Redefining philosophy: The individual, philosophy and politics
Theory, practice and philosophical anthropology
Gramsci’s philosophical reflections rely on one essential postulate above all others: the intimacy of theory and practice. For Gramsci, theory is called on to provide a rational basis for practice, and practice is necessary to actualize theory: in every philosophy, and in each human being, one cannot be conceived without the other. Moreover, the concrete unity between thought and action is as an essential mission for individuals and for organized social classes.
Two aphorisms from the young Marx are worth recalling when situating the starting points of Gramsci’s philosophy. In the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx writes, ‘The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.’1 Two years later, we find the following assertion in the third of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845): ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’2 In the first of the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx rebukes Feuerbach for failing to understand the significance of revolutionary or ‘practical-critical’ activity.3 Gramsci attempts to think through what it means to put human ‘practical-critical’ activity, or praxis, at the heart of Marxist philosophy.
A note titled ‘What Is Man?’ in notebook 11 provides a possible entry point into Gramsci’s philosophy. Gramsci’s answer to the question he poses himself is clear: there is no eternal human nature, and no fixed essence of the human being. Gramsci rejects both the idealist conception of a perfect Idea of man found in Plato and the notion of a human nature anchored within a fixed materiality that Ludwig Feuerbach develops. According to Gramsci man is above all a social and historical animal whose reality is constituted by the relations that tie the individual to others. These social relations, in turn, are the product of an accumulation of social practices.
This theory of man can be called Gramsci’s ‘philosophical anthropology’ and is a keystone of the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci’s philosophical anthropology is characterized by his rejection of naturalism, by his historicist understanding of ‘the human’ and above all by a relational ontology in which being can only be understood by reference to a set of relations. Here Gramsci’s philosophical anthropology converges with the idea expressed by the young Marx in the sixth of his Theses on Feuerbach (1845): ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’.4 In accepting the idea that every human being is defined by the ensemble of his or her social relations, Gramsci attempts to trace a median ontological path between an ‘individualism’ that tends to detach the individual from their context and a ‘holism’ that reduces individual traits to characteristics of systems, which might be thought of as the Charybdis and Scylla of the social sciences.5
Gramsci then asks what might be found on ‘opening up’ an individual. The answer, he believes, is a complex and stratified reality, combining collective culture and individual psychology. For Gramsci, then, ‘personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over’.6 Every epoch of history has thus handed down as its legacy to the individuals of the present a set of more or less consistent and compelling doctrines, beliefs and superstitions that survive as traces or ‘sedimentations’ in the human mind. Gramsci sees this essential historicity of the individual as generating a Socratic imperative. Embracing the famous inscription on the Delphi oracle, Gramsci writes, ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Such an inventory must therefore be made at the outset.’7 Already in January 1916 Gramsci had written in Il Grido del Popolo: ‘To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos’.8
We can note that for Plato the Socratic precept of the centrality of self-knowledge is situated in the context of a dialectical ascension towards the Idea performed through the philosophical dialogue. By contrast, for Gramsci the requirement to ‘know thyself’ requires the individual to look towards human society. We can only attain self-knowledge through social and historical awareness.
The relationship between ‘philosophy’ and everyday life is a central preoccupation of Gramsci’s. Gramsci’s position can be characterized by his bold assertion that ‘every man is a philosopher’. Gramsci contends, ‘It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are “philosophers.”’9
What, then, does Gramsci understand by philosophy, if he takes it that every human being can participate in it? Referring to a definition Croce had applied to religion, Gramsci sees philosophy as a certain conception of life to which an ethical attitude is attached.10 Every human, for Gramsci, is led to establish an original mental connection to his or her social environment and to the ways in which that environment is being transformed on a daily basis – a transformation that Gramsci sees every individual as contributing to in the irreducibly political dimensions of their everyday life (see Chapter 3). Within the reciprocal relations that tie each individual to his or her social milieu, Gramsci sees a certain conception of life as being developed, and it is this conception of life that emerges out of a concrete social context that Gramsci understands as philosophy. Importantly, Gramsci notes that such a philosophy usually remains at an implicit or fragmentary stage.
There is a clear link between Gramsci’s assertion that everyone is a philosopher and his conviction that it is impossible to talk of ‘non-intellectuals’ (see Chapter 2): just as each individual, for Gramsci, uses his or her intellect, each individual also necessarily develops a conception of life – that is, a philosophy – by virtue of living and acting in society. However, in the same way that Gramsci recognizes the existence of professional intellectuals he is also aware that specialist or professional philosophers distinguish themselves from the ‘everyday philosophers’ that one finds within the mass of the people. Generally speaking the professional philosophers stand out from the everyday philosophers on the basis of the greater internal coherence or consistency of their reflections, their more fully developed capacity for logical argumentation and above all their cultural training that ensures them a fuller knowledge of the history of human thought. After having stated these differences, Gramsci notes that they are all, importantly, of a purely ‘quantitative’ character and that, qualitatively speaking, it is thus the case that all men equally are philosophers.
Having posited the essential correspondence between quotidian human thought and philosophy, Gramsci also sees an equivalence between philosophy and politics. As we explored above, politics for Gramsci refers to the transformative praxis that ties every human being to their environment (see Chapter 3). Thus philosophy and politics both originate in the most elementary reality of social life, and one cannot be actuated without the other: every political project that intends to act on and change society relies on a normative vision of collective life, and every conception of life germinates a praxis. Importantly, then, Gramsci contends that every conception of life and every Weltanschauung possesses – whether explicitly or in a hidden way – the will to reform social being, such that even the most seemingly ethereal and detached philosophy contains its own ‘active ingredient’. At the same time, he believes that even the most apparently trivial and prosaic political demand cannot be expressed without an underlying ethical stance vis-à-vis the world and the society in which it is put forward. Here we can see that the unity of philosophy and politics corresponds to the unity of theory and practice that Gramsci takes as his starting point.
Gramsci thus ties together the notions of the individual, philosophy and politics in the following way:
the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in. If one’s own individuality is the ensemble of these relations, to create one’s personality means to acquire consciousness of them and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations.11
For Gramsci, if human praxis is the engine of history, then the bearer of that praxis – the individual – is socially, politically and historically constructed. Practical-critical activity consists precisely in recognizing the historical limits of one’s own individuality, and then acting to reform it.
The concept of senso comune – or common sense – is a central one in Gramsci’s philosophical reflections.12 Gramsci understands common sense as the ‘most widespread conception of life and man’ that can be found among different social groups at a given point in history.13 Thus common sense is a form of popular philosophy or, more accurately, it is the ‘mass’ moment of philosophy. Gramsci goes as far as to call common sense ‘the “philosophy of non-philosophers”’.14
What are the properties of common sense for Gramsci? First of all, Gramsci warns against simplification, as common sense is multiple and labile: ‘“Common sense” is a collective noun, like religion: there is not just one common sense, for that too is a product of history and a part of the historical process (un divenire storico).’15 Further, ‘common sense is an ambiguous, contradictory and multiform concept’.16 The fragmentary or even inconsistent (inconseguente) aspect of common sense is manifest, writes Gramsci, ‘even in the brain of one individual’ who must live with the baggage of a set of contradictory thoughts, assumptions and presuppositions inherited from the past but lived out through the prism of a singular individual biography.17 Common sense is not, though, for Gramsci understood simply as the thought of a unitary or uniform ‘man-on-the-street’; indeed, Gramsci writes of the ‘average’ man, in a letter to his sister-in-law: ‘I doubt he is to be found in any anthropological or sociological museum’.18
Importantly, Gramsci takes common sense as seriously as he does the writings of professional philosophers. He sees these two aspects of ‘philosophy’ as mutually influencing and unconsciously fashioning each other throughout history. The ‘savants’ – the eminent thinkers and professional philosophers of the day – elaborate their systems on the basis of the philosophical humus of their epoch, which is composed of the recently discarded and decaying ideas of previous periods. At the same time, common sense renews itself by filtering through philosophical systems and incorporating some of their elements. As Gramsci puts it, ‘Every philosophical current leaves behind a sedimentation of “common sense”: this is the document of its historical effectiveness.’19 Common sense, by embodying the dominant philosophical doctrines of its day, albeit it in a partial and refracted way, in turn endows those doctrines with a sort of historical potency. Linking philosophy and history, Gramsci writes:
The philosophy of an age is not the philosophy of this or that philosopher, of this or that group of intellectuals, of this or that broad section of the popular masses. It is a process of combination of all these elements, which culminates in an overall trend, in which the culmination becomes a norm of collective action and becomes concrete and complete (integral) ‘history’.20
Thus for Gramsci common sense and ‘high philosophy’ together compose the cultural reality of a given epoch; the cultural life of any period cannot be understood only in reference to its works of ‘high’ culture. A historian of society or culture who ignores or overlooks common sense is thus, from Gramsci’s point of view, committing a scientific mistake. In addition, as we stress below, the communist revolution that Gramsci anticipates must situate itself as a revolution of common sense, that is, as a revolution of quotidian philosophy. Consequently, the imperative to engage with common sense is for Gramsci simultaneously a methodological and political one.
Gramsci’s methodological engagement with common sense starts with his recognition that common sense is the ‘folklore of philosophy’ and that ‘like folklore, it takes countless different forms’.21 During Gramsci’s childhood in Ghilarza he became familiar with countless rural superstitions, and during the biennio rosso he was again confronted with the traditional beliefs of workers who were often from rural origins and with whom he tirelessly debated. Significantly, at the time of L’Ordine Nuovo many revolutionaries perceived the workers’ common sense as a possible obstacle to the revolution and as a symptom of a conservative mindset.
While in prison Gramsci again grapples with common sense, but this time it is of course a theoretical engagement. He contends that common sense, including that held by the workers he had previously debated, is in one way like Janus: it displays two contrasting faces. One aspect of common sense is ‘neophobic’, centred on tradition and looking for indisputable truths and reassuring certainties. An illustration of this might be the usual turn of phrase or style of popular proverbs, which can set themselves up as a kind of ‘wisdom of nations’ meant to be valid at all times and in all places. With his deep historicist sensibility Gramsci is acutely aware of the ways in which such an attitude may consist in ignoring the historical character of the cultural world, and may thus be paralyzing for any sort of praxis that takes as its first assumption the changeability of society.22
At the same time, though, common sense also contains the germs of potential resistance to the established order and a critical outlook on society from the point of view of the subaltern classes. Gramsci believes that the ‘healthy nucleus that exists in “common sense”’, which he calls ‘good sense’, ‘deserves to be made more unitary and coherent’, although he does not fully explicate how this nucleus can be identified and built upon.23 Importantly, though, Gramsci does see common sense as in perpetual transformation and this makes it possible, at certain historical moments and through contact with revolutionary thought and praxis, to rationalize and reform it as a conscious critical Weltanschauung.
Whatever the political orientation of common sense in a given situation, it is for Gramsci importantly constitutive of human subjectivity. As such, common sense can be understood as a continuously operating reality, ceaselessly working at the ‘pre-intentional’ level where human agents are shaped as conscious subjects in society.24 The anthropologist Kate Crehan has noted that Gramsci’s notion of common sense is not only an accumulation of particular propositions, assertions and notions, but is the very process by which thought on a whole range of topics is itself generated.25
Given that Gramsci postulates the qualitative equivalence of common sense and philosophy, it is important to clarify what he takes to be the truth status of a ‘conception of life’. This is perhaps additionally significant given the importance of the notion of truth for philosophy (not to mention self-conceptions of philosophy as the search for, or love of, truth).
At this point in Gramsci’s thought, two highly different intellectual traditions converge. First, there is the young Marx, particularly the second of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845): ‘The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth – i.e. the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice.’26 Second, there are the American pragmatists of the early twentieth century, William James and John Dewey, who figured among Gramsci’s prison reading and who enjoy a limited but real influence on his thought. Gramsci finds in Dewey in particular the idea that human thought is a tool in the service of situated, contextualized and concrete human action, such that the degree of truth of thought can only be accessed pragmatically.
Gramsci’s critique of common sense or of philosophical systems of the past does not attempt to establish the inadequacy of those bodies of thought in terms of fixed and eternal truth categories. In contrast to a mathematical theorem or a law of physics, philosophy – whether specialized or popular – must be judged pragmatically, which for Gramsci means an appraisal that is primarily historical. Thus, a given Weltanschauung or fragment of common sense should not be understood as a series of propositions that are simply either true or false in the abstract, but rather as the accompanying element to the actions of human beings in society. The power of a given thought, in other words, is manifested as praxis.
The critical analysis of common sense must, then, proceed from an understanding that the propositions of common sense cannot be straightforwardly acknowledged as true or denounced as false. Gramsci, instead, sees the central aim of the critique of common sense as drawing on the Socratic ‘know thyself’ and applying it not to the individual but the collective being, or to the culture of the whole of society. While grappling with a given belief or saying, a piece of common wisdom, prejudice or habit, or a common attitude, Gramsci thus sees it as necessary to work as a sort of archaeologist in discovering the precise inventory of the strata of meaning that can be uncovered behind an apparently simple phenomenon. In investigating the multitude of ‘palimpsests’, then, that form common sense, one can begin to identify the traces of many past epochs of culture.27 We attempt to develop a methodology of the critical analysis of common sense in Chapter 6, attempting to make such an inventory of a specific fragment of common sense. We argue that one way of beginning to understand the complex truth status of common sense is by seeing it as composed of narratives that attempt to give a more or less compelling, rather than straightforwardly true or false, account of social reality.
‘Ideology’ is another of the notions that, like philosophy, education or the intellectual, Gramsci redefines in his own way, granting it a much wider scope of application than conventional accounts might. In a note titled ‘The Concept of “Ideology”’, Gramsci retraces the history of the word. He notes that it first appeared in the materialist French school of the eighteenth century, where it denoted the science of ideas and the analysis of their origins. The meaning of the word had shifted towards the meaning of a ‘system of ideas’ by the time Marx and Engels used it in The German Ideology (1846). They there define ideology as a kind of collective illusion or, more specifically, as a deceptive veil that masks the conflictual and contradictory reality of the relations of production under the guise of various universalistic principles (such as ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’). The German Ideology was a key reference point during the twentieth century for Marxist critiques of the dominant ideology, although Marx himself rarely used the term ‘ideology’ in his works after 1846.
Gramsci consciously makes the concept of ideology central to his thought, regretting – in a way that might be surprising – that the Marxist tradition had assigned a ‘negative’ meaning to the word. He writes, ‘The bad sense of the word has become widespread, with the effect that the theoretical analysis of the concept of ideology has been modified and denatured.’28 Rather than seeing in ideology human thought degraded by bourgeois society, Gramsci identifies in ideology the very culture of society. In this sense the social surface of ideology is, for Gramsci, vast; similarly to ‘high philosophy’, ideology is intimately blended with and linked to common sense and to the everyday practices of everyone in society. Thus Gramsci writes that ideology is ‘a conception of the world manifest implicitly in art, the law, economic activity, and all manifestations of individual and collective life’.29
Therefore, for Gramsci ideology is not simply a distorted ‘reflection’ of social or material givens, as this sort of reduction would deprive it of autonomous power in history. On the contrary, it is an active aspect of political praxis, and as such ideology exists in progressive as well as reactionary forms, depending on the objectives of the social groups whose struggles it accompanies. In political struggle, ideology is a crucial factor of unity, capable of joining together heterogeneous social coalitions under the rubric of shared or universalistic slogans or demands. As such, ideology must be an essential unifying ingredient in any ‘national-popular’ movement (see Chapter 3).
Gramsci illustrates the role of ideology in historical movements at various points in his Prison Notebooks. For instance, Gramsci comments on the ways in which the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers diffused throughout eighteenth-century France, reaching beyond the bourgeoisie – albeit it in a refracted and unavoidably simplified form – to reform common sense and discreetly prepare the people for the French Revolution. Another example often mentioned by Gramsci, and which stands as a counterpoint to the French Revolution, is the Catholic Church, which we discuss in more detail below. Gramsci sees, in both cases and particularly in the latter, the binding or ‘cementing’ force of ideology, as it glues together diverse interests in pursuit of a shared goal.
As an instrument of political unification, though, Gramsci also understands ideology as a terrain of struggle within the world of culture. Here there is a direct link to Gramsci’s formulation of the organic intellectual as permanent persuader (Chapter 2) and to his understanding of civil society as the site where attempts at persuasion are manifest (Chapter 3). As a producer of ideas and a diffuser of cultural critique, Gramsci sees the organic intellectual as a standard-bearer for the ideology they have embraced. Thus we can note here that for Gramsci the mission of the organic intellectual of the proletariat as a member of the Communist Party will be to develop, deepen and diffuse revolutionary ideology in the context of a struggle against rival ideologies.
Lastly, we might ask what, in Gramsci’s opinion, can confer on a given ideology historical force and efficacy. Gramsci carefully distinguishes between ‘historically organic ideologies, which are necessary to a given structure’ and ‘ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”’.30 It is possible to recognize in this distinction the Marxist premise that Gramsci was never to renounce, namely that ideologies originating in the fundamental (economic) structure of society are the only organic ideologies and therefore the only ideologies truly essential to political struggle. As applied to the proletariat, this can only for Gramsci refer to Marxism. As we will see below, Gramsci develops his own specific conception of Marxism as ‘the philosophy of praxis’.
Elsewhere in society, though, there may exist a plethora of ideologies, some of which may be the product of brilliant isolated thinkers. Whatever the profundity or sophistication of such intellectual constructions, Gramsci does not hesitate to describe these ideologies as ‘arbitrary’ since they are unable to tie themselves to the practice of the collective actors who make and unmake history. In other words, these secondary ideologies are condemned to remain purely intellectual products that are deprived of the activating and actualizing power of contact with human masses. Gramsci concludes, ‘Only by this contact [with the masses] does a philosophy become “historical”, purify itself of intellectualistic elements of an individual character and become “life”’.31
Religion and the Catholic Church
Gramsci sees religion both as a form of consciousness that necessitates understanding and critique from a standpoint within historical materialism and as an ideology actualized in a social movement. Gramsci’s analysis of religion begins to bring together some of the themes we have explored in this chapter to this point. With regard to religion as a form of consciousness requiring critique, Gramsci contends that this critique must be carried out by philosophy: ‘Philosophy is intellectual order, which neither religion nor common sense can be. It is to be observed that religion and common sense do not coincide either, but that religion is an element of fragmented common sense.’32 Philosophy can, then, exhibit a greater level of coherence and a more logical structure than can religion, and the philosophy that Gramsci has in mind above all others here is the philosophy of praxis, or Marxism, which we will explore in more detail below. As Gramsci concludes, ‘Philosophy is criticism and the superseding of religion and “common sense”’.33 Another key affinity between religion and common sense is that every religion is in practice multiple and inconsistent, with different component groups holding different conceptions at the same time:
Every religion, even Catholicism (indeed Catholicism more than any, precisely because of its efforts to retain a ‘surface’ unity and avoid splintering into national churches and social stratifications), is in reality a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions: there is one Catholicism for the peasants, one for the petits-bourgeois and town workers, one for women, and one for intellectuals which is itself variegated and disconnected.34
Previous religions influence and remain parts of any contemporary religion, just as with common sense – with respect to Catholicism Gramsci mentions the influence of ‘popular heretical movements [and] scientific superstitions connected with past cults’.35
Importantly, though, Gramsci maintains that religion can and must be differentiated from common sense and folklore on the basis of its organization: ‘all religions, even the most refined and sophisticated, are “folklore” in relation to modern thought. But there is the essential difference that religions, in the first place Catholicism, are “elaborated and set up” by the intellectuals … and the ecclesiastical hierarchy’.36 The ways in which a religion is elaborated and set up necessitate, for Gramsci, analysing religion in terms of its history and social context, and not just as a set of ideas.
Gramsci, thus, is interested in religion not only as an ideology, but also as a social movement. Gramsci investigates, then, ‘the problem of religion taken not in the confessional sense but in the secular sense of a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct’.37 In this sense, religion falls under a more general question for Gramsci: how and when can ideologies provide rules for practical conduct? This is, of course, one of the central questions Gramsci seeks to answer on behalf of the philosophy of praxis.
The study of religion is thus interesting to Gramsci as he sees in it clues to the practical solution of uniting praxis and theory. Accordingly, Gramsci investigates the history and structure of the Catholic Church in search of concrete organizational lessons that can be applied to working class movements. Thus Gramsci writes that the organizational challenge facing any religious movement is:
that of preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideology serves to cement and to unify. The strength of religions, and of the Catholic Church in particular, has lain, and still lies, in the fact that they feel very strongly the need for the doctrinal unity of the whole mass of the faithful and strive to ensure that the higher intellectual stratum does not get separated from the lower.38
Gramsci takes ideology here in its ‘highest sense’ of a conception of the world, and he is particularly interested in how it may play what we called above a binding role, bringing together a variety of social actors under a single, shared banner. It is important to be clear that the kind of organizational work Gramsci notes as particularly important here – in this case the struggle over doctrinal unity within the Catholic Church – must be carried out in a concerted and organized way by dedicated actors within the institution itself. Gramsci continues, ‘The Roman church has always been the most vigorous in the struggle to prevent the “official” formation of two religions, one for the “intellectuals” and the other for the “simple souls”’.39 Gramsci has deep respect for the organizational capacity of the clergy in the cultural sphere and what he calls ‘the abstractly rational and just relationship which the Church has been able to establish in its own sphere between the intellectuals and the simple’, noting the particularly efficacious work of the Jesuits in this regard.40
Gramsci’s study of the history of the Catholic Church is immensely rich and displays a great sensitivity to the specific role played by its cultural and organizational actors, including the Jesuits and the Catholic Action anti-secularization group (a study of the origins and development of which was included in Gramsci’s central arguments in the opening of the first notebook). The central conclusion that emerges from his study relates to the relations between the church and the faithful:
Religion, or a particular church, maintains its community of the faithful (within the limits imposed on it by the necessities of general historical development) in so far as it nourishes its faith permanently and in an organised fashion, indefatigably repeating its apologetics, struggling at all times and always with the same kind of arguments, and maintaining a hierarchy of intellectuals who give to the faith, in appearance at least, the dignity of thought.41
Gramsci notes that if a political event – such as the French Revolution – interrupts the organizational work of the church to a sufficient extent, then the losses can be irrevocable. Importantly, Gramsci sees the lessons of the importance of ideological unity as directly relevant to any cultural movement intending to replace common sense and old conceptions of the world. First, it must never tire ‘of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form)’ since ‘repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality’.42 Significantly, it must also – in direct contrast to Catholicism – aim to ‘work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amorphous mass element’.43
Here we can see the central difference between Marxism and Catholicism: the former aims to work to lead the masses to a higher conception of life and a higher cultural state, whereas this is impossible for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to do without losing the privileges directly derived from their superior position. We can note that Gramsci also criticizes Croce for his ‘Malthusian attitude towards religion’, or in other words one based on a contempt for the masses and a corresponding view that religion is suitable for the masses while the elite are able to comprehend a more rational conception of the world.44 For Gramsci, thus, the position of the philosophy of praxis is antithetical to that of Catholicism on the basis of the type of educational relationship it envisages between the institution and its members: ‘Whereas [the philosophy of praxis] maintains a dynamic contact and tends continually to raise new strata of the population to a higher cultural life, [Catholicism] tends to maintain a purely mechanical contact, an external unity based in particular on the liturgy and on a cult visually imposing to the crowd.’45 The philosophy of praxis is inconceivable without the premise of engaging the masses in critical thinking through the whole range of cultural and educational institutions centred on the party and the organic intellectual.
Gramsci’s understanding of religion is, therefore, driven by the question of how a unity between beliefs about the world and actions within it can be achieved by working class movements through organizational work based on an attempt to achieve ideological consistency. Gramsci sees the work of the party as central to this undertaking. In the context of criticizing Hitler’s proclamation in Mein Kampf (1925) that founding or destroying a religion is more historically significant than founding a State or a party, Gramsci writes, ‘The three elements – religion (or “active” conception of the world), State, party – are indissoluble, and in the real process of historico-political development there is a necessary passage from one to the other.’46
The economy: From economic base to historic bloc
Point of departure: The base/superstructure metaphor
We can now address the question of how Gramsci conceives of the place of the economic within society as a whole. The answer to this question involves tracing the development of one of his most important concepts, that of the ‘historic bloc’. We can also note, in the context of an overall interpretation of Gramsci’s work, that Gramsci’s thought cannot be reduced to reflections on cultural and political themes, as the economy clearly plays a central role in the construction of his methodology for investigating social life.
The starting point of Gramsci’s understanding of the economic is the distinction made by Marx between Basis and Überbau, usually translated into English as (economic) ‘base’ and (socio-political) ‘superstructure’. The original framing of the distinction by Marx comes from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). There one finds the famous assertion that the totality of the relations of production ‘constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’.47 Thus, the political, legal, religious, intellectual, artistic and even psychological realities of an epoch are, for Marx, dependent on the specific character of economic relations that preside over the material reproduction of society. Accordingly, for Marx a society with an economic infrastructure centred on slavery will have a political regime that tolerates or promotes slavery, a legal system that recognizes it, and a religious or moral ideology that justifies it.
The Basis–Überbau distinction, then, consists in applying to society a spatial metaphor based on the existence of ‘levels’. For Gramsci, it is as a metaphor with heuristic value – rather than as an ontology – that these concepts must be appraised.
In the period of the Second International the base–superstructure metaphor was, though, rigidified into a dogma. For some of the intellectual and political cadres of German social democracy and the PSI before the First World War, the base–superstructure model had become the pretext for the reduction of all social life to its economic dimension. Interpreted in a deterministic way, by positing the unequivocal priority of the base over the superstructure, the base–superstructure metaphor had become an easy way to negate the autonomy of the political and the cultural.
This context explains why many European Marxists tried to relativize or qualify the weight given to the base–superstructure distinction in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, two cataclysmic events that offered a resounding rebuttal to those who might have been tempted to deflate the role of politics in history. At the turn of the 1920s, Georg Lukács, in his History and Class Consciousness (1923), takes stock, as Gramsci was also to do, of the failures of revolution in Western Europe. Lukács attributes this defeat to the shortcomings of proletarian consciousness in Europe and considers that only a specifically political response would have a chance of developing that consciousness.
It is in the same historical conjuncture that Gramsci reached political maturity. As we have seen in Chapter 1, he showed himself to be a fierce critic of economic determinism as early as 1917 in his brief article ‘The Revolution against Capital’. His critique of economic determinism is far more extensive in his Prison Notebooks, where he terms his target ‘economism’. Economism consists, for Gramsci, in interpreting any political event or tendency as the unequivocal reflection of the economic base, a form of crude reductionism that Gramsci describes as a ‘primitive infantilism’.48 Rather, politics is for Gramsci both an autonomous science and an autonomous art (see Chapter 3), and thus requires serious and careful study in its own right.
Gramsci reproaches a number of Marxist authors individually for what he takes to be their economism, including Achille Loria (a ‘materialist’ economist and popularizer of Marx widely read in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century) and I. A. Lapidus and K. V. Ostrovitianov (perhaps less well-known today but the authors of the Soviet Union’s standard economics reference textbook of the interwar period). Most importantly, though, Gramsci repeatedly criticizes Nikolai Bukharin, the ‘Golden Boy’ of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s – though executed in 1938 as a result of the Moscow trials – who had published in 1921 his Theory of Historical Materialism, which was subtitled ‘A Manual of Popular Sociology’. Gramsci sees Bukharin’s textbook, which was highly respected at the time, as characteristic of the sort of approach that would distort Marx’s thought into an economism. Gramsci is keen to stress that Marx, despite his preoccupation with the critique of political economy, was ‘an author of concrete political and historical works’.49
Gramsci’s critique of economism is also politically situated – in Chapter 3 we explained that Gramsci saw the conversion of economism from an intellectual stance to a practical attitude as the source of the political disasters he terms ‘fatalism’, ‘mechanism’ and ‘abstentionism’. Gramsci had been a first-hand witness to the embarrassing divisions within the PSI during the chain of events that led to Italian participation in the First World War. For Gramsci, the hesitations and clumsy passiveness of the PSI at this time were the fruits of a pernicious economism that undermined thought and paralysed action.
Gramsci’s attempt to move beyond economism is centred on his ambitious attempt – not always remarked on by those who would later interpret him – to lay the methodological basis of what he calls ‘critical economics’. ‘Critical economics’ should aim, for Gramsci, to historicize the concepts of classical political economy, namely ‘homo oeconomicus’, ‘market’ and ‘law of tendency’. With reference to the first of these three, Gramsci writes, ‘Homo oeconomicus is the abstraction of the needs and of the economic operations of a particular form of society, just as the ensemble of hypotheses put forward by economists in their scientific work is nothing other than the ensemble of premises that are at the base of a particular form of society.’50 Thus although Gramsci sees the concept of homo oeconomicus as an abstraction, he sees it as one that emanates from the very foundations of bourgeois society; within the historical limits of this society, it legitimately acts as a cornerstone of the science of the economy. In a similar fashion, several passages of the Prison Notebooks feature epistemological glosses on the notions of ‘determined market’ and ‘law of tendency’, which Gramsci sees as the decisive contributions of economics following David Ricardo (1772–1823). From his prison cell Gramsci is in frequent contact with his friend Piero Sraffa (1898–1983), a neo-Ricardian economist who had moved to Cambridge in 1927, and often in his letters to Sraffa he develops his intuitions on the economy. However, we follow Krätke in concluding that Gramsci’s project of the development of a ‘critical economics’ remains at a very rough and exploratory stage, noting that it was extremely difficult for him to put his hands on the original texts of political economy while in prison.51
Despite lacking the textual resources to engage in the critique of political economy, at several points in the Prison Notebooks Gramsci demonstrates a genuine originality in his reflections on the economy, perhaps most clearly in his thoughts on the consequences of changes in the world of production of American capitalism. Gramsci’s notebook 22, titled ‘Americanism and Fordism’ and written in 1934, is remarkable in many respects, not least because it is one of the rare examples in the Prison Notebooks of a more or less structured and consistent text, focused on a single problematic. In addition, by focusing mainly on the evolution of the character of production in the United States, Gramsci focuses primarily on economic reality, somewhat contrary to the main pattern of the Prison Notebooks.
Gramsci starts his inquiry by questioning whether the transformations of industrial production in America represent a new organic cycle of capitalism or whether they are only conjunctural alterations that are incapable of ‘constituting an epoch’ (fare epoca). Gramsci did not have access to the full range of documentary sources he considered necessary to answer such a question fully and decisively, and consequently he is quite cautious and does not put forward a definite answer. Nevertheless, he seems to consider that the economic aspects of what he calls ‘Americanism’ constitute a major historical phenomenon with implications on the political, cultural and even anthropological planes.
Most basically, for Gramsci, the historical significance of Americanism is anchored in the specific changes to production methods that it has enacted. Chronologically, the cycle of Americanism starts with Taylorism. Taylorism was the scientific organization of work as pioneered by Frederick Taylor, centred on the rationalization of manual work by decomposing it into a series of minute movements that can then be optimized and performed in tight coordination with the operation of machines. Drawing on Taylorian innovations, Henry Ford succeeded in markedly increasing the productivity of his car factory by generalizing assembly-line work and intensifying the pace of production while paying his workers a wage that was generous for the time (the famous ‘five dollar day’). Starting in the 1910s these innovations of American capitalism started to be discussed and debated in Europe, and some European entrepreneurs began to adopt them (for instance in Louis Renault’s Billancourt factory). In the interwar period, Americanism diffused through Europe – including Lenin’s Soviet Union – and it began to receive more consistent ideological backing.
The originality of Gramsci’s perspective lies not in the perhaps commonplace observation of the universal spread of Americanism but rather in his perception of the consequences of Americanism beyond the productive sphere. Notebook 22 puts forward the powerful hypothesis that Americanism is ‘the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man’.52 For Gramsci the increased intensity of Fordist production methods requires of the worker ‘the creation of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type’.53 Gramsci’s audacity here is remarkable: he is applying to the American economy a notion – ‘to change man’ – typically associated with Leninism.
Adopting a tone almost reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887), Gramsci suggests that the progress of the human species is only actuated through a succession of increasingly ruthless and painful struggles against the ‘animality’ that exists in each individual. The first Industrial Revolution imposed on the nascent proletariat, with what Gramsci calls ‘incredible acts of brutality’, a discipline of body and mind unimaginable in the context of traditional village modes of life.54 Thus in the nineteenth century entire working populations were sacrificed on the altar of industrialism. Gramsci sees, in notebook 22, Americanism as a new phase in the secular process of ‘anthropological reform’ and although he does not deny its tragic aspects, he also emphasizes its ‘inherent necessity’.55
According to Gramsci, Americanism demonstrates that the twentieth century is witnessing a new economic model, that of the ‘planned economy’ or the ‘programmatic economy’. America, with its high degree of economic concentration, represents the avant-garde of this new economic form. In Gramsci’s view the ‘programmatic’ nature of this sort of economy comes from the centrality of the coordination of public and private actions, and extends far beyond the economic sphere in the strict sense. Gramsci thus notes how prohibition (public policy) and the ‘morality inspections’ of the lives of his workers carried out by Henry Ford (private action) both partake in a shared dynamic of the forced ‘rationalization’ of human life. Whereas the conventional interpretation of these events at the time saw in them the signs of an American religious moralism, Gramsci considers this surface analysis to be wrong, since a more deep-seated logic moves under the superficial layer of ‘puritanism’.
Thus even though Gramsci takes in notebook 22 a set of innovations specific to the production process as his starting point, he engages in a much wider reflection centred on the economy. Moreover, one sees in Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism an illustration of the notion of ‘historic bloc’ – that we discuss below – positing the organic solidarity of the economic, political and cultural dimensions of social life. In a sense Gramsci’s reflections here are strikingly prescient: Fordism became a key term in the analysis of the Western world’s socio-economic model only after the Second World War. Gramsci also perceives that the Great Depression would not end Americanism but rather that it would accelerate, particularly through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, the tendency towards the ‘planned economy’.56
Perhaps more than any other section of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci’s thoughts on Americanism and Fordism have been the target of concentrated criticism (especially from French scholars). According to André Tosel, Gramsci here commits the sin of industrialism, putting his faith in the industrial economic system and, like Marx and Lenin before him, conflating the advance of the productive forces with the genuine progress of the human species. Thus Tosel concludes that Gramsci’s belief in a ‘civilizing mission of capitalism’ leads him to fall into a ‘socio-teleology’ whereby the development of capitalism in history is equated with the development of humanity towards a final end state (of communism).57 Jacques Texier, one of the pioneers of Gramscian studies in France, goes as far as to describe Gramsci’s account of the repression of animality here as ‘reactionary’.58
Without necessarily rejecting these criticisms entirely, we can still stress that Gramsci does not depart from what he takes to be the perspective of revolution in his analysis of Americanism. Thus, when referring to Marx’s Capital (1867), he writes that Fordism represents the ‘ultimate stage in the process of progressive attempts by industry to overcome the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’.59 For Gramsci it is important to emphasize that American and European workers would be wrong to take Taylorism or Fordism as such as their enemies. A genuinely revolutionary project must, for Gramsci, consist at least in part in re-appropriating these methods, in the sense of building a future society where innovations in production of this type would no longer be the instruments for the exploitation of one class by another. However, Gramsci does note that under capitalism Americanism can only be imposed ‘top-down’ onto the masses of workers. Therefore, it constitutes for Gramsci a type of twentieth-century ‘passive revolution’ (see Chapter 3 on ‘passive revolution’), since it is based on the necessity of imposing Fordist practices on the economy by fundamentally coercive means.
Point of arrival: The ‘historic bloc’
Gramsci’s reflections on economic questions – including his development of the starting points of a critical economics and his investigation of Fordist changes in production methods – can be seen as developing a conception of society that constitutes a decisive step beyond a crude reading of the base–superstructure metaphor. Although Gramsci refers frequently to the base–superstructure model in the Prison Notebooks, it is clear that for him the base does not ‘determine’ the superstructure in a straightforward and uniform way. A slightly iconoclastic reading of Gramsci – defended by Norberto Bobbio and Jean-Marc Piotte – goes as far as to hold that the superstructure is the pre-eminent and determining level of Gramsci’s thought.60
A more plausible reading might be that for Gramsci the base and the superstructure instead constitute moments of equivalent importance in social life.61 At any rate it seems crucial for Gramsci that these two levels are not understood as static realities with purely exogenous relations with each other; instead Gramsci contends that the Basis and the Überbau of any given society interpenetrate one other, with each level ceaselessly acting on and partly constituting the other. Gramsci calls the concrete unity between the base and the superstructure at any given point in history a ‘historic bloc’, asserting, ‘Structures and superstructures form an “historic bloc” (blocco storico).’62
Although Gramsci does not use the expression ‘historic bloc’ frequently in the Prison Notebooks, it is an essential part of his thought.63 In his discussion of the Risorgimento, Gramsci shows how the unification wars led by the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia generated a specific historic bloc founded on a series of traits: the economic domination of the Northern industrial bourgeoisie in objective alliance with the landowners of the South; the political dominance of Piedmont and of an elite that was molecularly assimilated by the new order through the subsequent process of trasformismo; the social passivity of the peasantry, which was at the scale of the villages absorbed into patronage networks controlled by local ‘notables’; and the subalternity of the Northern industrial proletariat, which was at once too limited numerically and too privileged economically when compared to the peasantry not to engage in particularist, ‘corporatist’ demands and aspirations.64
While the social situation of Italy in the wake of the Risorgimento is perhaps Gramsci’s central example of a historic bloc, Gramsci discerns another historic bloc in the political struggles of the French Revolution, as we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 5. Beyond the interaction of economic and political variables we should also stress that a historic bloc must be understood in relation to the ideological landscape of society, that is by reference to the state of philosophy and the nature of the common sense that predominates at the time. The notion of a historic bloc serves for Gramsci to denote the aspect of unity that can obtain at the level of the whole of society, such that the unity of that society becomes operative through the solidarity of its parts. Simon argues that the notion of historic bloc indicates the situations in which a hegemonic class is able to combine leadership in the sphere of production with its leadership of a block of interests in civil society.65 This is one of Gramsci’s most complex concepts, and in Chapter 7 we attempt to place it into an extended historical context, arguing that it may also be possible to see a historic bloc in situations where there is no hegemony.
The notion of a historic bloc also, for Gramsci, has historiographical and methodological implications. First, seeing society as a historic bloc implies putting into question a notion of historical science divided into separate subfields such as ‘economic history’, ‘social history’, ‘political history’, ‘history of ideas’ and so on. The point for Gramsci is not to devalue detailed and rigorous historical inquiry, or to deny the relative autonomy of each individual dimension of social life, but rather to pay attention to the social whole in order to move from analysis to synthesis. It is only by comprehending the relations between all of the parts within the whole that any one part can be fully understood.
With respect to the base–superstructure metaphor and its possible place within the methodology of Marxism, the historic bloc also appears to represent an overcoming or moving beyond (as opposed to a simple negation) of the levels metaphor. Although the heuristic value of the Basis–Überbau coupling may endure, its explanatory power is reduced to the extent that the goal of historical inquiry is seen as thinking through the dynamic unity of the levels of base and superstructure within the historic bloc.
Here Gramsci converges with the other Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century who have attempted, with quite different theoretical tools, to relativize or qualify the base–superstructure metaphor in order to emphasize a notion of social totality.66 It is no coincidence that Althusser simultaneously accused Gramsci, Lukács and Sartre dissolving the base–superstructure distinction into historicism.67
Materialism, idealism and Croce
Gramsci’s philosophy reaches its conclusion in his understanding of Marxism as the ‘philosophy of praxis’. Although the circumlocution serves to thwart prison censorship (see Chapter 1), it also, importantly, expresses Gramsci’s distinctive conception of Marxism.68 It is also significant that the phrase appears increasingly frequently in later notebooks, suggesting the maturation of Gramsci’s thought on this point.
The starting point of the philosophy of praxis is the rejection of the two philosophical traditions that are anterior to Marx’s thought: materialism and idealism. Gramsci observes that the Marxist tradition, and Marxist thought in his own day, is itself torn between these two poles, either converted into the vulgar materialism of the Second International and Nikolai Bukharin or transfigured into a vehicle for the renaissance of idealism among, for instance, the Italian neo-idealists led by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. The young Marx’s original intention, as explicated in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), was to put forward a superior dialectical synthesis of these two schools, and almost a century later Gramsci attempts to carry through this project in order to renew Marxist thought.69
Here Gramsci relies in part on the thought of Antonio Labriola (1843–1904). In his Essay on the Materialist Conception of History (1896) Labriola had revealed himself to be a pioneer of the critique of materialism from within the Marxism of the Second International. From Gramsci’s perspective philosophical materialism consists in the translation of economism into the realm of ontology, as it posits that material phenomena constitute the foundational reality of the universe and wholly determine the contents of human consciousness and the movement of history. Finding its modern origins in the thought of eighteenth-century philosophers such as Denis Diderot, materialism was reformulated as a critique of Hegelianism by Ludwig Feuerbach that was then submitted to the decisive critique of the young Marx.70
Although materialism aimed to be the ‘antidote’ to metaphysics, Gramsci – not without irony – draws an analogy between the two. ‘Vulgar materialism’, he writes, ‘“divinises” a hypostasis of matter’.71 Gramsci, in his typically historicist vein, defines metaphysics as ‘any systematic formulation that is put forward as an extra-historical truth, as an abstract universal outside of time and space’.72 Materialism, then, is for Gramsci a religion of matter, which in its Marxist version expects revolution as the Christian believers in predestination anticipated the grace of God. Gramsci had little time for this vulgar ‘necessitarianism’, which he located in Bukharin’s 1921 Popular Manual. Bukharin’s tendency to present a Marxism adorned with the trappings of a positivist sociology is not at all what Gramsci will come to mean by the philosophy of praxis.
The critique of philosophical idealism presented Gramsci with a greater intellectual challenge, not least because he confronts two worthy adversaries: Croce and Gentile. These two thinkers had read and absorbed Marx, eventually rejecting him at the turn of the twentieth century to promote their own neo-idealist syntheses.73 Gentile, who would later become an intellectual figurehead of fascism and whose education policy we discussed in Chapter 2, had made his reputation with his Philosophy of Marx (1899). In this text, Gentile argues for a radically subjectivist reading of Marx’s thought, one inspired by Fichte and giving a privileged place to the notion of praxis. At one point Gramsci was highly influenced by Gentile’s philosophy, as was a large section of the Italian revolutionary youth. However, Gentile’s thought can be seen to lead to ‘actualism’, that is the consecration of the act as a philosophical absolute without adequate consideration of the social environment of the subject. In Gentile’s neo-idealist conception of praxis, it becomes detached from society, turning inwards and leading to a ‘mystique of the subject’.74
Although Gentile clearly influences the development of Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis, Croce stands as one of the central figures in the whole of the Prison Notebooks and one of the most important of the ‘concrete adversaries’ that Gramsci had noted he needed an engagement with to develop his thought (see Chapter 1). Today, although the name of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) may be reasonably well-known within philosophy, his works are not widely read. In the first half of the twentieth century, though, Croce was one of the foremost intellectual authorities in Europe. Coming from the Abruzzo region of Southern Italy, Croce was a student of Labriola and was influenced by the latter’s attempt to put forward an anti-scientistic interpretation of Marxism against the mechanistic materialism that dominated the Second International of the time. While Croce was initially attracted to a sort of Labriolan socialism, by the time of a 1899 letter to Giovanni Gentile he was in a position to assert that ‘the sound, realistic core of Marx’s thought should be freed’ from Marxism.75 He later denounced ‘rigid orthodox Marxism’ for seeing the economy as the ‘hidden God’ of human history.76
Having settled in Naples and left Marxism behind, Croce set out in the early decades of the twentieth century to elaborate, following Hegel, a neo-idealist philosophical system centred on a ‘dialectic of distincts’. By this he meant a network of overlapping conceptual oppositions that he was to devote his career to reworking time and again.77 At the same time, Croce conceived history as the progress of the idea of freedom, ultimately manifesting the perfectibility of mankind. Croce was a prolific thinker, and in publishing works of history, political philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and logic, he eventually rose to become the most visible intellectual in Italy. In contrast to Gentile, he refused to rally to Mussolini, although he remained in Italy during fascism and continued to publish without being troubled by the regime.
The young Gramsci was an enthusiastic reader of Croce, and in the 1917 pamphlet La Città futura described him as the ‘greatest European thinker of the age’, while a letter from prison cites a description of Croce as ‘Italy’s greatest prose writer after Manzoni’.78 Although Gramsci was to distance himself from Croce on the issue of socialism, he did embrace in particular two aspects of Croce’s thought: the critique of the kind of positivism that had been in fashion in post-Risorgimento Italy, and the emphasis on the ‘ethical-political’ dimension of human action that provided an important contrast to the ‘vulgar determinism’ of some Marxist thinkers of the time.79
Although Gramsci’s admiration for Croce would not disappear, as the Prison Notebooks develop it becomes increasingly counterbalanced by acerbic criticism of Croce’s philosophical and political positions. It is precisely because Croce’s thought exercised such a cultural influence on educated Italians – for whom Gramsci thought him to be the ‘secular Pope’ – that Gramsci takes him as a favoured target while in prison.80 In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci even sketches the outlines of an ‘anti-Croce’, modelled on Engels’s famous Anti-Dühring (1878). For Croce’s idealist and speculative historicism Gramsci aims to substitute a fully ‘terrestrial’ philosophy: the ‘absolute historicism’ that we discuss below. Moreover, Gramsci denounces Croce’s attitude of haughty aloofness from the events of ‘real’ history, seeing it in a ‘political morphinism’ that is all the more pernicious given that Italy was experiencing the horrors of a fascist regime.81
Croce was in fact later to write of Gramsci, in a 1947 review of a collection of the latter’s Prison Letters published after the Second World War: ‘As a man of thought, he was one of us’.82 The post-war period was to be the twilight of Crocean thought since reaction against neo-idealism within Italian philosophy and the rapid diffusion of Marxism in Italy after 1945 combined to eclipse Croce’s previously towering figure. Nevertheless, we can note that Croce’s neo-idealism remained a key point of reference for Gramsci in his development of the philosophy of praxis as the attempt to achieve a dialectical synthesis of materialism and idealism.
Thus rejecting Gentile and Croce, Gramsci looks to consolidate the intellectual basis of a ‘philosophy of praxis’ able to avoid materialism and idealism, and also able to escape falling entirely either on the side of the object (thereby creating an objectivism of matter) or on the side of the subject (leading to a subjectivism of action). Gramsci’s solution to this philosophical problem is what Tosel calls ‘situated praxis’, which displays the dialectical unity of society (as historic bloc) and human critical-practical activity (as praxis).83 Thus although human beings are subject to the influence of social circumstances, they are themselves able to modify these circumstances. While it is true, then, that the social environment is the ‘educator’ of men, it is equally true that, in a phrase of the young Marx’s from the third of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) of which Gramsci was fond, ‘the educator must himself be educated’.84
Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis thus allows an escape from metaphysics, in the sense that neither matter nor human subjectivity are converted into absolutes, which for Gramsci can only happen to one of these terms to the detriment of the other. Gramsci takes matter and human subjectivity to be in relations of co-constitution in an environment of an entirely historical character. Thus the philosophy of praxis also represents for Gramsci a philosophy of history, a Weltanschauung that is exclusively anchored in the real world, and a fully terrestrial or ‘earthly’ discourse that rejects any notion of transcendence in favour of absolute immanence.85
Gramsci’s thought here implies, among other things, that any intellectual construction – including the philosophy of praxis itself – is tied to concrete history and expresses a specific moment of that history. The knowledge of human beings, whatever its nature, emerges for Gramsci from historical becoming, even if it is then converted into praxis and thereby affects history. Therefore we can agree with Christine Buci-Glucksmann that Gramsci’s philosophy is a ‘gnosiology’, that is a theory of knowledge that above all historically grounds the products of human thought.86
If it is true, then, that no philosophy can escape history, then the philosophy of praxis is the only system of thought fearlessly to accept this fact and fully to embrace its implications. As Gramsci writes, the ‘philosophy of praxis not only claimed to explain and to justify all the past, but to explain and justify historically itself as well. That is, it was the greatest form of “historicism”, total liberation from any form of abstract “ideologism”, the real conquest of the historical world, the beginnings of a new civilisation’.87
Thus we can see the true breadth of Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis: it constitutes nothing less than the beginnings of a ‘new civilization’ and ‘the result and crowning point of all previous history’, and that it is a ‘new culture in incubation, which will develop with the development of social relations’.88 Gramsci’s reference to the development of Marxism with the development of social relations suggests that Gramsci sees Marxism as a philosophy that is able to move past petrifying dogmatism and inherit from Marx’s thought by continually reaching beyond it. The process of the elaboration of the philosophy of praxis is, for Gramsci, a continuous task that must be carried out in tight conjunction with revolutionary activity.
Gramsci also considers the philosophy of praxis to be a ‘humanism’: it is based on the centrality of human critical-practical activity in history. The world is for Gramsci neither the slave of matter nor of the Idea, nor particularly of the divine. Rather, it belongs in full to the human species to the precise extent that it is forged by collective human praxis. To avoid any misunderstanding, it is important to clarify here that Gramsci’s humanism is not the same as that of the Renaissance ‘men of letters’. Instead, Gramsci’s humanism rests on a very specific conception of what man is, centrally defined by anti-naturalism (and explored in more detail in the first section of this chapter).
We can conclude with a famous passage from the Prison Notebooks in which Gramsci brings together many of the elements that we have discussed: ‘The philosophy of praxis is the absolute “historicism”, the absolute secularisation and earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of history. It is along this line that one must trace the thread of the new conception of the world.’89 The striking phrase ‘absolute historicism’ inspired many later polemics, perhaps most influentially in the work of Louis Althusser. Althusser, in his 1968 essay ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’, sees in this expression of Gramsci’s a serious and distorting ‘blunder’. Nonetheless, the idea of the philosophy of praxis as an absolute historicism is the logical conclusion of Gramsci’s philosophy, and it is clear that he believes this interpretation to be the only viable one of Marxist philosophy.
The revolution of common sense
For Gramsci, the philosophy of praxis is synonymous with revolution in a number of ways. First, it entails a revolution in the area of ideology: absolute historicism, as discussed above, requires the simultaneous critique of all past philosophical doctrines. For Gramsci, though, this critique should not take the form of an indiscriminate denunciation (which Gramsci criticizes Bukharin and other Marxists for having done in their writings on culture), but rather the grasping of the rationality of every conception of the world in the very limits of its historicity. ‘Of the past let us make a clean slate’, as The Internationale puts it, is thus not a Gramscian precept; Gramsci instead contends that it is only historical becoming that can enact the overcoming of movements of ideas, and thus any philosophy aspiring to be revolutionary must recognize the importance of history in systems of thought of the past. The philosophy of praxis is thus based for Gramsci on the critical absorption of a number of intellectual currents of the past, including the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the French Enlightenment and German classical philosophy. The question of the appropriate relation to the cultural and philosophical heritage of the past is a problematic that underlies much of Gramsci’s thought.90
The philosophy of praxis, though, first and foremost spells revolution in the sphere of concrete political activity: ‘The philosophy of praxis … does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society but is rather the very theory of these contradictions.’91 Gramsci’s understanding of the historic bloc is based on what he takes to be the fundamental truth of the class struggle. The proletariat, with the Communist Party at its head and armed with the theoretical weapon of the philosophy of praxis, will for Gramsci be the collective subject of a revolution that will put an end to social contradictions by abolishing capitalism.
At this point, Gramsci raises the question of how to ‘operate’ the link between, on the one hand, the philosophy of praxis as the doctrine of absolute historicism and, on the other, the mass of the ‘subalterns’ for whom Marxism is not a ‘spontaneous’ thought product. Gramsci understands this question as concerning the possible relation between the philosophy of praxis and common sense; he cannot accept the idea that the philosophy of praxis would be the specific culture of an elite of professional revolutionaries whose mission would be to lead a proletariat deprived of a full understanding of the historical process to the ‘grand soir’ of the revolution. Gramsci asserts instead that the subaltern classes must be the genuine, conscious subject of revolutionary praxis.
Gramsci responds to this practical challenge by formulating the notion of ‘the revolution of common sense’. The common sense of the dominated classes in society – which is also for Gramsci, as we have seen above, their own philosophy and Weltanschauung – must be worked on tirelessly in view of making it a favourable soil for the growth of the philosophy of praxis. In turn, the philosophy of praxis must be transformed into a new common sense through direct contact with the subaltern classes. The authentic intellectual support of the proletariat for Marxism validates, in Gramsci’s view, the historicity of the philosophy of praxis and thus constitutes a necessary step towards revolution.
It is perhaps no surprise that the key figure in this long-term process of ideological work is the organic intellectual, who Gramsci sees as the ‘permanent persuader’ of the revolution. The intellectual’s mission is to build in conjunction with the dominated classes in society an educational relation that is founded on consent while also being able to enact the progressive passage from conformity to spontaneity (see Chapter 2). Gramsci here applies the idea that the educator must always in turn be educated, and describes the reciprocal movement between the organic intellectuals and the proletariat as ‘living philology’, which enables the revolutionary leaders and militants to merge in a collective organism.92
Using an expression that he takes from Georges Sorel, and which originates in Ernest Renan, Gramsci calls this great upheaval of the mind ‘intellectual and moral reform’.93 This intellectual and moral reform is a direct consequence of the interrelation Gramsci sees between the philosophy of the masses and the philosophy of the elite. As Gramsci concludes, the ‘relation between common sense and the upper level of philosophy is assured by “politics”’.94 Ultimately, then, for Gramsci politics and philosophy are most intimately joined through the revolution of common sense.
1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, volume 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 182.
2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, volume 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 4.
3 Ibid., p. 3.
4 Ibid., p. 4.
5 Étienne Balibar, ‘Gramsci, Marx et le rapport social’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 259–70.
6 Q11§12; SPN, p. 324.
7 Q11§12; GR, p. 326.
8 ‘Socialism and Culture’, Il Grido del Popolo, 29 January 1916; SPWI, p. 13.
9 Q11§12; SPN, p. 323.
10 See Jean-Marc Piotte, La Pensée politique de Gramsci (Montréal: Parti-Pris, 1970).
11 Q10II§54; SPN, p. 352.
12 Thomas argues for retaining the Italian term over the English, both because of the difficulties of translating senso comune as ‘common sense’ and also to designate a genuinely new concept and mark the importance of Gramsci’s addition to our philosophical vocabulary. See Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 16n61.
13 Q24§4; SPN, p. 326n5; SCW, p. 421.
14 Q11§13; SPN, p. 419.
15 Q11§12; SPN, pp. 325–6.
16 Q11§13; SPN, p. 423.
17 Ibid., p. 419.
18 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 12 October 1931; LP, p. 216.
19 Q24§4; SPN, p. 326n5; SCW, p. 421.
20 Q10II§17; SPN, p. 345.
21 Q11§13; SPN, p. 419. Gramsci also notes that common sense as the ‘folklore of philosophy’ puts it ‘always half-way between folklore properly speaking and the philosophy, science, and economics of the specialists’. He continues, ‘Common sense creates the folklore of the future, that is a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at a given place and time.’ (See Q24§4; SCW, p. 421; SPN, p. 326n5.)
22 In his own way Roland Barthes, in his Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), also dissects the phenomenon by which the fantasies and collective images of a given epoch are manifest only in the fallacious guise of universal essences that naturalize history.
23 Q11§12; SPN, p. 328.
24 Guido Liguori, Sentieri gramsciani (Rome: Carocci, 2006).
25 See Crehan, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology.
26 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 3.
27 The notion of ‘palimpsest’ is from Marcia Landy, Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
28 Q7§19; SPN, p. 376.
29 Q11§12; SPN, p. 328.
30 Q7§19; SPN, pp. 376–7.
31 Q11§12; SPN, p. 330.
32 Ibid., p. 325.
33 Ibid., p. 326.
34 Q11§13; SPN, p. 420.
35 Ibid., p. 420.
36 Q27§1; SCW, p. 190.
37 Q11§12; SPN, p. 326.
38 Ibid., p. 328.
39 Ibid., p. 328.
40 Ibid., pp. 328–9.
41 Ibid., p. 340.
42 Ibid., p. 340.
43 Ibid., p. 340.
44 Q13§1; SPN, p. 132. See also SPN, p. 132n14.
45 Q16§19; SPN, p. 397.
46 Q17§51; SPN, p. 266.
47 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, volume 29 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), p. 263.
48 Q7§24; SPN, p. 407.
49 Ibid., p. 407.
50 Q10II§27; SPN, p. 400n39.
51 Michael Krätke, ‘Antonio Gramsci’s Contribution to a Critical Economics’, Historical Materialism, 19:3 (2011), pp. 63–105.
52 Q22§11; SPN, p. 302.
53 Ibid., pp. 302–3.
54 Q22§10, SPN, p. 298.
55 Q22§1, SPN, p. 279.
56 Christian Barrère, ‘Gramsci et la Troisième Internationale face à l’évolution du capitalisme’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 123–46.
57 André Tosel, Marx en italiques (Paris: Trans Europ Repress, 1991).
58 Jacques Texier, ‘Gramsci face à l’américanisme + Examen du Cahier 22 des Quaderni del carcere’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 347–79.
59 Q22§1; SPN, p. 280.
60 See Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione della societa civile’, and Piotte, La Pensée politique de Gramsci.
61 See Hugues Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972); Thomas, The Gramscian Moment.
62 Q8§182; SPN, p. 366.
63 Portelli, Gramsci et le bloc historique.
64 See Chapter 5 for a full account of the significance of ‘corporatism’ for Gramsci and its role in his theory of hegemony.
65 See Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought.
66 In particular, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1923), Franz Jakubowski’s Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism (Danzig: Fooken, 1936), and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Search for a Method (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
67 Louis Althusser, ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’, in: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, translated by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970).
68 See Tosel, ‘Modernité de Gramsci?’; Thomas, The Gramscian Moment.
69 See Tosel, Marx en italiques.
70 Although Marx and Engels later embraced the term ‘materialism’, Gramsci seems sceptical of this decision since he holds it to encourage a relapse into economism.
71 Q11§32; SPN, p. 469.
72 Q11§14; SPN, p. 437.
73 Tosel, Marx en italiques.
74 Domenico Losurdo, ‘Gramsci, Gentile, Marx et les philosophies de la praxis’, in: André Tosel (ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: Actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992), pp. 381–412.
75 Cited in Tosel, Marx en italiques.
76 See Benedetto Croce, Storia della Storiografia Italiana nel Secolo Decimonono (Bari: Laterza, 1921).
77 Tosel, Marx en italiques.
78 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 25 April 1932; LP, p. 233. The description is from a French account of contemporary Italian literature, written by Benjamin Crémeiux and published in Paris in 1928. Gramsci continues the letter, though, by arguing that Croce’s prose in fact derives more from the great Italian writers of scientific prose, centrally Galileo, than it does from Manzoni.
79 Losurdo, ‘Comunismo critico’.
80 Letter to Tatiana Schucht, 7 September 1931; LP, p. 203.
81 Q15§62; SPN, p. 114.
82 Cited in Losurdo, ‘Comunismo critico’.
83 Tosel, Le Marxisme du XXe siècle.
84 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 4.
85 See Q11§27; SPN, p. 465.
86 Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State.
87 Q16§19; SPN, p. 399.
88 See Q15§61; SPN, p. 417; Q16§19; SPN, p. 398.
89 Q11§27; SPN, p. 465.
90 Losurdo, ‘Comunismo critico’.
91 Q10§II§41xii; FSPN, p. 395.
92 Q11§25; SPN, p. 429.
93 Q13§1; SPN, p. 132.
94 Q11§12; SPN, p. 331.