ABSTRACT
The current crisis of the left led me to meditate on the communist crisis when, in the fateful twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), February 1956, Khrushchev officially denounced Stalinism. The denunciation was stifled by party bureaucracy, but Pasolini did not fall silent. He was accused of being a heretical communist, and a cultural extremist. Today, almost everyone recognizes that his verses were right: “the pain /of you no longer being on the first front / would be more pure, if at the time / in which the error, even being pure, is paid, / had the strength to confess yourselves guilty” (Gramsci’s ashes). The poet, before Gramsci’s poor and austere grave, was not ashamed of the accusation, even though he did not agree with a certain cultural mysticism present in Ragionamenti Magazine’s formula. Extreme or maximum culture, for every proletariat in the countryside and in the city, is Gramsci’s authentic strategy of civil hegemony, integrating the political struggle with the refined culture of the classics.
KEYWORDS:
Pasolini; Gramsci; political crisis; hegemony; extreme culture