Gramsci, Antonio (1891—1937) Italian Marxism philosopher and political theorist. His influence on twentieth-century Western Marxism, particularly in Cultural Studies, is incalculable. Anderson, Perry, Hall, Stuart, Ranajit Guha, Laclau, Ernesto, Tom Nairn, and Williams, Raymond were all influenced by his thought. In large part this is because of the way Gramsci wove culture into his theory of the political economy. For Gramsci, politics cannot be understood if it is thought of solely in terms of economic and political domination: one must also reckon with the processes and practices of culture that give a particular regime its character. In How to Change the World (2011), Hobsbawm, Eric argued that Gramsci’s originality, and hence his importance to critical theory, lay in the way he combined the problem of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism into a single continuum. Thus, the essential revolutionary problem in Gramsci’s work is not how to take power, but how to ensure one’s power is accepted as legitimate. Hobsbawm contextualized Gramsci’s thinking by noting that he wrote in a time of bitter defeats for the working-class people of Europe, but in contrast to many other thinkers of this period he did not hold that this defeat left the winners and losers unchanged. He worried that the defeat would give rise to a longer-term weakening of revolutionary ardour by means of a process he called ‘passive revolution’. His concern was that the ruling class would grant minor concessions to the working class---e.g. the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week---that would contain their passion for change and, even more damagingly, that the working class would begin to accept defeat as a sign of their impotence. In order to theorize this problematic Gramsci adopted the concept of hegemony from the writings of Lenin and re-engineered it as a supple tool for rethinking the complexities of bourgeois power in the West. According to Perry Anderson in The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (2017), Gramsci’s emphasis on hegemony and the problem of the acceptance of power reflected his direct experience with organizing and leading labour organizations, something his predecessors Marx and Lenin lacked. Gramsci’s political and literary apprenticeship was served writing for socialist newspapers from his mid-teens until his early twenties. Fiat and Lancia were then setting up factories in Turin, moving it towards the giant industrial city it would become, and Gramsci helped the new factory workers to organize trade unions. He joined the Partito Socialista Italiano (GIP, Italian Socialist Party) in 1913. In 1919 he helped found the weekly newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), which was recognized by Lenin as ideologically closest to his own Bolshevik programme. The editors of this periodical formed the core of the splinter group Partito Communista d’Italia (GIP, Italian Communist Party) which Gramsci helped form in 1921. Gramsci became leader of the PCI in 1924. In 1924 Gramsci was elected to the Italian parliament as a representative of the Veneto region. Gramsci was vocally anti-Mussolini, which was a highly dangerous stance to take. In spite of his parliamentary immunity he was arrested in 1926 by the Fascist government under its ‘emergency powers’ act. At his trial, the prosecutor famously declared that it was imperative to stop Gramsci’s brain from functioning! This manifestly did not happen: that Gramsci is known at all today is because of the 3,000 pages of notes he compiled while in prison, which were later smuggled out and published in four volumes as Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks). The miserable conditions in prison aggravated his already poor health, and he died in a prison hospital halfway through his twenty-year sentence at the age of 46. The Prison Notebooks cover an astonishing range of topics, including close readings of Marx’s work which had to be written entirely from memory because communist books were not allowed in prison. His writing was also subject to the scrutiny of the prison guards, and for this reason he had to create an elaborate new vocabulary. Many of his new concepts, then, are not entirely new; they are rather new words for already existing concepts---the best-known instance of this is hegemony, which might be considered a recasting of the traditional Marxist concept of ideology. By the same token, he also produced new concepts using old words---hegemony might just as easily fall into this category. There is considerable debate in Marxist discourse about the merits of these changes, some arguing that they are not simply new words but genuinely new concepts, with others taking the view that the changes are had at the price of a loss of a sense of intellectual heritage. Gramsci theorized the role culture plays in politics in a new and compelling way. He defines the state as a kind of dual system comprising the coercive forces of political society and the private realm of business and work or what Gramsci called civil society. With his concept of hegemony he showed that the reason the much-anticipated revolution of the proletariat had not yet occurred was because within the realm of civil society the working class had come to identify their own best interests as being one and the same as the best interests of the bourgeoisie. The global banking crisis or ‘credit crunch’ of 2007—9 provided a clear example of what this looks like in practice: taxpayers’ money was used by governments in the UK, US, and elsewhere to prop up failing banks on the basis that everyone would be worse off if they were allowed to fail, meanwhile private mortgage holders were given little or no relief. This rationale was largely effective because---as Gramsci argued several decades earlier---the ruling class control the cultural means of production, not only the media, but ‘common sense’ itself. To defend against this, Gramsci argued, the proletariat needs its own intelligentsia, in other words a standing army of what he called organic intellectual. These are intellectuals raised up from the working classes, who in direct contrast to the ivory-tower intellectuals do not see themselves as separate from society. The organic intellectual shares the experiences and understands the situation of the working classes, but unlike them no longer feels subaltern, and for that reason is in a position to facilitate progressive change. Gramsci advocated ‘popular’ education, that is, education for everyone at every stage of their life. His notebooks contain wonderful essays on the political significance of popular literature and film, seeing in them both the source of the reactionary nature of the oppressed and a promise of change. Further Reading: P. Anderson The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (2017). C. Bambery A Rebel’s Guide to Gramsci (2006). S. Jones Antonio Gramsci (2006).