Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci is presented as one of the Italian communist movement’s most important intellectuals, a founder of L’Ordine Nuovo and a participant in the delegation that traveled to Moscow in 1922. His role links the effort to build a revolutionary movement among Italian workers with the party’s defeats and internal conflicts; his serious illness, meanwhile, makes the distance between political ambition and personal capacity unmistakable.

Intellectual Work and the Workers’ Movement

In 1919, Gramsci joined Angelo Tasca, Palmiro Togliatti, and Umberto Terracini in founding L’Ordine Nuovo. The newspaper became a workshop for labor-oriented ideas and a cradle of the revolutionary movement of workers’ councils. The account places Gramsci’s early importance in this collective undertaking: he was not simply a commentator on socialism, but part of a group seeking forms through which workers could organize and exercise political power.

His intellectual standing is also conveyed through Vladimir Degott, the Communist International’s representative in Italy. Degott judged that Gramsci had understood the Russian Revolution better than his comrades, while doubting his ability to influence the masses. This assessment distinguishes theoretical insight from political reach. Gramsci is credited with grasping the revolution’s meaning, but the judgment also exposes a recurring difficulty for the Italian left: understanding revolutionary change did not ensure the power to bring it about.

Moscow and the Weight of Defeat

At the end of October 1922, Gramsci traveled to Russia as part of a delegation of Italian communists. The delegation arrived after the fascists had defeated the left, the Italian Socialist Party had split, and the communists had themselves divided. In Moscow, the contrast was stark. The Russian revolutionaries had built a mass army and survived a bloody civil war, while Western communists were retreating on multiple fronts. The account places Gramsci within that defeated delegation rather than apart from its predicament: Italian communism was entering an international organization increasingly dominated by its Russian members from a position of weakness.

Gramsci made the journey in poor health. He had returned from a sanatorium only days before the Moscow congress, after a six-month stay intended to keep his illness from worsening. He was suffering from chronic fatigue, amnesia, and insomnia. These concrete conditions qualify his presence at the congress: he was a prominent mind among the Italian delegates, but participation required him to leave medical care while still seriously unwell.

The delegation was received by Vladimir Lenin, who had already suffered a stroke. Lenin welcomed the Italian comrades and asked about events in Italy. Gramsci was among those present, though the account does not describe a private exchange between the two men. The encounter brings Italian political retreat into contact with the revolution’s Russian leadership, whose own future was becoming uncertain because of Lenin’s illness.

Conflict over Bombacci and the Party Line

Gramsci’s clearest public intervention in the evidence concerns Nicola Bombacci. When Bombacci proposed a definitive alliance between Italy and Russia on the grounds that both should share a revolutionary outlook, the suggestion drew laughter and disorder in parliament. The following day, Avanti! condemned his comparison of the Russian Revolution with the fascist revolution. Gramsci also publicly deplored Bombacci’s cordiality toward fascism, interpreting it as an unacceptable concession to Benito Mussolini’s claims and ambitions.

The episode reveals a boundary Gramsci defended: sympathy for Russia did not, in his view, justify treating fascism as a revolutionary partner. Bombacci’s conduct soon became a party crisis. The Communist Party of Italy called on him to resign his parliamentary seat, while some of his fellow deputies defended him and working-class supporters struggled to understand why he was being pushed out. The evidence does not make Gramsci the author of that decision, but it places him among those publicly opposing Bombacci’s approach as the party enforced its separation from him.

Parliamentary Return and Historical Position

After Bombacci was excluded from the electoral lists, Gramsci entered the Chamber of Deputies in his place. His arrival coincided with an election that sharply reduced the socialist and popular opposition, while the communists increased their representation from fifteen deputies to nineteen. The fascist list, despite its national success, remained a minority in the large industrial regions of the North and their capitals, including Milan; workers in the northern factories continued to vote against fascism. Gramsci’s parliamentary presence therefore belonged to a small, strengthened communist group within a political landscape in which fascism had nevertheless prevailed nationally.

The account’s portrait of Gramsci rests on a tension between intellectual distinction and constrained political agency. He helped shape a newspaper associated with workers’ councils, was recognized for his understanding of the Russian Revolution, and opposed an accommodation that blurred the distinction between communism and fascism. Yet the movement he represented arrived in Moscow after successive defeats, and his own illness limited his capacity at a crucial moment. His trajectory is not presented as a personal victory over those conditions, but as a measure of the Italian communist movement’s effort to preserve its principles and political presence amid division, retreat, and fascist ascendancy.