Gramsci revisited.

One of Gramsci’s most quoted phrases is his 1930 statement in the Prison Notebooks that ‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.

This has traditionally been taken to refer to the emergence of fascism against a background of capitalist crisis and failure of anti-capitalist forces. However, a closer examination of the textual and historical context of that sentence indicates that Gramsci was more likely to have been referring to the pci’s ultraleft turn in conjunction with the Comintern’s Third Period.

Relevant: The original author of the phrase “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is Romain Rolland*, not Gramsci who “expanded and developed the initial phrase, according to his technique of adopting a previously existing category and giving it a new and richer meaning”.

* Or maybe his spouse or sister who was then left forgotten as the patriarchy tends to do.