File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9805, message 208


Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 18:57:11 -0500
From: vacirca-AT-charm.net (robert brown)
Subject: AUT: prison notebooks


>X-Authentication-Warning: lists.village.Virginia.EDU: domo set sender to
>owner-aut-op-sy-AT-localhost using -f
>X-Sender: vacirca-AT-smtp.charm.net
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 02:59:22 -0500
>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>From: vacirca-AT-charm.net (robert brown)
>Subject: AUT: prison notebooks
>Cc: llopez-AT-unm.edu, fiocco-AT-ccuws4.unical.it, JShearer.1-AT-aol.com
>Sender: owner-aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>Precedence: bulk
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>
>        "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
>

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




     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005