MAULANA KARENGA

There is general agreement among both continental and diasporan Af-
rican social theorists--whether revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral,
W.E.B. Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon, or reformists like Harold Cruse
or E. Franklin Frazier--on the indispensible role of petty-bourgeois
intellectuals in broad and profound social change. ¹ In spite of the crit-
icism of their class and its tendency to hedge, betray, compromise, and
play broker between the masses and the ruling class in any given sit-
uation, there is the continuing concession that this class is most con-
scious of the possibilities of change and that a segment of this class
must accept the historical responsibility of imbuing the masses with a
new active self-consciousness which will culminate in self-liberation.
Whether they are called the petty bourgeoisie, the Talented Tenth, or
the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, it is these intellectuals who are
charged with the decisive role in the theoretical and practical project of
liberation, grasping the fundamental dimensions of the situation and
developing strategies and structures to change it.

Even Marxists such as Lenin and Gramsci assign a fundamental role
to members of this class in bringing about serious social change. Lenin
argued that left to itself, the working class would only develop a trade-
union consciousness and thus there was an urgent need for political
intervention from the party in the fundamental roles of education and
organization. ² Antonio Gramsci contended that without a revolutionary

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