Intelligentsia?

[Redistribute the Rep]

What role does the intelligentsia play in the revolution? Also who exactly falls under the category of 'intelligentsia'? Are they just better paid proletarians?

[Comrade Thomas]

Educating the workers with revolutionary ideologies.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Taking power and establishing an ivory tower dictatorship over the working class, no doubt.

[Rafiq]

Without the intelligentsia, the revolution has no direction.

For the record, workers can be part of the intelligentsia too.

[Redistribute the Rep]

Ok, some more questions : what role do they play in a capitalist society, and will some of them form a counterrevolutionary force?

[blake 3:17]

The intelligentsia, from Latin: intellegentia (Polish: inteligencja, Russian: интеллигенция,[1] pronounced [ɪntʲɪlʲɪˈɡʲentsɨjə]) is a social class of people engaged in complex mental labour aimed at disseminating culture. This therefore might include everyone from artists to school teachers. Intelligentsia is the subject of active polemics concerning its own role in the development of modern society not always positive historically, often contributing to higher degree of progress, but also to its backward movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia

[Thirsty Crow]

What role does the intelligentsia play in the revolution? Also who exactly falls under the category of 'intelligentsia'? Are they just better paid proletarians?
Some fucking complex issues right here. So, good questions.

The thing to do with that category is to split it right in half - by asking the following question: does the person perform a supervisory position in relation to other workers or not.

The so called lower management, and a good part of the middle management would fall unto the category of "yes them pricks surely do". In a social revolution, we can't really expect anything other than these layers of the ruling class (the lowliest of the low within the ruling class probably, with the exception of certain petite bourgeois people) doing what the ruling class does - fighting tooth and nail against workers.

Of course, I'm simplifying. The fact that an historical class analysis focused on the managerial...strata hadn't been really developed within Marxism doesn't help either.

[blake 3:17]

^^ Intelligentsia are not managers, they're culture makers.

Edited to add: Or opinionated idiots. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

In a social revolution, we can't really expect anything other than these layers of the ruling class (the lowliest of the low within the ruling class probably, with the exception of certain petite bourgeois people) doing what the ruling class does - fighting tooth and nail against workers.


It should also be added that when the intelligentsia acts in a bourgeois way, they may do so under the cloak of 'being on the workers' side' and under the red flag, thereby masking their own, anti-revolutionary role.

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

it's a far from homogenous group so it's impossible to come up with a blanket statement imo. Not only do we have to consider that members of the 'intelligentsia' range from being in positions of fame and influence to those working in thankless obscurity, and economically speaking come from the whole range of classifications. There's also the factor of their own opinions, activities and intellectual produce - there are members of the 'intelligentsia' who are unquestionably reactionary as all hell, and conversely it's a group often accused in the media of being full of closeted Marxists.


on a related note I think it was someone on here who referred to the class-status of revlefters as 'lumpen-intelligentsia'

[Rafiq]

It should also be added that when the intelligentsia acts in a bourgeois way, they may do so under the cloak of 'being on the workers' side' and under the red flag, thereby masking their own, anti-revolutionary role.

How does the intelligentsia act in a "bourgeois way"? It is in our tradition to recognize that within the realm of ideology, culture, they are as ripe of with contradictions as the capitalist relations which had birthed them. If there is a major predisposition for the intellectual strata of society to be bourgeois, which today there is, all this means is the overwhelming disadvantage the proletariat is in right now in the struggle for power.