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Two views of Italy's failed revolution

Turin was the industrial heart of Italy’s ‘failed revolution’ of the early twentieth century. As these two books reveal, this was a double failure. Both victims of Mussolini, Gramsci and Gobetti offered contrasting analyses of why the Fascist seizure of power had occurred and how it might be combated. The first is considerably better known than the second. Indeed, I can think of only two articles on Gobetti in English, in major journals at least.1Yet post-1989,Gobetti’s searing and committed account of Italy’s failed liberal revolution seems not only more poignant but also more relevant than Gramsci’s diagnosis of those same liberal deficiencies and his unsuccessful attempt to overcome them. Gramsci’s continued iconic status among the Left lies in his being ‘an innocent communist’.The phrase is Michael Walzer’s (1989: 81) and, as he has noted, it is unclear whether Gramsci’s guiltlessness results from his having been genuinely more democratic, libertarian and ‘western’ than those eastern-bloc Marxists who ultimately achieved power, or from Mussolini’s jailers having saved him from dirtying his hands by needing either to implement his ideals or to associate with Stalin. There is certainly a strong radical and anti-statist strand within Gramsci’s thought. There is also a shrewd appreciation of the obstacles to revolution within developed capitalist democracies, and hence of the need to make strategic compromises to promote the workers’cause.Yet there are also elitist and authoritarian elements, especially in relation to the role of the Party as the ‘new Machiavelli’ charged with organizing the popular will. Like any successful politician,Gramsci neatly balanced principle and pragmatism,and what stemmed from the one as opposed to the other is not always easy to judge. For example, was his desire to learn from and harness the ‘spontaneous’ feelings of the proletariat a deep commitment or a tactical concession, that would have given way to tight Party control whenever popular sentiments departed from the leadership’s line? Did his advocacy of building a counter-hegemony through educating the