Organic Intellectuals Are Hard to Find
By the Editorial Board

We have recently come under fire by our various and many friends over what can only be called leftist infighting. All right-it's no secret that we lean fairly toward the radical end of the political spectrum, as do many at this school. The two criticisms we hear most often are that the opinions section consists solely of liberal arguments, and that these arguments are often too emotional and poorly developed, even though our friends, in principle, agree with the sentiment.

To the first criticism, our response is two-fold. First, we invite all opinions in our newspaper and we wholeheartedly encourage those with conservative viewpoints to submit articles for publication. From time to time, we do indeed receive such viewpoints. Second, we do not believe this newspaper need be ideologically "balanced." The assumption of balance is itself an ideological position, since it requires a subjective judgement on the part of the editorial staff as to what exactly consitutes the "center" and, implicitly, where that "center" should be.

To the second criticism, we can only respond by quoting the popular Italian critical theorist Antonio Gramsci at length:

"Imagine the intellectual position of the man of the people: he formed his own opinions, convictions, criteria of discrimination, standards of conduct. Anyone with a superior intellectual formation with a point of view opposed to his can put forward arguments better than he and really tear him to pieces logically and so on. But should the man of the people change his opinions just because of this? Just because he cannot impose himself in a bout of argument? In that case he might find himself having to change every day, or every time he meets an ideological adversary who is his intellectual superior. On what elements therefore can his philosophy be founded?...

"The man of the people thinks that so many like-thinking people can't be wrong...as the man he is arguing against would like him to believe;...while he himself, admittedly, is not able to uphold and develop his arguments as well as the opponent, in his group there is someone who could do this and could certainly argue better than the particular man he has against him.... He has no concrete memory of the reasons and could not repeat them, but he knows that reasons exist, because he has heard them expounded, and was convinced by them....

"These considerations lead, however, to the conclusion that new conceptions have an extremely unstable position among the popular masses; particularly when they are in contrast with orthodox opinions (which can themselves be new) conforming socially to the general interests of the ruling classes....

"Specific necessities can be deduced from this for any cultural movement which aims to replace...old conceptions of the world in general:

"1. Never to tire of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form): repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality.

"2. To work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amporphous mass element. This means working to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them...."

We couldn't have put it better ourselves.