Antonio Gramsci

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Antonio Gramsci (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician, leader and theorist of Socialism, Communism and Anti-Fascism.

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Life

Gramsci was born in Ales, Italy, on the island of Sardinia, a relatively remote region of Italy that was mostly ignored by the Italian government in favor of the industrialized North. He was the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci. His father's family was Arbëreshë and probably the family name was related to Gramsh, an Albanian town. Francesco had financial difficulties and troubles with the police, suffered imprisonment and finally had to move about through several villages in Sardinia until his family finally settled in Ghilarza.

A brilliant student, Gramsci won a prize that allowed him to study at the University of Turin, where he read literature. He found Turin at the time going through a process of industrialization, with the Fiat and Lancia factories recruiting workers from poorer regions. Trade unions became established, and the first industrial social conflicts started to emerge. Gramsci had a close involvement with these developments, frequenting socialist circles as well as associating with Sardinian emigrants, which gave him continuity with his native culture.

His early difficult experiences in Sardinia had already shaped his view of the world. This, together with his experience on the mainland, had a part in his decision to join the Italian Socialist Party.

He became a notable journalist, even if his writings were mainly for political papers such as Avanti! (the Socialist Party official organ); nevertheless his brilliant prose and his intelligent observations soon resulted in greater fame.

An articulate and prolific writer of political theory, Gramsci produced a great deal of writing as editor of a number of socialist newspapers in Italy. Among the many, with Palmiro Togliatti he set up (in 1919) L'Ordine Nuovo (also the name of an unrelated 1960s fascist group), and contributed to La Città Futura. During this period, he also came into contact with the economist Piero Sraffa.

The group around L'Ordine Nuovo became allied with Amadeo Bordiga and the far larger Communist Abstentionist faction within the Socialist Party. This led to their organising the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia - Pcd'I) on January 21, 1921. Gramsci would be a leader of the party from its inception although subordinate to Bordiga until the latter lost the leadership in 1924. Gramsci's theses were adopted by the PCd'I at its 1926 Lyons Congress.

In 1922 Gramsci appeared in Russia, where he represented the new party and met his wife, Giulia Schucht, a young violinist with whom Gramsci had two sons. [1]

The Russian mission coincided with the advent of Fascism in Italy, and Gramsci returned with instructions to foster the unity of the leftist parties against fascism. Such a front would obviously ideally have had the PCI at its centre, through which Moscow would have controlled all the leftist forces, but others disputed this potential supremacy: socialists did have a certain tradition in Italy too, while the communist party seemed relatively young and too radical. Many believed that an eventual coalition led by communists would have functioned too remotely from political debate, and thus would have run the risk of isolation.

In 1924 Gramsci gained election as a deputy for the Veneto. He started organising the launch of the official newspaper of the party, called L'Unità (Unity), living in Rome while his family stayed in Moscow.

In 1926 Stalin's manoeuvres inside the Bolshevik party moved Gramsci to write a letter to the Comintern, in which he deplored the opposition, but also underlined some presumed faults of the leader. Togliatti, in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti which they never completely resolved.

On November 8, 1926 the fascist police arrested Gramsci, despite his parliamentary immunity, and brought him to Regina Coeli, the famous Roman prison. He received an immediate sentence of 5 years in confinement (on the remote island of Ustica); the following year he received a sentence of 20 years of prison (in Turi, near Bari). His condition caused him to suffer from constantly declining health, and he received an individual cell and little assistance. In 1932, a project for exchanging political prisoners (including Gramsci) between Italy and the Soviet Union failed. In 1934 his health deteriorated severely and he gained conditional freedom, after having already visited some hospitals in Civitavecchia, Formia and Rome. He died in Rome at the age of 46, shortly after being released from prison; he is buried in the so-called Protestant Cemetery there.

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Thought

Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks of history and analysis during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as:

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Hegemony

Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the proletariat in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Rather, capitalism seemed even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

The working-class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony was first achieved. In Gramsci’s view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces an ‘historic bloc’, a term taken from the syndicalist Georges Sorel.

Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to Christianity, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious mores and values. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognise it as an expression of their own experience.

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Intellectuals and Education

Gramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society. Famously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers involved in the practical task of building society. Furthermore, he distinguished between a 'traditional' intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks 'organically'. Such 'organic' intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather 'express', through the language of culture, the experiences and feelings which the masses could not articulate for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who shared the passions of the masses. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.

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State and Civil Society

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state, which he claims rules through force plus consent. The state is not to be understood in the narrow sense of the government; instead, Gramsci divides it between 'political society', which is the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control, and 'civil society', which is commonly seen as the 'private' or 'non-state' sphere, including the economy. The former is the realm of force and the latter of consent. He stresses, however, that the division is purely conceptual and that the two, in reality, often overlap.

Gramsci claims that under modern capitalism, the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in 'passive revolution' by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. Gramsci posits that movements such as reformism and fascism, as well as the 'scientific management' and assembly line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, are examples of this.

Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that 'The Modern Prince' - the revolutionary party - is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that the only tactic capable of undermining bourgeois hegemony and leading to socialism is a 'war of position' (analogous to trench warfare); the 'war of movement' (or frontal attack) carried out by the Bolsheviks was a strategy more appropriate to the 'primordial' civil society found in Tsarist Russia.

Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci warns against the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a 'regulated society' and defines the 'withering away of the state' as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.

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Historicism

Gramsci, like the early Marx, was an emphatic proponent of historicism. In Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or 'praxis') and the 'objective' historical and social processes of which it is a part. Ideas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. The concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to things, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. Resultantly, there is no such thing as an unchanging 'human nature', but only an idea of such which varies historically. Furthermore, philosophy and science do not 'reflect' a reality independent of man, but rather are only 'true' in that they express the real developmental trend of a given historical situation. The majority of Marxists held the common sense view that truth was truth no matter when and where it is known, and that scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulates historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense, and therefore did not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure. For Gramsci, however, Marxism was 'true' in the socially pragmatic sense, in that by articulating the class consciousness of the proletariat, it expressed the 'truth' of its times better than any other theory. This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce, possibly the most widely respected Italian intellectual of his day. However, it should be underlined that Gramsci insisted on an 'absolute historicism' that broke with the Hegelian and idealist tenor of Croce's thinking and its tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical 'destiny'. Though Gramsci repudiates the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of relativism.

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Critique of 'Economism'

In a famous pre-prison article entitled 'The Revolution against Das Kapital' [2], Gramsci claimed that the October Revolution in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist forces of production. This reflected his view that Marxism was not a deterministic philosophy. The principle of the causal ‘primacy’ of the relations of production, he held, was a misconception of Marxism. Both economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a ‘basic historical process’, and it is difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other. The fatalistic belief, widespread within the workers’ movement in its earliest years, that it would inevitably triumph due to ‘historical laws’, was, in Gramsci's view, a product of the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action, and was to be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class became able to take the initiative. The ‘philosophy of praxis’ (a euphemism for Marxism that he used to escape the prison censor) cannot rely on unseen ‘historical laws’ as the agents of social change. History is defined by human praxis and therefore includes human will. Nonetheless, will-power cannot achieve anything it likes in any given situation: when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, historical circumstances will be encountered which cannot be arbitrarily altered. It is not, however, predetermined by historical inevitability which of several possible developments will take place as a result.

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Critique of Materialism

By virtue of his belief that human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci’s views run contrary to the metaphysical materialism and 'copy' theory of perception advanced by Engels and Lenin, though he does not explicitly state this. For Gramsci, Marxism does not deal with a reality which exists in and for itself, independent of humanity. The concept of an objective universe outside of human history and human praxis was, in his view, analogous to belief in God. Natural history was only meaningful in relation to human history. Philosophical materialism, like primitive common sense, resulted from a lack of critical thought, and could not, as Lenin [3] claimed, be said to oppose religious superstition. Despite this, Gramsci resigned himself to the existence of this arguably cruder form of Marxism: the proletariat’s status as a dependent class meant that Marxism, as its philosophy, could often only be expressed in the form of popular superstition and common sense. Nonetheless, it was necessary to effectively challenge the ideologies of the educated classes, and to do so Marxists must present their philosophy in a more sophisticated guise, and attempt to genuinely understand their opponents’ views.

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Influence

Although Gramsci's thought emanates from the organized left, he has become an important figure in current academic discussions within cultural studies and critical theory. Political theorists from the center and the right have also found insight in his concepts; his idea of hegemony, for example, has become widely cited. His influence is particularly strong in contemporary political science, on the subject of the prevalence of neoliberal thinking among political elites, in the form of Neo-gramscianism. His work also heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.

His critics charge him with fostering a notion of power struggle through ideas that finds a reflection in recent academic controversies such as political correctness. They find the Gramscian approach to ideas, reflected in these controversies, to be in conflict with open-ended, liberal inquiry grounded in the classics of Western culture. To credit or blame Gramsci for the travails of current academic politics is an odd turn of history, since Gramsci himself (unlike most major 20th century thinkers) was never an academic, and was in fact deeply intellectually engaged with Italian culture, history, and current liberal thought.

As a Communist, Gramsci's place has been disputed. Togliatti, who led the PCd'I after World War II and whose gradualist approach was a forerunner to Eurocommunism, claimed that the PCdI's practices during this period were congruent with Gramscian thought. Others, however, have argued that Gramsci was a Left Communist, who would have been expelled from his Party if prison had not prevented him from regular contact with Moscow during the leadership of Stalin.

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Influences on Gramsci's thought

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Later thinkers influenced by Gramsci

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See also

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Sources

  • Bottomore, Tom, et al. (eds.), 1992, The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell Publishers ISBN 0631180826.
  • Gramsci, Antonio, 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers ISBN 071780397X.
  • Jay, Martin, 1986, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas, University of California Press ISBN 0520057422.
  • Kolakowski, Leszek, 1981, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. III: The Breakdown, Oxford University Press ISBN 0192851098.
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External links

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