Aleksandra Alekseenko Alekseenko itibaren Kel, Gujarat 393050, India itibaren Kel, Gujarat 393050, India

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I can't really decide if I like it or not. The only thing I actually like is Patch. The storyline is mediocre and I feel like its lacking ... Something. I can't even put my finger on what I'm missing in this. I'm so flustered, I just don't even know what else to say about this book. I'm conflicted right now :-/.

When I first read this book in highschool I hated it and thought it was excruciatingly boring. But now I love it!

Okay, stop me if i'm wrong. Gramsci is a critic of revolutions, taking an anarchist’s stance in that a state-structure will eventually obfuscate revolutionary goals on the basis of those-in-power's personal interest. He most closely dissects the Russian Revolution as the most recent (and successful) revolution to his time, though thoroughly criticizes Italian government and state as well (he was in their prison, after all). His complaint is that revolutionaries become invested in personal interest once they come to power. The remodeling of state for the specific interests of those in power develops a purely ‘economic-corporate’ economy, with no basis for human need, and Gramsci describes this as ‘the worst kind of feudalism.’ He praises the Jacobins in the 1790s of France for violently quashing any party to be reactionary towards the revolution, including revolutionaries who had seemingly changed. This violent period, where every one and their mother were guillotined gave way to the Napoleonic Wars, because the anarchism got so out of control it elapsed into chaos. To avoid this chaos, he implores cultural identity to be drawn for all classes. He says a nation must be formed nationally before it is deemed international. The growth must be organic and humanistic. Peasants and intellectuals chose their own culture, it grows from them and is accepted as national character: this is the dispersion of hegemony. The basis for Gramsci is the ability of the individual: A proletarian, no matter how intelligent, no matter how fit to become a man of culture, is forced either to squander his qualities on some other activity, or else to become a rebel and autodidact—i.e.(apart from some notable exceptions) a mediocrity, a man who cannot give all he could have given had he been completed and strengthened by the discipline of school. Culture is a privilege. Education is a privilege. And we do not want it to be so. All young people should be equal before culture. Accessibility is key. He believes in the power of contradiction, the dialectical necessity for difference: In life no act remains without consequences, and to believe in one theory rather than another has its own particular impact on action. Even an error leaves traces of itself, to the extent that its acceptance and promulgation can delay( but certainly not prevent) the attainment of an end. And that the ability to impart knowledge and progress comes not from the state’s implementation of culture, but from individual growth. He is a liberal, which by his definition makes him an economist. He believes in individual decisions to govern necessity. The necessity for that freedom: man knows himself, he knows how much his individual will can be worth, and how it can be made more powerful in that, by obeying, by disciplining itself to necessity, it finally dominates necessity itself, identifying it with its own ends. Who knows himself? Not man in general, but he who undergoes the yoke of necessity.