My dissertation examines the rise and fall of revolutionary workers’ councils in early twentieth-century Europe, uncovering the political horizons this period sought to open and the ways these horizons were dismantled or foreclosed. Thematizing the defeat of the workers’ councils amidst the rise of Fascism, the dissertation illuminates both the promises and the limits of grassroots politics and what I, following Antonio Gramsci, call “workers’ democracy”: the modes of insurgent self-government through which the working classes, broadly construed, lay claim to democratic control over the economic and political conditions of their collective existence.

In contrast to contemporary studies that treat the last century’s workers’ councils as a normative framework to be recovered, I examine them as historically embedded forms of insurgent self-government that emerged from — and were ultimately constrained by — the organizational ecologies and conflicting imaginaries of the interwar period. From this perspective, the council movements warrant scrutiny not so much for the resources they offer normative theory but for the strategic impasses they bring into view. By grasping the history of workers’ councils from the perspective of their collapse and unmaking, my project brings questions of reactionary opposition, coalitional failure, and participatory attrition into the foreground of debates on participatory democracy and anti-oligarchic politics. 

The first part of the dissertation reconstructs the young Antonio Gramsci’s writings on workers’ councils during the Italian Biennio Rosso — the “two red years” of 1919-1920. Foregrounding Gramsci’s relatively neglected early journalistic writings, these chapters chart the meteoric trajectory of the council movement and its rapid eclipse by the rise of Fascism. I comb the archives of the interwar Italian Left to situate Gramsci and the workers’ councils within the intellectual and organizational entanglements of the period, bringing into view the formation, deformation, and dissolution of grassroots institutions and  democratic capacities.

The dissertation’s second part examines how Gramsci and his contemporaries made sense of the Left’s defeats in the period 1918-1926. Tracing Gramsci’s reconceptualization  of workers’ councils, the political party, and the process of class composition in the later 1920s, these chapters explore institution-building under conditions of disarray, stagnation, and reaction. The aim is to recover analytic and strategic resources for re-building and re-organizing collective capacities when insurgency falters. What emerges is a framework of political pedagogy, praxis, and theory I call “Gramscian democracy”: a mode of action grounded in the ongoing re-articulation of class, education, and institutional experimentation guided by substantive commitments to social equality and democracy from below.