Discussing the thoughts of Antonio Gramsci, one must be careful. When he took notes in prison, he did not have the proper tools. Therefore, his ideas are not written regularly in a logical order.
At times Gramsci seemed to contradict himself. Only the publishers, who selected only about a fifth of all the records, organized the texts according to central themes. However, it is still possible that some of the above interpretations may have to be corrected.
What is immediately striking is Gramsci’s closeness to Lenin, which at the same time shows how distant he is from him. Like Lenin, Gramsci rejected economism and emphasized the critical role of revolutionary determination. It was from Lenin that he got his first ideas about the vital part of the intellectuals and the need for a party.
Lenin acquired the need for the proletariat to achieve hegemony over the other classes. Together with Lenin, Gramsci did not believe that the workers could realize socialism through the rules of the democratic game. Like Lenin, Gramsci emphasized the critical role of the revolutionary will.
However, at the same time, Gramsci was far from Lenin. According to Gramsci, the organic intellectuals are not the owners of the correct theory, which they must introduce from above into the working class. They say in the language of high culture what the working class feels and desires. They are intellectually from the working class. Likewise, Gramsci rejects the notion of the party as the exclusive owner of moral consciousness, which must therefore lead the working class.
The workers’ education on the party’s initiative does not mean injecting into their consciousness. Still, it makes them aware of the implications of the consciousness that already exists in them and the aspects of the struggle. Therefore, it is not the party’s key in the socialist revolution but the workers’ councils. The workers’ council, and not the party, must carry out the dictatorship of the proletariat for as long as necessary. Suppose Marxism, according to Lenin, is regarded as an objectively and scientifically correct theory. Gramsci asserts that talking about the “truth” of an idea always makes sense only in a liberating practice.
Gramsci’s hegemony is not just to ensure that the workers are more powerful than the other classes that are their allies, but to build a power based on genuine consensus. It was not the struggle for power used to suppress the “enemies of the revolution” which Gramsci focused on. It was the battle for the minds and hearts of the people by the workers’ worldview, values , and beliefs.
In Gramsci, we seem to peek at the promise of a socialist revolution other than the communist model, which is not based solely on coercion, because a broad consensus has been reached among the classes in society.
Is Gramsci still an orthodox Marxist? Gramsci rejected the notion of Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin that Marxism was a scientific theory of the laws of society, which also meant that there was no such thing as scientific socialism. He denied that the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism was necessary developments. He rejects the “base-up building” framework, in particular, that the development of the means of production is a determining factor in societal change. He denies that the realm of thought and culture is merely a building on the economic plane.
As for Habermas, changes in society’s world view, values , and beliefs determine the direction of change in society and not developments in the economic field. Not much remains from the foundations of classical Marxism.
However, Gramsci was a genuine socialist. He firmly believed that socialism – although it did not come automatically – was the pattern of the future society. He does not doubt that socialism is the form of economic organization most compatible with human dignity and potential, thus guaranteeing a genuinely human existence.
And although he rejects prophecy, in reality, he is attached to a philosophy of history that views socialism as the ultimate goal of humanity’s journey. Gramsci also believed in the crucial role of the working class in creating a new society. It is workers who will overthrow capitalism and build socialism. Labor is the class of the future.
Gramsci’s limitations are not surprising, given the circumstances in which he wrote, namely in prison and before the “take-off” of advanced industrial society after World War II. What he cannot imagine is that the working class itself will never exist again. Now, in the developed industrial countries, the working class in the traditional sense has evaporated. It was done because of service sector dominance.
Likewise, globalization and awareness of the earth’s limited capacity, coupled with increasingly sharp international inequalities, create problems that a working-class hegemony cannot solve. We cannot even imagine what the hegemony of the working class would mean in the world almost 80 years after Gramsci.
This limitation does not reduce the meaning of Gramsci as a thinker who returns the recognition of cultural factors to the treasures of Marxism. It firmly rejects a party’s leadership model over a society based on the claim to the monopoly of ownership of an ideology which is the ultimate truth about humankind. In this sense, Gramsci restores respect for the human dignity of society into Marxism.