this is richard wolff from democracy at
work responding to another ask prof wolf
question from our patreon community this
one comes from william cali
and it asks me to talk about the
contribution
of the great italian marxist antonio
gramsci
and i welcome the question
it is a pleasure to return as i often
have in my lifetime to this absolutely
remarkable and brilliant thinker
unquestionably the greatest contributor
so far
of the many that italy has contributed
to the growing marxian tradition of
thought
antonio gramsci famous as a
child of sardinia that island off the
mainland of italy
from the poorest of the poor
backgrounds
he grew to become an enormously
important
figure in italian history and politics
he founded
and led
the italian communist party in its early
years
he was famous for having organized one
of the greatest strikes at the beginning
of the 20th century in torino in the
north of italy against the then
very powerful fiat automobile
factory family
and he went on to be a political leader
arrested illegally by the mussolini
government the fascist government of
italy
imprisoned for the last dozen or so
years of his life
badly treated not given the medical
attention
for the rest of us those years in jail
produced his most important work called
the prison notebooks of antonio gramsci
there is a complete translation into
english of these works published by the
columbia university press in new york
he was allowed to leave prison a couple
of months before he died uh from the
conditions imposed on him by the fascist
government
of italy at the time
what is he famous for
well
there are many ways to get at it i
want to talk about the theoretical
contribution he made because if i've
read william calley's question correctly
that's what he's interested in but i do
want to say a word
about the fact that this
fellow from sardinia
proved to be a genius political
organizer the strike against fiat back
at the beginning of the century was a
masterful job of organizing workers in a
way that had never been seen in italy
before
he organized not only
a powerful communist party in italy
but let me be clear to everyone here
italy had the most important largest
most popular communist party of any
country in
europe
it was the most powerful communist party
in western europe after world war ii for
many many years it was a basic part of
the life of italy city by city factory
by factory village by village and the
organization of that political party
especially in the unwelcome
circumstances of italian capitalism was
an enormous achievement for which
antonio gramsci deserves credit
but his most remarkable
theoretical contribution can be
summarized as follows
when he looked at what had happened in
the soviet union
went the revolution of 1917 and so on
when he looked at the revolutionary
possibilities
in italy all around him and that's where
he spent his life and that's what he
devoted his intellectual and physical
strengths to
he reached the conclusion
which he put roughly this way
the conditions for a revolution
in terms of the poverty in terms of the
exploitation of the mass of the italian
people north and south
farmers industrial workers
urban and rural all of it
the conditions were there for
italy to have a socialist revolution
what he called the objective conditions
were there
but they weren't ripe yet
subjectively
in other words everything was in place
to have to make and to succeed with a
revolution and he admired much about the
soviet revolution in 1917
so we can imagine that he would have
tried to adapt that to the different
circumstances in italy
but what was not ready for the
revolution was subjective was the mental
pictures in the minds of the italian
people their feelings their thoughts
their commitments to their roman
catholic religion their commitments to
their regions to the institutions of
importance to them the village the
family and so on
so what antonio gramsci did in all those
years imprisoned was to keep notebooks
and give himself the task
of adding to all the analysis that had
come out of the marxian tradition
analysis of economics of politics of
what we would nowadays call sociology
how the society is put together
the focus of all of that in the marxian
tradition where the objective conditions
how is unemployment how is inflation how
is the factory working
but what antonio gramsci wanted to add
was the need also to understand how is
this being processed in the minds of the
people
what is the mentality
will the mentality
see the need for the possibility for a
successful revolution because in order
to have a successful revolution you need
not only the objective conditions that
make it possible but you need the
subjective conditions in people's minds
that they want
to do that that they want to get
together with one another that they see
through the self-celebration
of capitalism to the need for and the
possibility of a revolutionary break to
something better
and for that reason he studied
literature and poetry and music and the
roman catholic church and the liturgy
and everything that shapes how people
see the world so that he could add a
subjective
marxist analysis about the possibilities
of revolution to the traditional
objective analysis of what's possible
and that led to
vast new openings of research that many
many marxists ever since then
have been developing further so that the
tradition now is much more balanced
between objective and subjective between
what's happening in this society but
what's also going on culturally inside
the ways we think about the world it's a
much more balanced analytical and
revolutionary tradition now thanks to
gramsci than it was before
this is richard wolff for democracy at
work
you