Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist who asked how workers could build the power to lead society. He linked their struggle over jobs and wealth to work on beliefs and alliances. His prison writings later helped Americans debate their own plans for socialism. This account follows his life through 1937 and selected American responses through 1967.[1][2][3]
Early life and intellectual formation
Gramsci was born in Ales, Sardinia, on January 22, 1891. His family faced hardship after his father lost his job and went to prison. Antonio worked in a tax office while studying on his own. His family then helped him return to school. Joseph Buttigieg's account dates his first reading of socialist papers to about 1905. His older brother Gennaro sent them from Turin.[1]
In Cagliari, Gramsci lived with Gennaro and joined debates about Sardinia's social problems. Buttigieg describes his early views as Sardinian nationalism joined to anger at the rich. He began reading Marx during these school years. His concerns about Sardinia came before his fuller Marxist views.[1]
A scholarship took him to Turin in 1911. He studied language under Matteo Bartoli and took Umberto Cosmo's course in literature. He also met socialist workers and students. Buttigieg thinks he probably joined the Socialist Party in late 1913. Poor health and lack of money disrupted his studies. He took his last university exam in 1915 and turned toward writing for socialist papers.[1]
His writing shows what he was learning to ask. In Socialism and Culture in 1916, he argued that hardship alone did not create socialism. Workers had to grasp their shared position and decide what to do about it. He drew on writers outside Marxism, among them Novalis and Giambattista Vico. Their work helped him explain how people could gain a sense of their own worth and power.[4]
Russia's revolution sharpened that argument. In December 1917, he praised the Bolsheviks for refusing to wait for a fixed economic sequence. Their action challenged a reading of Marx in which Russia needed a long capitalist stage before workers could seek power. Gramsci still treated production and material needs as real limits. He thought organized people could change the course events took within those limits.[4]
Ideas and political aims
Learning to lead
Gramsci wanted workers to replace capitalist rule and build a new state. Factory councils offered an early model. Workers would elect delegates and learn to manage common affairs. In Workers' Democracy, written with Palmiro Togliatti in 1919, he proposed linking factory committees to wider councils. Practice in running them would help prepare workers to govern.[4]
Workers also needed allies. In his unfinished 1926 essay on southern Italy, he argued that industrial workers had to take peasant demands into their own program. He called this leadership hegemony : winning consent by showing other groups that a common struggle could serve their needs. A passage he reproduced from 1920 proposed farm machinery and credit under a workers' state. The alliance had a material basis as well as shared beliefs.[5][4]
Institutions, consent, and force
In prison, Gramsci studied how a ruling class kept its power. Police and law could enforce its rule. But people could also accept its leadership because they trusted it or saw its social order as normal. Cultural hegemony names this work through beliefs and values. His account joined consent to force and power over wealth.[2]
Civil society meant the institutions and groups through which people formed such loyalties. In a September 1931 letter to Tatiana Schucht, he named churches, trade unions, and schools. He argued that these could remain strong when a government faced a crisis. A movement in the West therefore faced defenses spread across society.[2][6]
He called the long struggle against those defenses a war of position. It required patient organizing and alliances, shaped to each country's needs. He set it against a swift frontal attack, or war of movement. He credited Lenin with seeing the need for the change in strategy. The struggle still aimed at state power.[2][6]
Changing everyday beliefs
Gramsci's common sense meant the mixed beliefs people picked up in daily life. Those beliefs could clash, yet contain useful insights. A movement had to begin with that outlook and help people examine it. People could work toward a clearer view through thought and shared action.[2]
Organic intellectuals helped a class explain its role and act together. Gramsci meant more than professors and writers. A business class, for example, needed skilled experts and people who helped shape culture and law. Workers seeking power also needed people who could put ideas to work.[2]
The party stayed at the heart of his plan. Gramsci called it the modern Prince, drawing on Machiavelli's study of power. Through a party, people could form a shared will and act on it. A change in thought and values had to go with economic reform. His account made culture part of a struggle to build a new social order.[2]
Career and activities
Gramsci worked for socialist papers in Turin during the First World War. In 1919, he helped found L'Ordine Nuovo. It became a forum for the factory council movement. Turin's general strike failed in April 1920. National union and Socialist Party leaders had withheld the support its organizers sought.[1]
He helped found the Communist Party of Italy in January 1921. In 1922, he went to Moscow to represent it in the Communist International. Later work in Vienna kept him in touch with party leaders in Italy. In a February 1924 letter, he attacked a party structure that left members passive and distant from their leaders. Western Europe's conditions, he argued, required more complex and lasting work than Russia's in 1917.[1][4]
Gramsci returned to Italy after election to parliament in 1924 and became the party's general secretary that year. The Fascist government arrested him on November 8, 1926. A special tribunal sentenced him in 1928 to more than twenty years in prison. He began his notebooks in 1929 after receiving permission to write in his cell.[1]
His sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht helped him get books and kept in close touch. His friend Piero Sraffa also helped provide books. Gramsci wrote under prison restrictions and returned to earlier notes to revise them. Illness led to transfers to clinics. He died in Rome on April 27, 1937, leaving the notebooks unfinished.[1]
Major works
Gramsci's early work appeared chiefly in newspapers. Socialism and Culture (1916) explains why people had to learn to see their condition as something they could change. Workers' Democracy (1919) connects that learning to elected councils and the preparation for state power.[4][4]
Some Aspects of the Southern Question (1926) examines the alliance workers would need with peasants. It also studies the intellectuals who helped hold the southern social order together. His arrest interrupted the essay. Its account of class leadership helps explain questions he pursued in prison.[5][4]
The Prison Notebooks contain studies of politics, history, language, and culture. They were working notes, rather than a single finished book. Later editors selected and arranged them in different ways. Readers therefore need to know which edition and translation they are using.[1][2]
Influence and criticism
Carl Marzani 's The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci appeared in New York in 1957. Marzani urged Americans to read Gramsci in light of current disputes over socialism. Howard Selsam welcomed the selection but questioned whether the editor's notes blurred Gramsci's arguments with Marzani's own views.[7][8]
John M. Cammett 's 1967 study gave English readers a fuller history of Gramsci's work in politics. Eugene Genovese used that book to make a case for socialist work in existing universities, unions, and other groups. His essay quoted Gwyn A. Williams's account of hegemony through Cammett. It set out a use for Gramsci. It did not show how widely Americans had adopted it.[3][9][3]
Luigi Barzini raised a further question in his 1967 review of Cammett and Giuseppe Fiori. He praised Cammett's research but doubted whether Gramsci's party could protect the freedom its admirers hoped for. American readers thus met two views: a plan for socialist change drawn from Gramsci, and a liberal challenge to its promise of freedom.[10]