Many people who are reading this are probably thinking to themselves, “Who?” Until recently, that was my first thought, “Who is this guy and what does he have to do with America?” After a quick check of the web and information from an article from Accuracy In Media (AIM) found on Discover the Networks, it began to come together. Later, while listening to Rush today (6 Oct.,2009), he was talking about what the left is doing and why. However, I feel he didn’t go back far enough so, I figured I’ll throw my 2 cents into the mix.

How did a person born in 1891 on the island of Sardinia, Italy, and would later become an Italian philosopher, writer, politician and political theorist effect the greatest country on earth? How would Gramsci, a founding member and eventually a leader of the Communist Party of Italy affect the democratic process and America’s elections?

Gramsci’s belief in Marxism, as well as his membership and leadership in the Communist Party as well as his actions, brought him into direct conflict with Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. This conflict would cumulate in 1926, when he was arrested and eventually imprisoned for 5 years. A year later, he was transferred to another prison for an additional 20 years. It was during this imprisonment that he wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of history and analysis. These writings are known as the Prison Notebooks. These “Notebooks” were heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership, as well as his tracing of Italian history and nationalism. These writings also contained his ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory. In 1934, his health had deteriorated, and he eventually gained conditional freedom. He would die three years later in 1937, at the age of 46.

It was these theories and ideas that would become associated with his name and would eventually have him recognized as a highly original thinker within the Marxist tradition. Among these theories were:
•  Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the capitalist state.
•  The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the         
   working class.
•  The distinction between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) which dominates
   directly and coercively, and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) where
    leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent.
•  'Absolute historicism'.
•  The critique of economic determinism.
•  The critique of philosophical materialism.

Of all of his theories, the key to his formula for revolution is the idea of breaking what he referred to as “hegemony”. Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution. This concept was sharpened by Gramsci into an analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. He believed that capitalism was firmly entrenched. He went on to theorize that capitalism maintained control of the populace not only through violence, but also by political and economic coercion, as well as ideologically. In a hegemonic culture, the values of the regular middle class citizens (bourgeoisie) became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class (proletariat) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and this helped to maintain the status quo rather than having a revolution. In other words, instead of an armed revolution, he advocated that the working class needed to develop a culture of their own. With the development of this culture, it would lead to the overthrow of  the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and this would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the poorest within the society. Does this sound familiar? Have we or are we seeing this in America today?

How would this change in culture come about? Well, S. Steven Powell wrote in his 1987 book,  Covert Cadre, that Gramsci advocated the need to “infiltrate autonomous institutions, such as schools (aren’t children being indoctrinated with ideas like global warming and more recently anti-capitalism by “The Story of Stuff”), the media (enough said), churches (Reverend Wright comes to mind) and public-interest groups (ACORN) – so as to radically transform the culture, which determines the environment in which political and economic policies are played out.” Carl Boggs in his book, Gramsci’s Marxism wrote, “the role of revolutionary theory is to create the foundation of a new socialist order precisely through the negation and transcendence of bourgeois society.”  Boggs continues to explain this “transcendence of bourgeois society” was the basis for Gramsci’s first priority – “the multidimensional transformation of civil society.

The central idea of Gramsci’s formula for this idea of breaking what he called the “hegemony”, or the mind-control exercised by the ruling capitalists over the masses. He believed that the bourgeois societies were ruled, by educating the citizenry that their accommodation of the moral, political, and cultural values defined by the governing system was in their best interests. Hence, a “reversal strategy” was designed by the left that would silently challenge the existing culture and value-systems that dominated bourgeois governance. This formula would be used by the progressive-socialist-Marxist Left to begin an ideological struggle to transform the entire spectrum of activities in civil society. This includes transforming the basic values of America; Judeo-Christian values, the family, schools, unions, and politics and popular trust in the existing government.