and filled him with the conviction that Marxism was the philosophy of the
new society he was working to build; or, as he put it later in one of his prison
writings: "Marxism . . . contains within itself all the fundamental elements not
only for constructing a whole and integral conception of the world, a total
philosophy and a theory of the natural sciences, but also for bringing to life an
integral practical organisation of society; in other words, for becoming a
total, integral civilisation." By the end of the World War Gramsci had matured
into the person whom Togliatti has called the first Italian Marxist.

The essentially new feature which Gramsci brought to the Italian socialist
movement from his study of Marxism was the concept of the struggle for
power, as distinct from the struggle to defend or improve the immediate
economic conditions of the working class. Looking back beyond the period
of the Second International and reformism, represented in Italy by Fillippo
Turati, he saw that the fundamental element of Marx's teaching was that the
working class had the historical task of destroying the capitalist state and
installing itself as the new ruling class in order to build socialism and ensure
human progress. Since the beginning of the century Lenin had been fighting
the distortions of Marxism carried out by the leaders of the International. In
Italy, Gramsci was the first to realise the paramount importance of this fight.
He saw that despite local differences and peculiarities of historical develop-
ment, the problems in Italy were essentially the same as those of other Euro-
pean countries. The war had brought capitalism to the verge of catastrophe;
the ruling class of industrialists and landowners was incapable of producing
the solutions to economic difficulties which the people demanded; leadership
must therefore pass into the hands of the only class which had this ability--the
working class. This class must broaden its view of its own tasks: it must cease
merely demanding partial reforms or contenting itself with "intransigent"
opposition to the state and must begin to exercise its own "hegemony" over
the nation, taking into its own responsibility the solution of the crisis. The
working class must, in fact, recognise its rôle as the protagonist of Italian
history.

The historical organisation from which Lenin developed the theory of the
proletarian dictatorship was the soviet. After the Soviet Revolution of 1917,
which aroused immense popular enthusiasm all over Italy, Gramsci wrote:
"Does there exist in Italy an instrument of the working class which can be
likened to the soviet, and which shares its nature; something which permits us
to say: the soviet is a universal form, not a Russian, a solely Russian, institution;
that the soviet is the form in which, everywhere there are proletarians struggling
to conquer industrial independence, the working class expresses this will to
emancipate itself; that the soviet is the form of self-government of the working

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