/lit/ - Literature

>>16586883
>he[Gramsci] learned the lesson of the fascists, the lesson of ‘corporatism’, which is the true original of his theory of ‘hegemony’. Society, he realized, is composed of a thousand small institutions, a thousand associations, a thousand patterns of communication and response. To reach into every one of these and to impose upon them – while safeguarding the hegemonic power that they contain – the iron discipline of party leadership: this is the secret of politics. is is what had led the fascists to power and what had formed, for the first time since the birth of the modern Italian state, the unity about a common purpose that gave form and coherence to the mass of followers, and also power and principle to the vanguard party that governed them
>In short, the theory of the Prison Notebooks is the true theory of fascism: of the power that had pre-empted Gramsci’s ambition, by realizing it in other hands. When, in an early article, Gramsci described the proletariat as making up an ideal unity, a fascio, he anticipated in his hopes precisely the form of social order that was later to be achieved by his rival. The philosophy of praxis – so like the ‘philosophical dynamism’ of Mussolini and, like that philosophy, influenced through and through by Georges Sorel’s apologies for violence – retains its charm for the intellectual precisely because it promises both power over the masses and a mystic identity with them. But that is the promise of fascism, and if the left needs constantly to identify the fascist as the single enemy we need look no further for an explanation. For what better way to conceal one’s intentions than to describe them as the intentions of the enemy?
>Gramsci’s importance for us today lies in his resolute attempt to lift the work of revolution out of the streets and factories into the realm of high culture. He redesigned the left-wing programme as a cultural revolution, one that could be conducted without violence and whose site would be the universities, theatres, lecture halls and schools where the intellectuals and their primary audience. The work of revolution was henceforth to involve an attack on the old curriculum and the works of art, literature and criticism that belonged to it. It was to be a work of intellectual subversion, exposing the power networks, the structures of domination, that lie concealed within the high culture of our civilization, in order to liberate the voices that have been oppressed by it. And such has been the new curriculum in the humanities ever since.