Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist theorist, journalist, and political organizer, a founding member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and one of its principal early leaders. Imprisoned by the Mussolini regime in 1926 (the prosecutor reportedly demanding “we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years”), he wrote the Prison Notebooks — over 3,000 pages of fragmentary but systematic theoretical work — between 1929 and 1935. He died shortly after his release. The Notebooks were published posthumously beginning in 1948 and have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century Marxist thought worldwide.

¶Core ideas

• Hegemony. The mode by which a ruling class maintains its dominance not principally through coercion but through the ideological-cultural production of consent — the saturation of common sense with categories that make existing arrangements appear natural. War of position (slow ideological-cultural struggle) is the political form adequate to challenging hegemony.
• The organic intellectual. Distinguished from the traditional intellectual (embedded in established institutions and presenting itself as neutral). The organic intellectual is produced by and accountable to a particular class, articulating its interests as the class forms itself as a political force. Every social group “creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals.”
• The historical bloc. A specific configuration of social forces in alliance, with corresponding ideological-cultural articulations, that constitutes the conditions of political possibility at a given historical moment.
• Common sense. The sedimented, contradictory, fragmentary set of assumptions and orientations that structure ordinary thought — to be distinguished from “good sense” (the critical-philosophical clarification of common sense’s better elements).
• Civil society and the integral state. The state in the integral sense includes both political society (coercive apparatus) and civil society (the network of cultural-ideological institutions — schools, churches, newspapers, parties, unions). Hegemony operates principally through civil society.

¶Key works

• Prison Notebooks (written 1929-1935; first Italian edition 1948-1951; critical edition 1975; selections in English from 1971 onward)
• Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920 and 1921-1926 (English editions, 1977-1978)
• Letters from Prison (1947 and many subsequent editions)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Gramsci is foundational for the gramscian subdomain — hegemony, the organic-intellectual analysis. The contemporary critique of industrial-intellectualism and the neurotic-platformal-intellectual draws explicitly on Gramsci’s distinction between the traditional and the organic intellectual.