"Myths about Antonio Gramsci are endless."
Today Gramsci is quoted everywhere, from the post-war Italian Communist Party, which made him its founding hero, to university seminars on hegemony and the 'war of position'. Onorato Damen knew him as a comrade. A founding member of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921 and a leading figure of its Left, Damen shared the revolutionary years that followed the October Revolution, and then fought the course Gramsci set for the party.
In this critique he traces Gramsci's thought back to its roots in Croce's idealism rather than in Marxism, and follows it from the factory councils of L'Ordine Nuovo to Gramsci's leadership of the party during the Matteotti crisis and the 'Bolshevisation' directed from Moscow.
This edition includes the documents of the Committee of Intesa, the Left's attempt to resist that course, Damen's essay on Togliatti, and a timeline of the period.
Onorato Damen (1893-1979) was a founder of the Communist Party of Italy and, in 1943, of the Internationalist Communist Party. Imprisoned under Mussolini and expelled from Togliatti's party for 'Leftism', he remained a revolutionary Marxist all his life.
