Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist theorist, ideologue, philosopher and journalist, has long been associated exclusively with communism and socialism. The late Italian thinker’s ideas have travelled the world, influencing elites and mass publics alike.
Remarkably, Gramsci has gained a following among the radical right as well, meaning among those whose political aspirations are in many ways the exact opposite of Gramsci’s Marxism. How?
As someone whose life and thoughts now appear in graphic novels and TikTok videos, Gramsci needs little introduction. A founding member and leader of the Communist Party of Italy, Gramsci spent his entire professional life fighting for workers’ rights and a more progressive society. This made him an enemy of the state.
In 1926, after a rigged trial, Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime sentenced Gramsci to 20 years in prison. During this time, he wrote his famous Prison Notebooks.
With luck and help from family, Prison Notebooks was published posthumously, though not before the early Cold War years.
Translations into major languages were generally slow. However, by the 1970s, Gramsci’s writings were sparking vigorous debates in places as diverse as Canada, Chile, Cuba and Czechoslovakia — while being strategically ignored in Communist China — and not just among those Gramsci would say were traditional intellectuals.
Gramsci fans
A case in point is an episode involving the Brazilian soccer legend Sócrates, captain in the 1980s of the national team who crossed the Atlantic to play in Italy for AC Fiorentina, Florence’s team.
When journalists asked him which Italian players he admired the most, Sócrates is said to have replied: “I do not know them. I came here to read Gramsci in the original language and study the history of the workers’ movement.”
In Florence today, there’s a Gramsci mural covering an entire apartment building. Created by the controversy-courting artist Jorit Agoch, the mural has upset a segment of the Italian right, notably including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s “post-fascist” Brothers of Italy party.
Local political theatrics aside, the right-wingers have a point here. In addition to being a national anti-fascist hero, Gramsci was in fact a dedicated Communist-Leninist and therefore an opponent of the kind of formal liberal democracy that Italians evidently cherish.
Yet countless right-wingers seem to be drawn to Gramsci’s writings precisely for this reason. To them, Gramsci’s revolutionary thought is not a threat so much as a resource that can be used in their own struggle against liberal values and institutions.
Worldwide appeal
Rather than confined to particular regional or linguistic contexts, an embrace of Gramsci can be found across the globe, connecting the late American “paleoconservative” Samuel Francis to the “Gramsci of the Brazilian Right,” the late Olavo de Carvalho, the Franco-Beninese activist Kémi Séba and the assorted culture warriors on India’s far right.
The origins of this thinking are European and can be found in a right-wing reaction to global uprisings in 1968 and the perceived strength of the New Left.
The key players were French: Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Dominque Venner and other figures of the Nouvelle Droite. They met in Nice in 1968 to establish the Group for Research and Studies for European Civilization, best known for its French acronym GRECE — Le Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne.
In setting out to recast far-right thought and action, the New Right thinkers borrowed ideas widely, including from their New Left opponents.
This led them to Gramsci and his concept of “hegemony” that argued the capitalist class cannot dominate politically without controlling not only a state and its economy, but also the arts, the media and civil society institutions at large.
Modern-day influence
The Gramsci adherents of the right took his teachings to heart.
Rather than fantasizing about winning power through elections, they turned their attention to a “war of position.” That was Gramsci’s term for a protracted, multi-faceted struggle to build the intellectual, ideological, cultural and institutional foundations for a new political elite and a new political order to eventually replace the old.
To these aims, they added their own ideas, such as the need to fight this war in a “metapolitical” domain, with an eye on destroying the very concept of liberal modernity.
Soon enough, New Right communities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy were annexing Gramsci in a similar fashion. By the 1990s, this ideological project spread to other parts of the world, and is now almost certainly influencing the shape of contemporary right-wing populism.
We see this in the presence of Gramsci’s theories and his phrases in speeches and publications.
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who studied Gramsci in the 1980s, rarely misses an opportunity to speak of the need to fight liberal-left ideas, parties and movements.
Elsewhere, Gramsci’s presence is more implicit. In the 900-page Mandate for Leadership, a document published by Project 2025 — the staffing and policy planning organization aimed at institutionalizing “Trumpism” — there’s no shortage of Gramsci talking points expressed in the inimitable style of the New Right in the United States.
Gramsci’s relevance today
Right-wing Gramsci adherents simplify and vulgarize Gramsci’s thought, reducing it to slogans and simple formulas. In doing so, they are doing what Gramsci expected right-wingers to do under democratic conditions — protect the capitalist status quo while framing “the left” as the cause of all manner of social, economic and geopolitical ills.
This should be another reason to read Gramsci.
The existential climate crisis aside, many of the problems that concerned Gramsci then are eerily similar to the problems that concern us today — a failing global economic system, multiplying military conflict, massive geopolitical shifts and the hollowing of representative political institutions.
This article builds on a book co-authored with Rita Abrahamsen et al: World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Both are part of a larger research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant number 435-2017-1311). Details available at https://globalright.ca
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
