The Gramscian influence … has been enormous, but the types of intellectual that prevail today are that of the “desecrator” or “demystifier” and that of the “expert” or “technician”; what relationship do they have with the Gramscian figure of the “organic” intellectual?
I reply that they are the result of its decomposition. The intellectual was assigned by Gramsci a function somewhat similar to that which Marx assigned to the proletariat: that of one who, by freeing himself, frees the world.
The decomposition turns him into an official of the culture industry, dependent on a powerful class that needs both the intellectual desecrator (as “custodian of nihilism”) as well as the corporate expert.
The process that led to it is not difficult to reconstruct, in a negative way. In fact, how does this kind of intellectual take shape? Without [Marxist] economism, the opposition will become that between traditional intellectuals and progressive intellectuals.
As historicists, they will no longer be able to speak in the name of a utopian socialism; not even a scientific socialism, given the abandonment of the materialistic-economistic, objectivistic aspect of Marxism; simply in the name of history as a process of self-transcendence.
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