No going back to normal- the left must seize the moment and dominate the crisis

The Italian Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci dedicated much of his thought to the concept of crises. This was the result of him coming of age and then living through a series of crises on the world scale (WW1, the 1929 stock market crash), and a domestic crisis which was the direct result of the aftermath of the international crises (the rise of fascism in Italy).

Many Marxists of the time tended to assume that capitalism’s periodic crises would inevitably usher in periods of socialist…