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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So all my local civility libs and intellectuals have now all of a sudden had enough of the big socials and are descending on the Fedi with full force. I’ve seen so much self-commodifying and “civil discourse” in my previously at least remotely leftist shitposty Mastodon feed that I need to tap out from there for a bit. Is there a way to block a whole language on there? I mean these are the sort of people I originally left the big socials for, they are obnoxious. So much outrage about optics, it’s exhausting.
Doula’s a funny word I wonder where it comes from?
The term doula was first used in a 1969 anthropological study conducted by Dana Raphael, a protégée of Margaret Mead, with whom she co-founded the Human Lactation Center in Westport, Connecticut, in the 1970s.[20] Raphael suggested it was a widespread practice that a female of the same species be part of childbirth, and in human societies this was traditionally a role occupied by a family member or friend whose presence contributed to successful long-term breastfeeding.[20] Raphael derived the term from modern Greek (δούλα, doúla (Greek pronunciation: [ˈðula]), “slave”[21]), as told to her by an elderly Greek woman,[22] Eleni Rassias,[23] and described it as coming from “Aristotle’s time,” an Ancient Greek word δούλα meaning “female slave.”
Crush showed up unannounced(not for me). I didn’t plan on seeing them again until next year >.>
I finally got feedback from a job that rejected me. All they told me was that other people have better communication skills than me. I’m on the spectrum…
Lathe: Bob Odenkirk will play Biden years down the line
Ful medames and hummus are yummy
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/chapo-trap-house-democrats-joe-rogan
chapo lib house eheheheehe
Come to chacha after getting lib overloaded of reddit boop boop booboo boop <- tune when you heal at a pokecenter(in crystal and earlier haven’t played later one so idk if they changed it, bad decision if so)
My family is taking me out to a nice Indian place for my birthday :) but I’ve gotten food poisoning from a statistically concerning amount of my birthday dinner since recent years, prayging that doesn’t happen this time
The English language is ridiculous. Herd, word, bird, curd. Four different vowels that are pronounced exactly the same, all of them should be spelled with a U.
Hard, lard, card, bard. Gard? Nope, that needs a U to make the same sound for some fucking reason. Ward? Pronounced differently.
I just had another date and it went as well as I had expected it to go. Get to the part where we talk about hobbies and she asks me mine, I say “I make short form content / music videos” then she presses me for more information so I tell her “you know like bladerunner, Her, fight club clips over a slowed down reverb melancholic song which is the only way I can express my emotions.” She said “ohhh okay” and then we ate in silence for about a minute and then said “I gotta use the bathroom and take a call” pick one sweety, phone call to your girls or peepee?
Short form artists deserve recognition. I spend hours making these edits and I paid THOUSANDS just to learn how to use premier pro which took me about a year just to get anywhere at all with it. I’m putting my emotion into my short form edits and there’s even a community full of snowfall x redinshi slowed reverb enthusiasts. People come to the comments section to tell me how beautiful the work I’ve done is and how badly they’re feeling and blaming someone else for those feelings, rightly so because there’s nothing wrong with us.
I am the 22nd century Van Go
“I did not pee on the chair” - guy I know
I don’t know if its nostalgia or just a natural part of adulting in hellworld, but I feel a weight crushing me everyday and I cannot enjoy things as much as before. It began in earnest once I graduated and unemployment broke me enough to accept any terms for a job (except working in a defense company), then after 8 months of work broke me further I guess. I just want to feel alive again
I don’t want to dunk on this person too hard, but I had an argument last night with someone in DMs and I need to vent. She’s a syndicalist and trans and seems alright in practice, but it’s a case of disagreeing on events from 100 years ago. But for some reason, of all the things she could’ve criticized the USSR for, she criticized them for “Stopping workers in the US from striking to serve Russian national interests, even denouncing the strikes as ‘fascist inspired’” when I asked, “Huh? How that would serve Russian national interests?” she explained, “They had a policy of appeasing liberal governments in the 1930’s and 40’s.” WHAT?! Do you mean during WWII? When the strikes would have directly benefited the Nazis??
Let me get this straight. The Soviets are too authoritarian because, while facing an existential fascist threat that killed 27 million Soviet people, they politely asked the American Communist Party, whose members joined voluntarily and listened to the Kremlin voluntarily, not to support strikes that hindered the war effort. Of course, the workers could strike anyway without communist support, and some did! But by not actively supporting them, it’s “authoritarian!”
“Couldn’t the same logic be used to oppose strikes in the healthcare industry, since people might die from lack of care?” Well, that depends, IF THE FUCKING NAZIS ARE AT THE GATES, THEN YES!
“By the time the Western front opened up, the Nazis were already losing, it wouldn’t have hurt the war effort that much.” Every day that the war dragged on, more people were fed into the furnaces. And how can you expect them not to do everything possible to win after losing so much? And why do you put so much more importance on some factory worker working long hours than the 27 million people killed by the Nazis??
I don’t get it. If you’re going to criticize the Soviets over something like that, why not bring up the classic talking point of Kronstadt? It’s as if she went out of her way to find the worst possible example, where the so-called “elitist” centralized leadership was 100% correct.
I want to get along because A) it’s foolish to fight over old disagreements, and B) we’re in a discord group together and I don’t want things to get awkward or cause drama. This all started because I mentioned PSL and tried to explain the Leninist line on electoralism, she didn’t run away screaming when I cited Lenin or call me a redfash tankie or anything, but she messaged me later to talk about it. We ended on me saying I needed to sleep and calling it a night. I wanted to avoid an ideological argument, but I couldn’t help getting drawn in and becoming upset.
Idk, Hexbear, any tips for navigating this sort of thing?
gramsci can I cop some of that optimism of the will off you kinda need another batch tbh
