Antonio Gramsci: A communist revolutionary, organizer, and theorist

On January 1, 1916, just about 10 years before Mussolini’s fascist regime imprisoned him, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci published a short article in Avanti! (Forward!)–the Italian Socialist Party’s (PSI) daily newspaper–about why he “hates” New Year’s Day. Gramsci thought it was a forced celebration and said he “would like every hour of my life to be new.” Gramsci connected this desire with socialism, writing, “I await socialism for this reason too.” This short article gets circulated on the left every year, which is much less frequently than his key political contributions get thrown around. Indeed, Gramsci’s political writings have a long and contested life. Struggles over the legacy of Gramsci began before his body was cold. An original thinker, Gramsci made substantial contributions to Marxist theory–from inside the Marxist movement–including the concepts of hegemony and the organic intellectual. More than simply an theorist, then, Gramsci was an active participant in the class struggles of his time. As a member and crucial figure within first the PSI (which he joined in 1913) and, later, as a leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), Gramsci helped spur the occupation of factories in Turin, founded the PCI at Livorno, and represented the Italian section of the Communist International at several of its key meetings in the 1920s. Capture by the fascist government of Mussolini put an end to his concrete involvement in the class struggle, but not to his theoretical contributions. The latter were especially concerning for the fascist government in the political showtrial, during which the state prosecutor said that, “For 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning.” Clearly the fascist prosecutors and judges understood that an idea can be a weapon for liberation as much as a rifle. What was eventually published as the Prison Notebooks, scribbled in the incredibly desperate conditions of a fascist prison cell, are a testament to Gramsci’s strength of will. On April 27, 1937, that strength of will gave out. Gramsci died in prison; his Prison Notebooks unpublished, unfinished, and incomplete. The incomplete nature of the Prison Notebooks represents a major problem for would-be scholars of Gramsci as well as revolutionaries looking to his work. As notebooks, they’re a compilation of essays–many of which are fragmentary–rather than a systematically developed line of thought. Moreover, Gramsci used deliberately difficult and non-Marxist terminology for the purpose of evading prison censors. All the troubles of translation and interpretation are exemplified in the confused application of Gramsci’s writing in practice. One of the great contradictions of Gramsci is that his thought has been consistently used to justify a rejection of revolutionary class struggle, despite having struggled in life so ferociously against reformist opportunism and ultra-left voluntarism as a long time member of the Communist Party. This article is not an attempt to wrestle with the long legacy of debates over interpretations of Gramsci–some of which are more academic and others of which have had serious political consequences–but rather to serve as an introduction to Gramsci’s life, historical context, and key ideas for a new emerging layer of “organic intellectuals.” We’ll focus in particular on Gramsci’s involvement in the revolutionary struggles of Italy in order to situate two of his key concepts: hegemony and the organic intellectual. We begin, then, with the the historical context that informed these concepts. Read the full article here: https://liberationschool.org/antonio-gramsci/