Italian intellectual and political activist, founder of the Communist Party (Ales, Sardinia, 1891 - Rome, 1937). Thanks to the support of his brother and his intellectual capacity he overcame the difficulties produced by his physical deformity (he was hunchbacked) and by the poverty of his family (since his father was imprisoned, accused of embezzlement). He studied at the University of Turin, where he was influenced intellectually by Benedetto Croce and the socialists.
In 1913 he joined the Italian Socialist Party, immediately becoming a leader of its left wing. After working on various party periodicals, he founded, together with Palmiro Togliatti and Umberto Elia Terracini, the magazine Ordine nuovo (1919). Faced with the dilemma posed to socialists around the world by the course taken by the Russian Revolution, Antonio Gramsci chose to adhere to the communist line and, at the Livorno Congress (1921), split with the group that founded the Italian Communist Party.
Gramsci belonged from the beginning to the Central Committee of the new party, which he also represented in Moscow within the Third International (1922); he endowed the formation with an official press organ (L’Unità, 1924) and represented it as a deputy (1924). He was a member of the Executive of the Communist International, whose Bolshevik orthodoxy he defended in Italy by expelling from the party the ultra-left group of Amadeo Bordiga, which he accused of following Trotsky’s line (1926).
He soon had to go underground, since since 1922 Italy was under the power of Mussolini, who would exercise from 1925 an iron fascist dictatorship. Gramsci was arrested in 1926 and spent the rest of his life in prison, subjected to humiliation and ill-treatment, which added to his tuberculosis to make prison life extremely difficult, until he died of cerebral congestion.
In these conditions, however, Gramsci was able to produce a great written work (the voluminous Prison Notebooks), containing an original revision of Marx’s thought, in a historicist sense and tending to modernize the legacy of Marxism to adapt it to the conditions of Italy and twentieth-century Europe. Already at the Lyon Congress (1926) he had advocated the broadening of the social bases of communism by opening it to all classes of workers, including intellectuals. His theoretical contributions would powerfully influence the adaptation of Western communism that took place in the sixties and seventies, the so-called Eurocommunism. 🤮
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci saw the ruling class maintaining its power over society in two ways –
Coercion – it uses the army, police, prison and courts to force other classes to accept its rule
Consent (hegemony) – it uses ideas and values to persuade the subordinate classes that its rule is legitimate
Hegemony and Revolution
In advanced Capitalist societies, the ruling class rely heavily on consent to maintain their rule. Gramsci agrees with Marx that they are able to maintain consent because they control institutions such as religion, the media and the education system. However, according to Gramsci, the hegemony of the ruling class is never complete, for two reasons:
The ruling class are a minority – and as such they need to make ideological compromises with the middle classes in order to maintain power The proletariat have dual consciousness. Their ideas are influenced not only by bourgeois ideology but also by the material conditions of their life – in short, they are aware of their exploitation and are capable or seeing through the dominant ideology.
Antonio Gramsci Marxists.org :gramsci-heh:
Antonio Gramsci and the Italian Revolution :anti-italian-action:
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If I stop posting for more than like a week, assume I got deported and am really pissed off about it
US economy ends in a week
Corporations going from pretending to care about minorities to pretending to care about Facebook memes boomers think are the news. We are so cooked lol
Anyone else find it really cool to enter a new area of a familiar place? Like when you were in school and you had to go to a different room you hadn’t gone before for a substitute teacher, or someone asked you to go get something from the supply closet? I guess it was cooler as a kid but I still occasionally find a new little alcove in a building I frequent and it feels interesting.
I used to say that we should kill all the people responsible for ai and bury them in a big iron box in the Marianas trench, but after reading the allegations against one of the founders of openai by his sister I think we should bury them alive
For the love of Marx, when will people/society at large realise that travelling is not a substitute for having a personality. I don’t care that you’ve been to 46 countries, tinder lady. Sitting on a plane for eight hours is not an achievement. In fact the fact you can afford all these trips makes me like you less because you’re probably some yuppie rich kid who never struggled in your life.
weed shitpost
58% THC pre roll joints coated in keef got me reading the Book of Revelations. We are indeed close.
Being poor or working class doesn’t give you anything. After a hundred years of mass media there’s no proletarian culture left. Being poor is not some more authentic form of life, it’s simply the absence of life, the passing of time and the aging of one’s body as the only measures of whatever little life one lived
Does it not matter to anybody that none of the shit Trump proposes is going to work? It is filled with reactionary hate and it’s nonsensical. But also nobody’s goals are served by it. We talk about how ass backwards it is to try and get infinite growth, but they’re not even trying to get growth in anything meaningful. People are going to be sicker, poorer, less learned, less curious about their less habitable land that is less insured. In exchange they get fossil fuels to help produce middling products and apocalypse shelters for billionaires. There’s no grand projects, no art, no good slop, and nobody to push the envelope. Fascism doesn’t make cool shit, it just hurts people
Hit the 100th turn tonight, only 796 more to go!
blaze it
FWIIIIHuh! Hooh! Huh! Hooh! Huh! Hooh!Shoutout to FtM femboys. That must’ve been one hell of a journey to figure out
also you’re cuteI don’t want much as a reward, my liege. Simply put a single twink on the first square of this chessboard. Then double the amount of twinks on the second square. Then double it again, four on the third, and so forth until the chessboard has been filled.
