“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
KEEP SCROLLING DOWN FOR SHORT AND LONG EXPLANATION
IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: Introspection and inquiry. Being alone and inner fortitude or guidance.
REVERSED: Inner loneliness. Emotional withdrawal. Isolation
IN DEPTH:
The Hermit imagines himself alone at a mountaintop cabin. The only man for as far as his minds-eye can see. Every night this is his routine—to imagine that he is elsewhere. At this point he is a prisoner, he struggles with his health, he struggles under the conditions of life in confinement. However indirect response to the bleakness of his physical constraints, he cultivates an expansive interior world. He stands atop a cavernous doorway, shadows dancing beside him. As the Hermit walks, his path is guided by the lamp he holds, always one step ahead of himself. Every small step, every detail it reveals illuminates the direction of the next. It is in this cryptic approach, that he evades being censored or even understood by authorities.
It is within his solitude that he makes his greatest intellectual connections. For the Hermit confinement facilitates crystalline focus and parallax vision, in which one can see overarching historical and political tendencies and already existing alternatives to the dominant role of the intellectual. Once a master of mass political organizing and the social, now a political prisoner, the Hermit wants to guide you through the darkness and the solitude. He offers endless books, wisdom, and the underlying insight to seek a studied liberation of the intellect, because this they cannot take from you.
AT LENGTH:
Antonio Gramsci (22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was a prominent Italian Marxist intellect and politician. He was both a founding member, and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. His syndicalist organizing of car factory-workers in Turin along with his notoriety as a critic of Mussolini and fascism led to his imprisonment in 1926 where he stayed until his death in 1937. At his trial, the prosecutor implored “For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.” While incarcerated, he produced over 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis, this collection has come to be known as ‘Prison Notebooks’. In pages of this book, Gramsci brings together insights from an array of topics—including Marxism, Machiavellian maneuvers, Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion and elite versus popular culture. He is perhaps best known for his theory of cultural hegemony. This theory illuminates the underestimated reliance of the ruling classes upon cultural institutions to maintain power in a capitalist society. For Gramsci, the bourgeois maintain power, not simply through state violence, but instead through ideological domination and the propagation of ‘hegemonic culture’ . Cultural hegemony, is the means which allow the ruling class to reproduce their own values and class interests as a natural order or status quo.
One of the great assets of a Gramscian approaches, is the shedding of light upon the role of culture/cultures within class-war. This and other illuminations within his work opened up the space for future generations of intellectuals to consider their own social position as intellectuals and engage in class war through wars of position. Despite the efforts from Mussolini’s fascist regime to muzzle Gramsci as public intellectual, his writing calls out from behind bars. His writing escapes prison, it travels across shores, and through time, gaining a life far beyond its confines a life all its own.
FURTHER READINGS:
https://jacobin.com/2021/06/antonio-gramsci-pravada-italian-communist-party-history
https://jacobin.com/2021/11/antonio-gramsci-selections-prison-notebooks-fiftieth-anniversary
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