All humans exercise intellectual activity, but only some become intellectuals.

Evidence

The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 268

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Gramsci’s distinction between intellectual activity universal to all humans and the social category of ‘intellectuals’ — foundational for understanding his redefinition of the term.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s toolkit concept of how hegemony legitimates a ruling stratum — here intellectuals are the stratum that must be created/reworked.