Rev Left Radio - Antonio Gramsci: Hegemony, Organic Intellectuals, & Italian Fascism

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

Jon (from Horror Vanguard) and Brenden (from Marxism and Moshpits) return to the show; this time to discuss the life and political theory of the famous Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Find Jon's show (@HorrorVanguard) here: https://www.patreon.com/horrorvanguard Check out Brenden's punk band No Thanks here: https://no-thanks.bandcamp.com/ Outro music 'To the Fellow Travellers' by Brzowski Bandcamp: https://brzowskimusic.bandcamp.com Latest album: https://ffm.to/blooddrivevol4 Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J-cduFlGBY&feature=emb_title Social media: @BRZOWSKImusic ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have John from the Horror Vanguard and Brendan from Marxism and Mosh Pitts on to talk about the political theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. Before we get into the episode, though, I did want to play a little clip from a longtime listener, friend and comrade of the show, Cameron Crowder, who recently spoke up in front of the Greensboro, North Carolina City Council on behalf of Marcus Dion Smith, who was a homeless black man murdered by police, by Greensboro Police, and he's just basically standing up in front of his community and really inspiring and passionate appeal for people not to forget this,

criticism of the police and white supremacy. I just found the entire thing incredibly inspirational and I hope that it inspires others to do similar things. Before I played the little two-minute clip. I just want to give a little context. This is what Cameron texted me for any context so people basically know what he's talking about in this clip. Cameron texted me, the Greensboro Police murdered a homeless black man, Marcus Dion Smith, who was going through a mental health crisis by hog-tying him with a rip-hobble device and he died from positional affixiation. The then-police chief Wayne Scott tried to cover up the murder by omitting the hog-tying from all the reports and even lied to the state

medical examiner. It was only the family lawyer that informed the medical examiner that Marcus had indeed been hogtied. So far, no justice has been served for the Smith family, no closure, no reparations, but Chief Wayne Scott retired with full honors and a pension, and a new police chief is incoming. And that's the context in which Cameron stands up in front of the leaders of his city and gives the following speech. I'm Cameron Crowder. I'm with a working class and House's Organizing Alliance, also known as well. January 30th would have been Marcus Dionne Smith's 40th birthday. An age where most looked forward to many years full of love and growth, he was cut down. He was cut down by those who are paid to see him as dangerous, a nuisance, less than human.

January 31st was Chief Wayne Scott's retirement. The man who worked so hard to cover up Marcus's murder at the hands of his brothers in arms and employees. Chief Scott retired with honors, a pension paid for by the community in full, and nearly a year and a half later, our morning continues uninterrupted. There has been no discernible movement towards closure or reparations. The officers that murdered Marcus still walk the beat with a badge and a gun, and the council that empowers this occupation still rests comfortably in their seats of power. And many of us, many of those who joined in advocating hashtag justice for Marcus Smith now seem content to lay the matter to rest with the incoming police chief, and I believe they are misguided for doing so. Audrey Lord told us, you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools, because she understood that genuine change does not come from within.

But I'm not here today to speak any mealy-mouth aphorisms designed to elicit applause. I'm here to remind everyone that simply putting a new person in the role of police chief does not adjust. the structural racism of the Greensboro Police Department, which is a feature and not a bug. No amount of Chief Ryan James's gestures towards individuals, quote, building upon trust we already have, and individuals, quote, establishing trust with communities that we may not have a great relationship changes this underlying reality. And I don't want to hear any talk about reform from the mouths of the establishment because we all have been around long enough to know what a ruse that is. Reform is just another way of institutionalizing the harm that police normally meet out extrajudicially. It does not matter that Chief James grew up in Greensboro.

It does not matter that he has a bachelor's degree from A&T. It does not matter he has a master's degree from Pfeiffer. It does not matter how many community adjacent boards he has served on. Nothing in his empty platitudes assures me that he possesses the leadership qualities that will prevent more Marcus Dion Smith from happening under his watch. putting diversity hires at the head of oppressive institutions just ensures that the white supremacy runs through a subpoea filter. We are at the home stretch of my statement,

and I felt as if I should say something nice about the Greensboro Police Department. It isn't especially racist. It's just as racist as police are all across the United States of America, because police are the backbone of America's racist society. So in a way, my anger towards the Greensboro Police Department is irrational. It's probably misplaced because they're just doing their historically racist job and doing it exceptionally well. I'm certain of one thing. Greensboro's latest hire, Chief Brian James, will continue the exceptional work of the Greensboro Police Department, but this time in Ebony instead of ivory. Thank you.

So, yeah, big shout out to Cameron. That was really important. And again, I hope it inspires others to do similar things. And, you know, to really reiterate this idea that we're not going to forget. these victims of police brutality, we're not going to let, you know, time make everybody ignorant of what happened. And in every major city, I know in Omaha, Greensboro, North Carolina, and every city in between, we have multiple instances of mostly people of color being slaughtered at the hands of police. And so we all have a situation like this in our own community. And I give, you know, a red salute to Cameron for standing up and giving voice to that side of things. So we really appreciate it and we hope others follow soon. Anyways, let's go ahead and get into our

Episode now on Antonio Gromshi with John from Horror Vanguard and my friend Brendan from Marxism and Moschbiz. Enjoy. Enjoy. Horror Vanguard. I've been lucky enough to come on Brett's show a few times to talk about a whole range of topics. I'm sure we can, we might bring up that previous conversations that we've had. And Brett's also come on Horror Vanguard to talk about class in American politics and horror. Please do check out Horror Vanguard if you like horror film, if you are interested in radical theory and radical politics. And yeah, I'm really happy to be here to talk about maybe one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. Absolutely glad to have you back. And we also have in

studio, Brendan, and between John and Brendan, they've probably both been on the show dozens of times. I mean, I don't know. Combined, a lot of times they've been on the show. But Brendan, would you like to introduce yourself again? Hi, I'm Brendan. Some of you might recognize me from this or that episode in the past. I also have a podcast spinoff of Rev. Left Radio called Marxism and Mosh pits. And then I do local activism, classic day job stuff, and then I'm in a punk band called No Thanks. Hell yeah. So, happy to have John and Brendan in the same room, kind of, for this episode. And this is a long time coming. I mean, we're, I think, three years in, yeah, it's February 2020. So Revlev's been on the air for three years now this month. And we have not gotten to

a Gramsci episode yet. So we will rectify that today. We want to talk like the first part I'm really going to focus on Gramsci's life as a political figure and as a human being. And then the second part, we'll talk more about his ideas and theory and contributions to Marxism. But the opening question I have for John and Brendan is, how did each of you first become interested in Gramsci? Yeah. Yeah. So Gramsci is maybe a slightly marginal figure. Like there's no book that it was completed in his lifetime. He was imprisoned by fascists. The reason that I became interested in him was there's a very famous line spoken by the prosecutor at his trial which we'll come on to that says the prosecutor said that this is someone working for a fascist government said we must stop this this man's brain working for the next 20 years as he was sentenced to 20 years in the Italian fascist cells and the reason I became interested in him was this idea of what what? What did this person have that made them such a kind of threat to the Italian fascist regime?

And I started reading probably the most famous book in English featuring Gramshy's work, which is called Selections from the Prison Notebooks. It was a real kind of revelatory experience of someone who was trying to rethink what he called the philosophy of praxis, Marxist philosophy, and political activism that was grounded in a really vital. ongoing political struggle. And so for me, it was because this was a person that fascists wanted to shut up and it didn't work. That's how I got interested in looking at his work.

It's hard for me to really parse out when I first became interested in Gramsci, whether it was because of Marxism or just kind of academia in general, because Gramsci is one of those rare figures on the Marxist tradition that's still kind of academically sexy. People like to talk about him. But it was definitely around sort of his ideas of hegemony and how that tied into like the broader Marxist conception of ideology is kind of the things that I first looked at. And then I became kind of really fascinated with the organic intellectual later on. Yeah. From my part, I was more towards the Brendan thing.

I got into the idea of hegemony through sort of analysis of ideology. And obviously Gromschi comes up in that. And then I got into more the man behind the scenes and, you know, learned that he was, you know, disabled his entire life, learned that he was in a fascist prison and wrote a lot of his stuff in that fascist prison under Mussolini's rule. And that disinterested me in him as a human being. And so, yeah, just whatever way you come at from Gramsci is just a fascinating character historically and theoretically. And, you know, Marxists owe a lot to him. And we'll get to that in the second part when we talk about his theories. But I do want to focus on this first half about Gromshi's life.

So the first question regarding Gramsci is maybe you can just talk about or, or a picture of who Gromshi was as a human being for our listeners to sort of orient themselves to the man before they engage with his life and his thought. So, John, you want to paint that picture for us? Yeah, absolutely. So Gramsci is born in January 1891. He comes from Sardinia, which is very poor, very rural. He is from quite a large family who, really struggle to feed themselves properly. It's a very tough life, very agricultural life. His brother comes back from the mainland and is now a committed socialist, and Gramsci

ends up getting sent to school in Kagliari and then gets sent, manages to win a scholarship to Rhin. He was incredibly smart. He was an incredibly gifted student, mostly focusing on philosophy and philology, so the study of languages. As you said, he was someone who's disabled. He had serious health problems his entire life. And yet, he was also one of the most well-known communist journalists.

He became involved in some really vital political struggles. He became a theoretician of Marxist history. He was one of the few on the Italian left at the time, really, who grasped the massive danger of fascism on the rise. he was in Moscow as a representative to the Soviet Union from the Italian Communist Party, which is where he fell in love and he met his partner. So he was also a great letter writer, a great polemicist, a great kind of critic of culture, someone who never kind of shied away from the responsibilities of what it means to be involved in radical struggle.

And to be honest, I think if you've never read any Gramsci, I would really try and find his His letters, he was a great letter writer. He wrote extensively to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, to his partner, Julia, to his friend, Pierre Estraffer, who's a famous economist. So he was involved in all of these kind of really dynamic cultural spheres. He was a cultural critic. He wrote theatre reviews. He wrote polemic. He wrote journalism.

He wrote really insightful kind of Marxist analysis of Italy at the time. So he was this really kind of diminutive figure and could have been so easily overlooked, but through the kind of force of his intellect, his ability to involve himself and his willingness to literally put his body on the line, to kind of stay true to his socialist and communist politics that I think he makes, there's a lot to learn, there's a lot to still learn from him. So a great writer, a kind of political strategist, someone who was, faced with maybe some of the biggest revolutionary opportunities in

20th century Italy and also some of the biggest defeats and he faced them both as well as he could so if you've never read any of his work do try and find his letters his letters from prison particularly are really moving

you know one of his one of his sons he never saw because he was in prison and they never met as he passed away in prison and there is there is a kind of real you get a sense of the of this person as being both really committed and very intellectually aware of what it was to be involved in the anti-fascist struggle, but also someone who was fully committed to the idea of a better world, someone who was very passionately engaged, not just intellectually, like political struggle

for Gramsci was never abstract. It was never purely an intellectual exercise, even though, as Brandon said, he wrote a lot about intellectuals. So I think there's a lot to learn from the way that he lived and on what he wrote, but he's also a very inspiring figure personally. I think that fleshes out the main, sort of key points of the biography. What I'd really add there is there's not a lot of misinformation, I'd say,

but there's a lot of sort of skewed information about Gramsci's life that happens for a number of reasons, one, because of his imprisonment and the oppression that was happening in fascist Italy, but then also because after the war, the direction that the Italian Communist Party took, they wanted to paint a specific figure of Gramsci. So they kind of emphasized certain details over others. For example, you mentioned he had a very poor childhood. But his families kind of comes from more of like what we'd consider

like a middling background. And they became poor money wise. But he wasn't like from what we would consider like a traditional like working class or peasant family. And that sort of stuff was frequently kind of misrepresented and then now like I said he's kind of sexy and academia so I think there may be some misrepresentations about how much he was you know for example for or against Stalin I think people kind of try to paint him in a lens so do your own digging there I think it's important and another thing to really like put into context I would say is you know coming from sardinia very poor like you said southern part of Italy there's like this traditional contradiction, I think, in the economy of Italy between the south and the north,

North being more industrial, and both having poverty, but in very different ways that leads to sometimes conflict kind of between people from southern Italy, people from northern Italy and how they perceive one another. And so moving from Sardin to Turin kind of, I think, gave Gramsci an interesting lens, because Turin is so different than Sardinian the way the economy is set up. And I think that would color kind of some of his later views towards how the Communist Party should treat peasants and stuff. Yeah, that's a really good point, actually. They call it the southern question.

So Sardinia, and actually when he was very young, she was quite nationalistic as a Sardinian rather than an Italian. There was a saying on Sardinia of throw the mainlanders in the sea, which is a great slogan. But Brendan's absolutely right. That move to the industrial north to Turin, which had its own economic struggles, its own economic tensions,

its own class antagonisms at play, absolutely helped reshape his political conception of how did Italy as a kind of nation, as a class society think about itself. So that southern question is something that he writes about extensively in the prison notebooks and throughout quite a lot of his work. All right, well, let's go ahead and talk more about his political life.

So what was Gramsci's political life like in Italy throughout his life? and what sort of political activity did Gramsci participate in throughout his life as well? Okay, so he arrives in Turin on a scholarship to study at the university there, and he is in, I mean, Italy, especially northern Italy, there's a very strong trade union presence. There is a fairly well-organized socialist kind of culture, and he gets very involved in this. he's kind of politically radicalized, I think, by that move to Turin and to some of the people that he meets there. And so he starts out as a philosophy and philology student and he ends up, I think, either leaving or just dropping out the university and ends up becoming a journalist for one of the socialist newspapers.

He ends up writing a lot of theatre reviews. He talks a lot about popular culture. He writes a lot about, like, day-to-day happenings. He gets involved in what they call in Italy, the two red years, which would be about 100 years ago, almost exactly, where these massive wave of industrial action going across huge swathes of northern Italy. And actually, like, much of the country itself, you know, there was hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people on strike.

There were waves of occupations. And there was honestly quite ineffective. leadership from trade unions and socialist parties. He was, that often led to violence, to violent repression, and he was there kind of reporting on this and documenting this. And he ends up becoming involved in the socialist, the Italian socialist party through a combination of things like arrests, through members being kind of suppressed. He ends up being one of the key figures in the north of Italy in their socialist party.

And eventually there is a, there is a kind of split. and the Communist Party of Italy is formed. He goes on to form another small journalistic outlet, one that's devoted mostly to, it's called the New Way, the New Order, I think, the one that's devoted to a kind of socialist and communist culture. He ends up becoming elected as a communist representative to the Italian parliament.

And again, this is at the same time as the rise of fascism. So increasingly, he, he, leaves the country for about um just over a year when he's in he's in moscow and increasingly there's a wave of uh arrests um the fascist groups are kind of raiding uh you know like catholic workers groups and and progressives and socialists the fascists are kind of starting to mobilize uh is the black shirts becoming more prevalent by the mid-20s things are starting to look extremely uh dangerous so there was there's a there's a moment where the there's a kind of remnant of the italian Communist Party try and arrange for Gramsci to get out of the country. They want to send him to

Switzerland. He says no, he's going to stay. He's the de facto sort of chairman and leader of the central committee of the party. And during this time, he's still writing, he's still publishing kind of comment on what's happened. And he ends up being arrested after Mussolini has marched on Rome, formed a government, and then later brings in these extremely draconian powers that kind of strips him of his parliamentary immunity. So he's involved in some of the biggest, this very tumultuous period of

kind of interwar class struggle. So from 1919 until like the late 1920s when he's arrested, there's this like huge amounts are happening and he's involved in all of these happenings in Italy in a whole different range of

events. So he is both what he's one of the first people to write about the Russian revolution as news manages to make its way through various layers of censorship and get into Italy. He is a big supporter of the workers councils that occupy lots of these industrial factories. He's very on the ground, I think, is what I would say about his political involvement. And maybe we can talk about in more detail some of the things that I've mentioned. But I think hopefully that gives a good overview of some of the things that he was involved in. Yeah. And we're going to talk about the international

communist movement and the rise of fascism and the following questions. But definitely, I appreciate appreciate that overview. Brandon, did you have anything to add to that? Again, I think you already hit all of the main points. So I guess it's really a question of what in terms of the sort of local politics of Italy at the time we think is worth expanding on. There's a lot that kind of goes into it. I think, as you said, he kind of is writing for this cultural journal. Very cultural, I would say. He kind of made friends with people like Tasca and Togliotti, who would be kind of very important, you know, as you said, there was a lot of economic class like struggle going on in Italy during that time period.

Turin especially was one of the most industrialized cities. I think that's where fiat was based, which is still throughout the history of Italy, a major source of like where class struggle is going to happen. And so that was really one of the main centers of communism, aside from where like Bordeca is organizing, you know, kind of the Nepalese region. And I think it's kind of interesting to conceptualize, like, the sort of history of Italian socialism. Maybe this isn't the place for that. But, you know, during the days of the international, the anarchists kind of really got to Italy before the Marxists did once there was the split.

And liberalism in Italy is kind of different than much of the mainland. Like within the context of Europe, Italy was kind of traditionally poor. And so you see people like Giribaldi and stuff, who are, you know, what we would consider liberals, but are actually kind of sympathetic to the international. And by the time this sort of split between anarchism and Marxism begins in the international, it gets really nasty, really fast in places like Germany and France. And there's a lot of mud slinging. It takes a little bit longer to happen in Italy. And I think Ingalls is, for whatever reason, kind of the chairman of the Italian section of the international, which is kind of weird to begin with. So they start basically mudslinging Balkan in there, but the Italian socialists didn't really know how nasty it had gotten in other countries already.

So they were kind of like, why are the Marxists being so nasty to the anarchists without any of the background? And that actually kind of weakened the position of the Marxists for a couple decades. Because they thought they were being unfairly harsh. Yeah. And there's some truth to that. I mean, again, I think Balkan's did some of the same things in some of these other countries. So from the Italian side, they're like, why is Ingalls being so nasty to the anarchists? But then there kind of comes this, like, syndicalist tradition.

You already talked about how strong trade unions are there. That's kind of Mussolini's background. And then the, like, sort of social democrats and the liberals, like I was saying, were much more to the left of the mainstream. So if we're looking at, like, social democratic parties in, you know, around World War I, for example, there's a lot less social chauvinism going in the PSI than, say, you know, like the German social Democrats. There wasn't the same sort of like socialist betrayal of of internationalism. Italian socialists were mostly against the war. Even Mussolini started off against the war. So this is

kind of period where there's kind of like a gap in like socialist leaders and you have older people like Surradi. And then not a ton of of young people who were taking like sort of leadership position. Again, like Mussolini is kind of considered one of the most important people in Italian socialism for a couple years, which is weird. because he's really not that left of an Italian socialist, but they kind of view, like history views him as that at the time, just because there was a gap of people. And then Gromshi's part of that next generation,

like right after that gap, who kind of after Mussolini kind of falls out of favor for all of his terrible opinions and, you know, betrays socialism. People like Bordoga, Gramsci, Togliotti are in a position to say, hey, you know, we're the new sort of wave. And I would say had a lot more intellectual depth than the waves that came before them. And so they kind of come into this period where Marxism is actually probably the most popular

it had been in Italy at that time, but also you have this danger of fascism. Really, I would say, a very complex political situation. Really quickly, because I know Brendan is studying Bordeca and knows a lot about Bordeca. Those lives overlap, and did they have a relationship at all? Yeah, so the attitude towards a lot of people kind of act like Bordeca is this older person who's kind of standing in Gramsci's way but he's really only a couple years older and initially they're uh again they're in different parts of of italy the sort of place where bordiga's operating is kind of the stronghold of like italian left communism which is actually not really marginal at all

it's a very influential fraction not just within the communist movement but the broad socialist movement. Really without Bordiga and his, like, I believe the Italian term is the Sinestra. I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. But that's the sort of like Italian left. And this is before like left communism has really been defined too. So that's, there's a whole another conversation to be had there. They were a big part of the push to separate the communists from the socialists and create the P.C.I, which was like the Russian socialists did not think that was a good idea at all. But even, even what we would consider kind of like center communists kind of agreed with that for a number of reasons. But so Bordeca and Gramsci had a

relationship initially, I'd say Bordigo was probably a huge influence on Italian socialism, period, and that's kind of been wiped away. But so in the period of time where Gramsci is writing in Turin, there's these sort of factory councils that are coming, and the sort of Turin group, their opinion is that these are Soviets. And Bordeca kind of says these aren't actually Soviets because even though these are workers' councils, they're not really exercising dual power in that sort of real way. I think there's some validity to that critique. Also, Gronschi kind of has a shift away from Tosca becomes a lot less culturalist, whether that's like a direct influence of Bordeca or just because of Bordeca's sort of like prevalence within the movement. It's, it's hard to really say.

Things kind of got nasty for a little bit. There was kind of like a smear campaign. against Bordiga kind of along the same sort of lines of what you'd see in Russia, but without the same degree of censorship and certainly the Italian Communist Party didn't have state power. So Bordeca got a little bitter, but then they were both actually in prison together. Bordeaux was arrested twice. I've seen some communists claim that Bordego was never arrested by the fascists and that he was a sympathizer. That's kind of, that's that sort of character defamation I was talking about earlier. But they were actually in prison together and kind of patched things up a little bit so yeah i think the two of them have a really interesting and and often quite

contentious but very there's a kind of mute there's i i think gram she definitely respects borgica you know this was this was someone who's so influential in in on the italian left um you know graham she defends bordeca on several points they disagree on several points and they do definitely have a kind of contentious of maybe maybe even fractious relationship uh on occasions. I've read that to kind of simplify a little bit too much, but it's a workable analogy. If Bordiga is on the kind of left, the left communist and Tasker is more of a sort of right communist, Gramsci is in the centre and is like desperately trying to find a kind of dialectical way to bridge that gap. Whether that was something that was possible or not is kind

of complex and as Brendan said probably depends upon what factors you want to emphasize. But yeah, But Bordeca is not a marginal figure by any means, and it's probably a huge intellectual influence on the way that Gramsci writes and thinks about the political situation he finds himself in. Fascinating. I had no clue that they were in prison together, and that's sort of how they mended their relationship. So let's go ahead and move on. And I know Brendan mentioned earlier the whole sort of controversy around Gramsci's relationship or thoughts about Stalin and all of that. so I want to kind of, you know, hone in on this. So the question is, what was Gramsci's relationship to the international communist movement at his time? And specifically with Stalin and the Soviet Union? Well, like, as Brennan mentioned, so the 20s and actually earlier than the 20s, sees these massive wave of strikes and occupations all throughout northern Italy, all throughout these industrial centers.

The Fiat plant in Turin, the Ramail plant. and Gramsci says that these workers' councils are the Italian equivalent of the Soviets. There are obviously legitimate disagreements and kind of challenges to that. So he is one of the first to kind of write about the Russian Revolution, as I've said. And so he is, I think he's kind of broadly, very much sympathetic and in line, but not lockstep agreement. with the Soviet Union. Obviously, we can get on to that in the context of Stalin, but he writes in a kind of theoretical dialogue and agreement

with people like Rosa Luxembourg, obviously Lenin's theoretical work. There's some interesting parallels with the work of Lukash in Hungary. So I think the relationship is not like simple deference, but I think there is definitely a kind of sustained and very positive engagement with the international communist movement? Yeah, I think there are a couple things to really keep in mind

when you're looking at this period. One, the Italian socialists overall are more sympathetic to the sort of Russian side of what socialism should be in the period following 1917, as opposed to France and Germany. So the PCI actually is one of the first parties to join the Com intern and to do so eagerly, whereas, you know, the sort of independent socialist party in Germany. It had a lot of reservations, but they just couldn't, they didn't want to be part of

the second international anymore. They couldn't start their own whole complex thing. So Italy already is in a position where they're more supportive of the sort of Russian project than most of socialist Europe, but at the same time, they would be on the right wing of the Cominterns politics. And then there's this huge chunk of the Italian socialists. movement that are not only communists but are what we would consider today, left comms or at least center communists. So there's this strong pressure from the Com intern to sort of Bolshevize.

They push very strongly to kind of redirect the way that all of these parties should be run domestically. And even people like Togliotti and Gramsci, who are more sympathetic to maybe the Comintern's positions than Bordeca, who's notoriously stubborn, still actually overall, we're not initially a fan of the United Front Policy, for example, but they were also much more interested in kind of, like, discipline and saying, hey, we're going to, like, we're going to follow the come-intern's lead, even though we might not actually want to do it, whereas Bordeca's flat out telling everyone they're wrong all of the time.

One of the reasons people who like Bordeca like him is because he's one of the last people in the internationalist socialist movement to tell Stalin he was wrong to his face and not get assassinated or, you know, thrown into prison. So, you know, the Comintern really doesn't like that and they kind of push Bordeca out of the leadership of the PCI. The thing that really does it is that he gets arrested by fascists. But so Gramsci is one of their choices for who they think would be a much better leader of the Central Committee. But I mean, this is a time period where There are power struggles in the USSR and the Comintern. So the way people tend to look at it in history is like after Lenin died, there was an obvious choice between Stalin and Trotsky.

And that's not how anybody viewed it at the time. I mean, I think a lot of people said anybody but Trotsky was kind of their attitude. And they formed power groups. There's a lot that's missing from Gromschy's stay in Moscow. There's like a lot of gaps that we really just can't fill out. he's not writing as many letters at the time. There's not tons of information. We know, you know, we know that he got married.

We know he sent Trotsky, a bunch of information on, like, the Italian futurist movement, a bunch of stuff like that. But we really don't know, like, how, what he's thinking. But one thing I found in a couple biographies is that he seems to be talking to Zenevev a lot more than Stalin. And Zenevev really is actually a major pusher of early come-intern party. And Zinov, Kamenev, and Stalin kind of do form like a power block at his time. So I think it's a little bit reductionist and preemptive to really, like, just say, like, oh, Gramsci was really under the influence of Stalin. There's this really weird phenomenon where there are these libertarian socialists who really like Bordiga, again, probably because of his critique of Stalin, despite him being very orthodox in his Marxism in a lot of ways. It's a weird phenomenon.

But sometimes from that camp, I kind of hear this argument that, like, Gramsci was really like Stalin. and Aaron Boy and like was the chief architect of this sort of smear campaign against Bordeca. I don't think that's accurate from what I read. No, no, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't agree with that at all. That doesn't kind of mesh with everything else that I've read about Gramsci and the way that he operated. I think like you said, he was, he was very, he was very strong on discipline. He wrote extensively about a united front. And so there's the, there's the infamous letter which was that never arrived in 1926. Gramsci writes to Togliati, who's in Moscow as a representative. And, you know, even though he's very critical of Trotsky, there is some objections he

makes to things that Stalin has done and Togliati never delivers the letter. And that very much sours the relationship between the two of them. That relationship never really fully recovered, I think. So I think to say that Gramsci is, is something. kind of Stalinist Aaron Boy is massively reductionist and tends to paint a very simplistic picture back onto history where I think if you read Gramsci and I'm sure Brennan would say the same thing about reading Bordeca and the stuff that we're writing at the time, you get the impression that things were much more complicated, that situations were much more kind of dynamic and rapidly changing than a very simplistic idea of like, you know, complete lockstep agreement

or, you know, complete antipathy and objection to what was happening in Russia and the broader international movement. You can't emphasize enough just the sheer degree to which the socialist parties were in crisis after World War I. I almost think that we're still really dealing with the aftermath of that today in a lot of ways. And so you've got a situation where Russia is really concerned because they're, you know, facing, you know, had just faced an invasion of 14 countries plus eternal civil war and this sort of like revolution in Germany didn't really go as planned. And so they're really trying to

figure out how they can maintain what they've won. From the Italian perspective, they don't think it's fair to treat them the way that the German and French socialists were being treated after all they were opposed to World War I. And beyond that, I think there was an attitude that The Russians don't really know what's going on in the ground, but at the same time, they go from this period, this red year period 1919 to 1921 where they think the revolution is not only inevitable, but it's almost happening now to fascism and just so quick that it's really hard to, you know, imagine the amount of pressure. you know, the various communists throughout the world and especially Italy are under. So, you know, I think what I see with Gramsci in terms of some of his critiques of Bordiga and Trotsky, aside from sometimes he's, he doesn't know what he's talking about. His main critique is that even though he thinks that they might have some good points, the sort of united opposition is probably doing more to destabilize this socialist project than they're doing more harm than good. And so that's that's an important perspective. to kind of keep in mind because there might be some validity to that. I don't know. When it comes to the letter, I was listening to like a BBC, like Great Lives thing on Gramsci,

and they sort of framed the letter situation as Gromshy's friend sort of protecting him from Stalin, not passing it forward because it knew that it would make Gromshy a sort of enemy of Stalin, but I don't know if that is, I mean, it's the BBC after all, so I'm sort of skeptical of how they frame things. Do either of you have any insight as to why that letter was not pushed through? was it protecting Gramsci thing or was it like I actually you know his friend disagreed with Gramsci

and that's why he didn't send it I mean it's quite arguable that there's a little bit of both in there but no I don't think so and I think you know it'd be very easy to go it's a very easy kind of propagandistic move isn't it to go well he's he was being protected

from a monster who would never have responded to any criticism but there was also the likelihood that there was some genuine disagreement between the two of them i see yeah because it very much was framed by the by these uh bbc assholes and i think the guy who was hosting was like a old-time thatcher government guy so i was completely skeptical of everything he said it was framed as oh we're protecting he was protecting gromshy because if stalin got that letter you know gromshy would have got fucking trotskyed or whatever and yeah i was very skeptical of that so i'm glad you could you could clear that up and i'm sure that was

some bullshit that the bbc was putting yeah i i i don't necessarily buy that i don't necessarily buy that I don't necessarily buy that. I think that's a very easy way of perpetuating kind of anti-Soviet ideology. But, you know, that isn't to say that Gramshy didn't have disagreements with what was coming from Russia, as Brennan said, you know, quite a lot of the time. Did they know exactly what the situation on the ground was? So, yeah, I really want to kind of emphasize what Brennan was saying that, like, these are seismic historical events that are happening. and honestly to have a kind of completely infallibly accurate record of how and why certain parties behaved the way they did is probably not possible, but we can make reasonable and kind of informed analysis of a particular situation.

You know, that span of, you know, from 1921 when you have, you know, a million people are out on general strike and the membership of the Socialist Party goes up to a quarter of a million to, you know, five or six years, later, you have fascists putting communists on trial and throwing them in prison for 20 years. That is a kind of rapid and so intense change that I think it's really difficult to kind of put a simplistic one-size-fits-all explanation on it. For context, Gromchey's arrested while he's a member of the Italian parliament. It'd be like if, you know, AOC got arrested right now by the federal government. Yeah, that's how dramatic this is. And he was, he was leaving.

Well, he was supposed to have parliamentary immunity, but he was arrested for inciting violence, I think, or being involved in potential violent or terrorist activities. So, yeah, it would be exactly like AOT being taken off the floor of the house in handcuffs. Well, let's go ahead and talk about fascism a little bit more. We've obviously touched on it a lot, but I was hoping that you could talk about more about the rise of fascism in Italy, sort of Gramsci's, um, response to it politically and intellectually, maybe talk a little bit more about Mussolini as a political figure, and then how Gramsci ended up in prison. So that's a big question, and both of you can take it in any direction you want. John, would you like to take a first stab at this? Okay, so how does this

happen, firstly, is maybe a really important question to look at. And there are two factors that I want to pick up on, and I'm sure there are going to be other factors that maybe Brandon can talk about as well. So firstly, the kind of trauma of the war, you have a huge amount, you have like, you have riots over bread prices, you have this very kind of feverish political atmosphere and you have a huge amount of soldiers returning from the war who are suddenly demobbed and have no kind of function in society. At the same time, you have, honestly, in many ways, a deeply ineffective socialist leadership, they're very, very slow to pick up on what's happening in the factory occupations. There's lots of kind of bureaucratic decision-making that happens, and a lot of the

work of working people who occupy the factories eventually fizzles out, and it fizzles out in tanks being sent in to tear down barricades, you know, mass arrests of socialist activists and working people, and a lot of people getting killed. At the same time, time, certain sections of Italian society do very well out of the war. War is incredibly profitable, as anyone who works for Raytheon will be able to tell you. And there's this very interesting... So it isn't that suddenly there's the potential for a socialist revolution so a fascist movement emerges. The fascists are much more organized. Mussolini has slowly drifted further and further away from his previous

involvement with the socialists, starts talking about, you know, the pure will to act and the destiny of a singular people. There is the huge debate over in the involvement in the war, which kind of, I think, is probably the decisive thing, which breaks him away from the left, as it were. And then you have, yeah, so the fascist organising is starting to happen. The black shirts are starting to appear on the streets. and you have certain sections of the Italian middle and upper classes

which have done quite well out of the war economy which have solidified their political influence you think that the fascists would be useful because now that you've sort of broken the back of this working class movement through kind of police violence, state violence and the inefficiencies of a socialist movement that could organise and direct it, now you replace the kind of velvet glove with an iron fist, right?

Now is when you start to kind of encourage demob soldiers, that it might be a good idea to get themselves one of those nice black shirts. And it's what, 1922, Mussolini orders his march on Rome, which is this huge movement, I think probably around 20 to 30,000 people who march to Rome. And the leader of the city wants permission to put the city in a state of siege, basically. they think that but the king Victor Emmanuel the third refuses and Mussolini is invited to form a government

so technically very technically according to the Italian constitution there has not been a violent overthrow of the state the state has just kind of surrendered or has rather not surrendered but admitted him into the halls of power so maybe those are the two kind of starting points which is a very slow left response

to what was happening on the ground, and by the time people realized it was often too late, and a section of Italian society that saw once these left-wing occupations had either started to die out or had been forcibly smashed, what would be useful would be a way of consolidating some power. That's where I would start, and I'm sure, you know, Brendan, you can maybe bring in some more factors that influence this. Yeah, again, I think that World War I was such a decisive of event. For years, the socialist movement had been talking about, what do we do if there is a world war? I mean, Ingalls is talking about a world war happening. 1880, he writes this letter

about the possibility of a large-scale industrial world war. So, you know, socialists had kind of an idea that it was coming. And the talk was, oh, you know, we're going to resist the war. We're not going to support it. No war, but class war and, you know, proletarian internet. nationalism and all of that. And then the war comes and then, you know, throughout the world, with major exceptions being Italy and Russia, just a huge support, you know, either for revolutionary defensism at in the middle or, you know, outright helping pass, you know, war bonds in whichever country's parliament. So the Italian socialists are kind of caught off guard. And like, I think Mussolini's like sort of rapid shift in attitude can be understood

in part by looking at his intellectual development. He comes from, like I said, this sort of syndicalist background. So he's already got some anarchist and Marxist influences. He becomes a Marxist. And then we know that at a certain point, he's starting to read Sterner and things like that. And he's, that sort of like shifts his belief in sort of class consciousness as is. And then the attitude a lot of people had during World War I was like, oh, the socialists were wrong. Nationalism is more important than class relations. And I think that there's a lot to break that down there,

but you can understand why some people just kind of believed that. And I think Mussolini did. Italy is poor. A lot of Italians are very poor. And you're in a situation where, you know, in terms of European power, Italy is just not nearly as strong as the rest of Europe. And it's very easy, I think, for people in other parts of the world to be like, well, they were still, you know, Europeans, but, you know, they didn't really, like, participate. They couldn't really participate effectively in the sort of colonial land grabs of the late 19th century. And their attempts failed. They just, they were really kind of economically put down by other European powers. So it's like, if you can't win power as a class, because these sort of imperialist nations are running.

the world, what do you do? You turn your nation into an imperialist nation, right? That's sort of the logic, I think. And you can kind of see that shift. Like, well, if I can't win the class war for the working class, then I can end class contradiction within our state. And that's something that fascism, I think, tries to do is to tamp down these class contradictions. The other thing, this kind of ties into Gramsci. Gramsci, like you said, was one of the first people to really take fascism seriously. At the same time, it takes him a while to have sort of a cohesive analysis because it's very confused. So, you know, where Zenevev will make a statement that it's, you know, fascism is the right wing of social democracy or the inverse, rather, that social

democracy is the left wing of fascism, or the fascism is just the dominance of the finance classes. That's not really the case initially, at least. You've got, you know, I think, I think it's Gramsci who writes this piece called the two fascisms. Essentially, if you look at the power bases of fascism, you have this sort of rural working class group, and then you've got people in the cities who tend to be sort of like petite bourgeois. So like the class base of fascism is in and of itself in contradiction already. That's very hard to analyze, and it's there parallels in the U.S. right now with neo-fascism, and I think a lot of socialists have a really hard time analyzing it and

Marxism is you know in some ways such a like overly intellectual political tradition sometimes Marxists will spend way too much time trying to figure something out before they act and I think there was sort of this paralysis to respond to fascism whereas fascism was about moving quick you know

like Mussolini knew he wasn't people overestimate how smart he was but they also underestimate how unintelligent he was like this is a person who can read Sterner and get it to an extent. So he's aware that even in his own conception, there are contradictions. And he was very aware of the contradictions between his theory of fascism and German national socialism. They're totally incompatible, actually. But he's like, but we got

to move because of these real geopolitical concerns. We have to make Italy a power as quick as possible. And who are our threats? Well, the socialists are our threats, so we're going to break them. We're going to break the trade unions because they're a potential power threat. You know, the liberals are ineffectual. So we're going to take advantage. of the sort of uselessness of parliament and just seize it before anyone can respond. So fascism, by its nature, meant to strike first and then resolve its contradictions later. And that gave them a little bit of advantage. You know, it's, fascism was already breaking strikes before Giovanni Gentile started actually, like, harmonizing its ideology.

So that's incredibly interesting. And there's a lot to say there, especially with the analysis of fascist, you know, you'll even hear like in America today. liberal, centrist, corporate media, pundits, talk about Trump's base as an entirely white working class base, and we know that's not true. On the other hand, you do hear some people try to completely tie fascism to the ruling class and eradicate or ignore any working class support that it might have, and we know that both those things are errors in opposite directions. I mean, just in America, just in the past few years, when a lot of these neo-Nazis and fascists started getting identified, it was much more common for them to work in like a hot dog vendor or

some fast food chain than it was for them to work in high finance necessarily, at least the ones on the ground being violent, getting outed. But we also know that fascism has a lot of institutional support in a lot of ways, segments of the Republican Party are crypto or pseudo-fascist already and heading more belligerently in that direction. So I was wondering before we move on if either of you could just talk a little bit more about the black shirts and sort of, you know, were they? And is there any analog in the contemporary US or UK situation that we can help people make sense of the sort of segment of society that the black shirts came out of? Do either of you have a response to that? That's, I think, pretty complicated. It's the paramilitary wing, basically,

of the Italian fascist movement. Obviously, there is a big section of it which comes from former soldiers they estimate that probably a membership of around across the entire country probably probably around 190 to 200,000 by the time of Mussolini's march on Rome. So you had, it was organized on very very militaristic grounds. They were divided up into battalions, companies, platoons, squads. And they were they were street brawlers. So you've probably got a section of the urban working classes who've maybe been disillusioned with the left, and there is not a kind of viable left politics

that's been put in place there. There's soldiers who, or former soldiers from the First World War, but there is also, I think, and I think this is something that Gramsci writes about, that there is a certain section of the Italian middle classes, which is appealed to by patriot, what he calls appeal to by patriotic,

slogans. So you start talking about, you know, nation identity and people and all of those other fascist dog whistles. You're going to draw, not just from the rural working classes and the urban working class, you're going to draw from that middle layer, that kind of, not quite the professional managerial class of today, but from the kind of the technocratic and emergent bourgeoisie of these urban centres will be drawn to it as well because it promises power and it because it promises stability and it promises the guarantee of securing your own capital interests. Mussolini doesn't necessarily care about that one once he's in power but it's designed you

know I think that point about speed is really important it's designed to do whatever it can to draw people into the movement rapidly and to immediately get them used to this idea of violence as a means to political power. So squads of these fascist black shirts would raid leftist newspapers. They would, you know, run socialists out of local communities. They would break up, you know, the social democrat or even the Christian democratic political parties who are often very involved in kind of like working with poor and working class people. So I think it's designed to appeal to a very broad section and to give a very

simple solution to those class antagonisms that Brennan was talking about, right? You have a military leader, you have a military structure, you have a very clear hierarchy and you have a very clear goal, which is power and power for the sake of the nation. It is very complex. I'd say the parallel there is maybe really to look at the sort of reactionary rural petite bourgeois element that I think you can find in both. America is fascism is interesting in my opinion because in a lot of ways it's more like German fascism than Italian for a number of reasons. And also here more than anywhere else it actually is directed by the finance class.

The finance class here is obviously incredibly powerful. really since forever, since like the entire history of the United States, known that they can take kind of rural reaction and use that as a tool to achieve their sort of class interests, whether it's, you know, pushing settlers beyond the limits of what the United States government thinks it's acceptable, newspaper, sort of tycoons, you know, kind of deliberately stoking the fires of, you know, rural reaction in order to use them as shock troops. At the same time, there's this contradiction.

between like sort of the urban and the rural like elements of fascism. You can see that in the U.S. as well. But, but as you were saying, the sort of orientation of Italian fascism was to focus on like Italy as a nation. And while you certainly do see some of that in like what I would consider U.S. neo-fascism, what that nation is is defined strongly on racial terms here, which which makes it a lot more similar to the German experience. If you really really read the fascist sort of stuff coming out of Italy, they really do say like all Italians and that included Jewish people. So, you know, when Hitler was like, okay, send us your Jewish people so that we can kill them, you know, on paper the Italian fascists said sure,

but there's some evidence that actually Italy snuck out some of their own, you know, Jewish people are deliberately slowed down the process because they weren't oriented on those same racial terms. Not that there's not racism in Italy, but that wasn't kind of the, it wasn't the center of gravity. And I don't think you can understand United States fascism without understanding, one, the way it was astroturf by finance capitalists and two, just the inherent nature of white supremacy. Like, fascism in America requires white supremacy. For so many reasons, I think a good thing to understand about fascism is how they kind of get this from Sorrel, if you're familiar with him this sort of idea of like myths kind of motivating groups to act um and so there's like

foundational myths the foundational myth of america is manifest destiny it's inherently based off of white supremacy it's inherently based off of capitalism um Protestantism settler colonialism yeah all of these things are inherently tied in and sort of the united states myth um so that that's kind of a difference that i think needs to be articulated very strongly but there's such an obvious parallel to black shirt violence though when you look at like let's say proud boys fighting antifa in the streets uh or charlottesville that sort of street brawl element of it that was kind of their function and we certainly do have that here one of the kind of driving forces is um in the italian context anyway is it's incredibly virulent anti internationalism

and this is only something that's necessary and needed because of the focus on an on proletarian nationalism. So, you know, Italian fascists would say, you know, we're not like those Bolsheviks. We don't care about people who aren't ours. We don't care about, we don't care about, you know, the poor who might be suffering over there. What about the poor that are suffering here? Why aren't we taking care of them? Why are we worried about these others? And in many ways, that's something that's crept into a lot of right-wing British political discourse, this idea that you have to care about your own people and that's often

done in very narrow, nationalistic terms. That doesn't mean there isn't racism. I think British society is disgustingly racist but it's done in the sense of like, well, we should take care of our own. You know, that was often something that you'd hear in popular

discourse, especially when we're talking about this idea of austerity, of making sure that people are vulnerable and not dependent on a social safety net. So maybe if German fascism gives a model for the neo-fascism you see in the States, I think Italian fascism probably does have quite a lot to warn British politics of. The thing that's so complex about fascism is that it's so strongly tied to the sort of national identity of each country involved.

So, I mean, Italy, again, it has its own histories of racism. And some of the first times Jewish people were put into ghettos was in Italy. So there is some of that in Italian fascism, but it's not the lynchpin the way it is in the United States. And it's interesting to kind of make the leap and say, you know, how much racism do you need to be fascist? It's like the awful question that we have to ask. But, you know, if you look at, like you said, I think there are a lot of countries that maybe are in between, you know, sort of like the German model of fascism and the Italian. Those are maybe the two extremes, you know, and each country might fit a little bit more. more on the model like the you know I'm sure like being like liberal countries that you know have

this sort of focus on capitalism and rule of lobbying kind of traditions in in England and the United States there's similarities between you know the sort of fascisms you'd see there that we might not find in in the German or the Italian model you know we could we could talk about this forever because we don't really have a Rome to look back to in the United States the way that Italy did, whereas Germany was looking at this sort of like, you know, sort of like Germanic warrior tradition was kind of their illusion. Like, what's that illusion in the United States? What's that in England? And sometimes it's this weird sort of constitutionalism for some fascist. Like, you can look at sort of all of it. It's a lot to parse out. Absolutely. Yeah. Incredibly complex.

And we could talk about this for days. But let's go ahead and wrap up this first part about Gramsci's life by just talking about Gramsci's time in prison and then how he eventually died? Yeah, so he is imprisoned on charges of incitement to violence of essentially treachery against the state and he is seriously ill. He is extremely unwell for a very long period of time and suffered kind of enormously what he went through, you know, terrible food, insufficient access to healthcare, just the violence and kind of monotony of prison life. And so he is also at the same time is desperately trying to organise a kind of study program for himself as a way of keeping himself mentally engage, of getting through the kind of struggle of prison day-to-day existence. And so

like one of the most immediate things that you see in all of his letters is like desperately requesting books. He wants permission to write in his cell, which he eventually. gets and he starts working on what would become the prison notebooks which we can get into more when we start talking about the work more in depth but these are very intricate they he has a very clear and specific system for organizing his thoughts and his material but his health continues to decline he is eventually transferred to a clinic in Rome still arrested still under the the authority of the prison service and he passes away. I think it's from a cerebral hemorrhage probably brought on by a stroke which given the the pressures that he was under in the time that he

was living and the fact that his health he was he was chronically ill for all of his life and probably lived a lot of his life in very serious pain is is not necessarily a huge surprise. So he he does not have a good time of it but his letters are constantly talking about the need to stay focused, stay organized, to give himself an intellectual program of study to help keep his mind occupied. He writes about how he finds kind of pleasure in small things. He says that he's like a, he's like a ferret. He delights, he's very curious. So he describes himself as this like little animal that's desperately trying to find anything of interest to keep his mind off his situation.

he writes about how frustrating he finds prison libraries because there's nothing in them but even if there's just like popular novels there maybe you can start thinking about why do certain aspects of culture become popular at a given historical moment so everything is designed to try and keep him organized and intellectually engaged

because he realizes that that's the limit of what he can do whilst he's in prison he can no longer report he's no longer in parliament he's no longer involved in the kind of day-to-day organizational life all of his letters go through censors so he develops his own code his writings are examined by the censors as well so he has to kind of develop a very specific vocabulary for talking about the intellectual ideas that he's trying to refine in the notebooks but yeah so his letters give this impression of very serious poor health for a very

long period of time, a desperate desire to try and find something that is going to occupy him and keep him together, mentally speaking, and an importance of trying to kind of continue the work that he was involved in. Yeah, interesting parallels with Rosa Luxembourg, who also was thrown in prison by fascists and so many times that she would actually have bags ready to go. So when she went back to prison, she'd have books and stuff to read through. Talked about, like, keeping herself busy by splitting some of her food rations with like the mice or the birds that came to the window of her cell and so just trying to see these brilliant minds these hyperactive minds these revolutionary figures confined to a cage and then trying to see how you know they they deal

with that that condition is it's tragic and fascinating and then yeah I think an important thing here is just trying to get past the sensors and then writing sort of cryptically and that's something you hear when you hear people talk about as prison notebooks is like you you sometimes times you have to sort of read between the lines because he's walking a very fine line when he's writing because he knows if he's too explicit with what he wants to say, those things will never get out. And so that's another thing you have to keep in mind when reading Gramsci and thinking about his work specifically while he was in prison. Brendan, do you have anything else to say before we move on to part two? That covers all the main points, but a nice little anecdote is, as I'd

mentioned briefly, there was a little bit of time where Bordoga and Gramsci were in prison together and they kind of patch things over. They actually ended up kind of planning classes together where they would teach the other prisoners and Bordeca, who is an engineer, would teach sort of more of the hard science elements of it, whereas Gramsci would focus on sort of the philosophy and the humanities. So that's a cute little story. Yeah, that's super cool. All right, well, let's go ahead and move on to part two.

And part two, we'll talk about, you know, Gramsci's theory and his ideas, his contributions to Marxism. And perhaps the best way to start out this is just, you know, from a sort of zoomed-out big-picture perspective, what do each of you think are among the most important things that Gramsci offers Marxism or perhaps put another way, how has Marxism been improved by Gramsci's participation in our tradition? Like, big picture and necessarily reducing things down a little bit, one of the big advantages of looking at things post-Gramshi is, this move away from what he called economism, this idea that was very prevalent in the second international, that revolution would be an inevitability when certain stages of economic

development had been progressed through. And I think Gramsci's, you know, we've been talking quite a lot about the fact that this was a hugely traumatic time. This was like so intense and so pressurized and there was so much that had been lost. And in many ways, like what this, what Gramsci does is when he's kind of forced into this cage is to desperately try and think through what went wrong. Why didn't things occur as we may be predicted that they might have? And what does this tell us about how capitalist society and culture operate in order to defend its own interests and to perpetuate itself, especially when, you know, in a country that, you know, he had written about.

Russia, which, you know, a revolution in Russia would have been unthinkable, this country that hadn't gone through all of the necessary stages of capitalist development, and the Bolsheviks had shown that actually a revolution had happened. Suddenly, you had an idea of what a socialist future could look like, however contested and however immediately challenged it was. And so what Gramsci is trying to do is basically kind of think through all of Italian society and culture and sort of key aspects of it and the ways in which capitalism operates on a level that goes beyond simply following various stages of economic development because we've seen that that doesn't necessarily mean anything anymore. That doesn't necessarily

or doesn't necessarily tell us as much as we thought that it did. So he's trying to get away from this idea of capitalism as he refers to it in his writing. And he's trying to give us a much more nuanced understanding of capitalist culture and the ways in which a communist movement can intervene and what the kind of relationship between a communist movement and a capitalist culture really should be. We'll kind of get into the specific ideas later, but I think what's great about Gramsci is he gives us new tools to look at old topics, or perhaps he expanded on some stuff that's very important. I think a lot of of a lot of Marxists specifically in the like sort of Leninist tradition tend to forget that the state

is actually a super structural thing and not a structural but not a base and you know if if Bordeca kind of his critiques of the socialist movement and stuff kind of show how they are forgetting the importance of looking at the social class relations what Gramsci does is say hey here's how we maybe address these important like superstructural conflicts you know between the state, popular culture, intellectuals, all of that in a way that I think is very important. Like, especially, I think, the time period immediately after there's a lot of narrowing down and maybe, like, reducing what Marxism could be and what Gramsci's work does is expands what Marxism can be.

There's this really great, great quote from Gramsci where he's writing about this idea of kind of, like, deterministic Marxism, you know, with the advantage of it. it, obviously, is that you can get rid of fatalism. You know, the laws of history are going to out and will arrive at the point that we want to. And in one of the prison notebooks, Gramsci says, in reality, one can scientifically foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to fixed quantities, since within them, quantity is continually becoming quality. In reality, one can foresee, to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies

a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result foreseen. Prediction reveals itself not as a scientific act of knowledge, but is the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will. And I think one of the things that Gramsci expands is this tension between practical concrete action and the idea of a scientific historical materialism, you know, where we believe that history operates in certain ways. But Gramsci also says actually our belief about the way that history operates reflects our involvement within history,

our fact that our actions as well as our method is, you know, vital to the struggle. Absolutely. All right. Well, then let's go ahead and having that sort of bird's eye view of Gramsci and the Marxist tradition. Let's hone in on some of the main concepts and the detailed concepts that come out of Gramsci's work. So for the first one, can you explain and talk about Gramsci's conception of hegemony and counter hegemony? And maybe talk about those concepts with regards to the bourgeois state. So like I say, Gramchie is in prison and he is trying to work out. you know, what has gone wrong?

The, their kind of proletarian internationalism has had its back broken. You know, there's Rosa Luxembourg has been imprisoned and then murdered. The social democratic parties have, across Europe, loads of them have suddenly given their assent or their support to the war. So the question is, how has capitalism managed to kind of defend itself, as it were? and so this is not a new term. I think Lenin also writes about hedge money, but Gramsci says that actually it isn't just a series of economic relations

that are determined here in capitalism, but capitalism perpetuates itself through ideology. You know, it changes the way that we think, and it gives you that kind of commonsensical view of the world is often a way of making sure that certain intellectual and political options remain almost literally unthinkable they can't be thought of because there is no range of thought for them to operate in. So, Hedgemoney is this cultural and ideological kind of means of control by which capitalism perpetuates itself. Obviously, that isn't to undermine or take away from

its economic base or from what Engel's called the armed bodies of men that defend it and perpetuate it, but also that people will willingly, but literally buy into, ideologically buy into capitalism. So it's this notion of hedge money that Gramsky is trying to work out. I think that's a good starting point to start thinking it through. Yeah, I think that really kind of covers the main basis of hegemony and sort of counter-hegemany. I think conceptually, you know, he talks about war of position and things like that. I think there's some limitations to this, but in some respects, he's almost talking about the ideological struggle as being sort of like trench warfare a little bit. And that's, you know, maybe kind of like how we can

conceptualize what a war of position is. Yeah, one of the ways that I think about the war of position is it's class warfare as siege. Yeah. So it's very protracted struggle, you know, as opposed to maybe strikes and things like that. There are moments of crisis that we have to act on to do those base things. When it comes to the superstructure, the structure, it's not focused on crisis the same way that the sort of base stuff is. Would it be fair to think about Gramsci's sort of conception of hegemony as him trying to figure out how capitalist class rule can persist sort of beyond just the, you know, the repressive mechanisms by which it pushes down the working class. But like, how does it actually get into working class people's minds? How does it

get working class people to buy into a system that is counter to their obvious interest, explicit direct interest. And you can sort of see Gramsci, you know, expanding the Marxist conception of ideology and by so doing also being a forerunner to later Marxist developments like the Frankfurt school and even Al Thuze, who took that ideology question and ran with it in their own various ways. So is it fair to sort of think about Gramsci as trying to work through that problem? and then by doing that being a forerunner for future Marxist positions on ideology and movements in that in that realm?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely, I think that's absolutely fair. I mean, I'm quite sympathetic to a lot of what Gramsci writes. And, you know, his work was very influential on like the British New Left, which did a lot of work on understanding capitalism's petuation of itself through cultural means. And he says it's not just a matter of kind of culture. It's also a matter of these very complex. interlocking systems of social relationships. So he talks about an awful lot about the intellectual class as well. And the way in which certain means of production produce certain intellectuals,

which will kind of perpetuate the necessary cultural hedge money to make sure that you maintain extractive and exploitative labor practices. So he talks about it in terms of like, you know, urban industry will, it will produce the kind of technocrats, the technical man. You know, we're not talking necessarily about a philosopher or, you know, our traditional conception of what an intellectual might be, but they're the technical officer of urban industry. A good contemporary example might be business schools, for example. You know, what is the job of the business school?

Business schools, you know, oh, you go to school to get educated, that way you get your MBA. No, the job of business school is to produce. the kind of technocratic officials of contemporary neoliberal digital networks capitalism. Right. So I think Gramsci would have an awful lot to say about the way that the contemporary university system works. He wrote a lot about how the Italian Catholic Church was embedded in the daily life of working class people and how its rights and rituals and its continuation gave it a kind

of legitimacy and authority that was very culturally pervasive and very culturally effective. So yeah, it's not just, it's not just about institutions, but it's about a way of understanding how a class society solidifies and stratifies and the ways in which capitalism produces its own defenses and allows not just, not just forcible kind of submission to it, but voluntary acquiescence. You know, people will happily, will happily kind of go against their own interests because there is a cultural hegemony that says, You know, perhaps the biggest one in America is, you know, manifest destiny or, or, you know, Horatio Alga, you can bootstrap your way to success. And people will genuinely believe that, not because of any kind of simple deception, but because everything that they have known has conditioned them to believe that to be absolutely true.

And that isn't just on a single generation. It is a long, often centuries-long process that has built to that point. Absolutely. And you can see him sort of pushing in the. a direction that Al Thusay would eventually pick up and start to call ideological state apparatuses when you're talking about the role that the church plays in maintaining hegemony, the role that the universities and departments within universities play in maintaining hegemony. You can see how Al Thuze would take that and run with it and get what we get out of Althusay,

which we just did an episode on if you're interested in pursuing that rabbit hole. But you did mention Gromschi's view of intellectuals, so maybe we can talk about that a little bit more. Do you want to talk a little bit about Gramsci's view of intellectuals more, and specifically the distinctions he makes between the two types of intellectuals? Yeah, I think what I find most interesting in Gramsci is this concept of the organic intellectual. But before he kind of differentiates between the sort of more traditional and intellectual and the organic intellectual in the prison notebooks, he kind of makes a point to say,

everyone isn't an intellectual. This fits, I think, very nicely into sort of Marx and Ingalls, like later in anthropology. I'm not sure if Gramsci was familiar with it or not, but human beings are thinking creatures, you know, homo sapiens thinking man. So no matter what you're doing, your brain is going to think about it in some way, shape, or form. So, you know, what Gramsci is kind of starting with for us is to not just look at human beings who have jobs that we would consider intellectual as intellectuals, but to think everybody is to some extent or another intellectual. And so then the next question becomes, to what extent? And then how does that fit into the division of labor? So more traditional in law tools, the way they fit in the division of labor,

and I think John's kind of already talked about this quite a lot, it reproduces a lot of knowledge in a way that's beneficial to maintaining sort of the state apparatus, like, you know, to use all these days terms, like this sort of state apparatus before you need to get to coercion. So, you know, the bourgeois economist's perfect example of that, you know, or, you know, the sort of intellectuals where like this is human nature, you can really see how a lot of intellectuals kind of defend the enlightenment, all of that sort of stuff. And so that's kind of like, like you said, he talks a lot about the church. So he talks about intellectuals kind of coming out of the church initially in existing and feudal society to maintain that, you know. And then as like academies go on, this sort of reinforces the sort of bourgeois world order. So what he's talking about with organic intellectuals are people who don't necessarily seek to maintain the status quo.

You certainly could be an organic intellectual who's gone through academia, but the point is that that's not necessary. You're somebody who is organically aware of maybe like the positions. of a certain class, rather than seeing themselves the way traditional intellectuals and bourgeois society do as sort of neutral observers who are just explaining the status quo, an organic intellectual exists within the class, recognizes himself as a participant in this class struggle, and has the ability to articulate maybe the needs of the class in a way that rather than viewing yourself as outside of the process is an active member, you know, and where you go from there, you can into all sorts of directions, but I think that's an important maybe starting point.

Yeah, I just want to kind of pick up on that, actually. This is actually one of the reasons why Gramshy was so interested and vocal about the importance of political education for everybody, political and cultural education for everybody, because, you know, if we're in the war of position, you know, if we're in this struggle against capitalism, you can't just rely on. a on a rapid mass movement, which is like immediate demands, slogans, propaganda, and a mass amount of workers, because, you know, Gramsci had seen what happens there. What happens is there is no leadership, there is no coordination, capitalists reassert themselves, and you end up

with tanks rolling over barricades. So what you need is you need a broad base of these, of these intellectuals and I think that's a really good point that these are not kind of academics in fact probably going through academia is going to be restrictive on being one of those organic intellectuals but it's it's about someone who is involved in the class struggle has a kind of clear conception of of the world has a very clear understanding of the aims of a of a Marxist or communist movement and Gramsci said that the kind of market was someone who is a permanent persuader you know you've always got to keep repeating the arguments you've always got to be persuading you've always got to be organizing you've always got to be

educating and those are the marks of an organic intellectual so it is a it is a person from from a particular class situation that remains connected to that and to those to those day-to-day material struggles. And it forms kind of the kind of proletarian counterpoint to the intellectual of the bourgeois, you know, the university, the academic, the liberal economist, the bishop, the business school graduate. So it isn't, this isn't, this isn't just the kind of abstraction. And I think, you know, Brennan's right that often Marxism becomes this kind of abstract ideal. It becomes something that we theorize about. But he said, he was very, very clear that, you You know, what we want is we want a mass movement of people who can see the world in a very particular way,

who can shatter that cultural hold capitalism has over how you view the world. And to do that, what you need is you need organic intellectuals, people who are grounded in the class struggle, but also have the kind of big picture view that can organize and educate those around them. And yeah, organic intellectuals can, you know, sort of peel back the veil of deceit that ideology operates in. So, like, a big part of what makes ideology, you know, ruling class ideology so pernicious is that it can often be so ingrained in people's minds that it comes off as common sense. And we'll hear that all the time when we talk about human nature and bootstraps and all this nonsense we hear all the time. And what an organic intellectual does is help sort of deconstruct that for people. Stop making it's not common sense.

here's why it's not common sense and by breaking down that ideology you can you can sort of reveal it for what it is which is sort of an apparatus put on people not something that people come to of their own critical and independent thought and to combine the views of intellectuals and hegemony slightly simplify but i think it still works as a sort of summary um you know ruling intellectuals pop up and sort of do the work of helping maintain hegemony whether consciously or unconsciously. That's the role they play. And organic intellectuals sort of provide one of the major pillars of counter-hegemony. And so that's a helpful way to tie Gramsci's views of these two ideas and put them together and sort of make sense of how they come together and how they work

together. Is that fair? Yeah. I think just to just to kind of flesh that out a little bit, one of the reasons he's so interested in what we call, what he calls the southern question, which is, so the south of Italy is very agrarian, quite rural, often quite poor, is that he says, like, the intellectuals, a certain class of intellectuals, often serve as the mediator between these massive, almost semi-fudal landowners and rontier farmers and the people who actually do the work. So that is a kind of, that's an intellectual strata that upholds a particular class dynamic in Italian society.

And he said that actually forming a left tendency not just in organic not just in kind of proletarian and working class intellectualism but in all intellectuals is how you shatter that class alliance how you break that kind of link that mediating link between

landowners and big farmers and you open the door for the possibility of a working class alliance between proletariat workers in the cities and peasant workers and farmers in the rural south so this was a really important

and strategy for Gramsci to try and actually reconfigure the social and political relationships in that really contested area of Italian life. I think that is a really important bridge between, you know, kind of Marxist theory and then some of the things they were trying to practically do, especially when, you know, in the USSR, they talk a lot about unity between the proletariat and the peasantry and stuff, but a lot of times when it comes to actually putting that into practice, the Marxists have failed. And there's like, as we were getting at with the relationship between North and South Italy, a lot of Marxists who weren't really interested in doing that are certainly not doing a good job of articulating

how that can be possible. And while I think there's a lot of like good points that people like Bordoga and Trotsky made strategically, they really didn't articulate in any way, shape, or form. How do we actually create meaningful alliances with people out who are neither bourgeois or socialist. And while people like Lenin or Bukharan might have talked about the importance of doing so, Gromshy is really like thinking about a way to do it. And the war of position is very much a way to do it. And very unfortunately, a lot of neo-fascists have been directly sort of inspired by Gramsci and you can see them using that to create these sort of like cross-class alliances they need to make power

and fight this sort of elongated ideological struggle in France and the United States, I think, are excellent examples of that. You know, how do you go from, how do you get, you know, this petite bourgeois rural population and this, like, sort of declass urban population and these financiers all to be on the same party? And if you look at France, they very, very deliberately use the war of position. It's a very, like, interesting idea that we can see has very real practical effects. and I think it's important that we as Marxists manage to use this idea practically. I think that's one of the big strengths of Gramshy's theoretical work.

And for all of the criticisms you can make, and there are plenty of ones which are very valid. One of the things that he was always very keen on doing was having an understanding of strategic alliances. How do you build connections between, you know, ultra-leftists and trade unionists? you, how do you build connections between the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry? How do you, how do you formulate a way out of this heavily stratified and, and alienated and individuated capitalist framework that we still find ourselves in?

So I think, yeah, absolutely, there's a huge amount that we, that we need to pay attention to when he's writing about the role and function of the intellectual and how we go about connecting what might seem like disparate groups with disparate interest to the same overall struggle. So the last question I have before we go into the reflection and legacy part of the discussion to close it out is, and I know we've touched on this a little bit, but maybe just to drill it, drill at home once again. I think people learn more when maybe a point is articulated a couple times in different ways, and it really helps stick in people's minds. So my question is, where does Gramsci diverge from aspects of the more orthodox Marxism of his time? Yeah, I think the big

one is, is critiques of communism. This idea that you can't, you can't wait for revolution. I think his writing on intellectuals is an interesting, it isn't a break so much as a kind of expansion or maybe even, I suppose you could call it a refining of some of Lenin's theoretical work. Lenin writing for one, for one kind of particular set of historical and material conditions, Gramsci writing for another. But I think this, this big, the big kind of takeaway, is this notion of the, you can't wait for revolution to arrive via the laws of history. And actually that involvement in the ongoing struggle against capitalist exploitation

is not a passive process. It's something that we enter into. It's something that we have to consciously choose to do so, choose to be, I said right at the top, to take responsibility for what it means to be a communist, to be a Marxist, to be someone who is involved in the left. There is this letter that he, or a kind of record of what he says when his comrades try and get him out of the country.

And he says, you know, people say that a captain should go down with his ship. And maybe that's not always true. But in this situation, it is because there are certain duties and I have to make sure that I've done everything that I can. And I'm pretty sure at that point he knew what way the kind of historical situation was turning. But I think it's this combination of having a very clear understanding. of history and at the same time believing that there was a very vital role for agency

and for organization and for action that I think is worth paying attention to. But the big takeaway in terms of where he might have broken with the more orthodox Marxism of his time for whatever that might mean is that focus on on communism, on waiting for the stages of capitalism to develop to the point where revolution just emerges. One of the key things is you have to organize, you have to be involved, you have to be educating and persuading everybody around you. You have to be trying to build and contribute to a mass movement of people. So yeah, so he's rejecting this stagist economist and this crude determinism while also expanding aspects of Marxism that, you know, other thinkers maybe like

Lennon have gestured towards, but it took Gramsci to really elaborate in their full dimensions. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. Anything else to add on that, Brendan? Yeah, I think that's, um, that really covers it. But kind of interesting to note the time period is the sort of break in what Orthodox Marxism even is, because a lot of what we think about now is Orthodox Marxism is a lot of the sort of ideological positions of the USSR. The Orthodox Marxism of that time would have been the sort of Kautzkyism, second international period. Grouchy kind of doesn't really fit into either category. Certainly what he's doing is writing in a way that breaks him off of this sort of economic determinism.

of the second international, but he also would have been breaking from the sort of third international period as well had he been more known probably. It puts him kind of in a similar position to somebody, I'd say like Lukash, is really working on expanding sort of the understandings of ideology, class consciousness, and the rules of people with these sorts of cultural struggles. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And do you think in this area, is this why he's obviously, often lumped in with the term neo-Marxists. Is it because of this sort of break and expansion of Marxism that he gets placed into that

category? And do you think that's a fair category for him to be placed in? As a sociologist, I myself would have been in the sort of new Marxist category. I don't think you can call somebody a neo-Marxist who was around back then. But his influence on what I would consider to be neo-Marxism is immense, more so than some people I'd say who were talking about some of the similar things. that he was talking about. Like, I think he's more in vogue than Lukash, at least, nowadays, in certain academic

circles. But what he's talking about, about superstructure, about ideology, it doesn't really actually contradict some of what Marx and Ingalls is saying in a big way. And at least sociologically speaking, a lot of neo-Marxists are interested in looking at some of the parts of Marx that are overlooked, whether it's like the anthropology of Marx or sort of the views of consciousness, you know, maybe that earlier humanist period. So Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Lukash, huge influences on neo-Marxism. Neo-Marxism also kind of, I think, rearticulates Marx in a way that allows it to stand better

against the sort of post-structural critiques of Marxism that we wouldn't get if we just kind of followed the more traditional, like USSR kind of derived understanding of Marx. Academically speaking, that's part of why it's important. He also, it doesn't just tie into like Marxist theory, but it also ties into other sociologists, Seyright Mills. Again, you can kind of look at the Frankfurt School as being another kind of bridge. So if you're trying to like come up with this theory of social reproduction,

even though that's not the term Gromshy's using, he pairs quite nicely with people like Seyright Mills, Bordeaux, you know, Lukash, Marcusa, Stuart Hall. You can make a very robust theory of the ways that, like, class consciousness works in sort of a modern age. There's Lukash's famous essay on Orthodox Marxism, because I think often we have a very narrow or, like, limited understanding of what does that mean, actually? and we're often very critical of people for supposed breaks or deviations. And so Lukash writes his essay

where he says, you know, if everything Marx ever wrote was revealed to be wrong, very bluntly, would someone who describes himself as a Marxist have to repudiate anything? And he says, no, because Marxism is not a set of dogma as what it is is a method.

And in those terms, I don't necessarily think it's helpful to think about, you know, radical breaks from the Marxism of his time. I think he was applying a particular version of a pretty orthodox Marxist method to a very particular set of problems. So, yeah, you know, he is built on and expanded certain things. But in many ways, it's merely a continuation of the tradition. It isn't a break or a deviation or a departure. Yeah, I love that. I think if we like look at very honestly, look at Marxist theorists, there's this weird tendency to sort of canonize some of them and be like this person was right and that person was wrong.

They're revisionist. Well, really, every Marxist has revised something. That's kind of a question of what and where and when. And I think it's a lot healthier to look at Marxism as this historical materialism, you know, even if you want to say dialectical thinking because, because there are certain ways that Gramsci is closer to Hegel than Marx even. A lot of these thinkers have dialectical relationships, right? And we can look at, you know, for example, Gramsci's ideas of hegemony and the organic intellectual compare it with Bordeca

and see in Gramsci this kind of critique of Bordeca's kind of like very base-centric view of Marxism. You know, or similarly you can view it as, like a reputation of maybe the direction that Togliotti and Tosco were going with this sort of right turn popular front theory because the organic

intellectual is still articulating the class interest. You can also look at it as a bridge between those two ideas. I think John said that earlier a little bit. It's that there's a dialectical relationship. And the fact of the matter is, is Bordeca's conception of organic centralism and the conception of an organic

intellectual may not mesh perfectly, but they actually can complement each other. And our job is Marxist is to continue that dialogue that's within our tradition. You know, we can, you know, the Trotskyists like to say that Gramsci wasn't really talking about Trotsky. He was really talking about Stalin and he was just doing it because of the pressures, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, the sort of pro-Stalin people tend to really emphasize Gramsci's breaks from Trotsky. But you can, you can kind of, again, you can see a dialectical relationship and ask, how do they complement each other, how do they improve on each other what's what's the next step you know i think that's the real way to look at it

and so you know people who aren't marxists love to talk about gromshy being this break for marxism as well because again there's this understanding of marxas this very crude economically focused theorist um i don't think we have to do that i think we can we can say like hey here's here's you know how he bridges you know bordecah and lukash what's useful you know what what can we apply absolutely i could not agree more um i think we're all in agreement on that basic approach to Marxism, and we've all articulated it in various ways. So I totally agree, and I really appreciate both of those inputs. I think they're really important.

So moving on to the last section, two more questions, just sort of a little part of, you know, reflecting and thinking about the legacy after Gramsci. You know, Gramsci died in 1937 at the age of 46, so, you know, a little under a century ago. And so these last two questions will just sort of be reflecting on them. And the first one is, I always like to throw this in here because I think it's some important for us to to critique people that we also learn from and as a way of learning from them as well. So what would you consider to be a fair critique of Gromshy, whether as a theorist or as a revolutionary, that we might be able to learn from today? John? I think a fairly good provisional

assessment is that a lot of this is speculative. We think he provides a kind of model of how culture works, but have, you know, with with Lenin and with Stalin, with Mao's writing, we can see these theoretical ideas being worked out in in actually existing socialist and communist struggles, right? Gramsci was imprisoned. He was not in any position to kind of change reality to test out these theoretical understandings of his situation in on the ground. political work.

The other problem, I think, is that that you've run into is that as a starting point, a lot of Gramscian strategy requires the existence of a Leninist or Leninist-type party. And at the moment in the United States, is there one that is actively working as a Van Gogh party among working class people? No, is there any hope that one might emerge with the resources to try and organize a mass of organic intellectuals at the moment? I don't know. So those are two pretty fair critiques.

I think now that we've gone, you know, really past the point of capitalism, at least organized in much of Europe and in America as being based on these very clear class distinctions of, you know, working class factory work, very trade unionized, very, you know, the model of the factory is the model of society. We've gone sort of past that. And in a way, you might argue that certain parts of Gramsci's economic analysis have been sort of left behind by history. So those are maybe a few kind of important things to keep in mind if we're looking for good faith critiques of him and his work. So in the period of time where we're kind of the Italian Communist Party is new, it's splitting from the Italian Socialist Party.

The Socialist Party grows its membership dramatically and does really well in the post-war elections. Bordeca's critique of that was it doesn't matter how many elections we win if we don't really like push forward class consciousness. If we don't have ourselves in a stronger position, we're merely diluting ourselves. I think there's a lot of degrees to which we can look at people like Bordeca and their stubbornness and be like, look, you know, we do need to make political alliances. the proletariat isn't just going to magically be ready to, you know, seize a crisis. But it's not really fair for us to say that that's what Bordeca was talking about any more than it was fair for people to say that about Lennon before. And the fact of the matter is, is there needs to be a direction of social struggle that is articulated.

And I think his like organic intellectual ideas maybe do tie into that and you can combine the two. I feel like he maybe doesn't fully understand or appreciate the need for the struggle in that base level. And I think that people who like him maybe use that to justify not really understanding the way that like social class and base functions. So that's that's more of a critique of people who like him than him. But it is important. It's important to like know that there are some concrete things that we need to do to make our revolution or our political whatever project. do what it's supposed to do, like we can't just win. Look at Republicans, right? You can, you can say, well, they've, they've kind of fought this war of position successfully. They've

made alliances with rural evangelical Christians, you know, neo-fascists, sort of old guard economic elites are all in the space. But if you look at a lot of the ideas that started, that the Republican Party had in its beginning or even 30 years ago, the Trump period is against all of them. You know, the, the Republicans control the Senate. They control a lot of the courts. They control the executive. So they're absolutely in power. But in what ways are they advancing the goals of republicanism? You know, we're not really expanding free trade the way that they used to articulate. You know, Christianity's kind of just become a synonym for white supremacy in terms of a lot of the political stuff. He's advancing, you know, and so on and so on. And you'll

see some of the old guard Republicans be like well you know what is this this isn't my party it's not the party of of lincoln anymore it's definitely not that uh it's it's in some ways not even the party of ragan it's shifting from a neoliberal party to something else a lot of the neocons are also very unhappy just look at john bolton and and so so that's a real question that i think the sort of left communists were asking that all of the weaknesses of their practice aside we as communists really haven't addressed yet, which is how do we gain power while actually achieving our objectives, you know, and I think you can take Gramsci's ideas, apply them very successfully, and then find you're in a position where because of those compromises you've made, you actually

not only can your party not make the policy it originally had in mind, but might not even want to, because once you have power, you want to keep it. I think that's a really good point. But I also think that point about the way that things are changing represents opportunities for new alliances and new kind of strategic possibilities, you know, if you're moving away from, and this, and that shouldn't, and that shouldn't, you know, remove the danger of compromises, but I also think in a time of like, political instability among the right, no matter how dominant they are, and they are, there's also opportunities for kind of building our own kind of counter-hegemonic, uh,

institutions, educational apparatus, journalistic, and even, you know, I think there's, there are, there are, there are moments of opportunity even within this kind of, what seems to be a very closed system. Absolutely. I, I think, uh, my critique of Gramsci that I just articulated, please do not throw the, the baby out with the bathwater there, because I think the real danger comes when, uh, in the name of creating these political alliances, or maybe the sort of, Marxist center, if you will, makes an alliance with the right wing of the communist movement at the expense of the left. I think by itself, left communism is shown it's had a really hard time succeeding at its goals. But part of that is because the center in communism,

much like the center in the broader Overton window, keeps picking the right. And then it gets diluted. And so I see a lot of people who are to me like center communists being like, oh, you know, how did we get to this period of revision? You know, it was so great when X, you know, center Marxist was in charge. But it was that center Marxist that they're so fond of that made alliances with the right wing of communism to take out the left. So rather than saying it's an either or between the benefits of left communism and the benefits of this like more mediated center communism, we need to say, hey, let's restore a dialectical relationship between the two where we maintain our program, where we maintain. the understanding that a political revolution without a social revolution is useless. That's Marx talking. You know, those ideas and combined them with the war of position, the organic

intellectual, the understanding that we need to fight this superstructural struggle over time as well, and we can't merely have an armed class just waiting for the crisis. Yeah, incredibly well said. And that leads well into the last question of the day, which is, and we've touched on this a lot, but just to sort of put a bow on it what is Gromshy's ultimate legacy in your opinion and what do you think revolutionaries in the 21st century today should take away

from Gromshy's life and his work? I think a good way of starting to think about this is the point that altering a hegemonic structure takes time that we are probably not in a

position where a rapid violent mass movement is on the cards and if that is the case then what we have to be able to do is strategize for the long term like the revolutionary struggle will be a long one even if we are confident of the way that it will end

and I think one of the best ways that we can prepare for that is to look at someone who probably saw a great deal of potential of revolutionary potential and also faced a kind of crushing and very sudden defeat but was able to kind of try and honestly and critically examine the reasons why that came to pass. So I think one of the things I would suggest as a takeaway is that one, yeah, the struggle is long term and you need to be prepared for it. The war of position is not a quick fight. it demands a, a commitment, a fidelity to the idea of what it is you're trying to bring about. Two, the cultural sphere is vitally important and should be constantly contested.

And three, like education, organization and persuasion are vital. This idea that, you know, the constant debates on, oh, should, do we have to read theory? Do we have to do this is, is I think, kind of tedious, because we don't, that means what we end up not talking about is just how important education is as a political function, right? We want to educate people because it helps build that counter-hegemonic movement, not just because we want people to be reading the right books. What we want is we want people to be able to understand their own position, the society in which they find themselves in, and to be able to see beyond the limits of the capitalist hegemony that tell them a better world is impossible.

their living conditions are only ever going to go down, that unions are ineffective. So those are the three things that I would say could be really important and clear takeaways. I like all of that. Maybe to continue along some of what you're saying, I think he really shows the value of not giving up and continuing to wrestle with things.

I think that what's unfortunate about him passing when he did is that I think some of the contradictions in his own thought he didn't have a chance to work out. but the whole time he was in prison he was continuing to work those out and in many ways the prison notebook shows like his best work so in the face of you know being arrested and repressed and stuff continuing to work I think is a good personal legacy that I think we should kind of articulate and then also going off of what you said I think that this kind of concept of an organic intellectual shows us that if we're trying to like relate to our class we have to be within it you know it does no good good to be intellectual with all these great understandings of Marx if you're not in bringing that to the class. And at that point, you know, you might be doing better as an intellectual as if you're, you know, a poet or a punk singer or a hip-hop musician that's bringing class consciousness to the people in a way that some academic in the university just simply isn't. Yeah, definitely.

All right. Well, thank you so much, John from Hora Vanguard and Brendan from Marxism and Mashpitz for coming on. We appreciate having you both on to talk about this wonderful figure and his ideas. I will link to both of their shows in the show notes and you can go back and find all the episodes where I've had John and Brendan on in the past if you enjoyed this conversation.

And the way I'll end this episode is by quoting Gramsci himself. One of his most famous quotes, The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. So let's go fight some monsters. Love and solidarity.

any sensible person right now would join an anti-capitalist organization and you have to we not only had the most standard but we had the toughest fucking crew and we have the best crew and we have the best crew I'm terrible sinous a foul from holding the horizon up at this bowed shoulders hooded tightens and offices incorrigible her give me an

effort rerouted from the clenstables flip the tables on money lenders hostage situation in the temple spake truth to powers that redraw armistice maps numb down organic life forms marching towards colony collapse property damages not violence property is theft fences a property we dug a hole into the fence but leave a ballot box initiative a conscientious consumption we'll turn the crimson tad purple it's better than nothing throw our bones in the cards and hopes to cease production oil on the heat source Every molecule is corrupted All in the masterclass In another punk finishing school

Sat in the back meticulous notations Young marks before succumbing The pitfalls of dogmatism First among equals Before the rise of automation Equify my bones Furnalize the long night Ideas are full of proof

Replicate like a virus Ideas are bulletproof Replicate like a virus The foot stands with a wrench A match not a me A little straight No can knees Sixty hours a week

Punched over the machine Sixty hours a week I don't see us debating and discussing that. I don't have the solution. I think I know what the nature of the problem is. It rags in mock tail, card house, a spit, scratch tickets. Community got baptized and drugs and has to rain. Employees must wash hands before return to wage slavery.

Subordinates must hush curses before advancing on the treadmill. A whiff with a far between the zoo and cesspool. Tools are sharp in the pains, screaming backs, fed fumes. Overthrothrothrothed the status quo with a slogan. A pity distilled sentiment forever remaining quotable. It's going to take more than science pickets. I'm so prayers. More than quirky buzz turns for live munitions.

Spreading away in escarites, no deliverables. He can't be counted on this habitat for the quickly endangered dog fest was a good start. But faith in co-intel pro-thugs, recession proof like vice. Waste management with cancer drugs and empty a boat shell light. Bacterial Husts provide a post to stop and backdrop for evolving into dust. Liquelify my bones fertilize the long night. Lequify my bones fertilize the long night. Ideas are full of proof.

Replicate like a virus. Ideas are bulletproof. Replicate like a virus. And he had to go out of me He's still straight And he's 60 hours a week Punched over the machine

60 hours a week And he had to go to the funeral this morning So when he gets back from the funeral He has to go To the fucking out of point in line And we have a duty It seems to me Those of us are academics

And seriously involved in the world To actually change our mode of thinking Thank you.