The Postcolonial Gramsci

Neelam Srivastava, Baidik Bhattacharya, Neelam Srivastava, Baidik Bhattacharya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136471469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The importance of Antonio Gramsci's work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national—a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.

Part I

Gramsci and Postcolonial Studies

1 Il Gramsci meridionale

Robert J. C. Young

Lo stato italiano …è stato una dittatura feroce che ha messo a ferro e a fuoco l’Italia meridionale e le isole, crocifiggendo, squartando, fucilando, seppellendo vivi i contadini poveri che scrittori salariati tentarono di infamare col marchio di “briganti.”

The Italian state …was a cruel dictatorship that massacred and burned Southern Italy and the islands, crucifying, quartering, shooting and burying alive the poor peasants that mercenary writers tried to shame by branding them “bandits.”

—Antonio Gramsci¹

There has always been something postcolonial about Gramsci. In his lifetime, Gramsci had minimal effect on colonial struggle: his influence has been felt almost entirely in the postcolonial era. Even José Carlos Mariátegui, who left Turin in 1922 inspired by Gramsci, L’Ordine nuovo, and the Turin 1920 factory occupations, was technically a postcolonial activist-intellectual (Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction 197–99). When Gramsci was first translated into English in 1957, the introductory blurb on the back cover described him as a Marxist philosopher “little known in the West,” as if he was an obscure East European communist or third-world revolutionary (Gramsci, The Modern Prince).² Of course Gramsci was neither of those things. Yet in a sense, he did come from a “Third World” country.

It is difficult now to imagine how poor rural Italy used to be, even as late as the 1960s, when Tuscan peasants still ploughed the soil with oxen, their bells jangling as they heaved and weaved in between the olive trees, when dusty villages in the South lay half-abandoned by their inhabitants who had left for the United States or Argentina in search of a better life than the grinding poverty of the Mezzogiorno. How much more so in 1891 when Gramsci was born, not into the milieu of the relatively prosperous Italian North, but in the South, in malaria-infested Sardinia, then a far cry from the summer playground culture of tourism and dissolute Berlusconi parties and even today still poor in the rural regions that lie away from the coast. Sardinia had been a former colony of a whole series of imperial dynasties—the Catalan kingdom of the Crown of Aragon, then Spain, then Austria-Hungary under the Hapsburgs, before becoming the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1814, prior to spearheading Italian unification under Cavour. Sparsely populated, with three-quarters of a million inhabitants and a feudal infrastructure still partly intact, the five major dialects of the Sard language (a dialect of Catalan is also spoken in Alghero) were so diverse that a version of Italian was used as a lingua franca of communication.³ Gramsci would always maintain an interest in minority languages as forms of popular culture, of subaltern knowledge and resistance.⁴ In Gramsci’s day Sardinia had the highest crime rate in Italy; the reputation of Sardinians was such that in 1855 the American consul at Genoa raised the question of “objectionable” emigrants from Sardinia coming to the United States in a letter to the New York Times.⁵ Migration from Sardinia increased in the 1890s, with emigrants moving to the Italian mainland, the US, Argentina or, after 1912, to Tunisia. The situation of Italy in this period came closest to that of Ireland: between 1876 and 1970, an estimated 25 million Italians left Italy in search of work. The bulk of these came from the islands and the South (Favero and Tassello). Gramsci’s father worked as a registrar, or petty bourgeois official; in 1898, when Gramsci was seven, he was accused of embezzlement and jailed, with the result that the family was thrown into abject poverty. Gramsci, who had had to leave school, eventually won a scholarship to study in Turin on the Italian mainland in 1911.

His background as an immigrant from an impoverished peripheral island with its own alien language would always mark his work with a perspective that made it in some sense at odds with the Marxism that had been developed on the European mainland by intellectuals who were often, like Marx or Lenin, countercultural bourgeoisie.⁶ It is for this reason therefore that in a certain sense Gramsci came from outside “the West.”⁷ A native of the islands, Gramsci was an intellectual from the peripheries, and in every sense “Southern.” He was a poor emigrant, an immigrant, and someone physically disabled by accidental circumstance. Although in his day, emigration was primarily a first-world issue (and immigration a problem for non-Western peoples), the questions of minority existence—“assimilation, emancipation, separatism, conversion, the language of state protection and minority rights, uprooting, exile, and homelessness” (Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony 2–3)—are those of Gramsci himself. This was especially reinforced by his father’s immigrant status in Sardinia, and his origins in the Italian colony (or variously semicolony) of Albania,⁸ a link that helps to account for Gramsci’s evident interest in Albania and in Islam (between 40% and 70% of Albanians are Muslims).⁹

I

In Orientalism, Edward W. Said remarks in a footnote that the (then current Gramsci 1971) English translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks inexplicably leaves out the final sentence in the first note to the “Preliminary Points on the Study of Philosophy and the History of Culture”: “Occorre fare inizialmente un tale inventario” (Gramsci, Quaderni 1376).¹⁰ The extraordinary inventory of the textual fabric of European hegemony that Said made in Orientalism was one product of Said’s reading of Gramsci, never before a reference in his books. What was remarkable though was not that he had been reading Gramsci, but that in a book concerned with the Orientalizing of the reality of the East, he had spotted what got left out of Gramsci too. The early English translations of Gramsci tended to Europeanize his work. The various selections leave the reader with little sense that Gramsci had any interest in the world outside Europe, a perspective that reflects and illustrates the Eurocentrism of European Marxism itself in the 1970s and 80s.

Although not one of the major themes sketched out for the Notebooks, Gramsci’s internationalism is certainly apparent in the pre-prison writings and in the twenty-nine prison notebooks that he wrote from 1929 until his death in 1937. It is true that Gramsci makes no direct response to the major episodes in Italian colonialism before his incarceration, for example, the invasions of Libya in 1911, Albania in 1915, or Turkey from 1919 to 1923, though he did offer a revolutionary perspective on the future of the colonies in general (revolt and emancipation—“Alla guerra europea non potrà molto tardare la guerra delle colonie”) during the First World War (Gramsci, Cronache torinesi 255–58).¹¹ Nevertheless, the non-Western world is visible, and evidently a point of interest. Gramsci’s publications in L’Ordine Nuovo, for example, written towards the end of the anti-imperial revolutionary ferment of 1914–1920, provide a typical Leninist perspective on the revolt of the colonial populations against their imperial-capitalist masters seen as a dialectic of oppressor and oppressed nations (Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo 68–70, 396; Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920 155; Young, Postcolonialism 132).¹² In “The Colonial Populations,” the widespread resistance that Gramsci describes as “the uprising of the Moslem world against the European states” (L’Ordine Nuovo 563; SPW 1: 303) is linked to the ongoing resistance of the Albanians to the Italian occupation of 1915: the article was published at the beginning of the Vlora War (June–August 1920), at the end of which Italy withdrew and ceded sovereignty (though Albania would be reoccupied by Italy during the Second World War). Gramsci argues that there is a “hierarchy of exploitation”: capitalism exploits the European working class, while imperialism enforces a secondary level of exploitation of the colonial populations who provide the raw materials and foodstuffs for Europe.

In this way the colonial populations become the foundation on which the whole edifice of capitalist exploitation is erected. These populations are required to donate the whole of their lives to the development of industrial civilization. For this they can expect no benefit in return; indeed they see their own countries systematically despoiled of their natural resources. (L’Ordine Nuovo 562; SPW 1: 302)

This chain of exploitation, it might be remarked, has not substantially changed in contemporary arrangements of capitalism. Gramsci’s argument here, which was made by Zinoviev and others in September of the same year in the First Congress of the Peoples of the East held at Baku (Riddell, To See the Dawn 77), is that far from being peripheral to revolutionary action, the overthrow of capitalism should logically begin in the colonies: “By freeing themselves of foreign capitalist exploitation, the colonial populations would deprive the European industrial bourgeoisies of raw materials and foodstuffs, and bring down the centres of civilization that have lasted from the fall of the Roman empire till today” (Gramsci, SPW 1: 303). This, however, was not an argument to which he would seriously return, even with respect to Italy’s own internal “colony”—the Mezzogiorno. Very shortly after Gramsci published his article on colonial populations, the Second Congress of the Third International would convene in Moscow in July 1920, the Italian delegation deeply divided in their different political ideologies (Riddell, Workers of the World 1: 34–35). At the Second Congress, Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” would produce a different position on the colonies from that expressed in Gramsci’s article, advocating guarded alliance with bourgeois-progressive liberation movements, and affirming the leading role of the party and European proletariat in organizing the peasantry in colonial countries in order jointly to overthrow capitalism and imperialism (Riddell, Workers of the World 1: 283–90).

Notwithstanding Gramsci’s pamphlet advocating that the radical left should stay within the PSI that was circulated at the Second Congress and that won praise from Lenin, in January 1921 Gramsci allied with Amadeo Bordiga who led the split from the PSI to found the Communist Party of Italy (CPI), as it was originally called. Bordiga’s subsequent refusal of Lenin’s directive to form an alliance or common front with the PSI resulted in Gramsci himself being nominated as the Italian delegate to the Comintern from 1922 to 1924. This meant that Gramsci was in Moscow during the period of Mussolini’s March on Rome and the fascist accession to power, a development which increased the urgency with which, at the Fourth Congress, the need for a common front between communists and socialists was advocated. Bordiga’s continuing resistance to the Third International’s demand would eventually lead to the International nominating Gramsci as the new leader of the CPI. Living through the Russian Revolution, Gramsci in certain respects also can be seen as affiliated to the situation of anti-colonial revolutionaries of that time, in particular, in negotiating the relation of the PCI to the policies being developed for international revolution by the Comintern. As the Italian delegate to the Comintern, Gramsci was in a comparable position to a range of anti-colonial activists, and faced with similar choices—namely, trying to negotiate a position with regard to the Comintern, on the one hand, and with his own party, on the other. Unlike M. N. Roy, Gramsci had a fully constituted party back home to deal with, though in his case he disagreed with the policies of the CPI leadership. After Bordiga’s arrest, the Comintern effectively took over the organization of the party and nominated Gramsci as its leader; Gramsci made strenuous efforts to persuade the PCI to come into line with the orders for fusion with the socialists made by the Comintern, as well as orientating the party more closely to general Comintern policy. Although in his earlier writing, Gramsci was prepared to bend orthodoxy in order to correlate with the specific local and national situation, as in his essay “The Revolution Against ‘Capital’” (Scritti politici 1: 130–33; SPW 1: 34–37), after his return from Moscow he would follow the broad lines of Comintern orthodoxy, albeit later developed in an original way with respect to his writings on Italian history and culture.

As one would expect from a member of the Comintern, serving on the Latin American Secretariat of the Comintern under Trotsky (a connection still visible in his interest in Latin America in the Prison Notebooks) Gramsci was seriously concerned with questions of imperialism and colonialism, a preoccupation that remains evident in the Prison Notebooks. We find him analyzing Italian colonialism from the perspective of the former colony of Albania, and commenting on British and American imperialism, the history of Italian-English involvement in Ethiopia and Somalia, the Yemen, Egypt, China, India, Palestine etc. (Quaderni 76, 68–70, 175–79, 186–88, 218–19, 582–84, 620–21, 635). Many of these entries take the form of discussions of books or articles that Gramsci had been reading, rather than developing independent arguments in the mode, for example, of his “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria.” But like the form of the Notebooks themselves, they represent an important part of both his methodology and his intellectual ambitions. For the most striking thing about the Notebooks, when compared for example to other famous Notebook writers—such as Gide, Gauguin, Leonardo da Vinci, Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land— is their remorselessly detached, impersonal nature, their lack of self-doubt and self-reflection. The Notebooks were, of course, intended to provide the basis for disinterested, für ewig book projects. Nevertheless, they also deliberately take on in their own way the form of the notebook genre. Gramsci did not plan one book after the next, as he might have done if writing in the freedom of his own study, the normal form of book production. In certain respects, his ambitious plan for the notebooks was far more ill suited to the conditions of his incarceration. He began from the first to plan sixteen or so interrelated topics (the one that he soon dropped was the only personal one, “Experiences of Prison Life”), reduced in 1931 to ten. In this way, the twenty-nine notebooks represented a deliberately fractured, multidisciplinary enterprise, moving at will from history to literature to folklore to Fordism—an early practical example of the broad perspective of what would become known as Cultural Studies. While Gramsci was researching and writing his vast array of topics, he was at the same time deliberately producing knowledge in a new way. The entries were not merely a group of essays—they were constructed against each other, in what might be termed a rough cut fashion, with Gramsci’s headings which order the material by repeating certain phrases and categories nevertheless preserving and in certain respects augmenting the montage effect. The jumps and moves enabled a formal heterogeneity that would otherwise have been impossible with the result that, ever since their publication, scholars have been arguing over the ways that they have been edited and translated. At the same time, this has enabled Gramsci’s work to be used as a conceptual resource in a manner comparable to few other left intellectuals: while the drive was not to produce a totalizing theory, at the same time, the analysis reaches out to the historical and political formations of society at an extraordinary range of levels.

Why did Gramsci begin his prison writing on so many multiple fronts, rather than simply think of writing one or more books in serial fashion, as is the norm for most writers? The notebooks were planned as a kind of total project, embodying Gramsci’s idea that, on the model of the French Revolution, the revolution should be the product not simply of a vanguardist party coup but of intellectual and cultural preparation: “[E]very revolution has been preceded by a long process of intense critical activity, of new cultural insight and the spread of ideas through groups of men initially resistant to them” (Pre-Prison Writings 10). In this “intense critical activity,” we can see here a link to his “postcolonial” profile. Until the Russian Revolution, the nationalist unification of Italy was regarded in colonial countries as offering one of the few contemporary examples of a successful anti-colonial revolution. Mazzini figures prominently in the pantheon of anti-colonial activists; on the model of Mazzini’s Young Italy, we find Young Sardinia (discussed in Gramsci’s “The Southern Question”), Young India...