Locked up by Mussolini, Gramsci filled 3,000 pages that outlived fascism
Antonio Gramsci stood under five feet tall, was jailed by the fascist regime in 1926, and wrote more than thirty notebooks behind bars. To slip past the censors he sometimes called Marxism the philosophy of praxis. Those prison pages gave political theory its idea of cultural hegemony.
Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in Ales, Sardinia, fourth of seven sons. His surname traces to Gramsh, a small Albanian town, from which he believed his father's forebears had emigrated. When his father was jailed for embezzlement in 1898, the family sank into poverty and the boy left school for odd jobs until 1904. A spinal deformity stunted his growth and left him hunchbacked; it was long blamed on a nanny dropping him, though a 2011 suggestion points to Pott disease, a tuberculosis of the spine.
At school in Cagliari he sympathised with Sardinian autonomy and the grievances of poor peasants and miners rather than socialism. A scholarship in 1911 took him to the University of Turin, where he studied linguistics under Matteo Bartoli and watched Fiat and Lancia draw migrants from the poor south into factories. He joined the Socialist Party in 1913, but money troubles and illness ended his studies in 1915. Journalism made his name: he co-edited the Piedmont edition of Avanti! and in 1919 co-founded the weekly L'Ordine Nuovo, championing the workers' councils that sprang up during Turin's strikes.
When the councils failed to spread, he concluded that a disciplined Leninist party was needed and helped found the Communist Party of Italy at Livorno on 21 January 1921. In Russia in 1922 he met the violinist Julia Schucht, whom he married; he never saw the younger of their two sons. By 1924 he led the party and sat in parliament for the Veneto, until the regime imprisoned him in 1926. He was released only shortly before his death on 27 April 1937.
His notebooks roam across Machiavelli, Croce, the French Revolution, Fordism, folklore and popular culture. Their central argument is that ruling classes keep power less by force than by shaping the ideas a society takes for common sense through its cultural institutions. Because he rejected the economic determinism of orthodox Marxism, he is sometimes called a neo-Marxist.
Source: Antonio Gramsci
