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 worry too much. I mentioned that I disapproved of neoliberal regime after neoliberal regime in one of my classes and now I'm concerned that classmates might think "neoliberalism" basically just means woke, because when I come to think of it none of the polsci classes I took ever even covered the subject.
I do not enjoy when i use a term i know the "official" definition of and it's taken as essentially the exact opposite by someone.
Not one bit
I don't mind that it happens out of ignorance, but it really makes it hard to have conversations when basic terminology hasn't been defined and I don't feel like having to give an entire rundown of the 20th century because education is so deficient they don't even know who Margaret Thatcher was.
I know that feeling. You try to maybe push the discussion towards a more serious or productive place while not taking up too much of the room, but without longer arguments it never feels like you get your points across.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. You have this tradeoff between simplicity, precision, and brevity. Realistically you have to be brief or else you annoy everyone by taking up time and you'll look like you're rattling off a manifesto. So you can either explain things in precise terms that preserve the meaning, but you'll sound detached and obnoxious for using a lot of jargon, or you simplify the complicated thing you're talking about to the point you can't say anything that's all that meaningful and most of the time it just comes across as an annoying lefty person saying "capitalism bad." Kinda makes you understand why leftist theory and memes are notoriously lengthy, you can't readily explain this stuff without making it at least a little complicated.
Yeah that's what makes it so exhausting is having to first establish where you need to even start from