Date: Mon, 27 Apr 1998 23:14:20 -0500
From: vacirca-AT-charm.net (robert brown)
Subject: why gramsci


                                                                why read
gramsci



Who is Antonio Gramsci and why are his life and writings important to us
even though he died in an italian fascist prison over 60 years ago?

                Antonio Gramsci was a co-founder of the Italian Communist
party, one of the leaders of the 1920 "Ordine Nuovo" Turin factory
occupation movement, and author of the Prison Notebooks. He was a
revolutionary journalist and mass working class organizer and one of the
great communist intellectual theorists of the twentieth century. His
marxism was unorthodox, controversial and still not fully understood today.
His prison notes were an in depth study of Italian culture and history for
the purpose of understanding and defeating italian fascism and launching an
italian proletarian cultural revolution. His thinking about fascism,
marxism and cultural revolution  was full of insights that are still
relevant to our struggles today  as we try to defeat a resurgent fascistic
culture and build a totally new socialist world culture.

                Along with Mao, he was one of a handful of early 20th
century communists who fully appreciated the central importance of cultural
revolution in the struggle for socialism. His insights on the importance of
cultural, intellectual as well as political autonomy for  working class
liberation helped lay the intellectual foundations for the rebirth of
revolutionary anti-capitalist working class struggle in Italy in the 60's
and 70's. The "Autonomist" New Left in Italy, France and Germany as well as
the US New Left  with their distinctive emphases on counterculture were
all Gramsci's intellectual children. Gramsci is a central part of who we
are as revolutionaries in the US and Europe are today. In addition Gramsci
has influenced the thinking of many 3rd world revolutionaries  in Latin
America, as well as new left activists in China, Russia and Eastern Europe
looking for new, non-oppressive models of revolutionary struggle. I believe
that  Gramsci's ideas are one of a number of  bodies of new thinking that
we will need to synthesize to create a new revolutionary theory  for the
21st century.

                Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need  to study
Gramsci to fully understand Fascism, how and why it was born in Italy and
spread  like a plague through out Europe in the 20's and 30's and is now a
permanent feature of imperialist world culture. Unlike most other marxist
and democratic opponents of fascism Gramsci wrote about fascism from inside
the belly of the beast, as a historical and cultural eyewitness, from the
sobering surroundings of a fascist prison cell. If we are ever to get to
the dark and complex heart of the phenomenon that is fascism  I'm convinced
we have to  study Gramsci's prison notebooks for that deeper take on
fascism we all need.

        Marx  and Lenin taught that power flows  from control of the means
of production and the State. Gramsci argued that in addition to control of
the economy and the State, in modern Capitalist society control of the
culture was essential to seize and hold power. Gramsci's insights on the
critical importance of cultural revolution certainly seem to have been
borne out by the history of the last 60 years. Mass politics today have,
more than ever, become culture wars between the Left and the Right. The
historic defeat of socialism and the reemergence of mass rightwing secular
and religious movements  on a world-wide scale parallels Gramsci and the
italian working class's defeat by fascism in the 1920's in many ways.
        It is  an ironic  and sad comment on the times that today
Gramsci's writings  are largely accessible  only to a handful of
intellectuals.  Gramsci strongly believed that fascism could only be
defeated and a new socialist culture built in Italy  by  ordinary working
people winning intellectual and moral independence for themselves.
                        So it is particularly important that ordinary
people be able to read and think about what Gramsci had to say about
cultural revolution and fascism. "GRAMSCI FOR BEGINNERS' is a modest
attempt to popularize Gramsci's writings and in so doing return the study
of Gramsci to its working class cultural revolutionary roots.



"A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer"  Long live the
fool.




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