Intellectual Labour and Social Class

Abstract

How should one conceive of the class location of intellectual labour? For Marxists, this is not simply a problem of interest, but rather a fundamental political problem. Marx placed the notion of proletarian self-emancipation at the heart of his theory of revolution,1 but simultaneously maintained that the capitalist labour process tends to render opaque to its subjects both its exploitative basis and the possibility of future non-exploitative alternatives. Such opacity necessitated the use of social scientific tools.2 Yet these tools—and the intellectual labourers who use them—have typically been considered as external to the proletariat.3 The idea of intellectual labour as external to the proletariat was of course emphasised by Lenin. Left to their own devices, the workers in What is to be Done? could not reach beyond the immediacy of the economic struggle, beyond ‘trade union consciousness’. The agents of social science — that is intellectuals of petty bourgeois origin—would therefore be required to bring revolutionary consciousness to the workers from without. I do not wish to comment on the cogency or otherwise of Lenin’s position, a position which must always be assessed in terms of Russian conditions. However, in the context of contemporary capitalism, the idea of intellectual labour—and hence academic social scientific knowledge—as external to the proletariat is undergoing a process of erosion.KeywordsLabour ProcessClass LocationTraditional IntellectualAcademic LabourPrivate Sector WorkerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.