Discuss Gramsci’ s notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ (2015, 15 Marks)
All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals, wrote Antonio Gramsci. Every kind of work involves some thought; what makes someone an intellectual is the social role of organising, directing and legitimising. The organic intellectual is his name for those who perform that role for a class, and hegemony depends on them.
Organic and Traditional Intellectuals
Every social group born of an essential function in the world of economic production creates, organically, strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function.
- Organic intellectuals grow with a class. The rise of capitalism brought the industrial technician, manager, engineer, economist, lawyer and civil servant, who made the new order workable and made it look natural.
- Traditional intellectuals are left over from an earlier order. The clergy, once bound to the landed aristocracy, is the classic case, with men of letters and notaries. They believe they stand above class, and that illusion of neutrality serves whoever rules.
- A rising class must assimilate the traditional intellectuals, and does so faster the more organic intellectuals it produces.
Their Function in Hegemony
Intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. They organise the “spontaneous” consent of the masses and staff the apparatus that coerces those who refuse. The new intellectual is therefore not an orator but a constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”, who turns a class interest into common sense.
Counter-Hegemony and the Modern Prince
The working class must therefore produce its own. They must make the good sense in popular experience coherent rather than import a finished doctrine, and they lead the war of position. The party, Gramsci’s modern Prince, is where subordinate groups produce their organic intellectuals and join them to traditional ones. Without such intellectuals there is no counter-hegemony.
Indian Illustrations
- Jyotirao Phule‘s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) and B. R. Ambedkar‘s Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (1924) and People’s Education Society (1945) can be read as a subordinate community producing intellectuals who put its experience into a language that could compel the state.
- E. V. Ramasamy (Periyar)‘s Self-Respect Movement built a counter-culture that later became political power.
- Kanshi Ram organised educated Dalit employees into BAMCEF (1978) before founding a party.
- Today’s think-tanks, economists and media commentators work as organic intellectuals of market reform, presenting policy choices as necessity.
Limits
- Edward Said (Representations of the Intellectual, 1994) saw the true intellectual as an outsider speaking truth to power, not a class functionary.
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 1988) warned that intellectuals who speak for the subordinate may silence them.
- Organic intellectuals are easily absorbed by the ruling bloc, the trasformismo Gramsci himself described.
Conclusion
Gramsci made intellectuals a political category: hegemony and counter-hegemony are both produced by somebody. It explains why the revolution Karl Marx expected stalled in the West and names the agent that could revive it, provided that agent stays accountable to those it speaks for.