Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to New Discourses Bullets, where I do a bullet point-like summary. I have a single topic from Woke that we need to understand so we can defeat it. And I want to talk to you today about Antonio Gramsci and his ideas of the organic intellectual. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail

about that because I want to make it practical for you, but the organic intellectual idea,

the history, what's going on? So in the early 20th century, the 1910s effectively, Marxism split

into two. Marxism took off in the East and Soviet Union,

then eventually in China, and it used a particular model that Lenin developed for the Bolshevik

party that was called vanguardism. So the idea was that the most intellectual Marxists, that's how Lenin put it, we're going to lead the Communist Party and the Communist Party was going to lead the proletariat, which means the workers along with the peasants, in order to run society. So the intellectuals are going to run everything and they're going to take over because you can't trust the old order and we're going to overthrow it.

And they actually got a lot of support from peasants.

The problem is that in the West, that happened in the East, it's split into two.

In the West, in Europe, in America and so on.

You already had built up functioning institutions.

We didn't have a feudal peasant society.

We didn't have feudal lords beating people over the head in an arrangement that many of them found unacceptable. You didn't have abjectly poor peasants who could be exploited as peasants or recruited

as workers to be exploited because they didn't have any

ground under their feet, not anymore. And so in the West, the Marxists had to do something different.

So one of the chief theorists of the time in the 1910s, he dies in 1937, as a matter of fact,

is this Albanian Italian called Antonio Gramsci.

He's witnessing that the Italian Workers Party won't organize in terms of an international communist push in alignment with, say, Soviet Union.

He is a fan of Lenin at this time.

He can't figure out why this is happening and he finally

figures out it's because the West has a different situation. We're not in a feudal situation like

Russia. We're in a capitalist situation and it has built up institutions that create and transmit

culture from one group of people to the next, from one generation to the next. And that has

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