Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 02:59:22 -0500
From: vacirca-AT-charm.net (robert brown)
Subject: AUT: prison notebooks


        "The proletarian revolution cannot but be a total revolution. It
consists in the foundation of new modes of labor, new modes of production
and distribution that are peculiar to the working class in its historical
determination in the course of the capitalist process. This revolution also
presupposes the formation of a new set of standards, a new psychology, new
ways of feeling, thinking and living that must be specific to the working
class, that must be created by it, that will become 'dominant' when the
working class becomes the dominant class. The proletarian revolution is
essentially the liberation of the productive forces already existing within
bourgeois society. These forces can be identified in the economic and
political fields; but is it possible to start identifying the latent
elements that will lead to the creation of a proletarian civiliza=E7tion or
culture? Do elements for an art, philosophy and morality (standards)
specific to the working class already exist? The question must be raised
and it must be answered. Together with the problem of gaining political and
economic power, the proletariat must also face the problem of winning
intellectual power. Just as it has thought to organize itself politically
and economically, it must also think about organizing itself culturally..."

 Antonio Gramsci - QUESTIONS OF CULTURE JUNE 14, 1920, AVANTI


    EVERYTHING (MOSTLY) YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GRAMSCI BUT =E7WERE
AFRAID TO ASK

                 NOTE TO READERS:
        The following is my attempt to get an overview of the Prison Notes.
I wanted to summarize the main political ideas of the Notebooks before
trying to write in any detail about them. I'm fairly confident that I'm
right about the main political intent of the notebooks. No one, to my
knowledge, has come up with a summary outline of the notebooks that looks
like this. I'm not even sure a summary outline even exists. At this point
I'm leaning toward doing a "Gramsci for Beginners". Anyway (sigh) here
goes...


                                                 PROLOGUE

        THE SOUTHERN QUESTION AND CROCE - A REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY

         When Antonio Gramsci, the head of the Italian Communist Party, was
arrested by the fascists in November 1926 he was working on a long article
outlining his revolutionary strategy for defeating fascism. On the basis of
a detailed class analysis of northern and southern Italy he concluded that
the overthrow of fascism was impossible without a peasant uprising in the
semi-colonial south.

        The article, "Some aspects of the Southern Question" is, I believe,
one of the keys to a political understanding of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.
By a close examination of this essay and  the main ideas of the prison
notes I hope to show that the notes were in effect a vast research project
that flowed directly from the political strategy outlined in this article.
If this is true then this essay can be seen as a general political
introduction to the notebooks and a very useful guide to reading them.

        Gramsci's strategy, which called for a revolutionary alliance of
northern factory workers and impoverished southern peasants, turned on
winning the mass support of radical petty bougeois intellectuals in the
south to help the Party organize a peasant insurrection. Gramsci argued
that the poorest southern peasants, while in a perpetual state of
semi-revolt, were disorganized and leaderless, and lacked independent
revolutionary organizations of their own. They took political direction
from southern intellectuals from the medium and small landowning
bourgeoisie; the lawyers, doctors, notaries, elected officials, petty
bureaucrats and priests of the rural villages and towns.

        Catholic priests  were an especially important group of  southern
rural intellectuals. The biggest and most powerful single landlord in
Southern Italy in the 1920s was the Catholic church. As economic agents of
the church, southern priests collected rents from peasant sharecroppers
(mezzadri) on church lands, loaned peasants money at extremely usurious
rates and as Gramsci put it: "manipulate<d> the religious element in order
to make certain of collecting his rent or interest".

        Gramsci also observed with great interest that southern rural
intellectuals made up more than 60% of the Italian State's bureaucracy. All
these southern intellectuals were tied to the big landowners and helped
keep the peasants politically subordinated to them.

        These southern "medium intellectuals" were in turn, ideologically
dominated by "great intellectuals", individual southern intellectuals of
great learning and culture, often landowning aristocrats themselves.
Gramsci identified Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce (liberal
neapolitan philosopher,historian and big landowner) as the leading great
intellectuals of the South who kept southern intellectuals (and therefore
poor southern peasants also), ideologically tied to the  big landowners and
capitalism. Croce and Fortunato were the biggest ideological enemies of
peasant revolution in the South and therefore, as Gramsci put it: "the two
major figures of italian reaction".

         The political and economic subordination of the poor peasants to
the big landowners and the Church through the medium of the rural
intellectuals led by Croce and Fortunato was what Gramsci called "a
monstrous Agrarian bloc". THis agrarian bloc, along with the urban middle
class, was the main social base of fascism. It was the landlords and rural
petty bourgeoisie of the agrarian bloc( with some strategic assistance from
horthern indutrialists as well) who supplied the bulk of the finances,
arms, leadership and personnel for the fascist terror squads that defeated
the working class revolt of 1919-20.

        Gramsci's strategy for breaking up this agrarian bloc and
overthrowing fascism depended therefore on winning a mass strata of
southern rural intellectuals away from Croce. As gramsci put it :

"Over and above the  Agrarian Bloc, there functions in the South an
intellectual bloc which in practice has so far served to prevent the cracks
in the Agrarian Bloc becoming too dangerous and causing a landslide.
Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce are the exponents of this
intellectual bloc, and they can thus be considered as the most active
reactionaries in the whole peninsula."

         But defeating Croce was no easy matter. Croce, as Gramsci pointed
out, had dominated Italian culture between 1900 and 1920, shaping the
thinking of a whole generation of intellectuals. Much of the intellectual
leadership for both the fascist,  socialist and communist movements that
arose in Italy between 1900 and 1920 came from a young generation of
radical southern petty bourgeois intellectuals( Gramsci for one). Croce
gave philosophical leadership to these disaffected young intellectuals,
calling for a secularization and modernization of italian culture and
society.
        Gramsci himself began his intellectual life as a  Crocean,
attracted by Croce's call for moral and intellectual reform of backward,
church-ridden Italy.
         Two great social, moral and political questions faced the 40
year-old neophyte italian nation in 1900; the "Southern question" and the
"Social question".
        The first was how to integrate the impoverished, rebellious,
agriculturally and minerally rich South of Italy (including Sardinia and
Sicily) into the Italian nation. As economic and political colony of the
more industrialized North, the South had powered italian capitalist
development but reaped none of its benefits. Southern peasants were the
most oppressed but least organized class in Italy.  And southern
intellectuals as members of a semi-colonial petty bourgeoisy were a
=E7potentially explosive revolutionary force.
         The second question facing Italy was how to relieve the misery of
impoverished, powerless industrial factory workers in the North. The
northern working class trade union  movement had developed along economist,
reformist racist anti-southern lines, a labor aristocracy emerged which
developed a political and economic alliance with northern Capital. Middle
class nationalist and  many leading syndicalist intellectuals pushed for
imperialist expansion of Italy into North Africa and the middle East.
Gramsci and other radical southern intellectuals proposed a revolutionary
alliance between northern factory workers and poor northern and southern
peasants as an alternative to the  pro-imperialist reformists,
nationalists, and  syndicalists. Croce as a member of the southern
landowner class had a direct interest in sabotaging such a dangerous
alliance.

         Gramsci goes on to describe the critical role Croce and Fortunato
played in keeping the South from becoming revolutionary:

         "....The Southerners who have sought to leave the agrarian bloc
and pose the Southern question in a radical form have found hospitality in,
and grouped themselves around, reviews printed  outside the South. Indeed
one might say that all the cultural initiatives by medium intellectuals
which have taken place in this century in Central and Northern Italy have
been characterized by Southernism, because they have been strongly
influenced by Southern intellectuals: all the journals of the Florentine
intellectuals, like Voce and Unita; the journals of the Christian
democrats, like Azione in Cesena; the journals of the young Emilian and
Milanese liberals published by G. Borelli, such as Patria in Bologna or
Azione in Milan; and lastly, Gobetti's Rivoluzione Liberale.
         Well, the supreme political and intellectual rulers of all these
initiatives have been Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce. In a broader
sphere than the stifling agrarian bloc, they have seen to it that the
problems of the South would be posed in a way which did not go beyond
certain limits; did not become revolutionary. Men of the highest culture
and intelligence, who arose on the traditional terrain of the South but
were linked to European and hence world culture, they had all the necessary
gifts to satisfy the intellectual needs of the most sincere representatives
of the cultured youth in the South; to comfort their restless impulses to
revolt against existing conditions; to steer them along a middle way of
classical serenity in thought and action. The so-called neo-protestants or
Calvinists have failed to understand that in Italy, since modern conditions
of civilization rendered impossible any mass religious reform, the only
historically possible reformation has taken place with Benedetto Croce's
philosophy. The direction and method of thought have been changed and a new
conception of the world has been constructed, transcending catholicism and
every other mythological religion. In this sense, Benedetto Croce has
fulfilled an extremely important "national" function. He has detached the
radical intellectuals of the South from the peasant masses, forcing them to
take part in national and European culture; and through this culture, he
has secured their absorption by the national bourgeoisie and hence by the
agrarian bloc."

         For a brief period in the 1890's Croce flirted with legal Marxism,
becoming a leader of revisionism. But as mass working class socialist
movements grew in Italy, France, Germany, Russia and  middle class
nationalist hostility to socialism intensified Croce became increasingly
hostile to Marxism . He strongly supported Italy's participation in World
War I, violently denouncing the Socialist party for its pacifism and lack
of patriotism. He bitterly opposed the rise of the Soviet Union and the
communist movement in Italy. He supported Fascism in its first years as a
stabilizing and modernizing force that could block a more radical working
class communist revolution.
        However as Fascism violently consolidated its dictatorship over
bourgeois liberals like himself as well as socialist workers and peasants
he went into passive "philosophical" opposition to the regime. However, he
refused to support any mass political action against fascism and remained a
member of the fascist-controlled Italian Senate and respected public
intellectual figure. He continued to speak and write openly through out the
22 years fascism was in power without any reprisals from fascist
authorities.
        In both his prison letters and prison notes Gramsci made clear that
he considered Croce to be  an invaluable ally of fascism despite his formal
liberal philosophical opposition. His political passivity, his
anti-communist, anti-working class, elitist upper class politics and
philosophy helped to keep southern intellectuals politically passive and
hostile to the masses. By remaining in the Fascist Senate as a formal
opponent of the regime he gave the Fascist State democratic legitimacy and
increased its intellectual prestige. For Gramsci, Croce was the most
sophisticated, influential and dangerous philosophical opponent of Marxism
and  working class revolution in Italy and Europe.

        In contrast to the reactionary figures of Croce and Fortunato,
Gramsci put forward Piero Gobetti as a model of those democratic
intellectuals that could be won over to a working class-led revolution.
Gobetti, under the influence of the communist auto workers of the Turinese
"Ordine Nuovo" movement had broken with Croce and come to see the northern
working class as the social force that could culturally and socially
modernize Italy.

         Against sectarian criticism within the communist party that
Gobetti was a bourgeois liberal and should be struggled against Gramsci
advanced his views on the need to make alliances with democratic
intellectuals:

         "....not =DDto understand [why the party needs Gobetti as an ally
-BB ], means not to understand the question of intellectuals and the
function which they fulfill in the class struggle. Gobetti, in practice
served us as a link: 1. with those intellectuals born on the terrain of
capitalist techniques [factory technicians and engineers-BB ]who in 1919-20
had taken up a left position, favorable to the dictatorship of the
proletariat;
2. with a series of southern intellectuals who through more complex
relationships, posed the Southern question on a terrain different from the
traditional one, by introducing into it the proletariat of the North...
         Intellectuals develop slowly, far more slowly than any other
social group, by their very nature and historical function. They represent
the entire cultural tradition of a people, seeking to sum up and synthesize
all of its history. This can be said especially of the old type of
intellectual: the intellectual born on the peasant terrain. To think it
possible that such intellectuals, en masse, can break with the entire past
and situate themselves totally upon the terrain of a new ideology, is
absurd. It is absurd for the mass of intellectuals, and perhaps it is also
absurd for very many intellectuals taken individually as well
-notwithstanding all the honorable efforts which they make and want to
make.
         Now, we are interested in the mass of intellectuals, and not just
individuals. It is certainly important and useful for the proletariat that
one or more intellectuals, individually, should adopt its programme and
ideas; should merge into the proletariat, becoming and feeling themselves
to be an integral part of it. [ Gramsci himself is an example- BB] The
proletariat, as a class, is poor in organizing elements. It does not have
its own stratum of intellectuals, and can only create one very slowly, very
painfully, after the winning of State power. But it is also important and
useful for a break to occur in the mass of intellectuals: a break of an
organic kind, historically characterized. For there to be formed, as a mass
formation, a left tendency, in the modern sense of the word: ie one
oriented towards the revolutionary proletariat.
         The alliance between proletarian and peasant masses requires this
formation. It is all the more required by the alliance between proletariat
and peasant masses in the south. The proletariat will destroy the southern
agrarian bloc insofar as it succeeds, through its party, in organizing
increasingly significant masses of poor peasant into autonomous and
independent formations. But its greater or lesser success in this necessary
task will also depend upon its ability to break up the intellectual bloc
that is the flexible, but extremely resistant, armor of the agrarian bloc.
The proletariat was helped towards the accomplishment of this task by Piero
Gobetti...."


         This strategy of intellectually defeating Croce and winning over
the radical southern intellectuals to the revolution was the political and
intellectual starting point, the basic intellectual DNA of the Prison
Notebooks. It led him to a massive study of Italian intellectuals, their
class origins, their politics, their culture and their history. It led him
to write a detailed 155 page outline for a major philosophical and
political assault on Croce, what he called an "Anti-Croce". In turn, his
Anti-Croce and his study of Italian intellectuals gave him the critical
foundation for his own political program for social, political and cultural
revolution in Italy. And finally, it led him to move toward a theory of
working class cultural revolution built around the  idea of  creating
leadership cadres made up of autonomous working class intellectuals  and
"national-popular", or revolutionary ,intellectuals.

         CHAP. 1 -THE POLITICS OF THE NOTEBOOKS- AN OVERVIEW


         While the critiques of Croce and Italian intelectuals are the
starting points of the prison notes, Fascism and working class revolution
in Italy are the Notebooks' real subjects. Why did Fascism triumph in
Italy? Or to put the question another way why was the Italian working
class's bid for power in 1919-20 defeated? These are the two questions
Gramsci tried to find answers for.

         Gramsci's answer to all these questions can be summed up in the
following very general way:
        1. Italian capitalism's historical backwardness was the underlying
cause of Fascism. Fascism was Italian capitalism's abortive attempt to
resolve the problems of its backwardness by  relying on the italian middle
class to carry out a strategy of "Passive Revolution" or limited reform
from above.
         2. The presence of the Catholic church in Italy was the main cause
of Italian capitalism's historical backwardness. The church successfully
blocked the bourgeois revolution  in Italy making the the rise of an
italian bourgeois nation-state impossible.  Even though the 20th century
Catholic church had lost its medieval hegemony over European culture with
the defeat of Feudalism it remained a great reactionary force in Italian
politics and culture that blocked the development of  Italy into a modern,
secular  capitalist nation.
        3. For this reason the Italian bourgeoisie and Italian
intellectuals never developed a strong  popular, national revolutionary
"Jacobin" tradition ( Gramsci  is referring to the  French revolution) As a
result, italian intellectuals were historically, culturally and politically
isolated from the working masses.
        4. All of Italian history and culture suffered from this lack of a
national-popular, jacobin tradition among intellectuals and the
bourgeoisie. This deeply elitist "non-National-Popular" middle class
culture (which Croce defended and promoted with his philosophy and history
writing) was a critical factor in the rise of fascism. At times, Gramsci
refers to Fascism as false national-popularism and degenerate jacobinism as
well as a passive revolution.
         5. To defeat fascism and win state power the working class had to
win hegemony, or intellectual and moral authority over the  poor peasantry
and a mass strata of middle class intellectuals. To do this Gramsci
proposed that the working class build a "Modern Prince", a new kind of mass
communist party with a nationalist and populist revolutionary program.
        6. A central feature of this Modern Prince was to be its goal of
working class intellectual autonomy thru the formation of working class
intellectual cadres. Only worker intellectual independence could guarantee
the working class's long term hegemony.

         A few words about Gramsci's idea of hegemony. Gramsci defined the
State as coercion + hegemony. According to Gramsci hegemony is political
power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority or
consensus as distinguished from armed force.  A ruling class forms and
maintains its hegemony in civil society, i.e. by creating  cultural and
political consensus thru unions, political parties, schools, media, the
church, and other voluntary associations. Hegemony is exercised by a ruling
class over allied classes and social groups. Force is used by the ruling
class only to dominate or liquidate hostile classes according to Gramsci.
Historically, under capitalism middle class intellectuals are the
"administrators" of hegemony, i.e. the organizers  and consenus builders of
capitalist culture; hence the strategic importance for Gramsci of studying
italian intellectuals.

        A central feature of Gramsci's nationalist- populist revolution was
to be the intellectual and moral reform of Italy; a cultural revolution
primarily directed against the Catholic church. The main goal of this
cultural revolution was a new socialist working class culture  organized
around sociialist production relations  which was to be the basis for a
modern, secular Italy. The working class could not win real power without
creating its own intellectuals. It could not rely on petty bourgeois
intellectuals to create a socialist culture for them. It had to become
intellectually autonmous. Thus, for Gramsci, creating "organic
intellectuals of a new kind" proletarian intellectuals, became a key step
to working =DDclass victory both in the short and long term.

        The experience of middle class reformist socialist leaders'
betrayal of the working class revolt of 1919-20 and the mass defection of
the italian middle class to fascism drove Gramsci to focus almost
obsessively on Italian intellectuals and  the problem of working class
intellectual autonomy. Intriguingly Lenin's last articles wrestled with the
same question: how the communist party could help the working class
liberate itself from cultural and political dependence on petty bourgeois
intellectuals.

        The large volume of notes on Croce, philosophy and Marxism
demonstrate the importance Gramsci assigned to philosophical struggle in
his plans for a cultural revolution in Italy. These notes are complex,
abstract and very difficult to follow and I dont feel comfortable trying to
summarize them at this point in my research.
        This much is clear to me however, the working class, to achieve
hegemony had to acquire the intellectual ability to struggle out a new
philosophy, or worldview, for itself. So I think, how to aid  workers to
achieve intellectual autonomy is one the main the underlying political
purposes of these notes for Gramsci. To this end Gramsci took on three
philosophical enemies: Croce, the Catholic church and vulgar Marxism. He
also wrote a long note outlining how marxists should approach the problems
of working class intellectual training, see: "Introduction to a study of
philosophy and culture."
        Finally Gramsci seemed to be moving toward a new Marxist theory of
the State and a revision of Marxism into a " Philosophy of Praxis". In
Gramsci's notes on the State it clearly emerges as both a coercive and a
hegemonic apparatus. This expanded definition of the State led him to
attach great importance to developing a marxist theory of cultural
revolution. This theory, in turn, required that Marxism be  "completed"
philosophically, that is,  become a totally new world view or "philosophy
of Praxis" to successfully replace Catholicism and Croceanism.

                                        SUMMARY


         So to recapitulate. Italian backwardness, largely the fault of the
Catholic church, led to Fascism. Betrayal of the working class by the
middle class was the key historical lesson of Fascism and reformist
socialism for Gramsci.
        Croce played a key role in setting the cultural stage for Fascism.
Gramsci's answer to Fascism, reformism, Catholicism, and Croceanism was
National-Popular revolution led by a new type of communist party, the
Modern Prince, thru which  the working class was to intellectually and
morally transform itself  to lead a kind of italian proletarian cultural
revolution. This revolution was  to replace the Catholic culture of the
peasant and worker masses and the bourgeois liberal culture of the
intellectuals. It led Gramsci to theorize a  new marxism, or philosophy of
Praxis whose key feature was a theory of the State as both coercive and
hegemonic apparatus. This marxism also required  a systematic theory of
cultural revolution to build an integral new culture.  two key features of
Gramsci's cultural revolution were the creation of a core of working class
intellectual cadres and transforming a mass section of middle class
intellectuals into national- popular , or revolutionary intellectuals.

                                                                Bob Brown

"Solidarity is running the same risks."
                        - Che Guevara




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