Carl Marzani helped American readers meet Antonio Gramsci through a short book he translated and edited in 1957. He wanted readers to use Marxism to think through new problems, including the crises in the Communist world. His route to that work passed through party work, wartime service, prison, and left publishing. This account follows his life through 1957, with selected responses to the book through 1967.[1][2][3]
Early life and intellectual formation
Marzani was born in Rome on March 4, 1912. His family moved to the United States in 1924 and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He learned English in school and won a scholarship to Williams College. After graduating in 1935, he worked in New York before a fellowship took him to Oxford in 1936.[2][4]
His later memoir explains how his views took shape. On the voyage to England, he read Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. He recalled being struck by its method: Trotsky placed events within a whole society and its conflicts. An earlier attempt to read John Strachey's work on the economy had left him confused. Trotsky made a Marxist approach clearer to him.[4]
Marzani linked his turn toward radical politics to several experiences. His father's struggles with employers had made class conflict personal. Fascism and the war in Spain strengthened his anger. He briefly served with an anarchist militia in Spain, then returned to England. In his memoir, he connected that experience to a growing belief that wealth and power protected those at the top.[4][5]
Joining a Communist party was a further step. His partner Edith Eisner had joined the American party and urged him to join in Britain. He recalled resisting party discipline even while admiring Communist anti-Fascist work and labor organizing. They married in March 1937. He joined the British party that spring.[5]
Party study then gave his outlook a firmer shape. At a school in Kent, he studied the Communist Manifesto and heard Maurice Dobb and R. Palme Dutt. The stress on class struggle helped him connect his reading to work and family life. He later described his Marxism as the product of learning over time. These are his memories from the 1990s. They were not a diary written in 1937.[5]
Ideas and political aims
Marxism as a method
By 1957, Marzani presented Marxism as a broad way to study society that should grow through new questions. He opposed turning it into a fixed set of answers. He saw Gramsci as a thinker who tied those questions to the tasks of workers seeking power.[1]
The title and notes were part of Marzani's own case for an open Marxism. In his introduction, he asked readers to consider Gramsci in light of disputes over the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Poland. He treated questions about culture and freedom as urgent problems for socialist states. His purpose was to renew Marxist thought and practice.[1]
He also stressed the freedom to seek new knowledge. Yet the passage he discussed allowed a socialist government to check findings before they appeared in print. The freedom to study and the freedom to publish were distinct questions. His account of Gramsci did not settle them for American readers.[1]
A party member's later account
Marzani said he joined the Communist Party USA in August 1939 and left in August 1941. In his memoir, he linked his departure to disputes over discipline and control. One dispute concerned his expulsion of a member who kept writing to the party leader. Marzani later regretted that act. Another concerned whether party orders would bind him while he worked for a broader anti-Hitler group.[6]
He presented these events as signs of an outlook that later drew him toward Gramsci. The timing needs care. Marzani wrote that he read Gramsci when the writings appeared in Italy after the war. He was looking back when he called his earlier conduct Gramscian. That label does not show that Gramsci guided his choices in 1941.[6]
Career and activities
Government service and a criminal case
Marzani taught economics at New York University before entering wartime government service in March 1942. He worked in the Office of the Coordinator of Information and its successor, the Office of Strategic Services . His work included presentations and films. His unit later moved to the State Department, where he became deputy chief of the Presentation Division.[2][7]
He left government service in 1946 and made films for labor unions. A federal court convicted him in 1947 over false statements denying past Communist Party membership and the use of an alias. On appeal, nine counts failed because the time limit for prosecution had passed; two counts concerning statements made in 1946 remained. Marzani challenged the case and later described it as a political frame-up. He later said he was in prison from 1949 to July 1951.[7][6][2][8]
Labor and left publishing
After prison, Marzani edited UE Steward for the United Electrical Workers. In 1954, he joined Angus Cameron in running Liberty Book Club and a publishing firm. These jobs gave him a way to select books and reach an American left audience.[2]
In his memoir, he recalled offering Isaac Deutscher's life of Stalin through the club in 1954. He thought his earlier reading of Trotsky had kept him from making Stalin a hero. News of Stalin's crimes in 1956 pained him but did not make him give up Marxism. That was his later account of why he sought renewal rather than a break with socialism.[4]
The Gramsci project grew within that work. Marzani's 1957 translator's note says Cameron Associates had considered a volume by 1955. Leg injuries later confined him to bed and gave him time to translate. He stopped when he learned of another planned selection, then decided the work already done spoke to American problems and should appear.[1]
Major works
The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci [1] was published by Cameron Associates in New York in October 1957. The short selection drew chiefly on Gramsci's philosophical notes. Marzani added an introduction and notes that connected the passages to current disputes. The book made his own interpretation part of the reader's encounter with Gramsci.[1]
Marzani explained some of his changes. He removed passages and notes he thought would be hard for Americans to follow, cut repetition, and changed some terms. He also replaced some of Gramsci's indirect wording with the names or ideas he thought it meant. His edition should be read as a selection shaped for a particular audience.[1]
His book therefore has two uses for this history. It provides English versions of selected Gramsci passages. It also records what an American Marxist editor wanted readers to do with those passages in 1957. Readers need to keep those voices distinct.[1][3]
Influence and criticism
Howard Selsam 's February 1958 review in Mainstream welcomed the chance to study Gramsci. He objected that Marzani's many notes pulled the text into current Communist disputes. He wanted references that would let readers check the Italian originals. Selsam found value in both men's ideas, but wanted room to study each on his own terms.[3]
Fred Hallett took a more favorable view in Political Affairs that April. He preferred Marzani's English to Louis Marks's, while finding the selection too short. Hallett stressed alliances and the work of intellectuals. He wanted a fuller account that spoke more directly to Americans.[9]
Cammett later recalled that the booklet had inspired him while his research was underway. His 1967 book offered a much larger history of Gramsci's political development. That recollection identifies one reader for whom Marzani's selection mattered. The reviews show an early American debate about how to use Gramsci, rather than a measure of the book's wider reach.[5][10]