ANTONIO

Alastair GRAMSCI:
Davidson
THE MAN
A lecturer in politics at Monash University contributes the
first of a series on the famous Italian marxist Antonio
Gramsci. The concluding part of this article will be pub­
lished in the next issue of ALR.
Later articles will consider Gramsci’s understanding of
Marxism and particularly his concept of hegemony, his
views on the role of a socialist party in advanced capitalist
countries and on the role of intellectuals and intellectual
activity.
The author, who started work at sixteeti, educated himself
through matriculation and part of his degree while working
at all sorts of manual and clerical jobs. H e has travelled
widely and speaks four languages. H e spent a year and a
half in Italy in 1956-57 and almost a year in 1962-63 learning
the language and something of the Italian labor movement.
AN'TONIO GRAMSCI’S work is already well-known in European
countries, but has yet to be translated at length into English.1
In Italy he is the rage, his Quaderni del Carcere* in which most
of his thought appears, selling 400,000 copies between 1948-57.2
In France his work has been translated and widely read, especially
in left wing circles. T he present policy of the Italian Communist
Party, which has such a distinctive stamp, is partly a result of that
party’s espousal of Gramscian marxism. In the French Communist
Party, while his ideas have not acquired a hegemony, they are
very influential.3 Dispute exists as to his real m erit as a marxist
theoretician but, I feel that he was underestimated by the writer
who said “Gramsci is a marxist of the calibre of the early Kautsky,
and compares favourably with Plekhanov and Rosa Luxemburg.
He is a marxist in the great tradition of M arx himself, a thinker
with an open mind, disciplined in the search for truth.”4 T he
reader of these articles may judge for himself the merit of Gramsci,
recognising that the articles may fail to do Gramsci justice. He
could, if he wishes to inquire further, read the only three texts in
English, which are, in order of merit, John Cammett’s, Antonio
Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, Carl M arzani’s,
* Prison Notebooks — Ed.
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The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, and Louis M ark’s, The

Modern Prince and other Writings.
This article is about the man and the social context in which
he expressed his ideas, as philosophy cannot be understood inde­
pendent of the context in which it was evolved. Today, political
philosophy taught in universities is dom inated by the school which
maintains the contrary and seeks for eternal values in political
philosophy. Thus the ideas of John Locke are taught as relevant
political ideas today without pointing out that they were written
in a particular sort of society, that of the green England which
existed at the end of the seventeenth century. More importantly,
it is not considered relevant that Locke wrote his theory in response
to certain political conditions and that his theory was inspired by
a desire to justify a certain political system. In other words, the
conditions sine qua* Locke would not have written what he wrote,
are dismissed as irrelevant. T o study ideas in historical and social
context is dismissed loftily as “political biography”. There can be
no doubt that the people who m aintain that the social context
is irrelevant are conservative apologists, no m atter what reasons
they give for their refusal to discuss ideas in historical context. To
illustrate my point: at Monash university the views of Edmund
Burke on the obligations of an elected representative are taught
without emphasising that Burke’s "speech to the electors of Bristol”
was delivered in an oligarchic society where there was no thought
of democracy existing in reality and that therefore what he said
can have no relevance to a society in which liberal democratic
government prevails, as he was talking about a different problem.
Futhermore, to compound the misdeed—for the students swallow
whole the notion that Burke is relevant today rather than merely
belonging to the history of political theory—teachers do not
teach the countervailing theory espoused and associated with
socialists, above all, that the delegate has an exhaustive mandate
and is not free to refer to his own conscience. Conscience is far too
frequently interest writ large.
So Gramsci will be studied in historical context as the eternal
verities which any man expresses can only be found by studying
his thought -in historical context and then deriving the verities.
Those readers acquainted with Gramsci’s thought will recognise
that the ideological framework in which this essay is written is
that of Gramscian marxism. For this I make no apologies. Indeed,
I hope that the vulgar marxists will be suitably shocked to discover
that there is no attempt to give explanations solely in terms of
* W ithout which — Ed.
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 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW Feb.-M arch, 1968
economic determinism. Gramsci himself pointed out, with greater
perception than any marxist philosopher since Marx, that:
W e m ust fight theoretically as prim itive infantilism the attem pt to explain every
fluctuation of politics and ideology as an im m ediate reflection of some change
in the economic base of the structure. T his nonsense is sometimes even p re­
sented as an axiom of historical m aterialism.
. . . T he point is th at any phase in the developm ent of the economic base can
be studied concretely only after its developm ent has been finished.
W e don't nay enough attention to the fact that many political actions are due
to internal organisational necessities, the needs to m aintain the coherence of
a party, a group, a society. 5
Nor will there be any attem pt to glorify the working class.
Gramsci, while an intellectual, was innately egalitarian. He felt all
men were thinking men, and all had their part to play. However,
the object of the revolution was not to secure the trium ph of
popular values. R ather it was “to lift up the people” to the level
of “higher” philosophy which would in the first instance be the
preserve of intellectuals. T he revolution was not to better the
worker’s lot, but in bettering him, to change him .6
T hat the ideas of a man are really only comprehensible and facts
relevant in historical context is revealed in the amusing fact that
Gramsci’s paternal ancestors were Albanians who had come to
Italy in 1821. This fact is not of relevance to Gramsci’s political
ideas, though it would be if he himself had come from Albania in,
say, 1960. W hat is of relevance is the fact that he was born at Ales
in Sardinia in 1891 to a father who was a m ainlander and a
member of the adm inistration and to a mother who was a Sardinian
of pure blood and more petty bourgeois/working class than his
father. Being born in Sardinia meant that he was born to the
problema del Mezzogiorno or more precisely, to that of Italia
isolana. T he date of his birth meant that he was born when this
problem was reaching its greatest height and when hopes of a
better social life, which had prom pted so many southern Italians
to support Garibaldi, had died.
T he problema del Mezzogiorno is the central problem of Italian
history and has remained the central problem. It embodies a com­
plex of social, political and economic inadequacies in Southern
and Insular Italy.7 Considered in historical perspective, the pro­
blem was the result of the reactionary nature of the social, econo­
mic and political systems of the pre-unification Southern States
and the mode by which Italian unification was achieved. While
Sardinia was actually part of the political system of the Kingdom
of Sardinia whose capital was T urin, it shared the general cultural
characteristics of the South. Crucial to understanding the South
of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, is an understanding of the miserable
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poverty in which the bulk of the people lived when Italy was
unified. A Neapolitan prince, Ferdinand II, once said that Africa
began at Naples. It could more truly be said that it began at
Rome, for the Papal States were more reactionary even than the
Two Sicilies.8 T he people lived in such poverty because of the
extreme exploitation they suffered at the hands of their feudal
landlords. Most were peasants, often having the status of feudal
serfs. They worked the huge latifondi which were owr.cd by
absentee landlords and the Church, on a predial* labour system.
Late in the 18th century the Neapolitans under Tanlogo, had
attempted to introduce more modern methods of agricultural
production, which sometimes preluded the coming of capitalism,
but on the whole the agrarian system had not changed since the
fall of the Roman Empire. W hat had changed was the productivity
of the land. From Sicily and Apulia being the golden granaries
described by the ancients, they had become barren, poverty-ridden,
wastelands. This decline was due in great part to the inadequate
methods of cultivation and the determ ination of the owners to
screw the last drop of blood out of the peasants no m atter what the
long term losses.
Meanwhile, despite the periodic scourge of cholera and typhus,
which swept through the sea-ports of the South, (including those
of Sardinia), despite the malaria, the infant m ortality rate, the low
life-expectancy and the famines, the population had grown. In
the 19th century there was no longer sufficient land to go around
and huge numbers of peasants either worked as day labourers for
somebody else, or starved on their too-small holdings, half of
whose produce often had to go to the absentee landlord anyway.
Hundreds of years of such conditions had resulted in the emer­
gence of certain cultural patterns among the people of the South
and the islands. First of all the individual’s object was to have his
immediate family survive. Morality, social conscience, class unity,
political affiliations was subordinate to this. As one despairing
politician from the North said “Politically, the Southerner is
absent”.9 T his is still true to some extent today.10 T heir dreadful
poverty often led them to become brigands as this was more
lucrative than agriculture. Before unity brigandage was so pre­
valent in the South and in Sardinia that it was in many cases
licensed (for a fee). T he South and the islands had well developed
criminal sub-cultures, represented by the Cammorra and Mafia.
Brigandage is still rife in Sardinia, so much so that guests from
the sumptuous Costa Smeralda resort are warned not to leave
the "pale of settlement.” It has been pointed out in many places,
* Of peasants, attached to the land — Ed.
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AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW Feb.-M arch, 1968
notably in the Massari report, which the new kingdom of Italy
released soon after it came to power, that brigandage was often a
primitive form of social protest." This should not hide the reality
that these brigands often preyed ,on the peasants who looked up
to them as “mafiosi” (arrogant, i.e. not resigned to their lo t).
In such a society nobody trusted anybody else, and except for
these criminal associations, there were no unifying institutions.
There were no political parties among the peasants. Even the
church was not to be trusted. They lived atomised existences in
family units, starving, and living in such spiritual and moral
degradation outside the family unit, that they were compared un­
favourably with “bedouins and africans,” groups regarded with
particular disapprobation by the Italian educated.12
Of course, not all Southerners or islanders lived thus. Apart
from the nobility who lived in capital cities while their middle
men exploited the peasants, there was another social category to
be perceived, the governmental bureaucracy. U ntil unification,
this had been Southern in composition and was characterised by
being more corrupt and venal than the middlemen on the latifondi
themselves. This bureaucracy already bore the characteristics of
the Italian bureaucracy today. It was over-large, filled with place­
men, lacking in technicians, corrupt, inefficient and more parasitic
than serving a social function. It usually voted with the powers
that be, but to pinch a metaphor, politically it was present and on
sale to the highest bidder.
W hen unification came, it came as a result of the extension of
Piedmontese hegemony over the rest of Italy. T he puritanical,
bourgeois, industrial and industrious Piedmontese were horrified
by the conditions and qualities of the South. Fortunato also
suggests that they were surprised. Coming in with the fervour of
the moral do-gooders, they resolved to clean it up, (provided, of
course, that this did not clash with their interests). They conducted
a long war of a guerilla nature against the banditti before being
defeated late in the century and coming to terms with the system.
There is even a reputable theory held that the Southerners have
converted the Northerners to their morality through a gradual
permeation of the adm inistration and government of Italy. The
Piedmontese also immediately removed most of the Southern
bureaucracy extending their personal and their administrative
system to the South. T his did not last long as the parasitic bureau­
cracy of the South soon ingratiated itself with the new masters
and was back in command, ready to do its duty as petty tyrants,
as much as it had ever done. Now however, there was a leavening
of Piedmontese and Northerners in the South.
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T he Southern peasant was disillusioned by the new regime, from

which he had hoped for an improvement in his lot, something he
conceived in terms ,of more land. T he object of the Northerners
soon emerged as the exploitation of the South for the benefit of
the North. If the Southerners’ lot did not get worse after 1861, it
certainly did not im prove.'3 After unification, peasant risings were
so frequent that a characteristic m ethod of Northern government
of the South was m artial law. One of the greatest of these risings
was that of the Sicilian fasci in the year Gramsci was born and
while the Italian Socialist Party was being formed. It marked the
height of Southern disillusion with the situation brought about by
N orthern exploitation.
Much of the southern peasants’ resentment was owed to the
terrible tyranny of the administration. Salvemini wrote:
W hen the corruption of ruling classes of a country has reached the point of
bestiality in which the Southern bourgeoisie has sunk, a crisis sooner or later
becomes inevitable: the lower classes shake off th e cruel yoke which oppresses
them , sack and com m it crimes, obliging the ruling class to renovate itself. 14
Indeed, some of the Southern intellectuals became alienated in
1861-1900 and through them anarchist doctrine was introduced to
the South of Italy. T he majority in Gramsci’s childhood still be­
longed to the corrupt.
Gramsci belonged to the class of dom inating corrupt bourgeoisie.
His father was born and bred in Gaeta, a classical southern town.
He was, to judge from his disapproval of his son’s socialist leanings,
an establishment m an.15 In 1897, he was sent to jail for five years
for “adm inistrative irregularity”16 (the nature of the irregularity
is obscure, but Gramsci’s mother was always worried that Gramsci
had been sent to jail for doing something dishonorable, which
suggests that his father may have been diddling the books or taking
bribes). T his left Antonio’s seamstress mother to support seven
children. They moved from his birthplace to the m alaria ridden
town of Ghilarza.
Gramsci’s family’s position as members of the bourgeoisie had
never been very stable, his father was only a m inor official. T he
loss of the father for five years precipitated the family into the
dreadful existence of the petty bourgeoisie who have fallen into
the proletariat. W hile they lived in miserable conditions, without
lighting or running water, it is difficult to be sure whether this
experience, between the age of six and eleven, turned Antonio
Gramsci to revolutionary solutions, to socialism. Nowadays, it is
believed that it is in situations like that which had overtaken
Gramsci’s family that the bourgeoisie will turn to revolution.
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However, it must be remembered that children are usually shielded
from the worst suffering. This appears to have happened with
Gramsci, who continued at school throughout the period when his
father was in prison. He, himself, suggests in his letters that his
mother shouldered nearly all of the burden. Certainly, Gramsci
was still fairly confident and showed little of the disorientation
which might be expected of a child for whom the fall from grace
had meaning. Probably he resented his father’s failure.
Only when he was eleven was he precipitated into adult life,
working long hours for little pay in his father’s office. His father
felt that despite his talent he could not be kept at school as the
extra two pounds a day of bread was needed in the family.
Gramsci resented this bitterly. His main reason for resentment was
his deformity. At the age of four he had been dropped, badly
injured, and was given up for dead. He had recovered with a
permanently hunched back. He was always very reticent about
this deformity, which left him permanently sickly and at no time
did he demand pity. W hile the psychologists may fasten on this
as an explanation of his later political leanings (another Rosa
Luxemburg?), there is no evidence that it was anything more than
one factor in his make up. Clearly, it made him unable to work as
a labourer and his personal security depended on his m aintaining
his position in the intellectual bourgoisie. His father’s action in
withdrawing him from school condemned him to the no-man’s
land where he would for ever be afraid of becoming a worker who
could not; work. H e knew he could not survive long as a labourer.17
In the following two years while he was close to the working
class, if not of it, he learnt with his own eyes about the terrible
conditions of the contadino* of Sardinia.18 T hen at thirteen his
mother and sisters sent him back to school with the extra savings
that they had made. He attended first the ginnasio at Santa
Lussurgiu and then in 1908-11 the Liceo Giovanni Maria Dettori
at Cagliari, the Sardinian capital. H sre he revealed a great ability
at classics, where as a primary student his best marks had been
in mathematics.
By 1910 his political opinions had started to form. He wrote an
essay in that year, “Oppressed and Oppressors”, in which he praised
m ankind’s incessant struggle against oppressors and he read Avanti,
the socialist newspaper, regularly.19 He was obviously becoming
alienated from the section of society to which he belonged. Any
explanation must take into account the fact that he starved himself
to remain at school. However, he now knew personally of the
* Peasant — Ed.
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suffering of the peasants of Sardinia and shared their resentments.

Later he wrote of the “pains of Sardinia, the miseria of the Sar­
dinian peasants and workers exploited by all the capitalisms: by
the English one which exploits the mines, by the Piedmontese one
which exploits the railways, by the Roman one which exploits
the grazing land, by the Italian State which each year carries away
millions and millions of taxes which are not returned in any
form and which serve to lighten the tax burden of the m ainland”.20
He may have had personal experience of the banditry which this
poverty caused especially after the unification, and identified it
later as a primitive form of social protest.21 He was strongly
separatist in his sympathies, a feeling provoked widely among
Sardinians by the exploitation by the North, Sardinia being the
first of the Italian regions to form a separatist party.22 His hos­
tility towards the rich and privileged and towards the Italian state
adm inistration and the mainland was still more the result of his
personal experiences and knowledge of the problema del Mezzo-
giorno than reading of socialist texts.
Before becoming a committed socialist of marxist opinion he
left Sardinia to attend the University of T urin. He arrived there
in 1911 and won a scholarship which barely kept body and soul
together. He was placed fifth in the examination, an examination
in which Palmiro Togliatti was placed second. Togliatti remem­
bers a “young man, dark, little, apparently very poor too, whose
body seemed suffering and whose eyes were large and shining.”23
They became close friends soon after, although Gramsci was en­
rolled in the faculties of philosophy and letters and Togliatti in
law. Another close friend at this time was Angelo Tasca with
whom Gramsci lodged in 1911. Gramsci embarked on an ambitious
course of studies and at his first examinations did brilliantly re­
ceiving 30 in geography, 30 in glottology* and 27 in Greek and
Latin grammar. It appears from his activities in 1911 and 1912,
that he still wished to become a professor as he had in Sardinia.
It is therefore arguable that he still wished to escape from his
social origins as much as to change the system which caused the
suffering they entailed. His unusual ability was evident from his
publications on linguistics in learned journals and from the fact
that one of his professors invited him to draw up the courses in
that subject. However, at the examinations in the spring of 1914
he received much worse marks. This may be due to the conditions
of starvation in which he lived, but it was also probably due to his
increasing interest in socialism and the Socialist Party. T he year
after he discontinued his university course, although he still
* = Glossology, the definition and explanation of terms, or m ore broadly,
linguistics — Ed.
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seems until 1918 to have aspired to winning a degree in glottology.
His friends and teachers felt that he could have had as many
degrees as he liked, so remarkable were his talents.24 Gramsci was
to develop into a true intellectual filled with contempt for the
narrowness of the academic.
Two main factors impelled him towards socialism. First there
was the influence of some >of his teachers and secondly, the in­
fluence of the Young Socialist Movement.
T urin university was an isolated outpost of liberalism in a
conservative city, ruled by the huge car-manufacturing complexes.
It was not dominated by marxist philosophers as Italian universities
had been in the nineties, but many of the professors had been
socialists in that period and retained their sympathies. T he man
who most influenced Gramsci was the professor of literature,
Umberto Cosmo, who was a follower of Benedetto Croce. Later
Gramsci wrote very harshly of Cosmo and then regretted it, acknow­
ledging that he was greatly indebted to Cosmo and had been
excessively harsh.25 Gramsci’s acquaintance with Cosmo extended
beyond the lecture hall. Evidently Cosmo used to lend or give
money to Gramsci and his circle when they were in excessively
penurious circumstances.
From Cosmo, Gramsci got not only his Croceian philosophy but
also, that rare quality in Italians, his puritanism and his cult of
political honesty. His beliefs on the obligation of the N orth to
the South also derive from this period.26
Cosmo was also a follower of Gaetano Salvemini, himself an
alienated Southerner, who at that time enjoyed the status of
Grand-Old-Manship among Southern if not N orthern socialists.27
Salvemini’s socialism was highly hum anitarian and intellectual and
had as much to do with the values of the Enlightenment as with
the values of Marx. Gramsci was later to attack Salvemini too, but
at the beginning of the war almost heroworshipped him.
Through common enthusiasm for Salvemini, Gramsci built up
contacts with members of the Socialist Young Federation of T urin
whom he met in various clubs and bars in the neighbourhood in
which he lived. Since his arrival in T urin he had had contact with
Socialists (e.g. Tasca, who was a founder of the SYF) but he
began to draw closer to the youth movement in 1913. T he Youth
Movement, too, had started with positivist beliefs and was moving
via reading of Prezzolini, and Salvemini’s paper Unita towards a
More m ilitant socialism. It took some time for Gramsci to finally
join the Socialist Party, something he did with Togliatti in 1914.28
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W hat really converted him to socialism, though as he himself ad­

m itted and as his actions during the war showed, it was a some­
what nebulous socialism, was his observation of the elections in
Sardinia in 1913.29 Tasca later wrote that Gramsci described to
him in a long letter that he “was struck by the transformation
produced in that area by the participation of the peasant masses
in the elections, although they did not know how to and could not
yet use their new weapon to their own advantage (per conto
loro) As the mode of his conversation suggests, he was still concern­
ed with the way in which socialism could help the; Southern peasant.
In 1914 he played a leading part in the attem pt to get Salvemini
to run for the T urin seat which Salvemini turned down. This
support for Salvemini’s candidature indicates that Gramsci was
still a hum anitarian socialist. He had not yet clarified his ideas.
Indeed, during the war he favoured interventionism, while the
official policy of his party was not to support the war. This error
of judgement damaged his reputation and his attitudes at this
time were frequently used against him in his disputes with the
socialists after the war. Furthermore, he showed some signs of
adm iration for Mussolini, who was the Socialist Party Secretary
until early in the war. Mussolini also supported Italian participa­
tion in the war. One of the reasons for this support was Mussolini’s
militancy, something Mussolini reputedly derived from Sorel’s
theories.
In explaining this vacillation, it must be remembered that
Gramsci was born in Italy when the theories and groupings asso­
ciated with fascism, socialism and idealism had not yet been
separated. Croceian theory was, for example, both a source of
idealism and marxism. Croce, himself, after a partial and disillu­
sioning honeymoon with marxism of the sort taught in Italy in
the 1890’s turned temporarily to fascism, before turning away
from it again. This was also the heyday of revolutionary syndicalism
which dom inated the socialist movement and which also provided
some of the ideas behind fascism (though not in Gramsci’s estima­
tion) .30 T he first and second decades of the twentieth century saw
in Italy, as elsewhere, a widespread alienation among the young
of Italy which provided a seed-bed for both socialism and the
nationalist movements which started to grow after 1911. It was
possible before 1914 for a socialist to find himself in very strange
company. It would be a fascinating study tracing the reasons for
the num ber of socialists who ended up in the fascist camp, after
having been honest and ardent socialists in the war years. It is
salutary for socialists to realise, that fascism is not the “tool of
monopoly capitalism” alone, it is also a mentally disturbed working
class movement, especially in its early stages.
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During the war Gramsci was, however, reading widely and
acquiring a deep and authoritative understanding of theories
associated with the working class movement. Most influential at
this time were the theories of marxism and their syndicalist variants.
At this time he was working as a journalist on the T urin socialist
paper Grido del Popolo and for Avanti. His articles written under
the heading Sotto la Mole enjoyed considerable popularity. He
himself through his dedication and his learning was accepted more
and more as a theoretician. He also began to immerse himself in
working class activities and life, living with the working class and
like them. This gave him an invaluable advantage over the other
theoreticians of the socialist party, and there were many of them,
because they had completely lost touch with the Italian masses.
Gramsci therefore knew how the workers of T urin felt and experi­
enced at first hand the rising radicalism of the war.
In T urin the workers had been becoming more and more m ilitant
as conditions for the working class grew worse and worse in 1915-
17. This continued the tradition of militancy which had ruled in
that city for some years before the war. Indeed, the T urin workers
and Italian workers as a whole became so m ilitant under the
pressures of wartime rationing and fall in standards of living that
there were several armed risings in Italy during or just before
Italy entered the war. T he Italian situation in 1917 can be paral­
leled quite fairly with that in Russia and it remained so for some
three years after 1917.31 It is a m atter of debate whether a revolu­
tionary situation existed in Europe during and just after the
war.32 However, it seems beyond doubt that a situation which
could have led to revolution if correctly utilised was present in
Italy. Gramsci, close to the workers, was conscious of this unease,
something he considered could be felt.
He was, early in 1917, groping towards his own understand­
ing of marxism. In La Citta Futura,* a paper which was all his own
work and which only appeared once, in February 1917, he wedded
Croceian idealism with marxism. Interestingly there were already
similarities with some of Lenin’s thought, though Gramsci had
read no Lenin. Most of these similarities fell under two heads.
First the rejection of the evolutionary theories of marxism favoured
by the m ature working class parties of Germany and secondly the
introduction of the notion of will in utilising revolutionary situa­
tions. Both Lenin’s and Gramsci’s theories were activist theories
emphasing the need for conscious activity before a revolution
could be conducted. However, there were crucial differences of
emphasis and content which make Gramsci’s theory as a whole
* T he City of the F uture — Ed.
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“qualitatively” different from that of Lenin. He argued that it

was necessary to capture the masses’ im agination for the revolution
in the way that the revolutionaries (he meant intellectuals) had
captured it before 1789, by establishing a mythical ideal state which
all men could work for. (In the case of the French Revolution it
had been the Rights of M an). Hence the first task was a struggle
to secure the acceptance of an idea. Here his Croceian heritage
looms large. Gramsci noted with some gratification that in Italy
there was no ruling ideal state (there were borrowed and inappro­
priate models from overseas—note that the Statuto of 1848 was
an unhappy attem pt to wed Rousseau and British constitutional
principles) and that therefore the ruling ideal did not . have to
be defeated before the new ideal Citta Futura could be intro­
duced. I note, in anticipation, that he revised his opinion on this
somewhat later, but in the revolutionary situation of 1917 it did
not appear that any notion of an ideal state had hegemony over
the minds of Italians.
T o destroy or retard the development of the line of thought
somewhat vaguely sketched in the Citta Futura came the news of
the Russian revolutions. They had an enormous impact in Italy
as they did elsewhere. In the Italian working class, Gramsci not
excepted, Leninist theory was widely adopted as a sort of infallible
guide on how to make a revolution. T he result was the develop­
m ent in Gramsci’s thought in 1919-1920 of theories which almost
contradict those which he developed in La Citta Futura and which
later formed the core of Gramscian thought which is valuable
today. It is in this period that Gramsci was in the Leninist tradi­
tion. Even so, in his writings of this period can still be detected a
wedding of ideas he had developed before Lenin became his
mentor. Later this lack of purity was condemned by the Comintern
as erring towards syndicalism.

1 J. Harvey, “A ntonio Gramsci”, M arxism Today, A pril 1967, pp. 114-120

states th at an English translation of Gramsci is being prepared. T h e three
books on Gramsci at present in English are Joh n Cam m ett, A ntonio Gramsci
and the Origins of Italian C om m unism , (Stanford, 1967); Carl M arzani, T he
Open M arxism of A ntonio Gramsci, (Cameron, 1957); L. Marks ed., T he M odern
Prince and O ther W ritings, (International Pub., 1959).
2 J. C am m ett, op.cit., p .190.
3 See for exam ple the Gram scian ideas in Cahiers du C om m unism e Jun e 1963,
p.74 b u t note th at the French leaders are quite hostile.
4 Carl M arzani, op.cit., p.5.
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AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW Feb.-M arch, 1968
5 Ibid., pp. 43-44; A. Gramsci, Ordine Nuovo 1919-1920 (Einaudi T u rin , 1955),
p.234. "Com m unism is integral hum anism ”.
6 M arzani, op.cit., pp.25-31.
7 N. Valeri, La Lotta Politico in Italia dal U nite al 1925 (Le M onnier
1962), p.l9ff.
8 Ibid., p.52, citing B. Croce, Storia del Regro de N apoli, (Bari, 1925).
9 F. N itti, N ord e Slid, Prime Linee di una inchiesta sulla repartitizione
Territoriale delle entrate e delle spese, (T urin, 1900). Introduction.
10 See E. Banfield, T h e M oral Basis of a Backward Society, (Free Press, 1958)
for a brilliant contem porary survey which confirms the attitudes expressed by
N itti, Spaventa and other nineteenth century observers.
11 E. Hobsbawm, “P rim itive Rebels" (M anchester, 1957) for a good exam ple of
this thesis. It m ust be considered next to accounts of terrorism against the
peasantry such as those given by D. Dolci, Waste, (London, 1963).
!2 N. Valeri, op.cit., p.63.
13 N. Valeri, op.cit., p.19-58.
14 G. Salvemini, Problem i educativi a speciali dell’Italia di Oeei, (Florence,
1922), p.29.
15 Gam m ett, op.cit., p .10.
'6 A. Gramsci, Lettere dal Carcere, (Einaudi, T urin , 1965), p.696.
' 7 J. Harvey, op.cit., p .114, “Many nights I cried secretly because my whole
body was in p ain ” [as a result of carrying heavy loads]
' 8 L ettere dal Carcere, p.674.
19 H e is reputed to have read it from the age of fourteen years.
20 O rdine N uovo, p.323.

2 ' Ibid., p.86; See Lettere etc. p.161 for an account of being fired upon
“Certam ente era una com itiva di buontem poni che voleva divertirsi a spaventa-
rci” writes Gramsci and it was n ot "u n a storia di briganti,” b u t h e could not
have been sure.
22 See N. Valeri, op.cit., p.60.
23 See Togliatti, A ntonio Gramsci, (Rome, 1944).

24 J. Cam m ett, op.cit., p.17.

25 Lettere dal Carcere, p.412, 466.

26 O rdine N uovo, pp.362-365.

27 Among Salvemini’s writings on the Southern peasantry see Problem i
educativi e sociali dell’ Italia di Oggi.
28 A. Tasca, “I Prim i Dieci anni del Partito Com unista Italiano." II M ondo,
18 August 1953.
29 Ibid.
30 A. Gramsci, Passato e Presente, pp.186-7.
31 See J. Cam m ett, op.cit., pp.23-31, 47-58 for T urin . I have argued that
jne form ation of the PCI can only be understood in these terms. A. B.
Davidson, “T he Russian R evolution and the Form ation of the Italian Com ­
m unist Party,” Australian Journal of Politics and H istory, X. No. 5, 1964.
32 For an argum ent against the proposition see B. Lazitch, Lenine et la
Troisieme Internationale (Paris, 1951).
63
 ANTONIO
Alastair
Davidson GRAMSCI:
THE MAN
T he concluding part of an article on the famous Italian
marxist A ntonio Gramsci, by a lecturer in politics at Monash
University, in A L R N o. 1 1968. Later articles will consider
Gramsci’s approach to marxism, particularly his concept of
hegemony, his views on the role of a socialist party in
advanced capitalist countries and on the role of intellectuals
and intellectual activity.

T W O FACTS M U ST BE BORNE IN M IND in understanding

Gramsci’s thought in the Ordine N uovo period of 1919-1920. T h e
first was the fact that he read as much Lenin as he could acquire after
1917 and disseminated it through the factories.33 T h e second is
that even so, very little Leninism was reaching W estern Europe
before late 1920 and this m eant a lopsided understanding of Lenin
which is clear from Gramsci’s work.34
In the years 1918-20 the October R evolution was often described
as the revolution of the “soviets” and Lenin and Trotsky as
leaders of the “soviets.” T h e ruling idea was that the key to an
understanding of the Russian revolution was an understanding
of the role of the soviets. T h e nature of the bolshevik party was
regarded as m uch less significant and until the second congress
of the Communist In ternational in August, 1920, which was formed
to conduct the “world revolution” the nature of a communist
party outside Russia was not regarded as im portant, even by the
Russian leaders themselves. One of the earliest facts about the
October revolution which Gramsci realised was the im portant
role the soviets had played.
Almost contemporaneously with the form ation of the Com­
m unist International in M arch, 1919, Gramsci, T ogliatti, Tasca
and Um berto T erracini, another T u rin student, formed the paper
Ordine N uovo (May, 1919). T h is paper was to become one of the
most famous papers in Italian history although in its original
form it only lasted two years. At first it was intended to be only a
cultural journal.35 However, as Italy became more and more
revolutionary and after the PSI became the first m ajor socialist
party of W estern Europe to join the Com intern, socialists began
59
AU ST R A L IA N L E F T REVIEW A pril-M ay, 1968

to ask themselves m ore and more how to conduct the revolution

in Italy, where a revolutionary situation was rapidly developing.36
H aving decided th at the soviet was a universal form and not a
Russian institution Gramsci looked around for something sim ilar
in Italy and discovered the germs of the soviet system which
could lead to the revolution in the commissione interna of the
T u rin factories.37 T h e commissione interne were akin to the
English shop stewards committees. Gramsci proposed in Ordine
N uove th a t they be developed into factory councils, consigli di
fabbrica. These consigli could ultim ately cover all factories and
agricultural production in Italy and provide the basis for the
socialist state after the revolution. In the m eantim e they would
be the means whereby the worker would be made conscious of
him self as part of a great productive process and taught that the
m anaging of the socialist society was not beyond his power.
T h ro u g h this process the worker would attain true liberty.38
Gramsci felt th at several problem s m aking a revolution difficult
could be solved through such a system. H e felt th at the nature
of the Italian state had had an atom ising and alienating effect on
its citizens; they became the “individui-cittadini.”39 T his m eant
th at in m om ents of radicalisation and worsening of conditions,
such as those which prevailed after the First W orld W ar, the
Italians became anarchist or libertarian.40 T his in tu rn led to two
developm ents in the leading circles of the socialist movement:
either revolutionary adventurism o r opposition to any attem pts
to take power at all.4' T h e developm ent of the consigli di fabbrica
would com bat all these tendencies, by developing in the worker
a consciousness of his social im portance, preventing alienation: by
com bating anarchism through discipline; and by enabling the
working class to take power already prepared to ru n the country.
In No. 7 o f Ordine N uovo in 1919 Gramsci launched an appeal
to the very m ilitant workers of T u rin :
H ow can we do m in ate th e huge social forces w hich the w ar has loosed? How
can we discipline them a n d give them a p o litical form w hich has th e virtue
of developing norm ally, of continually being in teg rated u n til it becomes the
skeleton of th e socialist state in w hich the d icta to rsh ip of th e p ro le ta ria t will
be incarnated? H ow can th e presen t be w ed to th e fu tu re, satisfying the
u rg e n t necessities of th e present a n d w orking usefully to create a n d “an ticipate"
th e future?

H e suggested th at the socialist state already existed potentially

in the organs of the working class, the commissione interna,
socialist clubs and peasant communities. T hey should be united
and hierarchically ordered. In the first instance they should be
u nited into regional committees. They should then dem and that
all state power be transferred to the consigli. H e invited all “the
best and most aware” workers to collaborate in this activity.
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AUSTRALIAN L E F T REV IEW A pril-M ay, 1968

Gramsci and T ogliatti and T erracini, bu t not Tasca, who

disagreed with the primacy given by Gramsci to the consigli,42
had already b u ilt up personal contact with the workers in their
place of work and did not rest with the appeal alone. T hey went
into the factories, sought out the best workers and propagandised
on behalf of their scheme. It took time and hard work to win
support. In August 1919, only 1,100 copies of their journal were
being sold in T u rin and little m ore throughout the rest of Italy.
But six months later the paper was selling over four thousand
copies in all. Forty three issues came out in the first year, after
which the num ber of copies sold seems to have settled at about
5,000 copies, though the editors hoped for ten thousand copies by
the end of 1920.43 T his circulation was unheard of for a “piccola
rassegna di cultura.” T h e distribution was m ore diffused by this
time, though mainly concentrated in M ilan and T u rin . Fascists,
and Rom an Catholics, as well as Socialists read Ordine N uovo.

T he workers responded to Gram sci’s appeal, though he was no

“tribune” and soon a netw ork of consigli were established in the
T u rin factories. T h e object of the Ordine N uovo’s editors now
became the raising of the consciousness of the workers and their
cultural level. T hey made no concessions to working class difficulty
in understanding some of their advice (unlike Stalin, who popu­
larised marxism) “Psychologically, the period of elem entary pro­
paganda, so called “evangelism” is over.”44 T h e object of Gram sci’s
intellectuals was to develop the critical faculties of the workers.
T he first task of the workers was to discipline themselves and
organise themselves. “T h e Com m unist revolution is essentially a
problem of organisation and discipline,” he wrote. T h e organisa­
tion would have to start in the factories and then be diffused into
the country.
All these policies seem very sim ilar to the Leninist principles in
What is to be Done?, b u t they were completely independent in
inspiration. Before the Second Congress of the C om intern in
August, 1920, Gramsci knew little about democratic centralism.
° n ly Gramsci’s directions th at the present task of the communists
was to encourage the creation and development of consigli of
Workers and peasants and their eventual unification in a national
organisation and to capture a m ajority in such a congress, were,
Perhaps, inspired by L enin’s policies vis-a-vis the soviets. However,
"is assertion th at the com m unist party could have no com petitors
Was independent.
T h e directions he was m aking to the workers seem fairly obvious
°nes, b u t the backwardness of the Italian working class movem ent
at this time must be rem em bered. Such elem entary directions were
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A U ST R A L IA N L E F T REVIEW April-M ay, 1968

needed. His real originality (if we do not adm it that arriving at

Leninism w ithout having read Lenin is original in itself) lay in his
obiter dicta and use of a wide knowledge of up-to-date Western
European work in political science and sociology.

In Ordine N uovo, Gramsci argued th at the m ain advantage of

placing the consigli in prim e position in the creation of a dictator­
ship of the proletariat, and m aintaining that the unions and then
the socialist party were passe forms, lay in the fact that only in
such a hierarchy could the workers reach an awareness of their
ability to adm inister the state w ithout the bourgeoisie. They
would learn on the job their own all-im portant role in the capi­
talist state. T hey would also, because they were close to their
social roles, more quickly discard their mythical, utopian, religious
and petty bourgeois beliefs in favour of one based on their role
in production.45 T his m ental readjustm ent was a sine qua non
for revolution. It is im portant to note that emphasis on the im­
portance of ideas preluded the theories developed later by Gramsci.

Gramsci argued determ inedly in 1919-20 that the existing institu­

tions of capitalism could not be used to conduct the revolution, nor,
indeed, could those which had arisen in response to the capitalist
system, th at is the trade unions and the Socialist Party. H e used
the Michels thesis to indicate the m anner in which such supposed
proletarian institutions became estranged from the mass. T heir
leaders, he asserted, were too far from the mass to appreciate what
the mass was feeling.
N or did he adm it that the state ushered in by the revolution
would be a parliam entary dem ocratic state. I t too would be
som ething completely new in which the communist party would
at first be dom inant.
Gramsci’s thought on the role of the party went through several
stages. T h e changes in his attitudes were determ ined both by the
developments in Italy in 1919-20 and the influence of the Com in­
tern on his ideas. T hey cannot be understood separate from these
two factors. In 1919 the situation in Italy grew m ore and more
unstable. It “felt” revolutionary. T h e Socialist Party proved unable
to lead the p roletariat to a revolution. It lacked both a programme
of action and the will. T hen, in O ctober it affiliated to the Com­
m unist In tern atio n al and announced its com m itm ent to the
methods used in Russia. Shortly after Gramsci wrote an article
called “T h e Party and the R evolution.” T his said that the PSI
was the agent of a revolution being m ade by the complex of
socio-economic conditions in which the masses were living. I t was
not the controller of the masses. Its job was to subtract from
62
AUSTRALIAN L E F T RE V IE W A pril-M ay, 1968

bourgeois democracy the “consensus” of the governed in the

system. This was the negative function for the party. Its positive
function consisted of diffusing in the masses via the new institu­
tions its fdea (W eltanschaung) which would provoke a conscious­
ness in the workers of the m anner in which they would ru n the new
society. T he task of the Socialist Party consisted of convincing the
masses that Italy un d er the current system of produc 'on was pro­
ducing only half her needs. T h e only way out of the dilem m a was
to introduce a new social system.46 Four m onths later he wrote
another article: revolution still hung “like a spectre” over Europe.
In this article he drew a distinction between the Socialist party and
the Com munist Party. T h e first had a multiclass base, the second a
proletarian. T h e various classes supporting the first could have
divergent interests. T h e second’s followers saw their only salvation
in revolution. T h e job of the PSI, while not neglecting the other
classes, was to b uild a ruling class psychology in the proletariat
proper.

How to carry out the revolution was the all im portant question.
He called on the PSI to proceed with its task of educating the
working class through the consigli and to call a national congress
of consigli. Perhaps his m ore critical attitude towards the PSI
was due to the adm onition of the Com intern to the PSI to beware
of the “reformists” in its midst.47 In the same num ber he loosed
a determ ined attack on the “reformists.” In mid-1920 the revolu­
tionary wave was ebbing and already the C om intern was seeking
to explain why the world revolution it had foretold for 1920 had
not occurred. One of the reasons it advanced was that there was
an absence of real revolutionary parties throughout the workers’
movement. Before it announced its intention to have all Com­
m unist Parties conform to the bolshevik model, Gramsci wrote a
further article calling for a renewal of the Socialist Party. This
was delivered to the M ilan congress held in April, 1920 just after
a general strike had broken out in T u rin . T h e PSI leaders and
the congress did not support the strikers. T his made the Ordinovisti
and the T u rin workers very bitter. Gramsci wrote (T ogliatti de­
livered the report, which was ignored by the leadership led by
G. M. Serrati) : “T h e present phase of the class struggle in Italy
is the phase which precedes: either the conquest of political power
by the proletariat in order to pass on to new modes of production
and distribution which allow a renewal of productivity; or a
trem endous reactionary trium ph by the propertied class and the
governing caste.”48 In this situation, because the socialist party was
doing nothing to organise the masses, they were incapable of taking
power. T h e PSI, despite its affirmations at the Bologna congress
had rem ained a parliam entary party and done nothing about the
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A U STRA LIA N L E F T REVIEW April-M ay, 1968

“reform ists” in its midst. He warned that the working class would
form a new party, which was cohesive and strongly disciplined. He
gave w arning th at a faction would be created to convert the PSI.

A fter this date, his attacks in the PSI, a traditional socialist

party came thick and fast. H e accused the PSI of being prim arily
govcrened by the values of the bourgeoisie. In August, the Second
C om intern congress occurred. T his instructed the PSI to adopt
democratic centralism and to expel the reformists led by T u rati.
T h e Italian delegation resisted these directions, and L enin an­
nounced th at he thought that the line of the Ordinovisti was cor­
rect. Soon after the T u rin workers occupied the factories of
T u rin . T h e PSI refused to extend the movement and the “refor­
mists” attacked the protagonists of the occupation. Gramsci now
turned on the PSI. It was no longer revolutionary he said; it was
like the B ritish Labour Party, a conglomerate of parties. He an­
nounced th at at the next congress the communists would turn it
into a com m unist party.49 At Leghorn in January, 1921 the com­
m unists seceded to form the PCI. By th at time the occupation of
the factories had collapsed and the revolutionary wave was over
in Italy.50
O ne of the m ain reasons for the im potence of Gramsci’s group
was its refusal to conduct factional activity in the PSI or to build
an opposition u n til it was too late. H e him self adm itted this later.51
W hether th ere could have been a revolution in Italy, had his
schemes been developed by the party will never be known. He
felt so, an d I am inclined to agree.

A n ticip atin g the content of later articles on his theory, I will

point o u t h ere th at the policies advised for socialists in Gramsci’s
O rdine N u o v o period nearly all contradict his later theories. T he
charge of inconsistency can be avoided if we recognise that con­
ditions changed— the theories he was to evolve later were for
advanced in d u strial or capitalist societies in a state of comparative
social stability. In 1919-20 he was advancing theories to cope with
a rev o lu tio n ary situation. H e himself recognised that they were
m ethods for peculiar or particular circumstances.52 On the other
hand it sh o u ld also be remem bered th at he was still groping to­
wards a clarification of his ideas at this time and greatly influenced
by the L eninism he read. Even so, at this time there were already
in em bryo som e of his future thoughts, and I shall refer back to
these in o th e r articles.

T h e n ex t phase of Gramsci’s life lasted from early 1921 u n til 1926

when he was arrested by the Fascist regim e' and jailed. H e re­
m ained in ja il u n til a short tim e before his death in 1937. This
64
AUSTRALIAN' L E F T RE V IE W A pril-M ay, 1968

phase, too was characterised by “leftism,” although there can also

be discerned a retreat from the values of Leninism as imposed by
the Comintern.

In January, 1921 the Com munist Party was formed at Leghorn

after the maximalist m ajority, led by G. Serrati, had refused to
im plem ent the Tw enty One conditions of membc ship in the
PSI. T h e communist party was rather heterogeneously composed
at first. A part from Gram sci’s group there was the “abstentionist”
group led by Amadeo Bordiga and an extreme-left socialist group.
Gramsci’s Ordinovisti group was recognised by all as the leading
intellectual group b u t Gramsci allowed the leading positions in
the party to fall into th e hands of Bordiga and his followers. Only
Terracini was on the first executive comm ittee of the PC I and he
had been the least “G ram scian” of Gramsci’s followers in 1919-
20.53 Gramsci thus allowed control of the party to slip into the
hands of a group w ith which he had never really seen eye to eye
and which had opposed him on various occasions.54
T hough the first com m unist leadership did not realise it, there
were two m ain problems to be faced in 1921-22; the menace of
fascism and reconciliation w ith the socialists. T h e leadership was
strongly “leftist” kept hoping for a revolution and regarded the
“m aximalists” as worse than the “reformists.”55 T h e ir attitu d e
thus preluded the disastrous policies of the Germ an C om m unist
Party in 1928-33.
T his leadership, perhaps drunk with the revolutionary fervour
of the past, continued to call for revolution, and presented it as just
around the corner. It neglected to unite to fight against fascism.
Squadrismo was growing worse throughout the year 1921, however,
and the Socialist Party entered w hat N enni calls its period of
defeat. They concluded a Pact of Pacification w ith the fascists,
which while it tem porarily resulted in a discontinuation of the
brawling, looked like a capitulation to the class enemy. T he
Communists immediately dissociated themselves from this Pact
and Gramsci pointed out its shortsightedness.56 Both the PCI and
the PSI lost members.57
Late in 1921 the C om intern, recognising that the communist
movement was on the defensive and that the revolutionary wave
had subsided, announced the introduction of the united front. This
instructed the communists to reunite with the socialists to fight
reaction and to play down revolution u ntil the time was more
appropriate. Coming so soon after the split, these directions
seemed the rankest of opportunism to the Bordiga leadership. At
the Rome congress of M arch 1922 they drew u p theses which
were prim arily an attack on the united front. These denied the
65
A U STRA LIA N L E F T REVIEW April-M ay, 1968

possibility of w inning the masses by toning down the theory. T hey

argued th at only “objective conditions” would allow this mass
support to be won. W hat the party said or did would m ake no
difference and it should stick to its guns.
Gramsci’s attitude at this time is obscure. According to Bordiga
he supported the Rom e theses. According to himself he opposed
them. According to Tasca he supported them for tactical reasons.58
It seems probable, given his past, th at he supported the theses
in principle b u t was troubled by the party’s indiscipline vis-a-vis
the Com intern.
In 1922, and much of 1923, he was in the Soviet Union, working
in the Com intern and recovering from illness in various Soviet
hospitals. He m arried G iulia Schucht after m eeting her while in
the hospital. They had two children (b 1924 and 1926). It was
during this period th at Gramsci was able to see the way the Soviet
U nion and the Com munist International functioned. He was also
far removed from the Italy where the fascists came to power in
October 1922.
In the struggle against fascism the Com m unist Party had been
“absent”, because of its refusal to unite w ith the PSI. Consequently
throughout the year 1922, while he was in Moscow, the Com intern
and the PCI had been more and m ore at loggerheads. In July
1922, despite the com m unist opposition to the united front, the
C om intern invited the PSI to rejoin it:
. . . if Serrati has really recognised his m istakes he w ill have no choice b u t to
reconsider everything he has said and w ritte n against the C om m unist In te rn a ­
tional. . . H e feared to p re p are for th e re v o lu tio n ary struggle a n d now h e can
see th a t to renounce it was a p re p a ra tio n for th e victory of th e fascists. If it
were m erely a question of Serrati we m ig h t m ock him tu l ’as voulu Georges
D andin. B ut behir.d Serrati th ere are still tens of thousands of workers and
so we say every Party can m ake m istakes, honest w orkers’ leaders can also
m ake m istakes b u t they m ust prove th e ir honesty by recognising th eir m istakes,
learn in g from them a n d fin d in g th e way back to th e correct road of struggle
m arked o u t for p ro letarian s of th e e n tire w orld by th e C om m unist In tern a-
tional.59

T h e leadership opposed this readm ission of the prodigal son.

However, since the PC I had first been formed because the PSI
had refused to expel the “reformists”, the leadership found itself on
shaky ground after the PSI did finally expel the “reformists” at
its M ilan congress. T h e m uch weakened revolutionary socialists
were ready to reconsider fusion w ith the PCI, which the Com intern
now advised too. Gramsci vacillated at first between support for
the C om intern and support for Bordiga b u t slowly moved over
to the C om intern position. Given his constant insistence on the
need for discipline in 1919-1920, his attitudes towards Bordiga are
understandable. However, his support of the C om intern was
contingent on its not m isusing the o ther com m unist parties in
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AU STRA LIA N L E F T R EV IEW A pril-M ay, 1968

Soviet interests. H e was present at the F ourth Com intern Congress

at which Bordiga was also present. T here he supported the fusion
while Bordiga opposed it, accepting the decisions of the congress
only for disciplinary reasons.60

On his retu rn to Italy, Bordiga showed that he was not prepared

to carry out the directions of the C om intern to u i.'te with the
Socialists. Besides the rum p of the socialists raised technical prob­
lems to unifications. Q uite clearly, at this stage and throughout
1923, the form er Ordinovisti group, with the exception of Gramsci,
supported Bordiga’s position. Togliatti, T erracini and others
spoke out against the mode of fusion.61 Only the rightw ing of
the party, led by T asta, was firmly in favour of the united front.
Gramsci’s position can be gauged from his fear of the Right. H e
was still erring to the left emotionally but he attem pted to reform
the Ordinovisti group to pressure Bordiga into carrying out the
Com intern line and failed. T h e hostility of communists towards
the socialists was too great.62

In November 1923 Gramsci moved to Vienna, perhaps in order

to be closer to the party, which since the fascists had come to power
the previous year had been operating in conditions of de facto
illegality. H e had now given u p hope of recreating the Ordine
N uovo group but he continued his activity of organising a new
leadership for the PCI, which, now that Bordiga was in jail, was
shared by the rightw ing and the followers of Bordiga in the party.
Gramsci’s form er colleagues were still supporting Bordiga, who
from prison was circulating m aterial opposing the united front.
T h e near collapse of the socialist movement, including the com­
munists, in early 1924, may have been one reason why Gramsci
m anaged to create an opposition in the party in that year. First
one, and then the other, of the leading men of the party: T ogliatti,
T erracini and Scoccmarro, came over to his position in favour of
working w ith the ru m p of the Socialist Party. Gramsci tolerated
no compromise w ith Bordiga. T h e trium ph of his line in the
party leadership came at a m eeting of the C entral Com mittee held
on 18th April 1924. T h e Com intern announced th at it had no
further com plaint ab out the activities of the PCI. A m onth
later the communists and the rum p of the socialists ran on a joint
list in the elections, w inning fifteen seats. Gramsci was elected
for the Veneto electorate and returned to Italy after an absence
of two years. He now had parliam entary im m unity from fascist
persecution.
On his retu rn he immediately set about preparing the PCI for
clandestine activity. H e found that many of the PC I menofbers
still supported Bordiga. T his m ade his task m ore difficult. M ean­
while fascist repression grew worse and worse. W ithin the PCI,
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opposition to the Fifth Com intern Congress dem and that it “bol-
shevise” itself grew m ore acute.
U p to 1925 Gramsci had proved a loyal follower of the Comin­
tern, leading the opposition to Bordiga in support of the C om intern
policy and supporting the bolshevisation of the PCI. In 1925 and
1926 his attitudes began to undergo a change. H ad he rem ained
free he m ight well have joined Bordiga, who was expelled as a
Trotskyite in 1927, in the limbo of communist non-persons. T h e
change in attitu d e was the result of a num ber of developments.
First, Gramsci had had time to m editate on the n ature of the
Com intern and began to have second thoughts about its usefulness
and its function. For it was now in 1924 that the Com intern
started to come under the aegis of Stalin and the transfer of
faction fights from the CPSU (B) to the C om intern began. Gramsci
was not averse to the introduction of bolshevik discipline to the
PCI provided this did not mean that the PCI would be misused
through Russian carelessness or in Russian interests. T h e Com in­
tern had the moral obligation of duty towards its sections. How­
ever, the process of bolshevisation coincided with directions for
more aggressive activity by the PCI. W hile in 1922-4 discipline
had coincided with the imposition of w hat Gramsci regarded as a
correct line of working with socialists this new line did not. He
himself accused the C om intern of applying irrelevant Russian
m ethods to Italy. Interestingly, this had been the position of
the PSI before Livorno and Bordiga after 1921. Gramsci wrote
in 1926 a letter cleared by the PCI and addressed to the Russian
leaders:
Com rades, in these n in e years . . . you have been th e organising and m otivating
elem ent for th e revolutionary forces of all countries. . . B ut today you are
destroying your work. You are degrading, a n d ru n n in g the risk of nullifying,
th e ru lin g function th a t the C om m unist P arty of the USSR conquered through
L enin s efforts; to us, it seems th a t the violent passion of R ussian questions
is m aking you lose sight of the in te rn atio n al aspects of the R ussian question
itself, m akes you forget th a t your d uty as R ussian m ilitan ts can and m ust
be fulfilled only w ith in th e fram ework of th e interests of th e pro letarian
In tern a tio n a l.

H e added w ith reference to bolshevisation

unity and discipline in this case cannot be mechanical and compulsory; they
must stem from loyalty and conviction and not like those of an imprisoned
or besieged enemy division from thoughts of escape or surprise sorties.63

T h is letter reputedly never reached the leaders of the CPSU being

“p u t in the wastepaper basket” by T ogliatti.
However, although Gramsci was already showing doubts about
Russian developments and certainly did not agree w ith the com­
m unist premise which ruled thereafter that the first duty of the
communist was to secure the Soviet U nion, I do not feel th at we
can distinguish the lines of his future thought in the 1926 Lyons
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A U STRALIAN LEFT REVIEW A pril-M ay, 1968

theses of the PCI, which were the last official documents he drew
up.64 On the whole these documents were "leftist” in tenor and
have been adm itted by T ogliatti to be partly “leftist” in tenor.65
Most of them were concerned with the bolshevisation of the PCI
which was secured to some extent at this congress. It is true
that there was considerable attention paid in Grcm sci’s speech
to the tactics called for by the conditions of Italy, which he
classified as semi-industrialised. However, at this time it was
C om intern policy for parties to take into account the national
conditions of the country. Furtherm ore, Gramsci’s analysis of
Italy was fairly sim ilar to that given by the Com intern. It is too
easy now to read into early communist documents traces of national
communism. A case can only be made out if they are in conflict
with the ruling C om intern directions. In this case they were not.
So with Gramsci, we can only say that he was reform ulating his
thought and his attitudes at this time.
It was after he was sent to prison under the Exceptional Laws
which were passed by Mussolini in late 1926 that his thought
really started to develop in new directions. H ad he been outside
the prison where w hat he was doing could have been observed he
would almost certainly have been expelled from the PCI. So,
another factor in the understanding of Gram sci’s thought is the
fact th at he was able to write as a communist w ithout being
subjected to the m oral and political pressures placed on communists
by their own leaders in the years which followed 1926. Of course,
he was subjected to other pressures. T he object of the court in
sending him to jail for more than twenty years was to “prevent
this brain from working for twenty years.” T h e fascist regime
did its best to make things difficult for him. Only his perse­
verance enabled him to receive the enormous am ount of reading
m aterial which provided the source of his Prison Notebooks. At
first he was im prisoned on the island of Ustica off the South of
Italy, but he spent most of his term in T u ri di Bari in miserable
conditions, designed to kill him. Eventually the regime succeeded,
releasing him just before his death. Always in poor health, he
suffered agonies from various ailments, including tuberculosis.
H e com plained very little, and to the last m aintained a clear
m ind of great brilliance.
Unlike his earlier work which was w ritten on the spur of the
mom ent for political purposes, his work in prison was “fur ewig”,
for history,66 and indeed it seems to be of lasting value.

In it there came to fruition his knowledge of Italian conditions,

of Marxism and of Croceian idealism, synthesised into a m arxist
theory for advanced industrial countries. T h is is the theory I will
discuss in fu tu re articles.
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33 “T re n t'a n n i di V ita e L otte del P.C.I.” Q uaderni di R inascita, II, p.37.

34 See J. H ulse, T h e Forming of the C om m u n ist International, (Stanford,
1964). A ustralian readers m ust not assum e th a t it took as long for Leninism
to reach Italy as it d id to reach A ustralia w here W hat is to be D one? was
only read in 1925. T o g liatti has indicated th a t Italian translations of the
contem porary works, i.e. non theoretical works of L enin were reaching Italy
in late 1918.
35 O rdine N uo vo , p .146: A. Tasca, op.cit., II M ondo, 25 /..:ju s t 1953.
36 A. B. Davidson, op.cit.
37 M. G uarnieri, I consigli di Fabbrica, (II Solco, n.d.)
38 O rdine N uovo, pp.146-154.
39 Ibid., pp ., 4, 14 and passim.
40 Ibid, pp.23, 72, 311, 379.
41 Ibid, pp.403.
42 A Tasca, II M ondo, 25 August 1953.
43 O rdine N u o vo , pp. 448, 463, 472-3.
44 Ibid., p.446.
45 Ibid., pp.29-30.
46 Ibid., p.67.
47 Ibid., pp.91 ff.
48 O rdine N uo vo , p.117.
49 Ibid., p . 161.
50 Some w riters m ain tain th a t the peak was reached in A pril 1920, C am m ett,
op.cit., p .101.
51 P. T o g lia tti, A n to n io Gramsci etc, pp.43ff.
52 O rdine N uovo, p.98.
53 For an assessment of T erracin i see P. G o b etti in R ivoluzione Liberate,
2. IV, 1922 in Valeri, op.cit., pp.595-6.
54 E.g. B ordiga h a d opposed Gram sci a t th e Second C om intern Congress.
55 Livorno, 1921 (resoconto stenografico) (M ilan, 1962) pp.470-4.
56 O riginal letter of Ex-Comm. PCI dated 6 Ju ly 1921.
57 A bout 100,000 socialists did not renew m em bership in e ith e r party.
58 P. T o g lia tti, La Form azione del G ruppo dirigente del P artito C om m unista,
(Rom e, 1962), p p .192-3; Tasca, op.cit. II M ondo, 1 Septem ber 1953.
59 J. Degras, T h e C om m unist In tern a tio n a l, D ocum ents, I (L ondon, 1960)
p.364.
60 F ourth Congress o f the C om m u n ist Intern a tio n a l, A bridged R ep o rt,
(London, pp.276-279).
61 P. T o g lia tti, Form azione etc, pp.55, 142, passim .
62 Ibid., pp.66-7.
63 Tasca, op.cit., II M ondo, 15 Septem ber 1953.
64 See J. C am m ett, op.cit., p.l70ff.
65 T o g lia tti, II P artito C om m unista Italiano, (M ilan), p.61.
66 L e tte re dal Carcere, p.58.

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