Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci: The Prisoner Who Explained Consent

"For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." So said the Fascist prosecutor at the trial of a hunchbacked Sardinian journalist under five feet tall, and the state duly took his teeth, his digestion and eventually his life. It did not stop the brain. In eleven years of imprisonment Gramsci filled more than thirty notebooks and some three thousand pages with an analysis of how power actually works in modern societies — an argument so unexpected that it is now cited across political science, cultural studies and postcolonial theory by people with no interest in Marxism whatsoever.

Ales

He was born Antonio Francesco Gramsci on 22 January 1891 at Ales in Sardinia, into the poorest end of the Italian periphery. In 1898 his father Francesco was charged with embezzlement, and the family collapsed into destitution; Antonio had to leave school until his father's release in 1904. He also suffered a spinal deformity — now generally thought to be Pott's disease rather than the childhood fall of legend — which stopped his growth under five feet, left him badly hunched, and gave him a lifetime of pain.

In 1911 he won a scholarship to the University of Turin, where he read literature and studied linguistics under Matteo Bartoli. Turin was then Italy's Detroit, and watching an agrarian society industrialise in one generation formed everything he later wrote. He joined the Italian Socialist Party in late 1913 and turned to journalism, writing for *Avanti!* and *Il Grido del Popolo* and building a serious reputation.

Councils and a Party

In April 1919, with Palmiro Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini, he founded *L'Ordine Nuovo*. Through the strike waves of 1919–20 he argued that the workers' councils springing up in Turin's factories were not merely bargaining bodies but the embryo of working-class self-government. The councils were beaten. On 21 January 1921 at Livorno he helped found the Communist Party of Italy.

He went to Moscow in 1922 as the party's representative, and there married Julia Schucht, a Russian violinist, in 1923; they had two sons, Delio and Giuliano. He was elected deputy for Venice in May 1924 and became party secretary that August. Mussolini's regime, consolidating after the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, was already dismantling the constitution around him. In November 1926 the Fascist police arrested him regardless of his parliamentary immunity. He was sentenced to twenty years.

The Notebooks

The *Prison Notebooks*, written between 1929 and 1935, are the reason anyone still reads him. They were composed under censorship — which is partly why he calls Marxism "the philosophy of praxis" throughout, a phrase borrowed from Antonio Labriola that also happened to slip past the prison censor — in fragmentary, thematically grouped notes never meant for publication. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that this fragmentary character is exactly why the text supports such contrasting readings.

The central problem he set himself was why revolution had succeeded in backward Russia and failed everywhere in advanced Europe. His answer was that he and everyone else had misunderstood the modern state. The state, he wrote, is political society plus civil society — hegemony protected by the armour of coercion. In a developed country the ruling class does not mainly govern by police. It governs by consent, manufactured continuously through schools, churches, newspapers and intellectuals, until its particular interests are experienced by everyone as ordinary common sense. He called this *hegemony*: not domination alone but intellectual and moral leadership.

From that follows the strategic conclusion. A frontal assault — a *war of manoeuvre* — works only where civil society is thin. In the West, where civil society consists of what he called trenches protecting the state, revolutionaries must fight a *war of position*, winning the institutions of consent before, not after, taking power.

Around this he built the rest. *Organic intellectuals* rise from within a class to articulate its experience, as against *traditional intellectuals* — priests, professors — who imagine themselves above history. Common sense is fragmentary and superstitious, but contains a healthy nucleus of *good sense* that must be engaged rather than despised. The *historic bloc* names the alliance of forces sustaining a given order. The *subaltern* names those excluded from representation altogether. *Passive revolution* describes how ruling classes absorb demands from below to avoid conceding power — his reading of Fordism and Americanism. And throughout he attacks the economism of orthodox Marxism, dismantling Bukharin's attempt to make historical materialism a predictive natural science.

Why Antonio Is Called a Genius

The quality on display is conceptual invention: the ability to name a thing that everyone can see and nobody has isolated. Hegemony is the clearest case. The observation that consent in a mass society is produced rather than given, and that culture is therefore a site of political struggle rather than a reflection of economic arrangements, is now so thoroughly absorbed that it is hard to recall it had an author. It was not obvious in 1930. It contradicted the reigning Marxist orthodoxy, which held that ideas were superstructure and the base did the real work, and it explained a failure — the non-arrival of revolution in the West — that the orthodoxy could only treat as delay.

The conditions make the achievement stranger. He worked with no library to speak of, in declining health, in fragments, under a censor, knowing his sentence would probably outlive him. He drew on Croce's neo-Hegelian idealism, Sorel's account of socialism as moral consciousness, Labriola's praxis, and Machiavelli, whose Prince he recast as the revolutionary party — the Modern Prince. *Jacobin* describes him as the most cited Italian Marxist ever and among the most celebrated Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century, and the reach extends well past Marxism: cultural studies, critical theory, international relations and subaltern studies all run on his vocabulary.

The counter-case deserves stating. The Notebooks are unfinished notes, not a system, and their ambiguity has let almost everyone claim him. Scholars point to his unresolved debt to Croce and his ambiguous relation to both materialism and Leninism. Critics argue his framework licenses a kind of intellectual elitism, and that his historicism, which treats truth as what a class can effectively live by, dissolves the ground for objective claims. He also, with his comrades, badly misread Fascism's capacity for violence before it closed on him. What survives all of that is the concept itself, which nobody has managed to do without.

Legacy

His health disintegrated in prison: teeth gone, unable to eat solid food, vomiting blood, beating his head against the cell wall from headaches. Moved to a clinic at Formia in 1933 and then to Rome, he was finally due for release on 21 April 1937. Arteriosclerosis, tuberculosis, hypertension, angina and gout made it impossible. He died six days later, on 27 April 1937, aged forty-six. His ashes lie in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome.

The notebooks survived him, and the twentieth century read them. Whether Gramsci himself would have survived his own party is doubtful — scholars note his growing hostility to Stalin and suspect that, had it been widely known, he would have been expelled. Togliatti's gradualist Eurocommunism later claimed him; so did the new left; so, more recently, has a conservative right that borrows his vocabulary to describe its opponents. The prosecutor got his twenty years. He simply chose the wrong organ to attack.

Achievements

• Viareggio Prize — 1947
• Notable work: Prison Notebooks