Italian intellectual and political activist, founder of the Communist Party (Ales, Sardinia, 1891 - Rome, 1937). Thanks to the support of his brother and his intellectual capacity he overcame the difficulties produced by his physical deformity (he was hunchbacked) and by the poverty of his family (since his father was imprisoned, accused of embezzlement). He studied at the University of Turin, where he was influenced intellectually by Benedetto Croce and the socialists.
In 1913 he joined the Italian Socialist Party, immediately becoming a leader of its left wing. After working on various party periodicals, he founded, together with Palmiro Togliatti and Umberto Elia Terracini, the magazine Ordine nuovo (1919). Faced with the dilemma posed to socialists around the world by the course taken by the Russian Revolution, Antonio Gramsci chose to adhere to the communist line and, at the Livorno Congress (1921), split with the group that founded the Italian Communist Party.
Gramsci belonged from the beginning to the Central Committee of the new party, which he also represented in Moscow within the Third International (1922); he endowed the formation with an official press organ (L'Unità, 1924) and represented it as a deputy (1924). He was a member of the Executive of the Communist International, whose Bolshevik orthodoxy he defended in Italy by expelling from the party the ultra-left group of Amadeo Bordiga, which he accused of following Trotsky's line (1926).
He soon had to go underground, since since 1922 Italy was under the power of Mussolini, who would exercise from 1925 an iron fascist dictatorship. Gramsci was arrested in 1926 and spent the rest of his life in prison, subjected to humiliation and ill-treatment, which added to his tuberculosis to make prison life extremely difficult, until he died of cerebral congestion.
In these conditions, however, Gramsci was able to produce a great written work (the voluminous Prison Notebooks), containing an original revision of Marx's thought, in a historicist sense and tending to modernize the legacy of Marxism to adapt it to the conditions of Italy and twentieth-century Europe. Already at the Lyon Congress (1926) he had advocated the broadening of the social bases of communism by opening it to all classes of workers, including intellectuals. His theoretical contributions would powerfully influence the adaptation of Western communism that took place in the sixties and seventies, the so-called Eurocommunism. 🤮
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci saw the ruling class maintaining its power over society in two ways –
Coercion – it uses the army, police, prison and courts to force other classes to accept its rule
Consent (hegemony) – it uses ideas and values to persuade the subordinate classes that its rule is legitimate
Hegemony and Revolution
In advanced Capitalist societies, the ruling class rely heavily on consent to maintain their rule. Gramsci agrees with Marx that they are able to maintain consent because they control institutions such as religion, the media and the education system. However, according to Gramsci, the hegemony of the ruling class is never complete, for two reasons:
The ruling class are a minority – and as such they need to make ideological compromises with the middle classes in order to maintain power The proletariat have dual consciousness. Their ideas are influenced not only by bourgeois ideology but also by the material conditions of their life – in short, they are aware of their exploitation and are capable or seeing through the dominant ideology.
Antonio Gramsci Marxists.org :gramsci-heh:
Antonio Gramsci and the Italian Revolution :anti-italian-action:
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This tracks because I’m pretty sure indie theatres on the management side are staffed up with film twitter millennials at this point lol.
Yeah. I mean, I really do like this particular theatre. I had a lot of fun seeing The People's Joker there with friends. But the selections lately have been pretty uninteresting.
Yeah, I think the millennial film twitter taste is great normally, but it’s gonna be a miss sometimes when they’re dealing with a name that’s very big in the art house scene because there’s an impulse for playing the “deep cut”. Luckily my local theater is just doing the “lazy” thing and playing blue velvet and mulholland drive.
Sometimes I have this suspicion that we're not too geographically distant. The other local indie theatre is doing Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. It's not a bad idea for a general-audience thing so it's probably coincidence. They're weird movies alright but they have a kinda-sorta-normal-ish Hollywood movie narrative structure. Also, it's a lot easier to bring in a general audience to see Isabella Rossellini being dark and alluring and breathy, or watching Naomi Watts and Laura Harring getting in on, than it is to watch three people wearing comically oversized rabbit heads and not moving around much interspersed with disturbingly-timed laugh tracks.
But on the plus side that theatre is also showing Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, and Eraserhead. It's a pretty solid and representative selection. Some "gateway Lynch" and some "what the fuck did I see?" Lynch.
I've heard rumours that the Dune-showing theatre was bought a few months back and the new owner plans to make it the local hub for Indian and southeast Asia cinema. It's actually a pretty good business idea. There's a huge local market for it. It would fit in with 95% of the movies being shown for the last few months being from that part of the world.
Yeah, we may be in the same area. The market here is large enough that Bollywood movies often play at the suburban megaplexes lol