The infant PCI was a mostly working-class party with a tiny intellectual layer

Evidence

Although at Livorno it commanded delegate votes equivalent to two thirds of those of the maximalist centre, its real strength after the split proved to be far smaller. In the April 1921 general elections, the communists won 290,000 votes, while the socialists won over a million and a half. Party membership was around 40,000 in 1921, of whom 98 per cent were workers and less than per cent (245 in all) intellectuals. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: The 98% worker / 245 intellectual split grounds the later Gramscian theme of organic intellectuals: a party almost entirely without intellectuals must build its own rather than borrow them.
• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s toolkit goal around Gramsci’s concept of organic vs traditional intellectuals; this specific demographic fact is the empirical base for that theory.