Western philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
|
---|---|
Name: Antonio Gramsci | |
Birth: January 22 1891 | (Ales, Sardinia, Italy)|
Death: 27 April 1937 (aged 46) (Rome, Italy) | |
School/tradition: Continental philosophy Western Marxism neo-Marxism Marxist humanism |
|
Main interests | |
Politics ideology culture |
|
Notable ideas | |
Cultural hegemony bourgeoisie as the hegemonic group building a counter-hegemony to challenge capitalist power war of position the distinction between "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals |
|
Influences | Influenced |
Karl Marx, Benedetto Croce, Francesco De Sanctis, [1] Giovanni Gentile, Niccolò Machiavelli, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Georges Sorel, Antonio Labriola, Amedeo Bordiga, Vilfredo Pareto | Louis Althusser,[2] William K. Carroll, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Ernesto Laclau, New Left |
Antonio Francesco Gramsci (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian Marxist writer and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy, imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime.
Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. His Prison Notebooks drew from varying sources – not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism, and Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion, and high and popular culture. The notebooks were Gramsci's attempt to address the problem that socialist revolutions were not happening in advanced Western societies as Marx's theory had predicted. Gramsci tried to explain theoretically why this problem occurred, and what could be done about it. It is expressed in his term "pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will."
Gramsci's theory centered on his concept of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain its position within capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic control on culture through its ideology, creating consent among the populace that allows them to govern successfully without resorting to violence, economic force, or coercion. Gramsci argued that hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the status quo, while hindering the ability of the proletariat to produce a revolution as Marx had predicted.
Gramsci was born in Ales, in the province of Oristano, on the island of Sardinia, the fourth of seven sons of Francesco Gramsci (1860–1937) and Giuseppina Marcias (1861–1932). The senior Gramsci was a low-level official born in the small town of Gaeta, in the province of Latina (in the Central Italian region of Lazio). He was from a well-off family from the Southern Italian regions of Campania and Calabria and of Arbëreshë (Italo-Albanian) descent.[3][4] Antonio Gramsci himself believed his father's family had left Albania as recently as 1821.[5] The Albanian origin of his father's family is attested in the surname Gramsci, an Italianized form of Gramshi, that stems from the definite noun of the placename Gramsh, a small town in central-eastern Albania. The mother of Antonio Gramsci belonged to a Sardinian landowning family from Sorgono (in the province of Nuoro).[6]
In 1898, Francesco was convicted of embezzlement and imprisoned, reducing his family to destitution. The senior Gramsci's financial difficulties and troubles with the police forced the family to move about through several villages in Sardinia until they finally settled in Ghilarza. The young Antonio had to abandon schooling and work at various casual jobs until his father's release in 1904.[7] As a boy, Gramsci suffered from health problems, particularly a malformation of the spine that stunted his growth (his adult height was less than 5 feet)[8] and left him seriously hunchbacked. For decades, it was reported that his condition had been due to a childhood accident—specifically, having been dropped by a nanny—but more recently it has been suggested that it was due to Pott disease,[9] a form of tuberculosis that can cause deformity of the spine. Gramsci was also plagued by various internal disorders throughout his life.
Gramsci completed secondary school in Cagliari, where he lodged with his elder brother Gennaro, a former soldier whose time on the mainland had made him a militant socialist. However, Gramsci's sympathies then did not lie with socialism, but rather with the grievances of impoverished Sardinian peasants and miners, whose mistreatment by the mainlanders would later deeply contribute to his intellectual growth.[10][11] They perceived their neglect as a result of privileges enjoyed by the rapidly industrializing North, and they tended to turn to a growing Sardinian nationalism, brutally repressed by troops from the Italian mainland,[12] as a response.
In 1911, Gramsci won a scholarship to study at the University of Turin, sitting for the exam at the same time as Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death..[13] At Turin, he studied literature and showed an interest in linguistics, which he studied under Matteo Bartoli. Gramsci was in Turin during the period of industrialization, with the Fiat and Lancia factories recruiting workers from poorer regions. Trade unions became established, and the first industrial social conflicts started to emerge.[14] Gramsci frequented socialist circles as well as associating with Sardinian emigrants on the Italian mainland. His worldview was shaped by both his earlier experiences in Sardinia and his environment on the mainland. Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party in late 1913, where he would later occupy a key position and observe from Turin the Russian revolutionary process.[15]
Although showing a talent for his studies, Gramsci had financial problems and suffered from poor health. Together with his growing political commitment, he decided to abandon his education in early 1915 at the age of 24. By this time, he had acquired an extensive knowledge of history and philosophy. At university, he had come into contact with the thought of Antonio Labriola, Rodolfo Mondolfo, Giovanni Gentile, and most importantly, Benedetto Croce, possibly the most widely respected Italian intellectual of his day. Labriola especially propounded a brand of Hegelian Marxism that he labelled "philosophy of praxis".[16] Although Gramsci later used this phrase to escape the prison censors, his relationship with this current of thought was ambiguous throughout his life.
From 1914 onward, Gramsci's writings for socialist newspapers such as Il Grido del Popolo earned him a reputation as a notable journalist. In 1916, he became co-editor of the Piedmont edition of Avanti!, the Socialist Party official organ. An articulate and prolific writer of political theory, Gramsci proved a formidable commentator, writing on all aspects of Turin's social and political life.[17]
Gramsci was at this time also involved in the education and organization of Turin workers; he spoke in public for the first time in 1916 and gave talks on topics such as Romain Rolland, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the emancipation of women. In the wake of the arrest of Socialist Party leaders that followed the revolutionary riots of August 1917, Gramsci became one of Turin's leading socialists when he was both elected to the party's Provisional Committee and made editor of Il Grido del Popolo.[18]
In April 1919, with Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini, Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order). In October the same year, despite its division into various hostile factions, the Socialist Party moved by a large majority to join the Third International. The L'Ordine Nuovo group was seen by Vladimir Lenin as closest in orientation to the Bolsheviks, and it received his backing against the anti-parliamentary program of the left communist Amadeo Bordiga.
Among tactical debates within the party, Gramsci's group was mainly distinguished by its advocacy of workers' councils, which had spontaneously come into existence in Turin during the large strikes of 1919 and 1920. For Gramsci, these councils were the proper means of enabling workers to take control of the task of organizing production. Although he believed his position to be in keeping with Lenin's policy of "All power to the Soviets," his stance that these Italian councils were communist, rather than just one organ of political struggle against the bourgeoisie, was attacked by Bordiga for betraying a syndicalist tendency influenced by the thought of Georges Sorel and Daniel DeLeon. By the time of the defeat of the Turin workers in spring 1920, Gramsci was almost alone in his defense of the councils.
The failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement convinced Gramsci that a Communist Party in the Leninist sense was needed. The group around L'Ordine Nuovo declaimed incessantly against the Italian Socialist Party's centrist leadership and ultimately allied with Bordiga's far larger "abstentionist" faction. On January 21, 1921, in the town of Livorno (Leghorn), the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia – PCI) was founded. In opposition to Bordiga, Gramsci supported the Arditi del Popolo, a militant anti-fascist group which struggled against the Blackshirts.
Gramsci would be a leader of the party from its inception but was subordinate to Bordiga, whose emphasis on discipline, centralism and purity of principles dominated the party's program until he lost the leadership in 1924.
In 1922, Gramsci travelled to the Soviet Union as a representative of the new party. There he met Julia Schucht (Yulia Apollonovna Schucht), a young violinist whom he married in 1923 and with whom he had two sons, Delio (born 1924) and Giuliano (born 1926). Gramsci never saw his second son.[19]
The Russian mission coincided with the rise of fascism in Italy. Gramsci returned with instructions to foster, against the wishes of the PCI leadership, a united front of leftist parties against fascism. Such a front would have had the PCI at its center, through which Moscow would have controlled all the leftist forces. Not everyone was happy about Moscow's potential supremacy. The socialists had a longer tradition in Italy, while the Communist Party seemed relatively young and too radical. Many believed that an eventual coalition led by communists would have functioned too far from the political debate, and would have run the risk of isolation.
In late 1922 and early 1923, Benito Mussolini's government embarked on a campaign of repression against the opposition parties, arresting most of the PCI leadership, including Bordiga. At the end of 1923, Gramsci traveled from Moscow to Vienna, where he tried to revive a party torn by factional strife.
In 1924 Gramsci, now recognized as head of the PCI, gained election as a deputy for the Veneto, the region around Venice.. He started organizing the launch of the official newspaper of the party, called L'Unità (Unity), living in Rome while his family stayed in Moscow. At its Lyon Congress in January 1926, Gramsci's theses calling for a united front to restore democracy to Italy were adopted by the party.
In 1926, Joseph Stalin's maneuvers inside the Bolshevik party moved Gramsci to write a letter to the Comintern deploring the opposition led by Leon Trotsky but also underlining some faults he perceived in the leader. Togliatti, in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti which they never completely resolved.
On November 9, 1926, the Fascist government enacted a new wave of emergency laws, taking as a pretext an alleged attempt on Mussolini's life that had occurred several days earlier. The fascist police arrested Gramsci, despite his parliamentary immunity, and brought him to the Roman prison Regina Coeli.
At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor stated, "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning."[20] He received an immediate sentence of five years in confinement on the island of Ustica and the following year he received a sentence of 20 years' imprisonment in Turi, near Bari.
Over his 11 years in prison, his health deteriorated. "His teeth fell out, his digestive system collapsed so that he could not eat solid food... he had convulsions when he vomited blood and suffered headaches so violent that he beat his head against the walls of his cell."[21]
An international campaign, organized by Piero Sraffa at Cambridge University and Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana, was mounted to demand Gramsci's release.[22] In 1933 he was moved from the prison at Turi to a clinic at Formia, but was still being denied adequate medical attention.[23] Two years later he was moved to the Quisisana clinic in Rome. He was due for release on April 21, 1937 and planned to retire to Sardinia for convalescence, but a combination of arteriosclerosis, pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, gout and acute gastric disorders meant that he was too ill to move. Gramsci died on April 27, 1937 at the age of 46. His ashes are buried in the Cimitero Acattolico (Non-Catholic Cemetery) in Rome.
Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, and a particularly key thinker in the development of Western Marxism. He wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name. His most important theoretical contribution was Cultural hegemony, which he describes as a means of maintaining and legitimizing the capitalist state. In addition to hegemony Gramsci was a critic of economic determinism and philosophical materialism within Marxism in favor of a philosophy of praxis rooted in an absolute historicism.[24] He held a humanistic understanding of Marxism, seeing it as a "philosophy of praxis" and an "absolute historicism" that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.
Hegemony was a term previously used by Russian Marxists such as Vladimir Lenin to denote the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution.[25] Gramsci greatly expanded this concept, developing an acute analysis of how the ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – establishes and maintains its control.[26]
Orthodox Marxism had predicted that the socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. According to the classical Marxist doctrine of base and superstructure, the ownership of the means of production was causal and the political and cultural sphere was an effect. Internal contradictions within capitalism would lead to revolution. The revolution in Russia buoyed that hope but despite the Great Depression, revolution in the West seemed a distant hope. Marxists had to wrestle with why the revolution had not occurred in advanced capitalist societies as Marx predicted. Gramsci was one of the first Marxists to develop a theory to explain this anomaly between theory and existing reality. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political/economic coercion, that is, through their control of the means of production, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the "common sense" values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeois state and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting against it.
To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented natural or normal values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin, representing the traditional Marxist view, held that culture was ancillary to political objectives, but for Gramsci, it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests; neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a "historic bloc," taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations, and ideas.[27] In this way, Gramsci's theory emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.
Gramsci observed that bourgeois cultural values were tied to folklore, popular culture and religion, and therefore much of his analysis of hegemonic culture is aimed at these. He was impressed by the influence of Roman Catholicism and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci saw Marxism as a marriage of the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism and the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to think of it as an expression of their own experience.
Gramsci's theory of hegemony is predicated on his conception of the capitalist state. Based on his theory of cultural hegemony, Gramsci, contra Marx, does not understand the state as simply the effect of the cause - the relations of production. He divides it between the state apparatus - the police, the army, the legal system which the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control – and civil society composed of the family, the education system, and trade unions. These institutions commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere mediate between the state and the economy.[28] However, he stresses that the division is purely conceptual and that the two often overlap in reality.[29] Gramsci argues that the capitalist state rules through both force plus consent: political society is the realm of force and civil society is the realm of consent.
Under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in passive revolution by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. For Marx, the nature of capitalist competition did not allow for such concessions. Gramsci sees examples in movements such as reformism and fascism, as well as the scientific management and assembly line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford respectively.
Gramsci argued that capitalist power needed to be challenged by building a working-class counter-hegemony. Gramsci saw the struggle with capitalist hegemony as a kind of war. He saw two options. One he labeled the "war of maneuver," the other the "war of position." The war of maneuver he defined as revolutionary power that is stronger than the state. In this case it can simply overwhelm the state, as in the case of pre-Soviet Imperial Russia. The Bolsheviks were able to win a "war of maneuver" in the Russian Revolution of 1917 relatively easily. However, unlike Russia which had a weak and crumbling ruling class that did not have genuine hegemonic power, in developed capitalist societies an alternate or counter-hegemony would be necessary. In the West, where the state was better developed and had control of both political power and ideological hegemony in civil society, another approach was needed. This approach Gramsci called the "war of position."
Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that a war of position, carried out by revolutionaries through political agitation, the trade unions, advancement of proletarian culture, and other ways to create an opposing civil society was necessary alongside a war of maneuver – a direct revolution – in order to have a successful revolution without danger of a counter-revolution.
Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from equating political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a "regulated society," in which political society is diminished and civil society is expanded. He redefines the "withering away of the state" in Marxism as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself[28]
Gramsci believed that a final "war of maneuver" was only possible in the developed and advanced capitalist societies after the "war of position" had been won by the organic intellectuals and the working-class building a counter-hegemony.
In the East 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 tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The State was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.[30]
By intellectuals, Gramsci meant the social function played by the class of thinkers in developing the basis for the "war of position."[31] Intellectuals were not just political theorists, but those in education, media and other institutions within civil society. He distinguished between a traditional intelligentsia which he believed sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks "organically."[32] Such "organic" intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but instead articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. It was the duty of the "organic" intellectuals to speak to the obscured precepts of folk wisdom, or common sense (senso comune). These intellectuals would represent excluded social groups of a society, what Gramsci referred to as the subaltern.[33]
The "organic intellectuals" and others within the working-class needed to develop alternative values and an alternative ideology to counteract bourgeois ideology. Gramsci called for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, whose task was not to introduce Marxist ideology into the consciousness of the proletariat as a set of foreign notions but to renovate the existing intellectual activity of the masses and make it natively critical of the status quo. This would lead to the creation of a working-class culture and a counter-hegemony.
Like the early Marx, Gramsci was an emphatic proponent of historicism.[34] For later Marx and his followers, Marxism had discovered the truth of scientific socialism rooted in a metaphysical materialism which had turned Idealism on its head. The type of relations between workers and owners of the means of production was historically contingent but Marxism itself was considered scientific and thus not historically contingent. In this view, Marxism (or the Marxist theory of history and economics) did not belong to the "illusory" realm of the superstructure because it is a science.
Gramsci does not explicitly reject the metaphysical materialism of Marx and Engels, but his belief that human history and collective praxis determine the ultimate validity of any idea meant that Gramsci's views run contrary to the copy theory of perception advanced by Friedrich Engels.[35][36] and Lenin,[37] In Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or praxis) and the objective historical and social processes of which it is a part. Ideas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. The concepts by which we organize our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to objects, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. As a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature, but only historically variable social relationships. Furthermore, philosophy and science do not reflect a reality independent of man. Rather, a theory can be said to be true when, in any given historical situation, it aligns with historical development.
Gramsci believed Marxism was true in a socially pragmatic sense: by articulating the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxism expressed the truth of its times better than any other theory. This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce. However, it should be underlined that Gramsci's absolute historicism broke with Croce's tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny. Although Gramsci repudiates the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticized by Marxists as a form of relativism.[38]
Late Marxism was a kind of "economic determinism." Marx argued that history was driven by the struggle over ownership of the means of production. The proletarian revolution would occur when the contradictions within capitalism reached their "tipping point." In a pre-prison article entitled "The Revolution against Das Kapital", Gramsci argued that the October Revolution in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist forces of production.[39] Gramsci believed, contra Marx, that Marxism was not primarily a determinist philosophy. He believed that the principle of the causal primacy of the forces of production was a misunderstanding within Marxism. Both economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a basic historical process, and it is difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other.
Gramsci saw the belief in economic determinism as a misunderstanding of the workers' movement due to the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action. This doctrine was to be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class became able to take the initiative. He understood the tension between Marxism's economic determinism which claimed with scientific certainly that the proletarian revolution was coming and the Marxist notion of praxis, which requires workers to exercise their free will and take social action. Gramsci believed that because Marxism is a philosophy of praxis, it cannot rely on unseen historical laws as the agents of social change. History is defined by human praxis. Once the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, it will encounter historical circumstances that allow it to act.
Gramsci anticipated many of the concerns of the Frankfurt School and the origins of critical theory and cultural studies. The idea of hegemony is used by political theorists from the center and the right as well as the left. His influence is particularly strong in contemporary political science.
As a socialist, Gramsci's legacy is contested.[40] For a time he was allied with Lenin and Stalin. He believed in revolutionary praxis. Although he argued that the revolution could only happen after the proletariat could create its own cultural hegemony, he actively worked for revolution. Togliatti, who led the Party (renamed as Italian Communist Party, PCI) after World War II and whose gradualist approach was a forerunner to Eurocommunism, claimed that the PCI's practices during this period were congruent with Gramscian thought. It is speculated that he would likely have been expelled from his Party if his true views had been known, particularly his growing hostility to Stalin.[22]
His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practiced in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice.[41]
All links retrieved January 4, 2022.
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.