Antonio Gramsci - Life of a Revolutionary - Giuseppe Fiori, Tom Nairn - translator Audiobook

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• 
  alnilam
  July 23rd, 2021
  

  One fundamental question motivated Antonio Gramsci throughout his life:

  Why had it proven so difficult for Marxists to promote revolution in Western Europe and America?

  The answer to that question is simple: the majority of European and American workers didn’t believe a word of what the Marxists had to say and neither did they want what they had to offer. Quite simply, workers didn’t want to be spoon-fed and led by a tiny elite (or a “revolutionary vanguard”) or very privileged Marxists-Leftists into a giant Gulag like the Soviet Union.

  So what were Marxists like Gramsci going to do about that terrible non-revolutionary situation?

  Simple: they were to “take over the institutions” and bring about “cultural Marxism” (the Frankfurt School’s own term) from the top. In other words, Gramsci offered his own version of what the equally totalitarian — at least at that time — Fabians had already done (from the 1900 onwards) in the UK.

  And hasn’t cultural Marxism been successful! Students who were once intent on violent revolution later became the leaders of the BBC, members of the Labour Party, journalists at the Guardian or New Statesman, charity workers, top lawyers, and even activists or propagandists in the red sections of the churches…

  Antonio Gramsci: Take over the Institutions! by Paul Austin Murphy | Apr 26, 2014 | https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/04/antonio_gramsci_take_over_the_institutions.html

  Antonio Gramsci - Life of a Revolutionary - Giuseppe Fiori, Tom Nairn - translator
• 
  alnilam
  July 23rd, 2021
  

  More than a 100 years ago, prominent Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. [Socialism is] religion in the sense that it too is a faith with its mystics and rituals; religion because it has substituted for the consciousness of the transcendental God of the Catholics, the faith in man and in his great strengths as a unique spiritual reality”. Equalizing an ideology with religion was pretty novel back then. However, Gramsci was talking about religion not as it is commonly understood — i.e., the relationship between God and men — but as a collection of religious attributes and rituals. In his point of view, socialism was godless religion, the cult of the messianic Marx.

  At the same time, Gramsci understood that socialism (and leftism in general), like any other dogma, is immune to empirical, rational challenges because, by definition, its postulates are untestable — untestable not because it is impossible to conduct such tests, but because followers of leftist ideology reject any idea of such a test in principle. (By the way, this is something leftists have in common with Muslims.) They are mostly true believers; they aggressively reject any attempts to test the foundations of their dogmatic beliefs…

  Left-Wing Ideology: A Cult, a Religion, or Science? by Gary Gindler | May 5, 2019 | https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/leftwing_ideology_a_cult_a_religion_or_science.html

  Antonio Gramsci - Life of a Revolutionary - Giuseppe Fiori, Tom Nairn - translator
• 
  alnilam
  July 23rd, 2021
  

  > The posthumous publication of his ‘Prison Notebooks’ established him as a major thinker whose influence continues to increase.

  The question is, “Antonio Gramsci’s influence continues to increase” among whom, exactly? — and, assuming it is true, why the author makes it sound like it is a good thing?

  (ditto “the substantial achievement of one of the most important figures in Western Marxism” — really? what good came out of the “substantial achievement” in question, and for whom, exactly?)

  Antonio Gramsci - Life of a Revolutionary - Giuseppe Fiori, Tom Nairn - translator
• 
  toadmanga
  July 25th, 2021
  

  

  Thanks for the book!

  Antonio Gramsci - Life of a Revolutionary - Giuseppe Fiori, Tom Nairn - translator
• 
  ednice
  August 2nd, 2021
  

  

  Great man

  Antonio Gramsci - Life of a Revolutionary - Giuseppe Fiori, Tom Nairn - translator

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