Gramsci rejected the deterministic Marxism that forbid revolution before capitalism developed.

Evidence

In this article he counterposed Lenin’s achievement as an affirmation of revolutionary will against the determinism which dominated the Second International—a determinism justified with the help of a positivist interpretation of Marx’s Capital . In his view “the Bolsheviks … are not ‘Marxists’ … they have not compiled on the basis of the Master’s works an external doctrine, made up of dogmatic assertions… . They live the thought of Marx, that which can never die, which is the continuation of Italian and German idealist thought, and which in Marx was contaminated by positivistic and naturalistic incrustations”. The parallel with Marx’s own assertion that he was not a “Marxist” is obvious; Gramsci was already more of a Marxist than he knew, but what he did, decisively, reject was the “Marxism” which held that there was “a fatal necessity for a bourgeoisie to be formed in Russia, for a capitalist era to open, before the proletariat might even think of rising up, of their own class demands, of their revolution”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 74

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial distinction between mechanical/determinist Marxism (Second International, positivist reading of Capital) and Gramsci’s voluntarist, will-affirming Marxism — a distinction later Islamophobia scholarship implicitly assumes when claiming racism/ideas are not mere superstructural reflections of economics.
• XREF: Gramsci’s ‘Marxist humanism’ here anticipates his core understanding of how ideologies gain material force — relevant to the reader’s Scaffolding Theory module on how belief systems take hold. — connects to: Camus rejected Marxist historical inevitability in favor of perpetual rebellion. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 809