Gramsci, Antonio

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the leading Italian Marxist of the first half of the century, became one of the most influential thinkers on cultural studies from the 1980s. Earlier grouped together with Georg Lukàcs and Karl Korsch as Western Marxists because of a shared sense that it was culture, not political economy that was central to social reproduction of bourgeois societies, he is principally known for the Prison Notebooks and associated with the idea of hegemony. The Prison Notebooks, composed while Gramsci was a guest in Mussolini's jails, are highly suggestive but frequently and radically incomplete. They reveal a sophisticated and historically sensitive mind engaging with the details of Italian society and culture, but they do not contain a developed theory of hegemony. Hegemony is defined in one place in the Prison Notebooks as coercion plus consent; the state is understood as dictatorship plus hegemony. The point is that while in Eastern experiences, such as Russia prior to the October Revolution, culture is secondary to force in securing social reproduction, in Western cases the balance works the other way around. We are not forced to consume; we like to consume. Television rules, not tanks, at least in the centres of the world system. Gramsci does not, however, subscribe to the idea of the cultural dope, or to Marcuse's thesis in One-Dimensional Man that we cannot break free of this system of near-total incorporation. Hegemony, or domination, is based on a shared common sense that naturalises this world, that tells us there will always be bosses (and they will always be men). Hegemony is much more than brainwashing; it appeals because it taps into a system of needs and justifies the necessity of this world on the grounds that it is impossible to imagine any other, let alone realise it.

Hegemony, for Gramsci, is not natural, but constructed. It depends upon daily reinforcement, in education, work, in advertisements, and soap opera. Gramsci takes belief to be central to social reproduction and is therefore one of the first Marxists properly to acknowledge the significance of popular culture and folklore. If you want to understand gender and domesticity, read the women's weeklies. Dominant groups and classes have to build hegemony to project their own form of dominance and the subordination of the subaltern classes. Hegemony is therefore mediated by the historic bloc or class coalition that constructs it. If hegemony rules, for Gramsci, then counter-hegemony must also be possible. This raises the question of agency—who will change the world?—which Gramsci answers ambiguously. Sometimes it is the Italian Communist Party, or New Prince; sometimes the agent looks more like the people, the popular alliance, or rainbow movement. Intellectuals have a key role in this process, for they are organizers who work with ideas. Gramsci thinks of the new, innovative intellectuals as organic, as opposed to the old clerical or civic category of traditional intellectuals. In terms of social theory, Gramsci is evidently a Marxist, with the difference that he sets his project against the economistic legacy of orthodox Marxism. This is what explains the double message of his 1917 essay on the Russian Revolution, “The Revolution Against Capital.” Gramsci supported the Bolsheviks, because they had the nerve to act, to seize power, and because they acted against the Second International's orthodoxy, for which Marx's Capital was correct: You only had to wait for revolution. The Russian revolution was also a revolt against this determinist reading of Capital. Gramsci's early Marxism rested on this voluntaristic, grassroots sympathy with the council movement, closer to syndicalism. The Party, or Modern Prince (after his fellow Italian, Machiavelli), became necessary to follow the Bolshevik example and to countermand Mussolini's fascist party.

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