The Ambiguous Legacy of Antonio Gramsci
Walzer, Michael
His is one of those lives that invites counter-factual questions. A founder of the Italian Communist party, a brilliant writer and devoted militant, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the...
...They reach to the most beautiful conceptions of art and literature...
...Common sense is, I suppose, Gramsci's version of false consciousness...
...But given the character of the cultural conflict (the war of position) and the relative preparation of the two sides, it is much harder for the children of factory workers than for the children of "gentlemen...
...they have to make a case for the ideas they are defending among men and women who have ideas of their own, who are intellectuals-ofeverydaylife...
...Gramsci's years of antifascist struggle and then his prison years add up to a small piece of usable past, a counter-tradition to set against the long line of Leninist precedents...
...Because of the concessionary character of hegemony, or because of its scientific and "advanced" character, the civilization of the future can be anticipated by intellectuals like Marx or Gramsci, who grow up among, share the culture of, and then set themselves in opposition to, the ruling class...
...Would Gramsci have kicked the backsides of the workers...
...For the moment, however, nothing was more necessary than "special leaders...
...Gramsci's response is remarkably conservative: Latin and Greek were learnt through their grammar, mechanically...
...Ruling ideas are always something more than rationalizations of class interest...
...it would be harder still for students from lower social strata...
...But objectivity has a price, which Gramsci also acknowledges: "the intellectual element 'knows' but does not always understand...
...the borrowed ideas are combined with the fragments of earlier ideologies, and like them are adapted to the needs of a subordinate social setting...
...A grim view, especially in that last phrase, which suggests that throughout the long war of position the proletariat will be led by outsiders...
...Here he marks himself off from (his own reading of) German and Austrian social democracy...
...Advancement is the form of his detachment, and it is a bar to a comradely politics...
...The first of these deals with the Bolsheviks, who maneuvered brilliantly and seized state power without ever having won a positional victory...
...Gramsci falls easily enough into this style of reasoning, and Frank Parkin is not entirely unfair when he describes "a succession of Marxist theorists, from Lukacs and Gramsci to the Althusserian and Frankfurt schools" whose diagnosis of revolutionary failure implies "in the most oblique and scholarly manner that the proletariat Usti suffering from a kind of collective brain damage...
...knowledge...
...12 Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Toward an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977), provides a good account of Gramsci's Sardinian years...
...To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...Should he stand outside or should he accept the risks of "going native...
...Unfortunately, they must also set themselves in opposition to the working class, at least insofar as the working class is shaped by its common sense...
...Think, for example, of the place of equality in bourgeois and oppositional thought...
...the dilemma of the Gramscian intellectual, after all, is ultimately a personal dilemma...
...They neither emerged from the class nor (except briefly, perhaps, at critical moments like the Turin strikes) integrated themselves within it...
...And yet it was the schools, the old curriculum, rote learning, and even the occasional assistance of largely incompetent teachers, he believed, that had carried him from the remote and backward province of Sardinia to modern Turin...
...Received ideas, for we do not start out, not the most brilliant philosophers among us, ab novo, with pure intuitions of Morality and Truth...
...The second description deals with the French Revolution and the Jacobins, the revolutionary elite that Gramsci most admired, who led a class that had already won the war of position...
...In the Notebooks, Gramsci focuses mostly on the problems of the first stage...
...The truth is that he had known something more: the first stirrings of revolt, sympathy with the oppressed, even solidarity— in the form of Sardinian patriotism, an emotion long repressed by the time he wrote the Notebooks .i 2 But all that was inchoate feeling, closely tied to the local version of common sense, and it had to be, as Gramsci's English editors say, "transcended...
...Criticism of this sort "makes possible," writes Gramsci, "a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess...
...Moral and intellectual reform begins with inner-hegemonic struggle, and the new culture is never wholly new...
...The socialists achieved a much closer integration with the workers but only, Gramsci believed, opportunistically, by surrendering theory to common sense...
...It wasn't only their energy, however, that made them an elite...
...Nor was that dialectic ever as fruitful as Gramsci hoped it would be—and for reasons about which he is always brutally frank...
...There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens...
...The English editors of the Prison Notebooks assure us that when he uses the word "elite" Gramsci does not mean to associate himself with the reactionary school of "elitists," the followers of Pareto and Mosca...
...Their thinking does not reflect their practical activity...
...Gramsci's second, and rather different, point derives from his general view of consciousness...
...And why did this require a disciplined political party...
...PN, p. 334...
...Ruling ideas rule directly and fully only among the rulers and the intellectuals...
...So too with the 452 • DISSENT Legacy of Antonio Gramsci common sense of the workers, even if it sometimes makes for a "rudimentary" solidarity...
...Whatever the case in Russia, in the West the state won't be seized until a popular base has been established: a shared culture will soften and legitimate the exercise of power...
...But this is not by any means an easy democracy, for the knowledge of the people is indeed dim—not because they are dim, but because their cultural life is broken and out of joint—while that of the party intellectual is scientific and precise...
...Certainly no communist theorist comes closer than Gramsci in his prison cell to a revolutionary strategy that fits, or might be fitted to, the norms of a functioning democracy...
...The standard account blames the victims: if only the workers knew their own interests...
...it is in large part a rearrangement of ideas already present in the old...
...The school is, of course, an agent of hegemony, that is, it teaches "a responsible awareness of the duties incumbent upon classes that hold the power of the State...
...he must reform their "moral and intellectual life" without coercively imposing his own...
...Gramsci's educational arguments are stern with a personal as well as an ideological sternness...
...but they also seek to appropriate him...
...it helps to legitimate democratic politics in a communist or far-left setting...
...For he is a rare bird in the twentieth century—an innocent communist— and he didn't have to leave the party, but only to be found guilty in a fascist court, to preserve his innocence...
...What Gramsci demands is that the promising student give up his own "culture and society...
...He knows that he can't lead them without their consent, but he also knows, and this time with a "scientifically and coherently elaborated" knowledge, that they ought to consent, and in the course of "real historical development" will consent, to his leadership...
...He seems to describe three stages in its development: (1) the party creates the terrain for (2) the development of a national-popular (n.b...
...Equality is a real but distinctly limited value in the hegemonic culture, but it also has larger, "utopian" meanings at least occasionally invoked by ruling intellectuals, if only as a concession to subordinate groups...
...But the defense its not without its complexities: Gramsci wanted a tutorial party but also a party 'prepared to give way (not too soon...
...Why shouldn't Marxist intellectuals participate in this war as real comrades, democratic philosophers, identifying simultaneously with ideas that are "secondary and subordinate" in the cultural system and with men and women who are "secondary and subordinate" in the social structure...
...The challenge of a genuinely progressive education is not to produce a new curriculum but to bring working class children (and peasant children too) into touch with what is best in literature and science...
...His political activity is an irregular movement toward and then away from the people he hopes to lead...
...They must come to hate their "spiritual slavery" as he hated Sardinian backwardness...
...In such conditions, a Leninist coup d'etat is possible.' But nothing like that is possible in Italy (even less so in Britain or France) where the state is protected by what it is ostensibly designed to protect...
...It's not the love of a brother or a friend...
...Romantic identification is a failure of nerve, and the support of proletarian spontaneity is a bad politics, very much like preferring folklore and superstition to modern science...
...Had Gramsci been free in the 1930s, alive in the 1940s and 1950s, what would he have said...
...Perhaps he never really believed...
...And a refusal of identification is dangerous too for reasons that I have already suggested: it is the proletariat, after all, and not the bourgeois intelligentsia, in whose practical activity the civilization of the future is somehow implicit...
...it requires a structure of command and obedience...
...there was always something schoolmasterish about Gramsci, and he seems to have held throughout his life both a stern conception of the tasks of the proletariat (those "incumbent" duties) and a low estimate of its members...
...But if this military imagery testifies to Gramsci's radicalism, it doesn't quite do justice to his practical intentions...
...q FALL • 1988 • 455 Legacy of Antonio Gramsci Notes I Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (henceforth, PN), Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed...
...His imprisonment saved Gramsci from the practical consequences of this corruption—or from the practical need to save himself...
...The chief reason for Gramsci's appeal to latter-day Marxists is his revaluation of civil society— which seems to open the way to a politics free from dictatorship and terror...
...not merely proletarian) will, which is not yet the achievement of but is only directed toward (3) the realization of a new way of life...
...Supposedly, the master takes his lead from his pupils, for his teaching is implicit in their lives...
...It's not, I suppose, an impossible dream: the vanguard connected to the rearguard, not with the coerciveness of steel but with persuasive words...
...Ruling intellectuals are armed with pens, not swords...
...4 And does follow it, Gramsci goes on, in "normal times...
...So Gramsci adapts and complicates Marx's dictum: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas...
...Like schoolchildren, they must learn to sit still while FALL • 1988 • 449 Legacy of Antonio Gramsci a somewhat unruly (and unreliable) group of teachers struggle to work out a proper curriculum...
...it requires discipline, organization, constant militancy...
...They must break as radically with the "Sardinia" of common sense as he had done with the actual Sardinia where he was born and raised...
...Gramsci is a victim, we might say, of Marxist teleology...
...The steady degeneration of international communism occurred, as it were, behind his back...
...This break, Gramsci argues in an important passage in the Prison Notebooks, signifies that the social group in question may indeed have its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic...
...Since Gramsci isn't a native of the new world, one might expect him to see the difficulty...
...The proletariat was terribly slow in producing suitably advanced elements...
...The party remained throughout the 1920s largely a missionary organization, whose members called one another comrades but were radically alienated from the workers whose comrades they hoped to be...
...His letters have the same tone...
...He must make himself, Gramsci says, into a "new type of philosopher . . . a `democratic philosopher' " —that is, one whose philosophy "is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment...
...Coercion has its place in (or alongside of) hegemony, but the power of FALL • 1988 447 Legacy of Antonio Gramsci ideas lies elsewhere, and hegemony is not possible without ideas...
...io PN, p . 37...
...Gramsci's great discovery was the density and complexity, the sheer sturdiness, of bourgeois civil society...
...What have they left out, and why...
...Gramsci does not, however, take a passive or complacent view of this process...
...These interests have, if only in a partial way, been incorporated into the structures of hegemony...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...They are, quite simply, the best ideas of the epoch (and of all previous epochs), and Marxism itself is continuous with them, the "consummation" of German philosophy, English economics, and French political science...
...2 PN, pp...
...The sign of a hegemonic class is that its professional intellectuals are able to refine and reshape this composition, or at least to overlay it with a new "deposit," and to do so not only for their immediate students and readers but for society as a whole...
...It will not be easy to deploy new . . . subjects in a didactic form which gives equivalent results in terms of education and general personality formation...
...But Gramsci takes the metaphor seriously...
...All the problems of his work derive from the tense relation between the claim and the hope, understanding and engagement, Marxist science and working class politics...
...The verb makes the adjective redundant, but the two together make the meaning of the sentence especially clear...
...He wants to be a missionary and a comrade...
...p. 333 on the "contradictory consciousness" of ordinary people...
...They suggest nonetheless, as Gramsci's own experience suggests, what needs to be done...
...But a program like Gramsci's works best with children, that is, "after the creation of a new state" (and then it works, very much like "Americanization" in the early twentiethcentury United States, largely through the public schools...
...The second is the "seizure" of civil society, which is neither literal nor simple, more like infiltration than takeover, a long and arduous cultural struggle, the new world slowly, painfully, displacing the old...
...Only in countries like Czarist Russia is the state "everything" and civil society "primordial and gelatinous," its classes underdeveloped, politically disorganized, incapable of controlling state power...
...Gramsci's meaning is clear: the working class won't produce its own organic intellectuals or its own culture until the work of the communist missionaries is backed up by the power of the state, until the party controls the media and the educational system...
...5 Parkin's joke about brain damage, then, misses Gramsci's most interesting point: when subordinate classes accept a view of the world that is at odds with their practical activity, they do so only because that view does allow, if only in a concessionary way, some scope for practical activity (if not for a full class consciousness...
...Our consciousness is instead a historical composition, the product of a process that has "deposited" in us—this is Gramsci's best phrase—"an infinity of traces, without . . . an inventory...
...and there is no organization without intellectuals . . . without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people "specialized" in [the] conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas.' Since the working class doesn't produce such people from its own midst, they can only come from the body of "traditional intellectuals," recruited largely, like Gramsci himself, from the petty-bourgeoisie...
...Even a class led by organic intellectuals, a powerful and self-enlightened class like the French bourgeoisie, scarcely dared to challenge the debilitated forces of aristocracy and absolutism...
...35-36...
...Every hegemony is "nationalpopular" in character, even though its deepest values and organizing principles are determined by the way of life of a particular class...
...he is committed to a doctrine, an integrated set of "scientific" arguments...
...The Jacobins, Gramsci writes, "made the demands of the popular mass their own" and then pursued those demands with "extreme energy, decisiveness and resolution...
...Intellectuals and the War of Position The committed intellectual is the central figure in Gramsci's version of Marxist doctrine...
...the bastions of civil society had been conquered, and there should have been no need to kick the triumphant middle classes along the path to their own hegemony...
...This is the style of someone who isn't sure, or who means to avoid saying, exactly what he means...
...With no feeling for his own past, how could he find fellow-feeling with men and women who still lived in that past...
...on the other, the partial and disjointed articulation of inherited and borrowed ideas: this is what Gramsci means by common sense, the ordinary wisdom with which ordinary people negotiate their way in the world...
...He must take aim instead at the consciousness, the culture and way of life, of the very people he hopes to lead...
...he has a direct, personal as well as theoretical, interest in the school and the curriculum...
...Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 81...
...But the point is important...
...he knew virtually nothing about what was happening outside his prison cell during the last decade of his life...
...For them, the war of position is a war in position...
...they incorporate classical humanism as well as bourgeois liberalism...
...They were not brain-damaged, but they were culturally retarded...
...unhappily, they point in different directions...
...The argument points toward a kind of communist Fabianism—more focused on the radio, the printing press, and the school, however, than on the municipal waterworks...
...Hegemony can only be overthrown by expatriate bourgeois intellectuals, equipped with hegemonic knowledge...
...it lacks the concreteness and intensity that Gramsci brings to the themes of backwardness and hegemony...
...In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts.'° An education of this sort has, apparently, no specific class character...
...Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an elite of intellectuals...
...In fact, Gramsci faces real difficulties...
...13 PN, p. 418...
...The Party and the Workers This then is Gramsci's dilemma: his task is social criticism, but not a criticism aimed most importantly at the dominant groups or the prevailing injustices of the society in which he lives...
...They provide a high philosophy that is reiterated, though with much distortion, at every level of social and intellectual life...
...But the orientation of these intellectuals toward the proletariat is awkward and unstable, and the philosophical elaboration of ideas appropriate to the proletariat is a process "full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersals and regroupings, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried...
...Reluctantly, he agrees that it might be necessary to dispense with ancient languages, though he can muster no enthusiasm for this reform, widely advocated on the left...
...Somehow, they represented future as well as present and actual demands: they "forced the hand" of the popular mass, though always "in the direction of real historical development" (much as a stern but devoted teacher forces a favorite student in the direction of his promise...
...He is likely, nonetheless, to appear to them very much as an outsider, the bearer of a new and alien truth...
...Throughout his life he looked back to the councils as the characteristic form of working class organization and the crucial arena of working class education...
...But if Gramsci recognizes this danger—the lines just quoted may be intended as selfcriticism — it is not clear what he means to do about it...
...The party intellectual must not get too close to the workers, lest he lose his ability to criticize their common sense...
...What then can one expect from the Italian workers, who are so "poor in organizing elements" and who cannot dispense with the leadership of expatriates like Gramsci...
...Common sense is the folklore of philosophy...
...In fact, I think, he isn't...
...Subordinated men and women need not be described, then, as wholly unaware of the meaning of their own practical activity, ideologically shaped by borrowed ideas: they have, after all, extracted the concessions...
...When a ruling class has to rely on force alone, it has reached a point of crisis in its rule...
...This is abstractly stated and without illustration in the text...
...Of course, he wants to feel the elementary passions of the workers, but he knows that he knows a superior doctrine...
...Questions of this sort are obviously unanswerable, and yet they underlie and probably motivate the extraordinary outpouring of books and articles about Gramsci, not only in Italy but also, more recently, in Britain and France and even in the United States (though the interest here is more academic than political...
...I have been using pedagogy as a metaphor for Gramscian politics...
...A founder of the Italian Communist party, a brilliant writer and devoted militant, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascists in 1926 when he was only 35 and died in a prison hospital eleven years later, in 1937, the middle year of the Moscow trials...
...And it is specifically the intellectual's intellectual activity, his work as a philosopher and critic, that Gramsci values...
...The state cannot be seized until that hegemony has been decisively overcome...
...Among subordinate classes these ideas are nothing more than the last of the "infinity of traces," overlaying all the others but not displacing them...
...No doubt...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...In Sardinia, he once wrote, he had known only "the most brutal aspect of life...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...6 It is less clear in the Prison Notebooks that he still believes in selfeducation...
...At the same time, Gramsci worried about intellectual transcendence...
...So the intellectual hovers uncertainly between the high culture of the old society, of which modern science and Marxism itself are the most advanced products, and the common sense of the people, the internalized form of their subordination (and their resistance to subordination), which simultaneously holds within itself intimations of a still higher culture...
...The school, like the party, has to stand in tension with the common sense of the people...
...His task is like that of the Gramscian teacher, who must commit himself to uproot "folklorist" conceptions of the world "and replace them with conceptions that are deemed superior...
...the result is something close to a common culture...
...it is well introduced and helpfully annotated...
...It would seem to follow that Marxist intellectuals don't have to stand outside the world of culture and common sense in order to see the "real" interests of the working class...
...This is the knowledge he won when he left Sardinia behind, and it makes him a self-confident and, in his own eyes, an objective critic of common sense...
...In the developed capitalist countries, he argues, the state is the creation of the leading groups in civil society, the instrumental appendage of a hegemonic class and its immediate allies...
...It is at least an honest question, recalling Rousseau's contempt for philosophers who loved humanity and despised their nearest neighbors...
...FALL • 1988 • 451 Legacy of Antonio Gramsci Gramsci is an advocate of the "common" or "comprehensive" school—and at the same time of the traditional curriculum...
...On the Turin years, see also Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) and Gwyn Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Communism in Italy, 1911-1921 (London: Pluto Press, 1980...
...Men and women cannot live, work, love, or raise children without coming to hold a view of the world, adopting and defending a line of moral 446 • DISSENT Legacy of Antonio Gramsci conduct, sustaining or modifying a set of received ideas...
...Expect nothing from anyone," he wrote to his brother Carlo in 1927, "and you will avoid delusions...
...Gramsci's Doctrine The completion of this process is the crucial requirement of the war of position...
...A human mass does not "distinguish" itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself...
...It is indeed a matter of some anxiety that cultural dominance is so radically incomplete...
...Nor is his comparison of the party to Machiavelli's prince immediately comprehensible: what is the life of the prince but an endless war of maneuver...
...So be it, then: on this point Gramsci is uncompromising...
...A group of determined men," whose personal lives must be as contradictory as their theory: for they love and don't really love the people they coerce...
...Perhaps Gramsci confused these two, imagining a utopian vanguard, a disciplined army of free intellectuals...
...The ideas elaborated by bourgeois intellectuals embody not only the most powerful but also the most nearly true understanding of social reality (and, not insignificantly, of natural science...
...This is the demand that the party makes upon the working class as a whole (though always with the caveat that the practical activity of the workers already represents a new culture and society, of which only the party intellectuals and a few "advanced" workers are fully aware...
...Gramsci's argument begins with the firmly egalitarian assertion that "All men are intellectuals...
...It is the purpose of the Communist party, of course, to mediate between these two conceptions...
...it is neither bourgeois nor (Gramsci's word) "oligarchic...
...State and class stand to one another in what Marxists have always regarded as the "proper relation...
...If it is an agent of intellectual and moral reform, it is an agent that can only work through, not behind the backs or over the heads of, the workers: it must change their understanding of the world before it can change the world...
...For he suggests that the servants of hegemony necessarily create, by incorporation and concession, a common culture, assimilating to their own "ideological complex" the interests and values of subordinate groups...
...he is a Leninist of the cultural struggle...
...It's not a question addressed at all, so far as I know, in the vast Gramsci literature, whose authors are concerned almost exclusively with cultural life and Marxist theory...
...And Gramsci has, sometimes, a Fabian optimism: "in politics," he says, "the 'war of position,' once won, is decisive definitively...
...In his Prison Notebooks—thousands of pages, to which thousands more pages of scholarly and political exegesis have now been added—Gramsci's focus was historical, his style reflective...
...The first of these is literally and simply the seizure of state power—buildings, communications, police...
...Here is that worry expressed in theoretical terms (from the Notebooks): The popular element "feels" but does not know or understand...
...But this is a strange story, surely, for in the case of France enlightenment had preceded revolution...
...The old schools in which Greek and Latin were taught were oligarchic only because of the exclusion of working-class children...
...backwardness was the practical consequence of subordination...
...it was ostensibly "progressive," emphasizing something called "active education" as against mere "instruction," which was taken to be dry, formal, repetitive, and incapable of engaging the interests of the young...
...And alongside all this, embryonically, there exist intimations of something radically new...
...These same arguments force upon the Marxist intellectual, face to face with the workers, struggling to understand and reform working class common sense, the standard anthropological dilemma: should he make a virtue of his distance from the workers or should he engage himself more immediately in their everyday life...
...A 448 • DISSENT Legacy of Antonio Gramm' relationship, presumably, with other men and women whose practical activity (since they belong to a progressive social class) is already modifying the environment and who, at least dimly, know this to be so...
...his view of the role of the party and of the place of intellectuals like himself in political life is so profoundly ambiguous, so painfully unresolved, that it can't be given such an agreeable label...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Gramsci's educational program amounts to treating the workers as if they were immigrants to a foreign country, "greenhorns," as he himself had been when he first arrived in Turin...
...If so, it is a gesture that studiously avoids sentimentality...
...They see the sun but nevertheless go back to the cave...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...He himself does not always pursue the hints and intimations of his own arguments, which point toward the replacement of political economy by a kind of cultural anthropology...
...The long process of enlightenment is indeed a war...
...a conception that manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes...
...11 PN, pp...
...He did not resolve those dilemmas, not for himself, not for us...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...The more advanced his theory, the more detached he is in practice from working class backwardness...
...It is more coercive and less attractive as a program for adults...
...It has to be added, however, that Gramsci is not entirely content with this account...
...consciousness does not follow existence...
...The unloved and self-pitying intellectual is a common enough figure, I suppose, and I don't want to focus on that but rather on the first of Gramsci's questions, which expresses his rejection of home and homeland...
...What is important now are the larger strategies of cultural criticism...
...The modern prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform . . . creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular . . . will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilization...
...Along with Lenin he believed that "the role of the intelligentsia is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary...
...and trans...
...One gets then a strange break in the culture of subordinate classes...
...Could he now form comradely ties with men and women who had not broken loose, who embodied the backwardness he had transcended...
...the protagonists of the two learn from one another...
...Ruling ideas internalize contradictions...
...14 The reference to "sentimental ties" is necessary, I suppose, to explain why these enterprising intellectuals, having assimilated Western culture, don't just remain in the West...
...Communist Schooling Some of Gramsci's earliest articles focused on educational issues, but his most systematic discussion comes in the Prison Notebooks where he criticizes a reform proposal drafted by the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini's minister of education...
...The "character" of a party member, Gramsci wrote, is revealed by his "resistance to the pressures of surpassed cultures...
...There is an inexact but suggestive correspondence here to Julien Benda's famous dualism...
...Its members are critics of common sense, but they don't merely proclaim their own scientific truths...
...It is the gulf between elementary feeling and common sense, on the one hand, and Gramsci's own absolute knowledge, on the other, that generates these contradictions...
...Did Gramsci ever "love" the workers...
...The two stand to one another as master and pupils, by no means a relation of equality...
...Physically weak, often ill, a hunchback and near-dwarf, he had made his way, not without help...
...Mostly, the appropriation of his work serves a good cause...
...Who then will maneuver to seize and hold the state...
...So it is more generally available, a contested or contestable value—and the war of position is the name of the contest...
...Gramsci's theoretical argument is deeply contradictory...
...He appears as an outsider first of all because he is an outsider—in class terms, a stranger, unlikely to have grown up in a factory town or ever to have worked in a factory...
...Or, more democratically, and Gramsci sometimes writes in this style too, it must help the workers educate and change themselves...
...Gramsci's Marxism requires him to believe that the content of this reform, its socialist or communist character, is historically given...
...At great personal cost, he had broken loose...
...So the French Revolution was won in the years of enlightenment, not in the more exciting days of insurrection...
...In fact, however, the borrowing is incomplete...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...Gramsci distinguishes between a "war of maneuver" such as Lenin had fought in Russia and a "war of position," necessary in the more developed countries of the West...
...In the West, the seizure of power would come only after the creation of a new proletarian culture, and then it would come with relative ease, a short political or military engagement confirming the outcome of a long cultural struggle...
...But it can do this as well for workers as for gentlemen—if only the workers were admitted to the schools...
...But his understanding of these "ruling ideas" is developed in political and cultural directions that few Marxists—until very recently anyway— have been willing to follow...
...In the councils, he wrote in 1919, the working class could "educate itself, gather experience, and acquire a responsible awareness of the duties incumbent upon classes that hold the power of the State...
...The communist intellectuals are the "clerks," committed to truth or, at least, to the "correct ideological position," while the socialists are "laymen" acting, if mostly ineffectively, in the real world, adapting to circumstances and seeking allies through compromise (rather than conversion...
...As a missionary, he aims to bring art and science and "the philosophy of praxis" to the masses...
...Perhaps the communist and socialist experiences exhaust the real possibilities: either missionary work from the outside by an elite of intellectuals or the creation of a mass party without a missionary elite and, soon enough, without a mission...
...The intellectual must choose distance or nearness, and in making this choice, two Gramscian arguments are crucial...
...Gramsci must have held this Marxist view of intellectual purposefulness, at least during the brief years when he led the Italian Communists...
...And there they won't confront the hegemonic culture and learn the "responsible awareness" of a ruling class...
...But it is far more subtle than the standard Marxist account repeated with hardly any embarrassment after every revolutionary failure...
...In fact, having made the move and the adaptation, having repressed his own past, he seems all the more ready to lead others (to force others...
...Nor did the Bolsheviks ever allow their own sentimental ties to old Russia to interfere with the task they had set themselves: "to compel the people to an enforced awakening...
...Hence the task of the intellectual was not merely to act from a correct theory but to expound and elaborate a new view of the world...
...The visible organization of hegemony and the range of values it expresses are worked out through a complex political process...
...An intellectual's dream—endangered, though, by an intellectual's confidence that when he marched, he always marched at the head of the line...
...The Problem of Common Sense The task of the party is "intellectual and moral reform," where reform does not refer to an incremental politics in the style of central European social democracy but to something more like a religious reformation or a cultural revolution...
...Gramsci is not committed to some abstract political "ideal" like freedom or justice or selfdetermination...
...Or was he always a loyal Leninist, committed and likely to have remained committed to the dictatorship of the Central Committee...
...Criticism can come from within, and they themselves can be subjects as well as objects of critical activity...
...What did it mean, exactly, to create the terrain of a new popular wilfulness...
...no one is born with diligence, precision, and poise...
...132-3...
...I can only speculate about its sources in his own life, but the speculation seems worthwhile...
...Can one ask this of adult men and women and still call oneself their comrade...
...it requires a vanguard of intellectuals like himself, a Communist party...
...It is in everyday actions and relations, and even more importantly in the ideas and attitudes that lie behind these, that the hegemony of a social class is revealed...
...Why not, as in eighteenth-century France, a band of philosophes...
...With few exceptions, the intellectu450 • DISSENT Leman of Antonio Ikamod als of the party were not "organic intellectuals" of the working class...
...That is indeed what Gramsci hoped for, but never saw his way clear to having...
...He believes that in countries like Italy the cultural war of position will come before the political war of maneuver and will be "decisive definitively...
...Nor are our minds blank tablets on which the ruling class—or the party, if only it could get there first—writes out its instructions, the marks of a dominant ideology...
...And yet his notes on education (his letters from prison, too, where he worries about the education of his son) are full of expectations...
...14 PN, pp...
...Writers on the left seek, no doubt, to understand Gramsci...
...The schools won't work for the workers until there is a workers' state...
...The teacher, writes Gramsci, must be aware of the contrast between the type of culture and society which he represents and the type of culture and society represented by his pupils, and [he must be] conscious of his obligation to accelerate and regulate the child's formation in conformity with the former and in conflict with the latter...
...For each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society...
...Gramsci has little to say, hardly seems interested in, any further Marxist proprieties: the economic base, the relations of production, and so on...
...2 It is an awkward sentence because of the multiplication of forward-looking prepositions, adjectives, and nouns—as if Gramsci, sitting helplessly in Mussolini's prison, recognizes that a "superior" civilization is very far away...
...Briefly, in 1919, in a moment of enthusiasm, he repudiated the role of "tutor...
...In more immediate terms, is Gramsci the secret ancestor, the silenced theorist of Eurocommunism (or even of Eurosocialism...
...Gramsci wants to be a "democratic philosopher," and his account of hegemony, had he fully worked it out, might well provide the ground on which democratic philosophers could stand...
...Excerpted with permission from The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 1988...
...He suggested then that the councils were little models of the proletarian state within which the creation of a new culture was already far advanced...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...His style in the prison writings, however, is distant and demanding...
...This argument from the Notebooks parallels the passage from 1926 that I have already discussed...
...The sole purpose of theory, the only reason to get it right, is political action, and action of a narrowly specific sort: the organization of the proletariat for the seizure of power...
...but what exactly does he mean...
...Education is always hard work...
...What is at issue in the war of position is culture itself, from philosophy and religion down to the most ordinary understandings of health and sickness, love, marriage, work, exchange, honor, and solidarity...
...but the accusation of formalism and aridity is very unjust and inappropriate...
...he is the proud defender of "advanced" ideas, and he identifies only with the "advanced" members of subordinate classes...
...Except for two brief visits, Gramsci himself never went back to Sardinia, but perhaps his reiterated insistence that the Italian Communists address themselves to "the Southern question" is a gesture toward a return...
...Admit such children and the character of the school will change...
...The new civilization carried by the working class can be articulated only through the medium of these ideas...
...If the workers really represent the culture of the future, then the socialists were right to think that it could only come from within, from the slow development of working class institutions, the slow elaboration of practical activity into a new culture...
...Gramsci had argued differently some six or seven years earlier when the factory councils, Italy's soviets, were active in Turin and he was active in defense of the councils (by 1926, his politics consisted mostly of intra-party intrigue...
...Ever since Marx, every Marxist leader has had to prove himself as a theorist—for without a correct theory, how is it possible to act correctly in political life...
...Having thus performed its intellectual apprenticeship it returns to its own country and compels the people to an enforced awakening, skipping historical stages in the process...
...Communists should not attempt to relieve this tension...
...But this same group has, for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group, and it confirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be following it...
...3 Hence the need for the party, the undamaged brain of the working class, which defends the "real" interests of the workers with or without their participation...
...the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel...
...The details of the proposal need not concern us here...
...It is not so easy, then, for the party to impose its "correct" line and lead the political struggle...
...Where is that criticism to come from...
...At this point, no sacrifices or concessions are called for...
...It is revealed in the practical activity of the workers (cooperation in the factory, union solidarity) but not yet in their understanding of the world, not yet in what Gramsci calls their "common sense...
...8 Quoted in Harold Entwistle, Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 72...
...He never gave up his commitment to the party and to the true doctrine that it embodied...
...it includes ideas that are true as well as ideas that are false—and also ideas to which these predicates just don't apply, as they clearly don't apply to consciousness as a whole...
...but Hoare and Smith tell their readers nothing about their principles of selection...
...And here a similar worry expressed in personal terms: in a letter to his wife, Gramsci recalled a life (before he met her) without love, and confessed that he had often wondered whether "it was possible to tie myself to the mass of men when I [had] never loved anyone, not even my own family, [whether] it was possible to love a collectivity if I had never been loved deeply myself by individual human beings...
...The common sense of the masses remains, to some significant if undetermined degree (there is no inventory), pre-bourgeois, a less than coherent amalgam of old prejudices, superstitions, and "utopias," which derive in their turn from previous ruling ideas, themselves never wholly understood or absorbed...
...The socialist state already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited laboring class...
...9 Or, alternatively, the slow elaboration of cultural activity into a new practice: this is the line taken by contemporary followers of Gramsci who have broken decisively, as he never did, with vanguard politics and who tend to assign a greater value to popular culture...
...He must criticize them without alienating himself from them...
...The intellectual elite, governed by an egalitarian ethic, works closely with the intellectuals-of-everyday-life...
...But I can best complete my own account of Gramsci's politics by looking at two descriptions (from FALL • 1988 453 Legacy of Antonio Grungei the Notebooks) of wars of maneuver, that is, of actual revolutionary struggles...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Ideally, the party brings together an elite of intellectuals and the "most advanced" sections of the proletariat in everyday political struggle...
...So the party's reformation aims at raising the workers to the level of their own activity, "fitting culture to the sphere of practice...
...They have made the crucial move—into the modern factory—and they must now adapt themselves to, or let themselves be re-educated for, the new world they have entered...
...Gramsci compresses the story he wants to tell into a single image when he describes the Jacobins as "a group of . . . determined men driving the bourgeoisie forward with kicks in the backside...
...The real bastion of bourgeois power is ordinary life...
...But is Gramsci in fact rather than counter-fact a democratic communist—as one might say of someone that he is a democratic socialist, meaning that he would not establish a socialist regime except with the consent of the people...
...to its own pupils...
...The process of development is tied," he writes, "to a dialectic between the intellectuals and the masses...
...In prison, with admirable courage and extraordinary physical and mental discipline, he wrestled with the dilemmas of intellectual militancy...
...The civilization of the future is carried, though not consciously carried, not carried aloft, by the industrial working class...
...THE EDITORS q 456 • DISSENT...
...Only after the creation of a new state does the cultural problem . . . tend toward a coherent solution...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Education and action go hand in hand...
...8 As a comrade, he aims at an active union with the people, perhaps even at a "unity of manual and intellectual work" (something Gramsci himself never attempted and, given his health, probably could not have done), and then a transformation from within of working class common sense...
...This selection has established the authoritative text for English-speaking Gramscians...
...6 Quoted in John Canunett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 78...
...through the same process...
...On the other hand, rejecting proletarian spontaneity is also a bad politics, for every spontaneous movement "contains rudimentary elements of conscious leadership...
...Given the war of position, however, tactics recede in importance (and in prison they cease entirely to be interesting...
...And then he is committed to a group of people who figure in the arguments, whom he claims 444 • DISSENT Legacy of Antonio Gramsci to understand scientifically and hopes to engage politically...
...Like common sense, ruling ideas extend well beyond "interests and tendencies...
...I want to make a simple claim: that what Gramsci demanded of the workers is what he thought he had achieved himself...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Initially," at least, they base themselves "on common sense [itself] in order to demonstrate that 'everyone' is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific mode of thought . . . but of renovating and making 'critical' an already existing activity...
...They rise out of the void between the people and the intel454 • DISSENT Legacy of Antonio Munn' lectuals, a vast space that even the dialectic can't bridge...
...19-20...
...5 Quoted in Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 181—in my view the best account of what Gramsci might have meant by "hegemony...
...The workers have a place within the old society, subordinate but not entirely negative— not a mere absence of status and entitlement— and opposition properly starts from where they are...
...The first of them is suggested but never worked out by Marx himself...
...It is a question I would hesitate to ask, at least in these terms, if Gramsci had not asked it himself...
...Gramsci must have expressed himself differently in face-toface encounters, especially in the factories in 1919 and 1920...
...And yet, in the long war of position, the masses can only be loyal: "loyalty and discipline are the ways in which [they] participate . . in the development of the cultural movement as a whole...
...An elite consisting of some of the most active, energetic, enterprising and disciplined members of the society emigrates abroad and assimilates the cultural and historical experiences of the most advanced countries of the West, without however losing the most essential characteristics of its own nationality, that is to say without breaking its sentimental and historical ties with its own people...
...In the Notebooks, common sense is never a matter of interests • alone...
...Did Mussolini save him from Stalinist orthodoxy or deprive the left of a brave and supremely intelligent opponent of Stalinism...
...What was previously secondary and subordinate . . . is now taken to be primary and becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex...
...It had not been easy for Gramsci himself, the son and grandson of provincial officials...
...He never ceased to hope that the war of position, led by the party, could nevertheless be a democratic war...
...The intellectual's error consists in believing that one can . . . be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them . . . and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated—i.e...
...Here he draws most explicitly upon his own experience and gives us, briefly, a glimpse of the inner life of a communist militant...
...Or perhaps not so radically new: for these intimations also appear as "traces" in the ruling ideas...
...they should insist upon it, live with it, fight it through until the defeat of common sense...
...FALL • 1988 • 445 Legacy of Antonio Gramsci Gramsci has something else in mind...
...All we can say is that he never had the chance...
...The Notebooks, it seems to me, are a sustained defense of exactly that role, reflecting the lessons Gramsci learned from the defeat of the councils and the triumph of fascism...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...On the one hand, a practical activity that can't be articulated...
...Though they hope for a new civilization, communist intellectuals are carriers of the old hegemony...
...But the Notebooks do suggest an answer: he loved the workers only as a stern teacher might love a backward, recalcitrant, but somehow promising student...
...If it is to avoid that crisis it has to compromise: The fact of hegemony presupposes that one takes into account the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony will be exercised, and it also presupposes a certain equilibrium, that is to say that the hegemonic groups will make some sacrifices of a corporate nature...
...In practice, the positions that his own party adopted in this or that political struggle were more often determined by external instructions from the popes and bishops of the Comintern than by the internal "dialectic" of theory and common sense...
...Where would he have stood when Ignazio Silone rejected party discipline and communist orthodoxy in 1929...
...And without understanding, criticism and leadership are alike corrupted...
...Gramsci's persistent use of military and Machiavellian metaphors suggests how fiercely he wished to transcend this dualism—to be, as a good Marxist is supposed to be, at once a critical theorist and a tactician, a revolutionary leader and a preaching friar, a clerk militant...
...Whom would he have supported in 1946 when Elio Vitorinni defended the intellectual freedom of communist militants against Gramsci's old friend and political successor Palmiro Togliatti...
...PN, p. 268...
...But he also believes that the war of position won't finally be won until after the seizure of power...
...This is an extremely useful book, which breaks loose from some of the pieties of contemporary Gramscians...
...4 PN, p. 327...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Gramsci suggests a surprising model: the preaching friars of the Middle Ages, organized in religious orders that imposed an "iron discipline" on their members, not for conspiratorial purposes, but "so that they [would] not exceed certain limits of differentiation between themselves and the `simple.' " When they move beyond such limits, intellectuals "become a caste or a priesthood...
...9 The deepest argument for communist politics is the (Leninist) claim that this internal criticism and inner-class transformation are simply not possible...
...Gramsci elaborates on this suggestion: Ideas don't come to rule, he says, unless they are expressed in "universal" rather than "corporate" terms—and universality is never a mere pretense...
...New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 238...
...They won't be admitted, Gramsci argues, under the conditions of bourgeois rule, except to schools whose curriculum has been adapted to their supposed capacities and interests...
...And this positional victory ought to make coercion, at least coercion of the "popular mass," unnecessary...
...The process was crucial, not the "events...
...The proletariat as a class," Gramsci wrote in 1926, just before his arrest, "is poor in organizing elements, does not have and cannot form its own stratum of intellectuals except very slowly, very laboriously, and only after the conquest of State power...
...In the future these questions may become extremely acute, and it will be necessary to resist the tendency to render easy that which cannot become easy without being distorted...
...Writing in prison, however, after the terrible defeats of the early 1920s, he argued for a significant shift in priorities...
...But Gramsci never quite manages this broad and generous identification...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
