Everything about Antonio Gramsci totally explained
Antonio Gramsci (
January 23,
1891 –
April 27,
1937) was an
Italian writer,
politician and
political theorist. A founding member and onetime leader of the
Communist Party of Italy, he was imprisoned by
Mussolini's
Fascist regime. His writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of
culture and political
leadership and he's notable as a highly original thinker within the
Marxist tradition. He is renowned for his
concept of
cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the
state in a
capitalist society.
Life
Early life
Gramsci was born in
Ales,
Italy, on the island of
Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci, a low-level official. His father's family was
Arbëreshë and the family name was probably related to
Gramsh, an
Albanian town. Francesco's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in
Ghilarza.
In 1898 Francesco was convicted of
embezzlement, unjustly it turned out, and imprisoned, reducing his family to destitution and forcing the young Antonio to abandon his schooling and work at various casual jobs until his father's release in 1904. The boy suffered from health problems: a malformation of the spine owing to a childhood accident left him hunch-backed and underdeveloped, while he was also plagued by various internal disorders throughout his life.
Gramsci completed secondary school in
Cagliari, where he lodged with his elder brother Gennaro, a former soldier whose time on the mainland had made him a militant
socialist. However, Gramsci's sympathies at the time didn't lie with socialism, but rather with the grievances of impoverished Sardinian peasants and miners, who saw their neglect as a result of the privileges enjoyed by the rapidly industrialising
North and who tended to turn to Sardinian
nationalism as a response.
Turin
A brilliant student, in 1911 Gramsci won a scholarship that allowed him to study at the
University of Turin, sitting the exam at the same time as future cohort
Palmiro Togliatti. At
Turin, he read
literature and took a keen interest in
linguistics, which he studied under
Matteo Bartoli. Gramsci found the city at the time going through a process of
industrialization, with the
Fiat and
Lancia factories recruiting workers from poorer regions. Trade unions became established, and the first industrial social conflicts started to emerge. Gramsci had a close involvement with these developments, frequenting socialist circles as well as associating with Sardinian emigrants, which gave him continuity with his native culture. His worldview shaped by both his earlier experiences in Sardinia and his environment on the mainland, Gramsci joined the
Italian Socialist Party in late 1913.
Despite showing talent for his studies, Gramsci's financial problems and poor health, as well as his growing political commitment, forced him to abandon his education in early 1915. By this time, he'd acquired an extensive knowledge of
history and
philosophy. At university, he'd come into contact with the thought of
Antonio Labriola,
Rodolfo Mondolfo,
Giovanni Gentile and, most importantly,
Benedetto Croce, possibly the most widely respected Italian intellectual of his day. Such thinkers espoused a brand of
Hegelian Marxism to which Labriola had given the name "philosophy of
praxis". Though Gramsci would later use this phrase to escape the prison censors, his relationship with this current of thought was ambiguous throughout his career.
From 1914 onward Gramsci's writings for socialist newspapers such as
Il Grido del Popolo earned him a reputation as a notable
journalist, and in 1916 he became co-editor of the
Piedmont edition of
Avanti!, the Socialist Party official organ. An articulate and prolific writer of political theory, Gramsci proved a formidable commentator, writing on all aspects of Turin's social and political life.
Gramsci was, at this time, also involved in the education and organisation of Turin workers: he spoke in public for the first time in 1916 and gave talks on topics such as
Romain Rolland,
the French Revolution, the
Paris Commune and
the emancipation of women. In the wake of the arrest of Socialist Party leaders that followed the revolutionary riots of August 1917, Gramsci became one of Turin's leading socialists when he was both elected to the party's Provisional Committee and made editor of
Il Grido del Popolo.
In April 1919 with Togliatti,
Angelo Tasca and
Umberto Terracini Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper
L'Ordine Nuovo. In October of the same year, despite being divided into various hostile factions, the Socialist Party moved by a large majority to join the
Third International. The
L'Ordine Nuovo group was seen by
Lenin as closest in orientation to the
Bolsheviks, and it received his backing against the anti-
parliamentary programme of the extreme left
Amadeo Bordiga.
Amongst the various tactical debates that took place within the party, Gramsci's group was mainly distinguished by its advocacy of
workers' councils, which had come into existence in Turin spontaneously during the large strikes of 1919 and 1920. For Gramsci these councils were the proper means of enabling workers to take control of the task of organising production. Although he believed his position at this time to be in keeping with Lenin's policy of "All power to the Soviets", his stance was attacked by Bordiga for betraying a
syndicalist tendency influenced by the thought of
Georges Sorel and
Daniel DeLeon. By the time of the defeat of the Turin workers in spring 1920, Gramsci was almost alone in his defence of the councils.
In the PCI
The failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement led Gramsci to believe that a Communist Party in the
Leninist sense was needed. The group around
L'Ordine Nuovo declaimed incessantly against the PSI's
centrist leadership and ultimately allied with Bordiga's far larger "abstentionist" faction. On
January 21,
1921, in the town of
Livorno, the
Communist Party of Italy (
Partito Comunista d'Italia - PCI) was founded. Gramsci supported against
Bordiga the
Arditi del Popolo, a militant anti-fascist group which struggled against the
Blackshirts.
Gramsci would be a leader of the party from its inception but was subordinate to Bordiga, whose emphasis on discipline, centralism and purity of principles dominated the party's programme until the latter lost the leadership in 1924.
In 1922 Gramsci travelled to
Russia as a representative of the new party. Here, he met Julia Schucht, a young
violinist whom Gramsci later married and by whom he'd two sons.
The Russian mission coincided with the advent of
Fascism in Italy, and Gramsci returned with instructions to foster, against the wishes of the PCI leadership, a united front of leftist parties against fascism. Such a front would ideally have had the PCI at its centre, through which
Moscow would have controlled all the leftist forces, but others disputed this potential supremacy: socialists did have a certain tradition in Italy too, while the communist party seemed relatively young and too radical. Many believed that an eventual coalition led by communists would have functioned too remotely from political debate, and thus would have run the risk of isolation.
In late 1922 and early 1923,
Mussolini's government embarked on a campaign of repression against the opposition parties, arresting most of the PCI leadership, including Bordiga. At the end of 1923, Gramsci travelled from Moscow to
Vienna, where he tried to revive a party torn by factional strife.
In 1924 Gramsci, now recognised as head of the PCI, gained election as a deputy for the
Veneto. He started organising the launch of the official newspaper of the party, called
L'Unità (Unity), living in
Rome while his family stayed in Moscow. At its Lyons Congress in January 1926, Gramsci's theses calling for a united front to restore
democracy to Italy were adopted by the party.
In 1926
Stalin's manoeuvres inside the
Bolshevik party moved Gramsci to write a letter to the
Comintern, in which he deplored opposition led by
Trotsky, but also underlined some presumed faults of the leader. Togliatti, in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti which they never completely resolved.
Imprisonment
On
November 9,
1926 the Fascist government enacted a new wave of emergency laws, taking as a pretext an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life that had occurred several days earlier. The fascist police arrested Gramsci, despite his
parliamentary immunity, and brought him to
Regina Coeli, the famous Roman
prison.
At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor famously stated, "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning". He received an immediate sentence of 5 years in
confinement (on the remote island of
Ustica); the following year he received a sentence of 20 years of prison (in Turi, near
Bari). His condition caused him to suffer from constantly declining health, and he received an individual cell and little assistance. In 1932, a project for exchanging
political prisoners (including Gramsci) between Italy and the
Soviet Union failed. In 1934 his health deteriorated severely and he gained conditional freedom, after having already visited some hospitals in
Civitavecchia,
Formia and Rome. He died in Rome at the age of 46, shortly after being released from prison; he's buried in the
Protestant Cemetery there.
Thought
Gramsci is seen by many as one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, in particular as a key thinker in the development of
Western Marxism. He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the
Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of
Italian history and
nationalism, as well as some ideas in
Marxist theory,
critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as:
Hegemony
Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as
Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the
working-class in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable'
socialist revolution predicted by orthodox
Marxism hadn't occurred by the early 20th century. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic
coercion, but also
ideologically, through a
hegemonic culture in which the values of the
bourgeoisie became the '
common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the
working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the
status quo rather than revolting.
The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci’s view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from
Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of
institutions,
social relations and
ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the
superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the
base.
Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to
Christianity, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power
Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in
Renaissance humanism to the elements of the
Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.
Intellectuals and Education
Gramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of
intellectuals in society. Famously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparati such as
education and the
media. Furthermore, he distinguished between a 'traditional'
intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks 'organically'. Such 'organic' intellectuals don't simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather
articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses couldn't express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who wouldn't simply introduce Marxist ideology from without the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical of the
status quo the already existing intellectual activity of the masses. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of
critical pedagogy and
popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by
Paulo Freire in
Brazil and have much in common with the thought of
Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.
State and Civil Society
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist
state, which he claims rules through force plus consent. The state isn't to be understood in the narrow sense of the
government; instead, Gramsci divides it between 'political society', which is the arena of political
institutions and
legal constitutional control, and '
civil society', which is commonly seen as the 'private' or 'non-state' sphere, including the
economy. The former is the realm of force and the latter of consent. He stresses, however, that the division is purely conceptual and that the two, in reality, often overlap.
Gramsci claims that under modern capitalism, the
bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by
trade unions and mass
political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in 'passive revolution' by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. Gramsci posits that movements such as
reformism and
fascism, as well as the '
scientific management' and
assembly line methods of
Frederick Taylor and
Henry Ford respectively, are examples of this.
Drawing from
Machiavelli, he argues that 'The Modern Prince' - the revolutionary party - is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that the only tactic capable of undermining bourgeois hegemony and leading to
socialism is a 'war of position'; this war of position would then give way to a 'war of movement' (or frontal attack). Gramsci saw 'war of movement' as being exemplified by the storming of the
Winter Palace during the
Russian Revolution.
Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the
Jacobins and
Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a 'regulated society' and defines the '
withering away of the state' as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.
Historicism
Gramsci, like the early
Marx, was an emphatic proponent of
historicism. In Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or '
praxis') and the "objective" historical and social processes of which it's a part. Ideas can't be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. The concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world don't derive primarily from our relation to things, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. Resultantly, there's no such thing as an unchanging "
human nature", but only an idea of such which varies historically. Furthermore,
philosophy and
science don't "reflect" a reality independent of man, but rather are only "true" in that they express the real developmental trend of a given historical situation. The majority of Marxists held the common sense view that truth was truth no matter when and where it's known, and that scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulates historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense, and therefore didn't belong to the illusory realm of the
superstructure. For Gramsci, however, Marxism was "true" in the socially pragmatic sense, in that by articulating the
class consciousness of the
proletariat, it expressed the "truth" of its times better than any other theory. This anti-
scientistic and anti-
positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce. However, it should be underlined that Gramsci's was an "absolute historicism" that broke with the Hegelian and idealist tenor of Croce's thinking and its tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical "destiny". Though Gramsci repudiates the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of
relativism.
In a famous pre-prison article entitled "The Revolution against
Das Kapital", Gramsci claimed that the
October Revolution in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist
forces of production. This reflected his view that Marxism wasn't a
deterministic philosophy. The principle of the causal "primacy" of the
forces of production, he held, was a misconception of Marxism. Both economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a "basic historical process", and it's difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other. The
fatalistic belief, widespread within the
workers’ movement in its earliest years, that it would inevitably triumph due to "historical laws", was, in Gramsci's view, a product of the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action, and was to be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class became able to take the initiative. Because Marxism is a "philosophy of praxis", it can't rely on unseen "historical laws" as the agents of social change. History is defined by human praxis and therefore includes human will. Nonetheless, will-power can't achieve anything it likes in any given situation: when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, historical circumstances will be encountered which can't be arbitrarily altered. It is not, however, predetermined by historical inevitability as to which of several possible developments will take place as a result.
His critique of economism also extended to that practiced by the syndicalists of the Italian trade unions. He believed that many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach in that they'd refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front. While Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organizations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure. Gramsci referred to the views of these trade unionists as "vulgar economism," which he equated to covert reformism and even liberalism.
Critique of Materialism
By virtue of his belief that
human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci’s views run contrary to the
metaphysical materialism and 'copy' theory of
perception advanced by
Engels and Lenin, though he doesn't explicitly state this. For Gramsci, Marxism doesn't deal with a reality which exists in and for itself, independent of humanity. The concept of an
objective universe outside of human history and human praxis was, in his view, analogous to belief in
God; there could be no objectivity, but only a universal
intersubjectivity to be established in a future communist society.
Natural history was thus only meaningful in relation to human history. On his view philosophical materialism, like primitive common sense, resulted from a lack of critical thought, and could not, as Lenin claimed, be said to oppose religious
superstition. Despite this, Gramsci resigned himself to the existence of this arguably cruder form of Marxism: the proletariat’s status as a dependent class meant that Marxism, as its philosophy, could often only be expressed in the form of popular superstition and common sense. Nonetheless, it was necessary to effectively challenge the ideologies of the educated classes, and to do so Marxists must present their philosophy in a more sophisticated guise, and attempt to genuinely understand their opponents’ views.
Influence
Although Gramsci's thought emanates from the organized left, he's also become an important figure in current academic discussions within
cultural studies and
critical theory. Political theorists from the center and the right have also found insight in his concepts; his idea of
hegemony, for example, has become widely cited. His influence is particularly strong in contemporary
political science, on the subject of the prevalence of
neoliberal thinking among political elites, in the form of
Neo-gramscianism. His work also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on
popular culture and scholarly
popular culture studies in whom many have found the potential for political or ideological resistance to dominant government and business interests.
His critics charge him with fostering a notion of power struggle through ideas. They find the Gramscian approach to philosophical analysis, reflected in current academic controversies, to be in conflict with open-ended, liberal inquiry grounded in apolitical readings of the classics of Western culture. To credit or blame Gramsci for the travails of current academic politics is an odd turn of history, since Gramsci himself was never an academic, and was in fact deeply intellectually engaged with Italian culture, history, and current liberal thought.
As a socialist, Gramsci's legacy has been disputed. Togliatti, who led the Party (renamed as
PCI) after
World War II and whose gradualist approach was a forerunner to
Eurocommunism, claimed that the PCI's practices during this period were congruent with Gramscian thought. Others, however, have argued that Gramsci was a
Left Communist, who would have been expelled from his Party if prison hadn't prevented him from regular contact with
Moscow during the leadership of
Stalin.
Influences on Gramsci's thought
Niccolò Machiavelli — 16th century Italian writer who greatly influenced Gramsci's theory of the state.
Karl Marx — philosopher, historian, economist and founder of Marxism.
Antonio Labriola — Italy's first notable Marxist theorist, believed Marxism's main feature was the nexus it established between history and philosophy.
Georges Sorel — French syndicalist writer who rejected the inevitability of historical progress.
Vilfredo Pareto — Italian economist and sociologist, known for his theory on mass and elite interaction.
Henri Bergson — French irrationalist philosopher and theorist of voluntarism.
Benedetto Croce — Italian liberal, anti-Marxist and idealist philosopher whose thought Gramsci subjected to careful and thorough critique...
Later thinkers influenced by Gramsci
Further Information
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