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Gramsci

Lessons From Gramsci For Social Movements Today

August 2, 2023 Mark Engler and Paul Engler, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
He has been called one of the most original political thinkers of the 20th century. Historians point out that “If academic citations and internet references are any guide, he is more influential than Machiavelli.” And his impact on the way we think about the processes of social change has been described as “little short of electrifying.” The accomplishments of Antonio Gramsci, born in Italy in 1891, are all the more remarkable considering that his life was both short and notably difficult: His family was destitute in his childhood; he was sick for much of his life; he spent the prime of his adulthood confined to prison by Benito Mussolini’s fascists after his own party’s attempts to foment revolution had failed; he was often denied access to books during his incarceration; and he died at the age of just 46.

Valentine’s Day: Look To Marxists To Reimagine Love, Romance And Sex

February 14, 2023 Sarah Jaffe, In These Times. , , ,
Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci has been quoted quite a lot in recent years amid our various political catastrophes from Trump to Covid-19 to climate collapse and the political center’s seeming inability to resist any of the above. The most famous line from his Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 while a political prisoner of the Mussolini regime, is probably: ​“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is sometimes more loosely translated as ​“The old world is dying and the new cannot be born; now is the time of monsters.”

Gramsci In The Midst Of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement

July 21, 2022 The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
Despite the persistent hegemony of capitalism and its ruling neoliberal ideology, various forms of resistance, social struggle, and proposals for an emancipated future continue to emerge. This is taking place in the face of economic, political, social, and environmental crises as well as a continuing lack of vision of how to overcome the health crisis. Our intellectuals must put their hearts and souls precisely into this orientation toward the future, one based on the possibility of change and hope for human emancipation, as we argued in Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 13, The New Intellectual. We must create innovative proposals on how to use our social wealth to resolve the immediate problems faced by humanity, such as hunger, poverty, disease, and climate catastrophes, and study and familiarise ourselves with the resistance and struggles that emerge in all corners of the world.
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