Chapter Eleven John Cammett’s Writings on Antonio Gramsci and the PCI

John McKay Cammett, who died in 2008 at the age of 81, was a history professor and man of the Left who had no patience with historians (or with academics in general) who remained aloof from the struggles and suffering of ordinary humanity. Unpretentious but learned and ready to do battle over issues he cared about, he challenged convention, on and off campus. Alastair Davidson was on target when he observed that John, although a professor by vocation, never forgot his early years as an automobile worker and trade unionist in Detroit, an experience that he brought to bear in his studies of Gramsci and the workers’ movement in Turin. I met John in the mid-1950s, when we were both graduate students at Columbia University, he in history and I in Ital- ian. I recall his enthusiasm whenever he spoke to me of his research on Gramsci, to whom he was to dedicate much of his intellectual energy for the rest of his life. The first part of this essay deals with the intriguing inter- play in Cammett’s writings between his loyalties to the Old Left and his attraction to the New Left. It then focuses on his work as a bibliographer and editor, the most important aspect of which was his monumental Bibliografia Gramsci- ana, composed of three volumes published in 1991, 1995, and 2001. I will conclude with some remarks on Cammett’s work as a professor and academic administrator, and a summary discussion of his 1967 study Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism. 176 • Chapter Eleven

Cammett between the Old and New Lefts In the early to mid-1960s, Cammett teamed up with a group of like-minded friends and colleagues at Rutgers University and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to found an organi- sation they called the Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC: not to be confused with the SSC sponsored a decade later by the Democratic Socialists of America). The first SSC was an important venture, perhaps unknown by readers of JMIS who were born after 1960. It held six well-attended annual meetings, from 1965 to 1970, when it ceased its activities because of unresolved internal disputes; but not before George Fischer, in partnership with three associate editors, Cammett, Alan Block, and Richard Friedman, published a volume of selected papers of the SSC with the title The Revival of American Socialism, which appeared in 1971. The book included essays by a politically disparate group of writers, which reflected their ecumenical approach to the prospects of American socialism. The contributors went from Irving Howe to Harry Magdoff, from Paul Sweezy to James O’Connor and Stanley Aronowitz, from Christopher Lasch to Mar- tin Jay. Cammett presented two papers to the SSC, one, entitled ‘Communist Theories of Fascism, 1920–1935’, on 11 September 1966, the other, which was anthologised by Fischer, on 9 September 1967, entitled ‘Socialism and Participatory Democracy’. His subject in the latter paper was the relation between socialism and democracy; he drew his examples from the factory councils theorised and actuated by Gramsci and several others in 1919 and 1920. When I began revisiting Cammett’s work several months after his death, I was a little surprised to discover that he had been so deeply involved in New Left politics and culture. I had always associated him with an abiding emotional as well as political attachment to the revolutionary accomplishments of the Soviet Union. There were several reasons for my thinking of him in this way. One was his early years as a worker and trade unionist in the automobile plants of Detroit, which influenced his conception of industrial work- ers as the fullest embodiment of productive labour and as such engaged in a fateful, class-based confrontation with the capitalist system. One of his heroes in the Italian labour movement was Giuseppe Di Vittorio, who with Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti was among the personalities whose achievements led John to become a member of the Italian Communist Party. The PCI eventually acquired the reputation of being basically a social-democratic party masquerading as a revolutionary one. But on this question we should remember that, when Cammett took this step sometime in the 1950s, the PCI was still a ‘Stalinist’ party ready to defend the Soviet régime against those who saw Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy as the antithesis of true communist principles. So his member- ship in the PCI was an assertion, not a negation, of his Communist ideals. Cammett’s work for the journal Science and Society also led me to think of him pri- marily as a Communist of an older vintage, inasmuch as this journal had many US Com- munists on its editorial board, and espoused the idea that the Soviet Union, despite the crimes of Stalinism, had always been an irreplaceable contributor to the world social-