File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-10-22.195, message 34


Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 21:13:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: The always timely Antonio Gramsci



Although it has been nearly two years since Gramsci's pre-prison writings
became available in English (edited by Richard Bellamy and translated by
Virginia Cox,  Cambridge,  1994: Cambridge University Press),  a recent
reading of it proved most propitious for recent threads on
Marxism-International.

It is,  as I said,  the first reasonably representative collection of his
early political and cultural journalism available in English.    It covers
his writings on the First World War,   on the Factory Council movement in
Turin in 1919-20,  on the formation and organization of the Italian
Communist Party,  and on the rise and nature of Fascism.    In its pages
Gramsci is revealed as a brilliant journalist first and foremost,  and
secondly as a Communist activist; his role as a political theorist,
wondering how to found a modern industrial state,   was thrust on him by
events.    Moreover,  we see an "Italian" Gramsci,  aware of the world
outside Italy but essentially engaged in day-to-day Italian political
debate.    This is a refreshing perspective,  not only for considering the
later *Prison Notebooks*,  but for our own efforts here in the international
Marxist arena.

It could be argued that Gramsci's writings before 1922 were not so much
"Italian" as "Piedmontese".    His perspective was based on the engineering
factories of the "proletarian city",  Turin;  here was a Piedmontese (labor)
aristocracy with a mission to lead a revolution and found a new state,  in
1919-20 as in 1859-60.    Austere and moralistic,  Gramsci constantly
stressed the need to "liberate the productive forces"  of the North from the
corrupt,  protectionist bureaucracy of Rome and the South.    He envisioned
a new state,  based on institutions of economic self-management,  within a
strongly "productivist" --and free trading-- framework.   Gramsci's views
for a time contained elements of the "productionists" ideal favord by
syndicalists like Lanzillo,   Orano,  Olivetti,  and Panunzio,  who would
soon repudiate Marxist revisionism and embrace Fascism.    But while the
syndicalists supported a productionist model that would partially
expropriate finance capital,  grant land to the returning soldier-peasants
and eventually erect a modern corporativist system (that they hoped would
spare Italy the chaos of a Bolsehvik--style revolution),  Gramsci came to
urge the entire expropriation of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie
and dismissed the notions of national self--purification and rejuvenation
promoted by national syndicalism (through the agency of social war against
that same bourgeoisie) as so much cant.    

All this has fascinating contemporary resonances.   Gramsci did,  of course,
recognize the need for the revolutionary northern workers to carry the
southern peasantry with them,  but he had few convincing ideas about how
this might be done.    

The most original aspects of Gramsci's pre-prison writings were probably
those concerned with workers' self-management,  through Factory Councils.
He despised traditional labor militancy and its institutions,  and argued
that the "New Order" could only be built by responsible,  sober,  educated
workers,  able to organize production by themselves.    These ideas,
rejected by trade unionists and industrialists alike,  had little practical
success,  but remain important as one of the most coherent attempts,  within
the socialist tradition,  to think about the very basis of a socialist
society.    Gramsci had little faith in the "docility" and "facelessness" of
an industrial working class untutored by a revolutionary elite and which,
if left to its own devices,   would soon degenerate into "a shapeless mass
of victims of corrupted power,  drilled into passivity."

The other striking feature of these writings is how many of them anticipate
Gramsci's later themes in his *Prison Notebooks*.    Even in 1915 we find
him inveighing against "economism",  and stressing the relative autonomy of
politics and the significance of ideology.   His famous analysis of the
"Southern Question" stressed the importance of intellectuals in maintaining
authority in the South.    Even the concept of "hegemony" was already
implicit in his earlier career,  which is why Gramsci was at such pains to
educate the workers,  and to organize a "productivist" counter-culture.
His later remarks about the need for praxis,  for mass political action
through appropriate institutions,  harked back to his days in Turin;  so,
too,  did his reflections on the failure of revolutions.

The *Prison Notebooks*,  in short,   were an outcome of Gramsci's own
career,  among much else,  and every aspect of that career is illustrated by
these writings.          


Louis Godena 



   

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