Founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party. His works have been called representative works of early “Western Marxism”.
Gramsci was born in Sardinia, Italy, into a small clerk’s family. Coming from a poor family, he finished the University of Turin with hard work and a scholarship. While at the university, he joined the Italian Socialist Party. After graduating from the university, he became the editor-in-chief of the weekly Turin social newspaper, Il Grido del Popolo (The Cry of the People). After the outbreak of the World War I, Gramsci actively echoed Lenin‘s slogan “Turn the imperialist war into civil war” and mobilized the Turin workers to hold an armed uprising against the war, which gained him prestige among the workers and led to his election as the secretary of the Turin branch of the Socialist Party. In January 1921, the Italian Communist Party was founded, and Gramsci was one of its important founders. In May 1922, as a representative of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci was elected secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In October 1922, when the fascists led by Mussolini seized power in Italy, Gramsci was sent back to Italy by the Comintern to carry out the anti-fascist struggle, and in November 1926, he was arrested. In prison, although he suffered various tortures, he studied revolutionary theory with a staunch will and wrote the 32-book Prison Notebooks. In April 1937, Gramsci passed away in prison.
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci discussed a series of questions about the history, religion, culture, education and the state in Italy. Most notably, he summarized the historical lessons of the international communist movement, explored the question of the path of proletarian revolution and proletarian emancipation in the advanced capitalist countries of the West, interpreted Marxist philosophy with his own understanding, put forward the theory of cultural leadership, explained the so-called cultural reasons for the success of the revolution in Russia and the failure of the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries at the so-called deeper level, and thus emphasized the function of culture itself and its dynamic role and even decisive counter-effect upon the economic base. Throughout his life, Gramsci fought resolutely against the Fascist forces and carried out an arduous search for the revolution and emancipation of the proletariat. But he fundamentally denied historical materialism and the doctrine of surplus-value, the two theoretical cornerstones of Marxism, from a theoretical point of view.
