ABSTRACT

Since the publication of his Prison Notebooks1 after World War II, the figure of Antonio Gramsci has loomed large in the radical imagination. Gramsci has been received, along with Georg Lukács and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Karl Korsch, and especially Rosa Luxemburg – who might be understood as the mother of this tendency – as part of a broader effort to generate what has been termed an “open Marxism” against the doctrinaire theorists of the Second and Third Internationals who ossified historical materialism in deterministic formulae. Like Luxemburg and Korsch, Gramsci, a radicalized “traditional intellectual,” was an active participant both in the Socialist Party and in the formation of the Communist International and its Italian section. Like Luxemburg, Lukács and Korsch among many others of his pedigree, as Socialist Party militant he joined Lenin in the call for revolutionary opposition to World War II, and eventually for the organization of a party of a “new type,” and finally for a break with the parties of the Second International. That is, in opposition to the growing reformist and electoralist trend of twentieth-century social democracy, Gramsci argued for a conception of political organization whose central precepts are to upend capitalism root and branch by any means necessary, including revolutionary action. Like Lenin he not only asserted, but developed a method for implementing the key role of professional intellectuals recruited, largely, from the ranks of the traditional intellectuals and the most advanced industrial workers. Yet, despite the fact that he, along with many others, were constrained to forge an anti-reformist alliance with Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other leaders of the Bolsheviks, his approach to questions of political strategy reflected an acute appreciation of what Korsch was later to call the “principle of historical specification” in forging a theory of social change, where specification refers to conditions of social time and social space, the particular aspects of national history, its economic aspects, but also the cultural, philosophical and political features that constitute the make-up of the nation.2 At the same time, Gramsci was an internationalist and never held to the Stalinist slogan of building “socialism in one country.” But he remained acutely attuned to the specificity of Italian history, its uneven economic and social development,

and the forms of cultural production that corresponded to the struggle for Italian nationality, as opposed to its centuries of chronic regionalism.