Hegemony Changes Everything: Antonio Gramsci's theories of how the rich stay rich

By Dilip -

On the night of November 8, 1926, policeman arrived at Gramsci’s apartment in Rome. Initially, he was sentenced to five years of “confined exile,” and began serving out his sentence on the island of Ustica. While there, Gramsci endeavored again to set up a cultural school. He offered lessons in history and literature, which were attended by his fellow inmates as well as some local inhabitants of the island... Gramsci then stood trial for higher crimes in Rome. There, the court sentenced him to over twenty years in prison for “planning to topple the regime and replace it with a government of soviets,” which, in all fairness, he was. It was during the trial that the prosecutor famously said of Gramsci, “For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.”

JEAN-YVES FRÉTIGNÉ; TO LIVE IS TO RESIST: THE LIFE OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI

Reviewed by JENNIFER WILSON

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture - wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as “senso comune” (common sense) - that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as “cultural hegemony.” In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature  -anything he could get his hands on in the prison library - to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom).

Accordingly, Gramsci approached the subject of taste with the same vigor that other Marxists reserved for political economy. He reserved special rancor for Eugène Sue’s popular novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843). In the novel, a Prince Rodolphe metes out vigilante justice in Paris’s seedy underbelly. Gramsci said the French serial provided “the romantic setting in which the fascist mentality is formed,” since it presented social problems as something to be solved by a superhero figure rather than through class struggle. 

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2901/antonio-gramsci-s-theories-of-how-the-rich-stay-rich-24819


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