Comrades

Karl Marx

I'm sure this revolutionary philosopher and founder of Communism needs no introduction, so I'll just say what Marx's work means to me: it means the world. A die-hard Marxist until my dying day, I loved the guy and everything he stood for.

That said, I did make some crucial changes to the framework Marx proposed in his magnum opus Capital (sometimes spelled the German way, Kapital, which makes it even scarier). What kind of changes, you ask? Well, I insisted that more emphasis needed to be placed on culture—including language, folklore, visual art, theater, opera, even pulp literature—than Marx himself thought.

Again, this is why cultural theorists of all kinds love to love me—and why they learn so much from me to this day. Now, some of them tend to get carried away and act like power's all about culture, as if making art always meant creating revolution (or supporting hegemony). To these well-meaning but misguided culture-enthusiasts, I say: remember that even though I placed a lot of emphasis on culture, I remained a Marxist to the end, and that means that I didn't think cultural change alone would be enough to change the world.

Read my work carefully, and you'll see that I offer an understanding of how culture is connected to—and even inseparable from—economics, politics, and history. So it doesn't even really makes sense to speak of cultural change happening before world change. The way I imagine it, change has to be global in scope, and it has to involve culture, economics, politics, and history all together and at the same time.

So you see: I have read and reread my Marx.

Walter Benjamin

For those of you who don't already know him, Benjamin is one big bad cultural critic. He's a much more literary—as in fancy shmancy—writer than I am, and his thoughts tend to be highfalutin', whereas mine stay close to the facts on the ground. But whatever our differences, Benjamin and I still have a lot in common.

We both died untimely deaths under Fascism, and most importantly, we both tried to assign culture a key place in Marxist critical thought—no easy task during those dark times of political upheaval and economic turmoil. (Great Depression and World War II, anyone?) Our books are good to read, and they belong on the same shelf.

Raymond Williams

Raymond is remembered as the founder of cultural studies, a school of thought and set of critical approaches that emphasize the culture impacts all aspects of life.

How did cultural studies come about? Traditional theory was content to focus on the products of high culture. It loved nothing more than to breathe in the rarefied air of the ivory tower, the art museum, the opera house, the national theater, and so on. It was a total snooze-fest, in other words. At least that's how Raymond felt about it.

Against old-school cultural criticism, Williams insisted that culture should be redefined as something happening everywhere, at all levels of society, all the time. Culture wasn't the exclusive property of the elite, in other words; it belonged to everyone, and it was ordinary.

This meant that in order to be responsible (translation: politically righteous), critics needed to take stock of all levels of culture, not just those levels that are supposedly highest. Here's where I came in, as you can guess: I'd already blazed the trail and set the precedent that made Raymond's work possible in my discussions of folklore, the national-popular, common sense, and all the rest. Take a look at my "Buzzwords" for more on that.

Stuart Hall

This Jamaican-born, UK-based theorist is an ally of Williams as well as a steadfast supporter of my legacy.

Hall's version of cultural studies builds on and shares a lot with Williams's, but it's expanded to address questions of race in addition to issues of class—pretty important, if you ask me. It's pretty gratifying to know that my work has shaped the thinking of so many forward-looking theoretical rock stars like Hall.

Edward Said

The big daddy of postcolonial theory relied on me at key moments in his career. For one thing, his Representations of the Intellectual gets underway with a discussion of my ideas about intellectuals. These ideas provide Said with a springboard for his arguments for politically engaged intellectual activity.

There is also a beautiful and highly influential discussion of my work in Said's great book Culture and Imperialism that's well worth checking out. Here, Said makes my thoughts on Southern Italy (as laid out in my game-changing but unfinished essay "On Some Aspects of the Southern Question") relevant to the colonial and postcolonial worlds.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Her Majesty the Queen of Theory keeps returning to and citing my work, and I'm grateful to her for keeping my ideas in circulation.

Early in her career, Spivak looked to my work in her effort to theorize the experience of the subaltern. More recently, she has been especially appreciative of my educational theory, as her book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization shows. In my Prison Notebooks and journalistic writings, I stressed the role of schools and other small-scale, face-to-face educational efforts in effecting large-scale social and political change, and Spivak follows my lead. I couldn't be prouder.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

He's from Argentina; she's from Belgium. Their last names are a mouthful, but don't let that put you off; their work's important and impactful. Together, this dynamic duo penned Hegemony and Socialist Strategy back in the heady days of the mid-1980s.

The book's title already betrays its radically democratic authors' debt to my thinking and writing. I'm everywhere in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Check out L&M's discussion of "The Gramscian Watershed," for example. They say I creating a watershed moment in theory: not a bad claim to fame, right? These pages give a helpful account of the role that my work has played in the broad context of European Marxism.

L&M also rely on my work to help them formulate their key concept of articulation, which is "a means to understanding the struggle to fix meaning and define reality temporarily" in "a world without foundations, without a transcendental signified, without eternal truths or given meanings" (source).

They also combine my theories with linguists' ideas when they theorize articulation. So it's not as if Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is just the Gramsci show; I share space with other thinkers working in different fields. But hey, I'm an eclectic and wide-ranging thinker myself, so I can get down with a little mashing-up. Anyway, remember that I trained as a linguist, so I especially don't mind L&M's taking linguistic liberties.

(For proof of my eclecticism, see my Prison Notebooks in a complete edition. This will let you get a sense of how free-ranging my work was before the editors tried to make sense of my notebook entries.)

Rivals

A sure-fire way to get on my bad side: show sympathy with fascists, Nazis, or other enemies of Marx's utopian state. Don't even get me started on Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini's in-house philosopher and sometime Italian Minister of Education.

Carl Schmitt may have been even more sinister. He developed theories of sovereign power that run directly counter to my understanding of the hegemonic nature of power. Whereas I tried to show how power is diffuse and mobile, operating at the level of ideology as well as at that of government, Schmitt thought that it really all boiled down to sovereign decision—to a leader's ability to say, at a crucial instant, yea or nay.

Given his ties to the Nazi regime, you'd be surprised how influential Schmitt still is in political and even cultural theory today.

Benedetto Croce, for his part, kept his distance from the regime, at least officially. But effectively, his "apolitical" stance was a political one, in that he didn't think and act against Mussolini and his goons, preferring to stay safe in his ivory tower instead. I say anyone not against the Mussolini was with him. I think intellectuals should be engaged, not cloistered away in academia.