If we were to list the great Marxists of the past two centuries, the name Antonio Gramsci would be on it with others that are perhaps more familiar to us: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg. For a number of reasons, unlike the others (other than Marx), Gramsci name is known better in academic circles than he is among revolutionaries—and it is for his prison writings in the 1930s rather than his work as an active revolutionary in Italy before his incarceration.

Gramsci grew up and became a revolutionary in the period of the early twentieth century. He experienced the period of the world war, the crisis and collapse of capitalism, the Russian Revolution, and the spread of revolutionary ferment to Europe and elsewhere; the period of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution—and the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy—as a result of the failure of the European revolution; he witnessed the subordination of the Communist International to the dictates of the Stalinist bureaucracy as it turned away from internationalism and toward “socialism in one country”; and finally, he witnessed the triumph of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a new ruling class in the period of the late 1920s.

Gramsci was adopted by the Italian CP to justify its every political twist and turn after the Second World War. He was especially revived in the 1970s to justify the turn of the CP’s to Eurocommunism, essentially the final transformation of the CPs in Spain and Italy into Social Democratic reformist parties, shedding any relationship to Russia (Stalinism), and seeking government portfolio through alliances and compromises with bourgeois parties.

The fact that Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (they will fill six thick volumes in English when they are completed) were deliberately elusive, in places open-ended, sometimes unclear—Gramsci was writing under the watchful eye of prison officials (and was likely also concerned about the gaze of increasingly Stalinized PCI)—made it easy for them to be used in whatever way anyone who wanted to use them saw fit. The notebooks came to be a kind of academic Rosetta stone, which could be employed in different scholarly fields safely hived off from Gramsci’s own revolutionary commitments. In fact a separation is usually made: his pre-prison writings are almost completely ignored in the academic world.

Gramsci’s early life

Antonio Gramsci was born 1891 in a small town on the island of Sardinia; the fourth of seven children. Sardinia was rural, agricultural economy, dominated by Italian interests and by large landowners. For most of his life Gramsci was concerned with the “southern question,” the way in which northern, industrial Italy exercised a kind of colonial domination over the “south” (which included the Islands), using tariff policy to siphon wealth from them, and then blaming their backwardness on the “character” of the southern people, and presenting the South as a drag on the rest of Italy.

In his early political development Gramsci became a “sardist,” that is, a Sardinian nationalist. For the rest of his life he fought to overcome the “corporatist” notions of the northern working class (and of the Italian Socialist Party)—that is, any tendency seek its own economic advancement in isolation, or even in opposition to, the struggles of the oppressed peasants and land workers in the south. “It was a question,” he later wrote, “of leading the workers to overcome their inverted provincialism with its ‘ball and chain’ ideas, deeply rooted in the socialist movement’s reformist and corporative tradition.”

At an early age, perhaps due to a bad fall, his growth was stunted. He grew to only about 4’6” and had poor health throughout his life. In 1897, Antonio’s father, a middle-class official, was arrested and imprisoned for five years on corruption charges imposed by the winning party in an election. Antonio was forced at age 11 to work in a tax office hauling books around, and could only resume his studies two years later.

He was a loner, probably because of his condition, but he loved to study and read books, and was, in spite of his extreme poverty, a good student. He also enjoyed capturing and taking care of animals such as birds and hedgehogs. After graduating from secondary school, he studied in a school 10 miles from Ghilarza, his hometown, and later, moved to study in a Lyceum in Cagliari in the south of Sardinia.

Gramsci lived in Cagliari with his older brother Gennaro, who was already an active socialist, and was as a young teenager already reading socialist and radical literature. An essay, probably written in his last year in school before college, is called “oppressors and oppressed.” In it, he argues that the violent reaction of the nationally oppressed is a direct result of the savagery of their oppressors.  “The French Revolution abolished many privileges, and raised up many of the oppressed,” he writes in his conclusion. “But all it did was replace one class in power by another. Yet it did teach us one great lesson: social privileges and differences, being products of society and not of nature, can be overcome.”

After graduating the Lyceum Antonio applied for and received a scholarship to attend the University of Turin, taking a great interest in linguistics. Again, though he was a good student, these were “years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion,” writes one of his biographers, Giuseppe Fiori. He spent long periods depressed, lonely, and cut off from others. He wrote to his sister in 1916 and said that he could not recall a single day in the previous three years where he had not suffered from headaches, dizzy spells, or stomach trouble. But he studied.

His health prevented him from taking his exams sometimes, and in the end he failed to get a degree, partly because of his condition, and partly because by then he had decided to devote his life to the cause of socialism, drawn into it by a fellow student and PSI member Angelo Tasca, who had started a socialist youth group in Turin with which Gramsci became associated.

At this early stage in his life Gramsci was already attracted to themes that would stay with him in later years. One professor described Gramsci in his last year in college: “Gramsci was concerned above all else at this time to understand how ideas became practical forces.” Among young radicals in Italy there was a strong reaction against any kind of determinism or “positivism”—the attempt to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the analysis of society, which, positivists contended, operated according to strict laws akin to the natural world, and to see social analysis as simply the gathering of “facts” without, allegedly, any prior theoretical framework.

The Marxist critique of positivism was, one, that it involved only passive contemplation of society, not an attempt to change it, two, that methods appropriate to natural sciences could not be transferred wholesale to understanding human history, since human history involved not just biological or natural evolutionary processes, but alos cultural change based on toolmaking, thought, and language. Moreover, “facts” cannot be plucked from the world without a prior framework, method, or theory as to what facts should be chosen and how they should be arranged. Gramsci was particularly critical of the positivist mechanical materialism of the socialist party in Italy, which tended to view history as something that happens of itself without any human agency, and in response he went the other way—toward voluntarism.

Gramsci joined the Socialist Party around 1915, and became a journalist, writing a column in the Turin edition of Avanti!; and he quickly became well-respected for his cultural writings and his theater reviews.

At this stage in his life he came in contact for the first time with the northern industrial working class, delivering lectures to workers on a number of topics, from the Paris Commune to the Novels of Romaine Rolland, to women’s emancipation. But he was not very active inside the party.

Turin was “the proletarian city.” It was the Petrograd of Italy, where over a period of a few decades the most modern car and steel industry sprouted up, a process that accelerated with the outbreak of war (which Italy entered in 1915 on the side of the allies). But many parts of Italy were still largely rural. Universal manhood suffrage was not granted until 1911 (women did not get voting rights until 1945): before than peasants and rural workers had no political representation, and received a poor education; half of the population in the South (not just southern Italy, but the islands as well) was illiterate.

To give a sense of Italy’s industrial development: The workforce of Fiat alone went from 4,000 workers in 1913 to 20,000 in 1918. Its capital rose from 17 million Lire to 200 million. The capital of the steel and engineering concern Ansaldo went from 30 to 500 million. Fiat produced 3,300 vehicles in 1914, whereas during the four years of war it produced more than 70,000. Turin’s population rose from 400,000 in 1911 (20 percent of whom were industrial workers), to over 500,000 in 1918 (30 percent industrial workers) Because of conscription, women during the war came to make up 40 percent of the work force. Women often led strikes and revolts because they could not be conscripted. This explosive growth of industry was concentrated in factories in the “industrial triangle” of Turin, Milan and Genoa. By the end of the war there were more than 900,000 workers in war-related industries. The number of workers in Turin doubled from 1913 to the end of the war.

The war has a tremendously radicalizing impact on Italian society, and particularly the working class and peasantry. During the war Italy had a state-regulated economy, with everything directed toward victory in the war. Any industry related to the war was subject to military discipline and control. Fiat workers worked a 75-hour workweek. Factories were supervised by armed soldiers, and strikes were banned. Workers who stepped out of line could be sent to the front as punishment, or to prison to perform hard labor. The unions put up no resistance; in fact the heads of unions collaborated in the war effort. The result of the industrial mobilization system, to quote one historian, was that workers subject to it “came to hate their employers and the state with equal ferocity.”

Peasants made up a large part of the infantry in the Italian army. They saw no reason for the war; but they also resented the industrial workers in the north, who they considered shirkers, an idea that was promoted by the ruling class and, without any counterargument from the PSI, played a role later in preventing a unification of the urban and rural struggles during the “two red years” of 1919-1920.

The impact of the war was devastating on Italy’s people. Almost 5 million were drafted. Six hundred thousand died in the war, and 700,000 were wounded. Bread shortages were common, producing rising class anger. Prices skyrocketed. If the cost of living index in 1913 is set at 100, then this is the record of its increase is: 1915: 132.7; 1916: 199.7; 1917: 306.3; 1918: 409.1 (That is, the cost of living quadrupled during the war). Average wages were so low that families had to have two wage earners to survive. Staples like bread and pasta were rationed, and were astronomically expensive on the black market.

Italian workers were inspired by the outbreak of February Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. So much so that when emissaries of the liberal provisional government (not the soviets) came to Turin in August 1917, masses of workers turned out chanting “Long Live Lenin!” Gramsci himself argued that the revolution would not stop at this moderate phase, but would proceed further and put socialists in power.

Anger at the war and the treatment of the working class exploded ten days later into a revolt in Turin that began with strikes against bread shortages, followed by angry street protests in which workers attempted to fraternize with the carabinieri—the national police.

Writes Gramsci’s biographer Fiori, “There was now a widespread popular feeling to the effect that it was better to lose 500 in a battle for the workers’ own cause, than ten thousand against the Germans fighting for the cause of the bourgeoisie.” Crowds of angry workers tried to converge on Turin’s center, and were driven back with machine guns. It sparked four days of rioting, and 50 were killed. This elemental outburst of class struggle had no party leadership and was easily crushed.

The entire leadership of the Turin PSI was arrested, and so Gramsci assumed for the first time a leadership position and also became editor of Il Grido del Popolo (Cry of the People). Later that year he participates in a national meeting of the “intransigents,” the revolutionary faction in the PSI.

During this period there was an explosion in growth of both trade unions and the left. The metal workers union grew from 11,000 to 47,000. Membership in the CGL (General Workers’ Confederation—the main, socialist party dominated trade union federation) and other union federations grew to 3.8 million, five times the prewar total.

Gramsci in this period was heavily influenced by the left reaction to positivism, and was particularly attracted to the idealist Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce; his idealism, his emphasis on human will and action was a reaction to the strong fatalist vein in the Italian PSI. He wrote, for example, on the eve of the February Revolution in Russia, of the reformists in the PSI:

Life for them is like an avalanche seen from afar in its irresistible descent. “Can I stop it?” asks the homunculus. “No. Therefore, it obeys no will. Since the human avalanche obeys a logic that may not be mine, and since I as an individual do not have the strength to stop it or divert it, I am convinced that it does not have an inner logic, but obeys natural, unbreakable laws.

At this stage in his political development, Gramsci’s conception of what is needed to develop the consciousness of the working class is not class struggle, but rather education and cultural uplift. That’s why he supports the creation of a “moral club” for youth at this time along with his co-collaborator Tasca. Gramsci set up discussion circles for young militants that discussed, for example, articles by Croce and the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius!

With the success of the October Russian revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks, Gramsci wrote an article called “The Revolution Against Das Kapital,” in which you get a good sense of his strong idealism, and how little yet he knew about what had happened in Russia:

The Bolshevik revolution is made up of ideologies, more than events (and hence, when it comes down to it, it does not matter that we do not know any more about what is happening than we do). It is a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.… Events have exploded the critical schemas whereby Russian history was meant to develop according to the canons of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks have renounced Karl Marx.

…However, they are living out Marxist thought—the real, undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism, but which, in Marx, was contaminated by positivistic and naturalistic encrustations.

…Socialist propaganda has forged the collective will of the Russian people. Why, then, should the Russian people wait for the history of England to repeat itself in Russia, for a bourgeoisie to form, for the class struggle to be set in motion—all so that class consciousness may be born and the final downfall of the capitalist world be brought about? The Russian people have passed through all these experiences in thought, even if only in the thought of the few.

Gramsci at this time called Croce, who was not a Marxist, “the greatest” thinker “in Europe at this moment.”

Gramsci and factory councils

As the war came to a close, the radicalism of the returning troops alarmed the Italian ruling class. “Let’s follow Russia,” was a favorite song among workers and soldiers.

The economy tumbled. The value of the Lire collapsed by half, and production, which had grown massively in wartime, dropped 40 percent.

These conditions produced a wave of struggle. In 1919 and 1920, two million workers went on strike—three times the 1913 figure. Peasants seized land. The metal workers union increased its membership by five times in 1919. In that year there were 1,663 industrial strikes, compared to 810 in 1913. The trend continued in 1920, which saw 1,881 industrial strikes. Peasant strikes also rocketed, from 97 in 1913 to 189 in 1920, with over a million taking action.

The PSI grew astronomically. During the war years, its membership doubled to 200,000, and by the time of the occupation of the factories in 1920, it had won 156 parliamentary seats, and received 30 percent of the popular vote (1.8 million). As the party grew, its membership became increasingly radicalized, so that there was a large gap between the moderate parliamentary and trade union leaders and the restive, largely militant rank and file.

Like other Second International parties, the PSI had a minimum and maximum program: the maximum program was brought out for parades and special occasions, the minimum program was the party’s practical program. In practice, the party’s work was geared almost exclusively toward electoral work. The party also had adhered to a strict separation between politics and economics. The “pact of alliance,” signed between the leaders of the CGL and the PSI, stated that national economic strikes were to be led by the CGL, without PSI interference, and the PSI was assigned to lead “political strikes,” which the CGL pledged not to hinder or obstruct.

The PSI and trade union leaders were not at all prepared for this outburst of class struggle. Turati, the reformist leader of PSI, argued that revolution would only lead to reaction; reforms are the only sure road. The centrists, known as the Maximalists, who dominated the PSI leadership, used very revolutionary rhetoric but did not back it up with any kind of program of action. Their 1918 program called for workers and peasants’ control of production—even the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But its leader, Giacinto Serrati also said, “We Marxists interpret history, we do not make it.”

Serrati’s main concern was maintaining the unity of the party, which meant offering radical phrases to the masses while he balanced between the reformist parliamentary and union leaders and the far left in the party. They thus failed to provide any lead to the revolutionary ferment that was developing in postwar Italy, a ferment that was encouraged by their own propaganda.

The left wing of the party was dominated by Amadeo Bordiga. Bordiga was a sectarian purist. While he was one of the first in the Second International to call for the creation of communist parties, his conception of the party was narrow. He believed revolutionaries should abstain from elections on principle, considering them a distraction from the struggle for socialism, and he thought socialists “must not strive for any measure which might render the bourgeois regime more tolerable and hence longer lasting.” He considered revolution to be the work of the party, and the party only, whose task was to wait for the propitious moment to make the call for it, meanwhile preserving its revolutionary integrity from any reformist or petty-bourgeois contaminations. Bordiga had no conception of a party that keeps in close contact with the class, provides strategic and tactical guidance in the struggle, and forms alliances of struggle for the purposes of advancing the interests of the class as a whole, and enlarging the party’s influence as preparation for capitalism’s overthrow. His was essentially a passive policy—active only insofar as he called for the left to split from the PSI and form a new party, in anticipation of the revolutionary moment.

Yet his was the only national left-wing fraction inside the PSI. The scope of Gramsci’s activities, and at this point his writings, were in large part confined to Turin. Though he made some efforts to spread the council movement, it encountered a lot of resistance from the trade union leaders, who were horrified by the growing control of the councils, and the PSI leadership.

The employers, especially the metal industry employers, who had organized themselves into a powerful association, wanted to impose discipline on the class, assert their control over the shop floor, and restore industrial profitability. They agreed to the eight-hour day in return for strict control in the workplace over the internal commissions and the workforce. In practice, workers lost control and even the eight-hour day was nullified by overtime.

In the Turin metal workers battle for control, things could go in two directions—either toward the idea of workers’ control as part of a revolutionary project to transform the whole society; or toward a kind of sectionalism where control of production was about workers “becoming involved in solving the employers’ problems,” that is, workers participation in the running of capitalist enterprises. As historian Donny Gluckstein points out:

The tendency to see the productive process in isolation from its class context (in other words, from who owned and profited by it) grew at this time out of the special conditions in Turin. Many metalworkers took a pride in the advanced nature of their industry, surrounded as it was by a sea of primitive manufacturing and peasant agriculture. Some carworkers received high pay and possessed real technical skills. The social character of their work gave them a choice. They could act as the vanguard of the entire working class, or see themselves as a separate group who, like the officials, were concerned with “the development of their industry” without regard to “whether industrialists got fat or thin.” Though the basis for craft sectionalism was weaker in Turin than in Glasgow, nevertheless the choices facing the skilled workers—to form a privileged labor aristocracy or act as a vanguard of broad class struggle—were present in both cities.

The role of Gramsci’s newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, was crucial in shaping events.

The Russian Revolution and the growing class struggle in postwar Turin had a strong impact on Gramsci. It shifted his orientation toward the class struggle, and began to make him a Marxist. He began to study the October Revolution, reading anything by and about Lenin and the revolution he could get his hands on, including Lenin’s Imperialism and State and Revolution, in which Lenin discusses the need to destroy the old state machine and replace it with a democratic workers’ state based on soviets or councils.

At the wars end, Gramsci and a group of associates, Palmiro Togliatti, Angelo Tasca, and Umberto Terracini decided to put out a biweekly newspaper, l’Ordine Nuovo, or “New Order.” Gramsci writes, what united them “Was our vague yearning for a vaguely proletarian culture. We wanted to act, to do something, anything; we felt afflicted and lost, drifting helplessly in the intense atmosphere of those months after the armistice, when Italian society appeared at the point of cataclysm.”

Gramsci explained later that initially the paper was merely a “rag-bag anthology.” But with the seventh issue came an important article. The question they posed themselves, even before the first issue came out, was:

Does there exist in Italy, as an institution of the working class, anything comparable to the Soviet, anything similar to it in character? Anything that will enable us to conclude that the Soviet is a universal institution, not merely a Russian one?… Is there an aspiration towards, or intimation of, Soviet government in Italy, in Turin?

After the defeat of 1917, workers slowly began to place more emphasis on what they did inside the workplace. Important were the internal commissions, delegate bodies elected by shop-floor workers during strikes, but which the FIOM leadership had attempted to harness to the directives of the union leadership as intermediaries between the rank and file and the union. In 1918 internal commissions were officially recognized in a deal struck between FIOM and the metal bosses. At this point only union members could elect them.

In 1918 a revolutionary committee of Fiat workers was formed around two leading left-wing “intransigent” PSI members and a couple of anarcho-syndicalists who favored the internal commissions over the unions, which they considered too prone to bureaucratism and compromise. They saw the commissions as the basis of the breakdown of sectionalism and the development of the links between immediate demands and the struggle of workers for an alternative. They became the militant backbone of the movement that transformed the internal commissions into factory councils modeled on the Russian Soviets.

An article in issue 7 of L’Ordine Nuovo called “Workers’ Democracy” answered the question about what institution could become a soviet in Italy:

The workshop commissions are organs of worker democracy which must be freed from the constraints imposed on them by the bosses, and infused with a new life and energy. At the moment, these commissions have the task of curbing the power the capitalists exert within the factory, and they perform an arbitrational and disciplinary function. In the future, developed and improved, they should be the organs of proletarian power, replacing the capitalist in all his useful managerial and administrative functions.

Workers should proceed right now, to elect vast assemblies of delegates, chosen among the best and most politically aware comrades, under the slogan, “All the power in the workshop to the workshop committees,” together with the other, complementary slogan, “All state power to the workers’ and peasants’ councils.”

Suddenly Gramsci, a largely idealist revolutionary journalist without links to the class, thrust himself into the workers’ movement of Turin, speaking sometimes three times a day, speaking with workers, delivering lectures and speeches on different topics, and talking to groups of workers. Togliatti, Gramsci’s close collaborator on the project at the time, said of Gramsci that only he knew how to “speak with workers individually, simply, without self-importance or condescension, but like a comrade or a pupil.” Gramsci said of those times, “No initiative was taken unless it was tested in reality, unless workers’ opinion had already been sounded out through a multitude of channels. Therefore our initiative almost always met with immediate and broad success, appearing as an interpretation of a widespread and felt need, never like the cold application of an intellectual schema.”

And he wrote later, “Ordine Nuovo became for us and our followers ‘the journal of the factory councils.’ The workers loved Ordine Nuovo…. Because in it, they found something of themselves, the best part of themselves.”

A key idea of the councils was that, unlike the internal commissions, they should be elected by all workers in the plant, not just union members. Starting with Fiat, the councils spread quickly, so that by October 1919, there were councils in 30 plants and 50,000 workers, rising to 150,000 by year’s end.

The council movement was an impressive development, and proof that the Russian example had significance for workers in other countries. But there were also problems.

One was the tendency to see the “solution” in the councils alone—that the development of the councils alone would ensure the path toward workers’ power, at least initially. The party—and at this point the only party model was the flawed model of the PSI—faded into the background. In fact none of the PSI’s key leaders, Serrati (center), Turati (the right), or Bordiga (the left), supported the factory councils.

Serrati opposed the inclusion of non-unionized workers in the commissions and argued that the “only possible dictatorship of the proletariat is a conscious dictatorship of the Socialist Party.” Bordiga argued that the councils were reformist, and that workers’ councils could only be erected after the socialist revolution, which would be carried out strictly by the party.

 Indeed the PSI leaders actively opposed the councils. The resistance of the union leaders to the councils prompted Gramsci to develop his ideas on trade unions as institutions caught within the framework of capitalism, geared to negotiations over wages, and therefore prone to establish a permanent bureaucracy that puts a brake on the struggle.

Another problem was “productivism”—the idea that workers’ control under a capitalist system was enough, with little space devoted to the question of power, that is, how exactly how was a system of workers’ councils going to replace the existing state? What measures were necessary politically to do this? Gramsci speaks of a “unity” of the class “based on production, on the concrete act of work.” He speaks of the solidarity in the workers’ council, “expressed in the joyous awareness of becoming an organic whole.: a homogenous, compact system which, through useful work and disinterested production of social wealth, asserts its sovereignty and realizes its power.” But this was more poetry than political plan of action.

Here, for example, is Ordine Nuovo’s reaction to an occupation of a cotton factory: “The work-in, in which the workers achieved a high level of production without the bosses, leads one to conclude that the experiment in self-management succeeded insofar as it achieved a speed-up of disciplined work and maximized output.”

The danger was that the factories were still owned by the bosses, not by the workers. Speeding up production, talk of doing “useful work,” “fulfilling work” this side of socialism, before the overthrow of capitalism, could lead into the idea that councils existed not as fighting organs for workers’ power, but embryonic islands of workers’ control within the framework of capitalism.

The question of workers’ power isn’t a technical question, not a purely local question, but a national and political question that could not be solved by Turin workers and Turin revolutionaries alone. Gramsci did not yet have a clear idea as to how the councils could be a springboard for the fight for a workers’ dictatorship and not get bogged down in minutiae of factory life; in what way can the working class become the leader of the popular masses to challenge for power? There was at this time too much of a telescoping between the creation of workers’ councils and these becoming a new state, which left out the small matter of how actually to make this happen.

Sometimes Ordine Nuovo and Gramsci wrote as if the problem of power was practically solved simply by the councils’ existence. He writes in early 1920, for example, that the “working class must train itself and educate itself in the management of society.” This is not unimportant, but to make this a key argument when the tasks are political—spread and centralize the councils, arm the working class, prepare for a struggle for power to destroy the old state and replaces it with council democracy—was one-sided.

To be sure, Gramsci did not see the factory councils as the sole solution to everything. He saw the need for a party to coordinate and lead the movement politically. However, he argued that the party does not become the socialist state—it is not the model of the future society. It achieves political hegemony and exerts influence over the working-class, but it cannot replace the class’s own self-activity. You cannot, he argued “force the revolutionary process into the forms of the party.” The problem is that these arguments he was making were about the PSI, when in reality he is talking about the relation between workers’ struggle and a communist party that does not yet exist.

Gramsci was aware of the growing unrest of the landless peasants and agricultural workers in the South, and argued that the party must take up the struggle in the south and link it with the workers’ movement in the north. In 1919, he tried to disseminate socialist propaganda among the peasant-soldiers of the Sassari brigade, sent to Turin to suppress the working-class. Alas, the party did not orient on these struggles. “Factory control and land seizure should be seen as a single problem,” he wrote.

The movement of the factory councils was resisted nationally by both the PSI leadership and the union leaders (though in 1919 the PSI had formally voted to accept “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as part of its program). To counteract this and do as Lenin did, organize a broad national movement for workers’ and peasants’ councils and for a policy of “all power to the councils” required the existence of a national organization, national publications, national contacts, and national networks of revolutionaries committed to the same goal that could, over time, win the working class to such a strategy. Without that, the PSI and the unions were able to prevent the spread of the Turin factory council movement elsewhere in Italy.

Gramsci became increasingly critical of the PSI. He wrote in January 1920:

Every day sees the party lose contact more and more with the broad masses in movement. Events occur and the party is absent. The country is racked by feverish spasms, the forces of eroding bourgeois democracy and the capitalist regime continues to operate implacably and ruthlessly, and yet the Party does not intervene, does not illuminate the broad masses of workers and peasants, does not justify its activity or its non-activity, does not launch slogans to calm impatience, check demoralization, hold serried the ranks and strong the structure of the worker and peasant armies…..

…Now, at the very moment when it could be decisive, the supreme instrument of the proletarian revolution in Italy—the Socialist Party—is falling apart, attacked and insidiously entangled by parliamentary politicians and national trade union officials.

The efforts of the Turin section of the SP to spread the councils nationally was not sufficient to overcome the national inertia and resistance of the biggest workers’ party in Italy. But Gramsci still continued to write articles as if he expected the Socialist Party (now swelled to 300,000 members) to play a revolutionary role, writing, “The Socialist Party, the political organization of the conscious avant-garde of the proletariat has the historical task of organizing the class of impoverished workers and peasants into a ruling class.”

Then came the big showdown: the April 1920 strike. The big employers decided that the factory council movement must be destroyed; they formed Confindustria, an employers’ association, to coordinate their attack on the class, and decided to provoke the workers into action. They were especially alarmed by the growing power of the councils. In February, at the main Fiat Factory, the director suddenly refused to recognize the factory council; the council orders work to stop immediately, and the director backed down.

At the end of March the factory owners imposed daylight savings, and the local Chamber of Labor asks workers to reject the change (because they associate it with war time regulations). At one of the Fiat plants, the workers demanded that the clock be set back to the old time, and the employer responds by firing the entire works committee.

The workers then occupied the factory, but were expelled by force the next day. Another Fiat plant, over another grievance (the right for factory commissars to be paid while working as commissars) led to another occupation. In response, the local FIOM executive committee called on all metal-workers of Turin to occupy their factories. The employers then imposed a lockout, enforced by government troops. Enough troops were brought into Turin, according to Avanti!, to quell a regional revolt.

The Turin strike leaders appealed to the national FIOM and the Chamber of Labor to spread the struggle in order to compel the employers, who were demanding that the internal commissions be reduced to union-controlled agents to monitor contract obligations, to back down. This did not happen. The national leader of FIOM and some local workers’ leaders negotiated a compromise that acceded to some of the employers’ demands. After stormy meetings of the factory councils, the settlement was accepted—until during the final negotiations the employers introduced even tighter restrictions on the internal commissions. Against the pleas of Buozzi, the FIOM leader, the factory councils rejected the deal, now seeing the struggle as one over the survival of the councils, and on April 13, the local Turin Chamber of Labor called a general strike.

The local leaders of the working-class movement wanted the strike to spread, but the union and PSI leaders were opposed, not wanted the council movement to “infect” the rest of Italy. They wanted the strike to burn out. Yet the local “committee of agitation” was still able to spread the strike through most of the Piedmont region around Turin. The PSI’s national council passed a resolution denouncing “localist initiatives.”

The strike was finally settled on April 23, negotiations being conducted between the head of the CGL and the leader of the employers’ association. It was a victory for the bosses, further restricting the internal commissions.

Gramsci was concerned that the strike, a showdown between the employers and the class in Turin at this point, might leave the Turin movement isolated and more easily defeated. The city was surrounded by soldiers armed with machine guns. Instead of being the vanguard, it could be left isolated.

The defeat made it easier for the PSI and the unions, which had deliberately left the Turin working class in the lurch, to discredit the factory council movement. Moreover, Gramsci’s Ordine Nuovo group was unable to lead during the struggle. That was not their approach. Indeed, during the strike they shut down publication of the paper, as they were to do during the occupation of the factories later that year, in order to make themselves available for the struggle—a move that showed a lack of understanding of the role of a revolutionary paper in the midst of struggle. So they played no role, through the paper, in spreading the strike or advancing slogans.

The defeat prompted Gramsci’s to make an important advance in his argument. In an article called “Toward a Renewal of the Socialist Party,” he argued:

The industrialists took advantage of the lack of revolutionary coordination…in the Italian working-class forces to attempt to break apart the whole structure of the Turin proletariat and destroy the prestige and authority the factory institutions that had begun the struggle for workers’ control…

The present phase in the class struggle in Italy is the phase that precedes either the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat…; or a tremendous reaction on the part of the propertied classes…. There will be a bid to smash the working class’s organs of political struggle… once and for all and to incorporate its organs of economic resistance (trade unions and cooperatives) into the machinery of the bourgeois state.…

The Socialist Party is watching the course of events like a spectator. It never has an opinion of its own to express that has any relation to the revolutionary thesis of Marxism and the Communist International. It never launches slogans that can be adopted by the masses; that can give a clear lead; that can unify and coordinate revolutionary action….

The Socialist Party has remained a purely parliamentary party, stuck within the narrow confines of parliamentary democracy…

The leaders led the party into the Communist International, but Serrati and co. made no effort to challenge the reformists, let alone expel them from the party: No polemic against the reformists and opportunists was ever even started; neither the Party leadership nor Avanti advanced a genuinely revolutionary conception of their own to counterbalance the incessant propaganda the reformists and opportunists were disseminating in Parliament and the Trade Union bodies.

Gramsci proposed that the left wing in the party should prepare to expel the reformists from the party. He concludes:

The fundamental and indispensable condition for attempting any experiment with Soviets is the existence of a cohesive and highly disciplined Communist Party that can coordinate and centralize the whole of the proletariat’s revolutionary action in its central executive committee, by means of its nuclei within the factories, unions and cooperatives.

Lenin gave this thesis a thumbs up and special mention in the Comintern’s Second Congress, but at home Gramsci had no real national profile, and even locally he was at this point isolated from even his former co-thinkers in Ordine Nuovo. Moreover, Lenin and other Comintern leaders were unable to convince Serrati of the need to expel the reformists from the PSI. This was also the congress where Lenin attacked Bordiga’s ultra-left abstention. If it is not yet possible to destroy parliament and replace it with workers’ power, then, Lenin argued, one must work inside parliament and use elections to reach the mass of workers and convince them of your program. Bordiga was not moved by these arguments.

The last major struggle of the “two red years” was the occupation of the metal factories. Throughout the summer of 1920 the employers had conducted a policy of obstruction and refusal to increase wages toward the FIOM. The union called a go-slow and stayed in the factories to prevent a lockout. The union leadership were not revolutionaries—their aim was to pressure the liberal Giolotti government to pressure the employers to make concessions. But things always had a potential to move much further. On August 31, the metal employers of Turin announced a lock-out, and the Turin metal workers moved in and occupied their factories. FIOM decides to spread the occupation nationally to other cities. In Turin the councils ran the factories. In most factories the workers kept them running, though at a lower level of production. Thus the struggle developed a potentially revolutionary dynamic that went beyond merely economic demands.

The occupation involved more than 400,000 workers, and was strongest in Turin, Milan, and Genoa. “Wherever there was a factory, a dockyard, a steel works, a forge, a foundry in which [metal workers] worked, there was a new occupation.” An estimated 100,000 workers in other industries followed the metal workers’ example. Spriano’s history of the occupations tells how “these hundreds of thousands of workers, with arms or without, who worked and slept and kept watch in the factories, thought the extraordinary days they were living through “the revolution in action.”

A sense of the character of the occupations is revealed in this story: A trucking company called one of the big Fiat factories in Turin, in the hope of talking to the manager:

“Hello, who’s there?”

“This is the Fiat Soviet”

Ah!… pardon… I’ll ring again…”

Here is a description of Genoa at the height of the occupation:

All along the line from Samierdarena to Voltri, there is a lavish display of red and black flags hoisted over machines, gates, ships under construction. On the great gate of the Ansaldo shop in Sestri Ponente there is a placard, Communist Factory…In the Ansaldo plants, at the Giano pier, everything is ready to repel the security forces if they attack.

Again, as in April, Gramsci and his associates suspend publication of Ordine Nuovo. Gramsci was clear, however, that a factory occupation was only a demonstration of workers’ power. He wrote in the Piedmont Avanti!

The pure and simple occupation of the factories…indicates the extent of the proletariat’s power, [but it] does not in or of itself produce any new, definitive position. Power remains in the hands of capital; armed force remains the property of the bourgeois state.

Another of his Avanti article noted that

A permanent establishment of the workers in the factories as self-governing producers rather than wage-earners is not possible unless other forces enter into play, forces which will completely displace the focus of the present struggle, which will carry the battle into other sectors, direct the workers’ power against the real centers of the capitalist system: the means of communication, the banks, the armed forces, the state.

We must keep in mind that all through this the PSI publications are pumping out red-hot lines about the impending revolution. For example, amid rising peasant land occupations (which are not at all coordinated with what is happening in the cities), the PSI issues a manifesto to peasants and soldiers which states:

If tomorrow the hour of the decisive struggle strikes, you, too, must rally to the battle against the bosses, all the exploiters! Take over the communes, the lands, disarm the carabinieri, form your battalions in unity with the workers, march on the great cities, take your stand with the people in arms against the hireling thugs of the bourgeoisie! For who knows, the day of justice and liberty is perhaps at hand.

But this was literally all talk and no action. The PSI made absolutely no preparation for such action: it made no practical effort to arm the working class, engaged in no organization among the armed forces, made no attempt to organize the struggling peasantry in rural areas. It was nothing more than irresponsible, and therefore criminal, talk.

The newly reelected liberal politician Giolotti, who had in the past been a master of manipulation and reconciling conflicting interests among the elite and between the classes, wanted to let the occupation wear itself out, and then bring the bosses and the union to the table and compromise. This happened to coincide with the interests of the union leadership and the PSI.

The occupation ended anticlimactically—in a comic scene in which the PSI and CGL voted on whether or not to have a revolution!

On September 10, the leaders of the PSI and the CGL held a joint meeting to discuss what to do with the occupation. The CGL leader D’Aragona told the gathering:

You believe that this is the moment for revolution. Very well, then, you assume the responsibility. We who do not feel able to shoulder this responsibility—the responsibility for throwing the proletariat into suicide—we declare that we withdraw…. You, you take the leadership of the whole movement.

The PSI leaders that were there said that the disagreement must be referred to the national council of the CGL, because no revolutionary step could be taken without their (i.e., trade union leaders who did not want revolution) leadership. An Ordinovista who was at the meeting, Umberto Terracini, himself noted that the union leaders “were at all times the representatives of the masses.”

The next day at the CGL council, the trade union membership voted whether to hand direction of the struggle to the PSI “to lead it towards the maximum solution of the socialist program,” or another proposal put forward by D’Aragona to effect social and political reform. The proposal for “revolution” was defeated 591,245 to 409,569 (the railwaymen, the maritime workers, and the syndicalists union members of the USI, did not vote), and the metalworkers FIOM members (93,000) abstained.

The PSI recoiled from responsibility for leading an insurrection. PSI secretary Egidio Gennari concluded: “The pact of alliance [between the PSI and CGL] states that for all questions of a political character the party directorate may assume the responsibility for the direction of the movement… At this moment, the party directorate does not intend to avail itself of this privilege.”

Thus was revolution put aside. By the end of September, the workers were exhausted, and the union leaders negotiated a settlement that ended the occupations on favorable terms for the employers. Although some verbal concessions were made about the need to develop workers’ control, these were never acted on. In fact the end of the occupations witness what Gramsci had predicted; it ushered a period of violent reaction.

Two participants later remarked, correctly: “A revolution is not made by first calling a convention to decide whether there is going to be a revolution or not.”

Now the PSI leaders could save face and claim that they were “for” revolution but were betrayed by the union leaders. Yet as Tasca noted, they had preached revolution, but “had foreseen nothing, prepared nothing.” Another socialist, Nenni, said that the convention “liquidated the political solution with the complicity of the party leadership, which wanted to lose.” While all of this transpired, Serrati and Bordiga were both attending the Second Congress of the Comintern!

This essentially ended the chapter of revolutionary possibilities in the postwar period in Italy before the rise of fascism decimated the working-class movement.

The fact is that during the two red years, the revolutionaries were not united in a way that they could give a national lead and combat the reformism of the PSI and the unions. From city to city, they had no real contact with each other, leaving the field open to the reformists to dominate, and wind down, the struggle. “While everyone talked about revolution,” wrote Serrati, “no one prepared for it.” This was true of Serrati more than anyone else! At no time did the initiative during the occupation pass from the hands of reformist trade union leaders in the CGL, who had no intention of leading a revolution.

Gramsci later (in 1923) recognized the limitations of Ordine Nuovo in this period:

Because of the antipathy we felt during the period of 1919-1920 toward setting ourselves up as a faction, we remained isolated, almost a collection of individuals, while on the other side, among the abstentionists, their tradition of factional organization and common activity left a deep imprint whose theoretical and practical effects are still visible in party life today.

Gramsci had neither the confidence nor the stature within the national party at that time to pose an alternative. Sadly, this carried over into the formation of the Communist Party.

At this point, Gramsci favored forming communist cells within the PSI, winning a majority, and expelling the reformists. However, the dominant force on the left of the PSI was Bordiga’s abstentionist group, which supported an immediate split. When a formal communist faction was created toward the end of 1920 uniting the PSI left, it was Bordiga’s faction that was dominant. The Piedmont Avanti! changed its name, and Gramsci became editor of a new daily l’Ordine Nuovo, paper of the Turin section of the communist faction.

The CP faction formally split from the PSI at the Livorno congress to form the Communist Party in January 1921. Bordiga was its leader, and Gramsci (who was attacked by some for an article he wrote in 1915 that seemed vaguely to support Italian intervention in the war), was not even elected to the party’s leadership.

These were bad times for the left, and for Gramsci in particular. First of all, the party was able to win only a minority (30 percent) of the PSI membership. When it broke away, the CP had at most 40,000 members.  Second, the CP formed in the wake of the serious defeat of the working class in 1920. The last echo of this period was the electoral success of the PSI at the polls in that year, not the growth of the Communists.

The CP was formed in the midst of the rise of Mussolini’s fascist black shirts—a mass middle-class movement formed of demobilized military personnel, enraged shopkeepers, and disgruntled nationalists funded by landowners and capitalists who  banded into armed gangs and smashed up the meeting halls and printing presses of the Left, just as Gramsci had predicted in the Spring. One of fascisms first bloody acts: In November, when the newly-elected socialist mayor of Bologna addresses a crowd from a balcony, fascists fire indiscriminately into the crowd and throw hand grenades, killing 10 and wounding 58. Armed fascist gangs burned down union and left organizations’ presses and meeting houses, attacked demonstrations, beat up and murdered leftists; they stormed by truckloads into cities and seized control of them. They took control of the streets. Gramsci now had to travel everywhere with a large bodyguard and take turns standing watch over the newspaper office where he worked.

The CP’s politics were shaped by Bordigism. Though under Comintern criticism Bordiga formally renounces abstention from elections, the party remained sectarian, seeing its task as preserving its revolutionary purity by restricting its membership and refusing to be “contaminated” by alliances or joint struggles with other forces—just at the moment when a working-class united front against rising fascism was of the utmost importance.

This was a low period for Gramsci. His writings in this period lack clarity. Strangely, at the very same time he describes these developments in his articles, he still talks of preparing the working class to develop councils and overthrow the bourgeoisie, something that at this point is off the agenda. He alternates between recognition of the seriousness of the fascist threat and speaking of the fascists “intrinsic weakness.” At the same time, in another article he explains that the CP has not become a mass party due to the “great demoralization and dejection” of the masses as a result of the failure of the occupation of the factories.

An example of his lack of clarity, he writes in Elections and Freedom in April 1921 of the debilitating attacks by fascists on the working-class movement:

[T]he premises of the working class, The Chambers of Labor and the Socialist and Communist sections, have been burned down in their tens and their hundreds. Even the streets are denied to the popular masses: the natural place where the proletariat can assemble without cost has become a field for surprise-attacks and ambushes. To keep its domination of the streets, the working class would have to remain mobilized day and night…

But this article is not a call to action against the fascists. This description comes in an article that is meant to show that the impotence of elections and parliament will convince the working-class of the need for a council-based workers’ state (he even makes reference to the constituent assembly elections in post-revolution Russia!), not to show the absolute necessity of a united working-class defense of its institutions!

He concludes, astonishingly:

Let us make the revolutionary hypothesis that a popular insurrection sweeps away the next parliament and replaces it with a congress of workers’ and peasants’ deputies.

According to Togliatti, though personally to his closest associates Gramsci expresses criticisms of Bordiga’s sectarianism, he keeps these opinions to himself. Publicly, he carries the Bordigist line. He votes in 1922 for the “Rome Thesis,” a document that conceives the party as something that must be preserved from contamination by reformist and petty-bourgeois influence, arguing that any alliance or joint work with the PSI would merely create illusions in it.

Fascism was declared to be just another form of bourgeois rule. The party’s official line was that no fascist or military dictatorship was possible; when Mussolini then came to power soon after that, Bordiga argued that fascism was a form of violent capitalist rule that signaled its immanent collapse. The party considered the PSI, if not worse than fascism, an equally bad enemy of revolution, and it was therefore indifferent as to whether there be a fascist or a social-democratic government. Bordiga considered Mussolini’s march on Rome a mere change of administrations.

Because the party failed to see that fascism was a mass reactionary movement designed to crush the working-class, “No political action,” Gramsci would later write in critical retrospection, “was carried out to prevent fascism from coming to power.”

The Italian socialists were equally passive in the face of fascism. Trotsky was later to write, “The Social Democracy hoped that the docile conduct of the workers would restore the ‘public opinion’ of the bourgeoisie against the fascists”—so it preached passivity to the class.

Trotsky’s summary of the politics of the PCI in its first years is extremely instructive and deserves to be quoted:

The Italian Communist Party came into being almost simultaneously with fascism. But the same conditions of revolutionary ebb tide which carried the fascists to power served to deter the development of the Communist Party. It did not take account of the full sweep of the fascist danger; it lulled itself with revolutionary illusions; it was irreconcilably antagonistic to the policy of the united front; in short, it suffered from all the infantile diseases. Small wonder! It was only two years old. In its eyes fascism appeared to be only “capitalist reaction.” The particular traits of fascism which spring from the mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat, the Communist Party was unable to discern. Italian comrades inform me that with the sole exception of Gramsci, the Communist Party wouldn’t even allow of the possibility of the fascists’ seizing power. Once the proletarian revolution had suffered defeat and capitalism had kept its ground, and the counter-revolution had triumphed, how could there be any further kind of counter-revolutionary upheaval? The bourgeoisie cannot rise up against itself! Such was the gist of the political orientation of the Italian Communist Party. Moreover, one must not let out of sight the fact that Italian fascism was then a new phenomenon, and only in the process of formation; it wouldn’t have been an easy task even for a more experienced party to distinguish its specific traits.

There is no evidence of Gramsci publicly disagreeing with Bordiga on any of these key questions in this period. He voted for the Rome Thesis. And yet, there were telling moments. In 1921, the Artidi d’popolo formed, an armed force involving people from various strands of the left, organized to resist fascism. Gramsci is excited by the prospects of a united armed defense against fascism and expresses support for the Arditi. Bordiga forbids the party to having anything to do with them—on pain of expulsion—and Gramsci acquiesces.

It’s possible that in this period he simply lost confidence in himself. It is not until 1923, that is, a year after Mussolini comes to power and begins slowly to consolidate a totalitarian state, and not until Bordiga and other leaders of the PCI are arrested, that Gramsci decides to break with Bordiga and win leadership in the CP based on a different conception of the party.

This comes after Gramsci travels to the USSR in May 1922 to participate in an enlarged executive meeting of the Comintern.

 At its recently help third congress, the Comintern— in the face of the defeat of the European revolutionary upsurge and the reconsolidation of capitalist rule—as well as a disastrous “March action” in Germany, in which the CP attempts to push through a revolutionary offensive when it does not have the support of the majority of the working class, and loses half its members)—argues for the necessity of the CPs forming United Fronts with reformist working-class parties for the purposes of uniting the working class against attacks on the working class, and through these tactics, win over a majority of the class.

Trotsky in 1922 Third Congress:

Unity of front consequently presupposes our readiness, within certain limits and on specific issues, to correlate in practice our actions with those of reformist organizations, to the extent to which the latter still express today the will of important sections of the embattled proletariat.

But, after all, didn’t we split with them? Yes, because we disagree with them on fundamental questions of the working-class movement.

And yet we seek agreement with them? Yes, in all those cases where the masses that follow them are ready to engage in joint struggle together with the masses that follow us and when they, the reformists, are to a lesser or greater degree compelled to become an instrument of this struggle.

This approach was rejected by all the leaders of Italian communism, including Gramsci. Yet, if there was to be any possibility of holding back the onslaught of fascism, such a strategy was imperative.

It is likely that Gramsci shifted his position finally on this question as a result of the arguments he had with Zinoviev, Trotsky, and others on the necessity of the United Front while he was in Russia. But it took some time. Even in April, 1922, he declares to the EKKI: “After the period of fascist government we will enter the phase of the decisive struggle for the power of the proletariat.”

Gramsci criticism of the party in 1924 indicates the ways in which he wanted to reorganize and refocus the party:

Gramsci was later to write:

We have not thought of the party as the result of a dialectical process in which the spontaneous movements of the revolutionary masses and the organizational directive will of the center converge, but only as something floating in the air which develops in itself and for itself, and which the masses will reach when the situation is favorable and the revolutionary wave has reached its height, or when the party center thinks that it must start an offensive and lowers itself to the masses to stimulate them and carry them into action.

This reorientation has some impact. The party grows, from 9,000 in 1923 to 25,000 by the end of 1924. But this could not alter the fact that by now, the bulk of the tested working-class militants in the party had either fled the country, were imprisoned, or had been killed by fascists.

He returns to Italy in May 1924, after having been elected to parliament, thinking that he can operate in Italy with Parliamentary immunity. Through a series of meetings, arguments, etc., he is able to win the ranks of the party away from Bordigism and on a new course.

The Matteotti affair—where it is revealed that Mussolini has order the assassination of a socialist deputy who openly criticizes him in parliament (was knifed to death)—creates an opening where the fascists are thrown onto the defense and which the party attempts to exploit. Gramsci proposes joint action with all antifascists forces, including a general strike, but gets no response, and the window quickly closes. The affair and the party’s growth made Gramsci have a brief flicker of hope that fascism could be overthrown sooner than later. But the masses by this time were too atomized.

Trotsky argued that Gramsci was the only one in Italy who came close to understanding the character of fascism. His description of Mussolini, written in 1924:

He was then, as today, the quintessential model of the Italian petty bourgeois: a rabid, ferocious mixture of all the detritus left on the national soil by centuries of domination by foreigners and priests. He could not be the leader of the proletariat; he became the dictator of the bourgeoisie, which loves ferocious faces when it becomes bourbon again, and which hoped to see the same terror in the working class which it itself had felt before those rolling eyes and that clenched fist raised in menace.

Gramsci wrote to his wife Julia in 1925:

I believe that here in Italy we are living through a phase of history no other country has known yet, full of the unexpected and unforeseeable, because fascism has now realized its aim of destroying all the organizations, all the channels through which the masses can express their wishes.

He traveled from one end of Italy to another, speaking in clandestine meetings, many held in out in the countryside. He set up a correspondence school to try and train cadre. He was cognizant of the fact that the socialist movement in Italy had never really developed a serious historical analysis of Italy, its class forces, and so on.

In his first debut as a deputy, with Mussolini present, he quietly delivers a stinging antifascist address. Those present had to remain completely quiet to hear what he said. In it, he sums up his conception of the party:

A class cannot remain itself, cannot develop itself to the point of seizing power, unless it possesses a party and an organization which embodies the best, most conscious part of itself.

Gramsci’s concern on the eve of his arrest and imprisonment can be summarized as follows:

1. A revolutionary party cannot be built without close contact with the working class and its struggles; it must be built as a party that is part of the class, not a party that stands apart from the class
2. In order to become a mass party capable of challenging capitalism, the party must be able to win over wider layers of workers. It cannot do so without utilizing the policy of the United Front—by engaging in joint struggle to defend the institutions of the class, and to fight for the immediate interests of the class. It cannot simply sit and “wait” for the working class to “rise” to its level—an elitist and sterile conception.
3. The party, especially in a country like Italy, where the working class is not in the majority, must seek to build alliances, in particular with Italian peasants.

In the debate at the party’s Lyon’s congress in 1926, he put it this way:

There is no country where the proletariat is in a position to conquer power and retain it by itself; it must therefore always seek allies. It must look for a policy which will allow it to assume the leadership of those other classes which have anti-capitalist interests and guide them in the struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois society. The question is particularly important in Italy, where the proletariat is a minority in the working population, and where it is dispersed geographically in such a way that it cannot presume to lead a victorious struggle for power until it has given a clear solution to the problem of the relationship to the peasant class. In the immediate future, our Party must devote itself to the definition and solution of this problem.

Indeed, the last (unfinished) article Gramsci wrote was on the “Southern Question,” that is, how to connect the struggle of workers in the north with the struggle of peasants and landless workers in the South. His formulations about class consciousness are similar to those of Lenin in WITBD. The working class cannot lead a revolution unless it positions itself as the champion of all the oppressed and working masses, that is, by moving beyond simply a consciousness of itself as an exploited class.

Gramsci is finally arrested on November 8, 1926, on his way to a meeting with a Comintern representative to discuss the fight against the Trotskyist opposition.

Gramsci and Stalinism

We would all be happy if in this period Gramsci took a stand with Trotsky against the Stalinist degeneration in Russia. Sadly this is not the case. While he did not rabidly join in the attack, his few comments on it show some dismay at the fight, some initial sympathy for the opposition; but ultimately he tended to skirt around the question.

He wrote in 1924, in a Letter to Togliatti, on Trotsky’s opposition:

Demanding a greater intervention of proletarian elements in the life of the party and a diminution of the powers of the bureaucracy, they want basically to ensure the socialist and proletarian character of the revolution.

Yet in the same letter he calls the opposition “nothing but Mensheviks who cloak themselves in revolutionary language.” This might perhaps have been due to the fact that the opposition at this time now included Zinoviev and Kamenev, who it was widely known, had opposed the October insurrection in 1917.

 He did not side with the opposition. Indeed, he could not have remained leader of the Italian CP if he had. He did, however, write a letter in 1926 to the Russia central committee that appeals for unity and makes an appeal against any “extreme” measures against Trotsky and the opposition. Togliatti refused to deliver the letter, and Gramsci was arrested before this issue was resolved.

The Prison Years

We do not have time to adequately deal with this period of his life and his Prison Notebooks. It will have to be left for another article.

Gramsci’s prison life was extremely difficult, to quote the introduction to his Prison Notebooks:

His years in prison were an eleven-year death-agony. His teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food, his chronic insomnia became permanent so that he could go weeks without more than an hour or two of sleep, he had convulsions in which he vomited blood, and suffered from headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell.

It is against this background that the achievement of the Prison Notebooks [six volumes] should be seen. He filled dozens of notebooks with his ideas and thoughts and studies. Under the eyes of the warden, who had to stamp ever notebook, he wrote, in elliptical language, reams of notes about various questions. The fragmentary nature of his notes, and the Aesopian language he is forced to use, has meant that they have been very much used and abused, as Hallas points out.

Almost alone amongst the first rank thinkers of the movement in the early twenties, he was able to avoid confronting the issue of Stalinism. Arrested in 1926 by the Fascist police, he was to spend practically the whole of the rest of his life in prison, and his release in 1937, after years of chronic ill-health, was followed almost immediately by his death. Thus it was possible for his erstwhile comrade Togliatti to create something like a cult of Gramsci in the post-war Italian Communist Party (PCI) and for all those, like the New Left Review, who wish to straddle between Stalinism and Marxism to make him into a totem. Here was an original mind and a significant body of thought “uncontaminated” by the disagreeable debate about Trotskyism.

Or to quote Massimo Salvadorion the uses of Gramsci:

What has happened to Gramsci is that he has become a fountain from which everyone takes whatever water he needs: for some he is the father of a conception of authentic proletarian democracy; for others, he is a strict Stalinist; for still others, he is a social-democrat, maybe even of a right-wing variety; there are those who consider him an orthodox Marxist- Leninist; while in the eyes of others, to conclude, he is an incorrigible idealist who has never understood anything of Marxism—or just about.

To give a sense of the elliptical formulations he used in the Prison Notebooks, which made these distortions and contortions easier, here is one example:

The modern prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilization.

Nevertheless, many of Gramsci’s concerns are those he took with him into prison as the leader of the Communist Party and throughout his life: He writes against the fatalism and determinism of Second International Marxism, and for the importance of human agency in transforming society: “Only the man who wills something strongly can identify the elements which are necessary to the realization of his will.”

How can the working class become “hegemonic” leading class—through the united front, building alliances with other oppressed classes (which he calls “war of position”) in order to be in a position to lead an insurrection to overthrow capitalism (“war of maneuver”)? How should the revolutionary party be built (he calls it “the modern prince”)? What is its nature? How does the working class produce its own leaders, its own “intellectuals”? And so on. It stretches credulity to think that the revolutionary before prison, suddenly got reformist religion once he found himself in his cell. There is no indication of that, however his ideas have been distorted after he died.

Gramsci’s always drew from the experience of the class and of the class struggle, and at every step he learned from the struggle. His great tragedy is having to learn lessons in a hothouse environment where there wasn’t time to correct mistakes and then move forward based on those assessments. He grew up in a time when the alternative was socialism or barbarism, and he had the misfortune of trying without the proper time or resources to hold back the tide of barbarism when the storm of revolution had failed.