Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

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.  


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May Billinghurst (1875-1953)

The Women's Suffrage campaigner Rosa May Billinghurst was born into a middle class family in Lewisham in 1875.  At five months old, she contracted an illness – almost certainly polio – which left her completely paralysed.   Despite some recovery, she was left paraplegic, relying on calipers and crutches to walk, and usually resorting to a three wheeler wheelchair which was pedalled by hand.  Despite these difficulties, she was as stalwart a political campaigner as any contemporary disability movement activists.

Like prototype social workers, May and her sister Alice worked on the streets with prostitutes, in the Greenwich workhouse, and in a Sunday School.  Politically, May started out as a member of the Women’s Liberal Association, but radicalized by her experiences of community work, she joined the militant suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union in 1907.  Her family donated money to the cause, but May was to put her own body on the line.

Always on her tricycle, decorated with WSPU ribbons and banners, she participated in the suffragette march to the Albert Hall on 13 June 1908, distributing leaflets advertising the forthcoming Hype Park demonstration.  In July, she worked for the WPSU at the Haggerston by-election.  This included teaching local children suffragist songs.  Two years later, she founded the Greenwich branch of the WPSU.  As a result of all her activities, she became known as “the cripple suffragette”, and her disability led to increased publicity for the campaign.

May repeatedly came into contact with the police and the authorities.  In November 1910, she was thrown out of her tricycle during the “Black Friday” demonstration, and the police pushed her down a side street and removed the valves from her tyres. She was one of 159 women arrested that day.    Another suffragette wrote later how,

“I remember hearing startling stories of her running battles with the police. Her crutches were lodged on each side of her self propelling invalid chair, and when a meeting was broken up or an arrest being made, she would charge the aggressors at a rate of knots that carried all before her.”

A year later, May was arrested again in Parliament Square and sentenced to five days in prison for obstructing the police.  In March 1912, she was sentenced to one month’s hard labour in Holloway Prison after smashing windows as part of the WPSU campaign:  she had hidden the stones for flinging at windows under the rug over her legs. 

In December that year, she was sentenced to eight months in prison, after being found guilty of firebombing Deptford pillar boxes.   This was part of the WPSU campaign which the government claimed destroyed more than 5,000 letters.

On this last occasion, she went on hunger strike, and was forcibly fed, causing damage to her teeth and general health.   In the Fawcett Women’s Library, there are many letters sent on her behalf by family members and fellow campaigners, objecting to her being force fed.  As a result of this pressure, she was ordered to be released by the Home Secretary after two weeks in prison.

By March 1913, she had recovered sufficiently to be able to speak about her experiences at a meeting in West Hampstead.  In June of that year she took part in the funeral procession for Emily Wilding Davison – the suffragette who had flung herself at the King’s horse at the Derby and been trampled to death.  In her invalid tricycle as always, May wore white.  On 21 May 1914, she chained herself and her chair to the railings as Buckingham Palace as part of another WPSU protest.  It was on this occasion that Sylvia Pankhurst recalled her being flung out of her chair by two policemen.

Once the First World War broke out, WPSU suspended campaigning, and members were released from prison.  May supported Christabel Pankhurst’s Smethwick election campaign in 1918, the year that the Qualification of Women Act was passed. 

After women's suffrage had been achieved, May ceased to be so politically active and little more is known of her.  She seems to have lived in Sunbury on Thames, Surrey and  to have had an adopted daughter.  She died on September 4, 1953.

Harriet McBryde Johnson (1957-2008)

“I am in the first generation to survive to such decrepitude. Because antibiotics were available, we didn't die from the childhood pneumonias that often come with weakened respiratory systems. I guess it is natural enough that most people don't know what to make of us.”

Born in Laurinburg, North Carolina on July 8, 1957, Harriet McBryde Johnson was one of five children born to parents who were college lecturers.  A  sister died of the same progressive neuromuscular condition that she herself experienced.  Thanks initially to the family’s economic security and later to her own professional career, she benefitted from the personal assistance and the power chair that enabled her to participate in American society.  She always knew that she was one of the privileged ones, who could escape what she called the “Disability Gulag”.

From an early age, Johnson realized that she would have a limited life expectancy.  She was an activist by the time she was a teenager at special school, trying to get an abusive teacher fired.  Like thousands of other disabled people, she thought that television charity telethons – such as the annual Jerry Lewis event on American TV – were demeaning and counter-productive.  Later she would describe herself as holding the world endurance record for protesting the Jerry Lewis telethon.  In return, Lewis described activists such as Johnson as the equivalent of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Harriet McBryde Johnson earned undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in history and public administration in Charleston.  After graduating from the University of South Carolina Law School in 1985, she set up in private practice as a lawyer, where she specialized in welfare and civil rights claims for poor people with disabilities.  She was also active in the Charleston Democratic Party, first as secretary and then as chair.

Johnson’s intelligence and confidence made her an ideal advocate for disabled people, not just in the courtroom but also in the political arena and through the pages of America’s newspapers.   She also had a wry sense of humour, as another extract from her writing demonstrates:

“It's not that I'm ugly. It's more that most people don't know how to look at me. The sight of me is routinely discombobulating. The power wheelchair is enough to inspire gawking, but that's the least of it. Much more impressive is the impact on my body of more than four decades of a muscle-wasting disease. At this stage of my life, I'm Karen Carpenter thin, flesh mostly vanished, a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

Beginning in April 2001, her most famous intervention was a series of encounters with the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer.  A utilitarian, Singer has notoriously challenged the value of life, and suggested that it should be permissible for severely impaired newborns to be killed. In 2002, she debated publicly with Singer, and subsequently published “Unspeakable conversations”, an article in the New York Times, the source of the self-description above.  Johnson pointed out that: “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”  Drawing on her own experience as someone with a neuromuscular impairment, she argued: 

“We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own.”  

Singer’s theories may lead him to obnoxious conclusions on the topic of disability, but he is no bigot: on other issues he is very progressive.   He is also of course formidably intelligent.  On the one occasion that I debated with him on radio, I found him a rather cold and intimidating opponent.  By matching him in person and in print, Johnson made a huge impact on all those who heard or read her, enabling millions to access and understand the arguments that the disability rights organization Not Dead Yet was propounding.  In particular, as an atheist Democrat, she helped non-disabled people understand that arguments against assisted suicide and selective abortion came not only from Christian conservatives, but  also from the disability rights community.

Johnson published two books.  The first, a memoir called Too Late to Die Young, was published in 2005 and contains eloquent descriptions of living with personal assistance, of fighting prejudice and of the value of life as a disabled person, what she called “bearing witness to our pleasures”.  In the preface, she wrote:

“For any Charleston lawyer, any Southern lawyer for that matter, storytelling skill comes so close to being a job requirement that maybe it should be tested in the bar exam.  Beyond that, for me, storytelling is a survival tool, a means of getting people to do what I want.”

A novel, Accidents of Nature, about a girl with cerebral palsy who had never known another disabled person until she went to camp, was published in 2006.

When Harriet McBryde Johnson died two years later, aged only 50, the fact that she had obituaries in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal demonstrates the impact her life and writing had had on American culture and politics.

Further information

Unspeakable conversations

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