Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937)

Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales (Sardinia) in 1891 and grew up in very modest circumstances. His father, a minor official in a local government office, was involved in a corruption scandal (it is thought that the charges were unfounded) that eventually led to his imprisonment for several years. This made life very difficult for the entire family. Economic problems were compounded by health problems for the young Antonio, who was accidentally dropped at the age of 2, after which he developed a curved spine. This made him small and somewhat frail, and he suffered from poor health throughout most of his relatively short life. His initial political position was that of Sardinian nationalism, which ceded to socialism by the time [Page 292]he got a scholarship to study linguistics at the University of Turin in 1911.

Moving from rural Sardinia to Turin in 1911 was probably somewhat like going from an African village to Tokyo today: Gramsci came into contact with a completely different world, the world of the modern industrial working class, which strengthened his conviction that the future was going to be socialist. Italian socialism was not radical enough for him, however, and he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as a founding member in 1921. In 1922, he worked for the Comintern (Third International) in Vienna and Moscow, and then assumed leadership of the PCI in 1924. Mussolini, who had been in power in Italy since 1922, began imprisoning and having his opponents murdered during the consolidation of the fascist regime during the 1920s. After the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924 and the crisis of the Aventine Secession, it became impossible politically to coexist with Mussolini. In November 1926, Gramsci was arrested and sent to prison. Shortly thereafter, he began working on the Quaderni dal carcere (Prison Notebooks), which he carried out until he was physically too ill to read and write, which was sometime in 1935. Thereafter, his health deteriorated. He died in 1937, only a few weeks after being released from prison. In addition to being the driving intellectual force of the PCI and providing the foundation of its theoretical and practical orientations in the post-World War II period, Gramsci is regarded as a major figure in Western Marxism along with such figures as Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Perhaps the best way to understand his ideas is to see how he develops and enriches some of the key concepts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.