Dear West: Your ‘Age of Monsters’ Has Begun
BY RAMZY BAROUD
Antonio Gramsci, 1921.
Antonio Gramsci was not a professional philosopher. His intellect was refreshingly situated within an inherent bias towards the common people, the ‘subaltern’ classes, particularly the working class.
He argued that all people are essentially intellectuals, in the sense that all people possess the intellectual faculties for rational thinking and deduction, though “not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”.
Thus, intellectualism should not exist for its own sake, but as a direct response to the collective needs of society.
In the same way that change in society is driven by class struggles, intellectuals are also involved in similar struggles, which are intrinsically linked to the cultural, ideolog...