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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I dunno why I'm thinking about The Boys but it failed so hard to deliver on the promise of its first few episodes, that being a ragtag group of fugitives fighting against a superpowered corporation. The writers became too enamoured with Homelander and the intrigue and lying and plot twists, but my favourite episodes are still the first few. The Boys use their individual skills to figure out a superhero's weakness and kill them without getting caught. Homelander in the first few episodes is Vought's heavy, the one who its impossible to win a fight against, and I wish he hadn't become so elevated. He's effectively the main character now, the story and world revolves around him. Huey hasn't been compelling since season 2 imo, he's just around because the writers don't know how to kill him off. This goes for most of the Boys, Butcher feels like the only one the writers are actually interested in. There's also no stakes whatsoever, because the Boys have faced off against Homelander and other superheroes so many times and never died or been seriously injured or changed. The writers clearly don't know what to do with Frenchie, and they should have killed him off two seasons ago. Honestly, they should have killed off a few of the Boys at this point, it could have been any of them, including Huey.
Its also embarassing how it started off as a satire of superhero franchises and is now a sincere superhero franchise. I didn't watch Gen Z because I didn't feel like it, but it turns out that's important for the ending of season 4. So now its a superhero cinematic universe, awesome, we didn't have enough of those.
I'll watch season 5 and probably enjoy it well enough, but the show has fallen so much in my eyes since season 1. Its just turned into pop culture slop now, for people to talk about in between seasons of Stranger Things and Squid Game.
Homelander and the gore genuinely disturbs me
Yeah the gore stopped being shockingly dark and was just there for shock value. Like why do we need to see a person's fingers getting sliced off by an ice skate. That's just for the sake of being edgy.
Also the treatment of Huey getting SA'd is really sickening.
There's definitely a lot to be said about all these shows that aimed to be satirical of a pop culture thing, then becoming that exact thing. It's played out.