The Sociology of Political Praxis (RLE: Gramsci)

An Introduction to Gramsci's Theory

Leonardo Salamini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317744283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume analyses the philosophical nature of Gramsci's Marxism and its Hegelian source, the radical critique of the economistic tradition and the original analyses of the role of superstructures, ideology, consciousness and subjectivity in the revolutionary process. It relates the central themes of Gramsci's writings, such as hegemony, 'historical blocs', the role of intellectuals and political praxis, to the more peripheral ones, such as science, language, literature and art. The introduction includes a brief intellectual biography of Gramsci.

Part I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS AND GRAMSCI’S SOCIOLOGY

1 MARXISM AS AN AUTONOMOUS AND INDEPENDENT WELTANSCHAUUNG

Marxism, for Gramsci, had been robbed of its philosophy and reduced to a simple method of explaining historical and political changes in terms of economic changes. Hence, the theoretical stagnation of the Second International, the economistic and mechanistic interpretations of historical materialism, and the consequent failures of the workers’ movement in Europe. The re-examination of the philosophical foundation of Marxism, ‘the philosophy of praxis,’ responded to the necessity of restoring the philosophical dignity of historical materialism. Marxism is an autonomous conception of the world, capable of explaining the totality of the historical process and engendering an intellectual revolution in all fields of knowledge. Historically, the theoretical impasse of Marxism has been attributed to the emergence of ideological divisions and popular varieties of Marxism, each claiming to represent the ‘orthodoxy.’ At the origin of these historical divisions lies the issue of whether politics is a mere reflection of ongoing infrastructural processes or whether it plays an autonomous role in socialist praxis. It is not our intention here to analyze the historical circumstances which nurtured economistic and deterministic interpretations of Marxism. It suffices to say that Gramsci was among the first in the West to rescue Marxian theory from its positivistic and objectivistic interpretations. He attempted to restore to Marxian theory its historicist and humanist components and to socialist praxis the primary role of political praxis and superstructural activities.

In this chapter we will attempt to elucidate the nature of Gramsci’s Marxism and to decipher the basic contours of a Marxist sociology of knowledge. But first a brief discussion of the ideological context of Gramsci’s writings is in order.

THE IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Gramsci’s Marxist elaboration takes shape in the context of an ideological debate with Croce’s idealist liberalism, Bukharin’s positivist Marxism and Lenin’s political strategy.

Critique of the idealist philosophy of Benedetto Croce

Croce represented in the Italian intellectual and cultural milieu what Hegel represented in Germany. He was the ideologist of the liberal bourgeoisie, the lay pope, Gramsci writes, of secularism and historicism in opposition to the positivistic ideas dominating the intellectual life of Europe until the beginning of this century.¹ For a short period of time Croce professed to be a Marxist but, soon disenchanted with the mechanistic and deterministic orientation of Marxism, he defected from it, and became the most outspoken critic of Marxist thought in Italy. Gramsci engaged himself in a polemical debate with Croce and ultimately launched his own attack against the ideology destined to become dominant in a period of transition following the crisis of fascism.² Croce exerted a decisive influence on Gramsci during his formative years. He had resurrected against positivism the values of culture, ethics, consciousness and the individual in the process of history, and had developed a conception of history with man at the center of its development. The humanist and historicist components of Crocean philosophy became useful conceptual tools in Gramsci’s critical analysis of the mechanicism of the Second International. Initially fascinated by Croce’s affirmation of the importance of human values and rejection of passivity and acquiescence in history, Gramsci separated himself from the Italian philosopher on the interpretation of man’s role in the creation and process of history. Idealism was evidently incapable of solving the conflict between theory and praxis. By transposing the concrete reality of social conflicts to the level of ideas, Crocean idealism became an ideological apparatus justifying abstract, speculative, and ahistorical values. When meta-historical values are elevated to the status of absolute values, then theology, metaphysics and pure theory replace real political conflicts among men. Gramsci’s work, thus, is intended to debunk Croce’s ideological and political pretensions, while accepting and incorporating the healthy elements of his system into Marxist theory.

Gramsci’s critique of Croce’s idealism can be essentially reduced to four basic points: the conception of historicism, the definition of philosophy, the conception of the dialectic, and the relationship between theory and praxis.

Gramsci and Croce are apparently in agreement on the ‘immanent’ and ‘historical’ role of ideas and on the refusal of any theory that is not grounded in concrete, specific, historical problems. But Croce was not consistent in making this his point of departure. In fact, he elaborated a metaphysical conception of history. When he affirmed that ideas generate action and that man is the creator of history, he did not speak of an historically determined man, that is, of a man who lives and struggles in concrete historical realities and is confronted with objective and social contradictions. Rather, man is conceived as a ‘universal’ man, a metaphysical entity. The Idea, the Spirit, is the meta-historical man which creates history. In sum, the creation of history is nothing but a history of ideas and concepts. For Gramsci, as for Marx, the historical process is praxis, that is, practical activity. Ideas do not exist by themselves but are concretized in objective social conditions. This signifies that the science of history is not metaphysics, as in pure Hegelianism, but rather an instrument for the creation of conscious history.

Historicism in Croce is the critique of transcendence. While for Hegel history is the unfolding of absolute Reason, for Croce it is the absolute becoming. Gramsci criticizes Croce’s historicism for not being absolute. Croce’s conception of history is impregnated with metaphysical, theological residues. The development in history is abstract development. Single concepts are hypostatized in eternal realities and become ahistorical noumena conditioning real, concrete history. Gramsci writes: ‘[In Croce] history becomes a formal history, a history of concepts, and in ultimate analysis a history of the intellectuals, more precisely an autobiographical history of Croce’s thought.’³ For Gramsci, as Leonardo Paggi notes, historicism from a critique of transcendence becomes an instrument for the comprehension and analysis of social facts, a form of comprehension and analysis of proletarian revolution.⁴ Historicism, then, is understood by Gramsci as a form of consciousness of the role of history, as an instrument of action and political mobilization of the masses. It is precisely this conception of historicism that demonstrates the intellectual opposition between Marxism and idealism. While idealism negates the possibility of prevision of historical events, Marxism asserts it on the basis of organized collective will, that is, political praxis. The scientific nature of a theory resides in its capacity to offer a valid basis for action. Marxism is absolute historicism in the sense that it is capable of revealing the sociological context of all philosophical systems and ideologies.⁵ It is just here that we can find the originality of Gramsci in relation to all other Marxist theoreticians. Marxism is a conception of the world, an ideology, the most encompassing ideology of all, which does not aim at mystifying human existence, but is rather the expression of human values. Marxism, Gramsci writes, is not ‘an instrument of government of leading groups to obtain the consent and to exercise the hegemony over subaltern classes; it is the expression of these subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government.’⁶

The conception of dialectical development sets Gramsci and Croce further apart. As Norberto Bobbio observes, Gramsci levelled two types of criticism at Croce’s dialectic. On the one hand, he denounces its speculative and conceptual character and unmasks its ideological functions; on the other hand, he rejects it as mystification of the Hegelian dialectic.⁷ Croce, in fact, by understanding history as a history of ideas, and those who create such ideas, and not as a theory of real contradictions, replaces the real dialectic with a conceptual dialectic. For Gramsci, Croce’s dialectic, as a dialectic between ‘conservation’ and ‘innovation,’ has immediate political implications. The philosophical error of such a conception of dialectic, Gramsci writes, lies in the complete negation of conflict. Croce would say that the thesis is not destroyed, but must always be maintained by the antithesis. The fusion of contradictions generates an historical synthesis. Gramsci rejects this dialectical conception as a mystification and mutilation of the Hegelian dialectic, which posits in real history a tendency within the antithesis to destroy the thesis, the synthesis being an ‘Aufhebung,’ a transcendence of the initial form by new forms. Croce’s error then resides in the assumption that what will be maintained in the synthesis is established a priori. Thus, the negation, instead of being a phase in the totality of the process, is a restoration of the totality. The Crocean dialectic has a mere ideological function: to eliminate revolutionary alternatives and justify the bourgeois order of the fascist state. That is to say, all forces struggling against the conservatism of the bourgeois state are bound to moderate the struggle and conduct it according to rules established by the bourgeois state. Croce establishes a priori the rules of the dialectical process which respond to the interests of dominant groups and dominant ideology. Such reformist historicism became the ideology of the bourgeois state after Italian unification, and subsequently, it became the ideology of the fascist state.

The reduction of the real dialectic of conceptual dialectic minimizes the role of politics. For Croce, aesthetics, economics, logic, and ethics constitute true sciences, pursuing respectively what is beautiful, useful, true and good. There is no place for a science of politics in such a system. Politics is merely ‘passion,’ an ideology; and ideology is not philosophy, Croce concludes. The first arises from a given historical praxis; the latter is pure theory and science. Croce’s classification of sciences, Gramsci would contend, has validity only in Utopian societies, structurally and epistemologically unified, that is, classless societies. Contemporary societies, however, are characterized by class conflict. In such conditions ‘political passion’ is a science. In contrast to Croce, Gramsci identifies philosophy and ideology in a single historical category. He posits only a difference of degree between them. The first is a conception of the world which represents the intellectual and moral life of a given social group in the process of its development; the second is a ‘particular’ conception of a subclass aiming at the solution of immediate, specific problems. Croce’s philosophical system in this sense is the ideology of a small but dominant group. Its lack of diffusion among the masses indicates its closed, caste-like character. The history of philosophy for Gramsci is the history of conflicts among classes which oppose different Weltanschauungen. Thus, philosophy is politics, and politics is the only science which can solve societal conflicts.

If Gramsci and Croce seem to agree that philosophy has a crucial role to play in the process of history, they are in total disagreement over the nature of such a role. For Croce, the initiator of historical movements is ideas; for Gramsci, it is praxis. For Croce, the creation of a new Weltanschauung is a function of the intellectuals who present it to the masses; for Gramsci, the intellectuals can only interpret the historical situation on the basis of praxis. Their opposite conception of the role of philosophy in the development of history derives from their opposite manner of positing the relationship between theory and praxis. Undoubtedly, for both, theory is related to specific historical conditions, but for Croce the function of theory is to understand and clarify social phenomena, while for Gramsci theory has the function of solving practical, concrete, socio-historical problems. Theory does not possess a value in itself, as Croce proposes; the real theory and ultimately the real knowledge is that which is contained dialectically in practical activity. This is what Gramsci means when he writes that philosophy must become political to be true and continue to be philosophy.⁸

Critique of Bukharin’s Positivist Marxism

Gramsci arrived at a formulation of Marxism through a systematic critique of N. Bukharin’s positivist Marxism. In his famous ‘Theory of Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology,’ published in 1921, Bukharin espoused clearly deterministic principles, such as the concepts of regular, necessary, and objective laws in history and society as well as the primacy of matter over human consciousness.⁹ Reacting against the idealist tendencies of German social democrats, he fell into the same materialist philosophy which Marx so vehemently criticized. From such vulgar materialism the notion of the dialectical development of history disappears. The methods, canons and concepts characteristic of natural and physical sciences are applied to history; thus Marxist theory is reduced to a mere positivist sociology. Bukharin, Gramsci argues, falls into the same error of idealist philosophy, that is metaphysics. Abstract categories and the conceptual dialectic are replaced by empirical classifications and canons, in se abstract and ahistorical. Typical of this objectivistic conception is the notion of technique, that is, the instrument of relations of production. For Gramsci, the primary and decisive element of technical transformation is the economy defined as a network of human social production. For Bukharin, economic processes operate independently from human volition and outside history. Social phenomena can only be analyzed in terms of certain causalities which are objective and necessary. In the ultimate analysis, Bukharin, by eliminating the dialectical relationship between economic processes and human consciousness, eliminates the ‘active’ element from the historical process, which is the organized collective will. For Gramsci, as we shall see later, all laws are tendential laws; they reveal not what is fixed and immutable, but tendencies and possibilities. To admit concepts of laws of regularity and causality is to capitulate to bourgeois positivist methodology.

The very attempt to develop a philosophy of praxis on the basis of common sense is highly questionable. Bukharin’s Marxism is an a-critical acceptance of the masses’ conceptions and notions. He refused to come to grips with traditional philosophical systems whose influence on common sense throughout history is undeniable. ‘These systems influence the popular masses as an external political force, an element of cohesive force exercised by the ruling classes and therefore an element of subordination to an external hegemony.’¹⁰ Positivist Marxism becomes a fatalist and determinist conception which tends to perpetuate the political and cultural passivity of the masses before the laws of history, thus becoming a fatalist doctrine of the ‘inertia of the proletariat.’ In this respect Bukharin is more reactionary than Croce. Marxism does not tend to leave the masses in their condition of cultural backwardness. Instead, it aims at elevating them to a critical conception of reality. As we shall see, the point of departure of Marxism is not common sense but critical common sense, which is transformed into a higher conception of the world. It is a matter of educating the masses, of diffusing among them the very culture which has been the privilege of the few throughout history. Culture is a process of human emancipation, a conquest of a critical and historicist method. Marxism is, then, for Gramsci, humanism and historicism.

Critique of Lenin’s concept of hegemony

It can be said that the ideological debate within Marxism has focused on the well-known dichotomy, materialism versus idealism. On the one hand, materialist Marxism has stressed the primacy of economics over philosophy (pure theory), attempting to explain in a positivistic fashion the evolution of societies and history on the basis of empirical, scientific laws, thus formulating a mechanistic theory of causality which hampered the revolutionary process. On the other hand, the emphasis has been on the primacy of philosophy over economics, thus divorcing theory from its sociological context and creating a caste-like and abstract type of knowledge. Such a theoretical impasse has been overcome by Lenin with the assertion of the primacy of politics over both economics and philosophy. For Lenin, the Russian Revolution demonstrated the capacity of politics to mobilize vast masses for the creation of a new socialist type of society. In asserting the primacy of politics, Lenin established a reciprocal, dialectical relationship between the economic infrastructure and the superstructure.

Gramsci, following Lenin’s intellectual lead, became the theoretician of the superstructures. He did not minimize the importance of the infrastructure. On the contrary he sought to establish a just equilibrium between the economic and political processes.¹¹ The relations of production do not evolve according to autonomous and self-generating laws, but act, are regulated or modified by the human consciousness. The economic moment of consciousness constitutes a negative phase (realm of necessity) in the historical ascendancy of subaltern classes toward political hegemony, which must...