Antonio Gramsci

Steven Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134364107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

For readers encountering Gramsci for the first time, Steve Jones covers key elements of his thought through detailed discussion and studies the historical context of the theorist's thought, offers examples of putting Gramsci's ideas into practice in the analysis of contemporary culture and evaluates responses to his work.

Including British, European and American examples, key topics covered here include:

* culture
* hegemony
* intellectuals
* crisis
* Americanization.

Gramsci's work invites people to think beyond simplistic oppositions by recasting ideological domination as hegemony: the ability of a ruling power's values to live in the minds and lives of its subalterns as a spontaneous expression of their own interests

Is power simply a matter of domination and resistance? Can a ruling power be vulnerable? Can subordinates find their resitance neutralized? and What is the role of culture in this? These questions, and many more are tackled here in this invaluable introduction to Gramsci.

KEY IDEAS

1
GRAMSCI’S POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

For the most part this book will argue that Gramsci’s theories are relevant to the study of contemporary culture. However, you might reasonably ask whether it is not anachronistic to use the work of an early-twentiethcentury Marxist to analyse modern cultural forms and practices. Many of the categories that are central to Gramsci’s analysis (‘proletariat’, ‘peasantry’, ‘folklore’, ‘Fordism’) are less prominent or clearly defined than in his lifetime, and some of his observations on popular culture (for example on jazz and football) turned out to be very wide of the mark. Perhaps it is the case that his explanatory frameworks are equally specific to their period, and consequently outmoded? Later chapters will address the question of why, and how, we may use Gramsci’s work outside its historical and geographical ‘moment’, but let us for now observe that Gramsci himself lends some support to such scepticism, for he forcefully draws our attention to the necessity of studying events, ideas, texts and behaviour within their historical context. As a consequence of this, he saw placing one’s own life within a political and intellectual context as one of the most pressing philosophical activities. ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration’, he writes, ‘is … “knowing thyself ” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces’ (1971: 324).

This chapter therefore places Gramsci’s thought within a historical framework, mapping out the ‘infinity of traces’ that led to its formation. On the one hand, this is a grand narrative of political and intellectual change, setting the development of Gramsci’s ideas within the context of wider political developments in Italy and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But as Gramsci would have been aware, such broad changes could not entirely determine his theoretical evolution: he was not simply the effect of other people’s writings but also an agent in his own intellectual construction. Understanding the development of his thought is therefore a means of comprehending the interplay of impersonal structures, human agency and chance occurrence (or contingency) in any intellectual and cultural formation.

RISORGIMENTO AND TRASFORMISMO

The Italy that Gramsci was born into, in 1891, was a new nation. Until 1861, Italy was a patchwork of provinces ruled by an assortment of traditional monarchs and foreign powers. While small parts of the country developed a modern, industrial infrastructure, much of it consisted of large estates, on which an impoverished peasantry scraped a subsistence-level existence. As was the case in a number of European and South American countries during the nineteenth century, this backwardness led a significant minority of middle-class and aristocratic activists to agitate for national self-determination. Although local uprisings could act as the catalyst for action, at no stage did this desire for independence translate into a mass uprising of the Italian people. Instead, self-rule came piecemeal, through three wars of unification known collectively as the Risorgimento (‘the Resurgence’).

The Risorgimento was directed by an uneasy confederation of two Italian parties: the Moderates, led by the liberal Count Camillo Cavour (1810–61), chief minister of the northern kingdom of Piedmont, and the republican Action Party, led initially by Giuseppe Mazzini and later by Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82). The latter played an important role in one of the most significant events of the Risorgimento, the liberation of Sicily and Naples from Spanish Bourbon rule. Alarmed by Garibaldi’s autonomous action, Cavour dispatched a Piedmontese army southwards, their union with Garibaldi’s force leading to the formal declaration of Italian unification in 1861. However, once Italy had established a parliamentary democracy, the policies of the ‘right-wing’ Moderates and ‘left-wing’ Action Party were largely identical, with both parties committed to a programme of industrial modernization, political reform and imperial expansion. Over time, Italy became governed by a variety of Left–Right coalitions in a period known as the Trasformismo, after the policy of ‘transforming’ the party conflicts of the Risorgimento into a centrist consensus.

Gramsci saw the Risorgimento and its aftermath as a key example of how a governing power absorbs its political antagonists and institutes reform, without expanding its programme to involve full democratic participation. He argued that the Moderate Party was successful because it represented a specific class. The intellectuals who made up its leadership were drawn from the class of estate owners and northern industrialists whose interests they served – in Gramsci’s term they were ‘condensed’. By contrast, the Action Party was not organically connected to any particular class (instead it adopted a paternalistic attitude to the popular classes, particularly the peasantry) and could not therefore develop a condensed political programme. Action Party policies were often marked by their inconsistency around, for example, hostility to the Church, or land reform, inconsistencies which ultimately failed the peasantry in whose name they presumed to speak. In this situation, writes Gramsci, the Action Party became a subaltern party to the Moderates. This does not mean that it was defeated – rather it became a junior partner in an alliance, actively identifying with the aims of the Moderates and adopting Moderate values as its own. In a famous passage, Gramsci observes that:

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 indeed is 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 grasp it must continue to ‘lead’ as well.

(Gramsci 1971: 57–8; emphasis added)

It is from this perspective that Gramsci observes that the whole history of the Italian state from 1848 to the 1920s can be characterized as one of trasformismo, initially a ‘molecular’ transformism as individuals passed into the conservative camp, and later a transformism of whole groups, as leftist radicals became supporters first of imperialism and subsequently of Italian intervention into the First World War. While these adventures appeared to have a popular and national dimension to them, they were actually deeply inimical to the interests of the working class and agricultural labour.

EARLY LIFE

The Risorgimento and the period of trasformismo impacted directly upon Antonio Gramsci’s early life. He was born in the town of Ales on the island of Sardinia where his father, Francesco, worked as a land registrar. Although prior to unification Sardinia was part of the northern kingdom that included Piedmont, the island was more typical of the Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy) with a rudimentary agrarian economy that had been devastated by a series of banking and export crises. As a middle-ranking state servant, Francesco, his wife Giuseppina, and their seven children were initially relatively immune to this poverty. This changed, however, when Francesco aligned himself with an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in the 1897 elections. Corruption and local vendettas played a major role in Sardinian politics and Francesco laid himself open to reprisal. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five and a half years in prison. Without his salary, the Gramsci family was reduced to a state of near-destitution. Despite Antonio being a promising pupil, he was taken out of school at the age of 11.

This was not Antonio’s only misfortune. When he was 3 he contracted a spinal problem, leaving him permanently hunchbacked and abnormally short (his illness was probably rickets, though the Gramsci family claimed that a clumsy nursemaid had dropped him down the stairs). Despite some primitive and agonizing attempts to correct his disability, severe ill-health would dog Gramsci for the rest of his life. ‘The doctors’, he later wrote, ‘had given me up for dead, and until about 1914 my mother kept the small coffin and little dress I was supposed to be buried in’ (Fiori 1970: 17). His sickliness, the visibility of his deformity and his suddenly reduced class status left Gramsci particularly vulnerable to the harshness of village life (Davidson 1977: 27), as a consequence of which he became intensely withdrawn. This aspect of his personality would resurface at regular intervals throughout his life. Years later Gramsci described himself as like a ‘worm inside a cocoon, unable to unwind himself’ (1979: 263).

Francesco Gramsci was eventually released from prison and the family’s financial conditions improved sufficiently to send Antonio back to school. At the age of 17 Gramsci moved with his older brother Gennaro to Cagliari, the capital of the island, to enrol at the liceo, or grammar school. Despite severe poverty (letters home recounted how he could not go to school because he had no serviceable clothes and shoes), Gramsci won a scholarship to the University of Turin, enrolling on the Modern Philosophy course in 1911.

These personal developments took place against the background of changing events in Sardinia, which would influence Gramsci’s politics and thought in competing directions. Another agricultural slump provoked the development of rudimentary industry in the form of foreign-owned mines. When the miners, who lived and worked in conditions of incredible squalor, went on strike at Bugerru, three were shot dead. The killings provoked a general strike in Italy, and the development of a more politicized consciousness amongst islanders of all classes. This related not only to the events at Bugerru, but more broadly to the treatment of the Mezzogiorno by the government of the day, whose concessions to northern industrialists and the organized working-class movement tended to further impoverish the rural South, in turn generating a sense of inter-regional and intra-class animosity. Mass rioting in Cagliari in 1906 led to hundreds of arrests, with troops firing into unarmed crowds.

As a consequence of this militancy and its subjugation, there was a well-developed infrastructure for protest in Cagliari by the time Gramsci arrived. Gennaro was secretary of the local Socialist Party, and Gramsci was befriended by a teacher, Raffa Garzia, who commissioned articles from his student for a Sardist (Sardinian nationalist) newspaper. Gramsci was also influenced by a radical socialist, Gaetano Salvemini, who argued against the exploitation of the Mezzogiorno by the North, and demanded that the southern peasantry be given the vote (although illiteracy was endemic in the South, illiterate Italian men were disqualified from voting. Italian women were not enfranchised until 1945). It was, therefore, as a young radical divided between international socialism and Sardist exceptionalism that Gramsci sailed for Turin in 1911.

‘YEARS OF IRON AND FIRE’: GRAMSCI IN TURIN

Gramsci’s student years were dominated by a continual battle with his physical limitations, exacerbated by the lack of adequate financial support from his family. In one letter home, he recounts a ‘glacial existence’ in which he would walk around Turin ‘shivering with cold, then come back to a cold room and sit shivering for hours’ (Fiori 1970: 73). Compounding this hand-to-mouth existence was the need to achieve academic success in order to retain his university scholarship. After a series of physical and nervous breakdowns, however, he was forced to abandon his degree course in April 1915.

Despite this, 1911–15 were years of intellectual evolution for Gramsci as he came to embrace socialism and reject his early Sardism. He never, however, abandoned the notion that the South was effectively colonized by the North. This transition was given urgency by working-class militancy in Turin, but it was also a struggle carried out in ideas. Gramsci arrived at university at a time when Italian (and indeed European) intellectual life was being influenced by a strong current of anti-positivism – a reaction against the idea that social life could be studied using the same ‘objective’ laws as natural science. Furthermore, as Lynne Lawner argues, although the currents of thought composing positivism took a number of forms, they shared ‘a set of political views that can be defined as reformist or gradualist’ (Lawner 1979: 17). While this involved welcome developments in education and health, it also advanced the notion that different strata of Italian society (the ‘elite’ and ‘the masses’), and different regions of the country (the North and the South), had reached different levels of development and therefore possessed separate cultures. From Gramsci’s perspective, this was compounded by a positivist tendency to cement together the economically privileged sectors of society (the relatively wealthy industrial working class, the middle class and the southern landowners) as the assumed representatives of an evolving, modernizing Italy. For the later Gramsci, the Socialist Party itself contributed to this ideology, assembling a northern alliance that defined itself against the ‘ball and chain’ of southern backwardness. Thus, Gramsci’s disavowal of Sardism was not a withdrawal from the ‘Southern Question’. Instead he engaged in a critique of the ‘sociologists of positivism’ who gave intellectual support to the development of the ‘two cultures’. This divide-and-rule strategy, he claimed, simply perpetuated the rule of the middle class or bourgeoisie by preventing the social development of the whole of Italy.

Gramsci’s persistent interest in his homeland was stimulated by contact with the socio-linguist Matteo Bartoli, who encouraged him to work on the Sardinian dialect. He also formed a friendship with the Dante scholar Umberto Cosmo, but his intellectual enthusiasms mostly came from philosophy. In particular, Gramsci encountered the work of Karl Marx (1818–83; see the next chapter) and Bendetto Croce (1866–1952; see box, pp. 19–20). Despite his unsociable personality, he also came into contact with a number of student activists. Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Gramsci’s fellow Sardinian Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964) were members of the Socialist Youth Organization (Gramsci joined the PSI – the Italian Socialist Party – around 1914) and would be his colleagues in journalism and in the foundation of the Italian Communist Party.

BENEDETTO CROCE

Gramsci’s intellectual formation drew on a number of Italian thinkers. Alongside the writings of Marx and Lenin, the Italian philosophers Niccolò Machiavelli, Antonio Labriola, Giovanni Gentile and, most significantly, Benedetto Croce provided important points of engagement and departure. Croce (1866–1952) was Italy’s major intellectual figure for over half a century, a leading southern landowner and liberal senator in the Italian parliament. Initially he was an apologist for fascism, though later he became a prominent critic of Mussolini. Croce’s philosophy is idealist, in its assertion that external reality is created by ‘man’s’ perceptions of it, and it is therefore anti-positivist since it rejects the notion that thought can only be based on observable phenomena. Within his philosophy, Croce advocated a position of ‘idealist realism’ in which men and women are ceaselessly required to think a new ‘ethical-political’ reality, which is implemented through their actions. Since idealist realism gave a role to human perception and agency, it provided a humanist corrective to ‘metaphysical’ accounts of history, in which a providential destiny shapes the future, and to the crude versions of Marxism in circulation at the time, in which history would be determined simply by developments within the economy. For adopting these positions, and advocating a rejuvenated national culture, Gramsci has been described as ‘Crocean’. Croce himself would describe Gramsci as ‘one of us’.

Yet for all its professed commitment to a human-centred view of history, Croce’s work is open to the charge that it, too, is deeply metaphysical. Rather than dealing with the socially situated struggles of real men and women, Croce advances the notion that there is an abstract essence, or Spirit, guiding history. ‘All history’, he remarked, ‘is the history of Spirit.’ For Gramsci, this account of Spirit betrayed Croce’s class position and his political orientation. Since Spirit was permanently operative (and for Croce – despite much evidence to the contrary – generally benign and rational), it released people from the requirement to struggle for change on a practical, political level and was therefore depoliticizing and reactionary. Moreover, Spirit was not the property of all people but of a class of liberal intellectuals who were able to elaborate their historical vision into cultural, political and economic forms. By naturalizing and universalizing a highly particular mode of thought and set of political actions, idealist realism thus intellectually underpinned the actually existing form of society in earlytwentieth-century Italy. For Gramsci, Croce therefore hovers uneasily between the positions of organic intellectual in the service of the emergent liberal bourgeoisie and traditional intellectual, rendered anachronistic by the rise of mass political movements. (For more on Croce, see Bellamy 1987.)

WAR, FASCISM AND COMMUNISM

Gramsci’s period in Turin coincided with an increase in Italian militarism and a drift towards war. Deprived of an overseas empire as a consequence of its late unification, Italy attempted to gain a foothold in North Africa by occupying a number of Libyan ports. Despite the military success of this colonial adventure, the episode polarized Italian opinion, particularly dividing the Left. This polarization was magnified two years later when Italy was forced to choose whether to enter the First World War. While the Right supported intervention as a means of taking territory from Austria, the Left was split between an ‘absolute neutrality’ faction and a growing number of interventionists, including Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), the editor of the party’s newspaper Avanti!.

The pro-war faction prevailed, and Italy entered the war on the side of France, Britain and Russia, only to experience a series of military setbacks, culminating in a disastrous defeat by German forces at Caporetto in 1917. Although Italy ended the First World War by making territorial gains, these were insufficient to disguise the political and economic crisis that the war had engendered. The years immediately after the conflict saw a huge growth in radicalism as inflation and unemployment rose steeply, and workers, peasants, and former soldiers looked towards political organizations for leadership (Ransome 1992: 77–8). While initially these were the established Catholic and socialist groupings, from 1919 a new political force emerged giving expression to the demands of militant nationalists and the lower middle class. Expanding from its base in Milan, Mussolini’s Fascist Party had, by 1921, taken control of large areas of northern and central Italy.

The growth of the working-class movement and the emergence of the Fascists need to be put in the contexts of events that were occurring outside Italy, but which had far-reaching effects within Italian politics and society. In Russia, the military and economic pressures of the war provoked a much more intense political crisis than was the case amongst the other fighting powers. With the army in retreat, mass strikes broke out in Russian cities, particularly in the capital, St Petersburg, where, in February 1917, a committee of ‘soviets’ (workers’ councils) and soldiers took control of the city. While the new government was initially reformist, a second revolution in October 1917 gave control of the National Assembly and army to the communist Bolshevik faction under the leadership of Lenin (see next chapter). In 1918, the Assembly was dissolved and the Soviet Socialist Republic, the world’s first workers’ state, was declared. While this marked a high point for revolutionary socialism, subsequent insurgencies failed to make further gains. Between 1918 and 1920, short-lived socialist revolutions in Germany, Austria and Hungary were suppressed with exceptional brutality.

Towards the end of 1915, Gramsci emerged from the illness that had caused him to give up his university studies. Exempted from military service, he threw himself into political activism, writing cultural and political articles for the socialist journals Il Grido del Popolo and Avanti! His first article on the Russian Revolution appeared in Il Grido in April 1917, where he noted that the mainstream press were characterizing the revolution as a bourgeois one. He, by contrast, was ‘persuaded that the Revolution is proletarian in character … and will naturally result in a socialist regime’ (Fiori 1970: 109). In anti-positivist fashion, he proposed that the Bolshevik Revolution was a revolution ‘against Marx’s Capital’, by which he meant the assumption that a workers’ revolution could only take place after a bourgeois, capitalist society had been established (Russia in 1917 was still an essentially feudal society, in which the great majority of workers were illiterate peasants). As we shall see, later events would lead him to a more nuanced account of how revolutions are installed and maintained, but he would persist in seeing Lenin as an inspirational revolutionary leader. In some ways this was vindicated by the events of 1917. As news filtered through of the Russian Revolution’s success, Italian workers attempted their own insurrection. But deprived of leadership and organization, the revolt was quickly suppressed.

In consequence, Gramsci embarked upon the creation of a new journal entitled L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order). The task of this project, he argued, was to discover ‘the Soviet-type traditions of the Italian working class, and [to] lay bare the real revolutionary vein in our history’ (Fiori 1970: 118). He found such a ‘Soviet’ form of organization in the factory councils that had emerged in Turi...