The Italian revolutionary socialist Antonio Gramsci argued that the working-class movement needs the services of what he termed the ‘traditional intellectuals’, theoreticians like Marx, or indeed himself, who had been trained in bourgeois academic skills but were willing to break unequivocally with the ruling class. But Gramsci also insisted that every class needs its ‘organic intellectuals’. In the case of the capitalist class, these include the managers, civil servants, journalists and politicians who organise its rule on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, the working class also needs its own ‘organic intellectuals’ if it is to seriously challenge the power of the capitalist class. Thus, the key task for a revolutionary party, Gramsci explained, is to weld together and develop such a layer of ‘organic intellectuals’ inside the working-class movement.

There is no doubt that during the 1920s the leadership of the British Communist Party bore all the hallmarks of the worker-intellectual polymath Gramsci saw as necessary. A whole generation of shopfloor trade union militants emerged, such as Harry Pollitt, Willie Gallacher, Arthur MacManus, Tom Bell, William Paul, Johnny Campbell, Wal Hannington, Harry McShane and J. T. Murphy, who educated themselves within the socialist movement before and during the First World War, and then went on to become leaders of the Communist Party. The energy and determination of such worker-intellectuals were displayed in their extraordinary hunger for reading books and the pursuit of knowledge, albeit outside the established institutions of learning. It was characteristic that J. T. Murphy's agitational pamphlet on shop steward organisation should list the famous writers, playwrights and poets Lewis Morgan, Havelock Ellis, Walt Whitman and Henrik Ibsen among the further reading recommended. Experience of religious doubt and an interest in materialism, against the background of a growing radicalisation of the working-class movement, helped to shape the intellectual curiosity of these autodidact trade union militants and led them on the road to Marxism. But significantly, they became committed to understanding the world not merely for its own sake, but in order to change it, so as to overthrow capitalism and establish an entirely different social order.