Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian journalist and activist who is known for highlighting
and developing the roles of culture and education within Marx's theories of
economy, politics, and class. He is also founder of the Italian communist party whose
ideas greatly influenced Italian communism. 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.

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. 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.

Physical and Chemical Properties of Matter

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.
 Hegemony
Hegemony - the dominance of one group over another, often supported
by valid norms and ideas. The associated term hegemon is used to
identify the actor, group, class, or state that exercises hegemonic power
or that is responsible for the dissemination of hegemonic ideas.

Hegemony derives from the Greek term hēgemonia (“dominance over”),

which was used to describe relations between city-states. Its use in
political analysis was somewhat limited until its intensive discussion by
the Italian politician and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s
discussion of hegemony followed from his attempts to understand the
survival of the capitalist state in the most-advanced Western countries.
Gramsci understood the predominant mode of rule as classs rule and was
interested in explaining the ways in which concrete institutional forms
and material relations of production came to prominence. Gramsci’s
analysis of hegemony thus involves an analysis of the ways in which such
capitalist ideas are spread and accepted as commonsensical and normal.
A hegemonic class is one that is able to attain the consent of other social
forces, and the maintenance of this consent is an ongoing project. To
secure this consent requires a group to understand its own interests in
relation to the mode of production, as well as the motivations aspirations,
and interests of other groups. Under capitalism, Gramsci observed the
relentless contribution of the institutions of civil society to the shaping of
mass cognitions. Via his concept of the national-popular, he also showed
how hegemony required the articulation and distribution of popular ideas
beyond narrow class interests.