27th April 1937: 87 years since the death of Gramsci

27^th April 1937: 87 years since the death of Gramsci

The Italian revolutionary and Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci died 87 years ago today. He was just 46 and had been held illegally in fascist prisons since 1926.

With the publication of the second 100th edition of New Left Review (July/August 2016) Perry Anderson returned to Gramsci, who he wrote about in the 100th edition of the first series of the NLR (Nov/Dec 1976).

In the Antinomies Anderson concluded that while it may seem to be stretching things a little to look at Gramsci’s relevance for the 1970s, in reality what he was involved in- factory occupations, workers control, a lengthy spell in a fascist prison that produced the Notebooks- was at that time only 4 or 5 decades away. We’re now 4 further decades away.

In 1976 Anderson made the point that the debates about revolutionary theory and practice that Gramsci was involved in, in the 1920s represented the pinnacle of where left thinking had reached on these questions and in some ways it still does.

In the 2016 Heirs of Gramsci, Anderson attempted a rather different exercise- primarily to look at how theorists in recent decades have applied Gramsci’s ideas in the Prison Notebooks. He praises the work of the late Stuart Hall in using Gramsci to analyse Thatcherism but notes he lost his way in the early New Labour years. He also seems keen on the work of Laclau and Mouffe (I was and remain no fan) which to be fair he suggests had some relevance to the kind of political approach taken by Podemos.

He doesn’t, unfortunately, in my view mention the work of the late Chris Harman on Gramsci who argued against the appropriation of his ideas by what were then known as ‘eurocommunists’.

There is now continuing research and writing on Gramsci including the publication of all his writings (in 8 volumes) up to the period of the Prison Notebooks.

However as the convenor of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, while Gramsci influenced the work of EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm (Anderson 2016 notes this) I can’t recall a paper in recent times that has touched on Gramsci, unless it was something I mumbled from the chair.

87 years on however Gramsci’s writings and his life repay study by anyone interested in Marxist ideas on how to understand and change the world and by anyone who is trying to do so.