Table Of ContentMARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Antonio Gramsci
An Intellectual Biography
Gianni Fresu
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
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York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
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Gianni Fresu
Antonio Gramsci
An Intellectual Biography
Gianni Fresu
Universidade Federal de Uberlândia
Santa Monica, Brazil
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-15609-0 ISBN 978-3-031-15610-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15610-6
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C
ontents
Part I The Young Revolutionary 1
1 The Premises of an Uninterrupted Discourse 3
2 Dialectics Versus Positivism: The Young Gramsci’s
Philosophical Background 17
3 Self-education and Autonomy of Producers 35
4 Lenin and the Topicality of Revolution 47
5 L’Ordine Nuovo 63
6 The Origin and Defeat of the Italian Revolution 73
7 The Party Problem 81
8 Revolutionary Reflux and Reactionary Offensive 95
Part II The Political Leader 107
9 The New Party 109
v
vi CONTENTS
10 The Comintern and the “Italian case” 125
11 Toward a New Majority 155
12 Gramsci Leading the Party 169
13 Theoretical Maturity between 1925 and 1926 179
14 The Congress of Lyon 187
Part III The Theoretician 201
15 From Sardinia’s Contradictions to the Southern Question 203
16 The Notebooks: The Difficult Beginnings of a
“Disinterested” Work 231
17 Hegemonic Relations, Productive Relations and the
Subaltern 239
18 Permanent Transformism 251
19 Historical Premises and Congenital Contradictions in
Italian Biography 267
20 “The Old Dies and the New Cannot be Born” 283
21 The Double Revision of Marxism and Similarity with
Lukács 297
22 Translatability and Hegemony 321
23 The Philosopher Man and the Tamed Gorilla 339
24 Michels, the Intellectuals and the Issue of Organization 355
CONTENTS vii
25 The Dismantling of the Old Schemes of Political Art 371
26 Epilogue 383
References 387
Index 401
PART I
The Young Revolutionary
CHAPTER 1
The Premises of an Uninterrupted Discourse
Antonio Gramsci was born in a context of deep crisis in the young Italian
state, which was particularly serious in Sardinia as it was historically shaken
after centuries of colonial rule and affected by such chronic misery and
structural underdevelopment that left him no way out.1 In 1891, Italy had
for a few years been plunged into a customs war with France, which was
waged by Crispi2 to defend the burgeoning industry and Italy’s large agri-
cultural production, but with very serious consequences for the
Italian South.
1 Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales (Oristano), a small village in the interior of Sardinia,
on January 22, 1891. Born to Giuseppina Marcias and Francesco Gramsci, he was the fourth
of seven children. Three years later, the family moved to Sorgono, near Ghilarza, Giuseppina’s
hometown, where little Antonio Gramsci spent all his childhood and adolescence.
2 After the collapse of the last right-wing government in Cavour, Agostino Depretis, the
new president of the council of ministers, abandoned the policy of free exchange in favor of
customs protectionism. Aimed at protecting the burgeoning national industry of the North
and large-estate farming in southern Italy, and maintained by Francesco Crispi, the new
prime minister, this policy led to the denouncing of old trade treaties and to a customs war
with France and thus to the closure of this key market to some Italian products (citrus fruits,
olive oil, cattle, wine, cereals, leather), which were particularly important to the
Mezzogiorno region.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3
Switzerland AG 2023
G. Fresu, Antonio Gramsci, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15610-6_1
