Obituary: Peter Thomas

Gareth Dale writes in memory of the brilliant Marxist theorist Peter Thomas who made a huge contribution to our understanding of the writings of Antonio Gramsci.

The life of Peter Thomas, brilliant Marxist theorist and interpreter of Antonio Gramsci’s thought, ended on 11^th October, of a heart attack while running near his North London home. He had just turned 53 — these lines, as I write them, are crying out against use of the past tense.

Peter was raised in a suburb of Brisbane, in Australia’s state of Queensland. You may know it as the city of the Bee Gees and Bluey, but Peter would insist, half-jokingly, that it monopolised Australia’s contributions to Marxist scholarship. He delighted in wry allusions to his Brisbane background, once a fringe terrain of the antipodes, its ‘wild west’ character having moulded his ancestors, presumably from the Irish ‘criminal’ (i.e. rebel) classes, and so he, a rugged outsider, now found himself bumping up against private-educated Europeans in the genteel academic precincts in which he was increasingly making his name. Of course, and here lay the humour, Peter was both more tough-minded than they and more erudite, with a dazzling command of philosophy and intellectual history, fluency in several languages including Italian and German and familiarity with several more.

The University of Queensland, where Peter read English literature and critical theory, was the site of his first encounter with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, through his inspirational teacher, Daniel O’Neill. Over the 2000s, this early passion evolved, via research stints in Rome, Naples and Berlin and his doctoral study in Amsterdam, into The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (2009). A prize-winning book, The Gramscian Moment represents the most comprehensive and compelling analysis of Gramsci’s thinking in general and the Prison Notebooks in particular. In its reconstruction of the connections between Gramsci’s evolving concepts and their political purposes, it showcased Peter’s extraordinary talent for thinking simultaneously with philological rigour, philosophical depth, and political grasp. Reading his work we gain vivid portrayals, for instance, of the political driving forces behind a philosophical argument, or the philosophical stakes behind a seemingly trivial philological detail.

Peter’s argument, to a degree, learned from Perry Anderson’s 1976 essay, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.’ That essay had wrested Gramsci’s work from social-democratic interpretations (essentially, the Eurocommunism of Italy’s Communist Party), re-interpreting it as consonant with, and in detailed dialogue with, the revolutionary traditions of Bolshevism and the early Comintern. Anderson’s approach was philological, seeking to establish precisely what Gramsci meant, through analysis of his sources, his texts, and the broader semantic constellations – the political discourses and networks of meaning – with which they stood in conversation. For Anderson, the Prison Notebooks are shot through with contradictions – unsurprisingly, given the harsh constraints of isolation and censorship under which they had been penned. Like Anderson’s, Peter’s Gramsci is a revolutionary communist. And he too deploys a philological method, but at greater depth, informed by the new critical edition of the Notebooks, a more precise comprehension of the sequence of Gramsci’s elaborations (thanks to Gianni Francioni and others), and altogether more alive to its dialectical (or ‘diachronic and contextual’) development. This yielded an altogether different reading of the Prison Notebooks, as a philosophical and political project whose concepts were provisional results of an ongoing inquiry, not a static set of dichotomies. Whereas Anderson, despite resisting a too sharp distinction of East (Russia) and West, ultimately affirmed the image of Gramsci as a fundamentally Western theorist, in a sense discontinuous with the Bolshevik experience, Peter shows that East-West and several other binaries in the Notebooks should be understood in their sublation (or overcoming). The Notebooks, read thus, are more coherent than their fragmented condition at first sight appears, their concepts more relevant and useable.

This matters for Marxist theory across a series of questions, from the morphology of capitalist states and bourgeois domination to the relationship between communist political organisation and class struggle. Elucidating Gramsci’s concepts of the integral state, passive revolution, and hegemony, Peter draws out their relationships to revolutionary Marxism as a historically evolving praxis. Gramsci theorised state power on non-instrumentalist lines, with the dialectical interpenetration of ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ traced within the state itself. The modern bourgeois state, while partially open to impulses from ‘civil society,’ centres on a set of agencies that organise, contain and repress those impulses. In democracies at least, a special place is occupied by labour bureaucracies that mediate between working people and capitalist power, forming part of the ‘earthworks of civil society’ that buttress the ‘integral state.’

On passive revolution, Peter shows, against standard interpretations, that it is not simply a thesis on bourgeois revolution ‘from above’ and the renewal of state power through social reforms and a calibrated incorporation of demands from below. Although it is those things, its use by Gramsci is bound up with reflections on the crisis of international communism in the 1930s and the broader project of what Marx and Engels in 1850 had called ‘revolution in permanence.’Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ likewise, Peter insists, must be understood in its Bolshevik provenance. It is not, for Bolshevism or for Gramsci, reducible to an amalgam of ‘force and consent.’ Hegemony is not simply its consensual side; it is a conceptual tool for grappling with the relationship of organisational leadership to social class, within projects of bourgeois rule and, in very different ways, as a philosophy of praxis concerned with how political actors can develop forms of organisation and knowledge conducive to bringing diverse ‘subaltern’ groups together behind communist goals. Strategically, that led Gramsci to explore how the early-Comintern tactic of the ‘united front’ could be adapted for subaltern struggles under fascist rule in Italy.

Whereas The Gramscian Moment focused on Gramsci in his own era, Peter’s next monograph, Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation (2023) applied Gramscian ideas to social movements and strategy in the twenty-first century. A leitmotif in both books is thinking of hegemony not as a slogan to summarise coalition-building or power (‘force + consent’), but as a movement practice and method, a process of collective education and experimentation that ultimately can constitute forms of power beyond sovereignty. As its foil, Radical Politics takes the analysis widely held on the far left that we live in an age of dormant class struggle, in which radical politics is marginal and left-wing cultures a pale shadow of their 1960s-70s predecessors. On this, I admit to some disagreement with Peter, although not with his rebukes to ‘left-melancholia’ or with his search for radical hope in the continually recrudescent forms of class struggle (understood broadly) and leftist organisations worldwide. Radical Politics tracks evolving patterns of social movements over the last two or three decades (including anti-war, ecological, migrant solidarity, anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements), identifying patterns of conceptual and organisational development, tracing the learning processes that become sedimented in those struggles, and noting the outcomes, how they affect everyday and political life. In recent decades it has, for example, (at last!) become a norm to keep social reproduction and accessibility questions in mind when organising events, with crèche provision and so on.

With its focus on theorising socialist organisation and class struggle, Radical Politics might appear an unlikely project, for Peter was never (to my knowledge) involved in a socialist organisation and infrequently in campaigns. This comparative lack of hands-on experience was compensated for by voracious reading of reports from the campaigning front lines and conversations with the growing worldwide community of scholar-activists with whom he connected through his writings and through the Historical Materialism journal of which he was a longstanding editor. In 2010, the year he joined Brunel University, I recall Peter marching with students to protest the marketisation of higher education. It was a militant movement that bore great promise but stumbled to defeat, allowing the neoliberal erosion of Britain’s university system to grind on – and on, and on – while universities became ever more corporate, and managerial. In the University and College Union, Peter served a stint on Brunel’s branch committee and in 2018 took part in the UCU nationwide industrial action over pensions, but it too fell to defeat.

These defeats formed the backdrop to a gamble that Peter took in 2021. He applied, successfully, for the role of Head of Department in Brunel’s department of social sciences. In socialist organisations to which he was close, taking on such roles is treated with caution, given their power to hire and fire and to implement austerity measures, but Peter, never an ‘organised’ socialist, was free of such collective pressures (and even sceptical me supported his decision). He took the plunge, won the job, and used his position to wonderfully positive ends, giving the ‘socialist sceptics’ much to chew on. Bringing tremendous humanity and commitment to his role as HoD, Peter led a transformation of the department, with, not least, a dramatic diversification of the faculty demographic, including its leadership positions, as well as a more democratic culture, a student-run newspaper for the local community, and pizza each Monday to gather students and staff together and chat. He dismantled the high walls between social-science disciplines, tirelessly built bridges to other departments to help keep ours afloat, and introduced a galaxy of other initiatives aimed at improving the learning experience for students, and for staff too. Since his death, personal tributes have poured in, from the Vice Chancellor downwards, but the most moving have come from junior faculty members, testifying to the extraordinary – in one case even life-changing — care and devotion with which Peter addressed their concerns.

For five years Peter’s working life was focused on the HoD role. As an impressively competent manager, the role brought a sense of achievement and satisfaction, but was not without costs. Positions on the lowest rung of the university hierarchy require a continuation of one’s research and teaching at full throttle, with management work on top. These were years of austerity and decline across Britain’s Higher Education sector, and AI (which Peter hated with a passion) was rapidly corroding the learning processes that Peter was devoted to fostering. University workers were in a weak collective position, their discontent often manifesting in individualised and internalised ways, which for Peter often meant long office-bound evenings engaged in tortuous (and sometimes torturous) exchanges. He was fighting the good fight, but on claggy ground. Worse, many decisions and initiatives he was constrained to implement conflicted sharply with his socialist principles. Although much of a HoD’s activities could align with his values – improving the student and workplace experience, most obviously – a substantial segment could not. Such internal clashes could be repressed up to a point, assisted by Peter’s extraordinary thespian gifts. Basically, his approach was method acting. He grew into the role and enjoyed the authority (in several senses) that it brought. However, none of this was especially comfortable, and when eventual release arrived in February 2026, thanks to his winning a Leverhulme fellowship, the stress relief after five years ‘on the stage,’ the sense of elation as he morphed back into his ‘true’ shape, Mephistopheles returning his soul, was profound.

At Brunel, it is an understatement to say that Peter will be sorely missed. He was an absolute mensch: considerate and honest, a warm colleague, generous mentor, dedicated scholar and teacher. Even when elevated to HoD, pastoral care and teaching, especially classroom engagement with students, remained his priority. The networks of Marxist scholarship to which he devoted such energy, through Historical Materialism not least, and in Britain, Italy, Brazil and globally, have suffered a grievous loss of his inspirational ideas and original thinking.

A political obituary is not the place to explore Peter’s many worlds beyond Gramsci and Brunel, yet it is worth recalling that Peter’s humanity was rounded and grounded. He was utterly at home when discussing Machiavelli or UCU strategy, but equally when cooking for guests or constructing cat-proof fencing or bookshelves. (His woodworking proficiency, he joked, may be essential if the decay of our sector continues.) Above all else, Peter was a man who loved. Nowhere was he happier than with his partner, Sara Farris, and their daughters. In these days of heartbreak words fail me… but all thoughts are with them, in addition to Peter’s parents and wider family.

In addition to engaging with Peter’s works, including, we hope, his latest near-completed book on hegemony, readers may consider donating — a crowdfunding page will likely be available soon (details to follow; if it’s hard to locate, contact gareth.dale@brunel.ac.uk).

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For helpful and clarifying comments on an early draft, my thanks go to Elizabeth Humphrys, Riccardo Bellofiore, Dan Hartley, Panagiotis Sotiris, Filippo del Lucchese, Brecht de Smet, Rick Kuhn, and Nibedita Mukherjee. The usual disclaimer applies.