Gramsci was a note-taker at the Comintern section run by Muenzenberg on influence operations
If you read the details of Gramsci’s time in Moscow, from various sources, you see he was a mid-level flunky.
Interesting thoughts, but you’re missing the actual creator of PC — Willi Muenzenberg. Gramsci was a note-taker at the Comintern section run by Muenzenberg on influence operations. Muenzenberg ran covert influence and overt propaganda operations for the Comintern from the beginning of the USSR till WW2.
If you read the details of Gramsci’s time in Moscow, from various sources, you see he was a mid-level flunky.
Not saying that he was the janitor. Just that he never was a thinker, doer, mover and shaker in the Comintern, or communist theory or practice, or covert action theorist that some have credited him with posthumously.
Seems like there was some movement by Italians, post-Stalin, to find a communist hero from their own ranks. Gramsci fit the bill.
Muenzenberg was running multi-million dollar front companies, multiple book publishing, magazines, newspapers throughout Europe, overt propaganda operations, and covert influence ops, at the same time — and had been the Chairman of the Young Communists International League (or something like that), since the 1910s.
Gramsci ran a newspaper in Italy from 1918 until 1922, when he went to the Comintern congress. And then he couldn’t quite get it together to open another. A sort of pathetic striver who was always in the shadows of the big boys. He died in prison. Italian communists found the notes he wrote up, likely based on Muenzenberg’s teachings, when he died, and published them.
Muenzenberg was in exile in Switzerland with Lenin when Lenin boarded the “sealed train” through Germany to return to Russia. Muenzenberg accompanied Lenin to the station in Geneva, and wanted to accompany him. Lenin refused, since the Germans would have arrested Willi when the train passed through Germany. Muenzenberg’s status and importance and connections only became more solid in the next 10 years.
Full details: www.willingaccomplices.com