In
1897, Antonio's father was suspended and subsequently arrested and
imprisoned for five years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly
thereafter, Giuseppina and her children moved to Ghilarza, where
Antonio attended elementary school. Sometime during these years of
trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant, to which
his family attributed his hunched back and stunted growth: he was an
inch or two short of five feet in height.
At
the age of eleven, after completing elementary school, Antonio worked
for two years in the tax office in Ghilarza, in order to help his
financially strapped family. Because of the five-year absence of
Francesco, these were years of bitter struggle. Nevertheless, he
continued to study privately and eventually returned to school, where
he was judged to be of superior intelligence, as indicated by
excellent grades in all subjects.
Antonio
continued his education, first in Santu Lussurgiu, about ten miles
from Ghilarza, then, after graduating from secondary school, at the
Dettori Lyceum in Cagliari, where he shared a room with his brother
Gennaro, and where he came into contact for the first time with
organized sectors of the working class and with radical and socialist
politics. But these were also years of privation, during which
Antonio was partially dependent on his father for financial support,
which came only rarely. In his letters to his family, he accused his
father repeatedly of unpardonable procrastination and neglect. His
health deteriorated, and some of the nervous symptoms that were to
plague him at a later time were already in evidence.
1
was an important year in young Gramsci's life. After graduating from
the Cagliari lyceum, he applied for and won a scholarship to the
University of Turin, an award reserved for needy students from the
provinces of the former Kingdom of Sardinia. Among the other young
people to compete for this scholarship was Palmiro Togliatti, future
general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and, with
Gramsci and several others, among the most capable leaders of that
embattled Party. Antonio enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. At the
University he met Angelo Tasca and several of the other men with whom
he was to share struggles first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI)
and then, after the split that took place in January 1921, in the
PCI.
At
the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate
diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a
variety of courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social
sciences and in linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted
to contemplate academic specialization in that subject. Several of
his professors, notably Matteo Bartoli, a linguist, and Umberto
Cosmo, a Dante scholar, became personal friends.
In
1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an
active member of the PSI, and began a journalistic career that made
him among the most feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His
column in the Turin edition of Avanti!, and his theatre
reviews were widely read and influential. He regularly spoke at
workers' study-circles on various topics, such as the novels of
Romain Rolland, for whom he felt a certain affinity, the Paris
Commune, the French and Italian revolutions and the writings of Karl
Marx. It was at this time, as the war dragged on and as Italian
intervention became a bloody reality, Gramsci assumed a somewhat
ambivalent stance, although his basic position was that the Italian
socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn Italian
national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist
direction. It was also at this time, in 1917 and 1918, that he began
to see the need for integration of political and economic action with
cultural work, which took form as a proletarian cultural association
in Turin.
The
outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred
his revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the
years thereafter Gramsci identified himself closely, although not
entirely uncritically, with the methods and aims of the Russian
revolutionary leadership and with the cause of socialist
transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.
In
the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with Angelo Tasca, Umberto
Terracini and Togliatti, founded L'Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna
Settimanale di Cultura Socialista (The New Order: A Weekly
Review of Socialist Culture), which became an influential periodical
(on a weekly and later on a bi-monthly publishing schedule) for the
following five years among the radical and revolutionary Left in
Italy. The review gave much attention to political and literary
currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.
For
the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the
development of the factory council movement, and to militant
journalism, which led in January 1921 to his siding with the
Communist minority within the PSI at the Party's Livorno Congress. He
became a member of the PCI's central committee, but did not play a
leading role until several years later. He was among the most
prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of the
fascist movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless
unified action were taken against the rise of Mussolini's movement,
Italian democracy and Italian socialism would both suffer a
disastrous defeat.
The
years 1921 to 1926, years "of iron and fire" as he called
them, were eventful and productive. They were marked in particular by
the year and a half he lived in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the
Communist International (May 1922- November 1923), his election to
the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924, and his assumption of the
position of general secretary of the PCI. His personal life was also
filled with significant experiences, the chief one being his meeting
with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a
violinist and member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met
during his stay in Russia. Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio
(1924-1981), and Giuliano, born in 1926, who lives today in Moscow
with his wife.
On
the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in
accordance with a series of "Exceptional Laws" enacted by
the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary
confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year
odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a
result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in
his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed
him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that
were never properly treated in prison.
Yet
as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci's life knows,
these prison years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as
recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various cells that
eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in
the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and
especially to family members, the most important of whom was not his
wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the
person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life,
since she had resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to
provide him not only with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings
in letter form but with articles of clothing and with numerous foods
and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine
of prison life.
After
being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist
leaders, to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was
consigned to a prison in Turi, in the province of Bari, which turned
out to be his longest place of detention (June 1928 -- November
1933). Thereafter he was under police guard at a clinic in Formia,
from which he was transferred in August 1935, always under guard, to
the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he spent the last
two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who
helped him either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible,
were his mother Giuseppina, who died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his
sisters Teresina and Grazietta, and his good friend, the economist
Piero Sraffa, who throughout Gramsci's prison ordeal provided a
crucial and indispenable service to Gramsci. Sraffa used his personal
funds and numerous professional contacts that were necessary in order
to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in prison. Gramsci
had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without Sraffa's
assistance, and without the intermediary role often played by Tania,
the Prison
Notebooks as
we have them would not have come to fruition.
Gramsci's
intellectual work in prison did not emerge in the light of day until
several years after World War II, when the PC began publishing
scattered sections of the Notebooksand
some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote from prison. By the
1950s, and then with increasing frequency and intensity, his prison
writings attracted interest and critical commentary in a host of
countries, not only in the West but in the so-called third world as
well. Some of his terminology became household words on the left, the
most important of which, and the most complex, is the term "hegemony"
as he used it in his writings and applied to the twin task of
understanding the reasons underlying both the successes and the
failures of socialism on a global scale, and of elaborating a
feasible program for the realization of a socialist vision within the
really existing conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these
conditions were the rise and triumph of fascism and the disarray on
the left that had ensued as a result of that triumph. Also extremely
pertinent, both theoretically and practically, were such terms and
phrases as "organic intellectual," "national'popular,"
and "historical bloc" which, even if not coined by Gramsci,
acquired such radically new and original implications in his writing
as to constitute effectively new formulations in the realm of
political philosophy.
For
modern Greens and Ecosocialists Gramsci is essential reading
Antonio
Gramsci’s writings provide a valuable conceptual and political
sensibility for critical approaches to nature.
Antonio
Gramsci’s writings provide a valuable conceptual and political
sensibility for critical approaches to nature.
The
question of-Gramsci's reflections on ‘nature’ is important to
examine the embryonic possibilities and limitations of Marxism and
its relationship to Green ideas and political action. Gramsci, I
think provides stimulating commentary on the differentiated unity of
nature and society: in part, this anticipates recent arguments on
this subject. Similarly, it is important to see how Gramsci’s
conceptualization of how hegemony relates to core issues within
political ecology.
Given the centrality of ‘environmental issues’ to ecosocialism,it is necessary to consider how social groups enrol natures and environments (both material and symbolic) in their struggles for hegemony. Gramsci has much to offer us all in 2017
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