Gramsci’s factory-council focus delayed but ultimately grounded his party work

Evidence

But in Italy, too, and above all in proletarian Turin, the impact of the Soviet model was immense. And during the next three years, Gramsci became the theorist and propagandist of an attempt to emulate that model in Turin. One result of this option was to delay his understanding of the central importance of the revolutionary party, so that he was not to play a determining role in the formation of the P.C.I. But at the same time it meant that Gramsci was at the centre of the main struggle of the Italian working class in the post-war period—a struggle which was to furnish the new P.C.I. with the essential of its working-class base. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 81

Categorization

• XREF: The factory council as a site of direct working-class institutional power prefigures Gramsci’s later concept of civil society as the arena where hegemony is contested—central scaffolding for the Islamophobia toolkit.