means antonio gramsci was an italian marxist theorist who argued ruling classes stay in power not just through force but by winning cultural consent, a concept he called hegemony.

from born 1891 in sardinia, gramsci co-founded the italian communist party and was imprisoned by mussolini in 1926 under a fascist prosecutor who said the goal was to stop his brain from functioning for twenty years; he wrote his major work anyway, smuggling out over 3,000 pages of prison notebooks before dying in 1937 at 46.