Antonio Gramsci

I

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian Communist Party leader and Marxist political theorist. Gramsci grew up in a lower-middle-class family at Ales, on the Italian island of Sardinia. As a boy, Gramsci sometimes dropped out of school to earn money to help support his family. Despite the interruptions in his schooling, he managed to win a scholarship to attend the University of Turin, which he entered in 1911. Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1913, and later became a journalist for the Socialist newspaper Avanti! (Forward!).

The political unrest in Italy following the Russian Revolution of 1917 increased Gramsci’s commitment to socialism. But Gramsci also came to see the dim prospects for building socialism in Italy. Many Italians believed that the Socialist Party, then Italy's largest political party, would push for the introduction of a socialist political and economic system in Italy. Most socialist theory prescribed ways to organize a socialist movement among urban workers, but most Italians still lived in the countryside. As a result, the Socialist Party was left with little direction.

Gramsci sought to chart a new course for the Socialists. During this period he worked closely with Palmiro Togliatti, who went on to serve as leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1926 to 1964. Togliatti and Gramsci joined forces with Umberto Terracini, who began publishing the leftist journal L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) in 1919. The three men tried to encourage workers to take over the factories in Turin, Italy's industrial capital. They argued that if the workers seized the factories and assumed management responsibilities, the workers could form factory councils that would help them acquire the political and technical sophistication necessary for achieving socialism. Socialist Party leaders condemned this approach as utopian and argued that the chief task for the radical left should be the overthrow of the state.

II

Role in Founding the Communist Party of Italy

In 1920 workers seized factories throughout Italy, but they were unable to operate the factories because they lacked the financing and skilled management necessary for day-to-day operations. The workers soon returned the factories to their owners. Gramsci blamed this defeat on a lack of resolve by the Socialist Party, and in 1921 he helped form the breakaway Communist Party. The Turin factory council incident persuaded Gramsci that strong working-class movements had to be led by the workers themselves, not by leaders outside the factories.

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Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, and the brutality of his regime formed another critical influence on Gramsci’s thinking. Mussolini banned opposition political parties, abolished trade unions, and slashed wages. Gramsci soon concluded that Fascism posed a severe threat to the Italian people, and he tried to understand how the Fascists had won control of the government. Gramsci believed that Mussolini and his Fascist forces had won power partly because they received far more middle-class support than the Socialist and Communist parties did. He also believed the Fascist victory was supported by the wealthy upper classes that were willing to let Mussolini destroy the country’s democracy in order to protect their own economic position.

III

Imprisonment

By 1927 the Fascists had crushed the Communists in Italy, and Gramsci himself was captured and imprisoned. His health declined rapidly while in prison, but Fascist authorities denied him adequate medical care until 1935, when they sent him to a special clinic and gave him a conditional release. Gramsci died at the clinic on April 27, 1937, a few days after his prison term officially ended.

IV

Writings and Influence

While in jail, Gramsci filled 33 notebooks with wide-ranging essays on Italian history, fascism, the factory councils, Marxist theory, and other subjects. Portions of the notebooks, published in Italy in 1947 as Quaderni di carcere (Prison Notebooks), are his best-known works. Gramsci made many important arguments in the notebooks. One of the most influential ideas was that the power of governments is based not only on brute force of the military and police, but also on hegemony. Gramsci used the term hegemony to mean the ways in which ruling classes use a dominant ideology to conceal their control of the masses. In Gramsci’s view, a socialist transformation could be achieved only if the people confronted this hegemony of ideas.

The translation into English of the Prison Notebooks in 1971 brought Gramsci’s writings to the widespread attention of scholars outside of Europe. Many Marxist and non-Marxist scholars came to regard Gramsci’s writings as an essential complement to Das Kapital (1867-1894; Capital, 1907-1909) and other landmark works by German political philosophers Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. Scholars in France, Britain, the United States, and other countries used Gramsci’s insights to explore a wide range of subjects, including revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and social movements in Peru. Today some scholars rank Gramsci’s work among the most important political writings of the 20th century.

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