Today the name of Antonio Gramsci is mainly associated with his Prison Notebooks. This vast and eclectic collection of fragmentary notes on an enormous range of topics continues to be studied in human sciences departments all over the world. Gramsci’s remarkable academic popularity – particularly in Italophone and Anglophone academia – is no doubt justified, but it might serve to create a misunderstanding about Gramsci’s life and work.
Gramsci, centrally, wanted to be a man of action as much as of thought. He was a political leader of high profile, at the head of the Italian Communist Party from 1924 to 1926 – the same party that for years, after the Second World War, was the largest communist party in the West. The exceptional circumstances of his incarceration cut him off from the world of action, and it was in a state of personal and political isolation that he wrote his Prison Notebooks.
Before his arrest, Gramsci wrote an enormous amount: he was an intellectual by temperament, a voracious reader and seemingly interested by all political events and cultural forms. He was a prolific journalist, who had a reputation for his panache and eloquence in writing. Nevertheless, when he was arrested in November 1926, he did not have a coherent oeuvre to his name.
As opposed to the authors of other ‘classics’ of the social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century – such as Max Weber or Emile Durkheim – Gramsci did not belong to the ‘academic’ type, and in fact he did not acquire a higher education diploma or degree. He was, as we will explore below, a political organizer and militant by calling, and he conceived the Prison Notebooks as a political project, as much as an intellectual one. Moreover, his prison writings display a very strong strategic dimension and questions of political practice are never far from his mind, as we will see later with, for instance, the notions of ‘war of position’ (Chapter 3) and ‘hegemony’ (Chapter 5).
Crucially, Gramsci’s thought developed on the basis of a life of political action and militancy. Gramsci’s thought is thus inextricably linked to his biography.1 This chapter aims to set out and contextualize the main events in Gramsci’s life, and to explore some important texts that Gramsci wrote before he was imprisoned.
Sardinian origins: Antonu su gobbu
On the topic of his roots, Gramsci once wrote to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht from Turi prison in 1931: ‘I myself am of no one race: my father was of recent Albanian origin … my mother is Sardinian on both sides’. ‘Despite these things’, he continues, ‘my cultural formation is basically Italian and this is my world here’.2
Antonio Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in Ales, a small town in Sardinia. It has often been supposed that Gramsci had peasant origins, but this is not true. At the time of the birth of his son ‘Nino’, Francesco ‘Ciccilo’ Gramsci was in fact a bureaucrat in the local civil administration. However, in 1897 disaster struck the Gramsci family when Francesco, the paterfamilias, was accused of embezzlement, extortion and counterfeiting. These accusations were never proved, and it seems Francesco was the victim of a local political vendetta aimed at punishing him for supporting the wrong candidate at a previous election.
Francesco was imprisoned from 1898 to 1904, and the consequences for his wife and seven children were nothing short of terrible. The home fell into a dire misery. Having sold the patch of land she had inherited from her family in order to pay the lawyer’s fee, Gramsci’s mother Peppina Marcias attempted somehow to ensure her children had sufficient food and a dignified life by working as a seamstress. The harsh trials of his childhood would leave a mark on Gramsci for a very long time. Among other things, he would develop a deep admiration for his mother, to whom he would often write letters from prison stamped with tenderness and respect.
It was also during this period of his childhood that the little Nino started to display symptoms of physical malformation. Seemingly due to Pott’s disease (a variant of tuberculosis), his spine developed abnormally. In an attempt to cure him, the town’s doctors ordered him to be suspended from a beam in the ceiling, regularly and for long hours. Nino thus endured the humiliation of this treatment – whose character is a sign of the relative social backwardness of Sardinia at the turn of the century in which Gramsci grew up – as well as the bullying of his schoolmates, as they threw stones at him in the schoolyard and called him ‘Antonu su gobbu’ (the hunchback).
However, Gramsci’s childhood health problems did not stop at his spine, and his physical state was so precarious that until 1914 his mother kept ready in the house the small coffin and little dress in which he was supposed to be buried. In short, life did not exactly smile on the young Gramsci. But he reacted to adversity with a determination and a sheer strength of will that was to characterize him throughout his entire existence. Nino suffered without complaint the long sessions suspended from the ceiling and, in order to develop his muscles and be able to fight back the assaults of his schoolmates, he built makeshift dumbbells from stones and an old broom handle. In 1902, he was forced, along with his older brother, to work in the local municipality’s offices. There Nino (who was 11 at the time) was compelled to carry heavy registers throughout the day, and spent his nights crying because the physical pain it caused him stayed with him long after he had returned home.
The fate of the young Gramsci, though, was being played out at school. In 1898, he was sent to school for the first time in Ghilarza, but he had to abandon his schoolwork at the end of his primary schooling to find a job and contribute to the family’s income. The release of his father in 1904 allowed Gramsci to return to his studies. Nino then attended the small middle school of Santu Lussurgiu and, succeeding in his exams, went in 1908 to the Dettori high school in the provincial capital of Cagliari. There he moved in with his older brother Gennaro, who was already a political militant and had, since 1906, been sending socialist pamphlets back to Nino.
At this time, Sardinia experienced a wave of political rebellion targeted at the Italian central State. It should be borne in mind that the country had only been unified a few decades previously, through the unification process of the Risorgimento (a historical event of great interest to Gramsci that we discuss at length below, particularly in Chapter 3). Moreover, the largely agricultural Sardinian economy was the direct victim of the protectionist policies that the regime had put in place in the interests of Northern industrial production. When troops were dispatched from the continent to quell the movement, the rebels welcomed them with the cry of ‘Continentals into the sea!’ As a young Sardinian, Gramsci was receptive to this political cause and his first political adherence was to the regionalism of the island of his birth. He would soon renounce this, after his arrival in Turin, but throughout his life he retained a keen interest in analysing the regional specificities of Italy and the geographical elements of local and national political struggles.
As a result of his diligence at school, Gramsci won a scholarship and entered the University of Turin in 1911. He selected a philology and linguistics curriculum, and his studies in these disciplines influenced some of the theoretical stances in the notebooks he would later fill up during his time in prison. However, Gramsci’s true passion at this time – and for the rest of his life – was politics. Eventually his political commitments and his activity as a journalist led him to give up his studies and leave the university behind.
In 1912, Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), which was affiliated to the Second International and in which Benito Mussolini was a prominent figure. Gramsci felt close to Mussolini at this time and notably sided with him in hostility to Italian imperialism in Libya. In 1914, at a point where the majority of the PSI advocated neutrality in the First World War, in one of his first published articles Gramsci defended Mussolini when the latter supported Italian participation in the conflict. Gramsci justified his stance in the name of the rejection of political passivity, of which ‘neutrality’ was in his eyes only one form, and one that he compared to Buddhist renunciation. A few years later, in the political pamphlet La Città futura (‘The city of the future’), he explained that ‘indifference is a powerful force in history. It operates passively but effectively’. Rejecting this, Gramsci wrote, ‘I am alive, I take sides. Hence I detest whoever does not, I hate indifference’.3 For Gramsci, indeed, living meant being partisan and taking sides.
In 1915, Gramsci joined the socialist weekly Il Grido del Popolo (‘The cry of the people’, a reference to Jules Vallès’s paper of the Paris Commune, Le Cri du Peuple). Two years later, a wave of arrests hit Left-wing circles in Turin after an attempt at insurrection, and Gramsci was catapulted to editor-in-chief of the paper. At the same time he was also the theatre critic of another socialist newspaper, Avanti! This is perhaps an early demonstration of Gramsci’s belief in the inextricable link between culture and politics.
Gramsci’s experience as a political journalist instilled in him a talent and a taste for polemics. He was later to write to Tatiana, while imprisoned in Turi:
My entire intellectual formation was of a polemical nature, so that it’s impossible for me to think ‘disinterestedly’ or to study for the sake of studying. Only rarely do I lose myself in a particular train of thought and analyse something for its inherent interest. Usually I have to engage in a dialogue, be dialectical, to arrive at some intellectual stimulation. I once told you how I hate tossing stones into the dark. I need an interlocutor, a concrete adversary.4
In another letter to Tatiana, from 1931, he would refer to his journalistic output somewhat dismissively, commenting that ‘these pages were turned out every day and should have … been forgotten immediately afterwards’.5 Gramsci’s self-criticism here is excessive, since we can find in the accumulation of articles he wrote at the time, albeit perhaps in half-shaped form, many intellectual incursions that would go on to furnish some of the essential matter of the Prison Notebooks.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 radicalized Gramsci.6 It was also the occasion for Gramsci to write one of his most famous pre-prison articles, the iconoclastically-titled ‘The Revolution against Capital’. According to Gramsci, the conquest of power by the Bolsheviks demonstrated that a proletarian revolution could take place in a country whose capitalism was still ‘primitive’ or ‘underdeveloped’, such as Russia – or Italy. Gramsci sees this as in conflict with certain of the historical forecasts in Marx’s Capital (1867), a work he sees as ‘contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations’. The Second International, for Gramsci, ran the risk of hypertrophying these ‘scoriae’ into a dogma centred on economic determinism. However, Gramsci sees Lenin and the Bolsheviks as being able to ‘live Marxist thought – that thought which is eternal’ without falling into the trap of converting Marxism into a scholastic exercise divorced from political realities.7
For Gramsci, importantly, authentic Marxist thought:
sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through their contacts … a collective, social will; men coming to understand economic facts, judging them and adapting them to their will until this becomes the driving force of the economy and moulds objective reality, which lives and moves and comes to resemble a current of volcanic lava that can be channelled wherever and in whatever way men’s will determines.8
These words suggest the extent to which the young Gramsci’s perspective was removed from the conventional image we might have of Marxist doxa, although it is also clear that he is eager to assume the legacy of Marxism and to embrace (albeit critically) Marx’s thought. In this passage Gramsci seems to want to find, within Marx’s thought, a fundamentally voluntaristic kernel.9
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci would take his distance from such a radical voluntarism. However, he would at the same time continue to fustigate any form of crude economic determinism (as we will explore in Chapters 3 and 4) and remain an unfailing and merciless enemy of dogmatism of all stripes.
Perhaps Gramsci’s most important formative political experience came during a period of intense political turmoil. A year after the October Revolution and the attempt at insurrection in Turin, the armistice was signed and the First World War came to a close. The Italian elites had finally chosen to enter the war on the side of the Triple Entente, but were unable to stabilize a society that was dislocated and scarred by the experience of an unprecedentedly destructive conflict.
Thus 1919 saw the unleashing of the biennio rosso, the ‘two red years’, centred around the revolutionary activism of the Turinese workers. In the wake of the failed Spartacist revolution in Germany and soon after the short-lived Republic of Councils in Hungary, it seemed that Italy was entering a period of unrest and potentially revolutionary activity. Panic spread among the ‘owning classes’ of the peninsula – a section of which would be only too happy, before long, to turn to fascism. Turin, together with Milan, was at this time the heart of the Italian industrial economy; a textile and metalworking centre, it was the seat of the FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) concern that employed 20,000 workers in the city in 1918. The workers, who were often female, went on strike and occupied their factories, demanding to direct production themselves. Giovanni Giolitti, the head of the Italian government, thought he might be able to defuse the situation if he could convince the FIAT managers to entrust the management of the firm to the unions. The Italian elites, in other words, were considering previously unconscionable measures.
The landscape of contestation at the time was marked by division within the Left. The national leaders of the PSI were hesitant, remaining a step back from the movement at a time when its most radicalized members in Turin, including Gramsci himself, were participating in it passionately. The unions, including the powerful Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL, or ‘general workers’ union’), were also on the battlefield, but their leaders were mostly reformists. In effect, then, the main organizers of the struggle were the workers’ councils, which took the form of ‘enterprise committees’ (commissioni interne) inspired by the structure of the 1917 Russian Soviets. Thus the biennio rosso importantly was not the production of a single Leninist political party or a single union organization, but rather the result of largely spontaneous ‘councilistic’ activism on the part of the workers.
There was, however, an organ of the press that embodied the political avant-garde of the movement: L’Ordine Nuovo (‘The new order’), the very newspaper set up in 1919 by Gramsci and his comrades Palmiro Togliatti, Umberto Terracini and Angelo Tasca.10 The new weekly made its first appearance in May 1919, after Il Grido del Popolo had already closed its doors. L’Ordine Nuovo’s subtitle was ‘a review of socialist culture’ and at first its ambition seemed quite circumscribed, as witnessed by the fact that in the first issue Tasca mostly spoke in favour of an ‘exercise in remembering’ in the area of socialist culture. Yet as the surrounding protests grew in size, the paper started to sense the atmosphere on the streets. Gramsci, Togliatti and Terracini led a newsroom ‘coup’, thus marginalizing the Tascian line.11 The unsigned editorial of the seventh issue of 21 June 1919 sets this new tone:
The socialist State already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class. To link these institutions, co-ordinating and ordering them into a highly centralized hierarchy of competences and powers, while respecting the necessary autonomy and articulation of each, is to create a genuine workers’ democracy here and now.12
They continue, ‘the concrete and complete solution to the problems of socialist living can only arise from communist practice: collective discussion, which sympathetically alters men’s consciousness, unifies them and inspires them to industrious enthusiasm’.13 What is remarkable in these assertions is the expectation that all existing working-class organizations constitute together the embryo of the future socialist State. By contrast with the party-centric revolutionary model associated with Leninism, it also appears that at the time Gramsci and his comrades were rather looking to the commissioni interne instead of the party to play the chief coordinating role in the struggle. They urged, moreover, the participation of all workers – including non-union members and anarchists – in the commissioni. This in turn drew the ire of many in the PSI against L’Ordine Nuovo’s alleged ‘spontaneist’ and ‘syndicalist’ tendencies (although Gramsci actually never went so far as to deny relevance to the political party).14
L’Ordine Nuovo rapidly came to stand as the emblematic publication of the biennio rosso. Although it never reached a circulation above 5,000 copies per issue, it managed to exert a profound influence on the workers’ movement of the time. It addressed topics that included socialism, council-based democracy, productive organization and the impact of Taylorism, working class education and the conditions of the emergence of a proletarian culture. The editorial line is slightly difficult to categorize briefly, as the small editorial team was influenced not just by Marxism but also by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile and the French anarcho-syndicalist thinker Georges Sorel, and was not immune to a certain kind of what we might call ‘revolutionary romanticism’ (of which it would come to be more critical later). Looking internationally, L’Ordine Nuovo linked up with the small French cultural communist group Clarté associated with Henri Barbusse.15
The political-cultural turmoil of the biennio rosso was described by Togliatti as a ‘proletarian Sturm und Drang’.16 Rapidly, though, the fever fell. In April 1920, a month-long strike by the metalworkers of Turin failed as it not only encountered a huge armed force in the city but also did not manage to secure the support of workers outside Piedmont. After this, the autumn’s strikes and occupations in Milan and Turin were mostly defensive in character, and the biennio rosso was in reflux. The biennio rosso ended as the industrial elites of Northern Italy eventually reached their goal of ending the situation of ‘dual power’ of capitalist management and workers’ commissioni interne in factories.
The editors of L’Ordine Nuovo, however, wanted to carry on the struggle. To them, the socialist revolution remained an imminent possibility in the Italy of 1921. Yet they had to acknowledge the failure of the attempt at council communism in Turin, which led them to reflect anew on the problem of political organization. Gramsci’s articles at this time show a change in his thinking on the role of the political party; although he continued in the years immediately after the biennio rosso to stress the need for a plurality of working class institutions, he increasingly called for a leading role to be played by the party. However, he was clearly disillusioned with the PSI, since during the biennio rosso it was revolutionary in words only and its leadership made little attempt to coordinate the popular struggle during those years.
The solution to this problem of political organization came from the creation of a new party. At the Livorno Congress in January 1921 the Left of PSI, under the impetus of the Neapolitan Amadeo Bordiga, seceded and founded the Italian Communist Party (initially Partito Comunista d’Italia, or PCd’I, but later Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI, which is how we will refer to it here). The four comrades from Turin – Gramsci, Togliatti, Terracini and Tasca – decided to join as, like Bordiga, they felt hostile to the PSI’s indecision and impotence. However, there were strong disagreements between the four and Bordiga, whose theoretical perspective was a dogmatic economic determinism and whose practical stance was often marked by intransigence.17
After 1921, Gramsci decided to hide for the time being his disagreement with Bordiga, who emerged as the main figure of the PCI during its first years. Thus while the Comintern (the Third International) demanded of the PCI as a member party the establishment of a ‘united front’ with the PSI, Gramsci firmly supported Bordiga when the latter refused to compromise with the ‘reformists’ of the Left. Gramsci and Bordiga both saw such an option as ‘liquidationist’, risking the dissolution of the PCI’s revolutionary identity, although Tasca (who came to embody the Right wing of the new party) was favourable to it.
The early life of the PCI was precarious. In October 1922, the ‘March on Rome’ led Mussolini to the presidency of the Council of Ministers. Compared to Hitler’s regime in Germany, the fascists in Italy took comparatively much longer to suppress Left-wing organizations. Nevertheless, starting in 1922 the PCI endured successive waves of repression and arrests, which drained its working class membership. The communist press eventually had to become clandestine, and the PCI cadres were forced to operate underground.
In 1922, Gramsci was nominated as a delegate of the PCI at the Comintern, and moved to Moscow. He stayed in the Soviet Union from May 1922 to November 1923. When he was being treated in a sanatorium, he fell in love with Julia Schucht, a violinist. This was an unexpected and unhoped-for source of happiness in Gramsci’s life. Antonio and Julca (‘Giulia’) were married in 1923. They were to have two sons, born in 1924 and 1926, although Gramsci would never meet his younger son.
As he was about to be elected into the Chamber of Deputies (Camera dei Deputati, the lower house of the Italian Parliament) as a communist representative, Gramsci returned to Italy from Vienna (where he had moved from Moscow to be able to follow the activities of the PCI more closely) in May 1924. At this time, the rigidity of Bordiga’s leadership was increasingly criticized, both within the PCI and the International, and the Neapolitan was eventually replaced by a ‘centrist’ leading group around Gramsci (who at the same time was the head of the communist parliamentary group of nineteen deputies). Gramsci only had one chance to give a speech at the National Assembly; Mussolini, present on the day, allegedly had difficulty following Gramsci, who was speaking quickly and in a low voice.18
With hindsight we can see that Gramsci failed to gauge the full dangers of fascism during these decisive years. Beginning in the autumn of 1920, fascist squadristi (militias) had started to proliferate in North and Central Italy, but Gramsci and his comrades at L’Ordine Nuovo saw this development as little more than a symptom of the failing bourgeois order badly shaken by the protests of the biennio rosso. Rather than seeing fascism as a fundamentally new or different threat, in other words, they interpreted it as a sign that the position of the owning classes was so desperate that they would consider doing without either legality or parliamentary constitutionalism. Even after the March on Rome, this interpretation remained the favoured one of the PCI; within Italian communist circles it was a commonplace to consider fascism as a noxious interlude bound shortly to be submerged by a revolutionary wave and then replaced by a genuinely popular democratic regime.
By the time of his arrest in 1926, Gramsci still saw fascism as essentially a contingent embodiment of the power of the bourgeoisie rather than as a threat in its own right. Thus neither Gramsci nor the PCI had ever proposed an anti-fascist alliance between Communists, socialists and anti-fascist liberals.19 Nevertheless, Gramsci did write during those years several brief articles that carefully analysed some of fascism’s facets, including the historical reasons for the support of the petty-bourgeoisie, the squadristi phenomenon and the supposedly ‘Blanquist’ instincts of Mussolini.20 For Gramsci’s analysis of fascism in the Prison Notebooks, see Chapter 3.
Shortly before his arrest, Gramsci began writing an essay, which remained unfinished, titled ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale; hereafter Alcuni temi). In this important essay Gramsci puts forward a profound sociological reflection on Italian social and political space, setting out a comparative analysis of social organization in the North and the South. In this text, Gramsci establishes himself as a pioneer of spatial studies in Marxism.21 Alcuni temi also gives Gramsci the opportunity to review the biennio rosso and to investigate why the movement ran into the indifference and even hostility of the Southern popular masses even though L’Ordine Nuovo was keenly aware of the need to overcome geographical cleavages and build a strategic alliance of all the country’s subaltern elements. In addition, Alcuni temi develops the concept of hegemony more than any other pre-prison writing of Gramsci’s, and we will have many chances to return to it in later chapters.
On 5 November 1926, following an alleged murder attempt on Mussolini by a fifteen-year-old boy on 31 October, the Italian Council of Ministers put forward a series of emergency measures aimed at reinforcing the repressive powers of the State and eroding the democratic prerogatives of parliament. Some of Gramsci’s comrades foresaw the authoritarian shift of the regime and exhorted him to flee to Switzerland. Gramsci, though, was reluctant to leave. As far as we know, he continued to believe in the protection of his parliamentary immunity, and at any rate he decided to stay in the country to participate in the parliamentary debates on the emergency measures (which were planned for 9 November). On 8 November, though, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned, in flagrant violation of his immunity.
Gramsci’s trial began eighteen months later, in May 1928, and he was sentenced to imprisonment for twenty years. Mussolini allegedly demanded ‘we have to stop this brain from working for twenty years’, and these words of Mussolini’s were cited during the trial by the prosecutor. But Il Duce’s wish would not be fulfilled, as witnessed by the thirty-three notebooks Gramsci had written in prison by the time of his death.
Shortly after his arrest, Gramsci began to develop the ambition of engaging in a long-term intellectual undertaking during his time in prison. In 1927, he wrote to Tatiana, ‘I am obsessed by the idea that I ought to do something für ewig [for eternity].’ He continues, ‘I want, following a fixed plan, to devote myself intensively and systematically to some subject that will absorb and concentrate my inner life.’22
The mention of doing something für ewig – a reference to Goethe – might be surprising coming from the pen of a revolutionary who had previously abandoned his academic studies to engage in political action. Yet it is possible to discern a change in Gramsci’s state of mind following his arrest. As a response to the abrupt severance from the very political action that had defined his life, Gramsci foresaw the possibility of delving into ‘disinterested’ study and making this the main thread of his new life in jail.23 However, it is important that this did not amount, for Gramsci, to a renunciation of politics. The Prison Notebooks are inconceivable without their reflections on strategy and revolution.
The circumstances of Gramsci’s imprisonment, though, were from the start very unfavourable to the completion of such an undertaking. It was only in January 1929 that he was granted permission to write something other than his correspondence (which was itself limited to one letter per fortnight, which Gramsci often sent to his sister-in-law Tatiana as she was in Italy while his wife was in Russia). Even after being allowed to write, Gramsci only had access to a fraction of the sources he requested. It is perhaps no surprise that Marx, Engels and other ‘subversives’ were out of the question. Gramsci had to fall back on quoting them from memory, or had to scour the work of the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce for scattered quotations from Marx.
In addition, every page that Gramsci wrote was subjected to the examination of prison censors before being returned to him. In a 1936 letter to Julia, Gramsci explained that this humiliating practice had led him over the years to develop a ‘prison style of writing’ that would circumvent central concepts in a way bordering on self-censorship since he knew that every word he wrote would be read with ‘acrimonious, suspicious pedantry’ by the prison director.24
Gramsci was thus forced to resort to paraphrases and circumlocutions in place of certain ‘sensitive’ terms. For example, Marxism became ‘the philosophy of praxis’ and Marx ‘the founder of the philosophy of praxis’, while Lenin was ‘Ilich’ (since his real name was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov). The subterfuge was often quite rudimentary, which suggests that the prison’s agents were not overly familiar with the revolutionary thought of Marx and his successors.
Frosini has proposed dividing the writing process of the notebooks into three phases.25 From 1929 to 1931, while incarcerated in Turi in the south of the Apulia region, Gramsci completed nine notebooks, which included translations – often from German – whose purpose was for Gramsci to retrain his hand and brain after being forbidden to work for three years. In 1932 and 1933, while still in Turi, Gramsci re-transcribed and amended some of these early notebooks in three ‘special notebooks’ (numbers 10–13 in the Italian critical edition). Finally, from 1933 to 1935, after having been transferred to the Formia clinic for medical reasons but still a prisoner, Gramsci continued his project both by furthering the reflections in past notebooks and by introducing some new themes (such as the idea of ‘Americanism’ in notebook 22; see Chapter 3).
Only a small proportion of the thirty-three notebooks aim for a single object of study or are based on a systematic mode of exposition. Instead, the pages of Gramsci’s notebooks contain notes that are more or less brief, and of a disparate and heterogeneous character.26 Frequently, the notes are simply incursions, leads, sketches or hypotheses – intellectual starting-points meant to be developed further, fleshed out and refined at a later stage. It is this essential openness of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that has made them such an open-ended resource for critical thought, but which has also raised the challenge of interpreting and understanding them.
Shortly after his trial, there was an international campaign for Gramsci’s liberation. However, it was only in 1933 that a gravely ill Gramsci was transferred to Formia, where he finally started to receive the medical care that he had desperately needed but that had been denied him previously.27 He experienced a brief remission and started writing again. However, his health had already deteriorated too far, and by the time Gramsci was transferred to the Quisisana clinic in Rome in 1935 he was too weak to read and write. He became unable to digest and died, exhausted, on 27 April 1937. His sister-in-law Tatiana managed to smuggle his notebooks out of the clinic and send them to Moscow through diplomatic channels.
Gramsci’s prison letters, together with reports from other inmates at the time, reveal the exceptional stoicism he displayed during his decade in prison. This is perhaps all the more remarkable given the bad health that plagued Gramsci his entire life. Writing to his mother from Turi, Gramsci stated, ‘I don’t want to be pitied. I was a soldier who had bad luck in the immediate battle.’28 Despite his ill health, he adamantly refused any special treatment and criticized Tatiana when she attempted to obtain favourable treatment on his behalf. In another letter to his mother, Gramsci wrote, ‘I’ve always refused to compromise my ideas and am ready to die for them, not just to be put in prison.’29
1 Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, translated by Tom Nairn (London: New Left Books, 1970); Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977).
2 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 12 October 1931; LP, p. 218.
3 La Città futura, 11 February 1917.
4 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 15 December 1930; LP, p. 193.
5 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 7 September 1931; LP, p. 203.
6 See Domenico Losurdo, Antonio Gramsci dal liberalismo al ‘Comunismo critico’ (Rome: Gamberetti, 1997).
7 ‘The Revolution against Capital’, Milan edition of Avanti!, 24 December 1917; SPWI, p. 35.
8 ‘The Revolution against Capital’; SPWI, pp. 35–6.
9 It is also possible to discern in the above passage the influence of Giovanni Gentile’s ‘philosophy of action’ as well as the élan vital of Henri Bergson; Gentile and Bergson were part of Gramsci’s reading at the time and he was often taxed with ‘Bergsonism’ by his socialist comrades. We explore in more detail below the combination of Marxist and non-Marxist influences on Gramsci’s thought.
10 Togliatti was to become secretary-general of the PCI from 1927 to 1964, Terracini would be imprisoned by the fascists from 1926 to 1943 before eventually becoming a communist senator, and Tasca, purged from the party in 1929, would emigrate to France and join up with the Vichy regime.
11 See Antonio Santucci, ‘La perspective du communisme dans L’Ordine Nuovo’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 191–206.
12 Editorial titled ‘Workers’ Democracy’, unsigned, written by Gramsci in collaboration with Palmiro Togliatti, L’Ordine Nuovo, 1:7 (21 June 1919); SPWI, p. 65.
13 ‘Workers’ Democracy’; SPWI, p. 68.
14 An in-depth study of Gramsci’s often-overlooked relations to Italian anarchism and syndicalism is Carl Levy’s Gramsci and the Anarchists (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).
15 See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, translated by David Fernbach (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980).
16 Cited in Marie-Antonietta Macciocchi, Pour Gramsci (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
17 Bordiga was a target of Lenin’s in the 1920 pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
18 See Fiori, Life of a Revolutionary.
19 The anti-fascist front in France and Spain was a product of the shift in Comintern policy at the Seventh Congress in 1935.
20 Revealingly, the fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia founded and edited by Mussolini had a quotation from Auguste Blanqui on its mast, ‘Chi ha del ferro ha del pane’ (‘He who has iron, has bread’).
21 See Bob Jessop, ‘Gramsci as a Spatial Theorist’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8:4 (2005), pp. 421–37.
22 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 19 March 1927; LP, p. 79.
23 Nonetheless, Gramsci clearly found the isolation from political action and the outside world extremely difficult to handle psychologically, as can be seen from a letter to his mother (23 September 1929; LP, p. 153): ‘Boredom is my worst enemy, although I read or write all day long; it’s a special kind of boredom which doesn’t spring from idleness … but from the lack of contact with the outside world. I don’t know whether you’ve read the lives of saints and hermits; they were tormented by this special boredom, which they called the “noonday devil” because towards midday they were seized … by a longing for change, to return to the world, to see people.’
24 Letter to Julia Schucht, 24 November 1936; LP, p. 267.
25 See Fabio Frosini, Gramsci e la filosofia: Saggio sui ‘Quaderni del carcere’ (Rome: Carocci, 2003).
26 Revealingly, French scholars of Gramsci have converged in their refusal to use the term ‘oeuvre’ to describe the Prison Notebooks because this term is thought to imply misleading level of coherence; see for instance Robert Paris, ‘Gramsci en France’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 29 (1979), pp. 5–18; André Tosel, ‘Modernité de Gramsci?’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 7–16.
27 In protest at his treatment, Gramsci’s friend Romain Rolland wrote a short pamphlet entitled ‘Antonio Gramsci, for those dying in Mussolini’s jails’, L’Humanité, 27 October 1934.
28 Letter to his mother, 24 August 1931; LP, p. 202.
29 Letter to his mother, 10 May 1928; LP, p. 133.