AUT: why gramsci

[vacirca@xxxxxxxxx (robert brown)]

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>Date: Mon, 27 Apr 1998 23:14:20 -0500
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>From: vacirca@xxxxxxxxx (robert brown)
>Subject: why gramsci
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hi autopsy peoples,  thought you'd like a copy of  this draft for a webpage
i'm preparing on Gramsci
  if you haven't seen it already


                                        bob brown


>                                                                why read
>gramsci
>
>
>
>Who is Antonio Gramsci and why are his life and writings important to us
>even though he died in an italian fascist prison over 60 years ago?
>
>                Antonio Gramsci was a co-founder of the Italian Communist
>party, one of the leaders of the 1920 "Ordine Nuovo" Turin factory
>occupation movement, and author of the Prison Notebooks. He was a
>revolutionary journalist and mass working class organizer and one of the
>great communist intellectual theorists of the twentieth century. His
>marxism was unorthodox, controversial and still not fully understood today.
>His prison notes were an in depth study of Italian culture and history for
>the purpose of understanding and defeating italian fascism and launching an
>italian proletarian cultural revolution. His thinking about fascism,
>marxism and cultural revolution  was full of insights that are still
>relevant to our struggles today  as we try to defeat a resurgent fascistic
>culture and build a totally new socialist world culture.
>
>                Along with Mao, he was one of a handful of early 20th
>century communists who fully appreciated the central importance of cultural
>revolution in the struggle for socialism. His insights on the importance of
>cultural, intellectual as well as political autonomy for  working class
>liberation helped lay the intellectual foundations for the rebirth of
>revolutionary anti-capitalist working class struggle in Italy in the 60's
>and 70's. The "Autonomist" New Left in Italy, France and Germany as well as
>the US New Left  with their distinctive emphases on counterculture were
>all Gramsci's intellectual children. Gramsci is a central part of who we
>are as revolutionaries in the US and Europe are today. In addition Gramsci
>has influenced the thinking of many 3rd world revolutionaries  in Latin
>America, as well as new left activists in China, Russia and Eastern Europe
>looking for new, non-oppressive models of revolutionary struggle. I believe
>that  Gramsci's ideas are one of a number of  bodies of new thinking that
>we will need to synthesize to create a new revolutionary theory  for the
>21st century.
>
>                Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need  to study
>Gramsci to fully understand Fascism, how and why it was born in Italy and
>spread  like a plague through out Europe in the 20's and 30's and is now a
>permanent feature of imperialist world culture. Unlike most other marxist
>and democratic opponents of fascism Gramsci wrote about fascism from inside
>the belly of the beast, as a historical and cultural eyewitness, from the
>sobering surroundings of a fascist prison cell. If we are ever to get to
>the dark and complex heart of the phenomenon that is fascism  I'm convinced
>we have to  study Gramsci's prison notebooks for that deeper take on
>fascism we all need.
>
>        Marx  and Lenin taught that power flows  from control of the means
>of production and the State. Gramsci argued that in addition to control of
>the economy and the State, in modern Capitalist society control of the
>culture was essential to seize and hold power. Gramsci's insights on the
>critical importance of cultural revolution certainly seem to have been
>borne out by the history of the last 60 years. Mass politics today have,
>more than ever, become culture wars between the Left and the Right. The
>historic defeat of socialism and the reemergence of mass rightwing secular
>and religious movements  on a world-wide scale parallels Gramsci and the
>italian working class's defeat by fascism in the 1920's in many ways.
>        It is  an ironic  and sad comment on the times that today
>Gramsci's writings  are largely accessible  only to a handful of
>intellectuals.  Gramsci strongly believed that fascism could only be
>defeated and a new socialist culture built in Italy  by  ordinary working
>people winning intellectual and moral independence for themselves.
>                        So it is particularly important that ordinary
>people be able to read and think about what Gramsci had to say about
>cultural revolution and fascism. "GRAMSCI FOR BEGINNERS' is a modest
>attempt to popularize Gramsci's writings and in so doing return the study
>of Gramsci to its working class cultural revolutionary roots.
>
>
>
>"A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer"  Long live the
>fool.
>
>
>
>
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"A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer"  Long live the
fool.




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