The reader of the Prison Notebooks is immediately struck by the seeming omnipresence of cultural themes in Gramsci’s prison writings. From Dante to Pirandello, Balzac to Sinclair Lewis, Gramsci comments on cultural works from a range of epochs. Gramsci’s preoccupation with culture is perhaps not surprising given his personal trajectory. We have seen, for instance, that already by 1916 the young socialist militant – who had interrupted his studies in philology at Turin University – was the theatre critic of the Avanti! newspaper. The relative ease with which Gramsci had access to literary – as opposed to ‘political’ – writings may be significant but it is not sufficient to explain why he devotes so much space to cultural themes in the Prison Notebooks.
It is important to be clear what Gramsci means by the word ‘culture’. Gramsci was not a ‘standard’ literary or artistic critic; even a short note of a seemingly anodyne or trivial nature, such as a reflection on a serial novel or a newspaper article, typically involves Gramsci developing a conception of cultural life that is highly original, at once social and political. However, Gramsci never provided a systematic definition or explication of his concept of culture that would be valid once and for all. What we attempt in this chapter, then, is to reconstruct Gramsci’s understanding of culture through successive approximations.
First, we can note that for Gramsci culture is the antithesis of a system, and a fortiori of a ‘value system’, as it might perhaps be expressed today. This is an important point, because some strands in the history of anthropology have put forward precisely a paradigm of culture-as-system to elucidate modes of living of peoples once described as ‘primitive’. Some of the weaknesses of a culture-as-system approach are immediately apparent: it tends to project the artificial coherence of a given culture while situating it in a sort of closed container; thought and practice, and thus culture and politics, are detached from one another; and perceiving (or explaining) change and history is extremely difficult.1
Against this approach, Gramsci allows us to see culture as a succession of quotidian practices. Culture for Gramsci denotes a certain way of living in society, or way of acting as a social being while thinking one’s own action and the outside world. We will see in Chapter 4 the meaning and significance of Gramsci’s assertion that ‘everyone is a philosopher’. Here we can note that in Gramsci’s view each individual participates in the culture of their society – in the maintenance, contestation or destruction of this culture – precisely to the extent that they have an original relation to the outside world that is constituted by their practice and thought on a daily basis.
Gramsci’s understanding of culture goes radically against other common stereotypes about culture, such as the view that would associate ‘culture’ with some kind of encyclopaedic knowledge or would perceive behind the word ‘culture’ some surplus of intellectual refinement or sophistication to be found in the educated elite. In an article written in 1916, ‘Socialism and Culture’, Gramsci directly criticizes the latter position. The attitude of considering culture as the preserve of an educated elite, he writes, ‘serves to create the kind of weak and colourless intellectualism that Romain Rolland has flayed so mercilessly, which has given birth to a mass of pretentious babblers who have a more damaging effect on social life than tuberculosis or syphilis germs have on the beauty and physical health of the body’. The young Gramsci concludes in a more humanistic vein, ‘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.’2
We can also note that for Gramsci culture is never fixed or rigid, but is always in flux as an object of historical becoming. Importantly, what is true for time also applies to space: cultures change spatially as well as historically. Thus Gramsci documents in the Prison Notebooks the ascendancy of specific national cultures at specific times (such as French in the nineteenth century and American in the twentieth), as well as the porosity of other national cultures (in the first instance Italian) in relation to the dominant world cultures.
For Gramsci, then, culture is accessed through the combined ways of acting, perceiving and feeling of all people. However, Gramsci recognizes that these quotidian cultural situations that concern everybody – along with the heterogeneous ‘common sense’ of an epoch and a society, Gramsci’s understanding of which we will explore in more detail in Chapter 4 – are forged under the influence of the cultural production of elites. Thus literature, philosophical systems and fine arts stand in a set of important and irreducibly political relations to the ‘everyday’ or ‘ordinary’ culture to which everyone in a society contributes in their day-to-day lives. A crucial part of Gramsci’s overall perspective on culture consists in thinking through the reciprocal relations between ‘popular culture’ and ‘high culture’, or between the culture of ‘elites’ and that of ‘subalterns’.
Therefore, the issue of the relations between culture and social domination, and more generally between culture and politics, is at the very heart of Gramsci’s thought. Before Bourdieu or Foucault, the Prison Notebooks offered one of the most thorough and sophisticated reflections of the twentieth century on the relation between knowledge and power, centred on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (which we will explore in Chapter 5). According to Gramsci, then, culture at all levels, and in each manifestation, has profound political implications: culture is for Gramsci a privileged site of political struggles and the terrain on which power is generated and exerted, but also struggled against and resisted.
In Gramsci’s prison writings his constant preoccupation with the culture–politics relation is centred, we would argue, on the problematic of the organization of culture. Thinking about culture organizationally means thinking through how, where and by whom culture is produced, how it is diffused and distributed, and what structures, principles and constraints dictate its overall configuration. Thus Gramsci grapples with the following sorts of questions: what ensemble of institutions, including the press and ‘popular literature’, undergirds cultural life in a given society at a given time? What type of educational relation is required for the transmission and reproduction of a given culture? And, perhaps most importantly, what roles do intellectuals play in these processes?
As with many of Gramsci’s investigations, his treatment of the question of the intellectual appears in a fragmentary form in his Prison Notebooks; it is only really possible to speak of Gramsci’s ‘theory of intellectuals’ after a process of reconstruction that draws on material from the whole of the notebooks. Even then, it is important to bear in mind that such a theory could only exist at an exploratory stage. Nevertheless, many readers of Gramsci have seen in his reflections on the intellectual one of the most original aspects of his thought.
The first step in Gramsci’s approach consists in rejecting any possible definition of the intellectual that makes reference to the content of their activities as ‘cerebral’ rather than ‘manual’. As Gramsci notes, ‘There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.’3 Every human activity, that is, requires a certain amount of mental expenditure and effort on the one hand, and a certain amount of ‘muscular-nervous’ effort on the other. Against Frederick Taylor, who in his Principles of the Scientific Organisation of Work (1911) had lamented the fact that a warehouse worker would never reach the efficiency of a ‘trained gorilla’, Gramsci asserts that human intellectual power never ceases to be mobilized and drawn on in one way or another – including in the work of warehouse labourers. Thus, most basically, Gramsci states that ‘although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of non-intellectuals, because non-intellectuals do not exist’.4
Thus for Gramsci the intellectual is not merely a ‘thinking’ person, or someone who can think ‘more’ or ‘better’ than others. The intellectual does not make herself – rather it is society that makes the intellectual. As Gramsci writes:
The most widespread error of method seems to me that of having looked for this criterion of distinction [for the definition of the intellectual] in the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities, rather than in the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectual groups who personify them) have their place within the general complex of social relations.5
A consequence of Gramsci’s starting point, then, is that the intellectual is constituted by his or her social role. That role consists, for Gramsci, in the production and diffusion of knowledge in society. The intellectual’s function is in this way distinguished from the workers and peasants (under the empire of capitalists and landowners respectively) who directly reproduce society’s material resources.
At this point the originality of Gramsci’s perspective begins to emerge. Whereas Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (1846) appeared to include the intellectual without qualification in the bourgeois class, Gramsci does not entirely assimilate intellectuals into the bourgeoisie. He tends to describe the intellectuals as one of the ceti of a society, or one of its ‘layers’ or ‘strata’.
The intellectual stratum, for Gramsci, is quite large and includes many types of people. For him, university professors, academics, journalists and writers are of course intellectuals, but so are artists, priests, technicians, politicians, civil servants, lawyers and even army officers. All of these groups, in one way or another, fulfil a certain cultural, political or technical function that exists apart from the immediate material reproduction of society. Specifically, all of these types of people participate in the process by which a certain cultural environment forms, and through which a certain vision of the world is created, diffused and reproduced in time and space. In referring to this ‘vision of the world’ Gramsci often uses the German word Weltanschauung, meaning literally ‘world-perception’ but with the connotation of the world view of an individual or group.
We should bear in mind that Gramsci was writing in the interwar period when the service sector, as it is understood today, occupied a far smaller economic share than it does in today’s Western economies. Management and executive jobs were in Gramsci’s day in their infancy, particularly in a country as unevenly developed as Italy. Gramsci, though, perceived capitalism’s ongoing transformation, in the first place through the Taylorization of production methods, which tended to multiply administrative jobs within a firm. It is in the context of the changes in production led by Taylorism that he granted these emerging social positions the status of intellectuals, whether they were executives or administrators. Thus in his 1926 Alcuni temi essay Gramsci notes:
In every country, the layer of intellectuals has been radically modified by the development of capitalism. The old type of intellectual was the organising element in a society with a mainly peasant and artisanal basis. To organise the State, to organise commerce, the dominant class bred a particular type of intellectual. Industry has introduced a new type of intellectual: the technical organiser, the specialist in applied science.6
The organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual
For Gramsci, then, intellectuals represent a social stratum that is distinct from the classes that participate directly in the material reproduction of society. Gramsci’s perspective has the merit of problematizing the degree of relative autonomy of intellectuals vis-à-vis the ‘fundamental classes’ in society (by which Gramsci means the capitalist class and the proletariat). Thus Gramsci asks, ‘Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have its own particular specialized category of intellectuals? The problem is a complex one, because of the variety of forms assumed to date by the real historical process of formation of the different categories of intellectuals.’7
Gramsci relates his response to this question to the two main interpretative models of the intellectual of his period. First, Gramsci wants to fight against the thesis according to which intellectuals are able to rise above the turmoil of history and reach a plane of thought somehow independent of social conflict and free from any sort of social bias. Gramsci considers such a perspective naïve at best, and intends to demolish it (as Marx had attempted previously). To adopt such a position, Gramsci notes, would be to take the ‘eminent’ intellectuals of the day at face value, since those intellectuals – like, perhaps, intellectuals of any epoch – are keen to found their legitimacy on contentions of impartiality and neutrality. Gramsci thus endeavours to demystify claims to the independence of ‘pure thought’.
At the same time, Gramsci rejects the inverse thesis, associated at the time with ‘vulgar’ Marxism, that cultural life is no more than a mechanical reflection of economic forces. For Gramsci, any notion of ‘reflection’ cannot do justice to the decisive role that intellectuals play in the development of culture. For instance, Gramsci criticized the Russian revolutionary Bukharin for having straightforwardly reduced – and for that matter in an unrigorous way – Goethe’s Prometheus (1789) to an unequivocal reflection of the situation of the bourgeois class of his day.8
Despite his consistent rejection of vulgar economic determinism, Gramsci stays faithful to Marx’s original insight that intellectual life is always situated in a socio-historical field of forces in which class struggle is the primordial reality. Developing Marx’s thought, Gramsci distinguishes between two different types of relations that intellectual social groups can have vis-à-vis the fundamental classes of society. These two different types of relations create ‘organic intellectuals’ on the one hand and ‘traditional intellectuals’ on the other.
Gramsci defines the organic intellectual as an intellectual-social type that is created alongside an emerging social class (meaning the bourgeoisie and, at a later historical period, the proletariat). This intellectual-social type is called on to play the role of an organizer in the advance of the new productive, legal and cultural system that develops in conjunction with the rising power of the emerging class. Thus the industrial bourgeoisie generated at its side organic intellectuals in the form of technicians, managers, economic advisers, lawyers and so on, all of whom were auxiliaries to the production process. In addition, the rising bourgeoisie, in the process of its gradual triumph over the older aristocratic classes during the European ‘long nineteenth century’, saw its ascension to the summit of society accompanied by several generations of writers, journalists and politicians who constituted the cultural and political elites of this incipient bourgeois world. These groups were organic intellectuals linked to the bourgeoisie, but were individually removed from the daily industrial production process and so were not part of the capitalist class sensu stricto. These elites, though, succeeded in transforming this relative detachment from economic life into their key asset, becoming in this way the ‘cultural self-consciousness, the self-criticism of the dominant class’.9 Far from being simple servants of particular economic interests or passive observers of history, the most advanced organic intellectuals are in fact, according to Gramsci, the true organizers of a whole way of life that constitutes a society at a given point in time.
Gramsci refers to those intellectuals who exist prior to the ascendancy of the rising social class, and which the rising social class ‘finds along its way’, as traditional intellectuals. The first figure with which Gramsci illustrates the notion of the traditional intellectual is the man of the church – a product of feudal society who survived the supersession of that economic system as a caretaker of religion. In addition to religious figures, Gramsci also mentions certain State officials as traditional intellectuals, namely administrative types of high rank or diplomats who originated in aristocratic society but managed to reinvent themselves more or less successfully in the political world of the early twentieth century. More complexly, we could identify the figure of the academic as a traditional intellectual, particularly in certain national and historical contexts.10 In his Alcuni temi essay of 1926 Gramsci identifies in addition two other groups of traditional intellectuals specifically associated with Southern Italy. First, there are the plethora of small rural intellectuals, such as notaries, bureaucrats and ‘village pharmacy intellectuals’, numerically quite considerable but always subordinate to the North-oriented State on the one hand and the landowners on the other.11 Second, Gramsci refers to a handful of ‘eminent’ liberal intellectuals who enjoyed an immense cultural influence in the South during his day, such as Giustino Fortunato and, especially, Benedetto Croce (see Chapter 4).
Gramsci often uses the term ‘elite’ to describe organic intellectuals, and he turns to another French expression to describe the self-understanding of traditional intellectuals: ‘Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an “esprit de corps” [the pride and loyalty shared by members of a group] their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group.’12
For Gramsci, then, a central characteristic of the traditional intellectual is the tendency to self-perceive as free and independent from the course of history and, particularly, as a custodian of a centuries-old cultural tradition that serves to confer legitimacy. Referring to the traditional intellectuals who had a political or administrative function in his day, Gramsci remarks that ‘many intellectuals think that they are the State’.13
While at times traditional intellectuals are able to maintain a certain measure of autonomy – in particular when embodied in institutions specific to the traditional intellectual groups such as the Catholic Church – Gramsci rejects the notion of pure independence as an illusion. Even though they are the inheritors of a longue durée social reality, traditional intellectuals have for Gramsci only survived the vicissitudes of history as a social category by inserting themselves into contemporary social configurations. Here Gramsci mentions Benedetto Croce who, under the guise of a haughty detachment from the pettiness of political life, actually served before fascism to attract educated young Italians to Idealist philosophy and later to legitimize a stance of non-resistance to the fascist regime. This type of observation applies equally, according to Gramsci, to those traditional intellectuals who imagine they ‘are the State’: Gramsci notes that the aristocratic British members of parliament in the Victorian era, despite their self-perception as having a certain type of superiority, were in fact only the servants of the only existing dominant class, the bourgeoisie.
Intellectuals and political struggle
By denying the possibility of ‘free thought’ that stands independent of history and social contradictions, Gramsci takes away from intellectuals one of their traditional pedestals. Instead, he sees intellectuals as playing a key role in politics. Specifically, he calls upon the organic intellectual of the proletariat to produce a new culture, to diffuse a new conception of the world and to take on a directing role in political struggle: ‘The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator.’14
For Gramsci, intellectual activity, like manual activity, is a way the individual engages with the world and participates in its concrete transformation. The key difference here is that whereas the worker produces material objects, the intellectual produces knowledge and culture. In a way similar to the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie’s organic intellectuals of the nineteenth century, the ‘new’ (i.e. communist) intellectual of the twentieth century for Gramsci has to become the political organizer of the proletariat.
Moreover, the revolutionary intellectual has to act as a catalyst for the historical process by which the proletariat homogenizes itself both politically and culturally. The notion of ‘homogeneity’, which Gramsci uses often in the Notebooks, refers to the decisive moment when a social group acquires self-consciousness and thus prepares to enter the historical stage as a collective actor. This idea of Gramsci’s develops Marx’s distinction between a ‘class-in-itself’ (i.e. a class that exists in objective material terms) and a ‘class-for-itself’ (which is subjectively committed to its historical mission). The revolutionary intellectual thus contributes to the development of the ‘self-consciousness’ of the proletariat as a class.
It is also necessary to situate Gramsci’s notion of the communist intellectual in the context of his time. The figure of the communist intellectual was radically opposed to the conception dominant at one point in the Second International according to which the intellectual was an educated deserter from the bourgeoisie who could help the non-intellectual working masses at the theoretical level. By contrast, Gramsci’s organic intellectual is defined neither by educational attainment nor by social origin, but instead by his or her function as a revolutionary leader and role as a political organizer. The primary source of inspiration here is probably Lenin, who demanded the abolition of any status distinction between workers and intellectuals as early as his What Is to Be Done? (1902).
As Gramsci’s organic intellectual is committed to serving the revolution, it might be tempting to draw an analogy with Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of intellectuel engagé. Such an analogy, however, is unconvincing. The Gramscian organic intellectual is not a ‘fellow-traveller’ to the cause but is rather, among other things, a political organizer within the party who at once lives the political struggle by the word as a permanent persuader and by action as a militant. A more convincing analogy has been made between Gramsci’s organic intellectual and Mao Zedong’s ‘red and expert’ cadre; for both Gramsci and Mao, working class hegemony needs its own (organic) intellectuals who are expert enough to lead and ‘red’ enough to retain their ties with the working class.15
Despite the political imperatives of the struggle, Gramsci is careful to emphasize that this new communist intellectual should never go as far as to doctor the truth in the name of revolution. Gramsci had written as early as 1919 in L’Ordine Nuovo’s ‘Workers’ Democracy’ editorial: ‘To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.’16 We can see Gramsci’s personal life as a revolutionary, indeed, as a model of intellectual probity.
Gramsci was also keen to historicize the intellectual struggles of his day by comparing them with the past. He thereby arrives at the conception of the ‘popular intellectual’, which he sees as having a wider range of historical applicability than the notion of the proletarian organic intellectual, which he recognizes as tied to the political imperatives of the interwar proletarian struggle. On the topic of the popular intellectual Gramsci remarks admiringly how Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–72) and more generally the ‘Voltairean’ atmosphere of eighteenth-century France prepared the cultural terrain for the ‘Great Revolution’ of 1789. He also notes how, across the nineteenth century, France gave to the world an image of society where, despite political turmoil, the intellectual life that was bourgeois in character was able to work for the positive development of a wider part of society, specifically what he calls the ‘people-nation’ (see Chapter 3).
In a striking passage of the Prison Notebooks titled ‘Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and Vice Versa’ Gramsci asserts that the ‘popular intellectual’ must have an emotive or feelings-based bond to the people. For Gramsci, it is this relation of sympathy or empathy that is the true spur towards the intellectual practice of the ‘popular intellectual’, and that produces the aspiration to make their intellectual efforts work for the lifting of the people’s conditions: ‘One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relationships of a purely bureaucratic and formal order; the intellectuals become a caste, or a priesthood.’ He continues, ‘The popular element “feels” but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element “knows” but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other.’17
While the intellectual is the central figure of the world of culture in Gramsci’s account, another of his core preoccupations is the question of education. These two dimensions – intellectuals and education – are tightly linked for Gramsci, in particular in a specific progressive sequence whereby education trains and forms intellectuals, who are then able to educate the popular masses and raise their intellectual level, such that, finally, the people are increasingly able to self-educate and become actors in their own right in the new culture that is in the process of formation.
Gramsci does not hesitate to call such a revolutionary transmission process, in which he envisaged everyone in society as participating, as a form of work. Gramsci sees the process of education not just as political and intellectual work, but also physical work: ‘studying too is a job, and a very tiring one, with its own particular apprenticeship – involving muscles and nerves as well as intellect’.18 It is perhaps not surprising that Gramsci (who himself had many occasions to teach in his life, both at the PCI school and in prison) emphasizes the labour of the teacher and insists that the knowledge transfer between teacher and student ‘can only be realised by the living work of the teacher’.19
Gramsci begins, as he often does when setting out to examine a social theme, by taking the issue under investigation in its widest possible sense, and conferring to it a very wide domain. This might be termed Gramsci’s ‘maximal’ framing of the question he is studying. Thus for Gramsci educational practice is not confined to the school and to the university; instead, it traverses and operates across all of society. In addition to the school system, Gramsci identifies a large number of public and private institutions as sites of educational activity. These include parliament and its legislative activity, and the penal system (which, according to Gramsci, has a ‘negative educational function’). But also included here are political parties, unions, churches and popular clubs, along with more conventionally ‘cultural’ organizations such as the press, radio, theatre, museums, libraries, literary societies and even, Gramsci asserts, architecture and urbanism.
Although it might initially be unsettling, the true strength of Gramsci’s perspective is that it makes it possible to discern the objective links between diverse social practices without denying the differentia specifica of each of those practices. For Gramsci, education is the ‘live activity’ of transmitting knowledge and culture, which must be both inherited from the conditions of the past and re-actuated by practice. All of the institutions mentioned above participate, for Gramsci, in this very activity.
Relatedly, Gramsci tirelessly advocated the education of adults, decades before expressions such as ‘continuing education’ and ‘lifelong learning’ became common. Gramsci mainly had in mind, as might be expected, the working class population, and here we can see an interesting link to his biography. During the biennio rosso period of 1919–20 in Turin, the rise of the practices of the so-called ‘scientific organisation of work’ (notably at FIAT) led to demands on the part of the workers to reach a better understanding of the new production techniques and of technical and organizational changes. Although the management of a few large factories did provide some targeted ‘technical’ training to a few of the more qualified workers, L’Ordine Nuovo asserted that the training must combine professional training with education about the social reality – in both its historical and economic dimensions – underlying the scientific organization of work.20 Gramsci and his comrades contended that it is only by intellectually mastering the context of the social relations in which their own work was embedded that the workers would be able to develop their own critical and revolutionary consciousness.
Within the constellation of educational institutions that interest Gramsci, school in the strict sense has an essential role. An important context of Gramsci’s reflections on education is the major change in education policy that Italy had experienced under fascism. In 1923, Giovanni Gentile, who was Minister of Education and an intellectual defender of the official policy of the fascist regime, oversaw a series of reforms intended to transform the traditional model of education centred on Latin and rote learning. Centrally, technical or professional teaching for children of working class or peasant backgrounds was included in the curriculum, and the ‘spontaneity’ of pupils was promoted at the expense of the supposedly overly mechanical transmission of knowledge that had previously predominated. Somewhat paradoxically this fascist education policy could perhaps be perceived as progressive today, as it aimed to replace what it took to be formalism and theoretical aridity with communicative exchange between students and teachers. The advocates of the fascist policy at the time claimed a heritage from the ‘Genevan pedagogy’ inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762).
In a note titled ‘In Search of the Educational Principle’ Gramsci takes a stance opposite to that of the Gentile reforms. He asserts, rather, that the experience of elementary and secondary schooling by necessity includes a share of suffering for the child, since it requires the imposition of a bodily and mental discipline to which there will initially be resistance. Despite their possible tediousness, Gramsci also sees in Latin and grammar a stepping stone towards the future capacity for free thinking, and considers that the capacity for abstract thought made possible by these subjects may also be converted at a later date into tools that will allow the fusion of theory and practice.
Gramsci also notes that a privileged social background is likely to nurture in a child dispositions that are favourable to learning, while children from a working class or peasant background might find these dispositions harder to come by – here it is possible to recognize aspects of Bourdieu’s later theory of ‘cultural capital’.21 Therefore, to relegate intellectual discipline, as the Gentile reforms sought to do, is in fact to prevent students from working class and peasant backgrounds from attaining the sorts of dispositions necessary for the type of education practised in the school system. For Gramsci, the reforms aimed at promoting ‘spontaneity’ and developing technical secondary schooling curricula operate above all as a method of consigning generations of working class and peasant youth to subaltern manual positions. It is perhaps only superficially, then, that Gramsci appears in the Prison Notebooks to be a proponent of tradition or even authoritarianism in school. His aim is rather to illustrate the illusory character of Gentilean progressivism by demonstrating that what at first glance seems ‘advanced’ will in fact have reactionary social consequences.22
Gramsci also shows that in order for the school to be democratized, a completely different set of reforms would have to be adopted. We can mention here two of his prescriptions. First, he writes that a universal secondary curriculum has to be instituted and provided for the whole of society, as opposed to a bifurcated system channelling pupils towards either a technical-vocational track or an academic track at the end of primary schooling.23 Second, looking forward towards a socialist form of education, Gramsci expresses the wish for a symbiosis of intellectual and manual teaching throughout the school system. Such a transformation would prevent the reification of pure mental activity that Gramsci sees as an ‘intellectualism’, and, perhaps as importantly, would also stand as a means for future organic intellectuals to be ever more engaged in concrete society, thereby inaugurating ‘new relations between intellectual and industrial work, not only in the school but in the whole of social life’.24
The dialectic of conformity and spontaneity
Gramsci, then, conceives of education as a fundamental social process, present at every stage of human life and actuated by a whole range of diverse social activities that are both public and private, both collective and individual. At the same time, he puts forward a model of the school system that seems to include a traditional conception of education as discipline (although he does envisage transcending this traditional conception within an ideal of radical democracy).
Although there may appear to be a tension, perhaps even bordering on inconsistency, between these two aspects of Gramsci’s thinking on education, it is important to emphasize that there is a guiding thread in Gramsci’s writings on education that allows us to reconcile these two parts. Gramsci sees education in its social context as a transition from learning as a form of social conformity to the achievement of critical spontaneity. Gramsci attempts to transform the opposition of these two poles – conformity and spontaneity – into a dynamic association. Although we may be tempted to see it as a simple progression from conformity to spontaneity, Gramsci makes it clear that the relation is in fact dialectical and the passage must therefore be a two-way one that transcends both poles taken separately and in their strictest senses.
Thus for Gramsci the education of young people rests on a first phase that is conformist or even almost coercive. In this stage the child has to assimilate and internalize the physical and psychological dispositions, as well as the form of sociality, that are necessary to a subsequent richer and more positive type of education. We can note here that Gramsci at one point describes studying as ‘a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort, tedium, and even suffering’.25 We might term this first stage ‘conformisation’, and it will perforce be painstaking and difficult, and additionally so to the extent that the child originates from a relatively uneducated social background. Indeed, if the child originates from the peasantry, then Gramsci takes it that one of the primary missions of elementary schooling will be to uproot superstitions and folkloric beliefs in magic that the child may have been exposed to in village life. However, as the child moves forward in the curriculum towards secondary and then tertiary education, Gramsci insists that the disciplinary dimension will progressively be replaced by the exercise of spontaneous critical reflection. In this way, conformism eventually generates its very opposite: the freedom of judgement.
Gramsci also applies a perspective centred on the passage from conformism to spontaneity to adult education. In discussing the phenomenon of ‘Americanism’ (see Chapter 3) he notes, apparently without disapproval, that the new Fordist production norms had surpassed all previous attempts to impose a sort of individual and physical-psychological discipline on the workers in the industrial production chain. Gramsci perceives in this conformization moment the fact that the Taylorized worker – the human product of the scientific organization of work – has the potential to overcome his or her existence as exploited labour power by reaching critical self-consciousness not just as an individual social actor but also as a member of a potentially revolutionary class.
Education is thus, for Gramsci, political as it is an important moment in the development of a critical understanding of society and ultimately of class consciousness. Accordingly working class unions and particularly the Communist Party are called on to play roles as educational sites animated by the activity of organic intellectuals. Gramsci’s view of education in these contexts is completely removed from any project whereby party apparatchiks indoctrinate workers. On the contrary, Gramsci is interested in developing the critical consciousness of ‘subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths’.26 In this way, he understands revolutionary consciousness as the precursor and outcome of the self-education of the working class.
The press and the organization of culture
In this chapter so far we have foregrounded the issue of the organization of culture as central to Gramsci’s approach to understanding culture and its political dimensions, and have stressed that Gramsci sees the educational relationship central to the reproduction of culture as operating in a wide range of sites. The sites of the educational relationship, for Gramsci, include not just the school and university, but also the political institutions of the State, organizations of civil society (such as parties, unions and churches) and actors in the cultural market (including radio, the entertainment industry and publishing, for instance). It is worth emphasizing that Gramsci sees cultural life as made up of networks of institutions, with different parts having complex relations of interdependence with one another.
In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci asserts that the press can be considered as the ‘most prominent and dynamic part’ of the cultural universe made up of these reciprocal relations and interdependencies.27 As a result, he devotes many pages to journalism in his notebooks. In contrast to his contemporary Walter Benjamin – who like Gramsci attempted to think about culture from a Marxist perspective – Gramsci does not focus on the audio-visual technologies of radio and cinema that were emerging at the time. From his prison cell Gramsci was not in the ideal situation to take stock of the increasingly propagandistic use of these newer means of communication by the fascist regime. Nevertheless, he did manage to grasp something of the nature of this cultural transmission, even if he did not fully grasp its political significance: ‘spoken communication is a means of ideological diffusion which has a rapidity, a field of action, and an emotional simultaneity far greater than written communication … but [this action is accomplished] superficially, not in depth’.28
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci focuses mainly on the pre-fascist bourgeois press, which he had observed when he was himself a journalist in Turin. He notes that the greatest Italian newspapers before Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922 (such as Corriere della Serra or La Stampa) fulfilled a crucial function that was at once both cultural and political: they homogenized the different points of view of the property-owning classes to express a supposedly universal and consistent ‘public opinion’.
On this issue he asserts, ‘Public opinion is the political content of the public’s political will that can be dissentient; therefore, there is a struggle for the monopoly of the organs of public opinion’.29 Gramsci uses the expression ‘public opinion’, here as elsewhere, to refer not to the ‘spontaneous’ political disposition of subaltern classes, but precisely to the process whereby dominant social layers tend to project and reinforce their own particular and narrow perspectives through an apparently democratic media discourse ostensibly targeted at a universal readership. Thus ‘public opinion’, which the eminent bourgeois press purports to embody, serves to negotiate and smooth out the contradictions internal to the bourgeois class while also preventing the eruption of effective subaltern dissidence in the public sphere.
Despite a limited printing, the eminent newspapers of the post-Risorgimento decades enjoyed a form of cultural and political mastery over the destiny of the country. In Gramsci’s opinion, their importance can barely be overstated: ‘due to the absence of organized and centralized parties, one cannot overlook the newspapers: it is the newspapers, grouped in series, that constitute the real parties’.30
The Corriere della Serra, which was headed before the rise of fascism by Luigi Albertini, provides a clear illustration of Gramsci’s argument. This great daily newspaper from Milan had a reputation for its consistent support for the industrial profits of North Italy, and in particular of Lombardy. Yet it managed to avoid limiting its identification only to such narrow and localized interests; on the contrary, the newspaper endeavoured to promote national-level political projects with the aim of unifying the country’s industrial bourgeoisie without sacrificing any key part of that class. Thus Gramsci notes that in 1913 the editorship of the newspaper shifted political orientation and began to favour an alliance of Northern industrial profits with a ‘Southern bloc’ (mainly the landowning bourgeoisie) rather than with the industrial workers of the North.
At the same time, Gramsci acknowledges that the Corriere della Serra played a genuinely educational role in Italian society, through the professionalism of its journalists and the high quality of its contents. The newspaper was thus a remarkable asset for the established cultural order, as it helped to diffuse throughout society – and particularly among the bourgeoisie – a specific understanding of political issues that encouraged ideological unity within the dominant groups of society. The Corriere’s influence was both direct, through its readers, and indirect, through the more general intellectual atmosphere it could promote in different parts of society, which could then be transmitted from one person or organization to the next. While the influence of a single publication should not be exaggerated, it seems that the Corriere did indeed fulfil a true pedagogical role in society, in the sense of performing an important socializing function.
Gramsci’s ambition was to see the revolutionary press embody such an educational role – or, in other words, for the communist press to do what the bourgeois press of the time was already managing to do. Gramsci’s thoughts on the practicalities of fulfilling such an ambition are the subject of notebook 24, and are inspired in part by his own experience at L’Ordine Nuovo. Here Gramsci lays the foundations for a ‘little handbook’ (manueletto) for the creation of a party school for communist journalists. In the same way that the bourgeois press produced and disseminated the dominant culture, a communist publication would similarly have as its chief mission the illustration, diffusion and defence of the Weltanschauung of revolutionary socialism.
Gramsci writes a meticulous list of the various sections that a future communist publication would have to contain, including ‘encyclopaedic monographs’, ‘politico-intellectual biographies’, all manner of reviews, bibliographical resources, lexical appendices and so on.31 The list is quite long, and might appear dated in certain respects.32 Nevertheless, we can note that the sections mentioned above suggest that Gramsci had a very high intellectual level in mind, which is all the more remarkable given the publication’s readership would be working class party members with little secondary schooling. Furthermore, the publication would have to carry out an intellectual and moral ‘cartography’ of the country in order accurately to identify existing and possible future cultural trends. Finally, Gramsci holds that the editorial staff must be disciplined, since the aim is to produce an ‘intellectually homogeneous product’ while also reflecting the differences in styles and literary personalities of the individual contributors.33
Generally speaking, what is striking in these pages of the Prison Notebooks is the level of ambition that Gramsci has for the communist press. He speaks of this project as ‘integral journalism’ (giornalismo integrale): a journalism that is at once activist and pedagogical, political and cultural, scientific and historical. Gramsci writes that integral journalism ‘seeks not only to satisfy all the needs (of a given category) of its public, but also to create and develop these needs, to arouse its public and progressively enlarge it’.34
The communist press is, for Gramsci, not to be understood as an elitist educational project but rather as part of a wider revolutionary project carried out by the working class. The ‘communist journalists’ Gramsci has in mind to lead the development of the communist press are precisely the organic intellectuals produced by the proletariat itself.
Gramsci’s conception of ‘integral journalism’ relies on a dialectic which begins with the newspaper emanating from the real and existing aspirations rooted in a given social configuration. The newspaper then develops these aspirations to knowledge while bringing about new ones, with the newspaper then reacting to new evolutions on the side of the readership, and so on. Moreover this dialectical movement has to operate in synergy with the educational dynamic between conformity and spontaneity mentioned earlier; in both cases Gramsci envisages the progress from hierarchical instruction to self-education.
In Gramsci’s writing on ‘popular literature’ he develops a number of important ideas simultaneously: the importance of the intellectual as the organizer of culture; the need to investigate aspects and areas of cultural production that may otherwise be overlooked; and the necessity of examining culture historically. In the Prison Notebooks, we can see that the ‘popular intellectual’ of previous historical periods (which as discussed above he sees as more generally historically applicable than the category of the organic intellectual of the proletariat) is very often a novelist. For instance, Gramsci says of Dostoyevsky’s work that it shows ‘an awareness that the intellectuals have a mission towards the people’. Gramsci continues, ‘The people may be “objectively” made up of the “humble” but they must be freed from this “humility”, transformed and regenerated.’35
In a similar vein, Gramsci sees Honoré de Balzac, a monarchist by conviction, as important precisely because he ‘perceived clearly that man is the complex of the social conditions in which he has developed and lives, and that in order to “change” man one has to change this complex of conditions’. Gramsci adds that the fact that Balzac ‘is “politically and socially” a reactionary is only apparent from the extra-artistic part of his writing (digressions, prefaces, etc.)’.36 By revealing to his readers the essential fluidity of social structures, Balzac unwittingly offers his readers the intellectual means to acquire awareness of society’s potential to be transformed. At the same time, for Gramsci, an adventure story that might at first glance seem politically innocuous can reveal itself to be a sort of Trojan horse for revolutionary values. For instance, in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) by Alexandre Dumas the hero Edmond Dantès grows up among the labouring classes of Marseille before disguising himself as an aristocrat such that his personal vendetta can be interpreted as a kind of ‘social revenge’.37 Gramsci notes that this kind of popular literature contains an essential ambiguity: it is caught between its deference to existing social traditions and its latent subversive aspirations.
Gramsci deplores that nineteenth-century Italy did not produce a popular novelist of the calibre of Balzac, Hugo or Dumas in France or Walter Scott in Britain. He sees this absence, importantly, as a symptom of the Italian nation’s lack of cultural coherence and a legacy of its longue durée socio-political history (see Chapter 3). Gramsci also investigates the commercial literature of his own day, including serial novels, police stories, melodramas and other forms. He is often highly critical of the implicit Weltanschauung that he sees in these writings, but does not see in them simply another brand of ‘opium of the people’.38 Thus he remarks that ‘the success of a work of commercial literature indicates (and it is often the only indication available) the “philosophy of the age”, that is, the mass of feelings and conceptions of the world predominant among the “silent” majority’.39 Furthermore, despite the inherent mediocrity of the greater part of this commercial literature Gramsci also sees in it a possible starting point from which an authentically revolutionary literature might be built. Such a ‘new’ popular literature, which Gramsci eagerly anticipates, will have to ‘sink its roots into the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is backward and conventional’.40 Gramsci, then, did not contemplate a tabula rasa either for culture in general or for any particular cultural form. The cultural expression of the revolutionary project, for Gramsci, is not a complete negation or destruction of the inheritance of the past, but rather a critical embracing of that legacy that alters it from the inside and thereby transcends it by progressively lifting it to the level of revolutionary aspirations.
1 See Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (London: Pluto, 2002).
2 ‘Socialism and Culture’, Il Grido del Popolo, 29 January 1916; SPWI, p. 11.
3 Q12§3; SPN, p. 9.
4 Ibid., p. 9.
5 Q12§1; SPN, p. 8.
6 SPWII, p. 454.
7 Q12§1; SPN, p. 5.
8 The work referred to by Gramsci is Bukharin’s The Theory of Historical Materialism (1921).
9 Q5§105; SCW, pp. 278–9.
10 See Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review, 1:50 (1968), pp. 3–57 for a remarkable map of twentieth-century British academic culture.
11 SPWII, p. 443.
12 Q12§1; SPN, p. 7.
13 Ibid., p. 16.
14 Q12§3; SPN, p. 10.
15 Arif Dirlik, ‘The Predicament of Marxist Revolutionary Consciousness: Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, and the Reformulation of Marxist Revolutionary Theory’, Modern China, 9:2 (1983), pp. 182–211; Jerome Karabel, ‘Revolutionary Contradictions: Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Intellectuals’, Politics and Society, 6 (1976), pp. 123–72.
16 ‘Workers’ Democracy’; SPWI, p. 68.
17 Q11§67; SPN, p. 418.
18 Q12§2; SPN, p. 42.
19 Ibid., p. 35.
20 Attilio Monasta, ‘Antonio Gramsci’, Perspectives: Revue trimestrielle d’éducation comparée, 23:3 (1993), pp. 613–29.
21 See for instance Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Reproduction culturelle et reproduction sociale’, Information sur les Sciences Sociales, 10:2 (1971), pp. 45–99.
22 Harold Entwistle, Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics (London: Routledge, 1979).
23 It is only in the post-war period that Western European countries moved towards the unification of the first stage of secondary education, thus partly fulfilling Gramsci’s vision. In Italy, the 1962 reform turned the scuola media (middle school) into a unified, compulsory track for all pupils between 11 and 14. In France, similarly, a series of educational reforms between 1959 and 1975 established the collège unique as the compulsory stage between primary schools and lycées (upper secondary schools). Britain, by contrast, never achieved complete unification of lower secondary education, although the conversion into comprehensives of most secondary State schools in the 1960s and 1970s was very much part of the broader European dynamic at the time.
24 Q12§1; SPN, p. 33. We can also note that Gramsci’s proposals here are somewhat reminiscent of Chapter 15 of Marx’s Capital (1867), which puts forward a similar idea of combining intellectual and manual training.
25 Q12§2; SPN, p. 42.
26 Q10II§41xii; FSPN, p. 396.
27 Q3§49; SCW, p. 389.
28 Q16§21; SCW, pp. 382–3.
29 Q7§83; Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, translated and edited by Joseph Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 213.
30 Q1§116; SCW, pp. 390–1.
31 See Q24§3 for the full list; SCW, pp. 414–16.
32 Giuseppe Richeri, ‘Réflexion sur Gramsci et le journalisme’, Quaderni, 57 (2006), pp. 85–91.
33 Q24§3; SCW, p. 413.
34 Q24§1; SCW, p. 408.
35 Q21§3; SCW, p. 293.
36 Q14§41; SCW, p. 259.
37 Pascal Durand, ‘Culture populaire, culture de masse ou culture de mass-médias? Autour de cinq thèses moins une d’Antonio Gramsci’, Quaderni, 57 (2005), pp. 73–83.
38 André Tosel, Le Marxisme du XXe siècle (Paris: Syllepse, 2009).
39 Q5§54; SCW, p. 348.
40 Q15§58; SCW, p. 102.