He found the culture that killed the old epoch no improvement: dehumanizing, homogenizing, and corrupting capitalism, a genocide (as he called it) that emptied the borgate of its residents, who had their own language and their own, not-always political, solidarity. Today, the ones who could not become petit bourgeois lost their sense of belonging as the world changed around them.
Unlike a number of other Italian leftist intellectuals, many of whom had a quasi-mythic vision of the working class and the underclass or saw them as monolithic, Pasolini actually knew the people he wrote about. If his views sometimes had a subtle traditionalism, they did not fall into the ignorance of vast sectors of the Left or what he called in an article on Israel–Palestine the “[Communists’] traditional and never admitted hatred against lumpenproletariats and poor populations.” In 1959, he invited the PCI to become “‘the party of the poor people’: the party, we may say, of the lumpenproletarians.” [...]
Despite this collaboration, Pasolini never became a full-fledged organic intellectual. He always looked for different audiences. In the last phase of his life, he wrote for Il Corriere della Sera, then (and now) the main outlet of the Italian bourgeois establishment, which an independent journalist, Piero Ottone, was editing. There, Pasolini wrote the most polemical pieces of his life, perhaps feeling free from any constraints in this neutral, if not unfriendly, venue. [...]
As a nonorganic, heterodox intellectual of the Italian left, Pasolini understood before many others what role the intellectual would play not only in Italy but in the rest of the Western world. In one of the first issues of Officina, a cultural and political magazine that he created in 1959, he wrote that Marxist intellectuals were essentially living a contradiction. They spoke to a bourgeois class that did not want to listen. This situation required intellectuals to become spiritual guides. According to Pasolini this process was complete by 1968: the Left — not to mention the PCI — no longer had cultural hegemony. Instead, it belonged to industry. “The intellectual,” he wrote, “is where the cultural industry places him: why and how the market wants him.”
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