http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.

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Marxist Media Theory

Daniel Chandler
Gramsci and hegemony
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian (1891-1937), was a leading Marxist thinker. Like
Althusser, he rejected economism, insisting on the independence of ideology
from economic determinism. Gramsci also rejected crude materialism, offering a
humanist version of Marxism which focused on human subjectivity.
Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social
class over others (e.g. bourgeois hegemony). This represents not only political
and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its
own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it
as 'common sense' and 'natural'. Commentators stress that this involves willing
and active consent. Common sense, suggests Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, is 'the
way a subordinate class lives its subordination' (cited in Alvarado & BoydBarrett 1992: 51).
However, unlike Althusser, Gramsci emphasizes struggle. He noted that
'common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually
transforming itself' (Gramsci, cited in Hall 1982: 73). As Fiske puts it, 'Consent
must be constantly won and rewon, for people's material social experience
constantly reminds them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses
a threat to the dominant class... Hegemony... posits a constant contradiction
between ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makes this
interface into an inevitable site of ideological struggle' (Fiske 1992: 291).
References to the mass media in terms of an ideological 'site of struggle' are
recurrent in the commentaries of those influenced by this perspective.
Gramsci's stance involved a rejection of economism since it saw a struggle for
ideological hegemony as a primary factor in radical change.
Criticisms of Althusser's theory of ideology drew some neo-Marxists to
Gramsci's ideas.

http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/about_gramsci/biograpy.html

AN INTRODUCTION TO GRAMSCIS LIFE AND THOUGHT

by Frank Rosengarten
Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales in the province of
Cagliari in Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco
Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. His relationship with his father was never
very close, but he had a strong affection and love for his mother, whose
resilience, gift for story-telling and pungent humor made a lasting impression on
him. Of his six siblings, Antonio enjoyed a mutual interest in literature with his
younger sister Teresina, and seems to have always felt a spiritual kinship with
his two brothers, Gennaro, the oldest of the Gramsci children, and Carlo, the
youngest. Gennaros early embrace of socialism contributed significantly to
Antonios political development.
In 1897, Antonios father was suspended and subsequently arrested and
imprisoned for five years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly thereafter,
Giuseppina and her children moved to Ghilarza, where Antonio attended
elementary school. Sometime during these years of trial and near poverty, he
fell from the arms of a servant, to which his family attributed his hunched back
and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height.
At the age of eleven, after completing elementary school, Antonio worked for
two years in the tax office in Ghilarza, in order to help his financially strapped
family. Because of the five-year absence of Francesco, these were years of
bitter struggle. Nevertheless, he continued to study privately and eventually
returned to school, where he was judged to be of superior intelligence, as
indicated by excellent grades in all subjects.
Antonio continued his education, first in Santu Lussurgiu, about ten miles from
Ghilarza, then, after graduating from secondary school, at the Dettori Lyceum in
Cagliari, where he shared a room with his brother Gennaro, and where he came
into contact for the first time with organized sectors of the working class and
with radical and socialist politics. But these were also years of privation, during
which Antonio was partially dependent on his father for financial support, which
came only rarely. In his letters to his family, he accused his father repeatedly of
unpardonable procrastination and neglect. His health deteriorated, and some of
the nervous symptoms that were to plague him at a later time were already in
evidence.
1911 was an important year in young Gramscis life. After graduating from the
Cagliari lyceum, he applied for and won a scholarship to the University of Turin,
an award reserved for needy students from the provinces of the former
Kingdom of Sardinia. Among the other young people to compete for this
scholarship was Palmiro Togliatti, future general secretary of the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) and, with Gramsci and several others, among the most
capable leaders of that embattled Party. Antonio enrolled in the Faculty of

Letters. At the University he met Angelo Tasca and several of the other men
with whom he was to share struggles first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and
then, after the split that took place in January 1921, in the PCI.
At the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet,
unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a variety of
courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social sciences and in
linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted to contemplate academic
specialization in that subject. Several of his professors, notably Matteo Bartoli, a
linguist, and Umberto Cosmo, a Dante scholar, became personal friends.
In 1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an
active member of the PSI, and began a journalistic career that made him among
the most feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His column in the Turin
edition of Avanti!, and his theatre reviews were widely read and influential. He
regularly spoke at workers study-circles on various topics, such as the novels of
Romain Rolland, for whom he felt a certain affinity, the Paris Commune, the
French and Italian revolutions and the writings of Karl Marx. It was at this time,
as the war dragged on and as Italian intervention became a bloody reality,
Gramsci assumed a somewhat ambivalent stance, although his basic position
was that the Italian socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn
Italian national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist direction. It
was also at this time, in 1917 and 1918, that he began to see the need for
integration of political and economic action with cultural work, which took form
as a proletarian cultural association in Turin.
The outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred his
revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the years thereafter
Gramsci identified himself closely, although not entirely uncritically, with the
methods and aims of the Russian revolutionary leadership and with the cause
of socialist transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.
In the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini
and Togliatti, founded L'Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna Settimanale di Cultura
Socialista (The New Order: A Weekly Review of Socialist Culture), which
became an influential periodical (on a weekly and later on a bi-monthly
publishing schedule) for the following five years among the radical and
revolutionary Left in Italy. The review gave much attention to political and literary
currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.
For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of
the factory council movement, and to militant journalism, which led in January
1921 to his siding with the Communist minority within the PSI at the Partys
Livorno Congress. He became a member of the PCIs central committee, but
did not play a leading role until several years later. He was among the most
prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of the fascist
movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless unified action were
taken against the rise of Mussolinis movement, Italian democracy and Italian
socialism would both suffer a disastrous defeat.

The years 1921 to 1926, years of iron and fire as he called them, were
eventful and productive. They were marked in particular by the year and a half
he lived in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the Communist International (May
1922- November 1923), his election to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924,
and his assumption of the position of general secretary of the PCI. His personal
life was also filled with significant experiences, the chief one being his meeting
with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a violinist and
member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met during his stay in
Russia. Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio (1924-1981), and Giuliano, born
in 1926, who lives today in Moscow with his wife.
On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in
accordance with a series of Exceptional Laws enacted by the fascistdominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina
Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant
physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on
April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke
that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that
were never properly treated in prison.
Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramscis life knows, these prison
years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the
Notebooks he kept in his various cells that eventually saw the light after World
War II, and as recorded also in the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to
friends and especially to family members, the most important of whom was not
his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the person
most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had
resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only
with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles
of clothing and with numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive
the grinding daily routine of prison life.
After being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist leaders, to
20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in
Turi, in the province of Bari, which turned out to be his longest place of
detention (June 1928 -- November 1933). Thereafter he was under police guard
at a clinic in Formia, from which he was transferred in August 1935, always
under guard, to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he spent the
last two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who helped him
either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible, were his mother
Giuseppina, who died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his sisters Teresina and
Grazietta, and his good friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, who throughout
Gramscis prison ordeal provided a crucial and indispenable service to Gramsci.
Sraffa used his personal funds and numerous professional contacts that were
necessary in order to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in
prison. Gramsci had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without
Sraffas assistance, and without the intermediary role often played by Tania, the
Prison Notebooks as we have them would not have come to fruition.

Gramscis intellectual work in prison did not emerge in the light of day until
several years after World War II, when the PC began publishing scattered
sections of the Notebooks and some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote
from prison. By the 1950s, and then with increasing frequency and intensity, his
prison writings attracted interest and critical commentary in a host of countries,
not only in the West but in the so-called third world as well. Some of his
terminology became household words on the left, the most important of which,
and the most complex, is the term hegemony as he used it in his writings and
applied to the twin task of understanding the reasons underlying both the
successes and the failures of socialism on a global scale, and of elaborating a
feasible program for the realization of a socialist vision within the really existing
conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these conditions were the rise and
triumph of fascism and the disarray on the left that had ensued as a result of
that triumph. Also extremely pertinent, both theoretically and practically, were
such terms and phrases as organic intellectual, national popular, and
historical bloc which, even if not coined by Gramsci, acquired such radically
new and original implications in his writing as to constitute effectively new
formulations in the realm of political philosophy.
1998-2014 International Gramsci Society
Edited by Marcus E. Green.
This page was last revised on August 31, 2014
http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/about_gramsci/biograpy.html

http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/gramsci1.html

ANTONIO GRAMSCI, ORGANIC

INTELLECTUALS,
AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR
by Ralph Dumain
2 May 1996:
I am bothered by the inadequacy of the concept of organic intellectuals as I
understand it. I don't have much of a background in Gramsci; I go primarily
by the way I see people around me using the concept. I think the notion is
especially problematic for American conditions, given that the relationship
between the individual and "community" is especially problematic for us,
even more so than for other parts of the world.
First, the notion of organic intellectual is directly connected to the goals of a
political movement, real or desired. This, of course, is a goal in which
revolutionaries have a vital stake, but it is not the only issue in conceiving the
relationship between intellectual (or any individual) and society. And what if
there is no movement, or what institutions exist are totally corrupt? What
about the means of communication that link the intellectual to his audience?
Are they always community based, and what are the consequences either
way? The 'organic intellectual' matters so much to the academic left in the
USA precisely because everybody wants to belong but nobody does. Nobody
wants to stand alone or admit his ineffectuality. The concept of being
"political" means in practice tailing after every opportunist who comes along
who seems to be able to make an impact on society, or politicizing cultural
figures who cannot possibly bring about the kind of results one fantasizes
about.
The division of labor is one way of formulating the decisive problem I am
addressing; another is the relationship of the individual to community and to
society as a whole, not only in terms of political life narrowly defined, but in
terms of one's total system of relationships to other people in everyday life.
I belabor this seemingly obvious point because the academic left, often guiltridden and defensive about its own social position, thinks the solution is to
engage in political activism. Surely this is an important responsibility that
hopefully one day all citizens will take up, but it does not address the entire
range of issues involving one's relationship to one's social environment, which
does indeed involve the division of labor and the space one occupies in daily
life across the board the neighborhood one lives in, the people with whom

one interacts on a daily basis, where one gets one's information abut how the
other half lives i.e. one's total sense of reality based on how one lives.
Engaging in political work signing petitions, getting arrested in front of
embassies, participating in demonstrations, etc., are all important ways of
engaging social issues, but they address only a part of one's relation to one's
social environment, at least in our society in its present state. Given society's
present state, and the alienated existence which characterizes it, the way
intellectuals politicize their own work, even under the felt obligation to take a
stand, is very confused and naive, and is generally much more corrupt and less
socially useful than would be the case if leftist academics just stuck to the job
of working on ideas and publishing good, readable books. Theory without
practice is not the only problem; action without understanding is much worse.
Being neither an academic nor a person who confines his life to the subculture
of the activist left, being a person who spends relatively little time around
intellectuals, I have a perspective on this issue that is very different from the
academic and the activist left. So here is where my concern over the
implications of the division of labor goes beyond the concerns of all of them
the feminists, postmodernists, analytical Marxists, and of course the
sectarian left too all of them. My own particular position within a divided
society gives me my own vantage point which is quite different from most
people I encounter. Most people I encounter on the left academic or activist
are utterly confused and lost. They don't know who or where they are, and
their foundation of thought and action is very confused one has to be very
careful about how to deal with them.
The next major theme I need to introduce is the notion of theory and practice.
The left has a history of dealing with this in various historical periods. Now I
think this has to be thought out anew, now more than ever, given the
complexity of the relationships within society and the fact that many people
who claim to be practical are in fact corrupt or insane.
In researching the Young Hegelians and the young Marx (inspired by my
reading of C.L.R. James on intellectuals and culture), I realized that the
relation between theory and practice outside of narrowly defined political
work has to be completely re-thought. My conception of "unity" of theory and
practice is now informed by a (using the term loosely) Hegelian approach.
Perhaps I simply do not understand the concept of organic intellectual, but I
do not see how the concept can be useful to my concerns. Given the difficulty
of being "organic" in the USA in 1996 without being utterly corrupt, perhaps
this is not the concept that should most interest us now.

14 Sept. 1997:
I've always been suspicious of the American academics' appropriation of
Gramsci, particularly their obsession with "organic intellectuals". I didn't think
I could use Gramsci for my purposes until completely by accident I stumbled
across an essay by Sassoon in Boundary 2 [see bibliography] which links
Gramsci's ideas about intellectuals to the division of labor, and finally I found
something I could work with.
12 July 1997:
This article gave me a newfound respect for Gramsci in spite of his current
vogue and has finally given me a reason to want to study him. In spite of his
posthumous celebrity in these parts of late, I was always highly suspicious of
people's concern with him here, because I always suspected that a concern
with being an "organic intellectual" in American conditions was a load of
ballocks. But now I see that Gramsci was profoundly engaged with the real
problems of technical specialization and the division of labor, and his
concerns do not devolve to typically American moralistic preoccupations with
how to overcome being a lonely individual crying in the wilderness looking
for a power base or somebody's ass to kiss.
5 June 1999:
I never claimed to be an organic intellectual. I think the whole notion is
misapplied. In Italy the concept referred to the social function of a layer of
educated people. Here it is taken as some obligation or ideal, because this
country is full of alienated individuals looking for someplace to belong; they
are looking for a totally organic experience. For all intents and purposes our
organic intellectuals are Siskel and Ebertwell the fat boy is still aliveand
Oprah's self-help gurus. Don't you think this is funny?
(compiled and revised 10 Feb. 2000)
1996, 1997, 1999, 2000

http://vensociolib.blogspot.mx/2008/06/antonio-gramsci-1891-1937.html

domingo, 15 de junio de 2008

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

PERFIL BIOGRFICO Y ACADMICO

Nacido en Cerdea, en el seno de una familia humilde, pudo cursar
estudios de filologa en la Universidad de Turn gracias a una beca. Su
juventud est marcada por un claro compromiso poltico, que le lleva
a militar en el partido socialista (1914) y a trabajar en el diario
Avanti!. En 1919, junto a Palmiro Togliatti, Angelo Tasca, Umberto
Terracini y otros jvenes revolucionarios, funda la revista Ordine
Nuovo, afn al movimiento bolchevique, y, en 1921, crea con Amadeo
Bordiga el partido comunista italiano (PCI), del que ser elegido
secretario general. Fundador del diario comunista l'Unit. Miembro
activo de la III Internacional, pas dos aos en Mosc. En Italia, se
opuso al movimiento fascista de Mussolini, que, a pesar de su
inmunidad parlamentaria -Gramsci era diputado por Venecia- le
detuvo y confin en la isla de Ustica. Aquejado por la mala salud que
acompa su existencia, en 1934 fue puesto en libertad condicional,
muriendo en Roma (1937) poco despus de cumplir condena. Durante
los aos de confinamiento escribi Quaderni del Carcere [Cuadernos
de prisin], en los que se recoge el ncleo central de su
pensamiento.La obra de Gramsci influye e impregna muchos de los
discursos tericos crticos acerca de la comunicacin y de la cultura,

como la primera generacin britnica de los estudios culturales

(Hoggart, Williams, Hall...) y figuras
como Althusser, Sartre, Enzensberger, Freire, etctera, siendo uno de
los pensadores marxistas cuyas reflexiones mantienen mayor vigencia
a comienzos del siglo XXI.

PENSAMIENTO Y EXPRESIN CIENTFICA

A la dominacin econmica, que informa la doctrina marxista clsica,
Gramsci aade la idea de hegemona, como instancia de dominio
cultural, que lleva a un consenso tcito, a una aceptacin o
sometimiento natural de las clases subordinadas.
Los medios de comunicacin aparecen aqu como uno de los
elementos centrales en la difusin de los valores que construyen la
hegemona. La hegemona se manifiesta en la aceptacin de un orden
determinado por parte del conjunto social cuando, en realidad, ese
orden custodia los intereses de la clase dominante. No se trata de
una situacin irreversible, sino la sntesis de las tensiones dialcticas
y de las relaciones de poder en un momento dado.
Ms all de la idea de dominio o control mediante el empleo de
mecanismos represivos, advierte que son las soluciones culturales
(sistema educativo, instituciones culturales y religiosas, medios de
comunicacin...) las que socializan en unos valores, los propios del
bloque histrico que alcanza la posicin de dominio, al tiempo que
esterilizan a la sociedad civil en su capacidad de respuesta crtica.
Esta atenuacin dialctica, operada desde la superestructura del
sistema, instala pautas de consenso, de aceptacin lgica, de
subordinacin, consentimiento y pasividad. Gramsci, que define una
filosofa de la accin filosofa, poltica e historia aparecen unidas-,
cree en la capacidad de intervencin de los intelectuales orgnicos,
que expresan el sentimiento silenciado u oculto de la sociedad a la
que pertenecen; esto es, son exponentes de las clases subordinadas.

La ideologa aparece como la instancia de confrontacin dialctica en

la que se dirime la hegemona cultural. Gramsci se distanci del
socialismo real de la Unin Sovitica en el periodo estalinista, por
entender que la represin coercitiva sobre las masas haba primado
sobre la cohesin ideolgica y a la creacin simblica del consenso.
Una discrepancia que le alej del lder comunista italiano Palmiro
Togliatti.
Comunicacin, Sociedad y Cultura, Perfil biogrfico y pensamiento.
BDN/Infoamrica.