This study by a Sardinian journalist has been widely read in Italy
since its 1965 publication, partly because Gramsci is a martyred
hero of the left, and partly for its exposure of the suppression of
Gramsci's views at the 1930 Party Congress by Togliatti, who was
executing the Stalinist "Third Period" view of fascism. Gramsci was
in jail at the time, dying a slow death for lack of medical
attention. Fiori's book is primarily a personal history weighted
with great detail of Gramsci's Sardinian childhood, his extreme
poverty, his fealty to his family, his physical condition, his
loneliness. Gramsci is rendered more as a romantic revolutionary
who died for his "ideals" than as a theoretician whose writings
were a major contribution to socialist thought; the biography
evokes sympathy for Gramsci's suffering, but little comprehension
of his work. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which Gramsci
entered as a student during World War I, remains an enigma; the
"minimalist"/"maximalist" divisions, the Leghorn split by the left
wing of the PSI. Gramsci's conception of the workers' councils, and
his reasons for letting L 'Ordine Nuovo, his paper, lapse during
the 1921 factory occupations are among the points not explained.
The Togliatti betrayal demands more elucidation of Gramsci's role
in Moscow in 1922 and 1925, and his attempt at the 1925 Party
Congress to pull the Party away from its ultra-left role into a
united-front fight against fascism. Essentially apolitical, the
book can hardly be compared with Cammett's Antonio Gramsci and the
Origins of Italian Communism (1967): what it offers is hitherto
unpublished personal derails and the Togliatti episode. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891, became the leader of
the Italian Communist Party in his early thirties, was arrested by
Mussolini's police in 1927, and remained imprisoned until shortly
before his death ten years later. The posthumous publication of his
Prison Notebooks established him as a major thinker whose influence
continues to increase. Fiori's biography enlarges upon the facts of
Gramsci's life through personal accounts, and through Gramsci's own
writings to relatives and friends. In relating Gramsci's growth as
a political leader and theorist to his private experience, it
offers acute insights into his involvement in the factory councils
movement. It examines his relationship with political opponents,
including Mussolini, and with his comrades within the Communist
Party before and during Gramsci's imprisonment. It is an approach
which seeks to explicate, as well as underscore, the substantial
achievement of one of the most important figures in western
Marxism.
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