Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937, a leader and theorist of Italian Socialism, Communism and anti-Fascism.

Gramsci was born in Sardinia into a family that struggled economically and a part of Italy, the south, that was mostly ignored by the government in favor of the industrialized north. This early experience shaped his view of the world and informed his decision to join the Italian Socialist Party and later move into leadership roles in the Italian Communist Party and the Comintern (the Communist International).

An articulate and prolific writer of political theory, Gramsci produced a great deal of writing as editor of a number of socialist newspapers in Italy as well as more than 30 notebooks of history and analysis written during his 10-year imprisonment under Mussolini. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in critical theory and educational theory that he has become well-known for:

• Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the capitalist state
  
• The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class.

Cultural hegemony is an idea from Marxism that Gramsci developed into acute analysis to explain why the "inevitable" revolution of the proletariat predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Rather, capitalism seemed even more entrenched than ever. It wasn't just through violence and the threat of violence that capitalism maintained control, Gramsci suggested, but also through a hegemonic culture that taught the working class to identify its interests with those of the bourgeoisie and thereby police themselves. The working class needed to develop its own culture, and make that culture hegemonic, in order to succeed in overthrowing capitalism.

This need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of popular education as theorized and practiced in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil. For this reason, Gramsci is today considered an important voice in adult and popular education as well as in Marxist and political theory. His death at the age of 46, shortly after being released from prison, was a huge loss to these fields of thought.