Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci analyzed religion as a historical and political phenomenon, emphasizing its role in organizing the worldview of the masses and in constructing cultural hegemony. In the Prison Notebooks, he defined Marxism as a “religion” in a non-confessional sense, meaning as a worldview that, to assert itself, must connect theory and practice. Marxism thus fully participates in the religious conflict that runs through modernity, in the sense that it, like traditional religions, addresses the masses and attempts to provide an answer to their demand for coherence between thought and action. However, the response of Marxism must be situated on a completely new level: it cannot present itself as a new “orthodoxy” that replaces old religious beliefs. On the contrary, Marxism must make the absence of a pre-written orthodoxy a constant reference point for its philosophy of practice.