Antonio Gramsci: The Real Italian Stallion

Revolutionary Political Theorists

Antonio Gramsci was a revolutionary Italian political theorist whose works are less known than other socialists of his time. However, with a widening inequality gap, a de-unionized labor force and a generation of millennials who feel disenfranchised and left out of the American dream, Gramsci’s popularity has risen exponentially in recent years. The early 20th century was full of revolutionary fervor and the crippling of monarchies, and Gramsci was at the forefront of political thought for the time period. In order to understand Gramsci the man, we must understand his background and what ultimately led him to become the leader and intellectual heart of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1920’s.

Gramsci was born in 1891 in Ales, Sardinia in the Kingdom of Italy. He was the 4th of 7 sons. His father was a low level government official and his mother we don’t know much about. His father was convicted of embezzlement when Gramsci was young and this forced him to abandon his schooling. It would have a profound affect on Gramsci but none more so than his medical suffering that he began to endure. He had a malformation of the spine and was a hunchback from the age of eight. However, it didn’t stop him from completing secondary school and enrolling at the University of Turin to study linguistics. While at UT, Gramsci got introduced to trade unions for the first time. The city of Turin was undergoing mass industrialization and the local Fiat factory was constantly recruiting workers from UT and the surrounding villages. This fascinated Gramsci who realized that collective bargaining was a useful way to keep workers safe and he began going around campus encouraging mass unionization. One can say that this was the beginning of Gramsci’s radicalization.

Exposure to the university setting was the main catalyst in forming Gramsci’s revolutionary thinking. But his lower class experiences growing up in rural Sardinia also helped shape his worldview. In 1913, he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). The PSI dominated the Italian left until WWII when it would eventually be eclipsed by the often shapeshifting PCI. Being in the university setting also led him to bump elbows with other influential Italian political figures, most notably Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce. Croce had a profound influence on Gramsci early on and was often considered the most important living Italian philosopher at the time. This moment was important for Gramsci. It’s when he first heard about the brand of Hegelian Marxism that Labriola was working on. The “philosophy of praxis” would later come in handy and be used by Gramsci as coded language while in prison to escape the censors. Its definition essentially means that life problems are in reality, social problems that are abstractly conceived. It was a phrase used by Lukacs, Marx and other thinkers in the mid 19th century. To make it easier to understand, the word “praxis” is Greek for “theory.” A “philosophy of praxis” is thus theory being debated by intellectuals. Moving on, Gramsci began to formulate his own interpretation on Marxism at the time and understood quite well that labor power was the key. However, learning how to create and mobilize a mass labor movement amidst the height of the Industrial Revolution in Italy, was a much harder task altogether.

Just three years later in 1916, Gramsci would become co-editor of the Piedmont edition of Avanti!, which was the official organ of the PSI. Gramsci was excellent in this role given his zeal for political theory and the experience he received at UT. Shortly after, he gave his first public speech and would discuss the French Revolution, Fordism, the Paris Commune and the emancipation of women. It was during this period from 1916-1919, that Gramsci became one of Italy’s leading socialists. In 1919 he would start the newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), and make in-roads into joining the Comintern (Communist International). We can say with certainty that by making international connections with the Soviets, he began to for the first time, draw attention to himself outside of Italy. This would not be a major factor though in Gramsci’s ultimate life trajectory. He was a revolutionary political theorist at heart and was guided by those principles, not as much interested in parlor politics. During this time, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini provided funding and logistics help for L’Ordine Nuovo and their early distribution issues (pre-Fascist period, no censorship yet). Interestingly, Lenin thought L’Ordine Nuovo was the closest to the party organs the Bolsheviks had and thus gave Gramsci some funding help.

While in the PSI, workers’ councils were developed in Turin due to the strikes in 1919-20. The PSI believed that these were effective advocacy groups for the low-wage workers of the city mainly in the steel industry and Fiat factories. However, the councils quickly fell out of favor with not only Gramsci, but Tasca and other high ranking PSI figures. Gramsci figured this was due to them not reaching the status of a national movement. It was during this time that Gramsci advocated for a Communist party in the “Leninist” model. So therefore, in 1921 in the town of Livorno, the Italian Communist Party was founded (PCI). Amadeo Bordiga was the leader of the party on paper, but Gramsci was its intellectual core. Bordiga put an emphasis on discipline and purity but would eventually fall out of favor with the rest of the party, ultimately vacating his leadership seat to Gramsci in 1924. Before we get to 1924 though, we can’t skip the year of 1922. That’s the year fascism was officially formed and later indoctrinated with the March on Rome, October 27th, 1922 by Mussolini and his Blackshirts.

As Gramsci would later say himself, Mussolini’s rise to power was a life-changing moment for him and the PCI. With the war over, the country becoming more partisan and rampant agricultural poverty in the south, the fascists used fear and authoritarianism to consolidate power in Rome and its surrounding environs. They would begin to build a corporatist state that took any collectivist powers away from the poor workers all over the country. This was antithetical to Gramsci’s entire worldview and what he has spent the last 10 years involving himself in. Now, as the head of the PCI in 1924, he would be in a position to start doing something to combat these recent events. He founded the official party organ, L’Unita (Unity) while living in Rome. It was around this time, that Gramsci started to promote in the newspaper, his long worked on theses on “cultural hegemony.” His “thesis on cultural hegemony” is what he would later call it. The term “cultural hegemony”, as defined by Gramsci, is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society (beliefs, values, perceptions and mores), so that the imposed, ruling class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm. At its core, this analysis is a Marxist one and it centers around the bourgeoisie, capitalist class that towered over the plebeians that inhabited Turin during the Industrial Revolution. It was a culmination in all Gramsci not only theorized about, but saw with his own eyes dating back to his freshman days at UT. Furthermore, his thesis called for a united front against fascism and that included some of the petite bourgeoisie that held some land in urban centers.

By 1926 however, things were looking bleak for the PCI and Italy as a whole. Gramsci wrote a letter to the Comintern imploring them to check Stalin and practically begging Trotsky to do something about him and the trajectory that the USSR was taking. Gramsci obviously was unaware that by 1926, Trotsky had completely fallen out of Stalin’s favor and they both hated each other intensely during the rest of the decade. Stalin’s often brutish behavior to other comrades turned into a cult of personality as the Soviets veered off track into authoritarianism of the most absurd kind by the time the 1930s came. For Gramsci though, he realized that he would not be able to outrun the fascist police that were becoming more embedded inside Rome. This came to be true because on November 9, 1926, Gramsci was arrested after the fascist government enacted new emergency laws and claimed Gramsci threatened Mussolini’s life through pamphleteering. They took him to the notorious Roman prison, Regina Coeli and he appeared at trial a few weeks later. The judge sentenced him to 5 years on the island of Ustica and the following year he got charged with another 20 years, this time to be spent at a prison near Turi. Nobody knows where the additional 20 years came from, (but one can speculate on the motivations behind them.) During the painful 11 years that Gramsci would spend in prison, his health would deteriorate immensely. He lost teeth, had convulsions, spit blood and had his digestive system collapse to the point where he couldn’t eat any solids. It was a miserable existence. The great crime of what Orwell would later term (“thought-crimes) is what Gramsci was essentially guilty of. Of course, he was one of many socialists in the early 20th century who would either be imprisoned or killed; it just doesn’t make the outcome any less depressing. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for Gramsci. He took the time in 1926 when he was first arrested, to begin his infamous Prison Notebooks. This selection of notes that Gramsci jotted down between 1929 and 1935, would cover a wide range of topics. He wrote more than 30 notebooks which included about 3,000 pages of history, political analyses and some linguistic work. The notebooks ironically would turn out to be what he is most remembered for to this day. They cover state and civil society, a critique on “economism” a critique on “materialism” and some historicism referencing the Risorgimento (Italian Unification). These notebooks kept Gramsci very busy in prison and he was smart enough to couch his language and use code words in order to avoid the infamous Fascist prison censors.

While Mussolini consolidated power by the late 1920s, early 1930s with a massive military budget, a huge national debt and an impoverished countryside, Gramsci was wasting away in a prison near Turi. By 1933, his sister-in-law and his longtime friend and famous Italian economist Pierro Sraffa, organized an international campaign to get him released. Later that same year, he was moved from the prison near Turi to a psych clinic in Formia, not that far south of Rome. He was due for release on April 21, 1937 and was most likely going to retire to the seaside in southern Italy to recuperate. However, his amounting health issues such as gout, arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure, kept him confined to his bed for those weeks. This would prove fatal as he would die on April 27, 1937 at the age of 46 from a combination of those causes.

Antonio Gramsci was a unique political theorist. He was one of the all-time great socialists, despite his dying at a relatively young age. His early activism allowed the PSI and eventually the PCI to blossom during his tenure. He was undoubtedly the brainchild behind both organizations. His interpretation of Marxism was different and arguably led to a better interpretation of Marx to this day. Before Mussolini’s consolidation of power in Rome, the PCI was on its way to mobilizing a large group of peasants in the south and shifting its rhetoric to attract industrial workers in the north. L’Unita had great potential to spread its message across the country. They had the finances through working with the Comintern, to bring about a socialist government one day soon in Italy. All of this could have happened. But it didn’t. Politics is a fluid game of chess. WW1 left Italian veterans disenfranchised, jobless and unable to receive an education. Mussolini and his fascists provided a vehicle for young Italians (mainly men) to channel their anger and hatred of their bitter defeat to the Austro-Hungarians in the recent war. This partisanship was highly volatile for the country and unfortunately Mussolini gained enough corporate power-backing that was necessary to pull off his March on Rome. By the time of Gramsci’s death, Mussolini had already ravaged the countryside of Ethiopia but while doing so, cost himself a ton of manpower and money. They may not have seen it, but this was the beginning of the end of Fascist Italy.

Maybe Gramsci was laying in bed wondering what he could have done different, as we all do. We will never know since he stopped writing entirely by 1935. He had scratch pads but struggled to write toward the end of his life. What he heard on the radio and read in the newspapers must have horrified him. Fascists were gaining a foothold in Europe. Mussolini and Hitler were just negotiating a pact and Gramsci was close to death. I often wonder what he would think of the world’s geopolitical situation in 2020 and the authoritarian regimes we have seen rise up in recent years. In many ways our current time (almost 100 years later), mimics the 1920s Gramsci lived through. Inequality is at remarkable levels and there is a complete generational gap between those who see capitalism as a social good and those who see it as inherently evil. We need many more political theorists like Gramsci to help us sort out all of this madness.