When we think about who holds power in society, we usually imagine politicians, generals, or wealthy business owners. But the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that real power often works in a quieter way, through ideas, culture, and the people who produce them. Writing from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s, Gramsci developed a theory that placed intellectuals at the very centre of how societies are ruled and how they might be changed. Understanding his view of intellectuals helps explain why control over schools, media, and culture matters just as much as control over factories and armies.
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Who counts as an intellectual?
Most people assume an intellectual is a professor, a writer, or a scientist, someone with advanced degrees and a reputation for deep thinking. Gramsci rejected this narrow definition. He famously wrote that all men are intellectuals, but not all have the function of intellectuals in society. By this he meant that every human being uses reason, forms opinions, and interprets the world. The difference is that only some people perform the social role of producing and spreading ideas for others.
This reframing is important. It removes the snobbery from the concept and connects intellectual activity to ordinary work and life. A factory supervisor explaining a new process, a village elder settling disputes, or a trade union organiser making sense of workers’ grievances are all performing intellectual functions, even without a university title. For Gramsci, the question was never whether someone was clever enough to be an intellectual. The real question was which class or group their thinking served.
Two kinds of intellectuals
Gramsci’s most influential contribution to political theory was his distinction between two types of intellectuals. This division is the foundation of everything else in his analysis, so it is worth understanding clearly.
Traditional intellectuals
Traditional intellectuals are those who appear to stand above the everyday conflicts of society. They present themselves as independent, autonomous, and devoted to universal values rather than the interests of any single class. Think of priests, judges, professors, philosophers, and respected scientists. They often carry an aura of neutrality, as if they belong to no particular side and simply pursue truth or moral wisdom.
Gramsci argued that this appearance of independence is misleading. Traditional intellectuals usually carry forward the values and worldview of an earlier ruling order, and in practice their work tends to legitimise the existing system. A class that came to power long ago leaves behind its intellectuals, who continue to command respect across generations and seem to float free of class loyalty. Their claimed neutrality is exactly what makes them so effective at maintaining the status quo, because ideas that look impartial are far more persuasive than open propaganda.
Organic intellectuals
Organic intellectuals, by contrast, emerge directly from within a particular class or social group and consciously articulate its interests. Gramsci held that every class produces its own organic intellectuals as it develops. The capitalist class generates economists, managers, engineers, and advertising specialists who organise production and justify the market order. The working class, in turn, can produce its own thinkers and organisers who give voice to its experiences and aspirations.
The word “organic” captures the key idea. These intellectuals are not separate from their class but grow out of it, like an organ growing within a body. They are tied to the lived experience of the people they represent and they help that group understand its own situation, organise itself, and act politically. Importantly, the term is not a compliment reserved for the oppressed. Even dominant and powerful classes have their own organic intellectuals who serve narrow elite interests.
Why intellectuals matter for power
To grasp why Gramsci gave intellectuals such weight, we need his concept of hegemony. Earlier Marxists tended to assume that the ruling class dominates mainly through force, the police, the army, and the law. Gramsci agreed that coercion exists, but he insisted that in developed societies the ruling class rules just as much through consent, by making its ideas appear as common sense or the natural order of things.
This is where intellectuals do their decisive work. They operate within what Gramsci called civil society, the network of schools, churches, newspapers, cultural bodies, and private associations that shape how people think. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that for Gramsci, the modern state is not just an administrative machine but is intertwined with this sturdy structure of civil society. Within these institutions, intellectuals spread the values and assumptions that keep the existing order looking legitimate.
The result is that domination feels less like domination. When most people accept inequality as inevitable, or believe that the current system reflects fairness and reason, the ruling class barely needs to use force. Its hegemony is maintained quietly, through ideas that the population has absorbed and now treats as their own. Intellectuals are the agents who manufacture and circulate this consent.
Intellectuals and the path to revolution
If hegemony rests on consent produced by intellectuals, then challenging it requires more than seizing factories or government buildings. Gramsci understood that you cannot simply overthrow a system whose values people genuinely believe in. First you have to change how they think. This is why organic intellectuals of the working class became so central to his vision of revolutionary change.
Building a counter-hegemony
Gramsci argued that the subordinate classes must develop their own intellectuals capable of producing a counter-hegemony, an alternative set of ideas, values, and beliefs that can challenge the legitimacy of the dominant order. These organic intellectuals do not merely complain about injustice. They provide leadership, philosophical clarity, and direction, helping workers move beyond scattered grievances toward a coherent understanding of their position and their power.
He identified a serious practical problem here. Historically, the working class had relied largely on assimilated traditional intellectuals for leadership rather than developing enough of its own. To solve this, Gramsci called for educating workers in both technical skills and the humanities, so that a skilled worker could rise from being a mere specialist to becoming a director, someone able to think across the whole of society rather than just their narrow trade.
The war of position
Gramsci translated this insight into a famous strategic distinction. A war of manoeuvre is a direct frontal assault on state power, the sort of sudden seizure that succeeded in Russia in 1917. But in Western societies with strong civil societies, he argued such an assault would fail, because the state is protected by deep trenches and fortifications of civil society that absorb the shock.
Instead, he advocated a war of position, a long, patient struggle waged across the institutions of culture and ideas. This means winning hearts and minds gradually, building alternative institutions, and slowly shifting the ideological landscape until a new social order becomes possible. Organic intellectuals are the foot soldiers of this strategy. By exercising intellectual and moral leadership within community affairs and institutions, they translate alternative visions of society into everyday practice and steadily build consent for change.
Gramsci’s relevance today
Although Gramsci wrote nearly a century ago, his framework remains remarkably useful for analysing contemporary politics. His ideas help explain why social movements invest so heavily in shaping public opinion, why debates over school curricula and media ownership become so fierce, and why activists often see cultural change as a precondition for political change.
In the Indian context, the framework illuminates many long-running struggles. Dominant social hierarchies have historically been sustained not only through laws but through deeply held beliefs that made them seem natural and unquestionable. Reform movements have often worked precisely as wars of position, challenging these beliefs over decades by producing their own thinkers, writers, and organisers from within marginalised communities. Figures who rise from oppressed groups to articulate their interests and provide leadership fit Gramsci’s description of organic intellectuals closely. The American civil rights movement offers a parallel example, where activists such as Ella Baker organised from the bottom up and empowered local leaders to connect ideas about justice with concrete community action.
What makes Gramsci’s theory enduring is its insistence that power is not just about who holds office or owns wealth. It is also about who shapes the ideas that ordinary people accept as obvious. As long as that contest over common sense continues, intellectuals, whether traditional defenders of the existing order or organic challengers from below, will remain at the heart of political life.
A brief note on Gramsci’s own life
It is worth remembering the conditions under which these ideas were produced. Gramsci was arrested by Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1926, and the prosecutor reportedly demanded that the court stop his brain from working for twenty years. Yet it was precisely in prison that Gramsci filled his notebooks with thousands of reflections on culture, history, and the role of intellectuals. He died in 1937, never having fully regained his freedom, but his fragmentary prison writings became some of the most influential works in modern political theory. There is a fitting irony in the fact that a man imprisoned to silence his ideas produced a theory explaining why ideas can never truly be locked away.
What do you think? If hegemony depends on ideas that feel like simple common sense, how can any of us tell the difference between our genuine beliefs and the beliefs a dominant class has taught us to hold? And in an age of social media, who are today’s organic intellectuals, and whose interests do they really serve?
References
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gramsci/
- https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/82926-quaderni-del-carcere
- https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/organic-intellectuals-and-capitalist-hegemony
- https://luciddialectics.substack.com/p/tricontinental
- https://savageminds.substack.com/p/dear-west
- https://www.spcmc.ac.in/uploads/1726346447_GramscionHegemonyandCivilSociety.pdf
- https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/1982301.htm
- https://admirskodo.substack.com/p/antonio-gramsci-hegemony-culture
- https://wagingnonviolence.org/2023/08/gramsci-lessons-for-social-movements-today/
- https://anticapitalistmusings.com/2023/03/antonio-gramsci-and-the-relevance-of-the-organic-intellectual-today/
- https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780231105934
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