Gramsci's Politics

Anne Showstack Sassoon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032808185
• eBook ISBN: 9781000704884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1980. This book analyses Gramsci's political theory and the consequences of his ideas for the theory of the state and of the political party. Using the new tools of analysis which have been developed in Italy the book presents Gramsci's political theory as part of the attempt to develop further a Marxist theory of politics.

The book also serves as a basis for considering the theoretical foundations of political developments such as Eurocommunism and the author argues that Gramsci's political thought provides useful instruments for both a critique of Stalinism and of social democracy and offers a grounding for conceptualising democratic forms of socialism which did not simply reinforce the State. This title will be of interest to students of politics, philosophy, and history.

Part I

THE YEARS IN TURIN

The historical background to Gramsci’s political militancy in Turin in the period before, during and after the First World War, and the social and economic setting of his early years in Sardinia are well documented. His first acquaintance with the socialist movement, his work on various socialist journals, the intellectual climate of Sardinia and Turin, and the development of the most advanced working-class movement in Italy have been described in a number of works.¹ From the point of view of an examination of his political theory, the themes which are most discussed are the idealist language of his early works, and what has often been depicted as a spontaneist problematic in which the political party and the trade unions seem to be superseded as the most important organisations of the working-class movement by the factory councils.

Indeed, crucial questions of method immediately arise in considering Gramsci’s ideas on the party in the period of his political militancy in Turin. If these writings are examined with reference to a model of a party, Leninist or otherwise, it is quite easy to arrive at the result that Gramsci lacked a clear idea of a political organisation alternative to that provided by the Italian socialist tradition and that his view of the need to confront the problem of the State and the political struggle was confused with the economic struggle of the factory councils. In fact, Gramsci’s own development of a theory of politics contradicts this approach which is embedded in a problematic which in fact reduces the party and its tasks within the confines of the economism which dominated the Second International. This problematic separated the spheres of political and economic struggle in such a way, it can be argued, as to be unable to pose correctly the question of the nature of State power and therefore the requirements of a revolutionary struggle in the period of monopoly capitalism.²

If important aspects of Gramsci’s work in this period are not to be missed altogether, the correct questions must be asked of his writings. Rather than search for an abstract model of a party, unrelated to a specific historical conjuncture or to a theory of the State and politics, those elements which come to constitute aspects of Gramsci’s view of politics must be investigated in order to learn what they say about the role of political organisation and political struggle. Gramsci’s own work must be approached using indications from his criticism of Bordiga’s view of the party as a model unrelated to historical time or space. Further, the question of whether Gramsci’s ideas on the party are ‘Leninis’ or not, in this period or any other, is itself the product of a schematic view of party organisation and is therefore of little interest unless Lenin’s own ideas on the party are considered as part of a theory of the State and politics, applied in a specific historical, national context, a task which cannot be undertaken within the space available. If then we ask the correct questions of Gramsci’s ideas in this period, we will see how they represent the foundations for a theory of politics and the State and the role of the political party which represents a clear break with the tradition of the Italian socialist movement and by extension a break with the way the Second International in general viewed the problems of the institutions of the working-class movement.³

Revolution as Creation

While the major body of material to be considered in this period appeared in the Ordine Nuovo, founded in April 1919, a brief look at some selected earlier pieces of work demonstrates how Gramsci’s view of the revolution as an act which must be creative if it is to break through the bounds of the present social formation goes back to his earliest activity. Of particular interest are the article, ‘Active and Operative Neutrality’ (PWI, pp. 6–9) written in 1914 concerning the position of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) with regards to the war; the special issue published by the Piedmont Youth Federation, ‘La citta futura’ (SG, pp. 73–89), indicative of Gramsci’s conception of the transition to socialism at the beginning of 1917; ‘Socialism and Culture’ (PWI, pp. 10–13) an early indication of the relationship between politics and culture; and ‘The Revolution Against “Capital” ’ (PWI, pp. 34–7) for his view of the Russian revolution and the lessons he drew from it.

Gramsci’s position on the war is interesting to us because of his criticism of the reformist outlook of the PSI and his argument for revolutionary leadership in the crisis, an argument posed in terms of a positive intervention which went beyond the PSI’s position of neither sabotaging nor aiding the war effort. The immediate object of Gramsci’s article was a piece by Benito Mussolini, then leader of the so-called revolutionary wing of the party and editor of Avanti!, in which, in opposition to the official position of the PSI, Mussolini partially accepted the war since it was, as he put it, the ‘destiny’ of the bourgeoisie to fight.⁴

Two articles appeared in Il Grido del Popolo, the Turin socialist newspaper, in reaction to Mussolini’s position. The first, by Angelo Tasca, firmly opposed Mussolini, defending the official party line and arguing that the only valid position for socialists was to remain absolutely neutral with regard to the war.⁵ A second article, written by Gramsci, argued for a more active type of opposition to the war. Absolute neutrality, he said, had been necessary when the war broke out and the situation was confused, when an intransigent position was needed to counteract popular passions. But several months later when the situation had clarified, while absolute neutrality might be adequate for the reformists who would have liked the proletariat to act like impartial spectators, it no longer sufficed for revolutionaries.⁶

According to Gramsci, the task of revolutionaries was active opposition to the war, providing for the unhindered development of the class struggle. At this stage Gramsci contended that the heightened class struggle would reveal to the whole of society that the propertied class had reached the end of its historical role, that it had failed to supersede this role, and that the bourgeoisie no longer represented the national will.⁷

What is significant is Gramsci’s interpretation of what he called Mussolini’s rather incoherent statements.⁸ According to Gramsci, Mussolini was not calling for a general support of the war or abandoning the class struggle, in which case his position would have been anti-socialist, but he simply wanted to allow history to run its course. Nor, said Gramsci, did Mussolini exclude the possibility that the working class would assume power after the bourgeoisie had demonstrated its impotence. The proletariat, Gramsci thought, was well able to assume the new task of a more active role, and the ‘convenient position of absolute neutrality’ should not make socialists abandon themselves even for a moment to ‘an over-ingenuous contemplation and Buddhist renunciation of our obligations’ (PWI, p. 9).

Thus, the fact that the bourgeoisie was no longer progressive stems from its inability to represent the interests of the whole nation, and entrance into the war is considered an opportunity for the proletariat to demonstrate that at the present stage of history it has the potential to replace the bourgeoisie as a national class. What is missing is any indication of the type of political intervention needed to do so, for Gramsci posed the question in terms of history running its course, implying that history, if left to itself, will consist of a class struggle automatically resulting in socialism.

Gramsci, then, wanted the PSI to move away from a purely formalistic and doctrinaire opposition to a more concrete one.⁹ In line with Gramsci’s criticism of the evolutionary and deterministic view of Marxism so widely held in the party, there is an affirmation of the active role of the proletariat. However, in trying to overcome the mechanistic tendencies of Italian socialism, Gramsci remained within what can be considered the mirror opposite of a mechanistic problematic, idealism. Arguing against Tasca, he writes that

revolutionaries who see history as the product of their own actions, made up of an uninterrupted series of wrenches executed upon the other active and passive forces in society, and prepare the most favourable conditions for the final wrench (the revolution), should not rest content with the provisional formula of ‘absolute neutrality’, but should transform it into the alternative formulation ‘active and operative neutrality’. PWI, p. 7.

Gramsci’s debt to Hegel via Croce as well as the influence of Sorel is evident in this article. Firstly, the concept of future history being reflected in the spirit of revolutionaries implies that the very activities of these revolutionaries can dominate both the active and passive forces of society. Hence, no objective relation can stand between man’s will and man’s future. Secondly, the revolution is viewed as the culmination of a series of crises, each of which necessarily leads to the next, as every given stage develops into a higher one. The revolution itself is seen as a finite crisis. Gramsci himself later admitted the Crocean influence on his early philosophy at a time when, as he wrote, he did not have the concept of the unity of theory and practice.¹⁰ Moreover, the influence of Sorel’s writings and his determination to rescue the class struggle from the viscosity of reformism, which affected the thinking of a whole generation of revolutionaries, also appears in Gramsci’s approaches to the question of an active opposition to the war.¹¹

In arguing his case, Gramsci not only tends to read intentions into Mussolini’s position, but he does not see that Mussolini’s notion of the forces of history working themselves out does not overcome the evolutionism of the reformists. The difficulty of in fact overcoming this kind of problematic is reflected in the lack of a coherent alternative to the superficial line of the PSI on the war.¹² In a still groping, imprecise way, he was trying to establish the active role of the masses against the formalism of the PSI leadership and was aware, more than Tasca, of the dangers of simply waiting for the crisis to pass in order to act in the future.¹³

In another article written in January 1916, Gramsci considered a theme which would remain central in his thinking, the relationship between culture and politics. Arguing against counterposing culture and concrete historical practice, and still very much within an idealist problematic, Gramsci tried to establish a definition of culture which would allow the proletariat to become conscious of an autonomous historical role.

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture is really dangerous, particularly for the proletariat.

Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous evolution, through a series of actions and reactions which are independent of one’s own will—as in the case in the animal and vegetable kingdoms where every unit is selected and specifies its own organs unconsciously, through a fatalistic natural law. PWI, pp. 10–11.

Within the context of an argument against positivism, which seemed to remove the possibility of an active intervention in history, Gramsci cites the example of the French Revolution:

every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas …

The same phenomenon is being repeated today in the case of socialism. It was through a critique of capitalist civilization that the unified consciousness of the proletariat was or is still being formed, and a critique implies culture, not simply a spontaneous and naturalistic evolution… To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself,… And we cannot be successful in this unless we also know others, their history, the successive efforts they have made to be what they are, to create the civilization they have created and which we seek to replace with our own. PWI, pp. 12–13.

The role of culture is not yet linked to a concrete political strategy, but Gramsci’s emphasis on the need for a detailed study of bourgeois culture would be extended to a study of the dominance of the bourgeoisie in all its manifestations as a prerequisite for an autonomous political intervention by the proletariat.¹⁴

In early February 1917 the Piedmontese Socialist Youth Federation published a special issue of a newspaper as part of a recruitment campaign. Called, La città futura, it was written mostly by Gramsci with selections from works by Salvemini and Croce, and can be considered the high point of his early development.¹⁵ This work shows that on the eve of the February revolution in Russia, Gramsci was still very influenced by Croce whom he called the greatest European thinker of the period,¹⁶ and a brief examination of his position at that time indicates the theoretical view point from which he would view the Russian revolution.

The articles which Gramsci wrote argued against fatalism and acclaimed the power of man’s will to change society. Arguing against indifference, Gramsci wrote: ‘The fatality that seems to dominate history is precisely the illusory appearance of this indifference, of this absenteeism’ (PWI, p. 17). He was specifically calling on young socialists to commit themselves to the party and to the struggle, and within this context he was most particularly critical of the evolutionary...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I The Years in Turin
• Part II The Struggle for a New Type of Party
• Part III Gramsci’s Concept of the Party and Politics in the Prison Notebooks
• Bibliography
• Index