The central paradox of Italian Marxism since the war has been the intellectual dominance of a school whose philosophical inspiration was directly opposed to that of Gramsci. Galvano Della Volpe and his pupils, in particular Lucio Colletti, were to develop an original and radical anti-Hegelian oeuvre, characterized by an unflinching hostility to the influence of Croce (see nlr 59). The success of the Della Volpean school owed much to its intrinsic coherence and trenchancy. But it must also be understood in the context of the fate of Gramsci’s own thought within the Italian Communist Party. By the mid-’fifties, the pci had canonized Gramsci into an official icon of the party, whose function was largely to legitimate day-to-day tactical manoeuvres on the ideological front, by providing them with nominal revolutionary credentials. Togliatti’s organizational succession to Gramsci in the leadership of the party was equated with theoretical continuation of his thought, and mediated it as an orthodoxy to party members. The result was a suffocating cult of Gramsci within the pci, combined with very little serious study or development of his work (a situation symbolized by the absence even today of a scholarly edition of his writings, 25 years after the Liberation). This institutional embrace of Gramsci thus had the ironic effect of considerably neutralizing his intellectual influence; today many younger Italian militants outside the pci evince an emotional reaction ‘against’ Gramsci comparable to that of young Czechs or Russians ‘against’ Lenin. The source of the confusion in both cases is the bureaucratic appropriation of their name. In this atmosphere of official and uncritical celebration, the ideas of Della Volpe—deriving from an altogether other horizon—had a refreshing astringency and independence of spirit.

It is against the background that the work of Lucio Magri, a young pci militant from Bergamo, struck a novel and unwonted note in the early sixties. Perhaps alone in Italy at the time, Magri started to use Gramsci’s ideas in genuine theoretical work on politics. The results were startlingly different from the usual functionaries’ litany. Magri’s first major essay in 1963 was a study of the Marxist theory of the revolutionary party.footnote1 He was then virtually unknown inside or outside the the Italian Communist Party. Two years later, an article in Rinascita by the ranking leader of the pci Right, Giorgio Amendola, triggered great controversy in the party. Amendola argued that in the advanced capitalist countries, both the social-democratic and the communist traditions had proved to be failures, unable to achieve socialism; the time had therefore arrived for a unification of the two movements into a new party in Italy. This proposal gave rise to a stormy debate in Rinascita, before eventually being censured by the pci leadership itself. The most vigorous reply to Amendola from the Left was an article by Magri,footnote2 which was promptly denounced as ‘Trotskyist’ by Amendola’s veteran colleague from Naples, Emilio Sereni (also a leading member of the Right).footnote3 At this point, the debate shifted into a discussion of the nature and consequences of the Popular Front strategy in Europe, which Amendola and Sereni claimed had—rightly—remained the permanent inspiration of pci policy down to the present. In an essay in mid-1965, Magri retorted by subjecting the whole historical experience and conception of Frontism to a thorough and damaging critique—by implication condemning contemporary pci policies in the same judgment.footnote4 The XI Party Congress of the pci in 1966 duly purged the small revolutionary left from the press and cultural sections of the party, and Magri along with others ceased to be published in its theoretical journal, which was henceforward entrusted to the control of Sereni.

In the following year, Magri contributed to a symposium on the 50th anniversary of Lenin’s State and Revolution, in the independent Problemi del Socialismo, which had organized a debate on the actuality of Lenin’s theory of the State today. In a lengthy essay which succeeded a remarkable contribution by Lucio Colletti (published in nlr 56), Magri surveyed the metamorphoses of the modern capitalist State in the West, and the implications of the post-Khruschevite impasse of the régimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.footnote5 Within a few months, both questions were raised with maximum acuteness by the May Revolt in France and the August invasion of Czechoslovakia. Magri’s response was to write a book on the May events which remains two years later one of the very few systematic Marxist analyses of the entire course and consequences of the French crisis—perhaps, indeed, the only one.footnote6 The tone of the book is deliberately cold and dispassionate, and in some passages negatively conditioned by tactical considerations, but the substance of it is a damning indictment of the political record of the pcf. Shortly afterwards, Amendola vociferously demanded complete solidarity with the pcf in a Rinascita article, and a ‘struggle on two fronts’—against both the bourgeoisie and the student movement. Magri’s attack on this article was to be his last contribution to the party press.footnote7