The Prison Reflections of Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci is among the most influential political and cultural theorists of the twentieth century and one of the most important Marxists after Marx. Born in Sardinia, Italy, he helped found the Italian Communist Party in 1921, became its leader in 1924, and was elected to the Italian parliament the same year. As a member of parliament, Gramsci was immune from prosecution, but the government used an assassination attempt on Mussolini as a pretext to ignore it, and Gramsci and other Communist leaders were arrested in 1926. He expected a five-year sentence, but the prosecutor pressed for a harsher service, memorably stating that “for twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” The prosecutor prevailed, and Gramsci was sentenced on June 4, 1928 and sent to the prison in Turi, in the province of Bari. It was not the only prison to which he was confined, but it was where he spent the longest period, from 1928 and 1933.

Gramsci had never been physically robust. As a child, a nanny had dropped him, resulting in a hunchback, stunted growth, and a frail constitution. Under harsh prison conditions, where he received scant medical attention, his physical state deteriorated. Eventually, under police guard, he was treated in a clinic in Formia, Italy and then received his conditional release in 1934. In 1935, he was taken to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome, where he spent the remaining two years of his life. Despite his physical and psychological ordeal, Gramsci continued to think and write. The result is the thirty notebooks comprising 3,000 pages known as The Prison Notebooks (1971) and the more than 500 Letters from Prison, written to friends and family members. Both have been published in numerous edited editions and translated in multiple languages.

Gramsci is influential for his interpretation of modern Italian history, his understanding of Americanization and Fordism, and his analysis of “subalterns,” oppressed people (such as Italian peasants) who lacked a political voice of their own. But he is best known for his recasting of Marxism and his development of the idea of hegemony. Although an admirer of Vladimir Lenin, Gramsci believed that revolutionary strategy in Western Europe, with its elaborate civil society, had to be different than developed by the Bolsheviks who confronted weak social institutions and an elaborate state apparatus. Rather than the revolutionary onslaught or “war of maneuver” that succeeded in the East, he advocated an ideological and cultural struggle or “war of position.” For Gramsci, Marxists had too often assumed that exploitative class relations guaranteed proletarian triumph, but, in fact, political dominance or “hegemony” was won and lost on the cultural and political battlefield. It was never homogeneous, total, or all encompassing. It involved both coercion and consent. It was subject to forms of passive and active resistance. Gramsci, in effect, argued that, for the working class movement to triumph, it had to first win the battle of ideas. It had to capture the “common sense” of society. He accordingly analyzed those central to creating and articulating this common sense: the intellectuals. On the one hand, he had a populist view of intellectuals, famously proclaiming that everyone was one. On the other hand, he distinguished between “traditional” and “organic” intellectuals, that is, between those who thought of themselves as a distinct caste and those who articulated group interests.

Gramsci’s ideas have been influential in both postwar political and intellectual life. They helped shape the postwar Italian Communist Party, primarily through the influence of Palmiro Togliatti, who had been a friend and collaborator of Gramsci ever since they were students at the University of Turin. Under Togliatti, the Party committed itself to a path that fused loyalty to the Soviet Union and Gramsci’s stress on cultural and ideological contestation, which in the postwar world meant tacitly accepting the ground rules of parliamentary democracy. Following Khrushchev’s documentation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956 and the Soviet Army’s invasion of Hungary the following year, Gramsci’s star shined even brighter: he emerged as an inspiration to Communists who were loyal to the...