Gramsci, Antonio

Gramsci, Antonio (b. 22 Jan. 1891, d. 27 Apr. 1937). Italian Communist Of Albanian origin, he was born in Cagliari and educated locally until 1911, when he received a scholarship at the University of Turin. He joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1913. In late 1915, he was writing for the national socialist newspaper, Avanti!, and by the end of World War I he had already established some of the tenets of his political views. Influenced by Croce, he rejected positivism, determinism, and reformism, and emphasized the importance of the cultural struggle instead. Following Italy's domestic political disorder after World War I he hoped a socialist state would be established through the factory councils which paralysed the economic and political life of Turin, but which were ultimately crushed by Giolitti. Gramsci joined the Italian Communist Party upon its foundation, but soon found himself in opposition to the rigid determinism of its general-secretary, Bordiga. Supported by instructions from Moscow, in 1922 he began to improve Communist organization and to encourge anti-Fascist cooperation among the left-wing parties, in opposition to Bordiga's intentions. By 1926, he was firmly in control of the party, though he failed in his efforts to hinder the establishment of a Fascist authoritarian state. In the same year, all non-Fascist parties were banned, while he was arrested on 8 November 1926.

His fundamental importance to Communist ideology derives from his Prison Notebooks (1928–37), in which he reflected on why the Communist world revolution had failed to materialize. He argued that, contrary to traditional Marxist assumptions, in liberal democracies governments ruled mostly with general support. In other words, owing to historical, cultural, and religious factors which shaped people's perceptions, they were actually content with their own oppression. As a Marxist response, he advocated a sustained Communist campaign against the whole breadth of bourgeois institutions, leading to the eventual overthrow of the state and the establishment of a new socialist culture. Despite his insistence on the need for the masses to be guided by the Communist Party, he none the less advocated much greater mass involvement in the Communist movement. The party's most important task was to combine Communist theory and practice, i.e. to seek the combination of intellectual assiduity and revolutionary zeal (the ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’). His ideas had a tremendous influence on the Communist parties which operated in relative independence from Moscow, e.g. in Italy, France, and various South American countries.

Marxism; Trotskyism; Eurocommunism