Paper long abstract:

Using the example of present-day struggles in industrial Ferrol (NW Spain), I will show how the 'organic intellectual' is central to the production of class through the pedagogical transmission of a knowledge useful for analyzing reality and for organizing strategies of struggle. A work of commemoration reconfigures the memory of past 'class' struggle and produces 'exempla' to be followed. In a conjuncture of post-fordist fragmentation, delocalization and transnational migration where 'identity politics' and individualized idiosyncratic conflicts take center stage, producing class in real life practice is increasingly difficult and often appears as meaningless. Forms of struggle have become short term and targeted without the horizon of a radical systemic change. As producers of theoretical concepts that feed back into organic intellectual's categories of analysis and concrete action, social scientists might act as linchpin between structural and emergent aspects of collective struggle.