What is an organic intellectual?

Fannie Lou Hamer was an inspiring voice (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

Socialist organisation needs working class militants rooted in workplaces and communities.

Sometimes, these militants are also Marxist intellectuals engaging with new academic research.

The Marxist historian E P Thompson wrote, “The fashioning of coherent ideas, the understanding of the complex phenomena of contemporary economic, social, political life, demands time, access to books, leisure and submission to intellectual or cultural disciplines.”

This “is extraordinarily difficult for the industrial worker, or, indeed, the average overworked teacher.”

But we also need another sort of intellectual to challenge capitalism.

The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci considered the role of intellectuals. He described “hegemony”—the way the ruling class maintains its rule not only through brute force but through consent.

This isn’t just about propaganda—it is based on a “common sense” made up of assumptions people share about what is just, fair and inevitable.

Every social class, Gramsci argued, produces its own intellectuals who give that class its sense of identity, purpose and direction.

Traditional intellectuals—priests, scholars, philosophers, lawyers—present themselves as above all class interests.

But their neutrality is an illusion that hides their service to the ruling class. They present the ruling class’s world view as “universal truth”.

Organic intellectuals, by contrast, come from within the working class. They make no pretence of neutrality but promote the interests of the working class.

Ruling class hegemony is never unopposed. Organic intellectuals from the working class play a crucial role in encouraging opposition.

Gramsci distinguished these organic intellectuals from traditional intellectuals by their roots in a social group and their commitment to advancing its interests.

Their knowledge is a tool for changing the world rather than just describing it.

They are not defined by academic qualifications but by their capacity to express collective experiences and to organise.

A black woman, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper’s daughter with little education, became one of the most powerful voices of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. She was an organic intellectual and a leader.

Historically, working class intellectuals, who were denied much formal education, tended to develop from a process of leading struggles, reading and giving and attending lectures.

Today, organic intellectuals can emerge in new ways. An undocumented immigrant describing their experience on TikTok can create a shared understanding of the impact of racism and imperialism.

But social media complicates this because the reach of an activist depends on algorithms.

There have always been tensions between oppositional movements and institutions that aim to neutralise and coopt them.

Social media provides a potential mass platform. But social media also works against Gramsci’s idea of intellectuals who are accountable to those they influence and are rooted in the working class.

Online communities can only affect change if they encourage action in the physical world.

Distrust of experts is rooted in frustration with the absence of organic intellectuals, who are grounded in shared conditions and opposition to the establishment.

Protest movements need to counter ruling class lies, find ways to connect individual experiences to the system and suggest ways to win. Organic intellectuals are the people who provide these ideas and arguments.

Gramsci writes that organic intellectuals must participate “in the practical transformation of the real world”.

Any movement must combine theory and practice to be effective. Not every member of a revolutionary party has to be an expert on every question. But they need to be confident that someone in their party is.

A socialist society would transcend the artificial division between mental and manual labour and narrow specialisms and develop everyone’s capabilities to the full.