Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci, (born Jan. 23, 1891, Ales, Sardinia,
Italy—died April 27, 1937, Rome), intellectual and politician, a founder of the
Italian Communist Party whose ideas greatly influenced Italian communism. In
1911 Gramsci began a brilliant scholastic career at the University of Turin,
where he came in contact with the Socialist Youth Federation and joined the
Socialist Party (1914). During World War I he studied Marxist thought and became
a leading theoretician. He formed a leftist group within the Socialist Party
and founded the newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (May 1919; “The New Order”). Gramsci
encouraged the development of factory councils (democratic bodies elected
directly by industrial workers), which undercut the control of trade unions.
The councils participated in a general strike in Turin
(1920), in which Gramsci played a key role. Gramsci led a leftist walkout at
the Socialist congress at Livorno (January 1921) to found the Italian Communist
Party (see Democrats of the Left) and then spent two years in the Soviet Union.
Back in Italy, he became head of his party (April 1924) and was elected to the
country’s Chamber of Deputies. After his party was outlawed by Benito
Mussolini’s fascists, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned (1926). At his trial
the fascist prosecutor argued, “We must stop his brain from working for 20
years.” In prison, despite rigorous censorship, Gramsci carried out an
extraordinary and wide-ranging historical and theoretical study of Italian
society and possible strategies for change. Plagued with poor health in the
1930s, he died not long after being released from prison for medical care.
Extracts of Gramsci’s prison writings were published for the first time in the
mid-20th century; the complete Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) appeared
in 1975. Many of his propositions became a fundamental part of Western Marxist
thought and influenced the post-World War II strategies of communist parties in
the West. His reflections on the cultural and political concept of hegemony
(notably in southern Italy), on the Italian Communist Party itself, and on the
Roman Catholic Church were particularly important. The letters he wrote from
prison also were published posthumously as Lettere dal carcere (1947; Letters
from Prison).
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian journalist and activist who
is known and celebrated for highlighting and developing the roles of culture and
education within Marx's theories of economy, politics, and class. Born in 1891,
he died at just 46 years of age as a consequence of serious health problems he
developed while imprisoned by the fascist Italian government. Gramsci's most
widely read and notable works, and those that influenced social theory were
written while he was imprisoned and published posthumously as The Prison
Notebooks.
Today, Gramsci is considered a foundational theorist for the
sociology of culture, and for articulating the important connections between
culture, the state, the economy, and power relations. Gramsci’s theoretical
contributions spurred the development of the field of cultural studies, and in
particular, the field’s attention to the cultural and political significance of
mass media.
Gramsci's Childhood
and Early Life
Antonio Gramsci was born on the island of Sardinia in 1891.
He grew up in poverty amongst the peasants of the island, and his experience of
the class differences between mainland Italians and Sardinians and the negative
treatment of peasant Sardinians by mainlanders shaped his intellectual and
political thought deeply.
In 1911, Gramsci left Sardinia to study at the University of
Turin in northern Italy and lived there as the city was industrialized. He
spent his time in Turin amongst socialists, Sardinian immigrants, and workers
recruited from poor regions to staff the urban factories. He joined the Italian
Socialist Party in 1913. Gramsci did not complete formal education, but
was trained at the University as a Hegelian Marxist, and studied intensively
the interpretation of Karl Marx’s theory as a “philosophy of praxis”
under Antonio Labriola. This Marxist approach focused on the development
of class consciousness and liberation of the working class through the
process of struggle.
Gramsci as
Journalist, Socialist Activist, Political Prisoner
After he left school, Gramsci wrote for socialist
newspapers and rose in the ranks of Socialist party. He and the Italian
socialists became affiliated with Vladimir Lenin and the international
communist organization known as the Third International. During this time of
political activism, Gramsci advocated for workers’ councils and labor strikes
as methods of taking control of the means of production, otherwise controlled
by wealthy capitalists to the detriment of the laboring classes.
Ultimately, he helped found the Italian Communist Party to mobilize workers for
their rights.
Gramsci traveled to Vienna in 1923, where he met
Georg Lukács, a prominent Hungarian Marxist thinker, and other Marxist and
communist intellectuals and activists who would shape his intellectual work. In
1926, Gramsci, then the head of the Italian Communist Party, was imprisoned in
Rome by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime during its aggressive
campaign of stamping out opposition politics. He was sentenced to twenty years
in prison but was released in 1934 because of his very poor health. The bulk of
his intellectual legacy was written in prison, and is known as “The Prison
Notebooks.” Gramsci died in Rome in 1937, just three years after his release
from prison.
Gramsci's Contributions
to Marxist Theory
Gramsci’s key intellectual contribution to Marxist
theory is his elaboration of the social function of culture and its
relationship to politics and the economic system. While Marx discussed only
briefly these issues in his writing, Gramsci drew on Marx’s theoretical
foundation to elaborate the important role of political strategy in challenging
the dominant relations of society, and the role of the state in regulating
social life and maintaining the conditions necessary for capitalism. He
thus focused on understanding how culture and politics might inhibit or spur
revolutionary change, which is to say, he focused on the political and cultural
elements of power and domination (in addition to and in conjunction with the
economic element). As such, Gramsci’s work is a response to the false
prediction of Marx’s theory that revolution was inevitable, given the
contradictions inherent in the system of capitalist production.
In his theory, Gramsci viewed the state as an instrument of
domination that represents the interests of capital and of the ruling class. He
developed the concept of cultural hegemony to explain how the state
accomplishes this, arguing that domination is achieved in large part
by a dominant ideology expressed through social institutions that
socialize people to consent to the rule of the dominant group. He reasoned that
hegemonic beliefs dampen critical thought, and are thus barriers to revolution.
0 comments:
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.