Do not surrender to despair or hope

Marx analyzed the dynamics by which employers profit from workers’ labor, predicting that this exploitation would inevitably spark a revolution. A logical conclusion, it would seem—yet most workers have not revolted over the past hundred years, nor are they revolting today. Marx also predicted that European societies with the highest proportion of workers, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, would move toward socialism. Yet they turned to fascism, while the socialist revolution took place in Russian society, which had a low proportion of workers. This contradiction preoccupied the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. He spent his years in Mussolini’s prisons analysing it and concluded that authorities exercise not only coercive, material, violent hegemony but also cultural […]