QUESTION:
It’s an irony of history that at this moment young intellectuals, coming from the middle and upper classes, call themselves proletarians and say we must join the proletarians. But I don’t see any class-conscious proletarians. And that’s the great dilemma.

CHOMSKY:
Okay. Now I think you’re asking a concrete and specific question, and a very reasonable one.
It is not true in our given society that all people are doing useful, productive work, or self-satisfying work-obviously that’s very far from true - or that, if they were to do the kind of work they’re doing under conditions of freedom, it would thereby become productive and satisfying.
Rather there are a very large number of people who are involved in other kinds of work. For example, the people who are involved in the management of exploitation, or the people who are involved in the creation of artificial consumption, or the people who are involved in the creation of mechanisms of destruction and oppression, or the people who are simply not given any place in a stagnating industrial economy. Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labour.
And I think that the revolution, if you like, should be in the name of all human beings; but it will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings, and those will be, I think, the human beings who really are involved in the productive work of society. Now what this is will differ, depending upon the society. In our society it includes, I think, intellectual workers; it includes a spectrum of people that runs from manual labourers to skilled workers, to engineers, to scientists, to a very large class of professionals, to many people in the so-called service occupations, which really do constitute the overwhelming mass of the population, at least in the United States, and I suppose probably here too, and will become the mass of the population in the future.
And so I think that the student-revolutionaries, if you like, have a point, a partial point : that is to say, it’s a very important thing in a modern advanced industrial society how the trained intelligentsia identifies itself. It’s very important to ask whether they are going to identify themselves as social managers, whether they are going to be technocrats, or servants of either the state or private power, or, alternatively, whether they are going to identify themselves as part of the work force, who happen to be doing intellectual labour.
If the latter, then they can and should play a decent role in a progressive social revolution. If the former, then they’re part of the class of oppressors.