Reading Gramsci Today

A reservation is necessary at rsvp@primolevicenter.org

David Forgacs (NYU) and Kate Crehan (CUNY) will discuss Gramsci’s formative years during Italy’s early steps into nationalism and industrialism, his interest in the organization of industrial labor in the United States, and the enduring impact of his work on generations of intellectuals worldwide.

Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, Sardinia, to a family of Albanian descent. His experience of observing radical transformations from the periphery of the societies where they happened—particularly the rise of capitalistic national economies and that of the workers’ movements—shaped his writing and activism. 

Drawing on Marx’s analysis, Gramsci took a particular interest in “Americanism” – American innovations in factory production and related forms of social organization. His reflections appear under the entry “Americanism and Fordism” in the volumes that became known as the Prison Notebooks. 

Anticipating the opening of the exhibition, Gramsci and Americanism. The Prison Notebooks (Italian Cultural Institute, October 22 – November 19), and the conference America in Gramsci/Gramsci in America (NYU, October 24-25), the project organizers, David Forgacs and Kate Crehan, will talk at Bookhouse on October 20 at 6:30 pm. 

About the speakers

Kate Crehan is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island. Her publications include Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (University of California Press, 2002) and Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and its Narratives (Duke University Press, 2016).

David Forgacs is Zerilli-Marimò Professor of Contemporary Italian History at New York University. He edited The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935 (NYU Press, 2000) and (with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith) Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (Harvard University Press, 1985).

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

In 1911, Gramsci obtained financial support for his studies at the Carlo Alberto College at the University of Turin in the northern region of Piedmont. Turin was an advanced industrial city, dominated by the FIAT car factories, and the young student struggled with poverty and ill-health. He studied philology with the goal of becoming a teacher.  

In 1915, Gramsci abandoned the university to dedicate himself to socialist activism and workers’ education. He began writing for the Il Grido del Popolo and then for the Socialist newspaper Avanti! In 1917, he co-published a single-issue socialist cultural review, aimed at young socialists, entitled La Città futura (“City of the Future”).

At the outbreak of WWI, while the Socialist party stood for neutrality, Mussolini came out in favor of war intervention and was forced out of the party. Gramsci proposed the idea of “active neutrality,” using the war as an opportunity  to prepare for economic and social transformation.

He became secretary of the executive committee of the Turin socialists and, in the same year, took up the role of editor of Il Grido del Popolo. In December 1917 he published “The Revolution Against Capital” in Avanti!, and used Il Grido to publicize news and commentary on events in Russia, including texts by Lenin and Trotsky. 

After the war, Gramsci and his friends started a new publication, L’Ordine Nuovo (“The New Order”), which soon became a platform to debate the workers’ disputes and factory occupations of 1919 and 1920. In Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci presented a theory of a workers’ state inspired by the efforts at self-management by skilled workers. 

The occupations ended in defeat, and Gramsci aligned with the communist faction of the PSI. 

In 1921, in Livorno, the communists formally split from the PSI and established the Communist Party, Gramsci was elected to its central committee, and Ordine Nuovo, was transformed into the party’s daily paper. Throughout 1921 and 1922, fascist “squads” terrorized trade unions across the north of Italy, burning down their offices and sending armed gangs to violently assault workers and peasants. In October 1922, Mussolini was invited by the King to lead a coalition government, supported by conservative politicians increasingly alarmed at the intensity of social disorder and the prospect of a workers’ revolution.

In June 1922, Gramsci was dispatched to Russia as the Italian delegate to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (“Comintern”). Exhausted by the recent years of frenetic activity, he soon booked into a sanatorium to recover his health. During that sojourn, he met Julija Schucht, who in the next year became his wife and, later, mother to his two sons.

In Moscow, Gramsci came to reconsider his position on party tactics. In November, the fourth congress of the Comintern agreed that the Italian Communist Party should unite with the Socialist Party. However, there was little room for this option after Mussolini had taken power. 

Gramsci relocated to Vienna in late 1923 to open the Italian Communist Party’s Foreign Bureau. He and began organizing a new leading group with his comrades from Turin to expand grassroots presence across the country, particularly in the South. He started L’Unità (“Unity”), which would become the official party newspaper.

In April 1924, Gramsci was elected in absentia to the Italian Parliament and returned to Italy to take part in the clandestine party conference. Following the murder by fascist thugs of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, the opposition parties withdrew in protest from Parliament. Initially, public revulsion at the murder threatened to destabilize the regime, but the opposition gradually crumbled, and police harassment of anti-fascists continued.

In January 1926, the Communist Party held its third congress in Lyons, France. Gramsci’s ideas won support from the membership in view of adapting to national conditions in Italy and bringing together the forces of the industrial and agricultural workers.

Gramsci himself became increasingly in danger in Italy, where, despite formal immunity, the regime increased its harassment of opposition parties as it transitioned into a full authoritarian dictatorship. On 8 November 1926, he was arrested by the authorities and placed in prison, where he remained until 1934 when, due to his declining health, he was transferred to clinics and kept under surveillance. He died shortly after being liberated in 1937. His writings were published between 1948 and 1951 under the title “Quaderni dal Carcere” and became one of the most influential reflections on societal, political, and economic systems. 

Image: Steel Workers General Strike, Seattle, 1919