Excerpted from Roses for Gramsci
By Andy Merrifield
$24.95 / 978-1-68590-104-2 / 148 pages
THE MAN IN THE WHITE VEST AND I SHAKE HANDS AND bid each other arrivederci. Wandering back to my duties at the cemetery’s Visitor’s Center, leaving him with Gramsci and that red rose, I realized I’d forgotten to ask if it was he who had laid the flower there. I never got the chance to talk with him, either, about the significance of roses for Gramsci and how growing them became almost as much a passion as filling his thirty-three scholastic notebooks.
After Gramsci was transferred in July 1928 to the Turi prison for the infirm and disabled in Bari, Calabria, he began, in a little plot of soil along a sidewall of its courtyard, to grow different plants and flowers. His letters to Tatiana and Giulia thereafter fill up with news of their progress. On April 22, 1929, he wrote Tatiana: “On one fourth of a square meter I want to plant four or five seeds of each kind and see how they turn out.” He asks his sister-in-law if she can get hold of sweet pea, spinach, carrot, chicory, and celery seeds.
Gramsci says he’s become more patient, “but only by virtue of a great effort to control myself.” He seems to take inspiration from his flowers and plants, from their slow and persistent growth, from the rose he’s trying to cultivate, patiently and persistently—against all odds. “The rose has fallen victim of a dreadful sunstroke,” he says, “all the leaves in the more tender parts are burnt and carbonized; it has a desolate, sad aspect, but it is putting out new buds.” Seemingly referring to himself, he adds: “It isn’t dead, at least not yet.” In Gramsci’s letters, the plight of his dear rose strikes as an allegory of his own dear plight…. | more…
In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!
ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…
Richard Clarke recommends a hugely valuable text for those seeking theoretical analysis and practical action to defend public services: ‘Matthews argues that capitalism’s devaluation of the “normative body” and the social exclusion of many disabled individuals “is firmly grounded within capitalism’s rejection of them as a source of economic value”….’ | more…
Marsh draws on the insights of Marx and Veblen, producing literary criticism that blends the economy and ideology. We get a fresh take on a 100-year-old novel that helps to contextualize the current moment of AI and anthropogenic climate chaos. | more…
He writes of the ‘august wilderness’ of the ranch and his growing responsiveness to the landscape that teaches him to carry a ‘grand negation’ in the soul: “a relentless hate, or a fierce contempt, or an awful calm, or a granite resignation”. These are the qualities that shine through his prose and make “Paraguayan sorrow” such a powerful and moving book to read. | more…
Our collective humanity very much depends on the natural world, for joy, for comfort, and for sheer survival. Nature is full of complex and dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with our societies. The natural world is not simply active in some abstract sense; its collective physical interactions guide and forge many fundamental features of human societies and civilizations. Humanity does not exist on a magical pedestal above the rest of reality; we are just one slice in a grand continuum of physical
we’re born with the wit to master Advanced Drone Escape 101 and How to Breathe Through Dust 202. By the time this war began, I was already a seasoned student. I had passed the tests five times already, miraculously surviving five destructive wars in just 25 years. So I was familiar with the drill: grab your documents, your children and whatever food you can carry, and run. But knowing the drill doesn’t make it easier. | more…
Losurdo provides us with an ideological map of opportunist Continental left-wing philosophy. The Western Marxists that he criticizes are the Frankfurt School (Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas); French theory ( Alain Badiou; Michel Foucault); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of Empire); Hannah Arendt; Slavoj Zizek; Ernst Bloch; Norberto Bobbio; Leon Trotsky and his disciples (including Perry Anderson) and others. Losurdo demonstrates the influence of Western Marxism on such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser who did not wholly succumb to it…. | more…
….and the “normal” body, if you want to use that term, is the one which can keep up with the productivity of machinery, of factory life. And what Marx argued in fact was that in most cases, the productivity of machinery could outpace that of the ‘normal’ body, if you want to put it that way…” | more…
Excerpted from:
CHAPTER 8: Healthcare under Capitalism
Fundamental to the Marxist method is dialectics, with change understood as emerging from the interaction between objects and phenomena. The health status of any individual arises from the dialectical interaction between the materialism of their body and the materialism of the social context within which the body is situated. The body has its own biological structural organization, governed by its own internal biological forces. Without doubt there exists an expected way in which the body functions, reflecting its inherent structural operation, which,
It is true that what Losurdo leaves us is not an encyclopedia nor a comforting panacea. Instead, like Virgil leading Dante through the inferno, he offers to help light the way as our guide through this capitalist imperialist hellscape. Like Virgil, however, Losurdo cannot see this journey through for us. | more…
….cites a popular and influential book by a self-proclaimed Marxist that invites us to “change the world without taking power.” “Here,” declares Losurdo, “the self-dissolution of Western Marxism ends up departing from the terrain of politics and settling in the land of religion.” Losurdo is clear that “changing the world” involves an intensification of anti-colonial struggle, and an ongoing renewal of Marxism, not limited to any hemisphere. | more…
