Gramsci Quotes

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

I don't think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it's only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born

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.

Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

If you beat your head against the wall, it is your head that breaks and not the wall.

All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent. The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened? I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them. I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.

Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It's not a dialectical idea, it's a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, 'We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.

Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri.

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like.

تشاؤمُ العقل .. تفاؤلُ الإرادة

Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously "born" in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality.

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

History teaches, but has no pupils.

The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be be very numerous or highly trained.

Instrúyanse, porque necesitamos toda nuestra inteligencia. Conmuévanse, porque necesitamos todo nuestro entusiasmo. Organícense, porque necesitamos de toda nuestra fuerza.

Verus Quid Factum

The popular element "feels" but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.

حياتي تتدفق دائمًا بنفس الطريقة أقرأ، آكل وأنام وأفكر لا أستطيع أن أفعل أي شئ آخر ..

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

Is it better to work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one's own brain, choose one's sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one's own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one' own personality?

Since defeat in the Struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one's own successors is as important as what one does for victory.

Socialism lost its way largely when it became decoupled from the processes of democracy. My vision of a socially just society is one that is deeply democratic, that allows people’s voices to be heard, where people actually govern. C.L.R James sometimes used the slogan “every cook can govern” to speak to the concept that there should be no hierarchies of power between those who lead and their constituencies. This idea is related to Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the goal of the revolutionary party is for every member to be an intellectual. That is, everyone has the capacity, has the ability to articulate a vision of reality and to fight for the realization of their values and goals in society. Gramsci is pointing toward the development of a strategy that is deeply democratic, one where we don’t have elitist, vanguardist notions of what society should look like, but have humility and the patience to listen to and learn from working class and poor people, who really are at the center of what any society is.

my whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting. It is this idea that Gramsci, certainly, and Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very different ways have been trying to illustrate.

تقدمت في العمر أربع سنوات، أصبح شعري أشيب من السابق بكثير، فقدت أسناني، لم أعد أضحك من أعماق قلبي كما في ما مضى، لكني أعتقد أني صرت أكثر حكمة وازدادت تجربتي في الحياة ثراء

At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic "men of destiny".

Freedom is not utopia, because it is a basic aspiration; the whole history of mankind consists of struggles and efforts to creates social institutions capable of ensuring a maximum of freedom.

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.

The discipline imposed on citizens by the bourgeois state makes them into subjects, people who delude themselves that they exert an influence on the course of events.

Culture is a privilege. Education is a privilege. And we do not want it to be so. All young people should be equal before culture.

Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres .

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory.

[...] but we know. and have always said, that the bourgeoisie is attached to fascism. The bourgeois and fascism stand in the same relation to each other as do the workers and peasants to the Russian Communist Party.

The principle must always rule that ideas are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philosophies; they are a continually renewed expression of real historical development. The unity of history (what the idealists call unity of the spirit) is not a presupposition, but a continuously developing process.

The brain is not nourished on beans and truffles but rather the food manages to reconstitute the molecules of the brain once it has been turned into homogeneous and assimilable substances, which potentially have the "same nature", as the molecules of the brain

It should never be forgotten that, in the struggle between the nations, it is in the interest of each one of them that the other should be weakened by internal struggle. Hence it is always possible to pose the question of whether the parties exist by virtue of their own strength, as their own necessity, or whether rather they only exist to serve the interests of others.

At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other's mode of expression to varying degrees, etc.

Odio gli indifferenti. Credo che vivere voglia dire essere partigiani. Chi vive veramente non può non essere cittadino e partigiano. L’indifferenza è abulia, è parassitismo, è vigliaccheria, non è vita. Perciò odio gli indifferenti.

Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà.

of oppressive state power. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a form of cultural pedagogy is also invaluable as an element of critical educational thought. By emphasizing the pedagogical force of culture, Gramsci expands the sphere of the political by pointing to those diverse spaces and spheres in which cultural practices are deployed, lived, and mobilized in the service of knowledge, power and authority. For Gramsci, learning and politics were inextricably related and took place not merely in schools but in a vast array of public sites.

It is in their interests to have a stable, skilled labour force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts.

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.

Man can affect his own development and that of his surroundings only so far as he has a clear view of what the possibilities of action are open to him. To do this he has to understand the historical situation in which he finds himself: and once he does this, then he can play an active part in modifying that situation. The man of action is the true philosopher: and the philosopher must of necessity be a man of action.

Ciò che avviene, non avviene tanto perché alcuni vogliono che avvenga, quanto perché la massa degli uomini abdica alla sua volontà, lascia fare, lascia aggruppare i nodi che poi solo la spada potrà tagliare, lascia promulgare le leggi che poi solo la rivolta farà abrogare, lascia salire al potere gli uomini che poi solo un ammutinamento potrà rovesciare

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: "The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory." The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, "therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.

Odio gli indifferenti. Credo che vivere voglia dire partecipare. Chi vive veramente non può non essere cittadino partecipe. L’indifferenza è abulia, è parassitismo, è vigliaccheria, non è vita. Perciò odio gli indifferenti. L’indifferenza è il peso morto della storia. L’indifferenza opera potentemente nella storia. Opera passivamente, ma opera. È la fatalità; è ciò su cui non si può contare; è ciò che sconvolge i programmi, che rovescia i piani meglio costruiti; è la materia bruta che strozza l’intelligenza. Ciò che succede, il male che si abbatte su tutti, avviene perché la massa degli uomini abdica alla sua volontà, lascia promulgare le leggi che solo la rivolta potrà abrogare, lascia salire al potere uomini che poi solo un ammutinamento potrà rovesciare. Tra l’assenteismo e l’indifferenza poche mani, non sorvegliate da alcun controllo, tessono la tela della vita collettiva, e la massa ignora, perché non se ne preoccupa; e allora sembra sia la fatalità a travolgere tutto e tutti, sembra che la storia non sia altro che un enorme fenomeno naturale, un’eruzione, un terremoto del quale rimangono vittime tutti, chi ha voluto e chi non ha voluto, chi sapeva e chi non sapeva, chi era stato attivo e chi indifferente. Alcuni piagnucolano pietosamente, altri bestemmiano oscenamente, ma nessuno o pochi si domandano: se avessi fatto anch’io il mio dovere, se avessi cercato di far valere la mia volontà, sarebbe successo ciò che è successo? Odio gli indifferenti anche per questo: perché mi dà fastidio il loro piagnisteo da eterni innocenti. Chiedo conto a ognuno di loro del come ha svolto il compito che la vita gli ha posto e gli pone quotidianamente, di ciò che ha fatto e specialmente di ciò che non ha fatto. E sento di poter essere inesorabile, di non dover sprecare la mia pietà, di non dover spartire con loro le mie lacrime. Io partecipo, vivo, sento nelle coscienze della mia parte già pulsare l’attività della città futura che la mia parte sta costruendo. E in essa la catena sociale non pesa su pochi, in essa ogni cosa che succede non è dovuta al caso, alla fatalità, ma è intelligente opera dei cittadini. Non c’è in essa nessuno che stia alla finestra a guardare mentre i pochi si sacrificano, si svenano. Vivo, partecipo. Perciò odio chi non partecipa, odio gli indifferenti.

Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to "know" them, and know how to use them.

La indiferencia es el peso muerto de la historia. La indiferencia opera potentemente en la historia. Opera pasivamente, pero opera. Es la fatalidad; aquello con que no se puede contar. Tuerce programas, y arruina los planes mejor concebidos. Es la materia bruta desbaratadora de la inteligencia.

Tutti i più ridicoli fantasticatori che nei loro nascondigli di geni incompresi fanno scoperte strabilianti e definitive, si precipitano su ogni movimento nuovo persuasi di poter spacciare le loro fanfaluche. D'altronde ogni collasso porta con sé disordine intellettuale e morale. Bisogna creare uomini sobri, pazienti, che non disperino dinanzi ai peggiori orrori e non si esaltino a ogni sciocchezza. Pessimismo dell’intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà.

cultural cringe which prevents other people from challenging them. the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘cultural hegemony’ to describe the way in which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are universalised. they become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which shape our thinking

Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the "folklore" of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential.

Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.

Ogni movimento rivoluzionario è romantico, per definizione.

I live, I am partisan. This is why I hate those who do not take sides; I hate those who are indifferent

fuck this glitchy ass site.

A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his "true" philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics. In every personality there is one dominant and predominant activity: it is here that his thought must be looked for, in a form that is more often than not implicit and at times even in contradiction with what is professly expressed.

Education is a struggle against instincts which are linked to elemental biological functions, a struggle against nature, in order to dominate it and create man immersed within his own time.

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.

The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘cultural hegemony’ to describe the way in which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are universalized. They become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which shape our thinking. Perhaps we suffer from agricultural hegemony: what is deemed to be good for farmers or landowners is deemed, without question or challenge, to be good for everyone.

Istruitevi, perché avremo bisogno di tutta la nostra intelligenza. Agitatevi, perché avremo bisogno di tutto il nostro entusiasmo. Organizzatevi, perché avremo bisogno di tutta la nostra forza. [da L'Ordine Nuovo, anno I, n. 1, 1° maggio 1919]

The heirs of Gramsci, like the ideological progeny of Marx and Lenin and the Frankfurt School, insisted on the need to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.” By the twenty-first century, even biological sex was no longer considered a settled issue.

Gramsci used to say 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. What he meant is: understand how the bloody system works. What confronts you? The fact that the terrain is not favourable to your project. Understand that, even if it disillusions you, even if it makes you awake at night. Understand it. Then you're in a position to say 'Well what is.... what can change? Where are the emergent forces? Where are the cracks and the contradictions? What are the elements in popular consciousness one could mobilise for a different political program?

O camarada Lenis nos ensinou que [...] na guerra dos exércitos, não se pode atingir o objetivo estratégico, que é a destruição do inimigo e a ocupação de seu território, sem ter antes atingido uma série de objetivos táticos, visando a desagregar o inimigo antes de enfrentá-lo em campo aberto.

Once we grasp the scale of national and global inequalities, then the narrative that seeks to cast GDP growth as a proxy for human progress begins to seem a bit tendentious – perhaps even a bit ideological. And by ideology I mean in the technical sense: a set of ideas promoted by the dominant class, which serves their material interests, and which everybody else has internalised to such an extent that they are willing to go along with a system they might otherwise reject as unjust. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci has called this ‘cultural hegemony’: when an ideology becomes so normalised that it is difficult or even impossible to reflect on it.

It seemed insane that two such identical senses of humour could think of each other only in terms of hatred and destruction. He suddenly saw the political establishments of the world as a conspiracy of the humourless against laughter, a tyranny of stupidity over intelligence; man as a product of history, not his true inner, personal nature. He might, if he had browsed further in the book he had picked up in JAne’s drawing room in Oxford, have seen that Gramsci once said almost exactly the same thing, though he had derived his proof of it from the failure of mankind to make socialism universal. Dan saw it much more in existential terms, a universal failure of personal authenticity, faith in one’s own inner feelings.

I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.

Why is a petition for peace called a “violent” act? Why is a human barricade thwarting the police called an act of “violent” aggression? Under which conditions and within which frameworks does the inversion of violence and nonviolence occur? There is no way to practice nonviolence without first interpreting violence and nonviolence, especially in a world in which violence is increasingly justified in the name of security, nationalism, and neofascism. The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics “violent”: we know this from Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and from Benjamin. Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow

Un traduttore qualificato dovrebbe essere in grado non solo di tradurre letteralmente, ma di tradurre i termini, anche concettuali, di una determinata cultura nazionale nei termini di un'altra cultura nazionale, cioè un tale traduttore dovrebbe conoscere criticamente due civiltà ed essere in grado di far conoscere l'una all'altra servendosi del linguaggio storicamente determinato di quella civiltà alla quale fornisce il materiale d'informazione.

You’ve been an activist for decades. What keeps you going? Do you think we should remain optimistic about the future? Well, I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.

Il fascismo li aveva ridotti al silenzio per vent'anni, e ci spiegarono che il fascismo non era soltanto un malgoverno buffonesco e improvvido, ma il negatore della giustizia; non aveva soltanto trascinato l'Italia in una guerra ingiusta ed infausta, ma era sorto e si era consolidato come custode di una legalità e di un ordine detestabili, fondati sulla costrizione di chi lavora, sul profitto incontrollato di chi sfrutta il lavoro altrui, sul silenzio imposto a chi pensa e non vuole essere servo, sulla menzogna sistematica e calcolata. Ci dissero che la nostra indifferenza beffarda non bastava; doveva volgersi in collera, e la collera essere incanalata in una rivolta organica e tempestiva: ma non ci insegnarono come si fabbrica una bomba, né come si spara un fucile. Ci parlavano di sconosciuti: Gramsci, Salvemini, Gobetti, i Rosselli; chi erano? Esisteva dunque una seconda storia, una storia parallela a quella che il liceo ci aveva somministrata dall'alto?

As Crehan is arguing, based on Gramsci, we need to be able to formulate a new common sense to combat the existing one and open up the possibilities of different imaginaries. “The value of Gramsci’s concept of common sense is that it offers us a way of thinking about the texture of everyday life that encompasses its givenness [that is, the way in which we’re thrown into it at birth]—how it both constitutes our subjectivity, the way we think about ourselves, and confronts us as an external and solid reality” (2016). This is back to Giddens’s notion of structuration (1984). The way the world works doesn’t seem to have been created by us. It simply seems to confront us as a kind of materiality that we have no say in changing. This is what we really need to be combating. “But that also acknowledges its contradictions, fluidity and flexibility. For all its apparent solidity, it [that is, common sense] is continually being modified by how actual people in actual places live it” (Giddens 1984). So it’s important, it’s vitally important, to understand the sort of fluid nature of common sense, that it is not solid in the way that it’s constantly being told to us.

First, as I showed in Chapter 5, the term “cultural Marxism” refers to a particular Marxist theory and strategy inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci – working to establish “cultural hegemony” in order to effect socialist revolution. Second, the substitution of special identity groups advocated for by social justice activists for the working class championed by Marxists does not lead to an identical or nearly identical politics. With the working class as a lever, Marxism proposes to overcome its nemesis – the capitalist class, which maintains the class system, including a class-based system of production and resource allocation. Social justice, on the other hand, aims at little more than debunking particular identity groups from atop a putative social hierarchy, knocking them from their supposed positions of totemic privilege, and replacing them with members of supposedly subordinated groups. Third, in Chapter 5, I told why Marxism and postmodernism can’t be equated. I’ll restate it here. While postmodern theory is anti-capitalist, it not only rejects capitalism but also other “totalizing” systems, or “meta-narratives,” including even the major system proposed to counter capitalism – Marxism itself.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Vorrei, per essere proprio tranquillo, che tu non ti spaventassi o ti turbassi troppo qualunque condanna siano per darmi. Che tu comprendessi bene, anche col sentimento, che io sono un detenuto politico e sarò un condannato politico, che non ho e non avrò mai da vergognarmi di questa situazione. Che, in fondo, la detenzione e la condanna le ho volute io stesso, in certo modo, perché non ho mai voluto mutare le mie opinioni, per le quali sarei disposto a dare la vita e non solo a stare in prigione. Che perciò io non posso che essere tranquillo e contento di me stesso. Cara mamma, vorrei proprio abbracciarti stretta stretta perché sentissi quanto ti voglio bene e come vorrei consolarti di questo dispiacere che ti ho dato ma non potevo fare diversamente. La vita è così, molto dura, e i figli qualche volta devono dare dei grandi dolori alle loro mamme, se vogliono conservare il loro onore e la loro dignità di uomini

É preciso perder o hábito e deixar de conceber a cultura como saber enciclopédico, no qual o homem é visto apenas sob a forma de um recipiente a encher e entupir de dados empíricos, de fatos brutos e desconexos, que ele depois deverá classificar em seu cérebro como nas colunas de um dicionário, para poder em seguida, em cada ocasião concreta, responder aos vários estímulos do mundo exterior. Essa forma de cultura é realmente prejudicial, sobretudo para o proletariado. Serve apenas para criar marginais, pessoas que acreditam ser superiores ao resto da humanidade porque acumularam na memória certo número de dados e de datas que vomitam a cada ocasião, criando assim quase que uma barreira entre elas e as demais pessoas. Serve para criar aquele tipo de intelectualismo balofo e incolor, tão bem-fustigado duramente por Romain Rolland, intelectualismo que gerou toda uma caterva de presunçosos e sabichões, mais deletérios para a vida social do que os micróbios da tuberculose e da sífilis o são para a beleza e a saúde física dos corpos.

For the sake of their own self-image they had to force themselves to believe that they sought happiness for their slaves. But the “happiness” of the slaves could never have arisen from an acceptance of slavery. At best, it had to arise as a function of the living space created by paternalistic compromise forced on them. That living space meant the possibility of creation of an autonomous spiritual life – a religion of their own with which they could be “happy” – that is, they could live in reasonable peace with themselves. The masters, seeing their apparent contentment took credit and congratulated themselves for the slaves’ acceptance of slavery, whereas in fact the slaves had only accepted the limited protection that even slavery had to offer, while acknowledging the reality of the power over them. The masters then had to hold the slaves’ religion in contempt, for in truth they feared it. And properly so, for it meant that the slaves had achieved a degree of psychological and cultural autonomy and therefore successfully resisted becoming extensions of their masters’ wills – the one thing they were supposed to become. It made all the difference that the masters’ claims to be bestowing privileges were greeted by the slaves as recognition of their own rights. “Men” wrote Gramsci, “when they feel their strength and are conscious of their responsibility and their value, do not want another man to impose his will on theirs and undertake to control their thoughts and actions.” The everyday instance in which “docile” slaves suddenly rebelled and “kind” masters suddenly behaved like wild bests had their origins, apart from frequent instabilities in the participating responsibilities in this dialectic. Masters and slaves had both “agreed” on the paternalistic basis of their relationship, the one from reasons of self-aggrandizement and the other from lack of an alternative. But they understood very different things by their apparently common assent. And every manifestation of that contradiction threatened the utmost violence… The slaves defended themselves effectively against the worst of their masters’ aggression, but they paid a high price. They fought for their right to think and act as autonomous human beings, but it was a desperate fight in which they could easily slip backward… they had manifested strength…. In Gramsci’s terms, they had had to wage a prolonged, embittered struggle with themselves as well as with their oppressors to “feel their strength” and to become “conscious of their responsibility and their value.” It was not that the slaves did not act like men. Rather, it was that they could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act like political men. The black struggle on that front, which has not been won, has paralleled that of every other oppressed people. It is the most difficult because it is the final stage a people must wage to forge themselves into a nation.

O gramscismo transforma em propaganda tudo o que toca, contamina de objetivos propagandísticos todas as atividades culturais, inclusive as mais inócuas em aparência. Nele, até simples giros de frase, estilos de vestir ou de gesticular podem ter valor propagandístico.

I think you must like history, as I liked it when I was your age, because it deals with living people and everything that concerns people, as many people as possible, all people in the world, in so far as they unite together in society and work and struggle and make a bid for a better life. All that can’t fail to please you more than anything else, isn’t that right?

However, this ideology has been deeply discredited because of the 2008 crash, rising inequality and its failure to deliver economic freedom and prosperity for everyone. We are in a period similar to that aptly described by Gramsci when referring to the 1930s, where: ‘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

El marxista Antonio Gramsci, probablemente el intelectual más lucido y letal de la izquierda en el último siglo, afirmó que bastaba con tomarse la cultura, esto eso, con instalar las ideas socialistas hasta hacerlas hegemónicas para que el sistema capitalista terminará cayendo.

Beemot é o peso maciço da necessidade natural, Leviatã é a infranatureza diabólica, invisível sob as águas – o mundo psíquico – que agita com a língua.

Типичное проявление интеллектуального дилетантизма (или интеллектуальной деятельности дилетантов) заключается в следующем: при рассмотрении вопроса автор старается сообщить все, что ему известно, а не только то, что важно и необходимо для темы. Он пользуется всяким случаем, чтобы похвастаться своими скудными знаниями и выставить на позорище любое барахло из своего чулана; любой ничтожный факт возводится им в мировую проблему, дабы получить возможность смастерить свое собственное миропонимание и т.д.

tracing out the complicated dialogue between the knowledge of the intellectuals and popular opinion is one of the notebooks’ central concerns.

El que quiera el fin tiene que querer también los medios.

Ma questa non è cultura, è pedanteria, non è intelligenza, ma intelletto, e contro di essa ben a ragione si reagisce. La cultura è una cosa ben diversa. È organizzazione, disciplina del proprio io interiore, è presa di possesso della propria personalità, è conquista di coscienza superiore, per la quale si riesce a comprendere il proprio valore storico, la propria funzione nella vita, i propri diritti e i propri doveri.

Se un nemico ti ferisce e ti fa soffrire, sei un idiota, perché è proprio del nemico fare del male

Un poder que solo doblega, que solo tiene la fuerza de forzar al cuerpo, es ciertamente un poder débil e inestable. Un poder eficiente, en contraste, es aquel que fuerza la mente. La estabilidad del poder depende de su aceptación, y su aceptación se construye con palabras, no con armas. Producir sujetos conformes con el poder es la aspiración de todo poder que pretenda permanencia (Gramsci agregaría, además, que a mayor hegemonía, menor necesidad de usar la fuerza), porque él mismo no puede nunca ser pura coerción, mero uso de la fuerza; el poder necesita adhesión y disciplina, y para ello dispone de distintas instituciones, dispositivos y tecnologías de entre las cuales los medios masivos de comunicación, por su capacidad de llegar con un mensaje determinado a una cantidad indeterminada de sujetos, sobresalen con claridad.

I don't incidentally suggest that the deceit is conscious. Much more likely, it's just the enormous power of conformity to convention, to what Gramsci called hegemonic "common sense." Some ideas are not even rejected; they are unthinkable. Like the idea that US aggression is aggression; it can only be "a mistake," "a tragic error," "a strategic blunder." I also don't want to suggest this is "American exceptionalism." It's hard to find an exception to the practice in the history of imperialism.

To use James Burnham’s later phrase, he is thinking of the managerial class. Gramsci seems to have in mind the intelligentsia, those people responsible for disseminating and controlling the flow of information and ideas, opinion shapers, mythmakers, ideologists, upholders and justifiers of the political formula, or, if you prefer, a priest class.

What they did not realize, according to Gramsci, was that their passivity was the result of values imposed on them through things like libraries, schools, voluntary associations, architecture, street names, and the church.42

Revolution for Gramsci did not come from above but from below. It was organic. And the failure, in his eyes, of revolutionary elites is that they were often as dictatorial and disconnected from workers as capitalist elites. The masses had to be integrated into the structures of power to create a new form of mass politics—hence his insistence that all people are intellectuals capable of autonomous and independent thought. A democracy is possible only when all of its citizens understand the machinery of power and have a role in the exercising of power. Gramsci would have despaired of the divide in the United States between our anemic left and the working class. The ridiculing of Trump supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care, and good public education, including free university education, that speak directly to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about multiculturalism and identity politics. We cannot battle racism, bigotry, and hate crimes, often stoked by the ruling elites, without first battling for economic justice. When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters. Revolt without an alternative political vision, Gramsci knew, was doomed. Workers are as easily mobilized around antidemocratic ideologies such as hyper-nationalism, fascism, and racism. If they lack consciousness, they can become a dark force in the body politic, as history has shown and as we see at Trump rallies and with the proliferation of hate crimes.

From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past three hundred years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of “social justice.” Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony, and not simply the haves, which was actually responsible for oppressing the have-nots. György Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system. The Frankfurt School developed critical theory to analyze oppression in cultural institutions. French postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics. Kimbery Williams Crenshaw developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories. Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to the redistribution of privilege, from the liberation of the lower classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society. No social organization remains unaffected. Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” is almost complete. The final stage is to capture the last stand for Western Civilization and conscious of the country—the American evangelical church.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.