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 think you should be bolder with your opinions. ultimately i think she is doing that really annoying thing all ultras do, where they armchair quarterback from the comfort of their homes with perfect leftist ideas that never have to actually be sullied by the harsh truths of reality. i actually dont even 100% disagree, trusting america to actually help, especially once it’s clear you’re already winning, was a mistake. however, im also not harshly criticizing them for it, i think with 10s of millions of lives in your hands it makes sense you would do whatever you can to delay war (attempts to appease the liberals in the 30s) and try to end the war as quickly as possible (appeasing the liberals in the 40s). i have the benefit of hindsight, that the path the soviet union took led to them losing the cold war, and maybe advising communists to be more militant during the 30s and 40s would have changed the outcome of the cold war.
regardless, more to my original point, we need to stop dismissing these things as “events from 100 years ago”. these are very important things for us to study, and how we view them and which lessons we take from that study are immensely important as it will inform the actions we take today and in the future in our struggle against barbarism. this is not to say there arent pointless things from 100 years ago that we need to brush past, but i see the kind of sentiment im arguing against way too much on this site. you need to firm in your opinions like this, and not let things go. not to say you should hold this against her and be petty, but i also dont think you should go out of your way to avoid ideological arguments. if you find yourself getting upset to the point where you’re struggling not to resort to insults, i think it’s fine to ask to step away from something and come back to it later
I don’t think the reason the USSR fell is because they weren’t disruptive enough in allied nations in WWII. Like, maybe it’s reflective of an attitude that affected things later on, but it’s a bit of a stretch to think, like, that was the thing that set them on the path of defeat.
I do think these things are important to discuss, especially since it started from a discussion of practical tactics in the modern day. But it’s rare enough to find someone who will listen to stuff like that at all, so I don’t want to alienate them if I can avoid it, especially since like I said it would make things awkward with others. It took me a long time to come around on certain ideas and make peace with certain truths, so I think it’s important to be patient and give people time and space to consider things. Even if they don’t end up agreeing, if they can say, “I know people like that and they’re not so bad,” its a step in the right direction.
i’m not sure either, again not a harsh criticism of the ussr, i just think the only chance for the soviet union to win the cold war was for the west to collapse first, too many good communists died in ww2 that it was always going to fall during the cold war, so in retrospect things that ended up strengthening the west and harming the (already miniscule, especially in the US) chance of revolution