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Antonio Gramsci & Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)• Leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1922

• Witnessed failure of Turin workers’ strike in 1920

• Imprisoned by Mussolini who said ‘We have to prevent that this mind continue thinking’ (1926)

• While in prison compiles his Prison Notebooks which were smuggled out by his sister in law Tatiana and published in Russia

• Of fundamental importance to Cultural Studies because he identified popular culture as important in the circulation of ideas and proposed the concept of radical and critical pedagogy.

• Developed concept of the ‘organic intellectual’ who would enable working class to articulate their own oppression.

Revision:

According to Karl Marx:

• The essence of being human is in how we procure food, clothes and shelter.

• Under a capitalist system, some people own the means of production (the way in which goods are produced for sale on the market). These are the bourgeoisie.

• Other people (the proletariat) are exploited by the bourgeoisie who gain by their labour

The Bourgeoisie (middle class)

• Own the means of production (factories, machinery, banks, administrative offices, raw materials etc)

• Profit from exploiting the proletariat (they are never paid the full value of the goods they are producing)

• Determine the relations of production (eg., the conditions under which people are eligible to be employed)

The Proleteriat

• Sell their labour to the highest bidder

• Labour to produce what is required to sustain their lives but cannot immediately make use of it. They must go to a shop and buy it and pay the extra that represents profit. This, in very basic terms is alienated labour.

• They are alienated from the product of their labour, from their comrades (with whom they are in competition) and from themselves.

So…….

• The thesis is private property

• The antithesis is alienated labour

• The synthesis is communism

• Communism is the new social order that will result when the proletariat realise their exploitation and rise up to seize the means of production (revolution).

• Ideology (sets of ideas that govern thought and behaviour) ensures that the relations of production which form the economic base of society are presented as natural (eg., competition, hierarchy)

• The social superstructure (institutions like the church, government, the family, education and the media) secures and maintains these ideas

Why do the proletariat agree to their own exploitation?

Marx believed that:

• The proletariat labour under a false sense of reality.

• Humans are rational animals and, as such, are able to reason that capitalism is unjust

• History is progressing towards a point where capitalism will no longer be able to survive.

• Once the relations of production in the economic base are changed, the ideas that circulate in the superstructure will change to support the new arrangements of society.

Questions:

• Why do a minority of the world's population continue to hold the majority of the wealth?

• Why do people elect governments that make sure that they continue to be exploited?

• Why has there not yet been a successful workers' revolution?

Gramsci’s answers:

• Dominant groups secure consent to their leadership through what he called hegemony

• Social forces are mobilised by the class in power through compromise

• Ruling class retains power by making compromises on the basis of national popular interests, utilising a strategy of passive revolution

Welcomed ‘Americanisation’ of the workforce – introduction of Frederick W Taylor’s system of factory organisation – the moving production line (later called Fordism)

‘The only thing that is completely mechanised is the physical gesture; the memory of the trade, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, ‘nestles’ in the muscular and nervous centres and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations’

‘Not only does the worker think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from conformist’ (Gramsci, pp309 & 310)

Gramsci says:

‘COMMON SENSE creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.’

Common sense???

LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE YOU CROSS THE ROAD

HARD WORK WILL BE REWARDED

WE MUST GO TO WAR AGAINST EVIL