Italy stayed out of World War I (p. 6). The workers defeat opened the way for the rise of fascism. Mussolini took power in 1922 (p. 8). Mussolini consolidated his power in 1926 (p. 8). Mussolini was a former member of the Socialist party (p. 9).
Gramsci spent much of his life building a Marxist party (p. 13). For some time he operated from Vienna. Gramsci was developing themes first sketched by Antonio Labriola, a late 19th century philosopher who gradually, as a maverick on the fringes of the socialist movement, developed a supple and imaginative version of Marxism as "philosophy of practice" (p. 74)
In chapter two, Peter Thomas writes that 'we need to reaffirm that deepening the conception of politics and political organization- and linking that with a Marxist critique of political economy- remains at the absolute center of Gramsci's project the entire way through (p. 19).
In the third chapter Peter Thomas says that 'for a proletarian hegemony , Gramsci argues that a politics of truth is necessary. He states on many occasions that the precondition for doing mass politics in the working classes need to speak the truth (p. 22). Politics, for Gramsci, was not conceived of as a moment of administration or command from above, but always in terms of the transformative dimensions of a social formation or relations between social formations (p. 24).
Peter Thomas says that Gramsci 'came to the view that it is only by acknowledging the always-already-practical nature of philosophy that it is possible not only to criticize previous forms of philosophy (including, crucially, the criticism of previous conceptions of Marxist philosophy), but also to go further and attempt to develop a new form of philosophical practice that would arguably be more genuinely philosophical than the contending and rival positions, if we are to understand philosophy as always a practice, as "love of wisdom", in the classic sense' (p. 37-38).
Moreover, Peter Thomas mentions that 'the "democratic philosopher", for Gramsci, became the philosopher who was mature enough to acknowledge the foundation of their thought in the common every day practices of the people, a philosopher who was open to the capacity for transformation of those instances, and sought himself or herself to contribute to their transformation through his or her intervention in linguistic, conceptual, or political forms' (p. 39). He believes that the democratic philosopher means an active citizen.
In chapter six, Martin Thomas states that 'the last 25 years prove that a battle for democratic forms is ineffectual if not tied together with a socialist battle to reorganize the working-class as an assertive, militant combatant for its own interest, as the champion of democracy, and as the leader of all the oppressed and plebeians' (p. 65).
Further themes in the book include hegemonic apparatuses, Gramsci's analytical developments, neo-liberalism and class organization (p. 35), 'democratic philosopher', Marx, French Communist party philosopher Louis Althusser, cosmopolitan academic and Eurocommunist. This booklet discusses a major recent study on the Notebooks- Peter Thomas's The Gramscian Moment- and argues that the Notebooks were in fact a powerful contribution to the working-out of revolutionary working-class strategy in developed capitalist societies.
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