Gramsci judged the PCI’s failure to win socialist workers a reactionary triumph

Evidence

Indeed, he never clearly distanced himself from Bordiga’s position on the United Front strategy at all, at least until after his arrest, and then only in part. Yet differences with Bordiga there certainly were, from the very beginning. For Gramsci was to say (in 1923) of the way in which the P.C.I. was formed, i.e. of the failure to win the majority of the socialist workers to the new party, that this was “without a doubt reaction’s greatest triumph”: not an opinion shared by Bordiga. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 103

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is an early signal of Gramsci’s distinctive insistence that the party must actually win mass consent rather than merely split off — worth tracing forward into his hegemony theory.