A self-described liberal could celebrate the Russian Revolution as liberation while rejecting its socialism
Evidence
Piero Gobetti (1901 26) founded the fortnightly Energie Nuove in 1918, at the age of 17. The son of a Turin grocer, he was at first strongly influenced by Salvemini, but went far beyond the latter’s “concretism”, i.e. pragmatic liberalism, in his attitude towards the October Revolution, the working-class and Marxism. Although he was explicitly non socialist, he saluted the October Revolution and the work of Lenin and Trotsky as a gigantic liberation of the Russian people. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1937
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader concern with how non-Marxist intellectuals positioned themselves toward the workers’ movement — useful backdrop for later Islamophobia readings on intellectuals and hegemony.