Francisco Rüdiger: Trotsky, Gramsci, and Communist Journalistic Thought between the World Wars

Abstract
The International Communist (Comintern) integrated the press into political propaganda and organizational partisanship, leaving little or no room for true journalistic activity throughout its history. This article shows that, in spite of this, this trend did not advance linearly, knowing some thinking alternatives in and outside the Soviet Union. Trotsky and Gramsci’s ideas about journalism are a proof of this, despite how little they resonated in practice, due to the progressive political marginalization of the first theoretician by Stalinism and the jailing of the last by Mussolini’s Italy. This is argued here through a documentary analysis of their main writings concerning the matter. Notwithstanding their objective weakness or utopian status, there were efforts to think the specificity of journalism from the Communist point of view until the beginning of the 1930s.