This evocative book on Gramsci will draw readers to the great revolutionary, but doesn’t get to grips with the political strategy for which he argued, finds Jon Harding

On 27 April each year, two groups gather at Antonio Gramsci’s grave in a Rome cemetery to mark the anniversary of his death. They conduct separate ceremonies. They do not speak to each other. Andy Merrifield, who volunteers at the cemetery, treats their quarrel with fond irony: two men falling out over a rifle, the narcissism of minor differences. But what if the difference is not minor? What if it maps onto something real: a genuine dispute about what Gramsci actually argued, and what the left today is supposed to do with him?

That question haunts Roses for Gramsci. Merrifield never quite asks it.

David Harvey, the Marxist geographer, told Merrifield on the Brooklyn ferry that a good book should create an audience rather than merely satisfy an existing one. Merrifield largely delivers. Readers new to Gramsci will finish wanting to know considerably more. The problem is, when they go looking, they may find a rather more dangerous figure than the one tending roses in soft Roman sunshine, and one considerably less comfortable for the contemporary left than most contemporary left organisations would prefer.

Merrifield is a beautiful writer: closer in spirit to John Berger than to Gramsci himself. He reaches politics through the particular: a red rose on a marble casket, the semi-feral cats prowling the cemetery, the Sardinian stones that gave a young Antonio his patience and his sense of deep time. His account of Gramsci’s prison letters – translating Brothers Grimm fairy tales for nephews who would never know their uncle, writing to his son in Moscow who was becoming Russian and slipping beyond reach – is genuinely moving.

The Rumpelstiltskin reading is the book’s finest moment. Merrifield notes that Gramsci translated Rumpelstiltskin’s name not with the obvious Italian equivalent but with coboldo, goblin, rogue. The reason is obvious once stated. Rumpelstiltskin is the only honest character in a tale whose respectable figures lie, cheat, spy, and break every promise, living happily ever after while the ugly Rumpelstiltskin is cast as the villain. The king accumulates. The miller boasts. The queen breaks her word. Merrifield sees clearly that Gramsci, physically deformed, imprisoned, and refused clemency because he would not recant, knew which character he was. It is sharp and illuminating.

Yet here, as everywhere, just as the politics sharpens, something softens it. Merrifield calls for a ‘goblin Marxism’, mischievous, folkloric, ironic. It is a lovely phrase. But Gramsci himself reached for a different image: the Machiavellian centaur. In The Prince, Machiavelli argues that the ideal ruler must be half human, half beast, combining the cunning of the fox with the force of the lion. Gramsci took this directly as a model for counter-hegemonic politics: you need both the slow patient building of consent among the exploited, and the capacity for decisive force when the moment demands it. The fox without the lion gets outmuscled. The lion without the fox walks into traps. Merrifield knows this. The centaur appears in the book, and then it disappears again, back into the rose and the cat and the goblin. The book is about the fox – patient, cultural, consensual – and forgets the lion.

Gramsci’s centaur

This is not merely an aesthetic choice. Many on the left have reduced Gramsci to a single lesson: change how people think and the rest will follow. Build movements, shift culture, change the conversation. Power can wait. It is a half-truth that has hardened into an excuse for the status quo. This is a Gramsci the existing institutions can comfortably accommodate, one well-suited to those whose real interest lies in managing the boundaries of resistance rather than breaking through them. The organic intellectuals who lose sight of the revolutionary horizon don’t get defeated, they get absorbed. They become the system’s pressure valve, not its replacement.

Which brings us to what the book cannot fully account for: the Lisa report. In The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (1978), Perry Anderson shows how Gramsci’s revolutionary thought was systematically misread and suppressed. It is more gripping than the roses, the cats or the Sardinian stones. Anderson focuses on Athos Lisa, a fellow prisoner at Turi who recorded what Gramsci actually argued and passed it to Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci’s position was the whole centaur, or in the other metaphor, the fox and the lion together. He argued that a constituent assembly was the path toward revolutionary counter-hegemony, not a substitute for it. Before the war, Togliatti suppressed Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s lectures as too moderate: the party wanted insurrection, not patient institutional work.

After the war, when the PCI had embraced constituent-assembly politics but abandoned the revolutionary horizon, the lion in Gramsci’s argument became the problem: too radical for a party drifting toward historic compromise with the capitalist classes. Togliatti kept Lisa’s report secret. Only in 1964, the year of his death, was the report finally published. What Anderson makes clear is that Gramsci was a Leninist adapting Lenin to Western conditions. The war of position, that patient cultural work Merrifield traces so lovingly through Berger and through the heavily censored prison letters, cannot replace the revolutionary seizure of hegemonic power. It must be its precondition.

Those two groups at Gramsci’s graveside, not speaking, are not absurd. One of them is probably less revolutionary. Merrifield treats their dispute as a sad joke. The Lisa report suggests it’s the most serious question the left has.

Merrifield’s book will send readers to Gramsci, and that is genuinely valuable. But Gramsci was not interested in admirers. He was interested in people who could, as he wrote from Turi, impose a rule of life on their impulses, who could command themselves, become conscious of their own shackled personality, and act.

The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. A rose is not enough. The thorns matter too.