25.02.2021

The misuses of Gramsci

Quoted by charlatans to provide an air of magic, praised for his ambiguities, more revered than read: David Broder calls for a serious engagement with a political strategy that still has considerable relevance

To accuse others of ‘misuses’ of Antonio Gramsci might sound like the defence of some stale orthodoxy. But the challenge is, if anything, to assert the communist character of the Sardinian Marxist’s actual work, in the face of its dominant political and academic uses.

In a famous 1976 book Perry Anderson counted Gramsci among the first generation of so-called “western Marxists” - an array of thinkers counterposed to the “construction of socialism” in the eastern bloc.¹ In the then Trotskyist-influenced Anderson’s reading - and in the more acid tones of Domenico Losurdo’s more recent work² - western Marxism had come to represent a gradual distancing of Marxist analysis from any connection to party-building or political practice. Such a trend intensified over the first half of the 20th century: hence currents like the Frankfurt School were focused on academic production rather than writing for party newspapers.

As Anderson notes, the complication of a figure like Gramsci, who reached maturity in the period of World War I, is that he only partly embodies such a tendency. True, Gramsci wrote his most important theoretical work in jail from 1929 to 1935, when he had already been cut off from direct political involvement. Yet his fragmentary Prison notebooks had a strong orientation toward political strategy: they were fundamentally built on the question of how a Communist Party could build its leadership in a western society unlike tsarist Russia. But they were also unlike his earlier interventions, in form as well as content: they made only allusive (if sometimes telling) references to Comintern affairs, the Stalin-Trotsky split and suchlike, yet also raised historical-political questions that could later inform academic discussions, from south Asian subaltern studies to cultural theory and international relations.

For some, this can be taken as, broadly, a positive thing - making Gramsci’s works timeless, or at least constitutively malleable or ‘open’. Indeed, in the preface to a recent edited collection, Fredric Jameson argues that the value of Gramsci lies precisely in his ambiguities.³ In jail, his writings had to pass via the fascist prison authorities before they were handed back to him, so he resorted to various circumlocutions designed to avoid setting off alarm signals; hence, “philosophy of praxis” stands in for Marxism, the “Modern Prince” for the Communist Party, and so on. Jameson suggests that if these are disguises imposed by an external situation they may also express “a more complex internal and subjective one, which might have led Gramsci himself, in the course of seeking alternative phrasing, into wholly new paths and new problems”.⁴

But this also points to the problem addressed by this article: the removal of the historical actor at the centre of his outlook. Jameson, in common with most academic uses of the Sardinian, breezily skips across his central focus on the Communist Party and its tasks. Indeed for the cultural theorist, it is the application of Gramscian categories to subjects and situations which he could never have imagined that “makes for the freshness and adaptability of his thinking, its suggestiveness as a resource for contemporary theory, if not as some model or party line that he never offered in the first place”. Further, it is “precisely the ambiguity of Gramsci’s analyses of this or that issue or topic that makes for the richness of his work and its urgent relevance for us today”.

In one aspect this may sound compelling. Gramsci would not be much use if he merely described the particular realities of his own time. His call for an alliance of southern peasantry and northern industrial workers is not just of interest for historians of interwar Italy, but offers an innovative approach to an age-old problem posed already by Marx, whose Critique of the Gotha programme challenged Ferdinand Lassalle’s notion of the non-proletarian population as “one reactionary mass”. Equally, Gramsci’s focus on culture - meaning not just the arts, but something rather like common sense: the space in between economic base and political tactics, in which hegemony is exercised - hardly needs to be reduced to the immediate situation of interwar Italy, or indeed the particular fascination then exerted by the rising US hegemon and the Fordist model of the worker.

Yet it seems odd to suggest that the interest of using and building on Gramsci’s categories in our own time should rely on them being ambiguous. By analogy, Marx’s focus on the factory as the centre of the productive process in Capital may bear many traits of the expectations of his time - and needs to be properly historicised. But to recognise this would in no way rely on exploiting elements of equivocation or ambiguity in his writing, when we take him seriously as a theorist and not just a subject of literary interpretation. In fact, when we look at the history of socialist and communist parties in the early 20th century, we nowhere find a majority industrial working class, which existed still less in Marx’s lifetime. It is thus puzzling to be confronted with the assumption that Gramsci’s idea of a multiform working class, allied with other subaltern groups, challenged some pre-existing monolithism.

Such portrayals of Gramsci, focusing on his ambiguities or heterodoxy more than his contributions to the communist party, are broadly characteristic of both immediately political uses and scholarly fashions. Aside from a rejection of Leninism, this phenomenon seems especially driven by an academic tendency to assert individual ownership over ideas. Indicative in this regard is the attribution to Gramsci of the idea of hegemony - the combination of consent and coercion, with which one group or class establishes its leadership over others - while disregarding its earlier use in Russian social democracy. Equally, if Gramsci is often upheld as the apostle of ‘radical culture’ and popular education outside of the conventionally political domain, it is strange that such a presentation of him should overlook the experience of the German SPD - perhaps because this party and its early version of a vulgarised Marxism are less palatable than the Sardinian prisoner.

In this we could identify a certain comparison with Rosa Luxemburg: more widely celebrated as a martyr than read, the acclaim for her is all the more unanimous because she was murdered before the decisive splits in the communist movement. Just as most currents on the left have some positive myth of Gramsci, Luxemburg’s early death allowed her to be an icon of both the German Democratic Republic and libertarian post-Leninism - or indeed a “radical democrat” at odds with Bolshevism.⁵ In Gramsci’s case, the irony is that his image in the trappings of heterodoxy and national particularity itself owes so much to his use in the high-Stalinist era.

Togliatti’s Gramsci

Founded in 1921, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) gained huge popularity during the anti-fascist resistance of 1943-45, as it became a major player in a broad, anti-fascist alliance. Banished from the cross-party government in 1947 as the cold war hardened, it would for the next four decades remain a loyal opposition within the Christian Democrat-dominated system. In this situation, the PCI followed what its leader Palmiro Togliatti called the “Italian road to socialism”, based on broad democratic alliances and, in particular, the republican institutions that it had helped create immediately after 1945. In fact, from Comintern’s 7th Congress in 1935 onward, all Communist Parties adopted ‘national’ and ‘patriotic’ hues. The Italian party was more successful than most in giving this a distinct theoretical underpinning. While in France, leader Maurice Thorez was the object of a Stalinesque leader cult, in Italy the uncharismatic Togliatti instead relied on his association with the martyred Gramsci.

The Italian party’s democratic mores were particularly shaped by the fact that it had been crushed so early in its development, thanks to Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister in October 1922 and the near-eradication of communist organisation by the end of 1926. This also affected its internal structure. While a Stalin-loyalist apparatus did take form in Paris and Moscow after 1926 (with ramifications among clusters of prisoners and internal exiles), most militants in Italy were little able to follow the twists of Comintern policy over the 1930s. As in France - and Spain - PCI leaders helped build popular-front alliances, they also purged the clandestine party of founding leader Amadeo Bordiga, ‘Trotskyist’ opponents of the Hitler-Stalin pact and such like, but they had no disciplined structures in their homeland. The decisive efforts to create such a party instead came after the German invasion of September 1943, as the renascent PCI formed a resistance alliance with Christian Democrats, liberals, socialists and (from April 1944) monarchists.

In the partisan movement itself, the PCI was the largest force, its units organising around half of resistance recruits. Returning from two decades of exile in March 1944, Togliatti created a new party totally unlike that which had existed in 1921-26, both in its focus on “mass” organisation rather than cadres and programme, and in its concern to build broad cross-class alliances. Yet such a force could hardly be created with no reference to the party of 1921-26. Gramsci, who had been jailed at the end of this first period and died in 1937, provided the essential link. While the two men were allies in marginalising Bordiga from the leadership of the party in 1923-24, Gramsci had ended comradely relations with Togliatti in October 1926, when the latter refused to pass on to the Russian leadership his letter critical of the tone of exchanges with the Left Opposition. Yet Togliatti - throughout the clandestine period the undisputed PCI leader - became a kind of literary executor. In Moscow he came into possession of the Prison notebooks. Gramsci had written them between 1929 and 1935, expressing his wish to leave some trace “für ewig” - for eternity. Yet the way these writings came to light was contradictory: as an assertion of a specifically Italian tradition, but within the parameters of a party whose organisational model and popular-front strategy were essentially creations of the Stalin-era Comintern.

Indeed, the use of Gramsci in the war period is remarkable, considering the very low knowledge of him among the communist base. This was largely owing to the membership: after 1921 this had been in the low tens of thousands, and fell to 5,000 after 1926,⁶ yet the PCI’s rapid growth during the resistance and after saw it hit almost two million members by the end of the 1940s. For most, Gramsci was a famous martyr, or a name given to partisan units, rather than someone read and understood.

Over the first months after September 1943 the PCI had to confront sizeable currents which harked back to the class-war intransigence of its first years; Rome’s Bandiera Rossa outstripped the PCI’s own membership, and Turin’s Stella Rossa was around half the size. Yet striking in their texts, too, is an absence of any reference to Gramsci as a distinct thinker. Less governed by their allegiance to dissidents like Trotsky or Bordiga than by a generic defence of the party’s ‘original’ tradition, these currents preferred to ignore the clashes of the pre-1926 years and - showing their political confusion - often even invoked Stalin on their side, as the great continuator of the October revolution.

Upon his return from exile in late March 1944 - soon bringing the party into a broad anti-German, pro-Allied government - Togliatti invoked Gramsci both to buttress his own prestige and to counter those more impatient militants who wanted to ‘do like in Russia’. Yet the Gramsci used to this end - and championed by Togliatti in the PCI organ l’Unità - appeared in the guise of a ‘martyr of fascism’ rather than as the bearer of a distinct and immediately applicable political strategy. Gramsci was an object of reverence; Togliatti’s articles in April 1944 identified him as the “party’s founder” (thus memory-holing Bordiga) and mentioned the existence of the Prison notebooks, albeit without referring to their specific contents.

In this lies a great irony of Italian communist history. Gramsci is often, rightly, praised for his democratic understanding of political theory - explaining that every man is an intellectual, though not all have the social function of intellectuals. The irony is that the creation of a ‘folk Gramsci’ in the war period effectively reproduced this same division, laying a massive tombstone over the many green shoots of working class communist thought during the resistance period. This underground culture remains widely ignored, despite the vast amount of source material available to those willing to look.

An interesting recent trend in historiography - represented, for instance, by Andrew Bonnell⁷ and Jean-Numa Ducange⁸ - has questioned how far militants actually read or understood classic works. Telling in this regard is Paolo Favilli’s History of Italian Marxism⁹: focused on the pre-World War I era, it explores Marx’s influence on academic disciplines like sociology, and the spread of his writings and ideas in the movements that emerged in the late 19th century. The case of the Communist manifesto is illustrative: the German edition published in February 1848 announced forthcoming translations into English, French, Italian, Danish and Flemish, but the first partial Italian version did not come out until 1889, six years after Marx’s death.

Favilli shows how knowledge of Marx instead spread through popular explainers, the texts of anti-socialist intellectuals - or indeed via the anarchist-influenced circles hegemonic in the Italian section of the First International. But they also imposed their assumptions on him. In the autodidact workers’ press, Marx could be misrepresented as the defender of Lassalle’s iron law of wages (a vulgarised ‘economic determinism’), hailed alongside Garibaldi and Bakunin or even painted as a horseman galloping around Europe spreading ‘the revolution’ - an obviously unMarxist perspective, projected onto this ‘friend of the working man’. In his own 1925 introduction to the Communist party-school course, Gramsci would refer to Marx as a figure less read by Marxists than by their opponents, using him as a “dressing” for their own “indigestible sauces”.¹⁰

In Gramsci’s case, he appeared in terms consonant with Togliatti’s own strategy, in the world born of the Yalta Accords. The Gramsci of 1944 was thus cast as the “first Leninist in Italy” (an attack on residual admiration of Bordiga), but also the champion of a party for “the whole Italian people”. With many young anti-fascist intellectuals entering PCI ranks, he also became the end point of a national-progressive philosophical tradition - a ‘nationalisation’ that gained momentum during post-1956 deStalinisation. As for the Prison notebooks, the edition published by Togliatti and Felice Platone from 1948 onward was both condensed into thematic volumes - giving them a falsely ‘finished’ and systemic character, much derided by academic philologists - and censored of troubling references to parliamentarism, Bordiga, Luxemburg and Trotsky.

But Gramsci’s symbolism far exceeded these volumes, which were read by few: the martyr was, above all, a cipher for the PCI’s claim to be the democratic party of all Italians, united by anti-fascism and the values of the constitution written after the war. The party’s broad ‘national-popular’ alliances - seeking to win over intellectuals, peasants, white-collar employees and small shopkeepers - were loosely wrapped around Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Yet its framing in terms of ‘progressive democracy’ rather than class conflict was a narrowing of Gramsci’s approach within the limits imposed by the real hegemon - US imperialism, which exerted far more military, financial and cultural pressure on Italy than any force had after the previous war.

The PCI should nonetheless be credited with a real achievement after 1945: imposing its right to organise, despite often deadly reprisals from (ex-)fascists and their CIA, church and mafia allies, and even an assassination attempt on Togliatti himself. For 30 years Italy was not Greece - and that had a great deal of positive impact on Italian democracy and working class life. But, while there were certainly real gains - and the rhetoric of the post-war constitution even promised a democratic republic based on labour - what remained unclear was the PCI’s practical project for transcending its position as a subordinate, loyal opposition. It was understood that it would build up its forces through gradual accretion (‘war of position’), but unclear what the eventual ‘war of manoeuvre’ might look like, as social transformation was now defined in mainly negative terms - as not the storming of the Winter Palace or the insurrectionary ‘ora X’ imagined by many militants.¹¹

Eurocommunist?

The Russia of 1917 lose its model status. During the 1958 election campaign, Sputniks had adorned PCI election imagery, but the events of 1956 and even more so the Prague Spring tarnished the appeal of the “workers’ fatherland”. But also the PCI’s position as a latent anti-capitalist force in national politics was brought into question, not least after Togliatti’s death in 1964.

Especially notable here was the PCI’s weakness in promoting any specific reformist project. Leading ‘gradualists’ like Giorgio Amendola focused on the inherent backwardness of Italian capitalism and its need for ‘modernisation’. Yet such a stance was confused by the rapid economic growth of the 1950s-60s, while the decline of post-war Keynesianism left the PCI in a particular quagmire.¹² Following the example of the smaller Socialist PSI, which joined Christian-Democrat Aldo Moro’s administration in 1963, in the 1970s PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer advocated a “historic compromise” with Moro’s party, which - he emphasised - would also avoid the antagonism that had led to the 1973 coup in Chile. Reaching its electoral high-watermark in 1976 (34% support), over the next three years the PCI provided external support to Christian Democratic governments, backing wage restraint in the interest of combating inflation - a sure sign of how it was being ‘hegemonised’ by others, even if in the name of broad democratic alliances.

The Eurocommunist trend of the late 1970s was, on the whole, a particularly suggestive route away from Leninism. If the PCI had long defined its notion of revolution as ‘not a repeat of the Russian October’, Berlinguer’s 1981 statement that “the propulsive force that began with the October Revolution has been exhausted” formalised the end of the idea of a revolutionary transformation of society.

We see some evidence of this in Eric Hobsbawm’s 1977 book/interview with Giorgio Napolitano,¹³ illustrating the replacement of the socialist end goal with notions like ‘democratic programming’, ‘sustainable capitalist development’ and so on. Both the PCI’s Leninist origins and, in a contradictory way, the fact that it had mounted an armed struggle even to secure basic democratic rights, allowed the persistence of a certain insurrectionary idea of revolution, compounded by the party’s effective inability to enter national government during the cold war period. Yet well before its dissolution the PCI clearly lacked even a reformist programme of transformation; the implosion of 1991 showed it to be somehow less than the sum of its parts, as both more reformist and revolutionary currents entered a death-spiral.

Abroad, Eurocommunism meant both a ‘democratic road to socialism’, upheld by what had already long been the west’s largest CP, and a tilt away from the industrial working class. This itself fuelled interest in Gramsci, and not all the results were bad: as an analysis of Thatcherism’s counterrevolution in Britain, Stuart Hall’s work represents a fine, if not uncontroversial, application of Gramscian categories outside Italy. Yet Hall’s work is obviously marked by its disconnect with the transformatory project, which Gramsci’s own work centred on. Marxism Today’s vision of broad alliances against Thatcherism - and in this spirit the embrace of Neil Kinnock and his war on the left - sought not to create a new alliance around rising layers of the working class, but to write off the old bases of strength and instead tail small social movements, NGOs and such like.

If Hall’s trajectory was somehow tragic, this today has its farcical re-edition in the repeated invocations of Gramsci by lapsed Trotskyist Paul Mason. His political training - still visible in his frequent use of Comintern-era analogies - would, I imagine, lead him to consider Togliatti a Stalinist hatchet man and purveyor of nationalist and popular-frontist dogma. Yet Mason himself uses Gramsci as an apostle of ‘meeting people where they are at’, justifying his Starmerite agenda of concessions to popular nationalism, strong national defence, standing up to Russia, ad nuclearum. Yes, Gramsci said that the workers’ party must establish its moral and intellectual leadership in society as a whole. But this in no way implies swallowing the imperatives of bourgeois politics, or posing as better exponents of the existing hegemonic values. Such a shallow use of ‘big-name intellectuals’ reminds us why village priests in County Mayo speak in Latin - not to convey information, but to add an air of magic.

Even amidst the general association of Gramsci with Berlinguer’s turn (and thus the retreat from class), there were left-Eurocommunist thinkers who engaged more with the realities of the interwar Comintern. Indicative is Nicos Poulantzas’s reading of the state as both a terrain of struggle, and the “material condensation of a power relation between classes and class fractions”. This had the quality of neither understanding it as a monolithic fortress to be assailed from the outside nor naively taking it to be an empty terrain, in which the democratic will would assert itself, but rather a constitutional order that had been partly shaped by moments of working class breakthrough, and conservative reaction against them.

The PCI’s own idealised characterisation of the Italian republic and its constitution, whose first article declared it a democratic republic founded on labour, if anything presented a less conflictual vision, more naively confident in the gradual advance of progress. Poulantzas went beyond a purely instrumental reading of the state by recognising the separate interests of individual capitalists and the overall reproduction of capitalism. But this autonomisation of the political level was taken to the extreme by the likes of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, whose 1985 Hegemony and socialist strategy bid finally to free Gramsci of any connection to the economic base, and set political strategy on a fundamentally superstructural, discursive plane.

Where the PCI had taken the industrial proletariat as the core of a broad popular alliance, Laclau-Mouffe left populism removes even this hegemonic centre. Their postmodern vision of politics does without intermediate institutions, militants, cadres, programme and so on - it is, in effect, another variant of the colonisation of politics by marketing (notable also in its complete focus on steps toward electoral breakthrough, not toward transformation of the state). Syriza’s foundation is named after Poulantzas; its practice owes more to Laclau-Mouffe.

The French philosopher, Louis Althusser, identified the reasons why Gramsci’s own work lends itself to misuse of this kind - the Sardinian’s lack of study of political economy and focus on particular historical moments of the formation of hegemony tends to overshadow the idea of modes of production with that of hegemony and historical blocs.¹⁴

Partyism

Gramsci does not deserve epigones such as these. Of course, any theorist’s work must be able to be kept alive, renewed and built upon, but the dominant uses of Gramsci’s work in fact evacuate its core function - the building of a Communist Party for the socialist transformation of state and society in conditions unlike Russia in 1917.

Many seeking to recover Gramsci from the Togliatti tradition - notably the ‘new left’ of the 1960s and figures like Lelio Basso - looked particularly fondly on his ‘councilist’ period in 1919-20, when, during the occupation of the factories and the creation of workers’ commissions, Gramsci saw them as the embryos of soviets. This focus on bottom-up democracy has evident attractions for those looking for an alternative to the failed models of 20th century socialism.

Yet the most interesting thing about Gramsci - indeed most relevant for us now - lies precisely in his critical re-evaluation of this experience, and his activity within the Communist Party of Italy between 1921 and 1926. This is anything but a spotless record - we can again make a comparison with Rosa Luxemburg, whose leadership of the pre-1914 Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania shows she was no generic defender of ‘the right to think differently’. The imposition of Gramsci’s ‘centre’ over the ‘left’ leadership of Bordiga was orchestrated by the Comintern and never approved by the mass of militants.

In Gramsci’s development between 1920 and 1930 there were in fact several moments of reflection - first drawing him closer to Bordiga, then setting the two in opposition to each other, and then a period of reconciliation and restored ties. In the period of the factory councils in Turin, Bordiga had strongly challenged the idea that these were embryonic soviets, in particular emphasising that in Russia the soviets were political organs, not representations of workplaces, and that only the formation of a party could overcome the various petty sectionalisms and economic-corporate interests of particular groups of workers. Indeed, if in 1919-20 Gramsci often emphasised the notion that workplace councils could be the bases of the future proletarian state - an outlook not least conditioned by the extremely weak leadership provided by the Socialist Party - the inability of the factory occupations to lead a broad movement of the subaltern classes across Italy helped convince him of the centrality of the Communist Party, able to produce a “collective will” standing above sectional and localist divides.

Important differences remained, however, not only over tactical questions of anti-fascism, but also of the two men’s conceptions of the role of the party - with Gramsci’s position also strongly distancing him from the commonplace Trotskyist notion of a vanguard which can exploit a latent, but unrealised, class-consciousness.

Where Bordiga’s vision of the party had essentially relied on the building of a militarised cadre organisation, which would be swept into the limelight by capitalist collapse, Gramsci sought to build the scaffolding of working class democracy. The aim here was to provide a platform on which an organised, politically educated and militant part of the working class could prepare itself to lead the wider class, constantly fed and informed - but not subaltern to - the various demands from below. If rooted in the Leninist conception of the party of professional revolutionaries, Gramsci’s also went beyond it with his focus on the political education of the broad membership.

Hence, far from a Laclau-style vision of the party as an empty cipher, or the various kinds of direct democracy implicit in councilism, Gramsci emphasised that the party was not “democratic in the vulgar sense”. It sought not to mirror popular prejudice or common-sense opinion, but to create the tools with which to mould it. As such, he particularly sought to marry centralisation with a kind of communist pedagogy, through which worker leaders could emerge and forge a collective will. Bordiga - rather like Lenin in his discussion of building state capitalism in Russia - insisted that only after the revolution would the improved material conditions make it possible to raise the cultural level of the masses. But this was precisely the focus of Gramsci’s activity, from the worker-writing of the l’Ordine Nuovo period onward.

Where Gramsci is often held up as an analyst of ‘subaltern speech’, much more rarely do we examine his political record in creating the platform in which working people could prepare to rule society, to ‘become the state’. Aside from the Stalinist and academic defamations of his thought, that is the legacy most valuable to us today.

This article is based on a talk to the February 21 Online Communist Forum

P Anderson Considerations on western Marxism London 1976.↩︎
D Broder, ‘Eastern light on western Marxism’, a review of Domenico Losurdo’s Il marxismo occidentale: come nacque, come morì, come può rinascere, in New Left Review No107, September-October 2017.↩︎
See his preface in F Jameson and R Dainotto (eds) Gramsci in the world Durham 2020, ppxi-xii.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
On Rosa Luxemburg’s hardly libertarian stewardship of the social democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, see E Blanc, ‘The Rosa Luxemburg myth: a critique of Luxemburg’s politics in Poland (1893-1919)’ Historical Materialism 25, 4, 2017.↩︎
Gian Giacomo Cavicchioli and Emilio Gianni, members of the Italian left-communist group Lotta Comunista, have mounted a survey of over 6,000 early 1920s communists, with rich information on their class and educational background and subsequent political affiliations. See their PCd’I 1921. 100 anni, 100 militanti del Partito Comunista d’Italia Milan 2021.↩︎
AG Bonnell, ‘Did they read Marx? Marx reception and Social Democratic Party members in imperial Germany, 1890-1914’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 48, 1, 2002.↩︎
J-N Ducange The French Revolution and social democracy: the transmission of history and its political uses in Germany and Austria, 1889-1934 Leiden 2018.↩︎
P Favilli The history of Italian Marxism: from its origins to the Great War Leiden 2016.↩︎
A Gramsci, ‘For an ideological preparation of the masses’ (available at marxists.org).↩︎
The July 1948 assassination attempt against Palmiro Togliatti sparked armed demonstrations by communists in multiple cities, often digging up weapons from the war period. This showed that such militants remained prepared for confrontation, though the PCI did not orchestrate such displays and all leaders rejected the idea that this could be turned into an insurrection.↩︎
I expand upon these themes in ‘The Italian left after Keynesianism’: phenomenalworld.org/analysis/italian-left-after-keynesianism.↩︎
E Hobsbawm and G Napolitano The Italian road to socialism London 1977.↩︎
See P Sotiris, ‘Althusser and Poulantzas: hegemony and the state’: historicalmaterialism.org/blog/althusser-and-poulantzas-hegemony-and-state.↩︎