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: cw: trots

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  • Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I have this one.

    There are a few versions on LibGen

    He's not all that readable, though. They really are notebooks, so the ideas are scattered throughout. It's better than if it were, like, the Collected Tweets, and this edition is arranged by theme, which helps. But the circumstances of his career are that all we get are journalism and then prison writings, and nothing more systematic. It's a bummer. I haven't read much but might start with a secondary source before really diving in.

    Edit - Then again, I just opened to a random page and found him saying "The best thing about The Prince is that it is not a systematic treatment, but a 'live' work, in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of a 'myth.' " That'll show me for bemoaning the lack of a systematic text!

    • edwardligma [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      cheers, i saw that one although its also expensive to get shipped where i live (and i find i need an actual print version for difficult theory, i just dont absorb it properly on a screen). maybe i ought to just stump up the money and do it

      also lmao gramsci was on some good shit in that picture

      • Wertheimer [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        (and i find i need an actual print version for difficult theory, i just dont absorb it properly on a screen)

        Absolutely, me too. Especially for anything with endnotes or where I'll want to make use of the index. No endnotes in this, but the fragmentary nature means you'd want to flip through / bookmark pages more effectively than the PDF will allow.

        Bummer about the shipping / printing-on-demand costs.