Everyone a Legislator with author Michael Denning

Aspects of Gramsci’s work for the 21^st Century: A presentation and discussion with Michael Denning

“Perhaps Gramsci’s political science is … a “necessary expression of his time, the short twentieth century, an era now ended, the ae of three words divided between Fordist capitalism, bureaucratic communism and the post-colonial settlements of decolonization. If this is true, is there a future for Gramsci’s legacy?” —Michael Denning

In the introduction to the May/June, 2021 New Left Review is this summary of Michael Denning’s essay, “Everyone a Legislator”: “What is the principal legacy today of Gramsci’s writing on politics. Often taken to be a theory of the party as a “modern prince” derived from Machiavelli, can this still be so in an epoch when political parties are everywhere in decline? This year in the May June issue of New Left Review, Michael Denning reasons that what now matters in Gramsci’s work is his theory of organizing and a premonitory form of democratic legislation.”

The essay is available online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129.

The image used here, Verso la città futura (toward a future city), was painted on the side of an apartment complex on via Canova in Florence by artist Jorit. Underlying the painting, inscribed into the 213 meter wall is the following from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “Even when everything is or seems lost, one must calmly get back to work, starting from the beginning…The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born”.

Michael Denning is the author of Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2015); Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004); The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997); Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (1987); and Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (1987). Michael teaches American Studies at Yale University, where he coordinates the Working Group on Globalization and Culture.

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