REVIEWS

...LIKE HEGEL'S OWL, Gramsci's thought spread its wings after dusk had fallen on the political landscape...

...he expected the Italian revolution to be a continuation of national aspirations that had been at work ever since the time of the Risorgimento or even the Renaissance...

...Why did the rising medieval cities not achieve the breakthrough toward modern capitalism...

...The Hoare-Smith selections deal with history, education, and philosophy, but their centerpiece is political power and organization...

...To find the right middle course between these two extremes, the Party must have a better understanding of its role than Marx, or even Lenin, had bestowed on their heirs...

...hence Renaissance humanists were "reactionary...

...Gramsci directed his most abrasive criticism against materialists and positivists, especially when they pretended to be Marxists...

...He even understood Mussolini, and under the strange conditions in which he wrote he often confused the two: whether to conceal from his jailers his thoughts about fascism or to conceal his thoughts about Stalin, he was able to tell the truth about the one by citing the other...

...Meanwhile, the task was twofold: to preserve these forces from reformist contamination, and to preserve the one bastion the revolution had gained in Russia...

...How is history a priori possible...

...Gramsci had been under •the influence of Benedetto Croce, the ex-Marxist, neo-Hegelian liberal philosopher, and his views on Machiavelli and historical subjects still show this indebtedness...

...This was the truly heroic phase of his life as a revolutionist...

...What is amazing in Gramsci's review of his political experience is that he does not look for tactical mistakes or accidents' of history, but subjects his entire conception of politics to a thorough revision...

...Ideas were not either true or false but usable or unusable—or they could simply be flags: commenting on the factional fight in Moscow, Gramsci wrote that what mattered was not whose position was correct but who belonged to the faction holding a particular view...

...He never answers these questions...

...Today there is hardly a major city in Italy without a Via Gramsci...

...Following Croce and other Italian philosophers, Gramsci calls these speculations "philosophy of practice," which he equates with Marxism...

...Why has neither of the two Italian revolutions produced a Jacobin party...

...Many of the ideas are tentative, contradictory and inchoate, few are original...

...With less philosophical precision than Hegel (or Lukacs, for that matter), Gramsci's dialectics nevertheless aimed at a similar reconciliation...

...The Communist movement has taken advantage of this reputation and cultivates the myth...

...Gramsci asks these questions: Why does Italy not produce the kind of revolution that shook Germany during the Reformation, or France in 1789, or Russia in 1917...

...When the Center and Left parties were boycotting Mussolini's parliament, they remembered this and met on Mount Aventinus...

...He is concerned that professionalism could take over from the political directors, and he recommends a rigid classical education for the political elite (no "progressive," still less a "per missive" educator, he distrusted Dalton and "educational libertarians...

...his writings in that period still have the earthy quality of populism...

...Such formulations as "Man makes himself," which Sartre later was to popularize, came easily to Gramsci from other sources, as they did come to Lukacs even before Marx's "early manuscripts" be came available...

...between that party's need to possess moral authority (for which the code word is "hegemony") and the necessity, alas, of using coercion...

...HAD GRAMSCI LIVED LONGER, or had he been able to read German, he might have called his philosophy existentialist...

...It had been observed often before that the counterrevolution fulfills the work of the revolution...

...Kant asked, and answered, "If the prophet contrives that which he predicts...

...Like most Marxists then, he completely misjudged the character of the fascists state—a misconception Mussolini proceeded to correct...

...but the form it assumed was mistaken...

...The mechanism of "hegemony," therefore, is studied in a sequence of aphorisms, entitled "The New Prince," with a not too subtle allusion to Machiavelli and written in his vein as commentaries to paradigmatic events...

...Readers who skip footnotes and tire of turgid disquisitions can get a more concise, though essentially complete view of Gramsci in Louis Marx's edition, The New Prince and Other Writings (same publisher, 1957...

...One of many examples: Bukharin is taken to task for adopting the natural sciences' definition of prediction as the test of truth...

...Why was the Renaissance the work of princes and not of the middle class...

...He was deeply convinced, with Marx, that the Communists "do not try to realize any ideals" but must lead each nation toward the fulfillment of its destiny—molding that destiny in the process, to be sure, but not changing it...

...This leaves us baffled as to the relationship of theory and practice at all other times...

...Therefore, a Communst writer could recently say that Mussolini actually did Gramsci a favor when he forced him to think in solitude...

...Gramsci calls such a revolution from above "passive" or "restoration/ revolution...

...The "New Prince" rejects the traditional, cosmopolitan humanists whose concern is with ideas, and he resolutely supports the "organic intellectuals" who do not BOOKS even have to be intellectuals but are techno crats, bureaucrats, political leaders, and above all activists close to the national temper...

...New York: International Publishers...

...Gramsci apparently never read Das Kapital and his background in economics is weak...

...Their early sympathies lay with Wobbly-type activism, and they were strongly influenced by such thinkers as Georges Sorel and Antonio Labriola, who injected a dose of "idealism" into Marxist theory and counted on the spontaneous creativity of the masses...

...There is a tragic parallel between the ultraLeft Marx after the lost revolution of 1848-49 and the bolshevization of the European intellectuals after the lost revolutions of 1919-21...

...A more interventionist government must take the offensive against oppositionists...

...Here Gramsci's submerged syndicalism is allowed •to surface for a fu4tive moment...

...his Marxism was the kind of pragmatism, actionism, or vitalism that Mussolini and Gentile, too, were cultivating...

...The ultimate truth is the convergence of Stalin and Mussolini, Marx and Christ, revolution and religion...

...with controls everywhere reinforcing the hegemonial position of the dominant group...

...But Gramsci, I am sorry to say, does not get very far beyond Machiavelli...

...All differences are submerged in a total relativism and, paradoxically, the philosophy of praxis has no handle to deal with reality...

...Gramsci's doubts about Marxist-Leninist dogma are not hidden but, where possible, pointed out...

...His philosophy here gets avowedly idealistic: the hope for that moment is kept alive in the spirit while Stalin's and Mussolini's mills are grinding away...

...Neither edition quotes enough material from Lo Stato Operaio, which was the earliest selection from Gramsci's writings...

...His criticism of Bukharin's Historical Materialism (long the Comintern's catechism) is devastating though unfair.' 2 Gramsci's unfairness shows in infractions of elementary logic...

...This interpretation goes back to Croce, too...

...The Introduction to the volume is excellent, and the numerous footnotes, generally, are very necessary for readers who are unfamiliar with Italian history and philosophy...

...A dangerous maxim, which "in practice" opens the door to any kind of opportunism...

...He should be compared with Lukacs and Korsch: their careers in the radical movement started similarly and then diverged in significant ways...

...But in searching for answers he is led to ask other questions...

...The medieval town and its culture were "internationalist...

...Political society, or Jacobin democracy, is the highest form of consciousness the new class can reach both up to and during the revolution...

...Gramsci's logic is never very tight...

...How could radicalism be shunted aside in the Risorgimento...

...482 pp...

...He had a better understanding of Stalin's historical role than Stalin himself...

...It must be clear by now why Gramsci had to support Stalin against the "cosmopolitan intelligentsia...

...Such an extreme relativism can be justified only if some criterion is found to determine who shall be the agent of history (the historical subject, in Lukacs's language...

...he has never told anyone what his impressions were, nor has he written anything either favorable or unfavorable about the Soviet Union...

...Thereafter, however, civil society expands its functions at the expense of political society, and "the state withers away...

...And, later, Lichtheim quoted an unidentified "Comintern theorist" as describing "fascism as the bourgeois revolution in the age of bourgeois counterrevolution...

...WITHIN THIS LIMITATION, Gramsci is interesting...

...Did not the Social Democrats base their critique of bolshevism on the dogma that Russia was not ready for socialism...

...In this new English one-volume edition of the Notebooks, the Gramsci Institute makes a show of even-handedness: the exhaustive introduction gives due credit to Trotsky and Radek for their contributions to the Communist International...

...Positive" science and sociology condemned the proletariat to fight on its enemies' premises, which led to reformism...

...What is the relationship between society and the dominant class, and between both BOOKS and the leading elite...

...Is it possible that fascism relates to the Russian Revolution as the Prussian bureaucrats did to the Jacobins...

...Much of the work is repetitious...

...he is still in suspense between Fortuna and Virtu, between the conditions ripening in civil society (Hegel's bilrgerliche Gesellschaft) and the possibility of action by the leading party...

...He published the weekly Ordine Nuovo, which made the slogan "Democrazia Operaia" (workers' democracy) popular, and propagated the goal of "lo Stato Operaio" much along the lines of Marx's "free association of producers," or of Tito's shop councils...

...If my prediction changes these conditions, then I must predict how my prediction will affect the outcome...

...But the expectation of further "convergence" tempted commentators •to greet Gramsci's numerous deviations from Stalinist rigidity as so many harbingers of a universal Spring of Heresy...

...This, however, is not •the whole story...

...Gramsci was deeply involved with the factory council movement in Northern Italy—the "commission interne," which in 1920 occupied the factories...

...If that is the case, there would be no excuse for seeking a deep, esoteric meaning behind the much-abused notion of "praxis," which is so dear to the New Left philosophers...

...Did not •the Prussian bureaucrats introduce the same reforms the Revolution introduced in France...

...his political personality was a living lie...

...Later that year he went to Moscow and stayed for 18 months...

...he distinguishes it sharply from the "traditional intellectuals" (whom we can easily identify with Mannheim's "free-floating intellectuals") . To explain Gramsci's aversion to "traditional intellectuals," we must think of what he regards as windbags like Settembrini, or his model Mazzini who failed to understand what the people wanted in the Risorgimento...

...Gramsci calls this agent of history "the organic intelligentsia...

...While he condemns Trotsky's proposal to militarize labor, he adds: "The principle of coercion . . . in the ordering of production or work is correct...

...The demiurge can only be the conscious strata of the proletariat, or the "intellectuals" representing it who constitute the political society and whose interests are general...

...the importance of Amadeo Bordiga, the ultra-Left founder of the Italian CP, and of Ignazio Silone is acknowledged critically but honestly...

...Korsch was associated with the Rate movement in Germany, and later with the Spanish anarchists...

...In this protean formlessness Gramsci's neoHegelian, post-Marxian, and pre-existentialist philosophy became the suitable ideology for all—alienated intellectuals who look for a theory of action, left-wing Christian Democrats looking for an unorthodox Marxist with whom to hold a dialogue, and Communist opportunists looking for a certified martyr to legitimize their application for cabinet posts...

...he never spoke of alienation, but he railed against `libertinism" and agreed with Ford that "the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized...

...He probably had learned from Croce and Lukacs that Marxism should be con sidered not as a system but as a critique and a method—a method that, following Max Weber, he also applied to specific historical doctrines of Marx...

...Of course, I mean to suggest, not that Gramsci was a fascist, but that he was drawing on contemporary philosophies that also were available to others...

...Paper, $4.52...

...I do not of course hold this against Gramsci...

...This also was Stalin's opinion, and it was not only relevant but also rather confusing...

...Intellectuality totalitaria may refer both to the personnel and to the required at titude or conception of its function...

...Both Lukacs and Gramsci use "totalitarian" in this honorific sense...

...In Rome, an Istituto Gramsci piously guards Gramsci's papers pertaining to the turbulent history of the CPI, as well as the 2848 densely covered pages of his "Quaderni" (notebooks), reflecting his wide reading in history and the anxieties of the prisoner whose aspiration for a place in history were, for a time, frustrated...

...Gramsci's writing is neither elegant nor deep, neither enlighteningly precise nor gripping in human substance...

...For instance, Bordiga and Gramsci accused each other of lacking zeal in supporting "democratic centralism" when they really meant something very different...

...The Prison Notebooks testify that Gramsci was not afraid to draw some conclusions at variance with the established school of "MarxismLeninism...

...He ridiculed Plekhanov and Bukharin, who spent time and effort to prove that the universe was made of matter, that man was governed by inexorable, deterministic laws, and that Marxism was a science...

...However, he does not follow the earlier revisionists who simply gave up the revolutionary outlook, but goes back deeply into Italian history and tradition...

...Now Gramsci came to an uncanny, perverse understanding of what was happening in the Soviet Union: Trotsky's position had to be condemned not because he was wrong but because he was right...

...Gramsci therefore rejected theories that claim objective validity, especially those based on material conditions...

...How can one class achieve "hegemony" over the others in a national revolution, and how does the revolutionary elite (whom he also calls the intellectuals) achieve "hegemony" over the revolutionary classes...

...Only the CP returned to the Capitolinus...

...He returned to Italy to "bolshevize" the CPI, fought the "leftist deviation" of Bordiga and the "rightist deviation" of Tasca (who believed in trade union action and proletarian culture), but above all denounced the Social Democrats and Liberals, and led the Communists out of the Aventinian alliance.' Gramsci thought that the CP could operate legally under fascism, and he treated the Socialists as the "major enemy...

...To be sure, John XXIII did not repudiate the immaculate conception nor Gramsci the need for -a Party dictatorship...

...Therefore, although he knew that Trotsky was right in fearing the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state and the Bolshevist party, he nevertheless fought ruthlessly for the Stalin-Bukharin line—or, rather, for the Russia First line in the International and in the CPI...

...In this period Gramsci was neither undogmatic nor accommodating...

...but a coherent sequence dealing with Croce (about 200 pages), which is part of the original Italian sixvolume selection, has been totally omitted...

...Twenty years later, the provincial government (not leftist but Christian Democratic) of his native Sardinia called a "Gramsci Congress," which brought together philosophers, historians, and critics from many countries...

...he capitulated to become Moscow's cultural pope and in his later years was an epitome of Leninist sterility...

...Lukacs's early Luxem burgism and idealism came under heavy criticism in the Comintern...

...And what are the conditions for the rise of a revolutionary elite...

...Gramsci was least admirable in this period, when he was the Secretary of the CPI...

...Gramsci quotes Vico's "verum ipsum factum" (true is what I did myself) and a proverb that was dear to Mussolini, too: Act first, then think...

...BOOKS Henry Pachter Gramsci—Stalinist Without Dogma SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith...

...Was not Kautsky's complacent determinism to blame for the labor movement's collapse in 1914 and for the failure of the European revolutions after World War I? No doctrine could be more pernicious to good politics than the belief in scientific predictions...

...The editors of The Prison Notebook suggest that fear of the censor imposed the "Aesopian" term...

...He was as averse to metaphysics as to sociology...

...Absorbing (that's his word) ideas of Pareto, Michels, and Mosca, he studies the revolutionizing effects of modem bureaucracies and other leadership cadres, which leads him to these frightening thoughts: Perhaps a revolution can be achieved through the action of the elite without any need for the revolutionary class to intervene...

...the further development of the revolution no longer depends on the activities of the revolutionary class but on the performance of the bureaucrats, or "funzionarii," the "organic intelligentsia...

...it leads them into the political society, which is of course Rousseau's "general will," or Lukacs's "total aspect...

...Having accepted Stalin's definition of "socialism in one country," Gramsci understood the Russian Revolution as a national revolu tion...

...In an obscure passage, Gramsci refers to the Trotskyite opposition as "black parliamentarianism" representing particular interests in a totalitarian state...

...they were published at a time when, at the other end of the philosophical spectrum, a pope was revising some truths the Church had taken to be established...

...192 pp., paper, $2.25...

...How can I predict, asks Gramsci, if my prediction changes the premises...

...This is regrettable because Gramsci has often said that modern Marxists should relate to contemporary philosophers as Marx did to Hegel and Ricardo—i.e., develop their own ideas in the form of an immanent critique of their predecessors...

...The proletariat as such certainly is not that agent, since it is part of that civil society that lacks consciousness and since its interests are not universal...

...My prediction refers to the conditions extant before any new element is added...

...Such moments, however, are rare in the selections we are given and totally absent in the published fragments...

...In numerous passages one gets a glimpse of their differences...

...450 BOOKS Gramsci's attack followed the line of Benedetto Croce, whose sophism had been exploded a hundred years earlier by Kant...

...Although he knew The Roman people, in the fifth century B.C., staged an exodus to Mount Aventinus to obtain rights from the Senate—the first political strike recorded in history...

...Sociology was an ideology of the ruling class— politics an art...

...When Antonio Gramsci's Letters from Prison were first published, ten years after his early death, Benedetto Croce—his old teacher and adversary who survived him—hailed the martyred leader of Italy's Communist party as "one of the great literati of our country...

...Although they may seem original to young researchers who have never seen them in a Marxist author's handwriting, they are very much in the tradition of Italian political thought, from Machiavelli to Mazzini and Gentile...

...his code word for socialism is not "free society" but "regulated society...

...Gramsci was an admiring student of Taylorism and "Fordism...

...Gramsci was not afraid to call his Jacobin party or political society "totali tarian...

...In January 1921, when this great movement had broken down, Gramsci helped found the Communist party...

...These are indeed Notebooks, and just that—jottings of an intelligent reader who takes an interest in the philosophical discussions of his age, and who has the leisure, in his forced isolation, to think about the condition of his country, his party, and the cause to which he has dedicated his life...

...His actionist philosophy could tolerate murky definitions more easily than quietism...

...If this was perverse, the ultimatetransvaluation of a personal and political tragedy appeared in the shape that these glimpses into the web of history finally took: condemned to inaction, the prisoner projects a philosophy of action that seems to make history so transparent that the futility of action becomes manifest...

...It is a philosophy born of defeat, more paralyzing than the positivism it proposed to overcome...

...In some passages he even seems to hope that the creative forces of civil society will continue to grow under fascism (and under Stalinism) and eventually submerge the rigid crust of political society...

...in prison one is apt to produce circular ideas rather than well-structured systems...

...An unprecedented hegemony [his word for dictatorship] is necessary...

...To try to change it is the mistake of "voluntarism," while the opposite mistake, leaving that fate to be shaped by so-called objective conditions, is called "economism...

...There Gramsci deals with subjects of greatest interest to the "hegemonial" element: the leaders' education, the state's duty to punish criminals, rational production methods, bureaucracy...

...The "war of movement" (Gramsci's euphemism for the world revolution) had been replaced by the "war of position," which now demands immense sacrifices from the masses...

...This is nonsense...

...Their "hegemony" helps the classes of the civil so ciety to transcend their particular interests...

...In his ten years of prison life he gained insight into the workings of history...

...Coming back to the present one-volume Hoare-Smith edition, I must take issue with one major editorial decision...

...448 BOOKS that the revolution had been lost, he tried to perpetuate its posturing, embodied in the Communist party, and he clung to the notion that a new kind of organization could preserve the revolutionary forces—as though one could put them into a freezer to take out intact when a new period of revolutionary potentialities would arise...

...But what Gramsci feared most was "passive" submission to the "given": better make a mistake than do nothing...

...or perhaps we must go even farther back, to the Renaissance humanists who failed to see the national goal and continued to pursue the cosmopolitan ideals of medieval towns...

...It is strange that Gramsci, who condemned positivism and materialism precisely because they encourage reformist illusions, here should indulge in a truly Hegelian synthesis: All paths lead to the fulfillment of History's ultimate command...

...From Croce, Gramsci took the notion of the cathartic moment when theory and practice converge: the moment of revolution...

...his philosophy is journalistic...

...All three came to Marxism after absorbing the vitalist and pragmatist philosophies prevailing at the universities around the turn of the century...

...This notion also leads him to some astute observations on the Russian Thermidor: After the Kronstat uprising of 1921, the period of revolution has come to a close...

...It is never quite clear whether he looked toward a Jacobin state or expected the dialectics to continue...

...The present English edition is based on the original Italian six-volume selection, which was edited by Felice Platone and published in Torino by Einaudi, 1948-51...

...There is also a collection of Gramsci's Letters from Prison, and a biography by G. Fiori...

...I am merely observing that Antonio Gramsci was no Rosa Luxemburg and no Lenin, who both were able to work under similar conditions, nor a Machiavelli or Dante, whom exile forced to become great...

...0...

...But he was then a desperate man...