Abstract One of Gramsci’s most quoted phrases is his 1930 statement in the Prison Notebooks that ‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. This has traditionally been taken to refer to the emergence of fascism against a background of capitalist crisis and failure of anti-capitalist forces. However, a closer examination of the textual and historical context of that sentenc...
