revolutionary Marxism
During his lifetime Antonio Gramsci only briefly had a decisive influence on the party he had helped to found. Prior to and immediately after the Livorno split (1921) his theoretical and political contribution had the most impact in the Turin region and was generally counterbalanced by Bordiga's hegemony on a national scale. It was only when, in tandem with the Communist International's leadership, he launched a battle for the formation of a new leadership team that he took on the principal role in his party. This lasted until the end of 1926, until his arrest. Over twenty years had to pass before his historical role and ideas were again seen as central in the Italian workers movement.
The Prison Notebooks, which began to be published in 1948, were a revelation. But from the beginning the tendency to use them for conjunctural political ends very much overshadowed analysis of their intrinsic value. Furthermore they were published in those years when the Italian workers movement was most in the grip of Stalinism. Like the Letters they were altered and even falsified. Palmiro Togliatti was certainly directly responsible for this.
With the distribution of the Notebooks, the PCI (Partito Communista Italiano/Italian Communist Party) aimed primarily to increase its own prestige. As one of its founders, Gramsci had not only stoically and at great sacrifice stood up to fascist persecution, but also kept all his intellectual powers intact in extremely difficult conditions and bequeathed writings of great political and cultural value to the workers movement. No one since Antonio Labriola had made such a contribution to Marxism in Italy.
But the PCI leaders also had an interest in projecting Gramsci as the forerunner of the strategy they adopted after 1944. At the same time, in
8 International Marxist Review a period when the international communist movement had a protile marked by the repugnant features of Stalinism, they could only be helped by the counterweight objectively represented by the Gramscian style and approach. At the end of the 1940s the culture of the communist movement was under the iron rule of Andrei Zhdanov, the grand inquisitor of the Soviet intelligentsia. For the PCI, and even more so for the intellectuals in its orbit who had a generally hegemonic role in the country's culture, the Zhdanov style was hard to digest. Once the Prison Notebooks (especially the writings concerning the intellectuals) had come out everyone could grasp the difference in approach and prioritise references to Gramsci.'
A second phase in the use of Gramsci by the PCI leadership came after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (February 1956) and around the Eighth PCI Congress (December 1956). This was the time when the emphasis was especially put on the concept of hegemony. This aimed both at putting the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat definitively under wraps and to blur over as far as possible the strategic perspective of the seizure of power.
Today the PCI is pushing its ideological and political revisionism further and further. It has adopted the classical approach of social democracy on the universal value of democracy (bourgeois democracy that is) and finally now puts itself forward as an 'integral part of the European Left'. Consequently its references to Gramsci present increasingly insoluble problems. The difficulty is above all an intrinsic one, but it is also tactical. In their effort to give guarantees to real or potential partners the PCI leaders must prove they have 'gone beyond' the stages of their history symbolised by Gramsci. Thus they have arrived at the positions expressed by Natta, Berlinguer's successor, in a recent interview where he stated that his conception of the party was no longer the same as Gramsci's and that Gramsci had a "fundamentalist' conception of Marxism and had not 'anticipated' the present framework of national paths to socialism (Unita, 18 January 1987). Gramsci's method was still valid according to Natta to the extent that Gramsci ' started from reality as it is and fought against any doctrinaire approach'. It is difficult to think of a bigger platitude!
For our part, we consider the best way of honouring Gramsci's memory on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death is to respond to two questions. What has been his historical contribution to the Italian and international workers movement? Are his ideas still valid today? 1. From 1919 to 1926 Ordine Nuovo and the founding of the Communist Party, 1919-26 Leaving on one side what he wrote as a youth we can schematically divide Gramsci's life long struggle into four chapters:
• the battles of the Ordine Nuovo group up to the founding of the Italian
Communist Party and the fascist regime coming to power (October 1922);
• the struggle for the formation of a new leadership team and for a change in the overall political line of the party (1923 to 1926);
• his critical positions on the Italian CP's and Communist International's
Firstly, we should note that the PCI was in no hurry to popularise
Gramsci's writings that had appeared in Ordine Nuovo. These articles, from
1919-20 were only published in 1954 and those from 1921-22 only in 1966, more than twenty years after the end of the war. The reason for this delay is perfectly clear-they could not be used in support of Togliatti's strategy since there was a yawning gap between it and the one put forward by
Indeed, Gramsci started from the analysis of the situation in Italy as a specifically revolutionary situation' and consequently he drew the conclu-
. either the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat and the transition to new modes of production and distribution that will set the stage for a recovery in productivity-—or a tremendous reaction on the part of the part of the propertied classes
(Q. Hoare, ed. and tr., Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1910-20
In such a context all half-measures had to be rejected: this is why Gramsci not only rejected the positions of reformists like Turati but also the sterile declarations of Serrati and the maximalists. The proletariat had to fight with a perspective of the struggle for power. For example in May 1920 Gramsci
1h posed y mep lsiu a ma, iso in the ch tus redlut agry conal pror polit ial power to prepare and arm itself and in which the elements of communist solutions to current
In other words the strategic perspective was the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus and the setting up of a workers state. Given the revolutionary crisis that had opened up, a central role was assigned to the
The workers should proceed at once to the election of vast assemblies of delegates, chosen from their best and most conscious comrades under the slogan: 'All State power to the workers' and peasants councils' (...) The dictatorship of the proletariat represents the establishment of a new, proletarian state, which channels the institutional experiences of the oppressed class and transforms the social activity of the working class and peasantry
There is no need here to recall the contribution Gramsci made to the setting up of councils in the Turin workplaces which remain one of the most enlightening experiences of the Italian workers movement. We should just underline the fact that the Gramscian idea of councils is part of a more line during the 'Third Period' (1930); • the writing of the Notebooks (1929-1935). Gramsci and the Communist International. sion that the following alternative existed:
and governing caste. wrote:
problems are sketched. factory councils. Gramsci wrote in 1919:
into a widespread and powerfully organised system.
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 9
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 191)
(ibid, p. 195)
(ibid, pp 66-9)
The soviet has proved immortal as a form of organised society which adapts flexibly to the multiple. perinanent and vital needs (economic and political) of the great mass of the
Russian people. incarnating the aspirations and hopes of all the oppressed throughout the
Furthermore, contrary to what some of his critics have maintained?,
Gramsci was perfectly conscious that the revolutionary situation existing at that time in Italy, could only be successfully exploited by the working class on two conditions: one, the formation of revolutionary-democratic instruments of struggle organizing and unifying the workers; and two, the creation of a revolutionary leadership that had broken free of both reform-
Finally, it is absoutely clear that for Gramsci the workers state must be based on real proletarian democracy, that is on the 'active and permanent' participation of the masses. This implies that it should 'guarantee the rights of all anti-capitalist tendencies and their possibility of becoming parties of the proletarian government'. Those recognised as anti-capitalist would be all tendencies active inside the working class who accept the new legality installed by the revolution. (L'Ordine Nuovo op cit. pp 59-60).
For a whole period PCI leaders invoked Gramsci to justify their idea of the national role of the working class and their conception of alliances. Let us see what Gramsci actually wrote in an article written just before the the working class has the task of concluding the work of the bourgeoisie and unifying the Italian people in economic and spiritual terms. This can happen only by smashing the bourgeois state machine, which is constructed on a hierarchical dominance of industrial and financial capitalism over the nation's other productive forces (...) By emancipating itself the working class will emancipate all the other oppressed and exploited classes (...)
and the only way these other classes will ever emancipate themselves is to enter into a close alliance with the working class and to hold by this alliance through even the harshest poor peasants and intellectual proletariat (L'Ordine Nuovo op cit pp 134-135)
In other words the proletariat is the only class which can ensure the future development of civilization in all its forms. It alone represents the interests layers which are much more the victims than the beneficiaries of the capitalist system. If the proletariat is now the only 'national' class, that is a supplementary reason for concluding that the only possible solution to the crisis of
Italian society is that represented by the proletarian dictatorship.
The conception of the Italian revolution put forward by Gramsci is rigorously linked to a consistent internationalist framework. According to
Gramsci, just as for Marx and Lenin, the working class is an international class, the proletarian revolution in the last analysis can only be victorious on a world scale. The Russian revolution itself must be interpreted and
10 International Marxist Review' general conception of workers" democracy:
world.
ism and maximalism.
Livorno Congress:
sufferings and the cruellest trials.
The essential allies of the proletariat are the:
of the great majority of the 'nation' defended from this point of view:
(L'Ordine Nuovo 1919-20, (Einaudi, 1954), p.8)
(Selections 1910-20, op cit, p 376)
, including the interests of these middle
Only in the world revolution, and in the solidarity of the workers' International become arbiter of the productive forces, can the Russian and other proletariats hope for a resolution of the conflicts and crises which are rending society today, and for their salvation
It is easy to conclude today, with sixty years of hindsight, that some of
Gramsci's statements were too linear and certain expectations were only very partially justified (but this does not just apply to Gramsci). 3 Furthermore, we can point to a whole series of insufficiencies, ambiguities, even errors in the Ordine Nuovo writings. We can also underline the point that
Gramsci did not always establish in a sufficiently clear way the distinction between the function of the councils as instruments of struggle for the overthrow of the capitalist regime and their function as essential institutions of a future proletarian state. From the standpoint of analysis he did not appear to grasp the turn in the situation represented by the ending of the fac-
But to what extent are the ideas expressed by Gramsci in Ordine Nuovo
Clearly all these ideas reflected, to a great extent, the main themes formulated at the time by the Communist International and its principal leaders.
But, while many leaders of the European workers movement supported the ideas of Lenin and the International, very few demonstrated in their writings and even less in their actions that they had assimilated these ideas in such an effective way as Gramsci. Secondly, Gramsci knew how to apply these theses of the International in the Italian context, giving them a specific content and developing an often masterly analysis of the revolutionary crisis in his country. Thirdly, his reflections on the councils, beyond the obvious
Leninist inspiration, are derived from the experience of the Turin proletariat that Gramsci had personally lived through and are developed in an indepen-
The Lyons Theses and Notes on the Mezzogiorno Question
In the period between the fascists coming to power in October 1922 and his arrest in November 1926, by far the two most significant contributions of Gramsci were the Lyons Theses and the Notes on the Mezzogiorno Question. But we should first identify a sort of transition phase between May
1922 and May 1924, when Gramsci was abroad, in the Soviet Union and
Austria, as a member of the leading bodies of the Communist International.
This was the phase in which he began, although at first cautiously, his battle to change the Bordigist line of the party and to encourage, in the final
Already in December 1923 he had proposed the formation of a 'centre' current, occupying the political space between the ultra-left Amadeo Bordiga and the rightist Angelo Tasca. A month later he even floated the from utter ruin.
tory occupations in September 1920.4 an original contribution?
dent way.
analysis, the emergence of a new leadership team.
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 11
(Selections 1921-26, op cit, p 28)
12 International Marxis: Revien hypothesis of the Communist International using its authority to intervene. Later he increasingly criticised Bordiga's ideas, counterposing a conception of building and organizing the party and a tactical and strategic framework based on the fundamental documents of the first four congresses of the International. Underlying his thinking and his political initiative was the experience of the Italian workers movement and the need to come to terms with new situations. But the International's influence was very great and without it the battle would not have been engaged. It is significant that both in his analysis of his party's situation and in his definition of the communist movement as a world movement, Gramsci stated on several occasions that 'the fundamental force which keeps the body of the party together is the prestige and ideal of the International'.®
The first stage in the battle against the Bordiga current took place at the Como conference and finished at the Lyons Congress in January 1926. The Lions Theses on the one hand and the Notes on the Mezzogiorno Question on the other were without any doubt more original and independent contributions than his previous writings. True, the strategic objectives and more generally the method and approach of these two texts reflect the work and generalizations of the first five congresses of the Communist International. But both the Theses and the Notes are based on an analysis of Italian reality, particularly the South, that the International had not made and would not have been able to make.
The Lions Theses have been the object of two interpretations-with contradictory intentions but convergent conclusions-the PCI one at the end of the Second World War and that made by the Bordigist current which met its defeat at this congress. According to the PCI, the Lyons' decisions were the premises for the orientation that it has supposedly adopted since then. For the Bordigists they are said to have been the starting point, a first consequence of bureaucratization and of the party's slide into opportunism. In fact the Theses unambiguously explain that: • the revolution on the agenda in Italy is a socialist revolution and that the driving forces of this are the working class, the agricultural proletariat and the peasants from the South and other regions of the country; • the leading role belongs to the working class which must 'place itself at the head of the great majority of the population';
the victory of the revolution presupposes a mass insurrection;
the defeat of the workers movement in the post-First World War period was due to the absence of a revolutionary party; • the communist party must win a majority influence inside the working class by its struggle in the mass organizations for immediate demands and objectives able to be assimilated by the broad masses, to deepen their class consciousness and facilitate their breaking with the reformist organization; • the united front is a fundamental instrument of this struggle which must be carried out using the political formula of the workers and peasants
So it was a case of strategically rearming the party after the previous line adopted under the Bordiga leadership. This rearming was explicitly seen in the framework of the battle being waged more generally by the Communist International to put the sections back on a firm political and organiza-
Certainly some of the formulations used about the reformists and maximalists retain a sectarian tone which probably facilitated the "Third Period' turn a few years later. It is clear furthermore that the transitional slogans appear rather as intermediary slogans— from this point of view the lesson of the fundamental documents of the Comintern had not been assimilated.
As for the 'workers and peasants government' formulation Gramsci's explanation certainly does not clarify its real substance and practical use.°
What really does merit more consideration here is the question of
', particularly since it has traditionally been one of the targets
Certainly what was called 'Bolshevization' on an international scale was an ambiguous operation and even contradictory. Parties joining the Third
International were not real communist parties that had actually assimilated the experience of the Bolshevik Party. A campaign of clarification and education was therefore necessary. But this campaign, launched when the struggle against the oppositions in the Soviet Union was already raging, was carried out with methods that undeniably were a foretaste of Stalinist practices. This also had repercussions inside the Italian CP.
Later on we will deal with Gramsci's attitude to the Russian Opposition and to Trotsky in particular. Both in the Lyons Theses and in the articles he wrote at the time he consistently reaffirmed the right to form tendencies
(contrary to what the PCI allows even today). But at the same time we can find in his writings a witchhunting tone against 'factionalism' theory interpretation of political differences, a readiness to accept expulsions in an offhand way and support for unanimous votes inside the Comintern leadership. He explicitly accepted the idea of the primacy of the
The essay on the Mezzogiorno question is only an outline of the problem in Gramsci's own opinion. Nevertheless, it contains a masterly analysis of the mechanisms at work in Southern society, the social-political alliances in post-Unification Italy and particularly the role of intellectuals which the author analyses more generally in the Prison Notebooks. His central idea is that the proletariat must achieve an alliance with the poor peasants and in the first place with the poor peasants of the South. Through its system of alliances it has to stimulate the broadest mobilization 'against capitalism and the bourgeois state' with the objective of 'overthrowing the bourgeoisie
Revolution in the South is seen as an integral part of the Italian revolution which, as we have alread! said. Gramsci saw as necessarily being a
8 goverment.
tional footing.
'Bolshevization' of the Bordigist polemic.
CPSU.1° and the state'
, a conspiracy-
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionar! Marxism 13
socialist revolution. (See Selections 1921-26 op cit. pp 441-61.) As opposed to what the PCI leaders and intellectuals have claimed for at least a decade, such an approach is qualitatively different from the one the party adopted after the Second World War. It is true that in the 1950s the PCI explained it was necessary to change the old structures of the Italian state and to take away the government from the hands of the old ruling groups, but the hoped-for change was seen in the framework of existing society and its republican constitution and on the basis of alliances, including with the bourgeoisie or important sectors of it. More generally the solution of the problem of the South is fixed within the perspective of a perfecting of the bourgeois democratic revolution and not of a socialist revolution.
How fascism would be overthrown was a problem that cropped up often in Gramsci's writing. For a certain period he seemed to share the widelyheld illusion that fascism would fall in the relatively short term. For example in June 1923, he stated at the Comintern's enlarged Executive meeting:
After the period of fascist government we will go into a period of the decisive struggle of the proletariat for the conquest of power. This period will come in the more or less long term... But we can say that in Italy the decomposition of fascism will mark the beginning of the decisive struggle of the proletariat for the conquest of power.
At the Como conference in May 1924 he seemed to make a more cautious judgement. But after Matteotti's assassination (June 1924) his tone chang-
Fascism is running out of steam and dying because it has not fulfilled any of its promises, satisfied any hopes or relieved any misery. (August 1924 Central Committee)
Ten months later in a Unità editorial, he concluded that:
The PCI is closer to the decisive revolutionary struggle than the Russian Communist Par-
Even the significance of Mussolini's speech of the 3 January 1925, which practically marked the death-knell of bourgeois democracy in Italy, was underestimated by the PCI leadership and by Gramsci himself. In an Exective meeting held the day after, a report by Maffi had explained that
Mussolini's new measures were only 'a simple episode that did not change the situation' and Gramsci intervened without opposing this judgement.
A month later Gramsci made no bones about declaring that it was
It was only in November, after the failed assassination attempt against
Mussolini and the reaction it provoked, that he substantially changed his
A cycle in our country's history, the cycle opened up by the factory occupations, has
14 International Marxist Review ed sharply:
ty was in 1907-1909.
necessary to:
opinion of the situation:
come to an end.
Gramsci and the 'Third Period'
During this whole period the theme running through his writings was that fascism could only be overturned by the revolutionary action of the working class, supported by its allies. This was summarised in a Unità article
Only the class struggle of the worker and peasant masses is capable of liquidating fascism and eliminating its causes! Only by arming the workers and peasants will the fascist militia
However we should add that Gramsci did not draw the conclusion that the fall of fascism would necessarily bring about the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In an article written in August 1926 he wrote:
Though it is true that politically, fascism may be succeeded by a dictatorship of the proletariat—since no intermediate party or coalition is capable of giving even the most minimal satisfaction to the economic requirements of the working classes, who will burst violently onto the political scene the moment existing relations are broken—it is nevertheless not certain, and not even probable, that the passage from fascism to the dictator-
Four years later, when the Comintern imposed on the PCI (as it did on all other communist parties) the unrealistic, sectarian and adventurist analyses and approaches of the Third Period, Gramsci took up with even more force the very complex problem of perspectives after the eventual fall of fascism. There is no written text with his position on this. Unless there is some mistake, neither is there any direct or indirect trace of an analysis in the Notebooks. However in 1964—twenty-seven years after his death! —the PCI itself was obliged to admit that documents in its possession prove that in 1930 Gramsci did not agree with the line of his party
A large number of people have testified to this and their evidence has been widely cited by writers on the subject. " This testimony comes from militants who were in prison with Gramsci and were directly aware of his opinions. The most important evidence is a written report made by the communist activist, Athos Lisa, for the party's central leadership on the 22 March
1933 immediately after having left Turin prison where he was detained with
Gramsci has come to the conclusion that the party's political line is not correct.
the superficial analysis of certain comrades who, in 1930, were saying that the fall of fascism was imminent (. . .) who explained that we would go directly from the fascist dictatorship
Rejection of the catastrophist and sectarian line went hand and hand with an understanding of the importance of democratic demands. Again Athos
Lisa informs us that in a report Gramsci had made in prison he had raised the question of the Constituent Assembly and to show the extent of his disagreement with the party he had warned his comrades that he was ready put the slogan of the constituent assembly betore the other parties struggling against fascim. This idea was taken up again by Gramsci in his last meeting with Piero Sraffa a short time before his death. According to the of the 7 October 1924 in the following terms:
be disarmed ship of the proletariat will be a direct one.
and of the Stalinist leadership of the Comintern.
Gramsci:
He was said to be particularly indignant about:
to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
to 'give somebody a good thump'
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 15
(Selections 1921-26 op cit p 406)
. In his opinion the party should have
16 International Marxist Revier socialist Sandro Pertini, who was also imprisoned at Turin in the same period. Gramsci did not agree either with the characterization of the socialists as 'social fascists' and he foresaw 'a day when an alliance would be achieved between communists, socialists and all the other anti-fascist forces'. 12
Finally there is the testimony of Gramsci's brother Gennaro that he made public much later to Giuseppe Fiori on his visit to Turin prison in June 1930. Antonio shared the view of Alfsonso Leonetti, Pietro Tresso and Paolo Ravazzoli, Political Bureau members who had just been expelled from the party. Gramsci did not justify their expulsion and rejected the Comintern's line. All this testimony generally concurs and nobody has challenged it. Gramsci was opposed to his party and the Comintern at a crucial time in their development. We should add that there is no evidence to suggest that such a position represented-as the unconditional supporters of the leadership in the prison had claimed at the time-Gramsci shifting to social democratic ideas or even towards positions defended by the PCI a few years later after the new turn. Gramsci supported, again according to Athos Lisa's report, common action with parties struggling inside Italy against fascism, but without tailending them. As for the demand for a constituent assembly he clarified what he meant in the following terms:
The constituent assembly represents the form of organization within which we can raise the demands closest to the concerns of the working class. Within the assembly, through its representatives, the party's action can and must be developed aimed at disparaging any project of peaceful reform, showing the Italian working class that the only possible solution in Italy comes from the proletarian revolution. Nobody can claim that the PCI representatives operated in such a framework inside the 1946-47 Constituent Assembly.
A final point. Those people who did not know about or wanted to ignore Gramsci's positions in 1930 for more than thirty years can claim extenuating circumstances. Returning from Turin, Gennaro Gramsci, according to his own version of events, told Togliatti in Paris that Gramsci 'was completely aligned' on the party leadership's positions. He had deliberately lied out of fear that if he had given the correct account of his visit then his brother "would have been put beyond the pale'. Such an anecdote reveals a great deal about the leprosy of Stalinism in the workers movement. A communist activist legitimately feared that one of the founders of his party, its main leader up to the time of his arrest, a victim of the merciless persecution of the class enemy, would be ostracised, even purged because of political disagreement! Unfortunately for Antonio and for Gennaro, Togliatti had his own sources of information and in any case things had been made unambiguously clear to him through the Lisa report. He came to the 'necessary' conclusions about it all. '3 Togliatti never reestablished relations with Gramsci, which had been broken at the time of his arrest, not even when Gramsci was freed a short time before his death. Only those who are quite naive or unrepentant apologists can believe that a party with the resources of the PCI, a sec-
tion of the Comintern, could not establish some sort of contact with Gramsci
Is there a continuity between the Gramsci of Ordine Nuovo, the Lyons Congress period and the Gramsci of the Prison Notebooks? Do the Notebooks constitute an original contribution to the theory and strategy of the workers
We hope the reader will bear with us if, in order to reply to these questions we refer to what Gramsci wrote on a series of crucial problems and have to use long quotations. But if we want to combat and avoid arbitrary or over-hasty reconstructions then philological scruples are never excessive.
Compared to the Ordine Nuovo writings, particularly the early ones, the
Notebooks reflect a more systematic and deeper acceptance of Marxist conceptions. It is precisely this that Natta criticises when he says:
With Gramsci there are elements of 'fundamentalism' that we have clearly gone beyond.
Indeed on several occasions Gramsci presented Marxism as a:
fundamental and original philosophy which opens opens up a new phase in history and
(Prison Notebooks, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971—hereon PN), p.435)
He rejected any analogy with the specific contributions of 'a series of
, any reduction of Marxism to 'a simple method of historical research' (Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Edizione Critica, (Turin:
Einaudi, 1975—hereon EC), p. 1917) and even Bukharin's division of Marxism into 'sociology' and 'systematic philosophy' (Prison Notebooks op cit, not only has a totalizing function as a conception of the world but also is totalizing insofar as it will invest the whole of society to its most profound roots (EC, op cit, p. 515) and
Marxism is a philosophy which is also politics and a politics which is also philosophy
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that Gramsci raised a question about the "three cultural movements' which are at the origin of Marxism, 'classical
German philosophy, English classical economics and French political each had contributed respectively to the elaboration of the philosophy, the economics and the politics of the philosophy of praxis. Or that the philosophy of praxis has synthesised the three movements. that is the entire culture of the age, and that in the new synthesis, whichever 'moment' one is examining. the theoretical, the economic, or the political, one will find each of the three merements present as a preparatory 'moment'? (PN op cit, hecause of "technical' problems.
2. The Prison Notebooks (1929-1935)
movement?
Gramsei's Marxism a new phase in the development of world thought great thinkers' literature and practice' be considered that p. 400)14 p.436). According to him historical materialism:
'• (PN, op cit, p.399). He wondered whether it should
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 17
(PN, op cit, p.395)
18 International Marxist Review
He plumped for the second alternative, an interpretation that seems to us more precise and rigorous than the one sketched out by Lenin on the same argument. We should add that Gramsci rejected all the revisionists' theses for example on the theory of value and the tendency of the falling rate of profit (see PN op cit, pp 68, 280); and as for the crisis of Marxism he wrote:
How many times have we heard talk of the 'crisis' of the philosophy of praxis? What does it mean this permanent crisis? Does it not signify life itself which progresses through negations of negations? Furthermore what also guarantees the force of later theoretical advances if not the fidelity of the popular masses who have appropriated this conception although in superstitious and primitive forms? (EC, op cit, p. 1292)
His 'fundamentalist' approach does not lead Gramsci in any way to consider Marxism as the final end of history. In fact he integrates his understanding of the significance of Marx's thought within an overall perspective of the transitional society:
Marx initiates intellectually an historical epoch which will last in all probability for centuries, that is until the disappearance of political society and the coming of a regulated society. Only then will his conception of the world be superseded, when the conception of necessity is superseded by the conception of freedom. (PN, op cit, p.382)
A final quotation:
A theory is 'revolutionary" precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.
(PN, op cit, p.462)
This is another extract which exposes the gulf that exists between Gramsci's revolutionary Marxist ideas and the gradualist, eclectic and conciliatory 'philosophy' of the present leaders of the Italian workers movement! The conception of the state Further on we will take up the themes of hegemony and the relations between civil society and political society. But we can state here and now that there is nothing in the Notebooks which leads us to conclude that Gramsci questioned the Marxist conception of the state. What is true is that in the circumstances in which he was writing and given the nature of his Notebooks, he was best able to develop and articulate his analysis and place the emphasis on certain functions of the bourgeois state. In particular, he insisted several times on the economic role that the state can and did play both in the initial stages and in the period of decline of bourgeois society. Thus he recalled David Ricardo's ideas on the state "as an economic agent'15 (EC, op cit, p. 1310) and he underlined the state's intervention, particularly in the United States during the great depression of the 1930s (PN, op cit, pp.313-314).
He also returned on several occasions to the concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism which have always been a part of the Marxist problematic (PN, op cit, pp.219-223)16. It is precisely a page on Bonapartism, bringing out the new elements compared to 1848, which confirms that Gramsci
in no way had changed his view on this. For him the essential aim of the
State remained defending the political and economic domination of the rul-
One of the recurrent themes of the Ordine Nuovo writings, as we have shown, was the criticism of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. This theme is not brought up so frequently in the Notebooks for obvious reasons. But when it crossed his mind to take this up he did so within the framework of the classical Marxist and Leninist critique (see for example EC, op cit, p.929). Furthermore Gramsci also put forward once again the idea of the superiority of democracy of a soviet type. (PN, op cit, p. 192). The experience of the Turin factory councils is also positively referred to, even if this is from the point of view of the role of the workers in the factories
(PN, op cit, pp.202-2). More generally he insisted on the necessity of a living link at all times 'between the rulers and the ruled, leaders (dirigenti)
He also renewed his criticism of gradualist reformist ideas with all their corollaries (the lesser-evil thesis). Eduard Bernstein's 'philosophy" was
Bernstein's argument that the movement is everything and the end is nothing under the cover of an 'orthodox' interpretation of the dialectic, hides a mechanical conception of
Against such a philosophy and against the approach of the Italian reformist leader Claudio Treves, Gramsci reaffirmed the essential importance of the ends for the very existence of the movement and for the fundamental character of the problem of power (PN, op cit, p.224).
Finally, passages in the Notebooks make allusion to the historic long term objective of the emergence of a classless society and the withering away of the state with the elimination of any distinction between 'rulers and ruled':
(...) only the social group that poses the end of the State and its own end as the target to be achieved can create an ethical State-i.e. one which tends to put an end to the internal divisions of the ruled, etc., and to create a technically and morally unitary social
In another passage Gramsci outlined the perspective of:
an historical phase of a new type in which necessity and freedom have organically interpenetrated and there will be no moral contradictions, so that the only dialectic will be that of the idea, a dialectic of concepts and no longer of historical forces.
The tone of this is very close to the well-known passage of Trotsky's
Literature and revolution on the nature of contradictions in a classless society
All those who have written or talked about Gramsci have correctly highlighted two of Gramsci's formulations 'the party as modern prince' and ing classes (PN, op cit, p.220).
and led' (ibid, pp.418-419).
directly targeted:
life and politics. (EN, op cit, p. 1898)
organism.
(Julliard, 1964, pp.264-66)
The conception of the party
'the party as collective intellectual
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 19
(PN, op cit, p. 259-406 and EC op cit, p. 1752)
(PN, op. cit, p.370)
The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it did the political party-the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to
That all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals is an affirmation that can easily lend itself to mockery and caricature. But if one thinks about it nothing could be more exact. There are of course distinctions of level to be made. A party might have a greater or lesser proportion of members in the higher grades or in the lower, but this is not the point. What matters is the function, which is directive and organizational,
Behind the metaphors two essential points should be grasped:
if it is true that parties are not simply a mechanical and passive expression of those classes, but react energetically upon them in order to develop, solidify and universalize them.
2) parties play a generalising role, that is they go beyond that moment (of their economic-corporate activity) of their historical development and become agents of more general activities of national and international character.
The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole system of intellectual and moral relations, in that its development means precisely that any given act is seen as useful or harmful, as virtuous or as wicked, only in so far as it has as its point of reference the modern Prince itself, and helps to strengthen or to oppose it. In men's consciences, the
Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorial imperative, and becomes the basis or a modern laicism and for a complete laicization of all aspects of life and of ail customar
Furthermore, the party was said to be an 'embyronic State structure' (PN,
. We know that this idea that others have put forward in a different form (the party as the anticipation of the future society) has idealist connotations and involves furthermore a danger of identifying the party with the state in a workers state. Historical experience has also taught us to be wary of the idea that a party equals a class which seems to come up in
Gramsci's writing too. 1º But what interests us here is to emphasise the fact that Gramsci during his imprisonment kept faith with the Leninist conception of the party which is perfectly coherent with his Marxist conception of the state and his revolutionary framework for the strategy of the workers
We should add that he rejected any bureaucratic conception of the party and of its functioning. This underlies his criticism of organic centralism, which over and beyond the polemic against Bordiga, who supported such a formulation, more generally involved the defence of democratic centralism against bureaucratic centralism, and an effort to indicate the means through which it would be possible to ensure the active participation of all the members 'in the intellectual (discussions) and organizational life of the party' 20 He referred on the other hand to the examples of the English workers movement where 'at certain decisive moment the mass organizations transform their constitution from top to bottom, shattering the
20 International Marxist Review become universal and total.
i.e. educative, i.e. intellectual."
1) parties express social interests relationships'' op.cit, p. 133)18 movement.
(PN, op cit, p. 129)
(PN, op cit, p. 16)
(PN, op cit, p. 227).
(PN, op cit, p. 16).
(PN, op. cit, p. 133)1"
Gramsci's integral assimilation of Marxism is also reflected in the rigour of his methodological approaches. Let us take a few examples.
First of all he pointed out in the Notebooks that an essential feature of
Marxism was that it seeks a correct combination of the deductive and inductive method (EC, op cit, p. 1284). Hence the pertinent distinction between 'abstraction' and 'generalization' and the adoption of the concept of
From this approach flows the necessity of a scrupulous analysis of the specificities of any process and any situation. But it also follows that it is perfectly legitimate-and politically indispensable-to grasp the universal
The problem arises of whether a theoretical truth, whose discovery corresponded to a specific practice, can be generalized and considered as universal for a historical epoch. The proof of its universality consists precisely: 1) in its becoming a stimulus to know better the concrete reality of a situation that is different from that in which it was discovered (this is the principal measure of its fecundity); 2) when it has stimulated and helped this better understanding of concrete reality, in its capacity to incorporate itself in that same reality
It is precisely such an approach which permits an understanding of the underlying tendencies that are at work even when they are still at an embryonic stage. Furthermore, the above quotation exactly reflects the role played in 1919-1920 by Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo group which had understood most concretely and profoundly the link between the Russian revolution and the potential dynamic of the Italian revolutionary crisis. It also integrates the problematic of combined and uneven development which is referred to more directly in other passages of the Notebooks (see EC, op cit, p. 1898
While Gramsci insisted on the exemplary value of a given revolutionary experience, this does not mean that he made the least concession to doctrinaire schematism. In fact, in his prison notes he continued the battle he had started in 1923 against the Bordigista interpretation of Marxism and scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract
In the tradition of the best Marxist theoreticians he explained that:
reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations. It is up to the theoretician to unravel these in order to discover fresh proof of his theory, to "translate' into theoretical language the elements of historical life. It is not reality which should be expected to con-
Finally, Gramsci took up several times the question of the correct way bureaucratic carapace.' (PN, op. cit, p.36).
Some methodological approaches
"determined abstraction' (ibid. p. 1276)
character of specific historical experiences:
as if it were originally an expression of it.
and even p. 1468).
Leninism as well as more generally, against any:
such movements of revolt as are one hundred theory (which comes to the same thing).
form to the abstract schema.
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 21
(PN, op cit, p 201)
per cent conscious, i.e. movements that
(PN, op cit, p.200)
(ibid, p. 200)
of understanding the relationship between structure and superstructure.
Some people have used his notes to counterpose this understanding to the so-called simplistic economic determinism which is said to characterise
Marxism. Now while it is true that some Marxist writers have occasionally
'sinned' in this way and indeed Gramsci criticised rather severely a very well-known essay written by Bukharin, any counterposition on this terrain between the great Marxist theorists and the author of the Notebooks is without any foundation, as is shown (apart from anything else) by the fact that Gramsci frequently and explicitly referred to passages from both Marx and Engels. This implies no underestimation of his specific contribution.
On the role of intellectual in particular, he has left us some lucid texts which undoubtedly represent his most valuable contribution to the theoretical
The Prison Notebooks, in the words of their author, have a 'provisional character' and are to a large extent written as fragments (EC, op. cit., p.935).
It is worth remembering this point before dealing with the themes that have most attracted the attention of commentators on Gramsci. In my opinion these particular themes most clearly show the effects of the conditions in
First of all we should examine the question of civil society and political find different formulations and he swings back and forth between at least two definitions. To be more exact, sometimes you have an identification of civil society and political society with the civil society concept included in the concept of the state and, occasionally, the two concepts and the two
For it should be remarked that the general notion of State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that State
= political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour
The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and the State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of State regulation', introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means.
Spirito's concept of citizen as State functionary derives directly from the absence of separation between political and civil society, between political hegemony and State-political
Elsewhere Gramsci, referring to the capitalist society of the first half of
22 International Marxist Review patrimony of the workers movement.
Civil society and political society which they were produced.
society. As other critics have also emphasised21 of coercion).
government.
realities are sharply distinguished from one another.
Here are a few of the most significant references:
, in the Notebooks we can
(PN, op cit., p. 236)
(PN, op cit., Pp 159-160)
(PN, op cit., p. 127)
a relatively rudimentary State apparatus and a greater autonomy of civil society from State
He took up this distinction again with respect to the advanced and backward countries in a passage which we will come back to. (PN, op cit,
Are we faced here with real incoherence or even antinomies in his thought?
It is not simple to answer this. In fact Gramsci used concepts that were distinct and linked together and they could only be correctly applied in relation to bourgeois capitalist society in its totality. As we have seen he himself quite explicitly counterposed 'methodological distinctions" to 'organic
'. He implied in this way that it is possible to distinguish civil society and political society and civil society and the state in relative terms without that involving an organic or structural distinction. 22 The degree of distinction or identification depends on the historical phases or different political situations within one particular country or the different categories
The 'normal' exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. Indeed, the attempt is always made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority...
So it is a situation where a bourgeois society has reached its optimum equilibrium: the political institutions and the civil 'associations' tend to become identified or to fuse harmoniously in the framework of a sociopolitical totality, of a state in the most commonly accepted sense. In another note, Gramsci explains that a similar situation can exist in the epoch of the ding of public order and of respect for laws' (PN, op. cit, p.261), because on the one hand the state intervenes in the economy less than in previous epochs and on the other the ruling classes have less need to use force against a proletariat that is still weak and little organised. (see PN, op cit., pp 261
In these cases, inside the state in the broadest sense of the term (civil society + political society), the first element plays a significantly greater role than in backward societies where the state tends to be reduced to a political apparatus systematically operating through force. The same tendency emerges when a developed society is hit by a crisis--the split between civil society and political society widens and force once again has the upper hand (EC, op cit., p.937). A process going in the opposite direction develops as a classless society begins to emerge after the overthrow of capitalism-the state and the law becomes 'useless', having been
'absorbed by civil society' (ibid, p.937 see also PN, op cit., p. 263).
Such an interpretation of the Gramscian approach is further confirmed by a schematic note called precisely Civil Society and Political Society':
the nineteenth century, spoke of:
activity p. 238)
distinctions' in which different countries can be included.
'state as nightwatchman' and 262).
In a note on 'French National Life' Gramsci wrote:
', 'a state whose functions are limited to the safeguar-
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 23
(PN, op cit., p.234)
(PN, op cit., p.80f).
Separation of civil society and political society: a new problem of hegemony is posed, that is: the historical base of the State is displaced. We have here an extreme form of political society: either to fight against the new and maintain the tottering structure by reestablishing it in a coercive way, or as an expression of the new order used to break
These lines reflect rather well Gramsci's thinking about political phenomena at the beginning of the 1930s both in capitalist Europe and in
Gramsci summarised his concept of hegemony when he explained that he in the sense of the political and cultural hegemony of a social group over the whole of
Hegemony therefore represents the political/cultural 'moment' distinct from the moment of force or dictatorship. 23 In another note he stated:
Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed— in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential: for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. (PN, op cit, p. 161)
A dominant class or a class aiming to become one in projecting itself as the 'driving force of a universal expansion' (PN, op cit, p. 182), cannot therefore base itself uniquely on force-it has to try and achieve consent.
On this terrain the intellectuals play an irreplaceable and specific role.
Hegemony always involves a combination of theoretical activity and political
This is why it must be stressed that the political development of the concept of hegemony represents a great philosophical advance as well as a politico-practical one. For it necessarily supposes an intellectual unity and an ethic in conformity with a conception of reality that has gone beyond common sense and has become, if only within narrow limits, a critical
We can add here that in Gramsci's opinion Lenin's most important theoretical contribution to Marxism was precisely on the terrain of the
"theoretical-practical principle of hegemony'. According to him Lenin:
"advanced philosophy as philosophy in so far as he advanced political doc-
We might just say here that the explicit reference to Lenin and the judgement he made of Lenin's contribution should be enough to sweep away, not only the idea that the concept of hegemony was supposedly introduced into the workers movement by Gramsci, but also all attempts to line up
We have used the term 'dominant/ruling class' and 'class aiming to
• In fact the concept of hegemony for Gramsci also applied to two quite distinct phases, the periods before and after coming to power:
24 International Marxist Review the Soviet Union.
Hegemony used it:
practice:
conception. (PN, op cit, PP 333-334).
trine and practice. (PN, op cit., p.365)
Gramsci against Lenin on this question.
become one' the resistance it will meet as it develops. (EC, op cit, p. 876)
society, as the ethical content of the state. (EC, op cit., p. 703)
A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to 'liquidate', or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' before winning governmental power
(this is indeed one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its
In other words Gramsci was dealing here with the problem of the social and political alliances of the working class, which was always at the centre of Lenin's and more generally of all revolutionary Marxists', concerns.
But these reflections on hegemony and on the necessary role of consent in no way led him to tone down the point that repressive force represents the constitutive element of all states. One of his definitions of the state is quite succinct about it: State = Dictatorship + Hegemony. It goes without saying that the term 'dictatorship' is used here in the broad sense. But it is precisely on this terrain that Gramsci is with Marx and Lenin, for whom even a parliamentary democracy is a form of bourgeois dictatorship.
All the above references demonstrate unambiguously that Gramsci's notion of hegemony does not ignore the decisive importance of the ownership of the means of production nor the necessity of the qualitatively revolutionary breakthrough of the seizure of power. His conceptions have nothing in common with the interpretations of those who, hiding behind the prestige of
'references' to Gramsci, want to introduce gradualist, reformist ideas, giv-
Gramsci's thoughts on the strategy of the workers movement-starting from the analysis of different historical contexts and the theme of civil society and political society-can be seen particularly well in his comments about the war of movement and the war of position. But there are also problems
In a note on 'the transition from the war of manoeuvre (frontal attack)
to the war of position—in the political field as well', Gramsci alluded to the problems raised by Trotsky in his polemic with Stalin (we will come to this later). He explained that Trotsky is 'the political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats.' And he continued:
In politics, in other words, the war of manoeuvre subsists so long as it is a question of winning positions which are not decisive, so that all resources of the State's hegemony cannot be mobilised. But when, for one reason or another, these positions have lost their value and only the decisive positions are at stake, then one passes over to siege warfare;
this is concentrated, difficult, and requires exceptional qualities of patience and inven-
Another passage contains a quite specific reference to the strategy of struggle against the Austrians at the time of the Risorgimento. Here the supporters of a war of movement as against a war of position are criticised, more precisely because of their vanguardist ideas and lack of concern for involving the broad masses in the struggle (EC, op cit., p. 1932 but see
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 25 grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well.
ing a universal character to bourgeois democracy.
War of movement and war of position of interpretation with these analyses.
(PN, op cit., pp 58-9) 25
(PN, op cit., p 239)
PN, op cit, pp 111-112). This is a pertinent criticism but it cannot justify generalisations. In any case when theoreticains and leaders of the workers movement, who were not putschists, recommended a 'war of movement' or a strategy based on the insurrectional perspective, they had not forgotten that the broad masses must necessarily play the fundamental role.
A third passage poses the problem from a much more wide-ranging
In Europe from 1789 to 1870 there was a (political) war of movement in the French Revolution and a long war of position from 1815 to 1870. In the present epoch, the war of movement took place politically from March 1917 to March 1921; this was followed by a war of position whose representative-both practical (for Italy) and ideological (for Europe)-is
So on the one hand Gramsci was defining an epoch when the bourgeoisie was still fighting for political power or was trying to extend or consolidate its power. On the other hand he was dealing with a much more limited period-the one after the First World War with the sequence of revolutionary crisis and relative stabilization of capitalism. He refers again to this second period in one of the most quoted extracts of his writings:
It seems to me that Ilyich (Lenin) understood that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only form possible in the West-where, as Krasnow observes, armies could rapidly accumulate endless quantities of munitions, and where the social structures were of themselves still capable of becoming heavily-armed fortifications. This is what the formula of the "United Front' seems to me to mean, and it corresponds to the conception
Ilyich, however, did not have time to expand his formula-though it should be borne in mind that he could only have expanded it theoretically, whereas the fundamental task was a national one; that is to say it required a reconnaissance of the terrain and identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the elements of civil society, etc. In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks:
more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying-but this precisely
From the military point of view any criticism of Trotsky along the lines indicated by Gramsci lacks any serious foundation-his military writings prove that, far from having a schematic conception on the war of movement and the war of position Trotsky explicitly polemicised against those who supported an abusive generalization of the war of movement like
As for the policy of the united front, it should just be recalled that it had essentially been developed on the basis of two considerations: 1) the struggle for the seizure of power in the immediate or short-term in a number of countries was no longer on the agenda as had previously been the view;
2) the communist parties had not succeeded in general in winning a majority among the masses and therefore had to take into account the fact
26 International Marxist Revien perspective:
fascism.
of a single front for the Entente under the sole command of Foch.
necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.
Some clarifications are in order.
lukhachevsky and Frunze. 26
(PN, op cit., p. 120)
(PN, op cit., pp 237-238)
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 27 that the reformist parties either still had majority support in the working class or maintained very important influence. Adopting the united front tactic did not imply giving up the revolutionary insurrectional strategy. For his part Trotsky was one of the most fervent supporters of the united front in the debate inside the Comintern. Not only did he never give up this tactic, but he defended it tooth and nail enriching the conception through his anti-Stalinist polemics.
If we get down to the essential nub of Gramsci's line of argument we notice straightaway that his characterization of pre-revolutionary Russian society is too simplified. Lenin's analyses and his theoretical and practical battle to build the Bolshevik Party could not been explained without the existence of a rather articulated 'civil society' which had to be taken into account in the struggle for hegemony. Gramsci himself recalled the ideas Trotsky expressed at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (November 1922) on the different characteristics the revolution in the West would take on compared to the Russian revolution.
On November 7, 1917 our party assumed power. As was soon disclosed quite clearly.
this did not signify the end of the Civil War. On the contrary, the Civil War actually began to unfold on a large scale in our country only after the October overturn. This is not only a fact of historical interest but also a source of the most important lessons for the Western
European proletariat.
Why did events follow this course? The explanation must be sought in the cultural and political backwardness of a country which had just cast off Czarist barbarism. The big bourgeoisies and the nobility has gained some political experience, thanks to the municipal
Dumas, the zemstvos, the state Duma, etc. The petty bourgeoisie had little political experience, and the bulk of the population, the peasantry, still less. Thus the main reserves of the counter-revolution-the well-to-do peasants (kulaks) and, to a degree, the middle peasants—came precisely from this extremely amorphous milieu.
And it was only after the bourgeoisie began to grasp fully what it had lost by losing political power, and only after it had set in motion its counter-revolutionary combat nucleus, that it succeeded in gaining access to the peasant and petty-bourgeois elements and layers; and therewith the bourgeoisie had, of necessity, to yield the leading posts to the most reactionary elements among the ranking officers of noble birth. As a result the Civil War unfolded fully only after the October overturn. The ease with which we conquered power on November 7, 1917, was paid for by the countless sacrifices of the Civil War. In countries that are older in the capitalist sense, and with a higher culture, the situation will, without doubt differ profoundly. In these countries the popular masses will enter the revolufar more systematically than in our country; the present will flow far more directly out of the past. The bourgeoisie in Western Europe is preparing its counterblow in advance.
The bourgeoisie more or less knows what elements it will have to depend upon and it builds its counter-revolutionary cadres in advance. We witness this in Germany; we witness it, even if not quite so distinctly, in France; and finally we see it in its more finished form in Italy, where in the wake of the incompleted revolution there came the completed counterrevolution which employed not unsucessfully some of the practices and methods of the revolution.
What does this mean? This means thai it will hardly be possible to catch the European bourgeoisie by surprise as we caught the Russian bourgeoisie. The European bourgeosie is more intelligent, and more farsighted: it is not wasting time. Everything that can be
28 International Marxist Review set on foot against us is being mobilised by it right now. The revolutionary proletariat will thus encounter on its road to power not only the combat vanguards of the counterrevolution but also its heaviest reserves. Only by smashing, breaking up and demoralizing these enemy forces will the proletariat be able to seize state power. But by way of compensation, after the proletariat overturn the vanquished bourgeosie will no longer dispose of powerful reserves from which it could draw forces for prolonging civil war. In other words after the conquest of power the European proletariat will in all likelihood have far more elbow room for its creative work in the economy and culture than we had in Russia on the day after the overturn. The more difficult and gruelling the struggle for state power, all the less possible will it be to challenge the proletariat's power after the victory.
(L. Trotsky, The First Five years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, (London: New Park, 1974), pp.220-222).
Trotsky's analysis is more concrete than Gramsci's. It confirms from a different angle of approach that civil society in Russia was less 'primitive and formless' than the latter thought. By taking into account such an analysis and other analyses that Trotsky and other Comintern leaders developed on several occasions in relation to the failures of the workers movement in Western Europe between 1919 and 1923 we can outline a correct approach to the problem: • in most Western European countries the crisis not only of 'civil society' but also of the state and its apparatuses had never reached the stage of utter disintegration and either there had not been a revolutionary situation or there had only been the beginnings of one; • even in countries like Italy and Germany the repressive apparatuses in the broad sense of the term had not been reduced to the same degree of powerlessness as we saw in Russia;
last but not least, the Russian proletariat was the only one which could count on having, from the beginning of the crisis, a revolutionary party rooted in the masses which then became hegemonic as dual power became more and more extensive.
Having said that, when he wrote the famous passage at the beginning of the 1930s, Gramsci had doubtlessly come to the conclusion that the analysis made by the Comintern in 1921-22 and that he himself had stuck to even later, no longer corresponded to the situation that had since developed. The workers movement in Western Europe had suffered serious defeats or setbacks. It could not set its sights on relaunching a 'war of movement' in the short term but had to fix as a task for a whole period the new accumulation of forces and the regaining of positions it had lost including in civil society. This is why he rejected, as we have noted, the Comintern's analyses and perspectives during the "Third Period'. More generally he was led to renew and deepen his analysis of Westerns ociety and his understanding of how the ruling classes of this part of the world had resources which the Russian ruling class lacked.
His writings about Fordism fit into this framework. He correctly emphasised that Fordism did not only represent a restructuring at the level of the workplace but also involved 'a new mechanism of accumulation and distribution' as well as an attempt to integrate certain layers of the working class
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 29 (see PN, op cit, pp 217-316). In the notes he wrote in 1934 he drew attention to the changes taking place within the ruling classes under the impact of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal (ibid, pp 217-316). As far as Italy was concerned he correctly analysed the reasons for, the forms of and the significance of the State's intervention into the economy (ibid, pp 313-316).
The post-Second World War decades have a fortiori confirmed that the ruling classes of the industrialised countries still dispose of an economic capacity and a social fabric allowing them to overcome even the most serious crises. But their strength resides especially in the political framework they have maintained or re-established after the fall of the totalitarian regimes. This reality in the last analysis determines its political consciousness and positions—it will only throw itself into a revolutionary struggle when the bourgeoisie decides it has to empty of all substance or to eliminate its democratic institutions, where the alternative of a socialist democrac! qualitatively superior to any bourgeois democracy appears concrete!! achieveable, and where a credible revolutionary leadership exist.
A series of Trotsky's writings from the 1930s helps us deal with these problems much more than Gramsci's notes. In fact the latter was writing in the very trough of the wave (of working class action) and the only real perspective seemed to him to be long-term work reorganising the workers movement in the framework of a stabilisation of Western bourgeois society. Trotsky wrote about the events in France and Spain when bourgeois society was again torn apart by social and political crises which led to authentic revolutionary situations. This is why the war of movement—to use Gramsci's terminology-again became relevant.27
In any case, the significance of what one says about the war of movement and the war of position depends on the overall framework in which it is placed. Togliatti and his successors have interpreted it to mean that any perspective of war of movement, that is any perspective of the seizure of power by insurrectional means, had to be dropped. Furthermore they have been consistent in carrying out for forty years a gradualist reformist strategy which accepts the framework of bourgeois society. There is not a single page in the Notebooks, not a single note which even hints that Gramsci would have agreed with such an interpretation and put forward such a line. Gramsci, Trotsky and Stalin Gramsci on several occasions and from different perspectives took up the theory of permanent revolution. In a series of notes he explicitly refers to the Marxist origin of this theory and to the famous Address to the Communist League in 1890 (see P.N. op cit. pp 80. 83-84, 165, 179, 180, 220, 236, 241-3). But the target of his criticism is Trotsky's theory.
We have already quoted a long extract where an analogy is established permanent revolution and war of manoeuvre. Elsewhere this
It should be seen whether Bronstein's famous theory about the permanent character of the movement is not the political reflection of the theory of war of maneouvre (recall the observation of the Cossack general Krasnov), ie in the last analysis, a reflection of the general-economic-cultural-social conditions in a country in which the structures of national life are embryonic and loose, and incapable of becoming 'trench or fortress'. In this case one might say that Bronstein, apparently 'Western', was in fact a cosmopolitan—ie superficially national and superficially Western or European. Ilyich (Lenin) on the other hand
Bronstein in his memoirs recalls being told that his theory had been proved true... fifteen years later, and replying to the epigram with another epigram. In reality his theory, as such, was good neither fifteen years earlier nor fifteen years later. As happens to the obstinate, of whom Guicciardini speaks, he guessed more or less correctly; that is to say, he was right in his more general practical prediction. It is as if one was to prophesy that a little four-year-old girl would become a mother, and when at twenty she did so, one said: 'I guessed she would'—overlooking the fact, however, that when she was four years old one had tried to rape the girl, in the belief that she would become a mother even then.
In another note Gramsci explains that the theory of permanent revolution:
Taken up again, systematized, developed, intellectualized by the Parvus-Bronstein (Trotsky) group, it proved inert and ineffective in 1905, and subsequently. It had become an posed it in this literary form and indeed did not use it 'on purpose', applied it in fact in a form which adhered to actual, concrete, living history, adapted to the time and the place;
as something that sprang from all the pores of a particular society which had to be transformed; as the alliance of two social groups (ie proletariat and peasantry) with the hegemony
It is probable that Gramsci never had access to Trotsky's writings which dealt more directly with the permanent revolution. This is a possible explanation of the inconsistency of his criticism. In fact far from being the product of intellectual abstraction, the theory of permanent revolution was worked out on the basis of a rigorous analysis of the historical development of Russian society and perfected on the basis of the analysis of other underdeveloped societies and especially the dramatic experience of the Second Chinese Revolution. It cannot be reduced to a banal prognostic of which the achievement in real life can be banked on in advance. It aimed to set out more precisely on the terrain of political strategy what the conditions were for the achievement of the democratic goals of the revolution and the successful completion of the revolutionary process. Incidentally, it is significant that Gramsci did not challenge the substance of the theory and even states that Lenin and the Bolsheviks applied it in 1917.28
As for the international dimension of the theory of permanent revolution, commenting on a 1927 article by Stalin, Gramsci wrote in a note from
... the international situation should be considered in its national aspect. In reality, the internal relations of any nation are the result of a combination which is 'original' and (in
30 International Marxist Review between analogy is even more explicit:
of the urban group.
the 1932-35 period:
was profoundly national and profoundly European.
abstract thing, belonging in the scientist's cabinet.
(PN, op cit, pp 285-7)
(PN, op cit, pp 84-85)
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 31 a certain sense) unique; these relations must be understood and conceived in their originality and uniqueness if one wishes to dominate them and direct them. To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is 'national'-and it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the international class (the proletariat) will have to lead and develop, in accordance with the international perspective and directives (ie those of the movement a certain direction, within certain perspectives. It is on this point, in my opinion, that the fundamental disagreement between Leon Davidovitch (Trotsky) and
Vissarionovitch (Stalin) as interpreter of the majority movement (Bolshevism) really hinges.
(...) A class that is international in character has—in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national (intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than the national: particularistic and municipalistic (the peasants)-to nationalise itself in a certain sense. Moreover, this sense is not a very narrow one either, since before the conditions can be created for an economy that follows a world plan, it is necessary to pass through multiple phases in which the regional combinations (of groups of nations) may be of various kinds. (...) That non-national concepts (ie ones that cannot be referred to each individual country) are erroneous can be seen ad absurdum; they have led to passivity and inertia in two quite distinct phases: 1) In the first phase, nobody believed that they ought 1o make a start-that is to say, they believed that by making a start they would find themselves isolated; they waited for everybody to move together, and nobody in the meantime moved or organized the movement; 2) The second phase is perhaps worse, because what is being awaited is an anachronistic and anti-natural form of "Napoleonism' (since not all historical phases repeat themselves in the same form).
(PN, op cit, pp 240-241)
Once again, it is clear that Gramsci did not know the most significant writings of Trotsky on this question and either did not know-or left on one side-those writings by Stalin that reveal his ideas better than the extract he quotes from. When he says in particular, 'the internal relations of any nation are the result of a combination which is "original" and (in a certain sense) unique; these relations must be understood and conceived in their originality and uniqueness if one wishes to dominate them and direct them', or that 'it is necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the international class (the proletariat) will have to lead and develop in accordance with the international perspective and directives (ie those of the Comintern)', he is in reality much closer to Trotsky's approach than that of Stalin on the internal questions of the Communist movement in the United States (6 May 1929) and on the other hand Trotsky's preface to the American edition of Permanent Revolution. Stalin said:
It would be wrong to ignore the specific peculiarities of American capitalism. (...) but it would be still more wrong to base the activities of the Communist Party on these specific features, since the foundation of the activities of every Communist Party, including the
American Communist Party, on which it must base itself, must be the general features of capitalism, which are the same for all countries, and not its specific features in any given country. It is precisely on this that the internationalism of the Communist Parties rests. The specific features are merely supplementary to the general features.
(Bolshevik, No 1 1930. F 8. quoted in Permanent Revolution, L Trotsky, (London: New Park Publications 1962), p 28. LT emphasis.)
Trotsky, after having pointed out the fact that the world economy must
a sum of national sectors, but as a powerful independent reality created by the internait is false that the world economy is simply a sum of national parts of one and the same type. It is false that the specific parts are 'merely supplementary to the general features'
In reality, the national peculiarities represent an original combination of the basic features of the world process. (...) It is absolutely wrong to base the activity of the Communis arties on some 'general features', that is on an abstract type of national capitalism. 2
As for Gramsci's final comment, nobody would seriously rank Trotsky among those who would not have wanted to start a revolution for fear of remaining isolated, nor of having had a 'Napoleonic' conception of the international role of the workers' state formed as a result of the October revolution. He did not reproach the Stalinist bureaucracy for not 'exporting revolution' on the point of their bayonets, but of having held back and sabotaged struggles by imposing a political line on the Communist Parties and the
Comintern which corresponded to its specific interests and not to the interests of the proletariat in the different countries and on a world scale.
Gramsci was also not going to live to see that it would be precisely Stalin who after the Second World War would operate a new form of
Napoleonism' by establishing in Eastern Europe regimes similar to his own
Already in the period before prison and his writing of the Notebooks,
Gramsci had criticised Trotsky's ideas and positions on several occasions.
In November 1924 for example he had criticised his essay on Lenin as well as Lessons of October, in practice repeating the polemics then developing in the CPSU. At the Como Conference he had criticised Trotsky for having adopted a position of 'passive occupation' but at the same time he presented Trotsky's analysis on the dynamic of the situation in France in
In a report he made to the PCI CC in February 1925, there is a comment that ought to be noted because it reflects the ambiguities of the 'bolsheviza-
Trotsky's conceptions, and above all his attitude, represent a danger inasmuch as the lack of party unity, in a country in which there is only one party, splits the state. This produces a counter-revolutionary movement; it does not, however, mean that Trotsky is a counter-
It is true that if there is only one party and if this party leads the state its divisions will inevitably have repercussions on the state. But history has shown that if the conclusion one draws from this is that there should be a monolithic party then the consequences are disastrous. In fact in the eventuality outlined by Gramsci, internal party democracy and tendency rights
32 International Marxist Review not be considered as tional division of labour and the world market replies that and he goes on to explain:
bureaucratic one.
a favourable light. 30 tion' period:
revolutionary, for in that case we would ask for his expulsion.
(Permanent Revolution, op cit, p 23)
(ibid, pp 23-24, our emphasis)
(Selections, 1921-1926, op cit, p 284)
become even more important and are even more a barometer of the degree of democracy that exists more generally in the workers' state.
In the same February 1925 report there is also a reference to:
(Trotsky's) predictions about American super-capitalism, which will apparently have a
European arm in England and bring about a prolonged enslavement of the proletariat under these predictions, which by postponing the revolution indefinitely would shift the whole tactics of the Communist International, which would have to go back to mere propaganda and agitation among the masses. They would also shift the tactics of the Russian state, since if one postpones the European revolution for an entire historical phase-if, in other words, the Russian working class will not for a long time be able to count on the support of the proletariat of other countries-it is evidence that the Russian revolution must be modified. This is why the democracy advocated by Trotsky meets with so much favour.
The record of the report is probably imprecise and so there is a question mark about the exact significance of some statements. But two things are
1) Trotsky's analysis on American imperialism's tendency to become hegemonic does not in any way have the implications that Gramsci seems
2) In 1926 Gramsci continued to think that the fate of the Russian revolution was utterly linked to the fate of the revolution in the rest of Europe.
The most significant test of this period is undoubtedly the letter to the
CPSU Central Committee that Gramsci wrote in the name of the Political
Bureau of his party just before his arrest. This letter first of all expresses concern about the reactions that the development of the conflict inside the
Soviet leadership could provoke among the party members and cadres. He does not agree with the Opposition's criticisms and he states his agreement with the majority's political line. But at the same time he dissociated himself somewhat from the campaigns then being launched against the Opposition which were setting the stage for its expulsion and to the elimination of in-
... we like to feel certain that the majority of the Central Committee of the USSR does not intend to win a crushing victory in the struggle and is disposed to avoid excessive
In this respect the author of the letter maintained his independence of judge-
This is confirmed by the fact that Togliatti, who was in Moscow at the time, did his best to block the letter and he expressed sharp disagreement.
According to him the party should have given its total suppprt to the majority line (see ibid, pp 433-437). Gramsci's reply was sharp:
... the way in which you argue has made a ver! painful impression on me. (...) We would be pretty miserable, irresponsible revolutionaries if we passively allowed faits accompli to come into being. simply justifying their inevitability a priori. (ibid, p 438)
the dominance of American capital.
Gramsci rejects:
clear:
to give it. 31 ternal party democracy:
measures.
ment and was going against the current.
(ibid, p 284)
(ibid, p 284)
(Selections 1921-1926, op cit, p 432)
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 33
34 International Marxist Review: This single sentence helps us understand the figure of Togliatti much better than hundreds of pages of his biographers or historians.
To come back to the Notebooks we can find here a criticism of Trotsky's 'over-resulute will' to:
•.give supremacy in national life to industry and industrial methods, to accelerate through coercion imposed from the outside the growth of discipline and order in production. Such an approach:
... was destined necessarily to end up in a form of Bonapartism. Hence the inexorable necessity of crushing it. The preoccupations were correct, but the practical solutions were protoundly mistaken, and in this imbalance between theory and practice there was an inherent danger-the same danger incidentally, which had manifested itself earlier, in 1921.
These lines were written in 1934. Nobody would have dared to say inside a communist party at that time, and even less in the Soviet Union, that Trotsky's preoccupations were correct-just as nobody would have dared state that in 1917 Lenin had implemented, in his own way, the theory of permanent revolution. This is a supplementary proof that Gramsci had never adopted Stalinist attitudes.
As for the heart of the matter, problems of interpretation are raised again. At the outside what Gramsci was criticising Trotsky for could be explained in relation to writings from the war communism period before the NEP. But in 1934 Trotsky criticised Stalinist industrialisation with similar arguments to the ones Gramsci was using against him. Given the nature of the Notebooks it is difficult to imagine that Gramsci would have got involved in some sort of "Albanian-style' polemic. Nevertheless he was not ignorant, in broad terms, of what was happening in the Soviet Union and he would have even had some indications of Trotsky's positions.
Here we might add in a note we have already mentioned written earlier (1930-32) on the transition from the war of movement (and frontal attack) to the war of position in the political field, similar concerns had been expressed.
This seems to me to be the most important question of political theory that the post-war period has posed, and the most difficult to solve correctly. It is related to the problems raised by Bronstein (Trotsky), who in one way or another can be considered the political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats. This transition in political science is only indirectly (mediately) related to that which took place in the military field, although certainly a relation exists and an essential one. The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by indefinite masses of people. So an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more 'interventionist' government, which will take the offensive more openly against the oppositionists and organise permanently the 'impossibility' of internal disintegration— with controls of every kind, political, administrative, etc, reinforcement of the hegemonic 'positions' of the dominant group, etc.
(PN, op cit, pp 238-239)
This approach can appear to justify Stalinist practices. But apart from the fact that at the time Trotsky himself had not given up the perspective of reforming the workers' state which was becoming bureaucratized, there is with Gramsci a consciousness of reality as it is, without any idealisation.
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 35 That is the difference, a far from negligible one, between him and the overwhelming majority of communist party leaders at the beginning of the 1930s. 3. Who can claim Gramsci's heritage? At a time when bourgeois ideologists and 'repentant' left wing intellectuals are continuing their campaign to bury Marxism and when the PCI Is in fullscale ideological disarray, let us start with a simple statement of tact. It is unanimously recognised that Gramsci was not only a courageous militint ry or tuc id pol wal leader, ber also there is all acred can in tha of opinion that his writings have had a profound influence on Italian postwar culture and have even provoked interest and admiration in other European countries and other continents. Gramsci's work was only possible because he made great efforts to rigourously apply the materialist method. to assimilate and enrich Marxist concepts in their most authentic form. without any mechanical deformations of the reformist or dogmatic/pragmatist stalinist type. This was all achieved in the heat of the struggles of two crucial decades.
Secondly, there is an undeniable continuity in Gramsci's thought and approach from his writings in the years of the Russian revolution and the crisis of Italian society through to the end of the First World War and to the 1935 notes when the Notebooks end. At the beginning one can find traces of his idealist education which later disappear. Furthermore his prison writings are more dense than his L'Ordine Nuovo articles. But as our analysis shows his ideas did not change on the essential questions: support for the whole body of Marxist theory, radical critique of capitalist society, nature of the State, strategy of the workers movement in the perspective of a revolutionary break with capitalism, historic goals and to a large extent the problems of a transitional society.
Given the context of the workers movement, above all in Italy, after the major defeats or setbacks and since Gramsci could no longer directly participate in the struggle in any way at all and was cut off from his own party, then the angle of approach, the emphasis and tone evidently could not remain the same. Hence the important place taken by problems of method, historic analyses and syntheses and overall strategic reflections in his work. But even if we take all that into account, the argument that the Gramsci of the Notebooks is qualitatively different from the Gramsci of L'Ordine Nuovo is simply indefensible. This is even more the case for the argument that claims his conceptions foreshadowed the PCI's ideas and line after the Second World War. For some writers and commentators it reveals a great ignorance of the subject (and one can be ignorant and have a detailed knowledge of the texts) for others it is just blatant ideological mystification-
36 International Marxist Review in other words they lay claim to a 'theoretical' terrain to justify a political practice.
Thirdly, if Gramsci always kept an independence of judgement, did not hesitate to criticise the policy of his party and the Communist International and did not succumb to Stalinism, it was due to his intellectual honesty and his moral integrity, as well as his communist convictions. Incidentally it is precisely on this level that there is the difference between Togliatti and Gramsci. Gramsci can be correctly described as the anti-Togliatti par excellence. But the fact that he was in prison during the decisive years of the degeneration of the communist movement meant that he was objectively 'sheltered' from all the constraints and pressure exerted by the Soviet state and Comintern apparatuses. Nevertheless he paid a heavy price for his isolation. His analyses and generalisations show the effects of this: for it is not possible for anybody to give comprehensive answers to burning and historically new problems without any practical activity, without links with a mass movement and outside of any organizational framework. In addition to the progressive deterioration of his health it was such circumstances that prevented Gramsci from continuing to outline his strategic and theoretical reflections in the last two years of his life at a time when major events like the revolutionary crisis in France, the rise of the Popular Front and the Civil War in Spain, the first Moscow Trials, not to mention China, were taking place.
After having had recourse for a whole period to apologetic even falsified versions of events, PCI historians have had finally to admit that the party's links with Gramsci were tenuous at the beginning of his imprisonment and practically completely petered out afterwards. Here is another confirmation that the bureaucratization of the communist parties was not a 'natural' evolution from Leninism to Stalinism, but had only been possible through very deep going changes and genuine splits which caused lasting traumas. We have already mentioned the expulsion in 1930 of three PCI Political Bureau members and we now know the toll taken by the Stalinist dictatorship among the ranks of communists who had found refuge from fascism in the Soviet Union. Gramsci's calvary is another part of the picture. In order to adapt to Stalinism the PCI had to break with one of its founders and its main leader, to keep silent the latter's differences with the Party and Comintern leadership, conceal information they received about his positions, lie in the funeral elegies by presenting Gramsci as a faithful disciple of Stalin and manipulate the Notebooks.32
At the beginning of the 1930s Gramsci had adopted a similar position to that of the Left Opposition on a key question, the stakes of which involved, in the final analysis, Hitler's coming to power in Germany. We do not know the extent to which Gramsci was aware of Trotsky and his current's positions. It is certain that he did not have a direct or complete knowledge of them. 33 But he had assimilated the experience of the Comintern and its leadership during a period of major events and fundamental theoretical
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 37 debates and this was the mould in which he finished his education. This is why, by using the same criteria and references he could draw similar conciusions to those of the Opposition with respect to the aberrant line that Stalin and the Comintern had imposed using all the means at their disposal.
A more general parallel can be established. What is still valid from what was produced by the different currents of the workers movement from the 1930s? Certainly not anything said or written by the social democratic theorists, even the more respectable ones like Otto Bauer, nor anything from the leaders of the Stalinised communist parties. What has remained in the final analysis is the legacy of two political leaders and theorists, Gramsci and Trotsky, one locked in prison and forced to write for himself in the worst isolation, the other banished from his own country and mercilessly persecuted, continuing his struggle in more and more tragic conditions and with absolutely derisory resources.
We are not going to annex Gramsci for Trotskyism, forgetting what we ourselves have explained. Nevertheless a question springs to mind: if we consider all the currents of the international workers movement since the beginning of the century up to today-classic reformism, Kautskyism. Luxemburgism, Austro-Marxism, Centrism from the 1930s, Titoism, Maoism, Castroism or Guevarism, Eurocommunism, Neo-reformism, Trotskyism or revolutionary Marxism, with which current would Gramsci have the greatest affinity? There is no shadow of doubt about the answer. Revolutionary Marxists have the right and the duty to claim the heritage of Antonio Gramsci.
### Notes
(Translator's note: Quotations are taken from; Q. Hoare ed. and trs., Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920 and 1921-26, two vols, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977 and 1978). Where quotations used by L. Maitan have not been included in these volumes we have retranslated from the original article. In most cases a reference is given 1o the Italian original. The Italian references are L'Ordine Nuovo (1919-20), (Einaudi, 1954), Socialism e fascismo, L'Ordine Nuovo (1921-1922), (Edinaudi, 1966) and La formazione del gruppo dirigente del PCI, (Editori Riuniti, 1962), La costruzione del Partito comunista 1923-26, (Edinaudi, 1971). The Selections volumes in English include material from all three of the latter. L'Ordine Nuovo was published for the first time as a weekly from the first of May 1919. It became a daily later.)
1) One of the main PCI leaders and theorists, Emillo Sereni, nevertheless has seen it fit to express his undying Stalinist faith by putting Gramsci's notes and Zhdanov's ideas the History of Philosophy by Aleksandrov (See Scienza, marxismo, cultura, (Edizioni
Gramsci's conception of art had nothing in common with Zhdanov's (see for example
Quaderni del carcere, Edizione Critica, (Einaudi, 1975—hereon EC) p. 1793).
2) A critique along these lines has been made including in the collection Trenta anni di vita e di lotta del PCI, published in 1951.
3) Here we are to a large extent repeating analyses that we made in 1954 in our book Attualitá di Gramsci e politica comunista. (Schwarz, 1954), which however included an
4) A more correct analysis on this question is initiated by Gramsci in an article published on the 15 May, 1921 (Socialismo e Fascismo, op cit, p 165). As for his attitude before the Livorno Congress, Gramsci later considered that the Ordine Nuovo group had made
"a serious mistake in 1919 and 1920 in not attacking the Socialist leadership more resolutely, even if this meant running the risk of expulsion, by constituting a faction that could move out from Turin ...' He also thought that it had been wrong to not 'give the Turin factory councils an autonomous directive centre, which could have exercised an immense influence throughout the country, for fear of a split in the unions and of being expelled prematurely from the Socialist Party.' Selections, 1921-26, op cit, pp 187 and 189)
7) See among other things, Togliatti's article in Unitá, 26 June 1956. In the interview we have already mentioned Natta introduces a qualitative differentiation between the pre-
Lyons Congress party and the post-Lyons one. According to him, 'in the light of later
8) See the collection of material published as Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political
9) See La Costruzione, op cit, p.513. Concerning the workers and peasants government problematic more generally, see our article in New International, Vol 2, No 2, Fall 1985.
10) Original references to Italian are in the La Costruzione collection, Pp 454, 460, 29, 223,
11) See for example G. Fiori, Antonio Gramsci, Life of a Revolutionary, (London: New Left
Books, 1970). Among PCI writers there is Paulo Spriano's history of the party. Particularly noteworthy is the excellent book by Ferdinando Ormea, Le Origini dello stalinismo
The importance Gramsci assigned to democratic demands is proved by his allusions to the necessity of winning the demand for a constituent assembly in China (See EC, op
Athos Lisa's report was written on the request of Togliatti, who, after reading it, demanded its author 'not say a word about it to anyone' (Ormea, op cit., p.285)
14) Q. Hoare/Nowell-Smith, ed. and trs, Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
To deceive his jailers Gramsci normally used the term 'philosophy of praxis' instead
15) On the economic functions of the state, also see PN, op cit, p.272 and La Costruzione,
16) On Bonapartism see our article 'Mexico, su revolucion, su regimen politico y su ubicacion en el capitalismo mundial', in Criticas de la economia politica, no. 24/25. In this article one of the points we make is to voice our doubts about Gramsci's characterisation
17) Regarding the criteria for defining the nature of a party and the history of this, see PN,
18) Elsewhere Gramsci presented parties in a more pertinent way saying they were "schools
19) See PN, op cit, 420 and in another form, ibid, p. 157. In the latter passage Gramsci speaks explicitly of 'the theoretical truth that every class has a single party' and he correctly emphasises, 'when fundamental questions were brought into play—the unity was form-
, but in fact he envisages rather than a single party, a bloc or a united front.
20) With respect to organic and bureaucratic centralism see among other references PN, op cit, pp 185-90, EC, op cit ., p 1650, 1706-7. As for the active inbolvement of members in party life see for example EC, op cit pp. 236-37 where he emphasises the important role an 'intermediary layer' can play. In the same passage Gramsci makes a correct distinction between democratic structure of the state and democratic structure of the party.
38 International Marxist Revien
5) La formazione, op cit, p 174
6) ibid,pp 151, 192 experience' one can talk of a 'genuine second birth'
Writings, 1921-26, op cit pp 340-375.
nel PCI, Feltrinelli, 1978).
cit pp 559 and 564).
of 'Marxism'.
op cit, p 101 of bismarckism as a 'regressive' Bonapartism.
op cit, pp 150-151 of State life' (PN, op cit, Pp 267-268)
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
incorrect judgement about the Italian situation at that time. 466, 470, 544, 119 respectively. Also see ibid, p. 278. Notebooks, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973-hereon PN).
21) Especially consult the excellent essay by Perry Anderson 'Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci",
22) Marxists use the concept of the state in a broad sense when they use the terms capitalist
24) Also of another reference to Lenin, EC, op cit, p. 1235. In the article we have already mentioned, Perry Anderson rather comprehensively deals with the concept of hegemony
25) Criticising a passage from Benedetto Croce, Gramsci explained that 'in a given situation it can happen that the political and moral leadership is not exercised by the legal government but by a "private" organisation and even by a revolutionary party' (EC, op cir., p. 1233). In this case the conquest of hegemony before the seizure of power would have
The Massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the
"trenches' and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely 'partial' the element of movement which before used to be 'the whole' of war
So the counterposition between war of movement and war of position in Gramsci's
28) See PN, op cit., p. 165, the permanent revolution and the revolutionary democratic dic-
29) See L. Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, (London: New Park, 1962)
31) See the pamphlet in the mid-1920s on Europe and America and articles that have appeared
32) In the spirit of the shameless falsifications current at the time Togliatti presented Gramsci in the article he wrote at the time of his death as a faithful supporter of Stalin.
33) While in prison Gramsci tried to get hold of Trotsky's books, particularly those from the period he was expelled from the Soviet Union. As far as we know he was able to get, apart from My life which he explicitly refers to, Revolution Betrayed and Towards
New Left Review, no. 100.
state or workers state.
23) Also see PN, op cit, pp 12-13.
before Gramsci.
therefore resulted in a dual power situation.
27) Gramsci wrote:
etc. (PN, op cit., p. 243)
tatorship is counterposed
30) See La Costruzione, op cit., p.211-212 and 461.
in Ecrits, Vol 1, pp. 144 and 286-87.
Capitalism or Socialism.
Antonio Gramsci's revolutionary Marxism 39
26) See, L. Trotsky Military Writings (New York, 1969) passim.
writings is not as absolute as most writers have claimed.
nternational
FORTWIOHTLY HEWA REVIEW OF THE FOURTH
International Vlewpoint is an indispensable
VEMONT weapon in understanding world events. Not only does it provide a record of the struggles of the working class and oppressed world-wide, it gives a voice to all those fighting for socialism
IV has a proud record of international solidarity — in particular with workers in
South Alrica, Central America and Eastern
Europe, in the peace movement, and
•IOREEAST in the Black and women's liberation
SPALY movements.
IV also reports news and statements from the Fourth
International's supporting organizations and leading bodies.
Payment: French france preferred.
Subscribe
Choquos to PEC. Postal traneters 1o PEC,
CCP No 2 322 42T Paris. Bank transters
10 PEC, BNP Robespierre, Account now!
230179/80.
storting cheques peryable to Internationa
Verpoint
Subacriptions and correspondence 1o International Viewpoint, 2 rue Richard
Lanoir, 93108 Montreuil, France.
I SUBSCRIPTION RATES:
Surtece Mall: • 1 yoor 200FF; {18; 534 • 6 monthe 120FF; £9.50; 518
Armail: Eurape, Mido Enal, North Altion o 1 your 245FF; £21; $41 O 6 montha 135FF; £13; 522
The Americaa, Aloa & 1 your 300FF; {30; $47 0 6montha 165FF; £16.50; 525
Asa, Auatratasia O 1 your 340FF; {34; 550 & 6 montha 185FF; £18.50; 527
¡ (BLOCK LETTERS PLEASE)
... First name
Last name ...
¡ Address..
"CHty...
Code....
Country ...
L-
PAUL LE BLANC