinct social group with autonomous power — carries forward to how Islamophobia critiques will engage with independent intellectual strata. — connects to: Third-person intellectual autonomy survived bourgeoisie by escaping production coercion. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1064; Genius requires belonging to a privileged caste that treats the universe as its own. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1951
• QUESTION: Worth noting how the Junkers’ ‘priestly-military’ character both resembles and complicates Gramsci’s later Catholicism example — is the Church a parallel case of an independent economic base sustaining ideological monopoly?