Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist who developed the theory of Cultural Hegemony, which states that the bourgeois ruling class has a hegemonic influence on culture, through its control over the Mainstream Media and institutions such as NGOs.

Gramsci helped to found the Italian Communist Party in 1921. In 1924, he became its secretary.

From 1926, Gramsci was imprisoned and tortured by Mussolini's Fascists. There, he wrote his Prison Notebooks. He died from sickness due to torture in 1937.

Cultural Hegemony

Cultural hegemony is expressed today through bourgeois culture promoted by Hollywood and the Mainstream Media. It is also enforced through cancel culture.

Under bourgeois socialism, the cultural hegemony is centrally managed by the government or Blackrock. Through state apparatuses like the CIA, State Department, former CCF, NED, USAID before DOGE, and their affiliates like the Ford Foundation and George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the US government spends billions each year promoting Trotskyist narratives like "democracy" and "human rights".

The antithesis to this is proletarian culture, the culture that exists among workers. According to Gramsci, Communists must uphold proletarian culture, as it is part of the new communist society that is growing up within capitalism.

Infrared draws heavily from Gramsci, including his notion of the 'relative autonomy of the superstructure with regard to the base.'

Myths

New Left co-optation of cultural hegemony

The New Left (often Trotskyists or left-communists) have used the notion of cultural hegemony to argue that widely held moral traditions are simply invented by the bourgeois. For example, New Leftists oppose modesty, chastity, and raising a family in favor of prostitution and nymphomania, which they call "sexual freedom".

The problem is, these traditions existed long before capitalism and worldwide, across different modes of production, as part of a healthy human culture. They were passed down by peasants to their children without any motive to exploit them.

Some New Leftists claim these moral traditions were started under feudalism and will be destroyed by communism. For one, Gramsci wrote about capitalism, not feudalism. For another, many of these traditions exist worldwide, across different modes of production.

In his notes, Gramsci criticized the (semi-feudal) Italian countryside for "bestiality and sodomy", incest, and other "monstrous sexual crimes", existing despite their ideology of "religious fanaticism and patriarchalism". He compared their degeneracy to that of the (capitalist) cities, saying, "It is not only in the cities that sexuality has become a 'sport.'" He said women must attain "genuine independence" and "a new way of conceiving themselves". He concluded, "The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized."

Trotsky vs. Stalin

Trotskyists have falsely claimed that Gramsci was sympathetic to Trotskyism, pointing to his letter to the Comintern which (they claim) was "protesting Stalin's campaign against the Left Opposition."

In reality, Gramsci was completely pro-Stalin. He wrote in 1926, "Our letter was a whole indictment of the opposition."

He compared his leftcom rival Bordiga to Trotsky, saying that both "played a purely figurative role in the Central Committee" and created a "factional situation" with "disastrous repercussions".

Trotsky, although taking part ‘in a disciplined manner’ in the work of the party, had through his attitude of passive opposition – similar to Bordiga’s - created a state of unease throughout the Party, which could not fail to get a whiff of this situation. […] This shows that an opposition – even kept within the limits of a formal discipline – on the part of exceptional personalities in the workers’ movement, can not merely hamper the development of the revolutionary situation, but can put in danger the very conquests of the revolution. -- Antonio Gramsci, 1924

Moreover, "the passages in his ‘Prison Notebooks’ concerning Stalin, Trotsky, or Soviet socialism, all shine a favourable light on Stalin."

Gramsci's letter to the Comintern was blocked by Italian Communist chairman Palmiro Togliatti. Trotskyists might try to say Togliatti was a hardcore Stalinist, for working with the USSR. Yet in reality, once Stalin was dead, Togliatti, allying with Khrushchev, moved to liberal revisionism, against Stalin's legacy. He is considered a pioneer of Eurocommunism for advocating the "Italian road to socialism", a Khrushchevite idea that Communism can seize power peacefully (when in reality, the bourgeois will fight it violently). Before his death, he wrote a memorandum that, according to bourgeois historians, "strengthened the trend toward liberalization in communist countries". The Togliatti Memorandum condemned the Chinese, Albanians, and Stalin's "regime of restrictions", calling for "open debate" to resolve "the problem of the origin of Stalin's cult" - to an early parallel to Gorbachev's "glasnost" (openness) policy which effectively allowed the Western bourgeois to take over the Soviet media. Togliatti also made revisionist errors during Stalin's lifetime - 1) allying with Social Democrat leaders in the "united front from above", and 2) the Salerno Turn, where, at the end of WWII, Togliatti disbanded and disarmed the communist partisans in order to unify with bourgeois politicians, the Italian monarchy, and genocidal fascist general Pietro Badoglio. In exchange, Togliatti gained positions in the second Badoglio government of "national unity". The Soviets harshly criticized Togliatti for disarming the workers and pursuing bourgeois electoralism.