Marx and Engels themselves provide the perfect examples of these roles – Engels earned the income, in his role as successful capitalist, while Marx did the thinking. Yet there is a contradiction. The conclusion to which Marx's thinking led him was that ideas themselves are determined by the material forces of production. If this is so, then the words of the intellectual who explains this process are not only irrelevant. but probably untrue, as the consciousness which has generated his ideas has not itself been a part of the productive process.

The Communist Parties of the world, in and out of power, have wrestled with this problem for more than a century, and have come up with many solutions, some of them reasonable and all of them contradictory. Capitalist society, on the other hand, has been more concerned with production than with ideas, and consequently has generally either ignored the issue or left it to the intellectuals themselves to debate.

The term intellectual is itself ambiguous. Often, it has referred only to the aridly ratiocinative, the modern equivalent of the medieval schoolman. More accurately, however, it refers to those social products which are shaped by the intellect, the demand of the producer's inner consciousness, rather than by the immediately perceived material needs of society. Intellectuals, therefore, include not only abstract thinkers but also artists and scholars. In fact, any person who fully realises his potential will be, at least in some parts of his life, an intellectual.

Humans in the course of history have found many ways of accommodating this intellectual drive. In primitive societies, it can form a part of every activity, as ritual and symbol confer meaning on action and artefact. In more advanced societies, intellectual functions have been both institutionalized and specialized. Hence the special caste of intellectuals.

In earlier stages of civilisation, intellectuals found their niche in society as priests and bureaucrats. After the collapse of feudalism, they sought patrons among the powerful and the wealthy. Only after the industrial revolution was it expected that they would earn their living by selling their own products.

The great age of industrial capitalism was also the great age of the independent literary intellectual, whether as seer like Carlyle or Ruskin, or as novelist like Thackeray or Dickens. Even poets were for a century or so able to earn their income in this manner.

In a sense, however, the same forces which generated the market for intellectual goods were to destroy the producers, as specialization and industrialization advanced into the sphere of culture.

Dickens earned his income because of circulating libraries, cheap methods of printing and book production, and the continuing role of the author as independent craftsmen. Today, however, the author who wishes to make a living from his craft must, in most cases, join a team, either by becoming a member of an academic or similar institution or by selling his talents to an entrepreneurial organisation in advertising, publishing, filming or broadcasting. The consequence is a lack of independent voices in our international chorus of opinion.

The results are, however, even more serious than this would suggest, for the role of books themselves is being diminished in favour of the bland homogeneous products of mass production, tailored to ensure that they neither offend nor satisfy.

The mass-produced novel, the untroubling violence of the television series, the internationally produced and marketed film take the attention of the audience which might once have had time to listen to Lawson or to produce its own yarns and songs. The books that do carry the voice of an individual author find a sale only among specialised audiences, and their message can therefore easily be neglected.

A. Alvarez has argued that writers in the Communist bloc have more effect than their western counterparts precisely because the authorities take them seriously enough to censor them, even to exile them. Their words are heeded even as they are hated. In the west, however, writers, artists and scholars can safely be ignored, relegated to the producers of luxury items of display, or confined to the increasingly impoverished institutions, their students denied any hope of useful employment unless they use the products of their education to meet the needs of the state.

The results of this can be seen in the failure of the west to conduct any adequate public debate about its economic, political and defence problems. Apart from the monetarist and libertarian theories of Friedman and Hayek, and the neo-Keynesian response from Galbraith, virtually none of the ideas which have concerned intellectuals over the past decade has found a place in the present public debate.

The oil crisis, for example, is only the most acute instance of the general problem of energy which was foretold years ago by such people as Erlich and Nader, yet there has still been no serious attempt to find a new basis for western economies. The revival of Islam is met only with uncomprehending noises of racism. The post-industrial society has been foretold for almost half a century, yet the only response by our political leaders to economic slump is a Gadarene rush back to the 30s.

No better example of the knee jerk could be found than the hostile response of the Australian government to the union campaign for a 35-hour week. Despite the evidence produced by writers as various as Hugh Stretton and Bruch Williams that we must respond to increasing technology by reducing the effective working life or spreading the effective production, the government has greeted this logical response of the unions to its own efforts to increase investment in industrial technology with cries of doom. The fact that the official arguments are identical to those used in the 40s against the 40-hour week seems to embarrass the authors no more than the fact that their arguments are addressed to the wrong problem at the wrong time.

This does not mean that a 35-hour week is necessarily desirable. On the contrary, it would almost certainly fail to bring about any redistribution of employment, and thus would cause greater costs and greater inequality of income. Nevertheless, the motivation behind the campaign is sound, and it needs to be answered with arguments relevant to the 21st rather than the nineteenth century. These arguments would be familiar to anyone who has maintained even a fleeting acquaintance with the mass of sociological and economic analysis which has been published over the past decade.

It is not surprising that governments which fail to heed the written word should be so callous towards those who produce it. While art centres and opera subsidies rise, literature board funds and grants remain constant, and expenditure on higher education, in real terms per head, declines. An approving public, denied knowledge of alternatives to the commercial society, applauds the ostensible toughness of politicians who promise the return to a safe land of never was. The only cost be met is the future.