THE WHITE HANDS* Academic social scientists and forms of popular knowledge production Jofaan Muller and Nico Cloete The Russian-Polish radical Jan Makhaisky was exiled to Siberia in the 1890s. Reading Capital, he concluded that the greatest future threat to the proletariat would come from the new class of educated, unpropertied intellectuals. He called them the class of "White Hands". (Quoted by Adam Westoby in 'Conceptions of Communist States' ed D Held et al States and Societies, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983, p234) "Study is the patrimony of no one and the place of study where you carry out your work is the patrimony of no one - it belongs to all the people... and it must be extended to the people or the people will seize it" 1 . Che Guevara Introduction : Mental versus Manual The most dramatic feature of the labour market in late capitalism is the vast and widening gulf between intellectual and manual labour 2 . It is therefore all the more surprising that there is no clear, generally accepted account of the division. Has it always existed? Is it completely dispensible? Above all, what are its mechanisms? Kant articulated the bourgeois orthodoxy that the division was a transcendental necessity for the pursuit of truth and the evolution of natural science 3 . Gramsci's socialist assertion that all men are intellectuals but that only some have the function of being intellectuals makes a similar point 4 . Sohn-Rethel gives the split Critical Arts Vol 4 No 2 1986