Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci’s laboratory: “subaltern social groups”

Despite his fame, a considerable part of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its revolutionary period of the early 1920s who then wrote Prison Notebooks in Mussolini’s jails, is not available in English. Joseph Buttigieg’s English translation of Prison Notebooks 1 to 8 was published in three volumes by Columbia University Press in 1992, 1996 and 2007, but Buttigieg died in 2019, and it is not clear when the remaining Notebooks may be fully translated. However, another volume from the Notebooks has been published in English: Antonio Gramsci, Subaltern...

Gramsci's laboratory

Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebook 25, adds significantly to our knowledge

The valuable, critical Marxism of Paul Le Blanc

Paul Le Blanc has been one of the most prolific revolutionary socialist authors in recent decades, publishing scores of books, articles and reviews, in large part devoted to the early twentieth century Marxist tradition. Le Blanc’s work has numerous virtues. He writes clean and readable prose, makes theoretical issues accessible, represents various points of view objectively, puts the historical material in context and explains its relevance to present-day activism. He is honest about his own mistakes and the evolution of his views. And Le Blanc takes an ecumenical approach, willing to engage...

The usable Gramsci

The six recent contributions I will survey here mostly seek to identify an Antonio Gramsci usable for active socialist politics amidst the welter of Gramscis around us. They construct their usable Gramscis mostly from the terms which have figured largest in the “orthodox” Gramscis since the 1950s (the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI), the Eurocommunist, and then the academic): hegemony and war of position. My case will be that active socialists can gain more from seeing Gramsci’s arguments around those terms as weak areas, and starting with stronger seams of Gramsci’s writing. Jan Norden finds...

Paul Mason, China and Marxism

Paul Mason’s reply to John Ross of Socialist Action on Xi Jinping’s China annihilates Ross’ apologism and makes many valuable points. Mason sets himself the task of defending Marxism against its traducement by the Chinese elite. But his own comments about Marxism are confused. “Stalin faced no significant alternative form of Marxism”, claims Mason. “Even his opponents within the Soviet bureaucracy, from Leon Trotsky to Nikolai Bukharin, adhered to the same rigid historical method that was killing them. They knew nothing of Marx the humanist, Marx the philosopher of alienation, Marx the eco...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

The life, times, and ideas of Antonio Gramsci

Transcript of a talk at a Workers' Liberty Zoom forum on 17 January 2021. Download the Powerpoint used for the talk here . In February 1926 Stalin was challenged face to face by a non-Russian communist for the last time. That was by Amadeo Bordiga from the Italian Communist Party, at a meeting of the Communist International. Gramsci was back in Italy at that time, and he didn't agree with Bordiga on all questions, but that confrontation tells us something about the movement which shaped Gramsci. The inspiration of the Bolshevik Revolution and the struggles after the end of the First World War...

The People of the Book

Books have been a great factor in human culture. The Qur’an says: “Do not argue with the People of the Book except only by the best manner, except the unjust among them. Tell them, ‘We believe in what is revealed to us and to you. Our Lord and your Lord is one. We have submitted ourselves to His will’.” By “People of the Book” it meant principally Jews and Christians. These book-based religions were an intellectual innovation. The book-basis gave Christianity and Islam an expansive power and a cultural breadth that earlier religions had not had. Through books, at least for a minority...

Gramsci and unpleasant truths

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries”, wrote Lenin at the start of his pamphlet State and Revolution, “the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. “After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its...

Kautsky and ideas “from outside”

In Chapter 3 of The Russian Revolution: When workers took power, Paul Vernadsky discusses Lenin’s 1901/1902 document What Is To Be Done?, referring among other things to Lars T. Lih’s 2005 book, Lenin Rediscovered. Later (pp163-169) Paul demolishes Lih’s claim that in 1921 Lenin was still a disciple of Karl Kautsky. In Chapter 3, however, he broadly accepts Lih’s approach to What Is To Be Done?, which is that it’s primarily about urging revolutionaries in Russia to model their activity on methods used by the SPD in Germany. He discusses the 1902 passage by Kautsky which Lenin both paraphrased...

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