Socialism and Culture

This bit is another work from Gramsci's time as a journalist. In the reader .pdf it's on page 28 (being pg. 56 in the book proper). This was published in Il Grido Del Popolo on January 29th, 1916.

Here Gramsci explores a question that he will return to many times and would integrate later on when he finalized his concept of a civil society.

We all know what "culture" is hopefully, and I think we can have an appreciation of what its function is in society, diffusing ideas and concepts to many people.

Gramsci starts off with this important point:

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.

I think we can all relate to this- it's hard to truly appreciate culture if you are being forced to do so. I can relate that when I read many books in my school, I could care less for them. But as I grew up and experienced some of those themes, I found the books much more interesting and relevant.

Gramsci also makes an attack here against "educated" people who set themselves above the others. In the paragraph following this he brings up the example of someone who has learned Latin or graduated with a law degree, and subsequently see this more as a mark of superiority over others. Knowing "culture" isn't a matter of memorizing facts and what not, it isn't an exclusive lifestyle, but rather something you must acquire from your own experiences and what humanity experiences. Gramsci expands upon this in the following paragraph:

Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one's inner self, a coming to terms with one's own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one's own historical value, one's own function in life, one's own rights and obligations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous evolution, through a series of actions and reactions which are independent of one's own will -as is the case in the animal and vegetable kingdoms where every unit is selected and specifies its own organs unconsciously, through a fatalistic law of things. Above all, man is mind, i.e. he is a product of history, not nature. Otherwise how could one explain the fact, given that there have always been exploiters and exploited, creators of wealth and its selfish consumers, that socialism has not yet come into being? The fact is that only by degrees, one stage at a time, has humanity acquired consciousness of its own value and won for itself the right to throw off the patterns of organization imposed on it by minorities at a previous period in history. And this consciousness was formed not under the brutal goad of physiological necessity, but as a result of intelligent reflection, at first by just a few people and later by a whole class, on why certain conditions exist and how best to convert the facts of vassalage into the signals of rebellion and social reconstruction.

By minorities, Gramsci is referring to a "ruling class" that has existed in previous epochs of history.

It is important here to see the societal progression that Gramsci is referring to, how people react and adjust to their environment and what societies they grow up in. That must be considered when Socialists go into action.

This means that every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men who are at first resistant, and think only of solving their own immediate economic and political problems for themselves, who have no ties of solidarity with others in the same condition. The latest example, the closest to us and hence least foreign to our own time, is that of the French Revolution. The preceding cultural period, called the Enlightenment, which has been so misrepresented by the facile critics of theoretical reason, was not in any way or at least was not entirely a flutter of superficial encyclopaedic intellectuals discoursing on anything and everything with equal imperturbability, believing themselves to be men of their time only if they had read the Encyclopedie of D'Alembert and Diderot; in short it was not solely a phenomenon of pedantic and arid intellectualism, the like of which we see before our eyes today, exhibited most fully in the Popular Universities of the lowest order. The Enlightenment was a magnificent revolution in itself and, as De Sanctis acutely notes in his History of Italian Literature, it gave all Europe a bourgeois spiritual International in the form of a unified consciousness, one which was sensitive to all the woes and misfortunes of the common people and which was the best possible preparation for the bloody revolt that followed in France.

Here Gramsci makes a historical parallel, to that of Revolutionary France and the importance of the enlightenment before it. Not just on the intellectuals, but on the masses, and how instrumental it was to spreading the values of the bourgeoisie during their attempt to overthrow the old order. When the seeds of revolt were sown with the economic instability and oppression, the revolutionaries acted with the calls of liberalism and republicanism, one that resonated strongly with much of France at the time, making the incidents of things like Vendee armies even smaller.

In Italy, France and Germany, the same topics, the same institutions and same principles were being discussed. Each new comedy by Voltaire, each new pamphlet moved like a spark along the lines that were already stretched between state and state, between region and region, and found the same supporters and the same opponents everywhere and every time. The bayonets of Napoleon's armies found their road already smoothed by an invisible army of books and pamphlets that had swarmed out of Paris from the first half of the eighteenth century and had prepared both men and institutions for the necessary renewal. Later, after the French events had welded a unified consciousness, a demonstration in Paris was enough to provoke similar disturbances in Milan, Vienna and the smaller centres. All this seems natural and spontaneous to superficial observers, yet it would be incomprehensible if we were not aware of the cultural factors that helped to create a state of mental preparedness for those explosions in the name of what was seen as a common cause.

Again, another historical example. I think the bit about Napoleon is interesting, with how ideas of the enlightenment and liberalism had already excited the masses, hoping for a new order as Napoleon proceeded across the continent. Even with what followed in regards to Napoleon, we saw that the thoughts of liberalism and republicanism were still exciting the popular imagination, as we saw with the revolutions of 1848, which is the event that Gramsci is referring to at the end. That is, the French people rising up and overthrowing the Orleans monarchy and declaring the Second Republic, which in turn encouraged revolts in other places. The "Springtime of Nations" as some have called it.

The same phenomenon is being repeated today in the case of socialism. It was through a critique of capitalist civilization that the unified consciousness of the proletariat was or is still being formed, and a critique implies culture, not simply a spontaneous and naturalistic evolution. A critique implies precisely the self-consciousness that Novalis considered to be the purpose of culture. Consciousness of a self which is opposed to others, which is differentiated and, once having set itself a goal, can judge facts and events other than in themselves or for themselves but also in so far as they tend to drive history forward or backward. To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist as an element of order but of one's own order and one's own discipline in striving for an ideal. And we cannot be successful in this unless we also know others, their history, the successive efforts they have made to be what they are, to create the civilization they have created and which we seek to replace with our own. In other words, we must form some idea of nature and its laws in order to come to know the laws governing the mind. And we must learn all this without losing sight of the ultimate aim: to know oneself better through others and to know others better through oneself.

Gramsci again highlights the importance of culture to the masses and the success of a movement. It isn't spontaneous (that is, the formation of a culture) as he emphasizes continuously. He also calls for the importance of knowing the current culture and history, to gain an understanding of progression. I think the line at the end "to know oneself better through others and to know others better through oneself" is a nice summary of what culture means.

Gramsci finishes with the following summary:

If it is true that universal history is a chain made up of the efforts man has exerted to free himself from privilege, prejudice and idolatry, then it is hard to understand why the proletariat, which seeks to add another link to that chain, should not know how and why and by whom it has been preceded, or what advantage it might derive from this knowledge.

Gramsci continues here with the idea of a proletarian culture and how it could be possible. Not to wipe away the past, but to build upon it and move on.