Gramsci

[skitty]

I wonder how many have read the Prison Notebooks in their entirety? I bought them unabridged(three-volumes) and keep getting stalled, now in volume two. I recognise Gramsci's great intellect; but am often bored-to-tears by the subject matter, and wonder if he would even be considering it if he wasn't locked up, with limited resources. That, and he often sounds like a hypercritical, precocious brat! Should I lighten-up and persevere?:confused:

[Yuppie Grinder]

Persevere. Gramsci is brilliant and important, even if he isn't the funnest to read.

[GoddessCleoLover]

I wonder how many have read the Prison Notebooks in their entirety? I bought them unabridged(three-volumes) and keep getting stalled, now in volume two. I recognise Gramsci's great intellect; but am often bored-to-tears by the subject matter, and wonder if he would even be considering it if he wasn't locked up, with limited resources. That, and he often sounds like a hypercritical, precocious brat! Should I lighten-up and persevere?:confused:

I read an abridged one-version volume and must admit that I focused on the parts that seemed relevant to contemporary praxis. I scanned over the parts that were too esoteric, the long expositions on Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile come to mind. I am more interested in practical politics than abstract philosophy so that is what I focused on.

[skitty]

I read an abridged one-version volume and must admit that I focused on the parts that seemed relevant to contemporary praxis. I scanned over the parts that were too esoteric, the long expositions on Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile come to mind. I am more interested in practical politics than abstract philosophy so that is what I focused on.
I was expecting you...thanks.:)

[GoddessCleoLover]

Always glad to oblige.;) I found "The State and Civil Society" a good place to start.

[Ostrinski]

Red Commissar is the resident expert on Gramsci. Contact him for help or to learn more or visit his Gramsci Literati group, which can be found here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=547). It isn't active but if you are interested in Gramsci you will find it helpful.

Gramsci is somewhat of a divisive figure here, the ultra left don't really like him because he was Stalin's man in the Comintern and was involved with repression of the Bordigist and Trotskyist oppositional factions. Also, some of his sociological writings are heavily contested by some of the users here.

On the other hand some consider him a revolutionary sociologist and consider his writings on cultural hegemony and the relationship between ideology and society to be groundbreaking.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Red Commissar is the resident expert on Gramsci. Contact him for help or to learn more or visit his Gramsci Literati group, which can be found here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=547). It isn't active but if you are interested in Gramsci you will find it helpful.

Gramsci is somewhat of a divisive figure here, the ultra left don't really like him because he was Stalin's man in the Comintern and was involved with repression of the Bordigist and Trotskyist oppositional factions. Also, some of his sociological writings are heavily contested by some of the users here.

On the other hand some consider him a revolutionary sociologist and consider his writings on cultural hegemony and the relationship between ideology and society to be groundbreaking.


Given the time frame of Gramsci's appointment it would seem more likely that Zinoviev or Bukharin, rather than Stalin, were behind the Ordine Nuovo (Gramsci-Togliatti) faction.

Thanks to Ostrinski for detailing the reasons behind Gramsci's controversial status on RevLeft. Back in the 70s it was hip to be a Gramscian. Apparently, the hipness mantle has passed to Bordiga. Tempus fugit.

[Red Commissar]

Red Commissar is the resident expert on Gramsci. Contact him for help or to learn more or visit his Gramsci Literati group, which can be found here. It isn't active but if you are interested in Gramsci you will find it helpful.

Gramsci is somewhat of a divisive figure here, the ultra left don't really like him because he was Stalin's man in the Comintern and was involved with repression of the Bordigist and Trotskyist oppositional factions. Also, some of his sociological writings are heavily contested by some of the users here.

On the other hand some consider him a revolutionary sociologist and consider his writings on cultural hegemony and the relationship between ideology and society to be groundbreaking.

I wouldn't say that I'm an expert, I'm just one of those that have read his works. Heck even the OP has done more than I have- I've read only the "Selections from the Prison Notebooks".

http://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X/

It's actually from this particular publisher that has caused problems for the MIA over Gramsci's works there. They used to have a lot of them, but were made to remove them from their site.

As for Gramsci himself, those writings are very dense. It may have been he never intended anyone to see them, and had only been writing them to keep his brain straight and not go insane from lack of activity. For someone like him to go from party work to being isolated during a period of great upheaval in the communist movement, it was frustrating as it was with the others who ended up getting imprisoned at the time.

As far as he cared, if he wrote them in such an obfuscating way, the prison wardens would have not cared he kept demanding paper to write. What good would it do if it's only understood by other Marxists? There's always a division here in Marxist work, where you have some types that are written specifically for those who are already well versed in Marxism, and others that are disseminated for mass consumption. Gramsci's works fall more in the former, because he expects those reading to understand how he was using Marxist analysis to reach his conclusions, or when he'd refer to something Lenin did off hand.

As for the way he criticizes everyone, welcome to Marxist polemics. It's pretty much inescapable, we end up doing it here alot too, though in a far less dense form. Most of his vitriol, at least from what I got, seems to be concentrated towards Croce and Gentile, which were simultaneously a criticism of their beliefs as well as how they fit into the framework of hegemony.

Croce of course was the champion of liberals in Italy and formerly a Marxist before he broke with them over idealistic concerns, and ended up giving some support to the fascist government in its earliest years. This, of course, is what Gramsci was attacking the most since Croce was a symbol of liberal cooperation for the sake of defusing the country's crisis, and his false hopes in trying to work through that government to reform education.

There's also the angle that Croce was influential in many intellectual circles, Italian Marxists included, so it was rather annoying for a lot of them to see him do that. Croce himself was rather representative of the type of intellectuals who broke with socialists because they found it conflicted with their bourgeois position.

Gentile was another "intellectual", and was unabashed about his support for Fascism. In a sense it could be said that Mussolini had given him some credit in an attempt to try and give Fascism intellectual street cred. And as we know Gentile wasn't alone in this from intellectuals and artists- FT Marinetti of Futurist fame, Luigi Pirandello who was a well-known playwright at the time in Italy (Gramsci had reviewed many of his works during his time in the newspaper), and outside with types like Ezra Pound supporting Fascism. In a sense I guess Gramsci wanted to highlight how people like Gentile fit in to the grand picture of the state in trying to strengthen its support and "consent" from the masses.

The Selections book above though I think is pretty much a good, abridged version of his thoughts. I only struggled through the very end of it where he gets into dialectical materialism which is in itself a tough concept and not exactly invigorating.

In general the book focuses on the following parts:


Intellectuals: The difference between a traditional intellectual and the organic intellectual. It's towards the latter that Gramsci sees as those who will rise form their class and be the source of agitation and pushing along consciousness.

Education: How this fits into the state and its importance. This ties into the above more than anything, but is at its surface written as a criticism of the Fascist government's educational reforms which had input from both Croce and Gentile. There's some pedagogy things in here too.

Italian History: Where he uses his framework to analyze Italian history. This is interesting for history buffs but it's also can be extrapolated as trying to see why places like Italy developed differently than those like France, UK, or Germany in its embrace of capitalism and moving out of old systems. It is simultaneously though a subtle way of figuring out how developments like fascism fit into the grand scheme of things.

The one thing that comes out of here is the concept of a "passive revolution". This is a concept where Gramsci shows how a ruling elite can preserve their position in society by making some gradual reforms and necessary concessions. To Gramsci this is the way revolutionary moments were either neutralized or coopted and diluted. So Fascism could be seen as a form of a "passive" revolution that the elite undertook, as is the large coalition governments like those that came about in the UK in the 1920s and 1930s. Social Democracy in a sense can be seen as this too, a movement that was incorporated into the framework of the state in order to prevent upheaval.

Modern Prince: This is kind of a way for Gramsci to relate the importance of what Machiavelli wrote to modern times. Machiavelli is often seen and held as an example of someone who was fine with the excess of powers, but Gramsci feels he was trying to illustrate the nature of the state, a unique achievement considering the time it was written in. Gramsci's position of how the state uses both coercion and consent is a constant theme here and in the next

He then applies this to how revolutionary strategy was applied by French revolutionaries to try and show Machiavelli's relevance in a more recent time. This is written as Gramsci saying how a "modern" Prince would be written, though in a sense this whole section lays out what the "Modern Prince" ie the Communist Party should operate. This is probably the definition of revolutionary praxis that is sometimes associated with Gramsci.

State and Civil Society: This is essentially the crux of Gramsci's cultural hegemony and where it has often been applied and interpreted by Marxists and non-Marxists alike. This is basically an exploration of the relationship between the "state"- the Marxist conception of the force that operates for a particular class's interests- and the "civil society"- the host of bodies that exist outside the state but work with it in tandem in more developed societies.

The walk away lesson here is how the ruling class is able to use the "superstructure"- the civil society- to earn consent while using force from the state- twinned with the "base". This is essentially something central to Marxist theory- the base is representative of the fundamental organization of society and the means of production, while superstructure grows out of that. Gramsci basically asserts the later plays its own role rather than being only an extension of the former.

The unwritten conclusion, though disguised in a metaphor for warfare, is that merely overthrowing the "state" won't be enough if the civil society is left intact, as it will rebound on the new state and cause the revolutionary movement to fall apart. IIRC, Gramsci's metaphor is done through a trench system where he shows that even after an army has made a breakthrough on the front lines, they have to deal with the whole array of defense networks behind it and in a sense get worn down by attrition.

The metaphor is basically referring to the state and civil society. The state being the front-lines and the civil society being all the trenches and crap behind it that wears you down. In places where the civil society is strong, the overthrow of the state is more difficult than those where it is fractured and not consistent, like it was in Russia as Gramsci claims. In either event though it presents a challenge that must be overcome even if the state is overthrown.

So from there he goes on with the metaphors to describe a war of position to highlight the importance of an army's logistical support from the industry of its country as well as its defense emplacements, and a war of maneuver to make its gains. "War of Position" is representative of the agitation and such a communist movement does to gain support and form a counter-hegemonic bloc around the proletariat, the "war of maneuver" the actual strikes, agitation, class warfare, revolution, etc. that goes with it. If you want to go further, this is yet again another extension of the praxis, the intersection of theory and action. Theory without action is meaningless, action without theory is meaningless. And here dialectics rears itself, since he essentially posits theory and action act on each other in that manner.

Americanism and Fordism: This is like the Italian History section in that he applies Marxism in analyzing the history and development of the United States and why it was able to develop differently from Europe. The overall conclusion he gets here is that the United States did not have an equivalent of a parasitic landlord system that Europeans were addled with, and the one that they did have was utterly destroyed in the civil war before it got too deeply ingrained.

It is because of this, as Gramsci believes at least, that capitalism developed more robustly and in a stronger form than those that arose in Europe. He goes on to discuss the ways the Americans are beginning to advance over their opposition in the ways factories are organized, focusing on Taylorism- something that interested Lenin as well.

Theory of Praxis: This is the most frustrating to me since it's the most theoretical. "Theory of Praxis" is his byword for Marxism so he goes on to all his stuff about it, going from the ways it can analyze society to a criticism of the way Dialectical Materialism was being taught in the Soviet Union.


I don't want to post links, but if you really want to, I can give you a pdf of the selections book so you see what I'm getting at. I've been trying to epub that thing for sometime to make it more accessible to those with readers, no luck though.

[GoddessCleoLover]

I wouldn't say that I'm an expert, I'm just one of those that have read his works. Heck even the OP has done more than I have- I've read only the "Selections from the Prison Notebooks".

http://www.amazon.com/Selections-Prison-Notebooks-Antonio-Gramsci/dp/071780397X/

It's actually from this particular publisher that has caused problems for the MIA over Gramsci's works there. They used to have a lot of them, but were made to remove them from their site.

As for Gramsci himself, those writings are very dense. It may have been he never intended anyone to see them, and had only been writing them to keep his brain straight and not go insane from lack of activity. For someone like him to go from party work to being isolated during a period of great upheaval in the communist movement, it was frustrating as it was with the others who ended up getting imprisoned at the time.

As far as he cared, if he wrote them in such an obfuscating way, the prison wardens would have not cared he kept demanding paper to write. What good would it do if it's only understood by other Marxists? There's always a division here in Marxist work, where you have some types that are written specifically for those who are already well versed in Marxism, and others that are disseminated for mass consumption. Gramsci's works fall more in the former, because he expects those reading to understand how he was using Marxist analysis to reach his conclusions, or when he'd refer to something Lenin did off hand.

As for the way he criticizes everyone, welcome to Marxist polemics. It's pretty much inescapable, we end up doing it here alot too, though in a far less dense form. Most of his vitriol, at least from what I got, seems to be concentrated towards Croce and Gentile, which were simultaneously a criticism of their beliefs as well as how they fit into the framework of hegemony.

Croce of course was the champion of liberals in Italy and formerly a Marxist before he broke with them over idealistic concerns, and ended up giving some support to the fascist government in its earliest years. This, of course, is what Gramsci was attacking the most since Croce was a symbol of liberal cooperation for the sake of defusing the country's crisis, and his false hopes in trying to work through that government to reform education.

There's also the angle that Croce was influential in many intellectual circles, Italian Marxists included, so it was rather annoying for a lot of them to see him do that. Croce himself was rather representative of the type of intellectuals who broke with socialists because they found it conflicted with their bourgeois position.

Gentile was another "intellectual", and was unabashed about his support for Fascism. In a sense it could be said that Mussolini had given him some credit in an attempt to try and give Fascism intellectual street cred. And as we know Gentile wasn't alone in this from intellectuals and artists- FT Marinetti of Futurist fame, Luigi Pirandello who was a well-known playwright at the time in Italy (Gramsci had reviewed many of his works during his time in the newspaper), and outside with types like Ezra Pound supporting Fascism. In a sense I guess Gramsci wanted to highlight how people like Gentile fit in to the grand picture of the state in trying to strengthen its support and "consent" from the masses.

The Selections book above though I think is pretty much a good, abridged version of his thoughts. I only struggled through the very end of it where he gets into dialectical materialism which is in itself a tough concept and not exactly invigorating.

In general the book focuses on the following parts:


Intellectuals: The difference between a traditional intellectual and the organic intellectual. It's towards the latter that Gramsci sees as those who will rise form their class and be the source of agitation and pushing along consciousness.

Education: How this fits into the state and its importance. This ties into the above more than anything, but is at its surface written as a criticism of the Fascist government's educational reforms which had input from both Croce and Gentile. There's some pedagogy things in here too.

Italian History: Where he uses his framework to analyze Italian history. This is interesting for history buffs but it's also can be extrapolated as trying to see why places like Italy developed differently than those like France, UK, or Germany in its embrace of capitalism and moving out of old systems. It is simultaneously though a subtle way of figuring out how developments like fascism fit into the grand scheme of things.

The one thing that comes out of here is the concept of a "passive revolution". This is a concept where Gramsci shows how a ruling elite can preserve their position in society by making some gradual reforms and necessary concessions. To Gramsci this is the way revolutionary moments were either neutralized or incorporated and diluted. So Fascism could be seen as a form of a "passive" revolution that the elite undertook, as is the large coalition governments like those that came about in the UK in the 1920s and 1930s. Social Democracy in a sense can be seen as this too, a movement that was incorporated into the framework of the state in order to prevent upheaval.

Modern Prince: This is kind of a way for Gramsci to relate the importance of what Machiavelli wrote to modern times. Machiavelli is often seen and held as an example of someone who was fine with the excess of powers, but Gramsci feels he was trying to illustrate the nature of the state, a unique achievement considering the time it was written in. Gramsci's position of how the state uses both coercion and consent is a constant theme here and in the next

He then applies this to how revolutionary strategy was applied by French revolutionaries to try and show Machiavelli's relevance in a more recent time. This is written as Gramsci saying how a "modern" Prince would be written, though in a sense this whole section lays out what the "Modern Prince" ie the Communist Party should operate. This is probably the definition of revolutionary praxis that is sometimes associated with Gramsci.

State and Civil Society: This is essentially the crux of Gramsci's cultural hegemony and where it has often been applied and interpreted by Marxists and non-Marxists alike. This is basically an exploration of the relationship between the "state"- the Marxist conception of the force that operates for a particular class's interests- and the "civil society"- the host of bodies that exist outside the state but work with it in tandem in more developed societies.

The walk away lesson here is how the ruling class is able to use the "superstructure"- the civil society- to earn consent while using force from the state- twinned with the "base". This is essentially something central to Marxist theory- the base is representative of the fundamental organization of society and the means of production, while superstructure grows out of that. Gramsci basically asserts the later plays its own role rather than being only an extension of the former.

The unwritten conclusion, though disguised in a metaphor for warfare, is that merely overthrowing the "state" won't be enough if the civil society is left intact, as it will rebound on the new state and cause the revolutionary movement to fall apart. IIRC, Gramsci's metaphor is done through a trench system where he shows that even after an army has made a breakthrough on the front lines, they have to deal with the whole array of defense networks behind it and in a sense get worn down by attrition.

The metaphor is basically referring to the state and civil society. The state being the front-lines and the civil society being all the trenches and crap behind it that wears you down. In places where the civil society is strong, the overthrow of the state is more difficult than those where it is fractured and not consistent, like it was in Russia as Gramsci claims. In either event though it presents a challenge that must be overcome even if the state is overthrown.

So from there he goes on with the metaphors to describe a war of position to highlight the importance of an army's logistical support from the industry of its country as well as its defense emplacements, and a war of maneuver to make its gains. "War of Position" is representative of the agitation and such a communist movement does to gain support and form a counter-hegemonic bloc around the proletariat, the "war of maneuver" the actual strikes, agitation, class warfare, revolution, etc. that goes with it. If you want to go further, this is yet again another extension of the praxis, the intersection of theory and action. Theory without action is meaningless, action without theory is meaningless. And here dialectics rears itself, since he essentially posits theory and action act on each other in that manner.

Americanism and Fordism: This is like the Italian History section in that he applies Marxism in analyzing the history and development of the United States and why it was able to develop differently from Europe. The overall conclusion he gets here is that the United States did not have an equivalent of a parasitic landlord system that Europeans were addled with, and the one that they did have was utterly destroyed in the civil war before it got too deeply ingrained.

It is because of this, as Gramsci believes at least, that capitalism developed more robustly and in a stronger form than those that arose in Europe. He goes on to discuss the ways the Americans are beginning to advance over their opposition in the ways factories are organized, focusing on Taylorism- something that interested Lenin as well.

Theory of Praxis: This is the most frustrating to me since it's the most theoretical. "Theory of Praxis" is his byword for Marxism so he goes on to all his stuff about it, going from the ways it can analyze society to a criticism of the way Dialectical Materialism was being taught in the Soviet Union.


I don't want to post links, but if you really want to, I can give you a pdf of the selections book so you see what I'm getting at. I've been trying to epub that thing for sometime to make it more accessible to those with readers, no luck though.

Really excellent summarization of Gramsci's theoretical contributions. I literally have nothing to add on the subject of Croce. I would add on the subject of Gentile that Mussolini tried to promote Fascism as a forward-looking ideology and by co-opting Gentile into the Fascist regime sought to benefit from Gentile's reputation as an expert on progressive education.

If I had to succinctly state one major reason why it seems important to at least read some of Gramsci's work it would be the notion that the bourgeoisie attains hegemony in a complex manner and utilizes and network of the institutions of civil society. In other words, as much as all of us would love to smash the bourgeois state, achieving sufficiently broad support among workers to have a realistic chance of winning a revolutionary struggle requires developing a deep, organic connection with the proletariat.

[skitty]

I was surprised to read that Mussolini was originally a socialist!:confused:

[Red Commissar]

I was surprised to read that Mussolini was originally a socialist!:confused:

Yeah, he was originally a member of the Socialist Party and part of its hardline faction (Maximalists). Both of his parents were politically conscious, as you can see from his name- "Benito" refers to Bentio Juarez, instead of the more ordinary Italian Benedetto. It's believed his middle name, Amilcare, refers to the Italian anarchist Amilcare Cipriani. The other, "Andrea" to Andrea Costa, an Italian socialist

His standing grew fast in the party, and he was involved in protests against the Italian war in Libya in 1911-1912. When he was in exile in Switzerland after the government came down on those protests, it is believed his views started changing, though it was not readily obvious since upon his return the PSI gave him the editorship of their official paper/organ Avanti!

Mussolini's political shift starting with his support for Italian intervention in the first war really took a lot of his fellow party members by surprise, especially those who were considered to be "Maximalists" like he was. There's actually an article that Gramsci wrote at the time, a confused defense of Mussolini arguing that his article was not a call for intervention. Of course Gramsci and everyone else in the party later saw that Mussolini was indeed in favor of the war, and unapologetic about it. This was really disarming since, again, Mussolini was a fairly well-known figure in their party and the editor of their newspaper to boot, and an ally of the Maximalists against the reformist Minimalists.

It is interesting to read some of Gramsci's articles during this time to see how he responded to Mussolini's weird political shift, and his gradual inching towards the formation of the Fascist party and swinging hard to the right. Even so, as Gramsci criticizes, there were some trade unionists and members of the PSI that attempted to work with Mussolini still when he first came into government because they thought he was forward thinking. Mussolini would for a while still claim he was a "socialist" before the fascist party, and even then tried to paint it as a forward looking ideology like Gramsci Guy pointed out above.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Yeah, he was originally a member of the Socialist Party and part of its hardline faction (Maximalists). Both of his parents were politically conscious, as you can see from his name- "Benito" refers to Bentio Juarez, instead of the more ordinary Italian Benedetto. It's believed his middle name, Amilcare, refers to the Italian anarchist Amilcare Cipriani. The other, "Andrea" to Andrea Costa, an Italian socialist

His standing grew fast in the party, and he was involved in protests against the Italian war in Libya in 1911-1912. When he was in exile in Switzerland after the government came down on those protests, it is believed his views started changing, though it was not readily obvious since upon his return the PSI gave him the editorship of their official paper/organ Avanti!

Mussolini's political shift starting with his support for Italian intervention in the first war really took a lot of his fellow party members by surprise, especially those who were considered to be "Maximalists" like he was. There's actually an article that Gramsci wrote at the time, a confused defense of Mussolini arguing that his article was not a call for intervention. Of course Gramsci and everyone else in the party later saw that Mussolini was indeed in favor of the war, and unapologetic about it. This was really disarming since, again, Mussolini was a fairly well-known figure in their party and the editor of their newspaper to boot, and an ally of the Maximalists against the reformist Minimalists.

It is interesting to read some of Gramsci's articles during this time to see how he responded to Mussolini's weird political shift, and his gradual inching towards the formation of the Fascist party and swinging hard to the right. Even so, as Gramsci criticizes, there were some trade unionists and members of the PSI that attempted to work with Mussolini still when he first came into government because they thought he was forward thinking. Mussolini would for a while still claim he was a "socialist" before the fascist party, and even then tried to paint it as a forward looking ideology like Gramsci Guy pointed out above.


Red Commissar's post is excellent. my only regret is that I can only thank it once. With respect to Mussolini's childhood my collection is that the father was a leftist artisan-proletarian while the mother was a liberal schoolteacher. Mussolini was clearly a product of progressive trends in Italian society rather than the traditional Catholic-monarchist side of the Italy of a hundred years ago. Mussolini's political peregrinations IMO resulted from his overweening ego that caused him to abandon a class analysis for personal ambition. Look where it got him in the end. Dead and strung up sotto sopra/upside down.