Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist revolutionary and theorist whose ideas on culture and power transformed how revolutionaries understand the struggle for a new world. Born in Sardinia in 1891, he grew up poor and in chronic illness in one of Italy's most neglected regions, an experience that shaped his lifelong attention to the oppressed South and the peasantry. Winning a scholarship to the University of Turin, he joined the socialist movement in Italy's great industrial city. During the factory occupations of 1919 and 1920, his newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo championed the workers' councils as the seeds of a new society run by working people themselves.

In 1921 Gramsci helped found the Communist Party of Italy and became its leader as Mussolini's fascists seized power. He was elected to parliament, but in 1926 the fascist regime arrested him despite his parliamentary immunity. At his trial the prosecutor declared that his brain must be stopped from working for twenty years. In prison, ill and isolated, Gramsci filled the notebooks that became his Prison Notebooks, some three thousand pages, which his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht smuggled out after his death.

In those notebooks he asked why revolution had failed in the West and how the ruling class holds power not only through force but through consent. His answer was hegemony: the ruling class wins consent through culture, education, religion, and common sense itself. He called on the working class to build its own counter-hegemony through what he called organic intellectuals and a long war of position. Gramsci died in 1937 at forty-six, days after his release. His ideas became foundational for cultural workers everywhere, who understood with him that the fight for a new world is waged in culture as well as in the streets.

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