Italian intellectual and political activist, founder of the Communist Party (Ales, Sardinia, 1891 - Rome, 1937). Thanks to the support of his brother and his intellectual capacity he overcame the difficulties produced by his physical deformity (he was hunchbacked) and by the poverty of his family (since his father was imprisoned, accused of embezzlement). He studied at the University of Turin, where he was influenced intellectually by Benedetto Croce and the socialists.
In 1913 he joined the Italian Socialist Party, immediately becoming a leader of its left wing. After working on various party periodicals, he founded, together with Palmiro Togliatti and Umberto Elia Terracini, the magazine Ordine nuovo (1919). Faced with the dilemma posed to socialists around the world by the course taken by the Russian Revolution, Antonio Gramsci chose to adhere to the communist line and, at the Livorno Congress (1921), split with the group that founded the Italian Communist Party.
Gramsci belonged from the beginning to the Central Committee of the new party, which he also represented in Moscow within the Third International (1922); he endowed the formation with an official press organ (L'Unità, 1924) and represented it as a deputy (1924). He was a member of the Executive of the Communist International, whose Bolshevik orthodoxy he defended in Italy by expelling from the party the ultra-left group of Amadeo Bordiga, which he accused of following Trotsky's line (1926).
He soon had to go underground, since since 1922 Italy was under the power of Mussolini, who would exercise from 1925 an iron fascist dictatorship. Gramsci was arrested in 1926 and spent the rest of his life in prison, subjected to humiliation and ill-treatment, which added to his tuberculosis to make prison life extremely difficult, until he died of cerebral congestion.
In these conditions, however, Gramsci was able to produce a great written work (the voluminous Prison Notebooks), containing an original revision of Marx's thought, in a historicist sense and tending to modernize the legacy of Marxism to adapt it to the conditions of Italy and twentieth-century Europe. Already at the Lyon Congress (1926) he had advocated the broadening of the social bases of communism by opening it to all classes of workers, including intellectuals. His theoretical contributions would powerfully influence the adaptation of Western communism that took place in the sixties and seventies, the so-called Eurocommunism. 🤮
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci saw the ruling class maintaining its power over society in two ways –
Coercion – it uses the army, police, prison and courts to force other classes to accept its rule
Consent (hegemony) – it uses ideas and values to persuade the subordinate classes that its rule is legitimate
Hegemony and Revolution
In advanced Capitalist societies, the ruling class rely heavily on consent to maintain their rule. Gramsci agrees with Marx that they are able to maintain consent because they control institutions such as religion, the media and the education system. However, according to Gramsci, the hegemony of the ruling class is never complete, for two reasons:
The ruling class are a minority – and as such they need to make ideological compromises with the middle classes in order to maintain power The proletariat have dual consciousness. Their ideas are influenced not only by bourgeois ideology but also by the material conditions of their life – in short, they are aware of their exploitation and are capable or seeing through the dominant ideology.
Antonio Gramsci Marxists.org :gramsci-heh:
Antonio Gramsci and the Italian Revolution :anti-italian-action:
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Does it not matter to anybody that none of the shit Trump proposes is going to work? It is filled with reactionary hate and it's nonsensical. But also nobody's goals are served by it. We talk about how ass backwards it is to try and get infinite growth, but they're not even trying to get growth in anything meaningful. People are going to be sicker, poorer, less learned, less curious about their less habitable land that is less insured. In exchange they get fossil fuels to help produce middling products and apocalypse shelters for billionaires. There's no grand projects, no art, no good slop, and nobody to push the envelope. Fascism doesn't make cool shit, it just hurts people
Yeah it's reactionary. In reaction to the (limited) social progress made since the millennium.
Christman either on the podcast or the cush streams talked about how people have given up on government doing anything meaningful - we're on this runaway train and we don't have control or the illusion of control over it. And they're correct that the system as set up cannot be corrected absent revolution. So instead, they will make do with distributing pain and terror domestically. The point is to turn the power of the state to as pointless and petty ends as what they're doing right now, this is their mandate. Whether it makes sense doesn't matter, whether it would do anything about growth or prices doesn't matter, what matters is it hurts the people they want it to hurt. Even if it hurts them, if it hurts who they hate more they'll take that.
We live in a very cynical and desacrilized time. No one really believes institutions will do anything positive for them, no one believes in the power of some big idea, no one believes their fellow workers won't screw them over first if they're given a chance - well, as a rule. Obviously there's exceptions, it's just the vibe of this end stage malaise of the recognition that this all went on way too long and was able to (temporarily or not) suppress what will overtake it.
Bill Watterson called this thirty years ago.
Christman got me criss-cross applesauce. Cause I had a formative image of republican thought about how they stumbled into wealth by cosmic coincidence[1]. But ALSO politics is about distributing pain. Is there a popular synthesis of these ideas? This sounds like fodder for leopards eating your face
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtaTzFmAabk
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: