I'm a bit more than halfway through it, and something's bugging me. Gramsci rightly criticizes intellectuals who confused historical materialism with bourgeois economism, yet in the immediately following passages he goes on to commit the exact same error by accusing the "intransigents" in the PCI of embracing a "teleology like that of a religion" because intransigents recognize the inherent instability of capitalism due to its contradictions and adamantly refuse to ally themselves with non-proletarian, non-revolutionary elements in other classes as a "practical compromise". This is done for historical materialist, not bourgeois "economistic" reasons. The idea is of course that class consciousness lags behind the actual strength of the contradictions in capitalism (how far the rate of profit has fallen [though I'm still trying to figure out how likely that is to actually trigger an ultimate unavoidable capitalist crisis], the rate of exploitation, unemployment, etc.). That lag certainly exists, but it would be misguided in my view to claim that "compromise" of that kind is therefore necessary or even desirable. I realize that Gramsci was writing this in specific historical conditions in Italty, however. What would he have said about compromise with social democrats or other not-really-technically-proletarian (even petite bourgeoisie) groups in the context of advanced capitalist society kept afloat by debt? It doesn't seem like there's anything to be gained in "compromise" in the sense their might arguably have been in countries with a large peasant class allying with workers. Thanks.
The way I understood it, it was less about compromising with those elements and more about ensuring that the proletariat had hegemonic dominance over them. He had used the example of the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution as an example of a small group that had nonetheless managed to bring other sectors of the population into its fold and fight for its aims.
Yeah, that made sense with further reading. On an unrelated note, I'm now much further in and reading "Americanism and Fordism", specifically the section "Animality and Industrialism". It seemed to make sense at first to the extent that when there's a struggle to bring capitalism (especially Taylorism) to a particularly "backward" society, it can and will involve "mechanical repression" of less developed (or "primitive") activities or classes. He then goes on, though, to relate it to a "libertarian conception" of sexuality in the post-war period with logic I'm struggling to follow. Maybe I just need to read it with fewer distractions, but what exactly is Gramsci's attitude toward feminism and sexual liberation, if someone wouldn't mind elaborating? I'm getting the sense that when he talks about the "regulation and stability of sexual relations", he means trying to instill the "values" of the industrial American "nuclear family", in place of a more "ruralist" view of the family, but I might be off (especially since he talks about coercion by an "elite" of the same class rather than by a capitalist class as in Taylorism).
American and Fordism is a weird section, though a lot of it is an attempt to try and apply the previous readings into Base and Superstructure. It is useful to understand the context the passage was written in. For those who became Marxists in the early 1900s, the United States was an object of fascination by Marxists in trying to understand why capitalism developed differently in the US compared to European countries, despite all these countries having the same base as the 1800s came to a close. The popular Marxist position at the time was that capitalism had been able to develop in a more "pure" state in the United States because the colonies, while being transplants of the United Kingdom and other European states, did not replicate the old feudal base of Europe. In this respect the view was that the superstructure that could be associated with capitalism could develop without showing too many of the old characteristics of the previous society. As far as Marxists were concerned, there was not a large, hereditary land-owning class that Europe had who could slow or half-way the implementation of liberalism- the closest the US had to this was the slave-owning, plantation notables who had try to become a gentry of sorts in the US. The Civil War settled this question and put the US firmly on the path of liberalism and capitalism, building the society from the ground up rather than emerging from a previous one. This is a position that Gramsci was educated in and agrees with even into the later years of his life. Taylorism, of course, was an object of fascination among Marxists who held industrialization as the key forward for humanity. The factory organization and rationalization it entailed I believe even influenced Lenin. Taylorism is brought up keeping with the position of capitalism in a more pure state in the US, being able to emerge there due to the full commitment to principles of private property (and said property able to be sold and traded), free labor, position of capitalists as notables, etc. The way society is organized relates back to the factories, with compartmentalized organization, roles, ability to be freely moved around and exchanged, and so on. I don't know anything about Gramsci's attitudes on sexuality and feminism. It's been awhile since I read that section, and I didn't even recall his comments on this topic until you brought it up.
