1. Gramsci and the Sea

Gramsci on the Sea

The sea surfaces in an important way in Gramsci’s political writings in 1924, a volatile year in his life. Gramsci had been in Moscow since May of 1922, and was not in Italy during the fascist assent to power and the arrests of communist leadership in 1923. In late 1923, he moved to Vienna, tasked with linking the Communist Party of Italy, formed with Amadeo Bordiga and others in 1921 in Livorno, with other communist parties. In February of 1924, he wrote to Palmiro Togliatti and Umberto Terracini in the leadership to argue that they had entered a new phase in the history of the party and the country, that they had to engage the Third International and also rethink their relationship to the masses, and then honed in on the “problem of the military fleet”: “Italy lives from the sea; . . . to fail to concern oneself with the problem of the seamen, as one of the most important questions and worthy of the party’s maximum attention would mean to not think concretely about revolution.”7

One would think that such a strong statement would require elaboration, but it does not. I would like to think such a powerful statement is folded into other questions in his prison notebooks (Quaderni del carcere). Both propositions by the Sardinian are important and return in different forms in his writings: first, that Italy lives from the sea, and second, that seamen, particularly in the military fleet, are crucial to proletarian revolution.

In the early period of his incarceration, while he was shunted around prisons, Gramsci wrote in 1926 to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, about the penal island of Ustica: “You can’t imagine how happy I am to wander from one corner of the island to another and to breathe in the sea air after a whole month of being passed from one prison to another.”8 A letter meant for Piero Sraffa describes the arduous journey to Ustica, with seasickness in chains; a letter that never reached Schucht details another “rough crossing” from Ustica to Palermo and on to Naples in February of 1927.9 He reflects from Milan that April in a letter to Schucht that in Ustica he “came to know a colony of Bedouins banished from Cyrenaica [Italian Libya] for political reasons,” and that, in Naples, “I began to recognize a series of highly interesting types, whereas before the only southerners I had known at close quarters were Sardinians.”10 These letters offer an early revision and expansion of his statement on the importance of seamen. Perhaps, through this line of thought, Gramsci began to realize the limits to an anthropological rather than political conception of the subaltern. The embodied materiality of the sea is vividly present in seasickness and the brisk sea air, and in a structure of feeling that evokes the carceral sea as a contradictory space, a space of the emergence of new combinations in C. L. R. James Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra.

When he did start work in earnest on his notebooks, Gramsci was farthest from the phenomenal experience of the sea, but the materiality of the sea remained lodged in his consciousness as a precarious liminal zone. Gramsci does not name a sequence of notes on the sea directly, but certain themes emerge, beginning with Notebook 2, 1929–1933. He does not say it explicitly, but the concern across these notes is with a specific interwar ocean posed as a conjuncture in interimperial histories, with important cultural effects in the particular literary archives to which he had access.

In an extract from an article on the Italian merchant marine, Gramsci gets into the nitty gritty of wartime loss both for commerce and for the navy. He focuses in on the importance of freighters as opposed to passenger liners during the war, which left a premium on liner building after the war, and drew capital to luxury steam-liners precisely at a time of heightened mass migration; he also notes a tendency to gigantism and limits to the velocity of transoceanic circulation (“speed . . . must be held in check in order to be economical”); and he also notices that one can no longer think about the political economy of shipping in isolation from airspace.11 In this note, Gramsci has an intuition about some of the key elements of transmodal logistics that would emerge only much later in the century, of the fantasy of smooth movement of commodities by land, sea, and air. He does not fetishize Marx’s notion of the “annihilation of space by time,” because it may not always make political-economic sense. He argues that technological change in the building of new kinds of ships lowers the value of previous ships destined for the ship-breaking yard; and he also notes that this dynamic forces people and goods into risky forms of shipping—risky both for seafarers and for the insurance industry, that is. Thinking in the aftermath of the First World War, Gramsci theorizes what Laleh Khalili calls the “sinews of war and trade,” or the intertwining of military and capitalist dynamics.12 By thinking across sea and air, he helps us ask how oceanic extraction in our time is linked in complex ways to the specter of outer-space mining as well.

Another sequence of notes concerns geopolitics. The first note in this sequence (Q2, §16) begins with a critique of an argument that “from the battle of Marathon until the world war, world politics have been controlled by Europe”; criticizing the ahistorical treatment of “the world,” he adds sarcastically, “the Chinese and Indian civilizations must have counted for something.” Then he turns to the history of the United States, and to the Washington conference of 1921–1922 that “dealt with China, with the balance of power in the seas of the Far East,” while the Root–Takahira Agreement tried to stabilize relations with Japan. Gramsci notes the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines, Guam (from the Marianas), the Hawaiian Islands, and the Samoan island of Tutuila, and in the Caribbean Sea, U.S. power over Puerto Rico, leasing of Guantanamo Bay, control of customs at Haiti’s Port-au-Prince, and financial and military power in the Dominican Republic. Gramsci is attentive to the diversity of political and economic arrangements in the terraqueous spread of U.S. power across oceans, and he would be engaged with Chinese geopolitics in the Indian and Pacific Oceans today.

Gramsci picks up on these themes in Q2, §40, on naval powers and Eurasian geopolitics from Scandinavia and the Baltic region to the possibility of a Russian-German bloc from the Arctic Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Rhine to the Pacific. He continues in §48, on “the constitution of the English Empire,” with its combination of financial, industrial, and naval power. This attentiveness to the sinews of political-economic and military power becomes key to his reconceptualization of the notion of hegemony and, more precisely, of the integral state that conjoins civil and political hegemony. Scholars have tended to read Gramsci’s thinking in a national and European frame, but in these notes, we see him thinking across oceans in an imperial frame. When he reflects on imperial geopolitics, there is a different quality to his spatial attentiveness as well: he notes that, although the Imperial Conference of 1926 defined different areas as “autonomous communities with equal rights,” they in fact play differentiated roles in the imperial ensemble, also in control of the seas through the Indian and Australian navies. Then we have this enigmatic note §78, which I would like to read in full:

Atlantic-Pacific. The role of the Atlantic in modern culture and economics. Will this axis move to the Pacific? The largest masses of population in the world are in the Pacific: if China and India were to become modern nations with massive industrial production, their break from European dependence would really rupture the present balance—a transformation of the American continent, shifting the axis of American life from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast, etc. Examine all these questions in economic and political terms (trade, etc.)

If this sounds like conventional political science, we should keep in mind that Gramsci was mercilessly critical of the political science of his time. Just as Marx posed his task as a critique of political economy, Gramsci self-consciously engages across several notes in a critique of political science. We should instead keep in mind the notes I have suggested, in which imperial geopolitics are differentiated, and in which hegemony is an expansive and shifting geopolitical project in space and time. The concerns of these notes, however, do not seem to make explicit a spatial conception of imperial hegemony. His thoughts are very much part of what we can now see in retrospect as a set of late-imperial debates about oceanic power in the face of hegemonic continentalism, whether in the Pax Britannia, the Pax Americana, or the Third Reich.13

Consider note §97 of Q2, in which Gramsci interprets an anonymous article in his terms, as offering the hypothesis that the Unites States “wants to become the hegemonic political force of the British Empire, that is, it wants to conquer the English empire from within and not from the outside by war.” This is quite a provocative interpretation of what would later be called the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain as actually a new way of becoming hegemonic; it is also an application of his own way of understanding the emergence of new hegemonic projects within the old, through the renovation of prior social institutions and power relations.

He picks up on this theme in Notebook 5 (1930–1932), §8, in a reading of Frisella Vella, whom he cites as proposing that, “since Asia is the most suitable area for American economic expansion, and since America’s lines of communication with Asia go across the Pacific as well as across the Mediterranean, Europe must not oppose the transformation of the Mediterranean into a big artery of American-Asian commerce.” Gramsci’s own perspective is not always easy to discern in his readings of texts, except that he ends that Vella “is convinced of the inevitability of American global hegemony,” while Gramsci never thinks hegemony is inevitable or unending. This note helps us see maritime sinews of empire as precisely the terrain of an ongoing and insecure imperial hegemony.

When Gramsci takes these insights out of a Eurocentric frame, he battles with his own limitations. That is the most generous way I can put it. In §23 of Q5, “Brief Notes on Chinese Culture. I,” he argues that “England, America, and Japan . . . are superior to China not only ‘militarily’ but also economically and culturally; in short, they are superior in all areas of society.” He continues: “Only the current ‘cosmopolitan’ unity of hundreds of millions of people with its specific form of nationalism based on ‘race’—xenophobia—enables the central government of China to have at its disposal the minimal financial and military means with which to resist international pressures and keep its adversaries divided.” Despite this insight, he reverts to Orientalism when he argues here: “One must not forget that the Chinese historical movement is confined to the Pacific coast and the banks of the great rivers that flow into the Pacific; the great mass of people in the hinterland is more or less passive.” We ought to subject Gramsci to his own method here, to expect new forms of Chinese imperial power over land and sea; and we ought to insist on a critique of xenophobia and not simply an assertion of it, a point that the Sardinian had come to appreciate in his own critique of the Southern Question.

In Q5, §45, Gramsci just cites Enrico Catellani’s article “La libertà del mare.” He would have known Catellani’s work a decade earlier on Germany’s investment in the Luftwaffe as a means of gaining aerial military advantage over Britain’s naval power. Recall he had already suggested that we think of the sea in relation not just to land but also to airspace (Q2, §12). He does not say more about the legal regimes that might govern the sea of the future, but we can surmise that he knew it would be important for the shift to American imperial hegemony.

The next note on “naval issues” is §60 in Q6, which turns to the relative visibility of naval as opposed to landed armaments: “Naval armaments are hard to conceal; it is impossible to have secret shipyards or cruisers built in secret.” He then compares England as an island reliant on its connections with its colonies “to provision its populations, whereas America is a self-sufficient continent, has two oceans that are connected by the Panama Canal.” He then asks: “Why should a state relinquish its geographic and strategic advantages if these put it in a position conducive to world hegemony? Why should England have a certain hegemony over a set of countries based on certain traditional conditions that favored its superiority, if the United States can be superior to England and absorb it, together with its empire, if possible?” This is back to the “special relationship”; an editor’s note to §60 argues we should read this in light of the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, which included a treaty between Britain and the United States to maintain parity in naval power (see Q2, §97).

While Gramsci is absorbed in these intrigues over world hegemony, he also asks other questions about them. For instance, in Q8, §124, on “the economic corporative phase of Italian history, the Lepanto enterprise,” shifts the debate about the naval battle at Lepanto to note that, “of the more than two hundred ships that took part in the battle, only fourteen were Spanish; all the others were Italian,” and he critiques an account that makes a claim that there was no part of the peninsula that did not take part in Lepanto. Gramsci questions the methodological nationalism of this account and asks for more intricate accounting of the political and economic arrangements through which “soldiers from diverse regions of Italy [were] enrolled” in inter-imperial war.

There is another linked but quite different theme across another set of notes that are broadly on the cultural effects of oceanic geopolitics, and more particularly on ways of dealing with the end of naval or commercial power. In Notebook 3, §78, one of several notes about conservative populist writing called “Father Bresciani’s progeny,” turns to the popular serial novel, reading in Jules Verne “anti-English sentiment, linked to the loss of colonies and to the lingering pain of naval defeats.” Gramsci has something of the book historian in him as well. In Q4, §93 (“Intellectuals. Brief Notes on English Culture”), he argues not just that “the loss of naval and trade supremacy” has effects for content, but that the commerce in “American books, together with American culture, . . . are an increasingly competitive threat to English books.” The entire process of publishing, distribution, and advertising, he thinks, is becoming more American. And this is an effect of the oceanic geopolitical shifts in the Anglosphere.

This is what Gramsci has to say explicitly about oceanic matters, but there is more to be said about the oceanic metaphors that pervade his notes. In Q2, §32, Gramsci reads an anonymous text and speculates that the author is a Russian exile with ties with the English right wing committed to the notion of an inevitable Anglo–Russian war. He concludes: “Official relations between the two countries resemble the waves on the surface of the ocean which come and go capriciously; but deep down there is the strong historical current which leads to war.” What do we make of these metaphors of surface waves and deep currents?

Gramscian Tidalectics

The language of currents recurs across the notes: currents of thought, socialist currents, literary currents, philosophical currents, non-Marxist currents, cultural currents, ideological currents, political currents, currents of public opinion, currents of popular passion, main currents, continental currents, religious-ecclesiastical currents, optimistic currents, modern currents, individual currents, Italian currents, Jacobin currents, and less vulgar currents. And that’s just in Notebook 1. On the other hand, there are waves of revolutionary activity, waves of literary experimentation, waves of workers movements, waves of anticlericism, waves of insurrection that are not revolutionary, and those that are. The wildly inconsistent use of these metaphors means they were not meant to be concepts.

How, then, do we make sense of the statement that “waves on the surface come and go capriciously, but deep down there is the strong historical current”? How do we read this with Gramsci’s relentless intention to break with mechanistic materialism in the Marxist tradition? As various readers of Gramsci note, he takes as axiomatic across several of his notes this passage from Marx’s 1859 preface to the Critique of Political Economy:

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.14

The first statement is a refutation of a stageist conception of modes of production. The old social order (capitalism) cannot die while its technologies have room or scope; and yet the new (let us call it X, as Kojin Karatani does) cannot yet appear.15 The second statement is about the “problem space,” to use David Scott’s term, that Gramsci is always in.16 The task that mankind sets itself can appear only when the solution is already in formation. This does not mean it is inevitable, or we would know what to do with fossil-fuel capital; but we might know what is to be done in theory.

As we return to the metaphors of waves and deep currents, we should note that Gramsci himself argues that a concept-metaphor emerges from and should be understood in relation to “the historically determined cultural world from which it sprang.”17 This is a precise corollary to the passage from Marx above that Gramsci takes as axiomatic, and its implication is that there is more to Gramsci’s oceanic metaphors than meet the eye.

I have suggested that the statement on currents and waves in §32 of Q2 expresses Gramsci’s own attempt to think in a nonmechanistic way about the relation between structure and superstructure. So let us turn to a key note on the relation between structure and superstructure, §17 in Q13. “In studying structure,” Gramsci writes in this note, “it is necessary to distinguish organic movements (relatively permanent) from movements which may be termed ‘conjunctural’ (and which appear as occasional, immediate, almost accidental).”18 Conjunctural phenomena “give rise to political criticism of a minor, day to day character”; on the other hand, “organic phenomena give rise to socio-historical criticism.” On the face of it, this seems to be a theorization of the metaphor of surface waves and deep currents. In periods of protracted crisis, Gramsci continues, organic contradictions become apparent on the terrain of the conjunctural—that is, on the surface. The problem Gramsci identifies here is that critics tend to approach this eruption of the organic into the conjunctural through either “an excess of ‘economism,’” or “an excess of ideologism” when the challenge is in apprehending “the dialectical nexus between the two categories of movement, and therefore of research,” and he adds: “If error is serious in historiography, it becomes still more serious in the art of politics.”19

As a methodological operation, for research and for politics, Gramsci proposes in this note that we distinguish three “moments or levels”: first, the “relation of social forces which is closely related to the structure . . . and which can be measured with the systems of the exact or physical sciences;” second, “the relation of political forces,” which is also the terrain of “self-awareness” and of the formation of collective political consciousness and organization; and third, “the relation of military forces which from time to time is directly decisive.”

What Gramsci does not intend by the metaphor of “levels” is a Marxist stratigraphy in which the deeper level offers truths about higher levels. Note 17 of Q13 warns against thinking of these moments or levels in these causal terms. There is no inevitable “process of development from one moment to the next;” instead, he concludes, “contradictory outcomes are possible: either the old society resists and ensures itself a breathing-space, by physically exterminating the élite of the rival class and terrorizing its mass reserves; or a reciprocal destruction of the conflicting forces occurs, and a peace of the graveyard is established, perhaps even under the surveillance of a foreign guard.”20 I will return to this final phrase.

What I am calling Gramsci’s “tidalectics” is in fact pitted against a stratigraphic way of thinking; it is also a dialectical method key to thinking about oceanic processes in the wake of a patriarch of oceanic studies, Fernand Braudel, and his ambitious and deliberate layering of geographical histories of the Mediterranean, in which the deepest layer of oceanic history is “organic” in a different way, as the environment is a shaping force but not one that erupts into the conjunctural surface in quite the same way as in Gramsci’s imagination.21 Much has been written about thinking beyond the waning light of Braudel’s Mediterranean volumes, but it is his structure of thought, with its deep environmental determinism, that remains so powerful. Gramsci’s dialectical method offers something very different; it pushes against landed and layered grammars of historical temporalization.22

Crucial to this project is Gramsci’s hope that organic contradictions can be discerned on the terrain of the conjunctural to shape political and military strategy; this is all the more important when, as Gramsci claims through Marx, the material conditions for the new (X) are in the process of their materialization in the world and in theory, and just as importantly when they are not. To exemplify the latter, Gramsci turns to the exhaustion of a particular understanding of revolution in Europe in the late nineteenth century: the notion of “permanent revolution” and the emergence, he elaborates in other notes, of what he calls “passive revolution.”

I should pause to say that there is a great deal of debate about the concept of “passive revolution.” Anglophone writers have tended to fix the concept in ways that a more careful and philological reading across Gramsci’s notes cannot sustain. Philological reading became possible with Valentino Gerratana’s 1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks, only some of which have been translated into English by Joseph Buttigieg since the 1990s. Peter Thomas is indispensable in the Anglophone work, and he argues that we should think of passive revolution as a heuristic formula that allows for different formulations in different contexts, even though it emerged from debates in 1920s communism about how to think about “the revolution in permanence” in the politically fraught interwar period.23 It is also a framework for thinking with the axiomatic passage from Marx’s 1859 preface in a practice of “political and strategic reflection,” which for him in 1930s Italy required an engagement with Benedetto Croce, Machiavelli, and Marx.24

In elaborating this argument, Gramsci turns, as he often does, to a very schematic treatment of complex histories, as he writes in shorthand that the foreclosure of the French Revolution meant that, over a sequence of convulsions, the spirit of Jacobinism was sublated in a new form of political power that, by the end of the nineteenth century, restored hegemony by reviving older political and economic forms. This was not just the fate of revolution in France; it was also, in a different way, the fate of Italian unification and its restoration of mercantile and landed power. Gramsci is extremely careful about the spatial differentiation of passive revolution in various forms, even while he is extremely schematic. In different ways, passive revolution conserves the old, it hijacks the language of revolution that Gramsci in an important note calls “revolution-restoration” or “revolution without revolution” (Q1, §44).25

If we turn to the ensemble of concepts that Gramsci works with “philologically,” what is striking is that passive revolution leads him to continue to labor on his to-his-mind-incomplete 1926 piece titled “Some Aspects of the Southern question.” Written before his imprisonment, the 1926 piece was Gramsci’s reckoning with the social origins of the Sardist ideology of his childhood, as well as a schematic mapping of the conditions for a recasting of the “Southern Question” to enable the political alliance of northern workers and southern peasants under the leadership of an emerging proletarian hegemony in Turin and Milan. The incarcerated Gramsci turned to the heuristic of passive revolution in different ways to reckon with the defeat of this worker-led communist hegemony, or the transformations of the hegemonic apparatus in various ways in various times.

And as he works on passive revolution through his prison notes, it appears to be a form of “political and strategic reflection” in the wake of multiple defeats: at some points it is about explaining the failed possibilities of the Italian Risorgimiento; at others the sublation of “the revolution in permanence” in Europe, including, as we see in his letters on the centralization of power under Stalin, after the Russian Revolution; and it is a reckoning with the defeats of revolutionary currents from the French Revolution across the nineteenth-century landscape. At every moment, Gramsci is interested in what is nascent in these moments of defeat, to imagine their end. It is not surprising that this framework has been fruitful for thinkers in the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century concerned with the degradation of anticolonial nationalism, as in the work of Frantz Fanon, Partha Chatterjee, Stuart Hall, Gillian Hart, and others.26

We ought to pause to do what Gramsci suggests, to notice the rhythm of a thinkers thought. Within the ensemble of his concepts, passive revolution is central to his critique of political science, and to the rethinking of the notion of uneven and combined development of capitalism without the mechanistic materialism, economism, or voluntarism in various strands of radical thought. As Gramsci elaborates over a series of notes on passive revolution, he is not interested only in the residues of “historical Jacobinism” in the unmaking of the French Revolution, but also in the sublation, as both cancelling and preserving what he calls a Jacobin spirit in the political formation to come. Hence, the revolutionary eighteenth century gave way to a series of struggles in the nineteenth century that, by the 1870s, both cancelled and preserved the spirit of Jacobinism in a new kind of hegemony that made claims to the past while ensuring a break with popular militancy. Gramsci’s notes might seem to exemplify these shifts within a European frame, but his notes on the sea point to what it might mean to think of them in an imperial frame.

The key point I would like to make here is that the rhythm of Gramsci’s thought, and particularly his wrestling with a materialist conception of sublation, gives more than metaphoric significance to his notion of waves and currents. His note on structure and superstructure, §17 of Q13, conveys a nonmechanistic and nonidealist notion of sublation and actualization, a particular kind of “tidalictic” approach that avoids both mechanistic materialism and idealist voluntarism. Sublation of the spirit of Jacobinism points to submerged legacies of popular struggle that might surface at various opportune moments. I have suggested a particular reading of Gramsci, that the sea was for him not just an abstraction, but part of a tidalectical method that pushes well beyond the limits of a stratigraphic and terracentric imagination. That is his oceanic method.

Gramsci’s Oceanic Marxism

From the early sketch of “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” to his subsequent elaborations on passive revolution, the making and unmaking of the “hegemonic apparatus,” the intellectual, and the articulation of subaltern political will, Gramsci keeps returning to the unanswered questions of his youth. How do we understand the subordination of the south, and of Sardinia and particular, if not by driving the settler into the sea? I have suggested that the recursive quality of Gramsci’s thought, his reading of the cancelation and preservation of prior struggles in new hegemonic formations, reflects what he suggests is a relation between, on the one hand, the conjunctural surface as waves rocking the boat of prisoners to the penal isle of Ustica, and on the other, the deep currents that sometimes break into that surface, including the surface of militant consciousness.

So, what might we make of Gramsci’s “oceanic feeling,” a phrase from Romain Rolland that he would undoubtedly have labored with. Rolland referred to what he thought was a religious experience, a feeling of oneness with everything that he had discerned in the Indian mystics Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Freud, his interlocutor, shared Rolland’s sense of despair with the West in a time of World War, but he mobilized Rolland’s concept differently. Ranjana Khanna argues that, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, “Freud set up the modern ego against something named the oceanic feeling” not in Rolland’s sense but “as a regression to primary narcissism.”27 Gramsci was certainly as interested as Rolland in the importance of forging a “conception of the world” different from but nonconflictual with that held by the West. Yet, neither Rolland’s spiritualism nor Freud’s particular psychoanalytic response would have been adequate to Gramsci’s “absolute secularization and earthliness of thought” (Q11, §27). He does not exactly elaborate on what he means by this phrase, although we know from the rhythms of his thought that it would require interrogating not only the Christian foundations of European secularism and the colonial foundations of Roland’s orientalism, but also, as Isabel Hofmeyr puts it, the oceanic “spiritscapes” that persist despite “hydrocolonialism.”28 Gramsci’s oceanic feeling would also have to historicize the European oceanic sublime in the shipwrecks of J. M. W. Turner or the great white whale of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.29 Gramsci would have to elaborate Rolland’s concept through attention to multiple imaginaries and to the materiality of the sea.

If there is an oceanic Marxism in Gramsci, a Marxist engaged with the ocean as we see it today, it would have to attend to two things. First, this oceanic Gramsci would have to stretch his notion of the “organic,” which may have entered his thought through Henri Bergson, to take this speculative concept back through “the earthliness of thought.”30 Gramsci’s organicitá might have taken him to deepen a conception of biopolitics, particularly as the passive revolution across imperial space forged a terraqueous infrastructure in defense of some forms of life, and not others. This might have taken him to the world ocean transformed into our contradictory ocean, with its own “peace of the graveyard . . . perhaps even under the surveillance of a foreign guard” (Q2, §17).31

Second, we might keep in mind the letter Gramsci wrote to his son Delio in 1932:

Dearest Delio, I heard you went to the sea and saw some very beautiful things. I’d like you to write me a letter describing these beauties. Did you discover some new living creature? There’s so much teeming life near the sea: little crabs, medusas, starfish, etc. A long time ago, I promised to write you some stories about the animals I used to know as a boy, but then I wasn’t able to do so. Now I’ll try to tell you one or two.32

In this letter to his young son, we see Gramsci’s journey from his own childhood in Sardinia, from the notion of driving the settlers into the sea to remembering the teeming life of the sea. In this child’s eye view, a different but still embodied and earthly political horizon emerges, one of radical kinship with “little crabs, medusas, starfish, etc.” What might it mean to constitute collective political will to refuse its transformation into a graveyard as well?