Antonio Gramsci, Italian philosopher and thinker and founder of the Italian Communist Party, argues in his most important work, the Prison Notebooks, that power is not sustained only by force, but by cultural hegemony. It's one of the least obvious, and most useful, keys to understanding Animal Farm.
Why Europe couldn't copy Russia
Gramsci thought that it was not possible to start a revolution in Europe using the same method as the Russians, the class struggle and the workers' revolution, that is, transformation through direct economic infrastructure. He argued that it was necessary to apply a different methodology, more effective for the European context: culture. This is why he is considered the great thinker of the cultural revolution, distinct from the more orthodox Marxist tradition.
For Gramsci, reaching power and true social transformation requires first going through culture. His is the idea of the organic intellectual: a figure organically linked to a class, capable of shaping a society's worldview from within, not just criticizing it from outside.
What is cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the way in which the ruling class shapes society's worldview to maintain its dominance, without relying exclusively on coercion. Gramsci explains that the bourgeoisie uses institutions such as companies and schools to create consensus, a manufactured consent that makes people accept, and even defend, a system that does not favor their own interests.
Control of speech is an essential tool of political domination.
This is the point at which Gramsci and Orwell, writing from different traditions and decades, reach remarkably close conclusions.
Squealer as hegemony in action
In Animal Farm, Gramsci's mechanism appears clearly in the figure of Squealer, the pig who controls information and rewrites history to sustain Napoleon's power. Just as the Gramscian bourgeoisie uses the school and the company, Napoleon manipulates the farm narrative to keep the animals submissive, without having to resort only to the violence of dogs.
Gramsci's concept of manufactured consent also appears in the way sheep repeat slogans without reflection, reinforcing the dominant ideology even without understanding it. Orwell and Gramsci agree on this essential point: control of speech is a tool of domination as powerful as brute force, and often more lasting.
The bridge with Latin America
It is important to know Gramsci's thought to understand a difference that usually goes unnoticed: the socialism of the Soviet Union is not the same as the socialism, or communism, practiced in Latin America. Many political leaders from Latin American communist and socialist parties came to power starting with the ministries of education, culture and health, precisely because it is these ministries that create culture, and it is culture, in the Gramscian reading, that changes a society based on thought, even before any change in the economic infrastructure.
Understanding this distinction is essential to avoid reading every socialist experience as an identical repetition of the Soviet model that Animal Farm satirizes. Orwell's fable targets a specific regime; Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony explains a different strategy, one that continues to shape the politics of entire countries to this day. To see how this language control mechanism is radicalized in Orwell's later work, it is worth checking out what is newspeak, and to follow up on how this all connects to the original Russian Revolution, the article on the Russian Revolution mirrored on the farm closes the complete historical picture.
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What is cultural hegemony for Gramsci?
It is the idea that power is not sustained by force alone, but by the way the ruling class shapes the worldview of the entire society, using institutions such as school, business and the media to create consensus around their own interests.
What is Gramsci's organic intellectual?
He is the figure thought of by Gramsci as an agent of cultural transformation: an intellectual organically linked to a social class, capable of spreading a new vision of the world through culture, and not just theorizing about society from the outside.
How did Gramsci influence politics in Latin America?
Gramsci argued that, in Europe, the revolution could not be carried out using the same method as the Russians, class struggle and workers' revolution, but through a slower cultural transformation. This logic influenced Latin American leaders, who prioritized ministries of education, culture and health as a route to access and consolidate power.
Go deeper: The Russian Revolution in Animal Farm · The characters in Animal Farm and who they represent · What is Newspeak? · Macbeth and Raskolnikov: the anatomy of guilt
Source lesson (YouTube): A Revolução dos Bichos, de George Orwell (NousCast)