Antonio Francesco Gramsci (; Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo
franˈtʃesko ˈɡramʃi] (listen); 22 January
1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist
philosopher and communist politician. He wrote
on political theory, sociology and linguistics.
He attempted to break from the economic determinism
of traditional Marxist thought and so is considered
a key neo-Marxist. He was a founding member
and one-time leader of the Communist Party
of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's
Fascist regime.
He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000
pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment.
His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly
original contribution to 20th century political
theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying
sources – not only other Marxists but also
thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo
Pareto, Georges Sorel and Benedetto Croce.
The notebooks cover a wide range of topics,
including Italian history and nationalism,
the French Revolution, fascism, Fordism, civil
society, folklore, religion and high and popular
culture.
Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural
hegemony, which describes how the state and
ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie
– use cultural institutions to maintain
power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie,
in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture
using ideology rather than violence, economic
force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates
its own values and norms so that they become
the "common sense" values of all and thus
maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is
therefore used to maintain consent to the
capitalist order, rather than coercive power
using force to maintain order. This cultural
hegemony is produced and reproduced by the
dominant class through the institutions that
form the superstructure.
== Life ==
=== Early life ===
Gramsci was born in Ales, in the province
of Oristano, on the island of Sardinia, the
fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci
(1860–1937) and Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932).
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 region of Campania and of remote Arbëreshë
descent, though Gramsci himself mistakenly
believed his father's family had left Albania
as recently as 1821 (the Albanian origin of
his father's family is attested in the surname
Gramsci, an Italianized form of Gramshi, that
stems from the definite noun of the placename
Gramsh, a small town in today Elbasan County,
in centre-eastern Albania.), while his wife
belonged to a Sardinian landowning family
from Sorgono (in the province of Nuoro). 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.In
1898 Francesco was convicted of embezzlement
and imprisoned, reducing his family to destitution.
The young Antonio had to abandon schooling
and work at various casual jobs until his
father's release in 1904. 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)
and left him seriously hunchbacked. 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, a form of tuberculosis
that can cause deformity of the spine. Gramsci
was also plagued by various internal disorders
throughout his life.
Gramsci completed secondary school in Cagliari,
where he lodged with his elder brother Gennaro,
a former soldier whose time on the mainland
had made him a militant socialist. However,
Gramsci's sympathies then did not lie with
socialism, but rather with the grievances
of impoverished Sardinian peasants and miners.
They perceived their neglect as a result of
privileges enjoyed by the rapidly industrialising
North, and they tended to turn to a growing
Sardinian nationalism, brutally repressed
by troops from the Italian mainland, as a
response.
=== Turin ===
In 1911, Gramsci won a scholarship to study
at the University of Turin, sitting the exam
at the same time as Palmiro Togliatti. At
Turin, he read literature and took a keen
interest in linguistics, which he studied
under Matteo Bartoli. Gramsci was in Turin
as it was going through industrialization,
with the Fiat and Lancia factories recruiting
workers from poorer regions. Trade unions
became established, and the first industrial
social conflicts started to emerge. Gramsci
frequented socialist circles as well as associating
with Sardinian emigrants on the Italian mainland.
His worldview was shaped by both his earlier
experiences in Sardinia and his environment
on the mainland. Gramsci joined the Italian
Socialist Party in late 1913, where he would
later occupy a key position and observe from
Turin the Russian revolutionary process.Although
showing talent for his studies, Gramsci had
financial problems and poor health. Together
with his growing political commitment, these
led to his abandoning his education in early
1915, at age 24. By this time, he had acquired
an extensive knowledge of history and philosophy.
At university, he had come into contact with
the thought of Antonio Labriola, Rodolfo Mondolfo,
Giovanni Gentile, and most importantly, Benedetto
Croce, possibly the most widely respected
Italian intellectual of his day. Labriola
especially propounded a brand of Hegelian
Marxism that he labelled "philosophy of praxis".
Although Gramsci later used this phrase to
escape the prison censors, his relationship
with this current of thought was ambiguous
throughout his life.
From 1914 onward, Gramsci's writings for socialist
newspapers such as Il Grido del Popolo earned
him a reputation as a notable journalist.
In 1916, he became co-editor of the Piedmont
edition of Avanti!, the Socialist Party official
organ. An articulate and prolific writer of
political theory, Gramsci proved a formidable
commentator, writing on all aspects of Turin's
social and political life.Gramsci was, at
this time, also involved in the education
and organisation of Turin workers; he spoke
in public for the first time in 1916 and gave
talks on topics such as Romain Rolland, the
French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and
the emancipation of women. In the wake of
the arrest of Socialist Party leaders that
followed the revolutionary riots of August
1917, Gramsci became one of Turin's leading
socialists when he was both elected to the
party's Provisional Committee and made editor
of Il Grido del Popolo.In April 1919, with
Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini,
Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper L'Ordine
Nuovo (The New Order). In October the same
year, despite being divided into various hostile
factions, the Socialist Party moved by a large
majority to join the Third International.
The L'Ordine Nuovo group was seen by Vladimir
Lenin as closest in orientation to the Bolsheviks,
and it received his backing against the anti-parliamentary
programme of the left communist Amadeo Bordiga.
Among tactical debates within the party, Gramsci's
group was mainly distinguished by its advocacy
of workers' councils, which had come into
existence in Turin spontaneously during the
large strikes of 1919 and 1920. For Gramsci,
these councils were the proper means of enabling
workers to take control of the task of organising
production. Although he believed his position
at this time to be in keeping with Lenin's
policy of "All power to the Soviets", his
stance that these Italian councils were communist,
rather than just one organ of political struggle
against the bourgeoisie, was attacked by Bordiga
for betraying a syndicalist tendency influenced
by the thought of Georges Sorel and Daniel
DeLeon. By the time of the defeat of the Turin
workers in spring 1920, Gramsci was almost
alone in his defence of the councils.
=== In the Communist Party of Italy ===
The failure of the workers' councils to develop
into a national movement convinced Gramsci
that a Communist Party in the Leninist sense
was needed. The group around L'Ordine Nuovo
declaimed incessantly against the Italian
Socialist Party's centrist leadership and
ultimately allied with Bordiga's far larger
"abstentionist" faction. On 21 January 1921,
in the town of Livorno (Leghorn), the Communist
Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia
– PCI) was founded. Gramsci supported against
Bordiga the Arditi del Popolo, a militant
anti-fascist group which struggled against
the Blackshirts.
Gramsci would be a leader of the party from
its inception but was subordinate to Bordiga,
whose emphasis on discipline, centralism and
purity of principles dominated the party's
programme until he lost the leadership in
1924.
In 1922, Gramsci travelled to Russia as a
representative of the new party. Here, he
met Julia Schucht, a young violinist whom
he married in 1923 and by whom he had two
sons, Delio (born 1924) and Giuliano (born
1926). Gramsci never saw his second son.
The Russian mission coincided with the advent
of fascism in Italy, and Gramsci returned
with instructions to foster, against the wishes
of the PCI leadership, a united front of leftist
parties against fascism. Such a front would
ideally have had the PCI at its centre, through
which Moscow would have controlled all the
leftist forces, but others disputed this potential
supremacy: socialists did have a certain tradition
in Italy, too, while the Communist Party seemed
relatively young and too radical. 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.
In late 1922 and early 1923, Benito Mussolini's
government embarked on a campaign of repression
against the opposition parties, arresting
most of the PCI leadership, including Bordiga.
At the end of 1923, Gramsci travelled from
Moscow to Vienna, where he tried to revive
a party torn by factional strife.
In 1924 Gramsci, now recognised as head of
the PCI, gained election as a deputy for the
Veneto. He started organizing the launch of
the official newspaper of the party, called
L'Unità (Unity), living in Rome while his
family stayed in Moscow. At its Lyon Congress
in January 1926, Gramsci's theses calling
for a united front to restore democracy to
Italy were adopted by the party.
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.
Togliatti, in Moscow as a representative of
the party, received the letter, opened it,
read it, and decided not to deliver it. This
caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci
and Togliatti which they never completely
resolved.
=== Imprisonment and death ===
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 several days earlier. The fascist police
arrested Gramsci, despite his parliamentary
immunity, and brought him to the Roman prison
Regina Coeli.
At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor stated,
"For twenty years we must stop this brain
from functioning". He received an immediate
sentence of five years in confinement on the
island of Ustica and the following year he
received a sentence of 20 years' imprisonment
in Turi, near Bari.
Over 11 years in prison, his health deteriorated:
"His teeth fell out, his digestive system
collapsed so that he could not eat solid food...
he had convulsions when he vomited blood,
and suffered headaches so violent that he
beat his head against the walls of his cell."An
international campaign, organised by Piero
Sraffa at Cambridge University and Gramsci's
sister-in-law Tatiana, was mounted to demand
Gramsci's release. In 1933 he was moved from
the prison at Turi to a clinic at Formia,
but was still being denied adequate medical
attention. Two years later he was moved to
the "Quisisana" clinic in Rome. He was due
for release on 21 April 1937 and planned to
retire to Sardinia for convalescence, but
a combination of arteriosclerosis, pulmonary
tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina,
gout and acute gastric disorders meant that
he was too ill to move. Gramsci died on 27
April 1937, at the age of 46. His ashes are
buried in the Cimitero Acattolico (Non-Catholic
Cemetery) in Rome.
== Thought ==
Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist
thinkers of the 20th century, and a particularly
key thinker in the development of Western
Marxism. He wrote more than 30 notebooks and
3,000 pages of history and analysis during
his imprisonment. These writings, known as
the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing
of Italian history and nationalism, as well
as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical
theory and educational theory associated with
his name, such as:
Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining
and legitimising the capitalist state;
The need for popular workers' education to
encourage development of intellectuals from
the working class;
An analysis of the modern capitalist state
that distinguishes between political society,
which dominates directly and coercively, and
civil society, where leadership is constituted
by means of consent;
"Absolute historicism";
A critique of economic determinism that opposes
fatalistic interpretations of Marxism;
A critique of pre-Marxist philosophical materialism.
=== Hegemony ===
Hegemony was a term previously used by Marxists
such as Vladimir Lenin to denote the political
leadership of the working-class in a democratic
revolution. Gramsci greatly expanded this
concept, developing an acute analysis of how
the ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie
– establishes and maintains its control.Orthodox
Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution
was inevitable in capitalist societies. By
the early 20th century, no such revolution
had occurred in the most advanced nations.
Capitalism, it seemed, was more entrenched
than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested,
maintained control not just through violence
and political and economic coercion, but also
through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed
a hegemonic culture, which propagated its
own values and norms so that they became the
"common sense" values of all. 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.
To counter the notion that bourgeois values
represented "natural" or "normal" values for
society, the working class needed to develop
a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture
was "ancillary" to political objectives, but
for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment
of power that cultural hegemony be achieved
first. 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.
Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral
leadership, and make alliances and compromises
with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this
union of social forces a "historic bloc",
taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc
forms the basis of consent to a certain social
order, which produces and re-produces the
hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus
of institutions, social relations, and ideas.
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.
Gramsci stated that bourgeois cultural values
were tied to folklore, popular culture and
religion, and therefore much of his analysis
of hegemonic culture is aimed at these. He
was also impressed by the influence Roman
Catholicism had and the care the Church had
taken to prevent an excessive gap developing
between the religion of the learned and that
of the less educated. Gramsci saw Marxism
as a marriage of the purely intellectual critique
of religion found in Renaissance humanism
and the elements of the Reformation that had
appealed to the masses. 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.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately
relied on a "consented" coercion, and in a
"crisis of authority" the "masks of consent"
slip away, revealing the fist of force.
=== Intellectuals and education ===
Gramsci gave much thought to the role of intellectuals
in society. Famously, 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 saw
modern intellectuals not as talkers, but as
practically-minded directors and organisers
who produced hegemony through ideological
apparatuses such as education and the media.
Furthermore, he distinguished between a "traditional"
intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly)
as a class apart from society, and the thinking
groups which every class produces from its
own ranks "organically". Such "organic" intellectuals
do not simply describe social life in accordance
with scientific rules, but instead articulate,
through the language of culture, the feelings
and experiences which the masses could not
express for themselves. To Gramsci, it was
the duty of organic intellectuals to speak
to the obscured precepts of folk wisdom, or
common sense (senso comune), of their respective
politic spheres. These intellectuals would
represent excluded social groups of a society,
what Gramsci referred to as the subaltern.In
line with Gramsci's theories of hegemonic
power, he argued that capitalist power needed
to be challenged by building a counter-hegemony.
By this he meant that, as part of the war
of position, the organic intellectuals and
others within the working-class, need to develop
alternative values and an alternative ideology
in contrast to bourgeois ideology. He argued
that the reason this had not needed to happen
in Russia was because the Russian ruling-class
did not have genuine hegemonic power. 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. 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.
The need to create a working-class culture
and a counter-hegemony relates to Gramsci's
call for a kind of education that could develop
working-class intellectuals, whose task was
not to introduce Marxist ideology into the
consciousness of the proletariat as a set
of foreign notions, but to renovate the existing
intellectual activity of the masses and make
it natively critical of the status quo. 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. For this reason, partisans of
adult and popular education consider Gramsci
an important voice to this day.
=== State and civil society ===
Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his
conception of the capitalist state. Gramsci
does not understand the 'state' in the narrow
sense of the government. Instead, he divides
it between 'political society' (the police,
the army, legal system, etc.) – the arena
of political institutions and legal constitutional
control – and 'civil society' (the family,
the education system, trade unions, etc.)
– commonly seen as the 'private' or 'non-state'
sphere, mediating between the state and the
economy. However, he stresses that the division
is purely conceptual and that the two often
overlap in reality. Gramsci claims the capitalist
state rules through force plus consent: political
society is the realm of force and civil society
is the realm of consent.
Gramsci proffers that under modern capitalism,
the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic
control by allowing certain demands made by
trade unions and mass political parties within
civil society to be met by the political sphere.
Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in passive revolution
by going beyond its immediate economic interests
and allowing the forms of its hegemony to
change. Gramsci posits that movements such
as reformism and fascism, as well as the 'scientific
management' and assembly line methods of Frederick
Taylor and Henry Ford, respectively, are examples
of this.
Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that 'The
Modern Prince' – the revolutionary party
– is the force that will allow the working-class
to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative
hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci,
the complex nature of modern civil society
means that a 'war of position', carried out
by revolutionaries through political agitation,
the trade unions, advancement of proletarian
culture, and other ways to create an opposing
civil society was necessary alongside a 'war
of manoeuvre' – a direct revolution – in
order to have a successful revolution without
a danger of a counter-revolution or degeneration.
Despite his claim that the lines between the
two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship
that results from identifying political society
with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins
and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's
historical task is to create a 'regulated
society' and defines the 'withering away of
the state' as the full development of civil
society's ability to regulate itself.
=== Historicism ===
Gramsci, like the early Marx, was an emphatic
proponent of historicism. In Gramsci's view,
all meaning derives from the relation between
human practical activity (or "praxis") and
the "objective" historical and social processes
of which it is a part. Ideas cannot be understood
outside their social and historical context,
apart from their function and origin. The
concepts by which we organise our knowledge
of the world do not derive primarily from
our relation to things (to an objective reality),
but rather from the social relations (economic,
for Marx) between the bearers of those concepts.
As a result, there is no such thing as an
unchanging "human nature". Furthermore, philosophy
and science do not "reflect" a reality independent
of man. Rather, a theory can be said to be
"true" when, in any given historical situation,
it expresses the real developmental trend
of that situation.
For the majority of Marxists, truth was truth
no matter when and where it is known, and
scientific knowledge (which included Marxism)
accumulated historically as the advance of
truth in this everyday sense. 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. In contrast, Gramsci believed Marxism
was "true" in a socially pragmatic sense:
by articulating the class consciousness of
the proletariat, Marxism expressed the "truth"
of its times better than any other theory.
This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist
stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto
Croce. However, it should be underlined that
Gramsci's "absolute historicism" broke with
Croce's tendency to secure a metaphysical
synthesis in historical "destiny". Though
Gramsci repudiates the charge, his historical
account of truth has been criticised as a
form of relativism.
=== Critique of "economism" ===
In a notable pre-prison article entitled "The
Revolution against Das Kapital", Gramsci wrote
that the October Revolution in Russia had
invalidated the idea that socialist revolution
had to await the full development of capitalist
forces of production. This reflected his view
that Marxism was not a determinist philosophy.
The principle of the causal "primacy" of the
forces of production was a misconception of
Marxism. Both economic changes and cultural
changes are expressions of a "basic historical
process", and it is difficult to say which
sphere has primacy over the other. The belief
from the earliest years of the workers' movement
that it would inevitably triumph due to "historical
laws" was a product of the historical circumstances
of an oppressed class restricted mainly to
defensive action. This fatalistic doctrine
was to be abandoned as a hindrance once the
working-class became able to take the initiative.
Because Marxism is a "philosophy of praxis",
it cannot rely on unseen "historical laws"
as the agents of social change. History is
defined by human praxis and therefore includes
human will. Nonetheless, will-power cannot
achieve anything it likes in any given situation:
when the consciousness of the working-class
reaches the stage of development necessary
for action, it will encounter historical circumstances
that cannot be arbitrarily altered. However,
it is not predetermined by historical inevitability
or "destiny" as to which of several possible
developments will take place as a result.
His critique of economism also extended to
that practised by the syndicalists of the
Italian trade unions. He believed that many
trade unionists had settled for a reformist,
gradualist approach in that they had refused
to struggle on the political front in addition
to the economic front. 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. While
Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one
organ of a counter-hegemonic force in capitalist
society, the trade union leaders simply saw
these organizations as a means to improve
conditions within the existing structure.
Gramsci referred to the views of these trade
unionists as "vulgar economism", which he
equated to covert reformism and even liberalism.
=== Critique of materialism ===
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 Engels and Lenin, though he does
not explicitly state this. For Gramsci, Marxism
does not deal with a reality that exists in
and for itself, independent of humanity. The
concept of an objective universe outside of
human history and human praxis was analogous
to belief in God. Gramsci defined objectivity
in terms of a universal intersubjectivity
to be established in a future communist society.
Natural history was thus only meaningful in
relation to human history. In his view philosophical
materialism resulted from a lack of critical
thought, and could not be said to oppose religious
dogma and superstition. Despite this, Gramsci
resigned himself to the existence of this
arguably cruder form of Marxism. Marxism was
a philosophy for the proletariat, a subaltern
class, and thus could often only be expressed
in the form of popular superstition and common
sense. 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.
== Influence ==
Gramsci's thought emanates from the organized
left, but he has also become an important
figure in current academic discussions within
cultural studies and critical theory. Political
theorists from the center and the right have
also found insight in his concepts; his idea
of hegemony, for example, has become widely
cited. His influence is particularly strong
in contemporary political science (see Neo-gramscianism).
His work also heavily influenced intellectual
discourse on popular culture and scholarly
popular culture studies in which many have
found the potential for political or ideological
resistance to dominant government and business
interests.His critics charge him with fostering
a notion of power struggle through ideas.
They find the Gramscian approach to philosophical
analysis, reflected in current academic controversies,
to be in conflict with open-ended, liberal
inquiry grounded in apolitical readings of
the classics of Western culture. Gramscians
would counter that thoughts of "liberal inquiry"
and "apolitical reading" are utterly naive;
for the Gramscians, these are intellectual
devices used to maintain the hegemony of the
capitalist class. To credit or blame Gramsci
for the travails of current academic politics
is an odd turn of history, since Gramsci himself
was never an academic, and was in fact deeply
intellectually engaged with Italian culture,
history, and current liberal thought.
As a socialist, Gramsci's legacy has been
disputed. Togliatti, who led the Party (renamed
as Italian Communist Party, PCI) after World
War II and whose gradualist approach was a
forerunner to Eurocommunism, claimed that
the PCI's practices during this period were
congruent with Gramscian thought. It is speculated
that he would likely have been expelled from
his Party if his true views had been known,
particularly his growing hostility to Stalin.
=== In popular culture ===
Occupations – Gramsci is a central character
in Trevor Griffiths's 1970 play Occupations
about workers taking over car factories in
Turin in 1920.
Gramsci – Everything That Concerns People
– John Sessions plays Gramsci in the 1984
Channel 4 film. Brian Cox narrates.
Gramsci Monument – a project by Thomas Hirschhorn
in honour of Gramsci; built in a courtyard
of the Forest Houses housing projects in the
Bronx, New York by 15 residents in 2013. It
included displays and artefacts from Gramsci's
life in addition to lectures on Gramsci.
Scritti Politti – British synthpop/new wave
band are named in honour of Gramsci. The name
is a rough Italian translation of political
scripts/writings.
Piazza Gramsci – a central square, named
after Gramsci in Siena in Tuscany.
Via Antonio Gramsci, the main road to the
Central Train Station in Cefalù, on the northern
coast of Sicily, Italy is also named after
Gramsci.
Additional streets named after Gramsci are
found in the cities of Naples, Lascari, Pollina,
Collesano, and Palermo Sicily, Italy.
A major road going through the lower portion
of Genoa, along the coast, is named after
Gramsci.
In an episode of the comedy Spaced, Gramsci
was the name of a dog that was trained to
attack the rich. The dog was owned by Minty,
a friend of Tim Bisley (Simon Pegg). One day
Minty won the lottery and was attacked by
Gramsci.
== Bibliography ==
=== Collections ===
Pre-Prison Writings (Cambridge University
Press)
The Prison Notebooks (three volumes) (Columbia
University Press)
Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International
Publishers)
=== Essays ===
Newspapers and the Workers (1916)
Men or machines? (1916)
One Year of History (1918)
== See also ==
Subaltern Studies
Subaltern (postcolonialism)
Reformism
Articulation
Risorgimento
Praxis School
Liberation theology
Antonio Gramsci Battalion
== References ==
== Cited sources ==
Gramsci, Antonio (1971). "Introduction". In
Hoare, Quentin; Smith, Geoffrey Nowell. Selections
from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International
Publishers. pp. xvii–xcvi. ISBN 0-85315-280-2.
Gramsci, Antonio (1982). Selections from the
Prison Books. Lawrence and Wishart. ISBN 0-85315-280-2.
Kołakowski, Leszek (2005). Main Currents
of Marxism. London: W. W. Norton & Company.
ISBN 978-0-393-32943-8.
== Further reading ==
Anderson, Perry (November–December 1976).
"The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci". New Left
Review. New Left Review. I (100): 5–78.
Boggs, Carl (1984). The Two Revolutions: Gramsci
and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism. London:
South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-226-1.
Bottomore, Tom (1992). The Dictionary of Marxist
Thought. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-18082-6.
Davidson, Alastair (2018). Antonio Gramsci:
Towards an Intellectual Biography [2016].
Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Femia, Joseph (1981) Gramsci's Political Thought
– Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary
Process. Oxford. ISBN 0-19-827251-0.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the
Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.
ISBN 0-7178-0397-X.
Greaves, Nigel (2009) Gramsci's Marxism: Reclaiming
a Philosophy of History and Politics. Leicester.
ISBN 978-1-84876-127-8.
Harman Chris Gramsci, the Prison Notebooks
and Philosophy
Jay, Martin (1986). Marxism and Totality:
The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to
Habermas. University of California Press.
ISBN 0-520-05742-2.
Joll, James (1977). Antonio Gramsci. New York:
Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-12942-9.
Kolakowski, Leszek (1981). Main Currents of
Marxism, Vol. III: The Breakdown. New York:
Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-285109-8.
Hall, Stuart (June 1986). "Gramsci's relevance
for the study of race and ethnicity". Journal
of Communication Inquiry. Sage. 10 (2): 5–27.
doi:10.1177/019685998601000202.
Maitan, Livio (1978). Il marxismo rivoluzionario
di Antonio Gramsci. Milano: Nuove edizioni
internazionali.
McNally, Mark (ed.) (2015) Antonio Gramsci.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-137-33418-3.
Pastore, Gerardo (2011), Antonio Gramsci.
Questione sociale e questione sociologica.
Livorno: Belforte. ISBN 978-88-7467-059-8.
Santucci, Antonio A. (2010). Antonio Gramsci.
Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-1-58367-210-5.
Thomas, Peter (2009) The Gramscian Moment,
Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden/Boston.
ISBN 978-90-04-16771-1.
== External links ==
Gramsci's writings at MIA
The International Gramsci Society
"Notes on Language". TELOS
Fondazione Instituto Gramsci
Special issue of International Socialism journal
with a collection on Gramsci's legacy
Roberto Robaina: Gramsci and revolution: a
necessary clarification
Dan Jakopovich: Revolution and the Party in
Gramsci's Thought: A Modern Application
Gramsci's contribution to the field of adult
and popular education
The life and work of Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci, 1891–1937 (in Italian)
The Whole Picture – Gramscian Epistemology
through the Praxis Prism
Gramsci Links Archive
Bob Jessop's lectures on Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci and the Battle Against Fascism.
Chris Hedges for Truthdig. June 4, 2017
Antonio Gramsci at Find a Grave
