The Brooklyn Rail

In the preface to a recent volume of academic essays titled Gramsci In The World, Marxist and formalist literary critic Frederic Jameson argues that, today more than ever, much of Gramsci’s value lies in the ambiguities that his Prison Notebooks, the thirty-three notebooks the Sardinia born communist wrote in prison between 1928 and 1934 under strict surveillance and limited critical sources available to him, necessarily resulted from the unfree physical conditions of the writing. Because of it, Jameson argues, Gramsci was forced to coin a new vocabulary that unbeknownst to him, and yet mirroring his positions, would lead him to new concepts and pathways as well as possible solutions to some of the questions he posed. The Duke University professor is not the first Marxist of note in the anglophone world to make ambiguity central to Gramsci’s work. Before him, the British historian Perry Anderson, in a long essay titled “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” originally appeared in 1976 in the New Left Review and eventually republished in book form, also paired Gramsci and ambiguity. This time, however, the ambiguities were mostly on the students of the Italian politician. They had such an “ecumenical admiration” for Gramsci, Anderson lamented, that they could not ascertain the “multiple and incompatible interpretations of the themes of the Prison Notebooks.” These interpretations, of course, Anderson would clarify for them. Like Jameson, Anderson too pointed out that, first and foremost, this critical problem was to an extent due the writing conditions of the political prisoner.

Considering the forty-six-year span that divides Anderson’s long piece and Jameson’s short preface, one might say that, in the anglophone world, the question of ambiguity would seem to mark indelibly the reception of Gramsci’s work. True, the historian and the literary theorist do not represent the whole critical spectrum of the Italian thinker’s reception in the English-speaking world. One only needs to remember the use that Edward Said made of Gramsci’s notions of “bloc” and “territory” in his major works, although that use itself might be categorized under the ambiguity category, albeit for different reasons than Jameson’s and Anderson’s. I am referring to the strange disappearance in Said’s Orientalism and, especially, Culture and Imperialism, of struggle and class in those two Gramscian notions. A disappearance that is even more puzzling because Said did stress the importance of both forces in Gramsci.¹ Still, Anderson and Jameson are good markers, so to speak, of Gramsci’s reception in the English-speaking world and especially the US, also because they both observe the absence of a Gramscian tradition in the US. In the same volume as Jameson’s “Preface,” in fact, Michael Denning laments the lack of influence Gramsci had on the New Left, although the Yale American Studies scholar seems unaware of a major question that hindered the access to Gramsci and other non-English speaking thinkers: the lack of commitment on the part of US scholars, especially in English and American Studies programs, and, often, of their institutions, to the study and apprehension of languages other than English. As a result, often they are forced to rely on the availability of translations of major works. This is, in and of itself, a significant political issue, even more so in the case of Gramsci, originally a student of glottology who gave eminent importance to languages, both nationals and dialects alike. Gramsci himself was raised in a bilingual environment, speaking Sardinian dialect and Italian fluently, had an acquaintance with Russian, and taught himself German and French while in prison as well as some English.

Whatever Gramsci’s contradictions are none of them Jean-Yves Frétigné’s new biography titled To Live Is To Resist. The Life of Antonio Gramsci, translated by Laura Marris, makes a consistent effort to clarify. The French biographer does not develop theoretically the ideas and writings of the communist leader, preferring instead to narrate and engage his life, which he does nicely and thoroughly. Neither does the book benefit from the “Foreword” penned by Columbia University’s political scientist Nadia Urbinati, possibly the worst pages I have ever read about Gramsci (and I’ve read my fair share). Despite the translators’ acknowledgement, one even wonders if Urbinati did read the book from beginning to end. She writes that Gramsci was born “hunchbacked and almost a dwarf,” whereas Fretigné tells us that Gramsci was born healthy and was “in excellent health” until he was eighteen-month-old. Urbinati also asserts that Gramsci was “brought up in poverty and hardship.” There is no doubt that at a young age Nino, as he was affectionately called by his family members and comrades, faced hardship and a degree of poverty that Fretigné describes well. Nonetheless, the French biographer points out how Gramsci’s parents were “small-town elites.” The hardship they faced was the byproduct of his father’s choices in local politics, which earned him several years in jail and cost him his job as comptroller of the registry office of Ghilarza, the town where he had moved after abandoning law school in Naples. His grandfather had been a colonel in the carabinieri in the southern city after Italy’s unification and had married the daughter of an eminent lawyer of Spanish origins. While this lineage does not equal everlasting wealth, it certainly does not evoke poverty. Likewise, Gramsci’s mother, Peppina Marcias, did not come from a poor family. She even attended elementary school until third grade at a time when elementary school was not yet mandatory in Italy. Thus, she could read and write in Italian, one of the not many women that could do so in Sardinia and likely Italy in the late nineteenth century who did not come from a well to do family, aristocracy, or the clergy. The uncle that raised her after the death of her parents when she was a young girl was a pharmacist, although he ended up losing everything he had, including his mind. Even the hardship and poverty of her son’s university years in Turin, which was real, in a way was a choice Gramsci made. In his outstanding 2017 biography titled Gramsci. Una Nuova Biografia (Gramsci. A New Biography), which an intelligent publisher should translate, Angelo D’Orsi reports how in 1916 Gramsci turned down an offer to teach at a high school in Oulx, a small town some forty-five miles west of Turin (Fretigné omits his fact). Instead, he took the way less remunerated position at the socialist daily L’Avanti.

More importantly, Urbinati de-historicizes Gramsci by going against her own suggestion to read and understand him by way of “reconstructing the political history of the first half of the twentieth century.” Instead, she reduces Gramsci’s life to a metaphor, “a life of prison.” She argues that his hometown was a prison and so was his body. Even Turin in her view “resembled a sort of prison.” Except that the only prisons Gramsci inhabited were those made of cement, steel, and barbed wires where the fascists put him and Mussolini kept him for most of his adult life. Gramsci himself told us as much when he wrote in one of his prison letters that he was “a fighter without any luck in the immediate fight, and fighters cannot and must not be pitied when they fought, not because they were forced to, but because they sodesired [un combattente che non ha avuto fortuna nella lotta immediata e i combattenti non possono e non devono essere compianti quando essi hanno lottato non perché costretti, ma perché così essi stessi hanno voluto consapevolmente.]”² Or when he chided his sister-in-law Tatiana because in his view she connected “improperly my mental state to my health conditions [impropriamente il mio stato d’animo alle mie condizioni di salute.]”³ There was nothing that Gramsci hated more than a superficial neoromanticism, let alone opinions based on lack of factual information. He deeply believed in one’s personal responsibility toward him or herself, the others and, ultimately, toward history itself. Last but absolutely not least, Urbinati disconnects Gramsci from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and communism, two things he never distanced himself from, to the point that they cost him his life.

Fortunately, this is not what Fretigné argues. Rather, he reminds us that Gramsci was a “professional revolutionary” motivated by and invested in bolshevism. He does so by dividing Gramsci’s life in four sections and an epilogue. The first two sections, titled “From Sardinian Gramsci to National Gramsci (1891-1915)” and “From National Gramsci to Internationalist Gramsci (1915-1922), periodize and thematize geography, making it central to his political development. The third and the fourth section, “The Bolshevik (1922-1926)” and “The Prisoner (November 8, 1926- April 27, 1937) periodize and thematize political identity and its evolving process until the physical toll was stronger than Gramsci’s will to live. This degradation is described in graphic details in the epilogue. The volume also includes a useful summary of the English editions of Gramsci’s writings, a selected chronology of his life, and two appendixes. The first is a family tree of Gramsci’s wife family, the Schuchts; the second an overview of the visits and visitors to the prisoner between May 1927 and the day of his death ten years later.

The division serves the author well, as it establishes the coordinates of the book, especially considering that this is a biography conceived for a French reading audience, the first of its kind published in France I seem to understand. One need be mindful that the general French reader (and even more so the American one) might not necessarily be acquainted with significant historical events in and pertinent to Gramsci’s life as he or she would be with those of, say, Voltaire’s or De Gaulle’s. Fretigné exploits this possible disadvantage wisely. He takes the reader inside the life of the “professional revolutionary” by detailing the historical roots of Gramsci’s paternal and maternal families as well as the geosocial and political conditions of his native island. Then, he makes them both central to Gramsci’s childhood and youth until his arrival at the University of Turin before WWI. In addition to detailing the financial ups and downs of the Gramscis and Antonio’s health problems due to Pott’s disease (a rare form of tuberculosis that he contracted at an early age), Fretigné emphasizes how Gramsci’s mental conditions played as big of a role as the physical ones on Gramsci. This is an important and yet not widely explored aspect, one that Giuseppe Fiori did not emphasize in what became the standard biography of Gramsci, Vita di Antonio Gramsci, published in 1966, a book translated in ten languages⁴ and re-issued the same number of times in Italy. His “physical and psychological fragility,” writes Fretigné, “was the cause as much as the consequence of his great solitude,” which in the biographer’s view was what turned the young man to politics.

There is a great deal of truth in this statement. In more than one way, solitude was a constant in Gramsci’s life, often against his will. Still, the socioeconomic conditions of his native land were just as important in pushing him toward politics, something that Fretigné chronicles but does not conceptualize. Politically speaking, Gramsci came of age once he encountered socialism and the industrial working-class of the Piedmont’s capital. Yet, it was back home in Sardinia that he was first exposed to the role that politics, economics, and culture played in people’s life, how they impacted it, if not entirely determined a great deal of it. This he experienced first after his father’s previously mentioned political choices in Ghilarza, then when the island’s miners went on a five-day long strike that ended up with the police’s “cure lead,” which resulted in the killing of three miners. Those strikers were for the most part former peasants and shepherds. Fifteen thousand of them had been forced to abandon their previous occupation and go into the mines, where they worked in atrocious conditions. Fretigné correctly writes that Gramsci did not encounter any of Marx’s writings until he arrived in Turin. Nonetheless, he was observant enough to understand the class as well as the racial dimension of the miners’ struggle. All of which belonged, this much he had already understood, to the larger question of modernity.

The biography contextualizes the racial context in which Gramsci grew properly, showing how the ruling classes’ orientalizing of the Southern populations was an intentional political strategy typical of the positivism and eugenics of the time, to which elite intellectuals were organic. The best example is the forensic anthropology of Cesare Lombroso and his followers, whose arguments, Fretigné reports, described Sardinia “as if it were inhabited by an archaic population, marked by atavism and corruption, still incapable of adapting to the modern standards of life in a nation-state.” These conditions, of course, justified the subjugation of the locals and the violence to defeat the miners’ strike and other acts of rebellion that band of bandits that had been present on the island for a very long time conducted. Fretigné points out how in the Prison Notebooks Gramsci would sharply criticize a book by one Giulio Bechi, a colonel who had conducted operations against bandits, titled Caccia Grossa. Scene e figure del banditismo sardo (Big Game: scenes and characters of Sardinian Banditry). In it, Gramsci lamented, Bechi had made “mediocre literature” out of “tragic events in our national history.” Fiori, however, recalls how Gramsci had already situated similar events in a larger historical and class context in 1911 in high school. Reasoning on colonialism and oppressed people in the case of the British occupation in China, he commented, with his typical abrasive style, that “wars are fought for profit, not to advance civilization [le guerre sono fatte per il commercio, non per la civiltá.]”⁵ In other words, Gramsci understood that the miners’ strike signaled the beginning of a new era, where collective struggle replaced banditry. This epochal shift did not translate in the end of the Northerners’ racist attitude toward the former peasants. Rather, it made it organic to the workers’ struggle, as the Turin experience would convince the young Gramsci.

In the Piedmonts city he became close to and increasingly involved with socialist circles and the industrial working-class, learned about economics from the future first president of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi, absorbed the ideas of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, and, perhaps more important, he adopted a “vision of the world defined by a historicist approach to knowledge” thanks to his Vienna-educated glottology professor Matteo Baroli. Precisely for this reason he signed an anti-racist petition that two Sardinian intellectuals, Attilio Deffenu and Nicolò Fancello, had penned. In it, they accused the ruling class of exploiting the southern population of Italy to enrich the bourgeoisie and the northern proletariat. This view Gramsci shared with Umberto Terracini, Palmiro Togliatti, and Giuseppe Tasca, the young comrades that, along with the Neapolitan engineer Amadeo Bordiga, would eventually form the leadership of Communist Party of Italy, or PCd’I, they helped found in 1921 in Livorno.

By that time, Gramsci had long abandoned higher education and dedicated himself full time to politics and journalism. His goal, Fretigné writes, was “to spread a new conception of life, a new culture, so to speak, breaking with the present one,” which in his view prevented the Socialist Party from understanding the Italian proletariat, especially in the south. Fretigné makes clear that this new conception included “equality between sexes” because Gramsci viewed the family “‘as a moral world in process, competed by the intimate fusion of two souls which find in each other what each individually lacks.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 promised to achieve that new conception that attracted him more than anything else. It is no surprise, then, that he associated capitalism and modernity well before the event of 1917, when he still had not read any Lenin. Equally telling is the fact that eventually he would “develop a form of Marxism that gave the subject a decisive role, no longer taken individually, but collectively” Fretigné comments.

A decisive factor in the development of this worldview was the crucial experience of the factory councils of 1919-’20 in Turin that Fretigné covers in detail as well as the concomitant lunching of L’Ordine Nuovo, a “weekly review of socialist culture” as the subtitle read, that advocated for the councils. In Gramsci’s view they represented the foundations of a possible new kind of democracy, a “‘democracy of the producers’ as an alternative to bourgeois democracy,” which is to say, liberal democracy. The French biographer situates the story of the factory councils within the larger European and American history of similar experiments. Additionally, and this is something that is usually downplayed if not entirely overlooked in Gramsci’s studies, Fretigné points out the importance of the American socialist and IWW’s co-founder Daniel De Leon’s innovative thinking, which Gramsci read in the pages of Max Eastman’s The Liberator. Despite the councils’ defeat, or, better yet, because the capitalist industrial and political establishment won, Gramsci did not abandon the experiment’s premises. He did not because a democracy of producers meant that nobody would profit and benefit from others’ surplus labor, including the labor of the peasants, the crucial segment of Italy’s population for which, the young Gramsci realized, the Socialist Party lacked a policy, just like it lacked a policy for the petty bourgeoisie, for the organization of a party militia, for concrete revolutionary action, and for strong leadership. Moreover, he also realized that a democracy of producers meant the need for new institutions. The first step to answer to these problems wasn’t within the Socialist Party, but outside of it, in the guise of a new party, which he envisioned as an entity organic to the working and peasant classes, a tool for their self-representation and direct action.

The founding of the PCd’I, which after WWII would be re-named PCI, translated into the internationalization of the Sardinia native, by which Fretigné intends his embracing of Bolshevism between 1922 to 1926, which also coincided with Gramsci’s time outside of Italy, first in Moscow, where he arrived with other leaders of the party upon request of the Comintern’s chair Gregory Zinovyev, then in Vienna, and finally in Lyon, on the occasion of the third congress of the PCd’I.

If one had to pick a defining period in Gramsci’s life and political trajectory, these four years would be it. During this short period, he acquired an international dimension and stature among his comrades, which in turn signified engaging the Bolshevik revolution directly and dealing with the leadership of the Soviet and other European communist parties; he suffered even greater mental breakdowns than in the past, which were already significant to the point that in Turin he had started smocking opium; he met his future wife Julia in a Mosco’s sanatorium where they both were treated for depression and became father of two boys, Delio (initially called Lev in honor of Trotsky) and Giuliano (he would never see his second son); was elected a deputy in the Italian parliament; became the head of the party and co-wrote with Togliatti what came to be known as The Lyon Theses, which allowed him to lay the ground for the mass party and his own political views. These included his view that the Soviet Union as Lenin had conceived it and tried to achieve was essentially over, as he explained in a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Communist Party (CPSU) sent to Togliatti in 1926 that Bukharin made sure both the Central Committee and Stalin especially would not see (this would be Gramsci’s last direct interaction with Togliatti, whom he accused of “bureaucratism”). No less important, in 1926 he wrote what might as well be considered his most original and truly complete essay, the celebrated “Some Aspects Of The Southern Question.” In it, he changed the coordinates of the political debate of the time on the left. Instead of the debate between socialists and communists, he put at the center of socialism the North vs. South question, which in turn he identified as the question of the relationship between industrial workers and Southern peasants within the bourgeois order. Finally, in these same years he witnessed the rise and the consolidation of fascism.

The economy of language serves To Live Is To Resist well in unraveling all these developments. The biography navigates the intertwined personal and political dimensions and events of Gramsci’s life with clarity and precision. Nonetheless, one would be hard pressed to say that the author adds anything of interest in interpreting them. True, the author’s focus is on the life rather than the works of Gramsci, as the book’s subtitle indicates. Still, one would expect at least an attempt at a more in-depth, if not altogether original analysis of the crucial phase in the life of a man to whom history happened and that he helped make too, especially after his death with his writings.

A more nuanced framework of his life events would have served the readers better. Paolo Spriano pointed out right at the beginning of his multi-volume history of the PCd’I that the party was born as the Italian section of the communist movement. Amid nationalism and the rise of fascism, Moscow was the epicenter of an international movement and of the 1917 revolution, which in order to succeed it needed to expand everywhere in the world. On this, both Lenin and Trotsky agreed, at least initially. After all, Marx had envisioned and theorized a communist world. While working with and thinking about the specific conditions of Italy, especially after fascism’s turn into a legal dictatorship, Gramsci never forgot this. Even more so when he ended up in prison, where he expanded Marxian concepts and enlarged and innovated Marxism, ultimately conceptualizing it as “absolute humanism (umanesimo assoluto).” He knew that the failure to bring in in the Third International most of the Italian proletariat had opened the door to Mussolini. In his aforementioned letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU sent to Togliatti he wrote, “‘The unity of our brother party in Russia is necessary for the development and triumph of the world revolutionary forces.’”

Is there any link between this framework and way of thinking and Gramsci’s ideas of the need for workers to develop their own forms and institutions, to envision mass organisms different than unions and labor chambers? We are used to associateing Gramsci with Italian history, politics, and the history of the PCd’I, and for good reasons. Namely, because that occupies the bulk of the Prison Notebooks. But was Gramsci using Italy as a case study, for lack of a better word, to re-envision a world revolution that the industrial working-class and peasants would lead, now that he knew that the Soviet revolution was going astray? It might not be a coincidence that he penned the essay on the southern question exactly when he understood that the internal fights in Moscow were the cipher of the revolution’s limits, if not failure altogether. Likewise, it is no coincidence that, following Trotsky’s famous letter to the Pravda about the internal problem of the CPSU and democracy, the Old Man’s j’accuse to Stalin and last, failed attempt to save the party and the revolution, Gramsci wrote to Terracini that they needed a party in Italy able to survive the issues afflicting the USSR. We might ask ourselves, then, whether this framework has anything to do with the larger question of twentieth century modernity in Gramsci’s mind, especially considering that he would go on and dedicate an entire notebook to the theme of Americanism and Fordism. One of Gramsci’s most astute students, Alberto Burgio, called him a “historian of modernity” because he realized that capitalism is unable to emancipate everyone fully, which seems to me a much better and more fruitful way to study Gramsci, especially after the end of the Cold War, rather than debating whether he was a Marxist or not (which he was) or had in essence repudiated the class struggle and the revolution (which he did not). For this reason, even the way Fretigné narrates Gramsci’s and the party’s initial underestimation of what fascism signified and the perils it presented would have benefited from a better historical structure, especially considering that such a structure would play a determining factor in the failures to free Gramsci after his arrest on November 8, 1926.

Fretigné does link the conflicts between the socialists and the communists and the role the CPSU tried to play in it, especially Zinovyev. Yet, he confines this triangulation to the story of the diatribe and disagreements between the two Italian parties, in so many ways the twentieth century political version of Guelphs and Ghibellines, away from the bigger picture. Consequently, he neglects to address Zinovyev’s repeated attempts to convince the Italian communists to form a united front against fascism, to the point that he and his fellow Comintern leader Karl Radek eventually accused the PCd’I of being responsible for the victory of fascism. Similarly, Fretigné details how Gramsci too underestimated fascism, but he omits to report Gramsci’s call in the Italian parliament for a general strike after the fascist assassination of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in which Mussolini was directly implied, a strike that the Duce himself ordered to repress immediately. Furthermore, in the summer of 1924 Gramsci wrote in L’Unità that there was no way to defeat fascism without the use of violence. Albeit too late, eventually he proposed the PCd’I to join anti-communist organizations in the fight against fascism, while many in his party continued to refuse to embrace this position.

Even from the strict point of intellectual history, I think Fretigné could have done a better job by locating Gramsci in the larger debate of the time about modernity on the various sides of the political and theoretical spectrum. There is no mention, for example, of the fact that Gramsci borrowed the notion of the “bloc” that is so crucial to his thought, beginning with the Southern question essay, from Sorel. Or that Benedetto Croce, which these days hardly anybody reads or studies, was at the time a pre-eminent voice in the European context, not solely in Italy, especially as a proposer of a modernity that did away with religion, which is one of the main reasons why Gramsci instead put so much effort in thinking about the catholic question in Italy, another major aspect that makes his work unique and another argument for thinking of Gramsci as an historian and theorist of modernity. Of this increasing dialogism of Gramsci’s thinking process that of course unfolded in prison and is reflected in the Prison Notebooks there is not much account in the last section of the volume. Neither is there enough space and a clear analysis of the role his very dear friend Piero Sraffa played during Gramsci’s time in prison, which was much larger and more important than the way it comes out in To Live Is To Resist. Indeed, I believe that one of the major lacks in Gramsci’s studies is the absence of a serious biography of Sraffa, the son of a wealthy Jewish family, a prominent scholar of Ricardo brought to the University of Cambridge by none other than Keynes, and whose uncle, a Senator in the Italian parliament, had a significant role in one of the attempts to free Gramsci.

What we have, instead, is a rigorous and detailed chronicle of the events that led to the arrest of the by then elected member of the Italian parliament. These are: the three failed attempts to free Gramsci; how he finally managed to be released and transferred to a medical facility in Rome where eventually he would die a free but a physically deteriorated man; the material conditions of the writing of the Prison Notebooks, certainly one of the best section of this biography; and the Aesopian character of the notebooks’ writing, which is to say, the coded language the prisoner deployed to communicate his ideas to the outside world and, we might as well say, to history. Fretigné justly credits the crucial role and the sacrifice Gramsci’s sister-in-law Tatiana made throughout his imprisonment in addition to being his liaison to Sraffa, the party, and his family. Like Fiori before him, he shows how she, like most women in Gramsci’s life, was not simply a facilitator of the communication between the prisoner and the outside world. She was an intellectual partner just like her sister Julia had been in the very short time she spent with her husband. Correctly, the biographer does not shy away from showing the nasty ways the political prisoner could act toward Tatiana in writing or during her visits, to the point that one could speak of mental abuse on his part at times, which in turn helps making Gramsci the man made of flesh and bones he was and that this biography well depicts, instead of painting a non-existent mythic figure. Fretigné does spend a few pages interpreting the idea of the “war of position” and “hegemony,” although solely in relation to fascism. He also does not shy away from tackling the delicate and difficult question of Togliatti’s role in the failed attempts to free Gramsci, which occupies most of the last section of the volume. Fretigné unequivocally accuses Togliatti of being the one person who did the most to keep his comrade in prison, beginning with “The Infamous Letter from Grieco,” to quote the title of the section of the book on the letter the then head of the party wrote from outside of Italy his jailed comrade that prompted Judge Macis, the magistrate of Gramsci’s trial, to comment: “Honorable Gramsci, you have friends who certainly want you to remain in prison for a long time.”

There are very good reasons and sentiments to share Fretigné’s position. Gramsci himself grew to believe that Togliatti was behind Grieco’s letter. He was not the only one to have a poor opinion of his former fellow student at the University of Turin. In 1930 Alfonso Leonetti, an important member of the PCd’I, called Togliatti “an opportunist and a political parasite (un opportunista e un parassita politico.)”⁶ After Gramsci’s death, Fiori tells us, Tatiana called the new head of the PCd’I a “former friend (un ex-amico; note the word friend instead of comrade).” Fretigné relies on the interpretation of historical documents for his indictment of Togliatti. Essentially, he believes Togliatti condemned Gramsci to life in prison by not doing enough to free him. He blames him for not stopping the French paper L’Humanité from publishing Dr. Arcangeli’s health diagnosis of the by then (May 1933) famous prisoner, which basically doomed what Tatiana called “the great attempt” to free her brother-in-law. Neither did Togliatti try to stop a European campaign that ended up damaging instead of favoring the prisoner. Fretigné also points out Mussolini’s lack of political interest to free Gramsci, unless the latter asked him for clemency, something Gramsci vehemently opposed until the very end. Finally, he touches on the USSR’s disinterest, by the time of the last attempt, to free the Sardinian because Stalin, who was already suspicious of Gramsci, was trying to get politically closer with fascist Italy (after all, this was the man that would make a pact with the Nazis). Fretigné concludes aligning himself with Gramsci’s scholar Aldo Natoli, who, “in reply to Giorgio Amendola [one of the party’s leaders], lamenting the difficulties the PCd’I went through because of Gramsci’s polemic against the CPSU, [wrote] ‘that the international Communist movement and the PCI paid a much higher price for not having fought, from the start, as Gramsci intended, Stalin’s drive toward absolute power.”

I could not agree more with this remark. For the record, I have very little sympathy for Togliatti myself. But the key words here are “movement” and “party,” by which I mean that the entire context worked against Gramsci way more than Togliatti might or might have not. One might condemn Togliatti’s perhaps self-interested pragmatism. However, as of today there is no proof that his comrades went against Gramsci. Even the Catholic Church, which initiated the first attempt to free Gramsci, was not able to convince Mussolini to sign on the exchange between Italian Communists and ecclesiastical prisoners in the Soviet Union, despite the involvement of major players like Father Viganò, the Apostolic Nunzio and future pope Eugenio Pacelli, and the most prominent Jesuit of the time, Father Tacchi Venturi (along with Sraffa, the Comintern, and the USSR embassy in Berlin). Of this, D’Orsi’s biography informs us, Grieco knew nothing. Similarly, in the second attempt in 1928 Togliatti played a key role, pushing the Soviet Union to try liberating his comrade. A key factor that went against Gramsci this time was the political demise of Bucharin. Which brings us back to the larger context and Stalin, not to Togliatti, and the failure of the movement and the PCd’I, not of one person, to stop this despicable criminal. Gramsci’s fate and indeed the history of the socialist movement worldwide are entirely connected to this larger picture, which Fretigné omits to position theoretically in relation to the subject of his book, beginning with the fact that by the time of Gramsci’s arrest the state (the Soviet Union) had replaced the ideology (communism). Neither does he comment on the overall nature of the Prison Notebook or of how, if at all, do Gramsci’s previous writings, and especially the essay on the Southern Question, relate to his magnum opus. In his biography, Fiori submits to the thesis that the Prison Notebooks are the extension and the development of the Southern Question essay. D’Orsi, instead, considers them as a reflection of Gramsci’s and the communist and socialist movement’s defeat by the end of the 1920s. As such, they represent the way to begin anew the fight for the “liberation of the oppressed classes (liberazione della classi oppresse),” which he takes as Gramsci’s “ultimate goal (fine ultimo).”⁷ The historian and long-time president of the Gramsci Foundation in Rome Giuseppe Vacca, sees the Prison Notebooks as a way to re-think modernity, democracy, and the workers’ role in all of it, which in turn means to refuse the idea of imperialism as an economic transformation that accelerates the end of capitalism and the inevitable war, both pillars of bolshevism. In other words, Vacca sees Gramsci as going beyond Leninism, a position Fretigné shares (he concludes the last section of his work before the epilogue by quoting Vacca). If this is true, as I also believe it is, then one would expect Fretigné to explain how Gramsci remained “a professional revolutionary,” and tackle more systematically the question of Gramsci’s relationship to Marx and Marxism, modernity, and his idea of civilization. For this reason, I think the book would have benefited from engaging Gramsci’s ideas systematically. Consider To Live Is To Resist a good introduction to the life of Antonio Gramsci. And this review, an invitation to (re)read his work.

1. See Edward Said, “Gramsci E L’Unità Di Filosofia, Politica, Economia,” in Baratta, Giorgio and Andrea catone, eds. Modern Times. Gramsci e la critica dell’Americanismo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale organizzato dal Centro di Iniziativa Politica e Culturale di Roma, Rome: 20-22 May, 1987, 353-55.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Lettere Dal Carcere. Ed. By Caprioglio, Sergio and Elsa Fubini. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1965. My translation.
   
3. In Giuseppe Vacca, Vita E Pensieri Di Antonio Gramsci. 1926-1937. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2012, 179. My translation.
   
4. Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life Of A Revolutionary. Transl. Tom Nairn. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970.
   
5. Ibid, 78. My translation.
   
6. Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano. I Da Bordiga a Gramsci. Roma: L’Unità, 1990, 248.
   
7. Angelo D’Orsi, Gramsci. Una Nuova Biografia. Milano: Feltrinelli, 2017, 277.