Gramsci’s early differences with Bordiga concerned theory-practice relations and party strategy.

Evidence

On the one hand, there are numerous documents testifying to a substantial identity of positions on all the most important issues. On the other, there is Gramsci’s own testimony that his motives for accepting the Bordiga policies for so long were mainly tactical, and that he was later to blame himself bitterly for not differentiating himself from Bordiga earlier. At all events, it seems clear that such differences as there were concerned not so much questions of overall analysis, or of strategy even, as the relation between theory and practice. While broadly sharing Bordiga’s views on the united front and the nature of social-democracy, and while not as yet having drawn any very consistent conclusions from what was a very different analysis of fascism, he did clearly disagree with Bordiga’s lack of any positive strategy within Italy, with his entire conception of the party and its relation to the masses, and with his inflexibility—especially vis-a-vis the International. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 145

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the theory/practice axis that becomes central to Gramsci’s later concepts of hegemony and the organic intellectual.

Related

• Gramsci’s political divergence from Bordiga centered on the theory-practice relation. (similarity 0.91)
• Gramsci broke from Bordiga’s immobilism while keeping his own critique of Comintern (similarity 0.84)
• Gramsci opposed Comintern policy in 1923 as firmly as Bordiga did. (similarity 0.83)
• Gramsci’s shared anti-centrism with Bordiga delayed his open dissent (similarity 0.82)
• Gramsci’s leadership combined anti-sectarian party norms with mass responsiveness (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci backed Bordiga partly from fear of a rightward replacement (similarity 0.80)
• The early PCI leadership treated fascism as secondary to the social-democratic threat (similarity 0.79)
• The PCI’s founding policy treated fascism as secondary to social democracy within bourgeois rule (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci judged the PCI’s failure to win socialist workers a reactionary triumph (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci analyzed fascism through its social base rather than abstract class form (similarity 0.78)