Gramsci and the Struggle for Democratic Communism

In this, episode 7, I explore the British cultures of neo-liberalism between 1997 until the present day, using a Gramscian optic to understand the British crisis, political and economic.

In this, episode 6, I discuss Stuart Hall's Gramscian analysis of Thatcherism in the 1980s as a way of developing Grasmci's analysis of the political management of antagonisms in class democracies.

In this, episode 5. I discuss Gramsci's thinking in relation to three of his contemporaries from the United States - all New Yorkers. They are the philosopher John Dewey, the public relations genius Edward Bernays and the newspaper man and philosopher Walter Lippmann. None of these figures are interested in developing the kind of working class public sphere that we saw Trotsky wanted to develop. But coming from the most advanced and dense mass communications space on the planet, they have plenty to tell us about how elite hegemony works in class democracies.

In this, episode 4, I am going to look at Leon Trotsky’s book Problems of Everyday Life, which explores the importance of culture in the context of revolutionary political change. Along the way we can compare his thinking with Antonio Gramsci for whom culture was also a critical political question.  This episode illustrates the profound democratic ethos of communism, which has yet to find a political form of rule that can express that ethos while managing a transition away from capitalism.

In this, episode 3, I am going to be talking about Lenin’s contribution to the concept of hegemony,  how he developed it as a critique of what he called ‘economism’, and as a strategic guide for revolutionary practice. But there are limits to Lenin’s thinking about hegemony and I will use Gramsci's take on it to explore these limits and their practical political consequences.

In this, episode 2, I am going to give a brief introduction to Gramsci’s biography and then talk about his analysis of Italian history from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s and the rise of fascism.  I will talk of elite hegemony, revolutionary hegemony and passive revolution: key Gramscian terms.

In this, episode 1, I will consider how it was that communism and democracy diverged so radically in the twentieth century – to the extent that putting those two words, communism and democracy, together, is likely to raise at the very least, a sceptical eyebrow or two, if not outright guffaws of laughter. 

How can Gramsci help us re unite the words 'democracy' and 'communism'? I explore this question in a series of 9 episodes based on my recently published book.