It’s a romantic
tale: a young communist struggling against an authoritarian regime is arrested
on a treason charge. A dramatic trial
follows, and he is consigned to a long sentence, separated from his wife and
family. In prison, he rallies his
comrades, organizing education sessions.
It could be the story of Nelson Mandela, except that this would-be
revolutionary came from a poor family, not aristocratic stock. And while Mandela’s tragedy had a redemptive
ending, that of Antonio Gramsci ended in tragedy.
Antonio Gramsci,
born in Ales, Sardinia on 22 January 1981, was the son of a minor civil
servant, of Albanian descent. As a
child, he was frail, and he grew up stunted and hunchbacked. The family attributed his disability to him
being dropped by a servant. But it seems
rather to have been the result of Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the bones).
Gramsci’s hard
childhood became harder when his father was imprisoned for alleged
administrative irregularities. “Nino”
had to leave school at the age of 12 and work in the local tax office, continuing his studies in the evenings. Later, he was able to finish the final three
years of secondary school, and he then went to sixth form in Cagliarii, where
he lodged with his brother Gennaro.
Around this time, he began to read socialist magazines and meet other
young people for political discussions.
Aged 19, he published his first political article in a Sardinian
daily. The following year, he won a
scholarship to the University of Turin, where he enrolled as a student of
Letters. He was lonely, broke and
exhausted, but he made friends with Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti, two
other future leaders of the Italian left.
Despite his ill-health, he continued with his studies, but by 1916, he was as devoted to journalism as to research. Turin was a hot-bed of trades unionism and socialism: he wrote theatre reviews, articles critical of the war and of nationalism. His intellectual and political life would always be as much about culture as about revolution.
The Russian
revolution filled Gramsci and other socialists with hope and excitement,
although a popular uprising in Turin in 1917 was easily crushed, and all the
revolutionary leaders were arrested.
Gramsci was now secretary of the Turin section of the Italian Socialist
Party. The following two years, the
Biennio Rosso, were a time of revolutionary fervor in northern Italy, and
Gramsci was at the forefront. He was
one of the founders of L’Ordine Nuovo, a socialist review, which operated under
the slogan: “Educate yourselves because we'll need all your intelligence. Stir
yourselves because we'll need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because
we'll need all your strength.” In 1919,
Gramsci was briefly arrested. The
factory council movement – echoing the Russian Soviets – spread through
Turin and other northern industrial
cities. In April 1920 a general strike
was observed in Turin, but not in the rest of the country. In 1921, Gramsci was one of the founders of
the Italian Communist Party. The
following year, in poor health, he travelled to Moscow as a delegate to the
Communist International.
Shortly after
arrival, illhealth forced Gramsci to spend time in the Serebranyi Bor
Sanatorium, where he met his future wife, Julia Schucht, a Russian violinist.
Back in Italy,
Mussolini’s Fascists came into power that autumn. L’Ordine Nuovo was shut down and communists
and socialists in Turin were violently assaulted. Executive committee members of the PCI were
arrested, and a warrant was issued for Gramsci.
In April 1924,
Gramsci was elected to the Italian Parliament.
Trusting to his immunity as a deputy, Gramsci returned to Italy after a
two year absence. Gramsci spoke about
the need for unity of the left, in the face of the Fascist threat. Matteotti, a Socialist deputy who had
denounced Mussolini in the parliament, was murdered by Fascist thugs. By now, the Communist Party was organizing
clandestinely through cells and its leaders were meeting in secret. In 1925, Gramsci made his only parliamentary
speech, criticizing the banning of opposition groups.
In 1926, Julia,
who was expecting their second child (Giuliano) returned to Moscow. Unlike other Communist leaders, Gramsci
remained in Italy. He wrote a letter to
the Russian Communist Party to criticize the split between Stalin and Trotsky,
saying “today you risk destroying your own handiwork”, but in Moscow Togliatti suppressed
the letter.
On 8 November
Gramsci was arrested by the Fascists, as part of a crack down after an
assassination attempt against Mussolini.
He was charged under a new law on public security and sentenced to five
years imprisonment. He was sent to the
Italian island of Ustica with other political prisoners. Here he started
classes for the other inmates. His
friend Pierro Sraffa, an economist, opened an account at a Milan bookshop so
that Gramsci could be supplied with the books he needed to continue his work in
prison.
In 1927, Gramsci
was moved back to the mainland, eventually ending up in Milan. Subject to
illness and insomnia, he was interrogated many times. His sister in law Tatiana Schucht moved to
Milan in order to be able to help him.
In May 1928,
Gramsci and 21 other PCI leaders faced a show trial. Chillingly, the Prosecutor declared of
Gramsci: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.” He received one of the heaviest sentences of
20 years, 4 months and 5 days. First, he
was sent to prison in Turi, near Bari, where he was imprisoned in crowded
conditions. He was now suffering from a
uremic disorder which left him unable to walk.
In January 1929,
he was given permission to write in his cell, and on 8 February he began the
first of his famous Prison Notebooks. He would write notes on politics, culture and
history. Here, he developed his famous
notion of hegemony. By this he referred
to the way that a regime governed not just be coercion, but also by winning
consent. He was one of the first to
understand the role of the battle of ideas, and the need to create what he
called a “counter hegemony”, based on cultural struggle. He also developed his notion of “organic
intellectuals”, by which he meant people from the working class, as opposed to
traditional intellectuals of academia.
These ideas make him one of the few Marxist writers who still influences
contemporary thinking, decades after the fall of communism.
As well as
Gramsci’s theoretical writings, he also wrote letters to his family and his
friends, sometimes scolding, sometimes passionate, often touching, as when he
shared memories of his Sardinian childhood with his two sons, the younger of
whom he would never meet.
Over the years, successive
appeals reduced Gramsci’s sentence and improved his access to books and
newspapers. But his suffering continued
as his health deteriorated. When his
mother died in 1932, the news was withheld from him because his family did not
want to further undermine his well-being.
Tatiana continued to visit Gramsci and provide him with assistance. Meanwhile his wife, her sister, was unwell in
Moscow. In 1933, Gramsci was moved to
the prison hospital of Formia. In 1935,
as his health continued to deteriorate, he was moved to the Quisisana clinic in
Rome.
In 1937,
Gramsci’s reduced sentence expired on 21 April.
His plan had been to return to Sardinia when his health improved. But on the evening of 25 April, he suffered a
stroke. Two days later, he died, with Tatiana at his
bedside. He was buried in Rome, after a
funeral which was attended by a few friends and many more secret policemen.
Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks had been smuggled out of his prison cell and taken out of Italy for
safe keeping. Later, his writings would
be strongly influential in the development of western Marxism and the postwar
political strategy of Eurocommunism which repudiated violent revolution in
favour of democratic struggle and cultural action.
Gramsci is by no
means the only disabled revolutionary in history. The French revolution had Jean-Paul Marat
with his skin diseases and Georges Couthon with his paraplegia. Another Marxist, Che Guevara, had severe
asthma. But I find Gramsci especially
admirable, not just because of his heroism in the face of repression and
illhealth, but also because of his humanity.
He was no Leninist centralist trying to seize power, but a libertarian
socialist committed to popular consent.
He was not a tiresome political obsessive, but someone with wide ranging
interests in folklore and literature.
I’ve still got my own black notebook from 1991, where I’ve written down
quotations from his letters show how he is one of the most poetic of
revolutionaries:
“The cycle of the
seasons, the progression of the solstices and the equinoxes, I feel them as if
they were flesh of my flesh; the rose is living and will certainly flower,
because the heat leads in the cold, and under the snow the first violets are
already trembling. In short, time has
seemed to me a thing of flesh, ever since space ceased to exist for me.” (To
Tatiana, July 1 1929)
“When a man has
no chance of making plans for the future, he continually chews over the past,
analyzing it. Gradually he gets to
understand it better in all its aspects.
He thinks especially of all the stupidities he has committed, of hios
own acts of weakness, of everything it would have een better to do or leave
undone or the things he was in duty bound to do or leave undone.” (To Guilia,
February 9 1931)
Gramsci had a
fondness for quotations, which I share. His own favourite saying was “Pessimism
of the intellect, optimism of the will”, a thought which has always inspired
me. In that notebook I also wrote down a
quotation which expresses Gramsci’s unblinking realism: “Turn your face violently towards things as
they exist now”. Although I was once a
student communist, I no longer share Gramsci’s Marxist analysis. This does not stop me admiring his courage or
his intellectual achievements.
Links
Radio 4 Great Lives
Links
Radio 4 Great Lives
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