Prison Notebooks

and primarily focuses on cultural questions as the vehicle for social, societal, economic change downstream.

And for those of you who don't know, Antonio Gramsci is this guy who was an Italian communist who was imprisoned under Mussolini, who stayed in prison for 20 years, wrote this thing called the Prison Notebooks.

And in them, he basically elucidated that the Marxian paradigm of seizing the material means of production by the worker for a proletariat state ultimately do not harbor.

First of all, it's not as an effective vehicle for revolution, nor is it efficacious in the long term.

Gramsci died in 1937, but in the 10 years he was in prison, his brain never stopped working.

During that time, he wrote The Prison Notebooks, which were over 3,000 pages of history, analysis, and political theory.

In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci asked a question that is still being asked today.

Why did the communist revolution succeed in Russia but fail everywhere else? Gramsci postulated that in the West, the nucleus of political power is not in the state, governments, police, or in armies.

It is in the culture.

Well, you know, as a socialist, it's important to have an understanding of capitalism, right? It's an important to understand the state as a, as an entity, as a thing, as a concept.

Um, and you know, for those that are interested, Gramsci, which is a tough read, I'm not gonna lie, um, his book Prison Notebooks is incredibly difficult to read.

But some of the thoughts that he brought up are that the state and all of its institutions are a representation of ruling class power, and all that goes into manufacturing consent, and all that goes into what we, you and I and everyone else, deem as common sense.

So when you think about what the state is there for, the state is there to maximize shareholder value for capital.