Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci – theories of hegemony, civil society and revolution The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci remains hugely popular today across the left as well as in academic circles where a neo-Gramscian school of though crosses disciplines and generations. His most referred to works are his prison notebooks, a collection of articles and fragments that he wrote whilst languishing in Mussolini’s jail. What people value in Grasmsci is his contribution to political theory, including central concepts like hegemony and the war of position/war of manoeuver.
Gramsci was a leader and theorist of the Italian Communist party and editor of a popular Marxist journal called L’Ordine Nuovo. He was arrested by Mussolini’s fascist police in 1926 and thrown into prison where he remained until 1937 when he was released, sick and close to death. he died a few months afterwards. A vigorous and energetic thinker, he refused to let the fascist prisons silence him. In his cell he wrote several notebooks where he outlined his thoughts on several topics from historical materialism to the revolutionary party to the political world perspective. He painstakingly reconstructed quotes of Marx and Lenin from memory as he formulated ideas which are still discussed and used today. After his death his wifes’ sister smuggled his notebooks out of the country in diplomatic parcels, when they arrived in Russia they were edited and brought into circulation.
Sadly Gramsci’s position as a revolutionary communist is often downplayed by many of his modern supporters who tend to use him as a point of departure on their path to post-Marxism. They do this by addressing Gramsci as a left wing thinker, but removed from his revolutionary Marxist context, thus rendering him safe and palatable for the academic community. He is considered chiefly as a theoretician of the super structure – “already veering toward that cultural and linguistic turn that defines large sections of contemporary academia” 1 and this view