‘The time of monsters’: everyone is quoting Gramsci – but what did he actually say?

Line handily sums up people’s bewilderment at state of world, but it isn’t quite what the Marxist thinker wrote

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t a time when geopolitical certainties of old are crumbling away, it has become the go-to quote to make sense of the current moment in all its seeming senselessness. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” is a line attributed to the former Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci.

Over the last two months alone, it has been quoted – and often mangled – by a rightwing Belgian prime minister, a leftwing British political leader, an Irish central banker and in the title of the most recent BBC Reith lecture, given by the author Rutger Bregman.

“We can’t let the monsters win,” influencers earnestly warn their followers on Instagram; on LinkedIn, business consultants post graphs that visualise the “Gramsci gap” and its relevance to corporate strategy.