Gramsci and the Italian Communist Party

Abstract

WITH THE RECENT PUBLICATION OF A SUBSTANTIAL PART OF THE ‘Prison Notebooks’, Gramsci studies may safely be said to have ‘come in from the cold’. While Isaac Deutscher goes too far in his claim for ‘the oblivion to which Gramsci's memory was consigned during the Stalin era’, considerable parts of his political career remained obscure, and evidence of his disagreement with many of the orthodoxies of his time, and with PCI decisions associated with them, has only recently been forthcoming. Publication of his writings has had in general to wait for the ideological relaxation which followed the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Publication of his work in the Soviet Union itself was initiated in 1957, and a three-volume selection eventually appeared. In Yugoslavia, a Selected Works appeared in 1959. Yet it was evident that even in an era of declared de-Stalinization, Gramsci's writings could remain something of an embarrassment to communist orthodoxy.