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 and raising a family in favor of "sexual freedom" (prostitution and nymphomania).
Yet these traditions existed long before capitalism and worldwide, across different modes of production, as part of a healthy human culture.
To use the idea of cultural hegemony in this way is to ignore Gramsci himself. 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."[1]
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."[2]
In reality, Gramsci was completely pro-Stalin. He wrote in 1926, "Our letter was a whole indictment of the opposition."[3]
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". [3]
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 [3]
Moreover, "the passages in his ‘Prison Notebooks’ concerning Stalin, Trotsky, or Soviet socialism, all shine a favourable light on Stalin."[4]
Gramsci's letter to the Comintern was blocked by Italian Communist chairman Palmiro Togliatti, the cowardly revisionist who had succeeded him.
References
- ↑ Gramsci, Some Aspects of the Sexual Question. https://web.archive.org/web/20060919172205/http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/reader/q22-3.htm
- ↑ Leon Trotsky via Pioneer Publishers, "What Is Fascism and How to Fight It" (1944) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Communist Platform - Gramsci, a Bolshevik. https://espressostalinist.com/2015/02/10/communist-platform-gramsci-a-bolshevik/
- ↑ Aldo Bernardini, translated by Jessica Coco. https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv19n1/gramstal.htm