A single youthful political error can haunt a career for decades

Evidence

Gramsci’s first political initiative was a blunder, and one that was to cost him dear. In October 1914, when Mussolini began to shift away from the official party position of neutrality in the war, Gramsci wrote an article in the party press defending him. The mistake was hardly surprising, given Gramsci’s political inexperience; Mussolini was the unchallenged leader of the P.S.I.’s left wing, and nobody, of course, could foresee his future trajectory. The internationalism of Lenin was utterly unknown in Italy at the time. Gramsci was motivated above all by scorn for the passivity of the official party position “Neither support, nor sabotage”, for what was in effect nothing but a policy of “clean hands”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 71

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the biographical formation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony — his early scorn for passivity prefigures the activist conception of intellectuals.