Piero Sraffa was born in Turin in 1898, the son of a law professor at the university. As he himself described in a 1924 letter to Gramsci (quoted in the article by Ferrata below), he was a ‘pacifist socialist’ as an adolescent, in the years 1915–17: the Italian Socialist Party was one of the few Second-International parties to maintain its opposition to the War after August 1914, and even after Italian entry on the Allied side in May 1915 continued a policy of ‘non-collaboration’ (but also of ‘non-sabotage’) with respect to the national war effort. As a university student, in 1918–20, Sraffa was caught up in the wave of radicalization which followed the Russian Revolution and the end of the War. It was at this time that he came into contact with the revolutionary journal l’Ordine Nuovo, edited by Gramsci, which was at once the theoretical animator and a political reflection of the factory-council movement in Turin. During these so-called Two Red Years, Turin—‘Italy’s Petrograd’, as Gramsci was to term it—was one of the most revolutionary and most proletarian cities in Europe, its advanced industrial complex centred on fiat enormously expanded by war production. The atmosphere was a heady one for a young socialist intellectual such as Sraffa. Introduced to Gramsci by a university professor—Umberto Cosmo—who had befriended the latter during his student days, Sraffa began to contribute translations and reading notes to the weekly Ordine Nuovo.

It is not clear whether Sraffa formally became a member of the Italian Communist Party, which was only founded in January 1921. Gramsci was to speak in 1924 merely of ‘the contacts he had with us in Turin’—but went on to say that ‘it will only be necessary to keep in contact once again in order to resuscitate him and make him an active element of our party’. At all events, even if a member, he was a relatively inactive one; and as the exchange recounted below by Ferrata makes clear, he had by 1924 become quite alienated from the party’s policies. At this time, the party was still in transition between the Bordiga leadership of 1921–3, whose ultra-left refusal to implement United Front policies had brought the pci into open conflict with the Comintern leadership, and the Gramsci leadership which was consolidated at a consultative conference of the party a couple of months later than the exchange with Sraffa, in May 1924. This is not the place to go into all the intricacies of that political conjuncture. But schematically it can be said that, despite Gramsci’s determination that the new leadership should heal the breach with the Comintern, he remained much less hostile to Bordiga than he was to the third current within the Party—the Right, headed by Tasca, which had formed to fight for the positions of the International leadership, but which Gramsci saw as potentially ‘liquidationist’. The Twenty-One Points, the split in the parties of the Second International and the formation of separate Communist parties and a new International—these were premised on the expectation of an extension of the socialist revolution, above all to Western Europe. When such extension failed to take place—and even more when, as in Italy, there was instead a victorious black reaction—it was not surprising if a mood of pessimism affected the base of the young Communist parties, and if there were some who asked whether the whole policy of splitting the mass working-class parties had been correct. This was the mood, and the doubt, which Gramsci saw as the principal threat to the party, and which he believed that Tasca reflected at the level of the leadership. What was probably the key article Gramsci wrote in this period immediately preceding his emergence as party leader was entitled ‘Against Pessimism’. This, then, is the context of Gramsci’s 1924 exchange with Sraffa, by now a university lecturer at Cagliari in Sardinia. It should also be pointed out, however, that there was another aspect to Sraffa’s letter to Gramsci, which was not included by the latter in the published exchange in the party press. Sraffa suggested launching a new trade-union organization modelled on the Wobblies (iww), to break the reformist hold of the General Confederation of Labour over the Italian working class. The ‘pessimistic’ and inactive academic sympathizer was thus capable of advancing a political proposal of a kind very much in tune with Gramsci’s own (at this time, somewhat ultra-left) conceptions.