Date: Thu, 23 Nov 1995 12:42:53 -0500
From: LeoCasey-AT-aol.com
Subject: Gramsci


I wrote a great deal of this out last night, and then the bloody AOL software
erased it all on me. Let's take another try.

1. Far too much can be made of the supposed opaqueness of Gramsci's writing.
Since the Prison Notebooks were written in fascist jails, Gramsci resorted to
code words to identify figures and concepts which might provoke the prsion
censor. However, any decent annotated version of the Prison Notebooks, such
as the Lawrence and Wishart selections put together by Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith, is more than adequate in translating the meanings for
a reader otherwise familiar with the Marxist tradition. The code is also
important because the terms Gramsci selects are often suggestive: the fact
that one of his common terms for Marxism is the philosophy of praxis, for
example, suggests a particular view of Marxism. The far more serious problem
in assessing Gramsci's works is the fact that his prison writings were just
notebooks, and never systematized into a work for publication. They are thus
fragmented, isolated pearls never strung into a chain. A number of years
Perry Anderson made a great deal of this problem in his essay on "The
Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci" in NLR where he teased out different,
competing models of state and civil society from the different fragments.
IMO, this type of analysis really fails to come to grips with the conditions
and the nature of Gramsci's prison work. (Paranthetically, I want to dissent
from Bryan's suggestion that one can ignore the Prison Writings and just read
the earlier Political Writings; both are essential for a understanding of
Gramsci's corpus. The earlier writings are journalistic, written for
Socialist and Communist popular publications, and so lacking in sustained
theoretical engagement; by contrast, the prison writings are largely
theoretical, albeit informed by a lifetime of political work, as Gramsci is
cut off from practical political engagement. To ignore either is to view
Gramsci in a partial way.)

2. The suggestion that Gramsci was somehow a Stalinist is also, I am afraid,
a bit of  self-indulgent silliness which ignores the most basic facts of
Gramsci's life. He was imprisoned by the Italian fascists in the mid-1920s
(1926 if my memory serves me correct), and spent the remainder of his life in
severe isolation in prison. He was not, therefore,  politically active during
or aware of the consolidation of Stalinism in the USSR (the show trials, the
mass murders, and so on) or the Stalinization of the various Comintern
parties. To call Gramsci a Stalinist based on his leadership of the early
1920s Italian Communist Party and his opposition to Trotsky during the early
twenties makes as much sense as to call Engels a revisionist/reformist based
on his association before his death with Bernstein and Kautsky. One can
speculate, of course, on where a political trajectory might have led, but
this is hardly a basis on which to condemn someone as Stalinist. For my own
part, as long as we are speculating, I think that Gramsci's political theory
was so fundamentally democratic that some sort of conflict with Stalinism
would have been inevitable.

3. If I can read between the lines here, the suggestion that Gramsci was a
Stalinist probably has something to do with his critique of Trotsky's early
1920's argument for permanent revolution. If one wants to look at these
matters through a Manichean lens in which one is either Stalinist or
Trotskyist, then criticism of Trotsky is a sign of Stalinism. I would
suggest, however, that this is a woefully inadequate understanding. Gramsci's
critique of Trotsky is on a fundamentally different ground than Stalin's
criticisms; indeed, at the risk of arousing the ire of the orthodox
Trotskyist, I would say that it was Trotsky and Stalin who shared the most
common political ground when compared with Gramsci. Gramsci argued that
Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution (as well as Luxemburg's spontaniest
strategy) led to a putschist strategy of direct assaults upon the state, one
which failed to grasp the importance of a vast and powerful civil society in
advanced capitalist societies; Gramsci often compared political strategies to
modes of warfare, and he saw the Trotskyist strategy as based on the outmoded
'war of manuevre' characteristic of 19th century warfare in which the two
armies met head-on on the battlefield. In opposition to the
Trotskyist/Luxemburgist model, Gramsi developed a political strategy based on
the model of the 20th century 'war of position' in which a long and
protracted struggle in civil society was a pre-requisite to the
transformation of the state; such a strategy clearly rests on a much more
democratic conception of social transformation. It has been suggested on this
list that Gramsci was a 'revolutionist' and thus implicitly, not a reformist;
IMO, a close examination of his thinking on strategy shows that Gramsci was
moving beyond the classical reform-revolution dichotomy to a different way of
conceiving the project of democratic social transformation. In this respect,
to view his critique of Trotsky as somehow a sign of Stalinism is very
superfacial. (Another element of Gramsci's critique of Trotsky, which becomes
apparent below, is Gramsci's insistence upon being rooted in and social
transforming specific national realities in contrast to Trotsky's fixation of
world revolution.)

4. Lastly, I would like to take up Chris B's inquiries on Gramsci's view of
the party. There are several different 'party' themes in Gramsci's
formulations. For one, there is the notion opposed to both vanguardism and
passive mass parties, that the working class political party is the
organization of organic intellectuals of the class. Gramsci believed that
every social class and group had, organically developing out of it and linked
to it, a strata of intellectuals which organized its unity amd articulated
its world view in industry, in law, in culture, etc. (It is important to
understand Gramsci's concept of intellectuals to grasp this concept of the
party; it is not limited in the narrow way we often think of it -- as
academics -- but to the broader notion of _practical_ organizers of a class
worldview; moreover, he argues that all people think and act intellectually,
even if they do not have the larger social function of an intellectual.) The
concept of the party as organic intellectuals is a radically anti-sectarian
notion of the party, one which clearly rejects the vanguard notion of the
party as the repository of the correct line arrived at through the science of
Marxism-Leninism-(Trotskyism/Stalinism/Maoism) and then delivered to the
masses, and the passive mass party which is little more than an organizer of
 the parliamentary government or its opposition. It is also clearly linked to
the notion of a long, protracted struggle in civil society.

Another theme is taken up in Gramsci's description of the party as the
'Modern Prince'. Gramsci was a thinker firmly rooted in the national context
in which he wrote and practiced politics, and this theme was an attempt to
appropriate some of the concepts of Italy's greatest political theorist,
Machiavelli, within an Italian Marxist practice. Like Machiavelli's Prince,
Gramsci's Modern Prince has the task of organizing the "national popular
collective will" -- establishing the broad base, in industry, in law, in
culture and so on of the national unity, a national unity expressive of a
class' worldview. To put it simply, the party organizes the hegemony of the
class. In this respect, Gramsci is taken with Machiavelli's image of the
Prince as the mythical centaur -- half-animal and half-human. For Gramsci,
this expresses the need of the party to combine "force and consent, authority
and hegemony, violence and civilization..." in short, the party's need to
function in both civil society and the state. In combining these elements,
Gramsci creates a basis for a concept of democratic authority as the core of
both the party and the state.

My selection of these themes no doubt reflect some of my own preoccupations
and my reading of Gramsci. There is a great deal more in his work, and others
may want to highlight different themes.



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