Gramsci for Aotearoa – Lesson 1: Who was Gramsci, and why read him now?
A socialist introduction from Aotearoa, not a museum tour of an Italian Marxist.
What problem was Gramsci trying to solve?
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist, journalist, and organiser who spent much of his life studying a stubborn problem: if capitalism is so unstable and brutal, why doesn’t it simply collapse under its own contradictions?
Why do so many people adapt to it, defend it, or treat it as the only realistic option?
Gramsci looked at moments when the ruling class was clearly failing, yet the old order held on. He wanted to know how power manages to feel normal even when it is obviously harmful.
Beyond force: power that gets inside everyday life
The usual story about power is simple: states use violence, bosses use discipline, police and prisons do the rest.
Gramsci didn’t deny that. But he argued that force alone can’t explain stable domination.
Ruling classes also govern through leadership, culture, habits, and belief. Power gets inside daily life. It shapes what counts as respectable, sensible, or “just the way things are”.
People accept arrangements that hurt them because those arrangements are backed by a whole web of ideas, institutions, and routines that make them feel inevitable.
Why this matters in Aotearoa
In New Zealand, we’re soaked in the language of moderation and realism.
Inequality is “regrettable but necessary”.
Landlords are “providing a service”.
Private schools are “just another choice”.
Austerity is “fiscal responsibility”.
Māori demands are “special treatment” if they go beyond symbolic recognition.
Behind that soft language sits colonial land theft, wage labour, landlord power, class hierarchy, and a social order that sorts people by postcode, school, accent, and family wealth.
Gramsci is useful here because he teaches us to look at how this order becomes common sense, not just how it is enforced.
Institutions that teach us what’s “normal”
Gramsci’s big move is to treat schools, media, churches, NGOs, universities, and culture as part of the political battlefield.
They don’t just sit outside politics describing the world. They help produce the world as it is — by repeating, decorating, and normalising particular ways of thinking.
From a New Zealand socialist perspective, that means asking questions like:
How do schools teach us to see success and failure?
How do news outlets frame strikes, welfare, and housing?
How do arts institutions rely on corporate or philanthropic money that shapes what is “acceptable”?
How do NGOs and “community leaders” soften demands to fit what funders and officials find comfortable?
Gramsci gives us language for this: hegemony — the active work of organising consent around a ruling-class project.
We’ll dig into that word properly in Lesson 2.
How we’ll use Gramsci in this course
This series is not about treating Gramsci like an academic monument.
We’ll use him as a toolkit:
to read New Zealand institutions with sharper eyes;
to think about education and culture as terrain of struggle, not neutral service delivery;
to ask what it would mean to build counter-hegemonic institutions of our own: unions, media, schools, arts spaces, marae-based education, and study circles that don’t simply reproduce the ruling story.
Throughout, the question is practical: what can socialist organisers, teachers, workers, students, and artists actually do with this?
Questions for you
Take a minute before you close this tab:
Where in your own life do you most often get told to “be realistic” about inequality, housing, pay, or climate?
Which institutions (school, workplace, media, arts, church, NGO, whānau) did the most work to teach you what a “normal life” should look like?
If you want to, reply to this email or drop a comment with a short answer. Part of this course is collecting those experiences, not just sending you theory.