Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary

by Peter D. Thomas

Antonio Gramsci was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its revolutionary days, and spent all his last years bar a few weeks in Mussolini's fascist jails. The Prison Notebooks he wrote in jail have been quarried to justify many varieties of reformist or liberal politics.

A new Workers' Liberty booklet, discusses a major recent study on the Notebooks — Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment — and argues that the Notebooks were in fact a powerful contribution to the working-out of revolutionary working-class strategy in developed capitalist societies.

• Gramsci’s life and ideas: an introduction
• The philosophy of praxis, by Peter Thomas
• The Gramscian Moment: an interview with Peter Thomas
• The revolutionary socialist as democratic philosopher
• Anderson’s antinomies: a discussion of Perry Anderson's analysis of the “antinomies” of Gramsci
• The other shore of Gramsci’s bridge: Gramsci and “post-Marxism”
• Gramsci and Trotsky

76 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2012

Reviews

[Richard Hughes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Without a shadow of doubt, Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) is one of the most important theorists of the last century. His Marxist legacy is hotly contested. Various left currents – from reformist Euro-Communism to Left Communism - have derived inspiration from their idiosyncratic readings of his work. Here, Martin Thomas of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (formerly the Socialist Organiser Alliance), ‘third camp’ Trotskyists, puts his own slant on the debate. If you bear in mind Thomas’ own political perspective, this is a worthwhile read.