Gramsci Society (Asia-Pacific)

Why Gramsci ?

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci, Italian working class activist, political leader and Marxist theoretician, was born in 1897 in Ales, Sardinia, Italy. Brought up in poverty, he studied at Turin University, helped establish the left-wing paper, L'Ordine Nuovo, (The New Order), and was active in promoting workers' councils in factories in the revolutionary upsurge in Italy following the Russian revolution. Increasingly critical of reformist socialism, in 1921 he helped to establish the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and in 1924 he became the parliamentary leader of the party. When the PCI was banned by Mussolini, Gramsci was arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison (1926-37), where he completed some 30 notebooks of reflections. Published posthumously in 1947 as the Lettere del Carcere (Letters from Prison), the notebooks are considered one of the most important political works of the 20th century and Antonio Gramsci is the most widely cited Italian thinker.

Most of the work on Gramsci in English refers to his Prison Notebooks, only available in English since the 1970s, and then in edited "Selections" collections. Gramsci was affected by the circumstances of writing while in prison and very ill, so the Notebooks are not clearly expressed and contain many sometimes complex and contradictory thoughts and explorations into a wide variety of matters that concerned him in the face of Italian fascism.

Since 1992 Joseph Buttigieg of the University of Notre Dame, the Secretary of The International Gramsci Society, has been re-translating the Notebooks for Columbia University Press. Professor Buttigieg is trying to retain the integrity of the notebooks as Gramsci wrote them to provide greater insights into the breadth and depth of Gramsci's thinking.

Hegemony

It is in these Notebooks that we get a sense of the idea of hegemony as Gramsci developed it. The concept of hegemony is crucial to Gramsci's thought and embodies his most important legacy. By hegemony Gramsci means the process of securing the consent of subordinate groups, including the working class, through the negotiation of a political and ideological 'popular consensus'. Through its use of religion, education and elements of popular national culture, a ruling class can impose its world-view and come to have it accepted by a population as common sense. Hegemony in this sense is an 'organising principle' that is diffused by the process of socialisation into all parts of everyday life so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling class come to appear as natural, as the only way things can be thought about and done.

But hegemony is not automatic. It arises from a complex play of negotiations, alignments and realignments of various social forces and often resembles a comprise equilibrium. It is, most of all, a process, one that is never finished because hegemony can never be complete. It is always precarious, always in need of re-achievement. Hegemony's 'victories' are never final.

Gramsci did not use the currently popular concept of 'counter-hegemony', but wrote of the 'war of position' and 'war of movement' through which the working class and its allies would become capable of building and enforcing a clear hegemony of their own which would challenge the fundamental 'hegemonic principles' of capitalism, capital accumulation based on exploitation and private property. Gramsci's work on the subaltern, which is still to be elaborated may be useful in moving this forward. There is still much to be done, and The International Gramsci Society (Asia-Pacific) is keen to link up with like-minded scholars and activists in the region.