Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci

"Gramsci in context" : a book from Workers' Liberty (second edition: first edition was titled "Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary) The SWP and Gramsci "Gramsci with the feet cut off" ("Counterfire" and Gramsci) Discussing Gramsci: pluralism and hegemony "To produce a new stratum of intellectuals" "Gramsci is ours" : review of Antonio Santucci's "Antonio Gramsci" "The formation of intellectuals" "New York and the Mystery of Naples" : notes on a 47-minute video about Gramsci Antonio Gramsci: life and ideas The revolutionary ideas of Antonio Gramsci , by Peter Thomas "The Gramscian...

Gramsci defies a “terrible world”

Antonio Gramsci was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early days, when it was a real revolutionary party, and is now famous for the Prison Notebooks he wrote when jailed by Italy’s fascist regime between 1926 and just before his death in 1937. In this new collection of his letters from between when he was 17 and living away from home in order to study for entrance to university, and his jailing in 1926, the longest section is from just six months, between December 1923 and May 1924. Gramsci was then in Vienna, working with the Communist International (Comintern) to construct a new...

One-sided culture

Discussing why the old Italian socialist movement had failed so badly in and after World War One, Antonio Gramsci saw it as having been dominated an oratorical culture, lacking the theoretical depth for which a stronger stream of written debate would have been needed. Registering the difficulties facing the internationalists in Germany in World War One, Rosa Luxemburg noted ruefully that her comrade Franz Mehring was interested only in literary efforts, not in getting out onto the streets and into the factories to agitate by word of mouth. Gramsci was not dismissing speeches, and Rosa...

Marxism in the 1960's and 1970's

Jelle Versieren’s generous review of Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary ( Solidarity 311) offers a wealth of background information and context-setting. A central assessment, however, seems to me skewed. He writes that the “new wave of energy” in the intellectual affairs of the left over the whole long period from 1956 (Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, and the consequent turmoil in the Communist Parties) through the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the early 1980s (when “Eurocommunism” mutated into a drift towards plain bourgeois liberalism) produced two main...

Antonio Gramsci: Marxist ideas for difficult times

Click here to hear the recording of an introduction on this issue by Martin Thomas at a Brisbane Workers' Liberty meeting, 23 March 2013. See below for materials for a session planned for "Ideas for Freedom", Workers' Liberty summer school in London, 23 June 2013. (The session couldn't be run as planned because the printed materials for it were lost in transit). (click on the image to download the spider diagram at readable size). The diagram above shows 30 of Gramsci's comments on socialist party-building in Italy arranged to show the clusters and relations of ideas. Other spider diagrams...

The SWP and Gramsci

The SWP has published at length on Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early and revolutionary days; his Prison Notebooks , written in fascist jails (1929-35), have become more and more famous and widely-read. In 1970 the SWP put out a little book on Gramsci by the Italian writer Alberto Pozzolini. In May and June 1977 Chris Harman wrote, for the SWP magazine International Socialism, a two-part article on Gramsci and Eurocommunism; it was republished in 1983 as a pamphlet, Gramsci versus reformism . In 2006 the SWP put out a booklet by Chris Bambery, A...

Gove tries to claim Gramsci

Speaking on 5 February, Tory education minister Michael Gove claimed to have been inspired by Antonio Gramsci, who was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early years. Either Gove has never read Gramsci, or he is lying about him. Especially since Harold Entwistle wrote his book Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics , it has become quite widely accepted on the left that Gramsci had what would now be called 'reactionary' views about schooling, or even about education in general. Both of these things are untrue. He did not hold the kind of views about schooling that Gove...

Why Gramsci is important

The AWL’s book, Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary, has started some very fruitful discussions about what it means to be a Marxist in the present period. Martin Thomas has highlighted important conceptions from Gramsci, such as “the democratic philosopher” and “permanently active...

Gramsci and the party

Although only 70 pages long, Martin Thomas’ Antonio Gramsci: Working-Class Revolutionary is remarkable in containing more insights than many a full length book on Gramsci. In five short essays, Martin Thomas expertly summarises a mass of historical material relating to Gramsci’s political life, including evidence for the relationship between Gramsci and Trotsky and about Gramsci’s thoughts on Stalinism. He offers a succinct critique of the various interpretations and misinterpretations of Gramsci’s work by subsequent left-wing political formations (the Italian CP from the 50s, the New Left in...

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