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26/05/2022
The Need for ‘Organic Intellectuals’ from the Working Class:
Why is the National Students Federation heavily focused on the ideological training of
its members?
Dr. Muhammad Azeem (Senior Advisor, NSF)
Introduction
The current class-based education system perpetuates a
class-based society and increases the gap between the
rich and the poor. In Pakistan, this class-based
education system is so unequal that each income
category has a different education system based on its
buying capacity. In its extensive drive of study circles,
the NSF wants to address a particular dimension of this
crisis – the quality and relevance of the education
system to movements of working-class people in
Pakistan.
Students from public-sector and cheaper private
schools, who come from the working and lower-middle
classes, form the NSF's membership and the primary
demographic for its work. These schools have poor
quality education and do not equip the students for
survival, let alone challenge inequity. To counter this,
the NSF wants to simultaneously raise the intellectual
level of its members and all students from the working
and lower middle-classes while providing them with a
proper orientation they can use to face the challenge of
class struggle in their lives.
The educational activities of NSF constitute an
overarching approach connecting all professional
disciplines in a coherent philosophy centred on
working-class focused research and issues. NSF aims to
develop in its students the research skills and
intellectual capacity to spearhead its projects such as
'science for the people,' 'health for the people,'
'environment for the people,' 'education for the people,'
'people's journalism,' and legal aid and alternative
lawyering and justice initiatives.
NSF's goal is to ensure that when its students graduate
as doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, or teachers,
they can compete with and challenge ruling class
intellectuals while orienting their energies towards the
working class in a connected and coherent way.
Borrowing Antonio Gramsci's terminology, we call
these intellectuals from the working classes 'organic
intellectuals' who seek to serve and strengthen the
classes from which they come and to which they orient.
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The NSF rejects the belief that an intellectual can exist
as a social category independent of class. All persons
can be intellectuals, but not all persons can function
intellectually. Each social class group can generate
intellectuals, but only the ruling class makes a concerted
effort towards controlling the field for all intellectuals.
As a result, the 'intellectuals' produced by the current
system lay the ground for further expansion of the
ruling elite and its power over society. A critique of this
phenomenon requires a thorough understanding of the
current crisis, allowing us to describe an alternative
tradition of intellectuals.
Traditional intellectuals of the ruling elite
The dominant educational paradigm in Pakistan
consists of a private neoliberal model with remnants of
the old public sector system alongside a widely
prevalent religious madrasah education system.
Together these different systems form the current
educational system with its distinct pattern of
fragmentation along economic, political, and social
lines.
The focus of the neoliberal model is on business or
commerce education, service sector-related design and
marketing, vocational training, and imparting
engineering skills for the repair and maintenance of
imported machinery. The resulting workforce from this
system intends to export itself and then send
remittances back to the country as far as possible.
The public sector education system, on the other hand,
is largely neglected, run-down, and institutionally
stagnant, with almost no innovation in content or
teaching methodologies. It exists only to capture the
labour force generated by an increasing population.
Lacking a mind of their own, the intellectuals produced
by this system serve the traditional political needs of the
ruling elite and their beneficiaries, i.e., the military-state
sector. Mainstream political parties also rely on these
traditional intellectuals. As a result, the level of political
dialogue produced remains low and crisis-ridden.
Despite their anti-West rhetoric, religious parties too
can easily rely on these scholars to promote state
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Publications National Students Federation Pakistan
ideology. Consequently, state culture and Islam
reinforce each other as systems designed to control the
people. In this way, political parties, educational bodies,
and civil society synthetically carry out the same
functions as the state does on a larger scale.
In this form of ideological reproduction, traditional
intellectuals who are not equipped with critical
discourse merely promote 'instruction' and not
'education.' Therefore, the problem for our society is
not just the educational curriculum and its reform but
the entire educational and socio-political system. The
irony is that these traditional intellectuals were originally
from the lower middle class, peasantry and working
classes, including new streams of women entering
higher education. However, they have been assimilated
by the ruling elite into subservient roles and mediocre
intellectual blocs because the working class has not
produced its organic intellectuals.
The problem of working-class parties in Pakistan
In social democratic and other progressive and left
socio-political trends, left intellectuals act like refugees
from the bourgeois classes, who provide theory and
ideology to the working class. Lenin tried to erase this
distinction between workers and intellectuals by
building a cohesive unit through party structures.
Antonio Gramsci further developed this link and
explained how the working class is also capable of
producing intellectuals from within its resources.
There is a long tradition of select left-leaning
intellectuals from the upper classes joining working-
class movements in Pakistan. However, these
intellectuals have merely grafted a different set of ideas
onto their bourgeois outlook without changing the
nature of their intellectual endeavours. Some leftist
writers from the upper classes, like Sajjad Zaheer,
genuinely embraced the communist movement. These
writers and intellectuals were active with the
Communist Party of Pakistan (CP) in its early years and
with left-leaning literary endeavours such as the
Progressive Writers Association (PWA). As a result,
the leadership of the CP had significant overlap with
writers from the PWA.
This is also the reason for the survival of the histories
of the communist movement people's struggles. Yet the
discourse as a whole is either modernist-liberal or
scientific and positivistic, as derived from the strong
Soviet influence in the CP and the PWA. The writings
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produced as a result of this process often reproduce
'economically reductionist' and 'evolutionist' discourses
in a mechanical fashion. These discourses are legacies
of the enlightenment and are fundamentally dogmatic
and non-democratic.
Despite the early presence of such writers, by the 1990s,
the mainstream communist movement after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc
became bereft of intellectuals. A stream of refugee
intellectuals was produced as a consequence. These
intellectuals, who constitute most of the left-wing writers
and intellectuals in Pakistan today, are liberal in their
analysis, have the rhetoric of the Left, and are cognizant
of working-class issues but propose solutions that do
not address any of the fundamental contradictions in
the present society.
_______________
It is time we take this issue firmly in
our grasp and commit to producing
organic intellectuals of and from the
working class!
_______________
The Philosophy and practice of organic intellectuals
The organic working-class intellectual differs from the
'man of letters,' 'the scholar,' and other (masculine)
types who suspend themselves beyond people's reach.
The intellect of the organic intellectual is only a
function given to them by their class. Organic
intellectuals are not necessarily 'charismatic' orators
who move the feelings and passion of the people.
Instead, they actively participate in working-class life
through education, organization, construction, as
models of thought and action, as critics, and as
permanent persuaders.
An organic intellectual will not learn 'technique-as-work'
but 'technique-as-science,' and rather than being an
'expert,' the organic intellectual will be specialized and
political. An organic intellectual gives democratic
structure to intellectual disciplines that build on the
people's own voices and experiences of their structural
location. This approach is distinctly different from
treating the 'masses as asses' and under the control of a
rational bureaucracy. It is also different from the cleric,
priest, or brahman's approach, who use their centuries'
old control over mystified knowledge to hold onto the
upper or significant echelons of the educational system.
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An organic intellectual is to develop, launch, and We are yet to build such a party, so our organic
participate in a counter-hegemonic project of the intellectuals have to perform an extraordinary and
working class. This project challenges the institutions of special role before and during the process of building a
the ruling elite, which are based in the universities, law genuinely revolutionary party.
schools, media, churches, mosques, and temples, to
assure the reproduction of their system. The main job *****
of the organic intellectual is to expose the hypocrisy,
N.B. Please note that this article is based on the insights
flaws, corruption, and violence in this system and
of the Italian philosopher and theorist Antonio
deprive it of its legitimacy. Simultaneously the organic
Gramsci, adopted, and written in the Pakistani context.
intellectual has to build the legitimacy of working-class
culture and politics and not facilitate the exodus of
talented persons to other classes.
Published by:
An organic intellectual also believes in 'learning as Central Literature Committee
experience.' This means that while learning about National Students Federation Pakistan
building a dam, they will understand the mechanics in 26/05/2022
relation to ecology, indigenous people's land,
agricultural patterns and food supply, the sources of
energy, and other interconnected vitals - and may even
reach the conclusion that alternatives to dam building
are better suited to the situation at hand.

A traditional intellectual, on the other hand, believes in

'learning as work.' They will learn how to build a dam
to earn a good salary and to project themself through
their work on the untapped or empty landscape. They
will accept all instructions at work without question,
move into supervisory and management roles, and
become dismissive or ignorant of people's responses to
the dam project.

An organic intellectual's preoccupations are not

occasional superficial writings and articles but synthetic
studies. First, the organic intellectual has to learn and
understand the traditional intellectual's writings
thoroughly. It is impossible to develop a critique that
can surpass the traditional intellectual without knowing
these works. As opposed to this, traditional intellectuals
are produced in complete seclusion from other world
views. The discipline of Economics shows this clearly
where only free-market theories are presented to For queries regarding this essay or the NSF, please
students. No discussion of socialist planned economies write to us on our email address
nsfpk.official@gmail.com
or alternative community-based approaches is even
or contact us on one of our social media profiles
introduced. below:
Finally, the distinction between a traditional intellectual Facebook: NSF.OFFICIALS
and an organic intellectual is essential to understand the YouTube: NSF Official
relation of intellectuals to a political party struggling to Instagram: @nsfpak
build a new democracy. To make a dual power
structure, a revolutionary party needs organic
intellectuals. There is no leading party of the working
classes in alliance with the NSF.

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