Gramsci: Introduction

On November 8th, 1926 Antonio Gramsci, a newspaper editor, Marxist thinker, and elected member of the parliament for the Italian Communist Party was arrested by the Italian Fascist police despite his parliamentary immunity, and sent to the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State. The party was outlawed by Benito Mussolini during his regime, and Mr. Gramsci was sentenced to twenty years in prison for subversive propaganda against the power of state. He was relocated from one penitentiary onto another for precautionary measures; Mr. Stalin himself made several attempts to negotiate Gramsci's freedom via Comintern because Gramsci's Russian wife Julia was the daughter of Apollon Schucht, leader of the CPSU and Lenin's friend. Unfortunately Mussolini refused to negotiate and Gramsci spent years behind bars writing erudite essays on Marxist Theory, political leadership, and analysis of culture; and numerous letters to his family and relatives. According to speculations, Gramsci was betrayed by a quorum of undesirables within his own party with a controversial letter which went straight into the hands of the political police. He died in a private clinic in Rome during probation eleven years later, right before the collapse of Fascism.