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Stuart Hall on what he calls Gramsci's question, and why the Prison Notebooks changed his own way of thinking about politics. The classic texts of Marx and Lenin, he argues, lead you to expect a revolutionary epoch opening from the end of the First World War, and for a time events obliged: Gramsci belongs to that "proletarian moment", Turin in the 1920s, when people in touch with the advance guard of the industrial working class believed that if the managers and politicians got out of the way that class could run the factories and remake society. Hall's point is that it very nearly came off — it was touch and go, as Russia in 1917 showed. Gramsci's question arises afterwards, from the recognition that history was not going that way in the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe, and from having to confront that turn.
Précis by Red Mole.
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