An explicitly non-socialist liberal could nonetheless celebrate Lenin and Trotsky as liberators

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. His positions were extremely confused, and yet brought him near to the revolutionary Left in the years immediately after the war. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1937

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia toolkit’s concern with how anti-establishment figures occupy ambiguous ideological positions — parallels the way later readings treat figures who straddle liberal and revolutionary camps.

Related

• A self-described liberal could celebrate the Russian Revolution as liberation while rejecting its socialism (similarity 0.93)

Broader Connections

• James judged Lenin a dialectical thinker while Trotsky remained trapped in fixed categories #complicates (0.72)