Prison censorship forced Gramsci to rewrite his notebooks using veiled language.

Evidence

With his transfer to the prison clinic in 1933 and consequent partial recovery, he began to recopy, reorder and rework much of the material from the earlier notebooks. But he did so with an extra caution, eliminating any surviving words or phrases, like the name of Marx or the word “class”, which might attract the attention of the censor and so cause his work to be brought to an end. Most significantly of all, in a note in one of the Quaderni entitled “Questions of Method” (see below pp. 382 -86 ) he offers a warning, ostensibly about Marx but equally if not more applicable to himself against confusing unfinished or unpublished work with works published and approved by an author during his lifetime. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 16

Categorization

• XREF: The self-censorship under prison conditions that shaped Gramsci’s elliptical style is relevant background for how ‘hegemony’ and ‘common sense’ later appear coded rather than directly stated — a useful caution when reading the Islamophobia theorists who invoke Gramsci.