Gramsci’s Theory of Political Organization

Abstract

Since the publication of his Prison Notebooks 1 after World War II, the figure of Antonio Gramsci has loomed large in the radical imagination. Gramsci has been received, along with Georg Lukács and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Karl Korsch, and especially Rosa Luxemburg—who might be understood as the mother of this tendency—as part of a broader effort to generate what has been termed an “open Marxism” against the doctrinaire theorists of the Second and Third Internationals who ossified historical materialism in deterministic terms. He informs much of the current work on globality, particularly the concept of uneven development, but also infects recent discoveries in the post-colonial literature that political independence does not necessarily lead to political autonomy or to greater social equality. And he has earned a huge reputation in the corridors of Machiavelli scholarship and a unique place in educational theory and, especially, in the still nascent study of the role of intellectuals in modern societies. Harvard University Press has issued a volume of Gramsci’s cultural writings, where “culture” refers almost exclusively to literature and other aesthetic topics. The range of Gramsci’s interests surely confirms his status as a “traditional” intellectual, although even here, I want to insist that these studies can only be fully understood as moments in his theory of politics and political organization, and his elaboration of the many dimensions of the struggle for communism.