Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was a prominent political figure in Italy during the early 20th century. He was a member of the Italian Socialist Party, became the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, and became Deputy (MP) of one of the Rome constituencies. This final position led to his imprisonment by Mussolini in 1926. While imprisoned, Gramsci penned over 2500 pages on the topics of politics, history, philosophy, literature, culture, etc. Through writing, he sought to advance Marxist theories. He did not just want to explain the existing order of things. He wanted to confront, criticize, and transform it into a new power structure for those dominated by others.
He believed theoretical and practical questions of culture to be extremely important to politics, stating that diverse forms of culture are never separated from politics. Politics is bound up w/ questions of leadership, hegemony. All information in his works revolves around this concept. Hegemony is the basis for the ways he approached his questions. With hegemony, Gramsci makes three challenges:
1. To liberal idealists who believe culture is a-political
2. To fellow Marxists who reduced culture to a reflection of the economic base.
(vulgar materialism of economism)
3. To existing States to transform into an expansive, democratic government of intellectual and moral leadership.
In his approach, a crucial link exists between culture and politics. To study culture, it must be broken down into its diverse forms and analyzed in terms of effectiveness. He rejected the concept of class domination. He supported a concept coupling force and consent (coercion plus hegemony). He was primarily concerned with the way complex series of cultural, political, and ideological practices cement a society into a relative, but incomplete, unity. He interrogated a wide range of cultural forms and marked out the historical and political sites of their interaction and formation.

Culture:

In his younger years, Gramsci developed the idea that we must stop viewing culture as encyclopedic, full of empirical data to be absorbed. This belief creates maladjusted people with false senses of superiority over those not privy to the information they’ve gathered. He said that this is not culture, but pedantry (insistent adherence to formal rules and literal meaning). Gramsci believed culture was organization and discipline of the inner self. Culture is the attainment of higher awareness, which enables the understanding of one’s own historical value and function in life. Through intelligent reflection, people can begin to question their dependence on existing structures. The ultimate aim is to know oneself better through others and know others better through oneself.
Twenty years later, he stated his interest in studying the forms of cultural organization the keep the ideological structures of a particular country in movement (churches, schools, media, doctors, lawyers, etc.). He also sought to find the number of people employed by these organizations relative to the entire population of the country. By doing these things, he could begin to deduce the cultural aspect of collective activities (degree of ideological influence). This is important because historical acts are created collectively through multiple wills, with similar aims, forming into the basis of a common perception. This helps discover what builds the attainment of a single cultural climate.

Hegemony: (supremacy of a social group)

1. Manifests itself as domination and intellectual and moral leadership.
2. Dominates antagonistic groups.
3. Leads allies
4. Must exercise leadership before attaining power
5. Must continue to lead

Political hegemony must exist and be continued because you cannot count on the power and force alone to insure the ability to exercise hegemony. The nature of hegemony is ethical-political in that interests and tendencies of the dominated group must be considered, aiding construction of compromise equilibrium. This equilibrium addresses another characteristic of the nature of hegemony; it must be economic. The hegemony must make economic sacrifices to appease the dominated, but not so much as to effect the essential characteristics of that particular economy. Hegemony must also understand the relation of political forces as they have manifested themselves historically, revealing the evolution of hegemony.
First, members of professional groups are conscious of the necessity of organization and homogeneity among themselves and others in the same trade. Next, a unification of economic interests among all members of a social class occurs. Upon realization that their interests transcend economic class, they understand that they must include the interests of other subordinate groups (this is purely political). These ideologies conflict until one prevails and propagates throughout society. Once formed, organizational structures (the STATE) facilitate this ideological unification by forming forces between the dominant and dominated in which the interests of the dominant prevail without exploitation of the dominated. This “relative equilibrium” comes into question during times of “crisis of authority”. Hegemony then becomes coercive, not leading, leading to its downfall.

Ideology:

Gramsci stated that ideas are material forces. To him, Ideology is the general term for the way sets of ideas become dominant material forces in society. This is not spontaneous. It occurs through forms of schooling, relative maturity of the language, and the nature of dominant groups. To realize this, philosophy must be dispelled as difficult. All people are philosophers and define their philosophy through these structures. Gramsci believes we all belong to a group that encompasses these social elements, which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists; we are always functioning collectively. Therefore, we must find the type of conformism our society belongs to. Our personalities are composite, consisting of Stone Age elements, principles of advanced science, and the total of past prejudices and intuitions of a future philosophy uniting humanity. These realizations are essential to grasping the ideology of a culture.
The construction of ideology has three dimensions, which link elites with people: language, common sense, and folklore. If someone speaks and understands the language incompletely the person will have views restricted to immediate and self-interested concerns. Also, every philosophical current leaves behind a residue of common sense, which evidence of its historical effectiveness. This relationship is assured by politics. Common sense is constantly transforming. It is the generic form of thought common to a particular period and a particular popular environment. These thoughts form the basis of a society’s religion, or folklore.
As ideology dominates, it is also resisted by actions of subordinate groups. This is a direct result of the fact that every person can be considered a philosopher. Anyone can form new concepts that threaten the established power structure. Therefore, the main problem for hegemony is to preserve the ideological unity of the social bloc, which the ideology serves to unify.
Here, Gramsci says that ideology is not just a question of political beliefs. It is the material force that organizes human masses and creates an internal psychological concept in which consciousness is structured.

Intellectuals:

Ideological structures of dominant groups are supported by various functionaries that support the structures, intellectuals. Every social group creates the intellectuals who give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function. But every social group also emerges out of preceding economic structures with previously established intellectuals that are uninterrupted by changes in political and social forms. Therefore, no social group has its own isolated group of intellectuals. This allows diffusion of ideas and formation of collective thought that permeates all levels of society. This reveals that intellectualism is a function in relation to the general social structure of society. The importance of intellectuals lies in the idea that they are the dominant group’s deputies in exercising the functions of social hegemony and political government through both civil and political societies: Spontaneous consent and coercive power.

The State:

Gramsci defines the state as the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules. The function of state can be found in the will to conform. The state exists in two realms: civil and political societies. Civil is the realm of consent. Political is the realm of coercion, force, and intervention. The concept of state is though of as a political society used to control the masses in conformity with a given type of production and economy. Gramsci believed the state was the hegemony of one social group over an entire nation that is exercised through ideological structures (church, schools, etc.). The state should be understood not only as the apparatus of government, but also the private apparatus of hegemony or civil society.
At the formation of a state, centralization was minimal. The state was mechanical bloc of social groups within the political and military domain of a dominant group. But these groups had a life of their own. In modern states, social groups become subordinate to the active hegemony of the dominant group. Autonomy is broken through coercion as the State becomes centralized, and the entire national life is put in the hands of the dominant group.

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