Antonio Gramsci | 20th Century Lives - Explaining History Podcast

1. Who He Was and Why He Matters

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) poses the central question of 20th century socialist politics in its sharpest form: why did the revolution not happen in Western Europe? The Bolshevik model assumed that the collapse of capitalism would produce revolutionary conditions; in Italy, Germany, and Britain after 1918, it produced fascism, accommodation, and the long durability of the existing order. Gramsci’s answer — developed in fragmentary form across 3,000 pages written in a fascist prison before his death — is one of the most consequential attempts to think through why the left lost, and what it would take to win.

His concept of hegemony — the process by which ruling classes secure consent rather than simply exercising force — has been taken up far beyond the Marxist left and has become one of the most widely used analytical frameworks in political theory, cultural studies, and the social sciences. The organic intellectual, the war of position, the historic bloc: Gramsci’s vocabulary has outlasted its original context and continued to generate new political and intellectual work for a century.

2. The Thought

Hegemony

Gramsci’s central concept: dominant classes maintain their power not primarily through coercion (though coercion is always available) but through hegemony — the process by which their values, assumptions, and worldview become the common sense of the whole society, including those whom those values subordinate. The working class does not simply recognise its exploitation and revolt; it has internalised the framework of bourgeois society and must be won away from it through a long cultural and intellectual struggle before political revolution becomes possible.

This was Gramsci’s diagnosis of why the Russian model could not simply be transplanted to Western Europe. In Russia, civil society was ‘primitive and gelatinous’; the state was the dominant institution and its seizure opened the way to power. In Western Europe, civil society was ‘a sturdy structure’ — dense with institutions (churches, schools, trade unions, political parties, the press) through which hegemony was reproduced and maintained. Seizing the state without first contesting hegemony would produce nothing lasting.

The Organic Intellectual

Every class, Gramsci argued, generates its own intellectuals — not just philosophers and academics but all those who perform the function of giving coherence to the class’s worldview and organising its capacity for action. The bourgeoisie had its organic intellectuals (lawyers, priests, journalists, managers); the working class needed to develop its own. The role of the Communist Party was to be the collective organic intellectual of the working class — not to substitute for it but to help it develop its own capacity for leadership.

War of Position vs War of Manoeuvre

Gramsci distinguished between the ‘war of manoeuvre’ (direct frontal assault, the revolutionary seizure of power, appropriate in Russia) and the ‘war of position’ (the long struggle for cultural and ideological hegemony within civil society, appropriate in Western Europe). Socialist strategy in the West required a war of position: building counter-hegemonic institutions, contesting the common sense of bourgeois society, creating a new historical bloc capable of winning majority consent before attempting political power.

3. The Context

Gramsci was born in Sardinia into a poor family, the fourth of seven children, and suffered from Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the spine) which left him severely physically disabled throughout his life. He won a scholarship to the University of Turin, became involved in socialist politics, and was a founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921. He led the party from 1924 until his arrest by Mussolini’s regime in 1926.

The fascist prosecutor at his trial reportedly said: ‘We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.’ The brain continued functioning. Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks — 30 notebooks, 3,000 pages, in deliberately elliptical and coded language to evade prison censorship — until his health collapsed. He died in 1937, shortly after his sentence expired, from the cumulative effects of imprisonment.

4. The Contradictions and Limits

The Prison Notebooks are fragmentary, unrevised, and written in conditions of censorship and physical deterioration. The systematic Gramsci — the thinker with a coherent political theory — is partly a construction of his editors and interpreters. Different political traditions have claimed Gramsci for incompatible purposes: Eurocommunism, the British cultural studies tradition (Stuart Hall), Latin American social movements, and — most controversially — aspects of the populist right, who have taken the concept of hegemony and applied it to their own cultural politics.

The hegemony concept, while analytically powerful, can slide into a kind of political fatalism: if dominant values are so thoroughly embedded in common sense, how is counter-hegemonic struggle possible? Gramsci’s answer (through the organic intellectual, through the party, through the construction of a historic bloc) raises as many questions as it answers, particularly about the relationship between intellectual vanguards and popular agency.

5. The Legacy and Debate

Gramsci’s influence was most powerful in the 1970s–90s, when Eurocommunism drew on his theory of hegemony to argue for a democratic road to socialism through the conquest of civil society, and when the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies — associated with Stuart Hall — used hegemony to analyse the rise of ThatcherismThatcherism Full Description The political and economic programme of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990), combining monetarist economics, privatisation of nationalised industries, trade union legislation designed to break union power, deregulation of financial markets, and a confrontational approach to the welfare state. Thatcher’s government defeated the miners’ strike of 1984–85, sold council houses to their tenants, privatised British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, and the water utilities, and liberalised the City of London through the 1986 “Big Bang.” Critical Perspective Thatcherism transformed Britain’s economic model and political culture in ways that proved largely irreversible — successive Labour governments accepted its basic framework. But its costs were distributed very unevenly: the de-industrialisation of the north of England and South Wales created concentrations of long-term unemployment and social deprivation that persisted for decades, while financial deregulation created the City of London’s dominance of the British economy and the instability that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. The regional and class divisions Thatcherism deepened continue to shape British politics.. Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism as a hegemonic project that had successfully shifted the common sense of British politics is one of the most sophisticated applications of Gramscian theory to a specific political conjuncture.

The concept of hegemony has also been taken up by conservative and right-wing thinkers — notably in the United States — who use it to frame their own cultural politics as a counter-hegemonic struggle against a liberal establishment. This is a strange afterlife for a Marxist imprisoned by Mussolini.