Blackwell Reference Online

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Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, Sardinia on January 22, 1891 and died in Rome on April 27, 1937. Gramsci's father was a petty-bourgeois notable employed in the Land Registry and his mother was from a local landowning family. At 4 years old Antonio was left a hunchback after a fall. His father was imprisoned for malpractice in 1898 and the family lived in straitened economic circumstances. Antonio took a job. Then sent by his mother to middle and high school, in 1912 he won a scholarship to Turin University to study arts. Quickly involved in socialist politics, he discontinued his study and renounced a future career in linguistics. In 1913–16 he was a journalist for the socialist press. In 1917 he started to formulate his novel views in the single number of La Città futura and became a firm supporter of the Russian Revolution, which he typified as a “revolution against Marx,” understanding it to have reversed all determinist understandings of Marxism as a messianic creed by refocusing socialist attention on the force of wilful mass proletarian action to change the world. Together with Palmiro Togliatti, Angelo Tasca, and Umberto Terracini, in 1919 he established the newspaper Ordine Nuovo whose object was to promote an Italian version of “soviets” or workers’ councils in the factories of Turin. The ordinovisti established close links with the workers’ organizations in 1919–20, ... log in or subscribe to read full text