Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci

Book excerpt: "...[I]n the autumn of 1926, on the pretext of an alleged attempt on his life, Mussolini decided to make an end of even the semblance of bourgeois democracy that still survived. All remaining opposition organisations and their publications were banned, and a new, massive series of arrests was launched throughout the country. Among those arrested was Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a member of parliament -- but the régime was no longer interested in niceties about parliamentary immunity. He had also, since August 1924, been the general secretary of the Communist Party -- though of course under such political conditions the identity of party officials was kept secret. He was 35 years old. At his trial in 1928, the official prosecutor ended he peroration with the famous demand to the judge: "We must stop this brain working for twenty years!" But, although Gramsci was to be dead long before those twenty years were up, released, his health broken, only in time to die under guard in a clinic rather than in prison, yet for as long as his physique held otu his jailers did not succeed in stopping his brain from working. The product of those years of slow death in prison were the 2,848 pages of handwritten notes which he left to be smuggled out of the clinic and out of Italy after his death, and of which this volume is a selection." -- Pages xvii-xviii of Introduction.