Italian communist leader and theorist Antonio Gramsci is perhaps more referenced than actually read. But his work is worth wrestling with. As an organizer, Gramsci developed a method for doing politics as a communist militant leader and intellectual, and then as a prisoner under Benito Mussolini, where he wrote what became his famous Prison Notebooks over the last decade of his life.

Gramsci provides us not with historically determinist, iron laws of capitalist life and development, but rather with tools to analyze our moment and to think through what sort of politics, ideology, and organization might be required for the working class to overcome it and rule.

For the Jacobin Radio podcast the Dig, Daniel Denvir spoke about Gramsci to historian Michael Denning, a professor in the American Studies Program at Yale. You can listen to the conversation here. It has been edited for length and clarity.