Roses for Gramsci
By Andy Merrifield
$24.95 / 978-1-68590-104-2 / 148 pages
Reviewed by Seth Sandronsky for Counterpunch
Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned under the fascist Italian dictator Mussolini between World Wars 1 and 2, would have understood the popular appeal of President Donald J. Trump, a domineering figure striving to bring the cultural and political apparatus of the U.S. under his MAGA control. Andy Merrifield’s new book, Roses for Gramsci (Monthly Review Press, 2025), blends a nuanced personal and political portrait of the late Sardinian activist and author that seamlessly blends his cultural and theoretical significance. There is much to reflect on and savor in eight chapters.
In crisp and lyrical prose, Merrifield shows and tells how he ended up spending time tending to the gravesite of Gramsci in Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery. This experience launches a journey to amplify the salience and significance of a major figure of resilience and resistance to oppression. From Gramsci’s sickly childhood to his entry into economics and politics, Merrifield fleshes out the relevant actors and factors shaping that development.
Gramsci, one of six children of a hard-working single mother, endured no small measure of scorn for his diminutive stature from peers. The roots of his resilience to such hurtful mistreatment began to grow. I took from
Merrifield that Gramsci developed his patience from her, a strength of character that helped him to survive an 11-year prison sentence for violating public security. She was his emotional rock.
While imprisoned, Gramsci authored his famous Prison Notebooks, a classic of revolutionary thought, for which Merrifield provides context, including the intellectual influence of Gramsci’s friend Piero Sraffa, the Marxist economist and pal of John Maynard Keynes. Sraffa, along with Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, was a link to society outside prison walls.
A strand of Marxism ignores the late German’s earlier work and, in my view, also misinterprets parts of Capital, his magnum opus. On that note, Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony, or how the ruling ideas dominate a society, builds on Marx’s notion of false consciousness, which does flow from the ways in which the prices of commodities disappear the human labor contained in them. In Gramsci’s perspective, workers’ culture, past and current practices of laboring and living are also factors in their attraction to powerful authority. It is a complex mix.
Ruling class ideas prevail in social institutions such as the church, press and schools. With rare exceptions, indoctrination rather than education rules this roost of the status quo. As a U.S. citizen coming of age decades ago during the Vietnam War, I learned in school how Uncle Sam supports democracy globally. The reality is quite different, then and now. Take as a current case in point American funding of Israel’s murdering and starving of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Social media, a technology absent in Gramsci’s time, is a means to combat cultural hegemony.
Merrifield sheds light on Gramsci’s coining of the term “subaltern” to describe the indigenous inhabitants of imperial colonies. As a communist, he was an internationalist. Gramsci was a realist, writing about the “Southern Question” in Italy. The country’s southern region majors in agriculture, with a population less civilized, according to bigoted thinking. Ruling interests can and do exploit such differences for reasons of social control, e.g., capital’s exploitation of labor.
The historical case of the American South and its legacy as the center of slaveholding and the Confederacy’s Lost Cause resonates as Red State support for Trump now, though opposition does exist to that political order. Mobilizing white workers under economic attack to fear and hate non-white laborers is a key feature of fascist rule. A cultural strategy of divide and conquer has a history in the U.S. and takes the form of patriarchy and white supremacy.
The legacy of Gramsci speaks volumes. Merrifield introduces us to the people from around the world and all walks of life who pay their respects to the Sardinian original, leaving heartfelt notes and roses at his final resting place. Merrifield wraps up his book detailing the ebbs and flows of a flight and drive to Sardinia, culminating in ruminations on what Gramsci’s life might have been like if he had been free from imprisonment to reunite with family and friends and to pursue preferred activities such as strolling around the countryside.
The author’s black and white photographs throughout Roses for Gramsci bring a unique visual dimension to the book. A table of contents and index would help readers to better navigate Merrifield literary ode to Gramsci. He is a thinker for our time, with a personal history that helps us to understand his life of principled resistance to tyranny.
Comments are closed.