Introduction

In late November, 1926 the Fascist Government of Italy issued its "Exceptional laws for State security". By these all opposition parties were outlawed and their newspapers banned. The Fascist dictatorship had begun. Special tribunals were set up to try political suspects, outside the normal procedure of criminal law.

Gramsci was arrested in Rome on November 8th, 1926. At first he was exiled without trial to the island prison of Ustica, to the north of Sicily. After a few weeks he was transported back to Milan for trial. This was in January of 1927, but Gramsci had to wait for over a year for his trial. This finally took place in May, 1928, at Rome, where Gramsci was now transferred together with many other leading Italian Communists. The trial itself was a travesty. Gramsci was accused of plotting subversion of the State and fomenting class hatred and was finally sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Just before sentence was passed the Public Prosecutor rose and pointed to Gramsci. "For twenty years", he demanded, "we must stop that brain from working."

There followed a nightmarish journey, through the heat of an exceptionally oppressive Italian summer, from Rome to the prison at Turi di Bari. The cattle truck in which Gramsci was chained so that he could neither lie down nor stand was allowed to wait for days on end in railways sidings. The whole journey lasted over a fortnight and took a terrible toll of Gramsci's always fragile health. He had been reported sick before leaving Rome but was denied medical attention. During the journey one side of his body broke out in painful boils and inflammations. By the time he reached Turi he was found to be in an almost complete state of physical collapse.

The years of Gramsci's imprisonment at Turi were a period of slow torture by which the already sick man was driven inexorably and cold-bloodedly to his death. Under the influence of an atrocious prison diet and non-existent medical care his health gradually broke down. With immense courage he sought to keep his personality intact, and his letters from prison are an intensely moving and inspiring document of the tenacity with which he strove to maintain his life and dignity. He was rarely able to eat more than a few spoonfuls of rice a day. Within a few years he had lost all his teeth and this further weakened his digestion. He suffered during his waking hours from acute intestinal pains.

These conditions were rendered immeasurably worse by the fact that every night during the first years of his imprisonment Gramsci was woken three times for "inspection". His cell was next to the guardroom and this further interfered with his sleep. In a letter dated November 3rd, 1930 Gramsci wrote: "I have worked out the statistics for October: I slept for five hours on only two nights, for nine nights I didn't sleep at all. Other nights I slept less than five hours. I myself am amazed that I still have so much resistance and have not yet had a general collapse."

Worst of all, perhaps, he suffered the mental torture of one who had always led a most active life, who rejoiced in the company of others, and who now found himself totally divorced from his friends, his fellow workers and his family. After his arrest he never saw his wife or two baby children again. His wife, Guilia Schucht, whom he had married in Moscow in 1923, returned to her native land and never recovered from the nervous shock of Gramsci's imprisonment. Yet throughout this period he never once doubted the correctness of the decision taken several years earlier to devote all his energies to the cause of socialism. To his sister he wrote: "My imprisonment is an episode in the political struggle which has been fought and will continue to be fought not only in Italy but in the whole world for who knows how long yet. I have been captured, just as during a war one could be taken prisoner, knowing that this and even worse could happen. . . ." But these words covered up an immense inner struggle to adjust his whole psychological and physical being to the conditions of prison life. He never engaged in self-pity and at the same time he refused to look upon himself as in any way a martyr. In his own words he was "eminently practical". "My practicality consists in this," he wrote to his sister-in-law, "in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall . . . that is my strength, my only strength."

But Gramsci did in fact suffer two serious physical breakdowns—in May, 1931, and March, 1933, when he was thought to be on the point of death. The conditions of his imprisonment aroused the indignation of many leading intellectuals and others throughout free Europe, including Romain Rolland in France and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In January, 1936, Gramsci was finally transferred from Turi to a clinic at Formia, and later, as his condition continued to deteriorate, to the Quisiana Clinic at Rome. But he was a dying man. His sentence was reduced by ten years but a week after his shortened sentence was up Gramsci died, on April 27th, 1937, after eleven years imprisonment.

The conditions of Gramsci's prison existence must be borne in mind when approaching the following selection from his prison writings. The writings themselves—2,848 closely packed pages in thirty-two notebooks—are themselves a testimony to his courage and determination. From early on he was tormented with the idea of not wasting his time and of using what freedom still remained to him to produce something "for posterity". He projected a broad scheme of work embracing the whole modern development of Italian society, especially in its cultural aspects. The subjects covered show the immense breadth of his interests and knowledge—Dante's Inferno, the dramatic significance of Pirandello (Gramsci was the first to acknowledge his role), Machiavelli, the struggle for national independence in the nineteenth century, popular superstition and folk-lore, the role of the Catholic Church, the development of the education system, modern journalism, modern industrial organisation, the philosophy of Benedetto Croce—these are a few of the essays and notes in the prison writings.

Gramsci wrote quickly, often not pausing to rewrite and often expressing himself elliptically in order to keep up with the torrent of ideas which poured out of his brain. He was writing notes and essays in the first instance for himself—he was not writing directly for publication. Often he would refer in passing to a book or an article and one is left uncertain as to the exact significance of the reference. Often sentence structure itself would be abandoned and the writings suddenly take the form of a series of jottings. There are many repetitions—ideas sketched out in an early writing taken up again and elaborated later.

The prison writings, therefore, do not make easy reading. They demand close attention and careful study. Each re-reading will be found to reveal fresh subtleties of thought which at first may be missed. These writings should not be looked on as essays or articles in the conventional sense, since many of them lack inner structure of the kind demanded by writings prepared for publication. In a sense each paragraph stands on its own, and the order of paragraphs is not always logical.

In order to avoid the ever-watchful eye of the prison supervision Gramsci was forced to use his own periphrasis when referring to controversial names or ideas. Thus he never mentioned Marxism but spoke instead of "the philosophy of action", and Marx and Engels are always referred to as "the founders of the philosophy of action." In this translation these circumlocutions have been dispensed with and the usual terms used for the sake of greater ease of reading.