The misuses of Gramsci
Quoted by charlatans to provide an air of magic, praised for his ambiguities, more revered than read: David Broder calls for a serious engagement with a political strategy that still has considerable relevance
To accuse others of ‘misuses’ of Antonio Gramsci might sound like the defence of some stale orthodoxy. But the challenge is, if anything, to assert the communist character of the Sardinian Marxist’s actual work, in the face of its dominant political and academic uses.
In a famous 1976 book Perry Anderson counted Gramsci among the first generation of so-called “western Marxists” - an array of thinkers counterposed to the “construction of socialism” in the eastern bloc.