Who was Antonio Gramsci?
Antonio Gramsci grew up in Sardinia and studied in Turin, where he became a socialist and a newspaper writer. In 1919 he helped start the journal L'Ordine Nuovo, which backed workers' councils in the factories. He was a founder of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921 and later its leader, and he sat in parliament. Mussolini's government arrested him in 1926. He stayed in prison or under guard until his death in Rome in 1937, and in those years he filled some thirty notebooks with ideas about power, culture and history.
Political views
- He backed factory councils run by workers, which he saw as a way to replace capitalist managers with democratic control at work.Source: marxists.org
- He argued that ruling groups hold power through 'hegemony', which means leading minds and values and winning consent, and not by force alone.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- For Western states, he said revolutionaries needed a slow 'war of position' to win support in civil society before they could take power.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- He wrote that everyone thinks and so is an intellectual in some sense, and he wanted 'organic intellectuals' to rise from the working class.Source: marxists.org
- He rejected the idea that economics alone drives history and gave weight to culture, schooling and political organization.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- His notes on 'Americanism and Fordism' studied how modern factory methods reshape work and society.Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
After the war, the Prison Notebooks turned Gramsci into one of the most quoted Marxist writers. His thinking influenced the Italian Communist Party, the Eurocommunist move toward elections, cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Scholars of many political views use his ideas to study how power wins consent. Strict Leninists complain that some readers play down revolution and party discipline. Some conservatives say he gave the left a plan for taking over schools, media and the arts, though many Gramsci experts reject that reading. Liberal critics point to his loyalty to a Leninist party. His prison letters are also read as fine writing, and his years in jail made him a symbol of resistance to Fascism.
In their own words
“All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”