Antonio Gramsci Quotes on Politics
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere, written 1929–35, published posthumously) gave twentieth-century Western Marxism its most influential reorientation toward the cultural and ideological dimensions of political domination. The central concept of hegemony — the consensual leadership through which a ruling bloc secures the active consent of subordinate classes by articulating a conception of the world they accept as their own — frames the analysis of why the proletarian revolution Marx had predicted failed to materialize in the advanced capitalist West and the corresponding political strategy of the war of position through which the long counter-hegemonic struggle within civil society must be conducted before the war of maneuver of frontal political assault. The framework, developed under fascist imprisonment from 1926 until shortly before his death, shaped the postwar European Communist parties and the broader cultural-Marxist tradition through Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, and contemporary engagement with cultural politics.
Quotes
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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Prison Notebooks -
Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
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“All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
Prison Notebooks -
“To tell the truth is revolutionary.”
Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson , Edinburgh University Student Publications . -
Attributed to Antonio Gramsci:
“Indifference is the dead weight of history.”
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“The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions . The problem of education is the most important class problem .”
Cited in Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77.