Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)

 Antonio Gramsci was an Italian philosopher, a journalist, a socialist politician, an activist of the communist party of Italy, a political theorist, who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in Mussolini's fascist Italy. His writings are concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership. He has been a highly original thinker within the Marxist tradition. He is well-known for his concept of hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist system.

Gramsci's early life and youth coincided with the industrial and economic development of Italy. Despite the peculiarities of the Italian society (for example, the significant differences between North and South, the variety of regions, dialectics and traditions, the domination of the foreign powers, and the domination of the Catholic church) at the beginning of the twentieth century, efforts were made to modernise the Italian society on the model of the central European states-positivistic approach to science, technology and education, scientific organisation of work (i.e., Taylorism for industrial production), scientific organisation of culture and education. Consequently, Italy did enjoy a period of social peace during the last years of the nineteenth century.

Gramsci was born on January 22,1891 in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia, one of the poorest regions of Italy, which had maintained its own strong cultural identity. It had its own language, history, and culture, which differ considerably from those of the "Piemontese" who ruled the Sardinian Kingdom from Turin in the northern part of the mainland. It was in Turin that Antonio Gramsci went to study at university, but which he eventually had to abandon due to lack of money and severe health problems. Turin was, at that time, the centre of Italian industrialisation and the focus of the first organisation of the Italian working class.

Gramsci started his political and educational life during the First World War as a journalist and theatre reporter, attending, frequently in the evening, the meetings of the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro trade union and socialist party. After the war, within the core of "red" socialist Turin, he created two journals, Ordine Nuovo and Unita, with an object to educate the new working class created by industry and the war.

The most prevalent theme of the Ordine Nuovo was the relationship between the "scientific management of work" (Taylorism) and the scientific management of education and training, i.e., between the organisation of work and the organisation of culture. Gramsci's approach was both radical and revolutionary and he kept publishing leftist material during the following five years till 1926.

Things had already become difficult in Italy, with Mussolini capturing power in Italy in the early 1920s. With the massive series of arrests that followed Mussolini's special legislation of 1926, Gramsci was arrested and jailed. He was then 35 years old, a member of parliament and had been, from 1925, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party. At his trial in 1928, the-official prosecutor ended his peroration with the following statement to the judge: "We must stop this brain working for twenty years!"

Gramsci's brain did not stop working in prison. On the contrary, soon after his arrest he began to make plans to conduct research on what is now considered as the most important analysis on "hegemony", i.e. on the links between politics and education. In a letter to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, dated March 9, 1927, he spoke about a project to write something fur ezvig  (forever), something which would also serve to absorb him and "give a focus to [his] inner life". The first point of the plan referred to a history of Italian intellectuals; then he spoke of studies on linguistics, on the theatre of Pirandello, and on serial novels and popular literary taste. He defines the history of intellectuals as the process of "formation of the public spirit" and, finally, he writes that the different topics of his plan have in common "the creative popular spirit", i.e., the way the hegemony of a certain social group grows up, from the soul of the group, toward its political organisation.

In fact, in another letter to Tatiana he says: "thinking 'disinterestedly' or study for its own sake are difficult for me... I do not like throwing stones in the dark; I like to have a concrete interlocutor or adversary", and he speaks of the "polemical nature" of his entire intellectual formation.

Gramsci died in 1937 without having had the possibility of completing his work. His thirty-three prison notebooks were saved by his sister-in-law, Tatiana, and smuggled out of Italy. He had written a good deal before his imprisonment, but his reputation as one of the major Italian thinkers and educators rests on the Letters from Prison and the Prison Notebooks.

POLITICAL IDEAS

Gramsci has been described as one of the most influential Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, a key thinker in the development of Western Marxism. It is said that he wrote more than 30 notebooks and about 300 pages of history during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain his views on the Italian history, critical theory and educational theory—cultural hegemony which helps maintain the capitalist state, the need for popular's education to encourage development of intellectuals so as to guide the workers, the distinction between political society which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent, absolute historicism, the critique of economic determinism, and the critique of philosophical materialism.

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