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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My chef tonight on evolution: started his amazing thesis with the assertion stated as fact that evolution is all about making things live as long as possible and therefore if someone could live long enough they'd eventually become nigh invincible.
I'm interested in biology and animal archeology and stuff and another co worker had a geology degree and has a pretty good idea what the non rocks were up to as well. Trying to explain how his fundamental premise on evolution is entirely flawed was really really hard to do despite both of us doing a great job of it. It just wasn't getting through. Pointing out that evolution occurs over the generations and it doesn't select for survival so much as being able to pass on genes and listed a bunch of animals that die right after breeding cause there's a LOT. Other guy picked up the ball and explained what he's thinking of is mutation and when enough of the same mutation is passed along generation to generation you get evolution and that continuous random mutation in one organism would just mean they'd get cancer at some point if death by any means wasn't a factor. I then also pointed out that people tend to become more frail as they age and not more powerful which he claimed was because we are gradually weakened by constantly fighting off disease and without that we'd just get more powerful. I explained what a telomere is. None of this got through and he's just going around thinking that if someone was in a totally germ free environment they'd eventually developed skin made of tungsten and they ability to breath in space or whatever.
This man also still thinks the chicken and the egg thing is a legitimate question even when referring strictly to chicken eggs because we don't know for sure there was never a chicken egg around prior to egg laying animals. Dunno what sort of protozoa were swimming around a clutch of chicken eggs in the primordial seas but I guess they were well fed.