Like Antonio Gramsci found himself confined to Mussolini's dungeons, having to jot down short lines of thought in small notebooks, I at times find myself confined to the kitchen table, by a laptop, forced by an uncontrollable impulse to comment on something I have seen or read, to write a few short lines about some subject.
I recently started reading Monthly Review Press’ edition of Antonio A. Santucci’s Antonio Gramsci. Santucci there quotes Gramsci on the development of the political mass parties. Gramsci as we know was a leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and did most of his political work in the 20s and 30s. This was the era of mass parties with a wide membership base.
Gramsci however criticizes elements within these parties, namely so-called charismatic leaders. This "charisma" Gramsci claims, always coincides "with a primitive phase of mass parties, when doctrine is introduced to the masses as something so nebulous and incoherent that it needs an infallible pope to interpret it and adapt it to circumstances" (Q, p. 233, Santucci p. 41).
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