New Class of Intellectuals Must Engage in Building Policy Framework for a New World System
PARADIGM CHANGES, 18 Feb 2019
The Tricontinental – TRANSCEND Media Service
Tricontinental Institute for Social Research releases dossier “The New Intellectual,” emphasizing the need to “develop a theory of the future.”
12 Feb 2019 – Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s 13th dossier, released today, provides a short assessment of Castro’s Battle of Ideas and of the task that lies before intellectuals in our current political context in order to build such a world. Castro called not only for redistributed wealth, but also for an entirely new social and economic system. Such a system must be supported by intellectuals of the working people who see the conditions of their class, interpret them against the ruling ideas and produce a radical understanding of the world.
One of the great downsides of living in a world dominated by a profit-driven economic and social system—capitalism—is the sense that nothing other than this nightmare is possible. It tells us a lot that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than to imagine the end of capitalism, to imagine the polar ice cap flooding us into extinction than to imagine a world where our productive capacity enriches all of us. If we are to fight this system successfully, it is not enough to investigate the problems with the present. It is essential that we participate in the conversation about what a transformed society would look like.
Once you have organized people to push for a new world system, what is the policy framework that needs to be adopted? It is here that intellectuals must put their heart and soul into action. We need to think hard about the many creative ways to use our social wealth to solve the immediate problems of humanity—hunger, sickness, climate catastrophe. This is the task taken on by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, outlined in “The New Intellectual.”
“This dossier welcomes you to our world, to our work and our ambitions. Join us as we document the creative ways in which people imagine the future.”
—Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Download pdf: The New Intellectual
Download PDF: The New Intellectual
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Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. They seek to bridge gaps in knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of their political movements and involve themselves in the “battle of ideas” to fight against the bourgeois ideology that has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.
All of their materials are produced in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
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