Choose a side or intellectually perish, says 1950s sociology lecture

The intellectual loves to show the class struggle acting on other people. He hates like hell for it to be applied to himself. There is only one way to overcome this and that is to accept it. Identify yourself with a fundamental class and go where it goes, mount with it when it mounts and fall with it when it falls. On this basis you will commit some blunders. But you are always in a position to judge and intellectually command the contending forces of society. You can do this as a person identified with the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, or the struggle for preservation of the bourgeoisie. But once you stand in the middle looking from one side to the other, all the knowledge and intellectual honesty in the world will not save you from futility and folly. And even worse may befall.