The fact that Antonio Gramsci, a hunchbacked Sardinian communist who spent the final eleven years of his life in a fascist prison, ended up laminated on a trading card and tucked into sociology study packs sold at American universities is almost absurd. And yet, here we are. The card is real. It is carried by students. And depending on who you ask, it’s either the most egregious act of ideological smuggling ever printed on cardstock or the best tradition of critical education.
Born in 1891 in the small Sardinian town of Ales, Gramsci was one of seven children in a family that was familiar with poverty. On a scholarship, he attended the University of Turin, where the city transformed him. In contrast to rural Sardinia, Turin was industrial, organized, and politically active in the early 20th century. The skyline was dominated by the FIAT factories. Employees were starting to recognize their power as a group. Gramsci observed, made notes, and eventually gave up writing about politics as a journalist to become a politician. He led the Italian Communist Party until Mussolini had him arrested in 1926. During his trial, the prosecutor allegedly declared, “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” The brain continued to function. We now refer to the more than 3,000 pages of political and cultural analysis it produced while incarcerated as the Prison Notebooks.
Gramsci earned his spot on the flashcard because of those notebooks, particularly his theory of cultural hegemony. In its most basic form, the idea is this: violence is not the primary means by which ruling classes hold onto power. They uphold it by making their beliefs seem natural, inevitable, and unquestionable. Schools, universities, newspapers, and places of worship are all places where a certain worldview is propagated to such an extent that most people never consider questioning it. In other words, the dominated learn to accept their own dominance.
When sociology teachers incorporate Gramsci into their curricula, it seems as though they are teaching more than just history. Students are being given a lens through which all of the institutions they have ever trusted may appear to be different. That is not an act of neutrality. It wasn’t intended to be.
Physically, the card itself is unremarkable. typical shiny coating. A small photo, typically the well-known 1916 image of a young Gramsci wearing a jacket and appearing serious. His name, his dates, a line or two about hegemony. However, there is a political undertone to what is printed there that most educational materials try very hard to avoid. Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and possibly Robert Merton are among the other cards in the sociology deck. These intellectuals posed important social questions, but their theories are not frequently characterized as liberating by one side of the political spectrum and dangerous by the other.
Gramsci is in a truly distinct realm. Labor organizers, civil rights activists, and academic departments that want their students to see themselves as potential agents of social change rather than passive recipients of knowledge have all used his concept of the “organic intellectual”—the idea that every social class produces its own thinkers who help articulate and defend its interests. The right-wing Republicans have taken notice. More than any other theorist, Gramsci is mentioned by opponents of what they refer to as “cultural Marxism” in educational institutions. Unbelievably, he has turned into a well-known villain in school board meetings from Florida to Idaho.
When you look at this objectively, you’ll notice how little of that culture war rhetoric connects to what Gramsci actually wrote. He was not calling for anything to be overthrown violently. In many respects, his theory of the “war of position”—the protracted, patient process of creating intellectual and cultural alternatives to the prevailing order—was advice to be patient. Through education and the development of new forms of common sense, change occurs gradually. Depending on your prior commitments, that is either fundamentally democratic or highly subversive.
It’s still unclear if the card’s controversy will force it into more classrooms or if it will eventually be discreetly taken out of the required course materials. There is no doubt that Gramsci would have fully grasped the dynamic. He devoted his professional life to examining the precise ways in which concepts are incorporated into or removed from official culture, including which concepts are deemed dangerous and which are accepted as normal. In a small way, the flashcard debate serves as an illustration of the theory that is written on the card. That is either a warning or a lovely irony, and most likely both at once.
