Who was Gramsci and how was he different?

[Blanquist]

I don't know much about him besides the general outline of his life.

1. What his attitude towards the Stalin/Trotsky split?

2. Where can I read his 'Prison Noteboks' in English? The full works not just selected please.

Thank you.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

You should be able to find an edition of his Prison Notebooks here

http://radicalebooks.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-06-11T06:40:00-07:00&max-results=500

There are tons of leftist books on this site.I have definitely seen it there With megauploads down it may not be available but its easy to find from "alternate sources"

Gramsci was an early leader of the Italian Communist Party, the PCI. He was in political opposition to but also respected Bordiga. He went with Stalin but couldn't really be called a "Stalinist" He was a deputy in the Italian parliament. After Mussolini further tightened his control and cracked down on the left, Gramsci was sentenced to (if I remember) 20 years in jail. A fascist judge said something like "we have to silence this mind for 20 years". Gramsci himself was in poor health and the prison regime was deliberately designee to kill him, which it eventually did.

Gramsci's "Prison Diary" where he writes about his wife and son in Moscow is very moving.

Its difficult to summarize his thought. His main ideas were the theory of hegemony, a "war of position" and a "war of maneuver" and the "organic intellectual". He developed a sympathetic leftist view of Machiavelli.

Many say ironically if Gramsci was out of prison Comintern orthodoxy would not have allowed him to develop his ideas.

His ideas became popular in the 1970s, I believe. Euro-communists and post-modernists have distorted his ideas into a type of cultural reformism. He was actually a very powerful revolutionary/

[Prometeo liberado]

Very good subject as I know the RedCommisar and Gramsci wiill be in soon. From what I can remember Gramsci was a Stalinist, but his personal take on Trotsky is something that others could explain better. When I get my head together I'll have a better take.

[Red Commissar]

1. What his attitude towards the Stalin/Trotsky split?

Gramsci was part of a block within the PCd'I that supported what would become the Stalin/Bukharin bloc in the party against those of Trotsky and the Left Opposition. He was of the opinion that the Left Opposition was bring more harm than good. His relation with Trotsky was an odd one, from having nothing but bad words to him at times, while other times acknowledging Trotsky, such as his arguments for the United Front in the 20s.

Lot of what he positioned himself as was in regards to what would be beneficial for his viewpoints in the early years of the PCd'I. The first challenge was with Angelo Tasca (a former friend and fellow writer on L'Ordine Nuovo) and the 'right' wing of the party which pushed for reconciliation with the PSI and essentially liquidation of the PCd'I in order to pursue the Comintern's United Front policy better. Gramsci at this point was in the party 'center' and worked with the party's 'left', where Bordiga was. Once Tasca was gone, the conflict boiled down to the 'center' and 'left', and they took positions accordingly in the Comintern and the CPSU's factions.

When the Stalin/Bukharin bloc prevailed and it seemed the Left Opposition was done for, Gramsci penned a letter on behalf of the Politburo congratulating the victory of Stalin and Bukharin over Trotsky, moving the party towards unity. At the same time he also showed voiced the need for constraint and reconciliation, and this letter was reportidley never forwarded to the CPSU by Togliatti, acting as the party's representative to Moscow, since it would've harmed their standing in the new orientation in the Comintern.

In Prison Gramsci never really referred to what was going on between Stalin and Trotsky. He criticized actions of Trotsky in the 20s in some areas, and did not approve of the Third Period tactics of the Comintern according to accounts of prisoners he talked to. For the most part he didn't mention them all that much, even under the different pseudonyms he used to cover for names of important Communist figures in his journals. It's been speculated that in a way prison may have prevented Gramsci from experiencing the stress of party isolation and/or expulsion, since he was still stuck up on the concept of a United Front in Italy even as that was abandoned in the Third Period and later the Popular Front, and probably wouldn't have been able to bend and adapt like Togliatti was able to do.

It seemed for the most part he didn't really hold a 'warm' opinion of either Stalin or Trotsky though. Again though, that's speculation, he doesn't make it easy to see what he was writing to get to what he was thinking, and his letters to his wife and two sons in Moscow don't cover too deeply into his concerns about the factions that were developing.



2. Where can I read his 'Prison Noteboks' in English? The full works not just selected please.Lenina's probably provided the best link you can get to them in English, though they are the Selections from the Prison Notebook. The full set of writing you'll have trouble finding freely available beyond some archives and libraries. The Selections Lenina posted is enough to get you a full range of his 'important' ideas though, from the role of Intellectuals to the Party to Cultural Hegemony, as well as his notes on Italian History (including the often misinterpreted 'Passive Revolution'), 'Fordism', etc, among other things.

As for what Gramsci did and how he was 'different', I wrote up a bit about it after a similar thread.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/could-someone-explain-p2182605/index.html#post2182605


There's a lot to describe, it's not too easy to make it simple with out taking up a long block of text.

If you want to have a chance to read them and judge them for yourself, and ask for help on specific parts, that's probably a better approach.

The Antonio Gramsci Reader, Foracs

http://ifile.it/2mkez7t

The Pre-Prison Writings. This has some of his L'Ordine Nuovo writings and

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EEYFXHU0

Of these, they are only interesting if you want to see his political revolution. The "significant" ones are his L'Ordine Nuovo articles and the "Southern Question" article. Those can all be found in the Pre-Prison writings collection.

And the "Selections from the Prison Notebooks"

http://uploading.com/files/A1QR6XF7/071780397x%20gramsci-notebooks.rar.html

http://rapidshare.com/files/259329830/071780397x_gramsci-notebooks.rar.html

The last upload is where his more well-known contents come in, mainly what he writes on Hegemony in the "State and Civil Society", the political party in "The Modern Prince", his analysis of Italian history, and the theory of Intellectuals. There's some other stuff on "Americanism and Fordism" which is interesting too.

His "main" thoughts for starters would probably be the following:

-The Intellectuals: Gramsci makes a distinction between "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals. The former refers to more expected "intellectuals"- such as professors, philosophers, etc., while the latter refers to those with skills that grew out of a particular demand within their class. Gramsci seems to indicate the "organic" intellectual from the working class is to be the one that organizes and agitates.

-The Passive Revolution: an attempt to explain how the "bourgeoisie" are able to withstand tumults and pressures. He posits that they undergo a "passive" revolution, where they make concessions on certain reforms while retaining their power. This would in the end undercut revolutionary fervor. Gramsci describes various regimes at the time that could be described as the bourgeoisie undergoing such a process, such as social democracy, "grand" coalitions (like MacDonald's government in the UK), and to an extent, fascism.

-Hegemony: Gramsci borrows this term from formulations by previous theorists, which refers to the means by which the "ruling class" is able to rule in their respective states. He makes a distinction from previous Marxist analysis when he posits that this process by which the ruling class rules through "consent" by the other classes is by the power it exercises through the superstructure (civil society), rather than the base (or the means of production). The ruling class gets its rule by a sort of coerced consent, disseminating their values through various faucets in society. Only in moments of chaos does this deception go away and the force becomes apparent.

-The Modern Prince: Gramsci here basically describes the "revolutionary" party. It's probably one of his more overlooked contributions, and it's worth reading I think to put into context all his other writings.

He basically goes into the nature of the "civil society" and the nature of the state, their relation and impact on one another. This presents problems to those who overthrow the old order because it will "rebound" against it. Here he then makes the distinction between the "War of Position", forming a counter-hegemonic block around the workers, and the "War of Maneuver" or the actual revolution against the state. The role of the Communist Party is to do this, acting as a force of the workers in forming their hegemony and reaching out to other downtrodden classes, namely the peasants. He also sees the "Communists" as the modern Jacobins, who were able to form the hegemony of their ideas over the rural segments to make an effective block against the forces of reaction (vendee armies, foreign intervention, etc.), and this is mainly something he takes from Lenin concerning the relationship between the workers and peasants.

-Americanism and Fordism: This is basically an attempt by Gramsci to explain why capitalism developed the way it did in the United States compared to Europe. Essentially he attributes it to the United States not having a parasitic feudal remnant (beyond the slave holding classes), which allowed it to progress as most liberals desired. Lenin's Tomb had a good explanation, much better than I can do, about this:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/02/gramsci-on-americanism-and-fordism.html

And while I'm at Lenin's Tomb, he also wrote a good one on hegemony:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/05/hegemony-war-of-position-and-organic.html

I suggest though you get a good knowledge of Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin before you go onto Gramsci. He bases much of his thought on the analysis of those guys, and you need to know what they say before you understand what he is getting at. He tends to write not too clearly in his prison writings due to prison censors and expected those versed in Marxism to understand what he was getting at. You won't gain much out of him if you don't understand his predecessors.

*The first two links won't work anymore. One was taken down and Megaupload got destroyed by the US government. They should be easily found elsewhere, if not I can provide them to you if you want them for some reason. I guess I should add in the bit about the State and Civil Society, along with War of Maneuver and War of Position, he also attempts to apply this to explain why revolution was able to succeed in Russia, though failed in more 'developed' areas of Europe when similar conditions were present.

Gramsci's thoughts has been applied and used by people after him. Though some might write him off as a Stalinist stooge, others as the reason for the Eurocommunist mess, and more recently the vast Cultural Marxist conspiracy threatening western civilization though I think this is unfair and a simplistic way to view him. I think he had some good things to contribute, or at least another way to apply Marxist analysis. Gramsci doesn't really fit neatly into one 'tendency' or another (I've seen both Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist groups discuss his works), nor does he have a school of thought after him, though one could describe themselves as a "Gramscian" with respect to the way they may analyze and interpret something.