We’ll put Antonio Gramsci (born 1891, Ales, Sardinia, Italy – died 1937, Rome, Italy) in conversation with Marx and Engels. Please start be reading the short biography on Gramsci by Frank Rosengarten.

HEGEMONY

Gramsci. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (pp. 5-23, 56, 80, 125-33, 161, 175-85, 229-45, 257-66, [don’t neglect the footnotes])[1]

Gramsci offers some insightful analyses of domination. Our reading begins with an examination of “traditional intellectuals” and “organic intellectuals.” The former are thinkers legitimated by a past order and who appear to have autonomous interests. The latter are thinkers who emerge alongside rising classes under new relations of production to give such classes awareness and purpose. Gramsci argues that organic intellectuals help rising classes ideologically conquer traditional intellectuals and, more importantly, the popular masses. The discussion of intellectuals points to the particular importance of “superstructures.” Gramsci, while never losing sight of material circumstance, distinguishes between two superstructural levels: “political society” (coercive apparatuses) and “civil society” (private/voluntary associations where intellectuals tend to operate). This also constitutes Gramsci’s unique definition of the state (political society + civil society). Civil society is the terrain where consent among the dominated classes is elicited, while political society is the terrain where force is imposed on them. Any direct assault on the state traditionally understood (“a war of movement” in political society) will likely be futile when civil society is strong. A struggle over hegemony must be waged and this requires a more patient “war of position” in the trenches of civil society. All of this motivates Gramsci’s reimagining of capitalist crises and his predicted pathways to a post-capitalist world.