GRAMSCI, CLASS AND POST-MARXISM

While Gramsci was without doubt a revolutionary Marxist at least since 1920 and at the time of his imprisonment at the end of 1926, Ernesto Laclau and others have claimed that because of fascism’s victory, Gramsci fundamentally rethought his ideas in writing the Prison Notebooks (Poynting, 1995: 181). Laclau and other post-Marxists almost exclusively rely on the Notebooks for their understanding of Gramsci even though most of the concepts central to the Notebooks are in his pre-prison writings (Bellamy, 1994: x). Germino and Fennema (1998: 183) can find “no justification for the all too common practice of largely ignoring the pre-prison notebooks”. The prison writings have an “organic continuity with the political universe within which Gramsci had operated prior to his arrest ” (Hoare and Nowell Smith, 1971/1999, SPN: 91), and Alastair Davidson (1977: 162, 246) is certain that Gramsci himself “makes clear that his overall view had not changed since 1916, except in details ” and that “on the eve of his imprisonment Gramsci maintained much the same view of Marxism as he always had”. There had, he added, “certainly been no stupendous rupture in Gramsci’s intellectual development since 1919–20”