Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party in late 1913, where he would later occupy a key position and observe from Turin the Russian revolution.[28]. As a socialist, Gramsci's legacy has been disputed. PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). So the Bolsheviks were able to see through a war of manoeuvre (the 1917 revolution), relatively easily, because ruling-class hegemony had never been fully achieved. [17] As a boy, Gramsci suffered from health problems, particularly a malformation of the spine that stunted his growth (his adult height was less than 5 feet)[18] and left him seriously hunchbacked. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history and linguistics. [31], In April 1919, with Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini, Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order). [44] He saw modern intellectuals not as talkers, but as practical-minded directors and organisers who produced hegemony through ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. For Gramsci, these councils were the proper means of enabling workers to take control of the task of organising production. The failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement convinced Gramsci that a Communist Party in the Leninist sense was needed. Antonio Francesco Gramsci (UK: /ˈɡræmʃi/,[4] US: /ˈɡrɑːmʃi/;[5] Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo franˈtʃesko ˈɡramʃi] (listen); 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer and politician. Un- In this view, Marxism (or the Marxist theory of history and economics) did not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure because it is a science. Vladimir Lenin saw the L'Ordine Nuovo group as closest in orientation to the Bolsheviks, and it received his backing against the anti-parliamentary programme of the left-communist Amadeo Bordiga.[32]. People in the working class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Focusing on central concepts of the Prison Notebooks and relating them to the history of modern political ideas See More His political thought was expanded by his experiences at university and in his new home city. This forces us to analyze the historical context in which Gramsci worked, from the “Biennio Rosso — Two Red Years” (1919–1920) until his death in a fascist prison in 1937. This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce. Many believed that an eventual coalition led by communists would have functioned too remotely from political debate, and thus would have run the risk of isolation. date: 02 March 2021. For Gramsci, much as the ruling class can look beyond its own immediate economic interests to reorganise the forms of its own hegemony, so must the working class present its own interests as congruous with the universal advancement of society. In addition to poverty and work to support his family, Gramsci’s early years in Sardinia introduced him to socialist politics, as well as to the writings of prominent Italian thinkers of his time, including Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Giuseppe Prezzolini (1882–1982), and Pilade Cecchi, in addition to becoming introduced to the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883). [42] In this way, Gramsci's theory emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base. Keywords: The senior Gramsci was a low-level official born in the small town of Gaeta, in the province of Latina (in the Central Italian region of Lazio), to a well-off family from the Southern Italian regions of Campania and Calabria and of Arbëreshë (Italo-Albanian) descent. [38] In 1933 he was moved from the prison at Turi to a clinic at Formia,[39] but was still being denied adequate medical attention. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist government. History is defined by human praxis and therefore includes a human will. [41]:15–17 Gramsci greatly expanded this concept, developing an acute analysis of how the ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – establishes and maintains its control.[41]:20. He believed that a final war of manoeuvre was only possible, in the developed and advanced capitalist societies, when the war of position had been won by the organic intellectuals and the working-class building a counter-hegemony. [15] The senior Gramsci's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in Ghilarza.[16]. As a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature, but only historically variable social relationships. Political Science Lecture Series by Vivek Sanjay Pawar MA SET NET Political Science and International Relations. At the end of 1923, Gramsci travelled from Moscow to Vienna, where he tried to revive a party torn by factional strife. [43] He stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He presented work on political theory, sociology and linguistics. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to think of it as an expression of their own experience. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests; neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Instead, he divides it between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in passive revolution by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. By virtue of his belief that human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci's views run contrary to the metaphysical materialism and copy theory of perception advanced by Friedrich Engels,[52][53] and Lenin,[54] though he does not explicitly state this. One of the important contributions of Antonio Gramsci in Marxist thought is his conception about intellectuals and their role in bourgeois society. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. In the course of tactical debates within the party, Gramsci's group mainly stood out due to its advocacy of workers' councils, which had come into existence in Turin spontaneously during the large strikes of 1919 and 1920. – the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control – and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) Al-Amin Md. On 9 November 1926, the Fascist government enacted a new wave of emergency laws, taking as a pretext an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life that had occurred several days earlier. For decades, it was reported that his condition had been due to a childhood accident—specifically, having been dropped by a nanny—but more recently it has been suggested that it was due to Pott disease,[19] a form of tuberculosis that can cause deformity of the spine. But, before these concepts are explored, it is useful to situate Gramsci in the historical context that shaped and informed his theoretical contributions. His influence is particularly strong in contemporary political science (see Neo-Gramscianism). In 1926, Joseph Stalin's manoeuvres inside the Bolshevik party moved Gramsci to write a letter to the Comintern in which he deplored the opposition led by Leon Trotsky but also underlined some presumed faults of the leader. [56] Gramsci defined objectivity in terms of a universal intersubjectivity to be established in a future communist society. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Trade unions became established, and the first industrial social conflicts started to emerge. Hegemony and Revolution: Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory by Walter L. Adamson. contradictory consciousness, However, it should be underlined that Gramsci's absolute historicism broke with Croce's tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. [59] Nonetheless, it was necessary to effectively challenge the ideologies of the educated classes, and to do so Marxists must present their philosophy in a more sophisticated guise, and attempt to genuinely understand their opponents' views. Ideas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. In opposition to Bordiga, Gramsci supported the Arditi del Popolo, a militant anti-fascist group which struggled against the Blackshirts. Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from equating political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. [42] Gramsci calls this union of social forces a "historic bloc", taking a term from Georges Sorel.