Antonio Gramsci

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(1891-1937)

Italian Marxist and social theoretician. Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891, in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. Gramsci was introduced to the politics of socialism from his older brother, Gennaro.

Due to his father being fired from his work, young Gramsci had to work to support the family during much of his adolescence. He had an amazing intellect, and while excelling through schoool, Antonio first met organized sectors of the working class and with radical and socialist politics via his brother. In 1911, he attended the University of Turin and met many future Communist leaders, including Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti.

At the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a variety of courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social sciences and in linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted to contemplate academic specialization in that subject. In 1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an active member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and began a journalistic career that made him among the most-feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His column in the Turin edition of Avanti!, and his theatre reviews were widely read and influential.

In 1915, Italy entered World War I, Gramsci supported the position that the Italian socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn Italian national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist direction. The outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred his revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the years thereafter Gramsci identified himself closely, although not entirely uncritically, with the methods and aims of the Russian revolutionary leadership and with the cause of socialist transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.

In the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with pro-Bolshevik members of the PSI, founded L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), which became an influential periodical for the following five years among the radical and revolutionary Left in Italy. The journal gave much attention to political and literary currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.

For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of the factory council movement, and to militant journalism. In January 1921, at the Italian Socialist Party's Livorno Congress, the pro-Bolshevik minority broke off to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and Gramsci joined them. He became a member of the PCI's central committee, but did not play a leading role until several years later. He was one of the few prophetic political theorists of this period who saw the rise of Mussolini's Fascists as meaning doom for both Italian democracy and the working class.

Gramsci spent the time from May 1922 to November 1923 in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the Communist International (Comintern). While in Russia, he met his future wife, Julka Schucht; together, they would have two sons. In April 1924, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and became general secretary of the PCI.

On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome (after the Communist Party was outlawed by the Fascists) and committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. After being sentenced on June 4, 1928 to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in Turi — where he would remain until November 1933. It was while in prison that Gramsci's most important writing on society and revolution took place. Letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members were cleverly worded so that the Fascist censors would not prevent their delivery.

In 1934, he was sent (under police guard) to a clinic in Formia and later to Quisisana Hospital in Rome. On April 27, 1937, Gramsci died after suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage due to the poor conditions of his ten years in prison.

It was not until after World War II (in 1947) that Gramsci's writings began to be published. The Italian Communist Party began released scattered sections of the "Prison Notebooks" and some of the approximately 500 letters he had written. In the 1950's, his writings caught the attention of countless leftist intellectuals from all over the world. One of his most important analyses was on "hegemony" and how socialists could succeed in revolution by capturing popular society and why some revolutions ended with failure. His ideas have become some of the most important editions to Marxist thought since the time of Marx himself.