Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theoretician and politician. He wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies.
Background
Gramsci was born on Jan. 22, 1891, to lower middle class parents at Ales, on the Italian island of Sardinia. He was injured as an infant and grew up a hunchback. After a school career interrupted by periods of work made necessary by his father's imprisonment, Gramsci, a brilliant student, won a scholarship to the University of Turin. In 1913 he joined the Italian Socialist Party, and he later became a professional journalist for the Socialist newspaper Avanti.
Education
1911, University of Turin, but did not complete his degree.
Career
Gramsci, the Communist Party's leader from 1924 to 1926, was the first to recognize that fascism was not simply a violent variant of government by capitalists. He argued that it reflected the frustrations of a middle-class, from both the countryside and the cities, that did not feel itself to belong either to the working class, which labored in the big factories, or to the class of capitalists, which owned them. Gramsci believed that Mussolini and his Fascist forces had won power partly because they received far more middle class support than did the Socialists and Communists and also because they had persuaded the capitalists to abandon the liberal institutions that had sustained their political power in return for protection of their economic power. By 1927 the Communists had been crushed, and Gramsci himself was captured and imprisoned.
As early as 1919 Gramsci had decided that "men make their own destinies" and that socialism could be achieved only through a deliberate reorganization of social relations within the working class and the peasantry along the lines attempted in the factory councils. Fascism, however, had made it obvious that in countries like Italy the middle class would also have to be reorganized. The Communists would therefore have to take into account the outlook of the middle class, especially its lack of enthusiasm for class warfare, and learn how to woo the middle class away from capitalist social "hegemony." Gramsci argued that the power of the capitalists rested more on their domination of propaganda, education, and "socialization" than on ownership of society's productive resources or direct compulsion. He therefore paid particular attention to the part played by "intellectuals"--by which he meant managers, technical experts, and educated people--in organizing social relations so as to minimize the antagonisms between the capitalists and the middle class. The Communist Party would have to become a "collective intellectual" and persuade the middle class that its future lay not with capitalism, but with Communism. And it would have to develop a conception of Communism that both embraced liberal democratic institutions and went beyond them in a "national and popular" Communist revolution. Gramsci anticipated Eurocommunism, the movement that has attempted to adapt Communism to Western European conditions and attitudes.
Politics
In 1919 began a period that decisively influenced Gramsci's ideas. It had been then widely expected that, inspired by the Russian Revolution of November 1917, the Socialist Party, Italy's largest, would push for the introduction of socialism in Italy. But the Socialists could not agree on how to do this because socialism was then generally assumed to presuppose a large experienced industrial working class and the majority of Italy's population still consisted of peasants. Gramsci and his close personal associates, Palmiro Togliatti (Communist Party leader from 1926 to 1964) and Umberto Terracini, who began to publish the journal Ordine Nuovo (1919-1921), encouraged a factory council movement in Turin, Italy's industrial capital. They argued that if the workers took over and ran the factories, they would acquire the technical skills and self-confidence necessary for socialism. Such views were hotly condemned as utopian by the Socialist Party leaders, who believed the chief task to be the overthrow of the state. In 1920 workers actually occupied factories throughout Italy, but the factories could not be operated without skilled management and capital and were soon returned to their owners. Gramsci blamed this defeat on the vacillation of the Socialists and in 1921 helped form the breakaway Communist Party.
Views
Generally regarded as one of the most creative and original thinkers within the Marxist philosophical tradition, Gramsci spent most of his career in journalism and politics. He was active in the Turin Factory Council movement in 1919 20. and after its suppression he edited LOrdine Nuovo, later to become a Communist Party journal, and sat as a Deputy in the Italian Parliament. Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and although he was a political prisoner for the last ten years of his life, he went on to become one of the Party’s major theorists through his prison writings.
The earliest intellectual influence on Gramsci was the Italian idealist philosopher and aesthetician Benedetto Croce, whose work formed a lifelong source of inspiration despite the fact that its author ultimately turned fascist sympathizer. From Croce. Gramsci derives his deeply held belief in the importance of history as an intellectual activity. Another important source of influence for Gramsci’s intellectual development was the French syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, whose faith in the working class and admiration for the organizational powers of the Catholic Church throughout history, Gramsci shared.
Despite the strong pull of Marx and Lenin. Gramsci also retained a distinctly Hegelian bias to his thought, conceiving of the dialectic in primarily Hegelian terms. Gramsci’s early concern as a Marxist theorist was to find ways ot countering the fairly crude and mechanical forms of dialectical materialism being propounded by such Bolshevik theorists as Nikolai Bukharin.
Marxism was for Gramsci not so much a sociological as a historical theory, and he differed considerably from Soviet orthodoxy on this issue, with his interest invariably being concentrated on cultural and historical factors rather than on purely economic considerations.
Gramsci can be credited with expounding a more human version of Marxist doctrine than most of his contemporaries, one less driven by the dictates of economic determinism and more committed to keeping the political leadership ot a Marxist revolutionary movement in touch with the rank and file of its working-class members. Throughout his life Gramsci remained a firm believer in the use of persuasion to achieve political aims, as opposed to the more widespread Marxist-Lenin method of the imposition of party discipline and policy from above. The vision of the Communist Party put forward by Gramsci was a markedly less authoritarian one than usual, closer perhaps to the model of organization presented by the Catholic Church.
Gramsci's major contributions to Marxist theory, including the enormously influential doctrine of hegemony, come mainly from his prison writings, not published until alter the Second World War. ‘Civil hegemony’, to give d its full title, represents Gramsci’s attempt to provide an explanation for history’s periodic failure to conform to the determinist model of Marxism: if the conditions were ripe for the total collapse of the capitalist system, why did it not occur? A ruling class, Gramsci maintained, could keep control over the masses by means other than brute force or economic power. If it could encourage the masses to share its social, cultural and moral values then its dominant position, or ‘hegemony’, was assured.
Thus the working class could often prove to be a reactionary rather than a revolutionary force, even though it could never be in its long-term interests to be so and despite the
Presence of the correct economic conditions for revolution, because it had internalized the values °f its rulers. The continuing strength of capitalism could be attributed to the prevailing influence of hegemonic factors, hence the need for Marxist theorists to turn their attention to the cultural realm, where the ruling class’s values were constructed. Intellectuals were allotted a key role ln this process, and Gramsci set great store by education as a political weapon.
The emphasis on 'deas as a means of bringing about effective change is typical of Gramsci, who did not believe that change would be lasting unless individuals truly desired it and political leadership was based °n cultural and moral ascendancy rather than just economic power. In The Modern Prince Gramsci reformulated Machiavelli’s ideas about leadership s° that the Communist Party was seen to be just such an instrument of cultural and moral ascendancy. Throughout the prison writings Gramsci evinces a greater interest in analysing the past and identifying historical laws than in ay*ng down specific rules for future political nction.
He represents a humanist strain of thought within Marxism which owes much to a 0ug-running tradition of humanism in Italian culture stretching back to the Renaissance period, and he remains one of the least ‘economist’, as We11 as least dogmatic, of Marxist theorists. Gramsci’s humanistic interpretation of Marxist theory has exerted a considerable appeal amongst those Marxists unhappy with the excesses of Stalinism or the cruder forms of dialectical
fields such as political science, sociology and aesthetics. Theorists of popular culture, as a case in point, rely heavily on the notion of hegemony in their analyses, and most Western Marxist aesthetic theorists have adopted the doctrine in order to draw attention to the crucial ideological role played by the arts within culture.