In July 1994 the New York Marxist School held an eight-day intensive study course on Marxism. The eighth and final session of the course was conducted by Frank Rosengarten and was entirely devoted to the topic "Gramsci's Contributions to Marxist Theory." In October-November 1994 Frank Rosengarten also offered a course of six seminar sessions on Gramsci at the New York Marxist School. Rosengarten kindly provided us with a brief account of his experience of leading the seminars on Gramsci last autumn, as well as a description--in the form of rather detailed notes--of the topics and texts that were discussed in the final session of the week-long intensive study course on Marxism.
In the process of teaching a six-session course on Gramsci at the New York Marxist School--on successive Thursday evenings, 6 to 8 p.m., from October 6 to November 10, 1994--I had one of the richest intellectual and political experiences of my life.
The sixteen students enrolled in the course came from a variety of backgrounds, and had diverse interests, which made the exchange of ideas in class lively and controversial. The group ranged in age from nineteen to eighty-five, and included the following occupations: a book publishing editor; an instructor of Italian at CUNY; a public school English teacher; a political science student at Columbia University; a Chinese-American student at Hunter College; a Black professor of sociology at CUNY; a South African graduate student enrolled at the New School of Social Research; a child psychiatrist; a former member of the CPUSA and the American Labor Party, and a specialist in American and English literature; a retired New York City science teacher; a Palestinian Israeli citizen; and a Marxist scholar and writer.
The students all had some familiarity with Gramsci's writings, but much more significant was the fact that almost all of them viewed their study of Gramsci as part of their political education and as a source of ideas and perspective that would be useful to them in their lives as activists committed to socialist democracy. For example, the Italian instructor was engaged in "cultural struggle" aimed at "awakening an historical and social consciousness in my students." The professor of sociology was striving to establish connections between what he saw as the relevant features of the Black nationalist movement with Marxist social and economic theory. The psychiatrist was interested in seeing whether there were aspects of Gramsci's cultural criticism that might assist him in his analysis of The Bell Curve. [END PAGE 30] The South African graduate student, who has had several years of experience working in his country as a student activist of the ANC, wanted to deepen his understanding of the transition underway in South Africa by studying relevant sections of the Hoare and Nowell-Smith edition of Selections from the Prison Notebooks. The retired science teacher was interested in knowing whether Gramsic could help her see connections between science and politics, especially as this issue affected the women's movement. She was sharply critical of Gramsci's "sexism" and made all of us see how this sexism was built into some of the very language and imagery used by Gramsci. There is much more I could say about the students, but that would require space that is not available here.
I organized the course around two basic themes: main elements of the philosophy of praxis, and Gramsci's interrelated theories of hegemony and intellectuals. I asked the students to write short summaries of their readings for class discussion, and also to report on individual readings of book chapters or essays written by such people as Cornel West, Alvin Gouldner, Edward Said, Perry Anderson, Anne Showstack Sassoon, etc. In the opening session, I made an attempt to acquaint the students with certain "preliminary considerations" such as the Marxist political culture within which Gramsci's political education took place, Gramsci's intellectual indebtedness to his Italian forebears (Machiavelli, Vico, De Sanctis, Labriola, Croce), and the changing "situations" and "projects" that conditioned Gramsci's world view both before and after his imprisonment. I think that this introductory session was helpful in orienting some of the students not yet exposed to these important determinants of Gramsci's thought and action.
As far as my own education is concerned, in addition to learning a great deal from my students, who were certainly better versed than I in many domains, I think that the most important aspect of the course was my increasingly strong sense that the fundamental filo conduttore of the Prison Notebooks is the philosophy of praxis, in the sense that for Gramsci Marxism as an integral philosophy of life was still in an early phase of its development and needed the kind of refinement and elaboration that he himself was attempting to accomplish in his prison writings. It seems to me that it was precisely this elaboration that gives Gramsci's thought its distinctive character and a kind of thematic unity that is not undermined by the well known diffuse and "open" character of his reflections in the Notebooks. Of the various books that I read on Gramsci as a theorist of Marxism, I found Jacques Texier's Gramsci (Editions Seghers, 1966) to be very useful. But it was mainly in the course of my own close reading of the pages in the Notebooks I had assigned to the students that opened my eyes to the absolute centrality of Gramsci's philosophy of praxis to virtually everything he had to say on politics, philosophy, history, literature, folklore and other topics. This may be quite obvious to readers of this Newsletter but I have to say that it was an exciting discovery for me. [END PAGE 31]
In February and March of 1995, Benedetto Fontana, author of Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli (University of Minesota Press, 1993), taught another six-week course on Gramsci at the Marxist School. The title of his course: "Gramsci's politics." No doubt Fontana will provide a summary of his teaching (and learning) experience for the next IGS Newsletter.
Frank Rosengarten
July 24: Gramsci's Contributions to Marxism, led by Frank Rosengarten:
A. Summary of Gramsci's life, 1891-1937, and some remarks on how and why his particular "situation" and "project" were influenced by historical events from 1917 to 1926.
B. The Italian sources of Gramsci's Marxism:
1. Niccolò Machiavelli: on will and "virtue", the theory of the political party as the "modern prince"; the leaders and the led; theorization of the origins and character of the modern state; the relationship between theory and practice: Machiavelli as "the Italian Luther," as revolutionary.
2. Giambattista Vico and the "humanization" of history.
3. Antonio Labriola and "critical communism": the essays on the materialist conception of history and the "philosophy of praxis"; belief that Marxism had to be completed, that it was still in its early phase of development; rejection of dogmatism and omniscience; belief that Capital was crucial to understanding of modern world; insisted that there are no preordained, "providential" outcomes in historical process.
4. Francesco De Sanctis on the interrelatedness of literature with the history and spiritual life (in Hegelian sense) of a national society.
5. Benedetto Croce's "philosophy of the spirit" and the responsibilities of the modern intellectual. Croce's spiritual historicism. In some respects, Gramsci stands in the same relation to Croce as Marx did to Hegel.
C. A brief look at four writings by the "young Gramsci": "Socialism and Culture," 1916; "The Revolution against Capital," 1917; "Our Marx," 1918; and "Worker's Democracy," 1919.
D. Gramsci in the history of "western Marxism," as seen by Perry Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism and by Martin Jay in Marxism and Totality. [END PAGE 32]
E. Analysis of some passages from the Hoare and Nowell-Smith edition of Selections from the Prison Notebooks that highlight Gramsci's ideas in the realms of philosophy, politics and culture, and that illustrate his contributions to Marxism:
1. the theory of hegemony and 2) theory of intellectuals (pp. 57-58 on the history of "the Italian revolution"; pp. 12-13 on role of intellectuals in formation of hegemony, and expanded conception of intellectuals; pp. 333 and pp. 365-66 on Lenin and hegemony, and on relationship between Marx and Lenin; p. 404 on need to "develop all the superstructures in state phase of hegemony if one is not to risk dissolution of the state"--note relevance of this passage for recent events in Soviet Union and eastern Europe). See also Frank Rosengarten's edition of the Letters from Prison, vol. II, pp. 66-7 on hegemony.
3. relationship between intellectuals and "nation-people", p. 418
4. a strategy for socialist struggle in the West: on wars of maneuver and wars of position (pp. 432-33 on difference between wars on politico-military front, and war on the ideological front; pp. 237-38 on the nature of civil society in Russia and the West, and politics of the United Front.)
5. Renewal and refinement of Marxism as the "philosophy of praxis", as unity of theory and practice:
a. The critical notes on Bukharin's Theory of Historical Materialism: A Popular Manual: (p. 379, Gramsci's repudiation of Bukharin's tendency to reduce Marxism to status of positive science, to a crude sociological scientism; p. 426 on "vulgar evolutionism" at root of Bukharin's Marxism; p. 428 on relationship between philosophy of praxis and history; p. 431 on teaching of dialectics; p. 435 on philosophy of praxis as "integral and original philosophy opening a new phase of history"; p. 435 philosophy of praxis transcends, but retains vital elements of, traditional idealism and traditional materialism; p. 437 on Bukharin's tendency to replace the historical dialectic with mechanical causation).
b. Characteristic features of philosophy of praxis, and present state of Marxism, as seen by Gramsci (p. 332 attitude towards "common sense"; pp. 334 and 336 rejection of "residues of mechanicism" present in "recent developments of philosophy of praxis"; p. 352 on "man" as series of active relationships; p. 395 on philosophy of praxis as "modern popular reformation" with its roots in a cultural past; pp. 405-406 philosophy of praxis is not eternal and absolute; p. 408 on "error"--note what Gramsci had to say about Achille Loria, "Cuvier's [END PAGE 33] little bone," and the importance of "philology" to the philosophy of praxis, as analyzed by Joseph Buttigieg).
Selected passages by and about Gramsci, for intensive study course, July 24, 1994:
1. From Selections from the Prison Notebooks, "The Modern Prince: Brief Notes on Machiavelli's Politics," pp. 126-27:
.in a dramatic movement of great effect, the elements of passion and of myth which occur throughout the book are drawn together and brought to life in the conclusion, in the invocation of a prince who "really exists". Throughout the book, Machiavelli discusses what the Prince must be like if he is to lead a people to found a new State; the argument is developed with rigorous logic, and with scientific detachment. In the conclusion, Machiavelli merges with the people, becomes the people; not, however, some "generic" people, but the people whom he, Machiavelli, has convinced by the preceding argument-- the people whose consciousness and whose expression he becomes and feels himself to be, with whom he feels identified. The entire "logical" argument now appears as nothing other than auto-reflection on the part of the people--an inner reasoning worked out in the popular consciousness, whose conclusion is a cry of passionate urgency. The passion, from discussion of itself, becomes once again "emotion," fever, fanatical desire for action. This is why the epilogue of The Prince is not something extrinsic, tacked on, rhetorical, but has to be understood as a necessary element of the work--indeed as the element which gives the entire work its true color, and makes it a kind of "political manifesto."
And p. 185:
the most important observation to be made about any concrete analysis of the relations of force is the following: that such analyses cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless the intention is merely to write a chapter of past history), but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will.
2. From Benedetto Fontana, Hegemony and Power (1994), pp. 39 and 41:
For Gramsci: In the same way that the Reformation engendered a broad national-popular movement resulting from the innovating and mass- [END PAGE 34] mobilizing activities of the new religious teachers, so too the philosophy of praxis is to initiate a moral and intellectual reform of modern bourgeios society by means of the dialectical and active relation between the popular masses and the democratic philosopher.
For Croce: Luther and the Reformation represent the death and sterility of philosophy, in the same way that Marx and the workers' movement marked the decline and corruption of philosophy.
3. From "Socialism and Culture" (1916):
To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist as an element of order--but of one's own order and one's own discipline in striving for an ideal. And we cannot be successful in this unless we also know others, their history, the successive efforts they have made to be what they are, to create the civilization they have created and which we seek to replace with our own.
4. From Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, pp. 75-6:
Western Marxism. . .was progressivley inhibited from theoretical confrontation of major economic or political problems, from the 1920s onwards. . .The result was that Western Marxism as a whole, when it proceeded beyond questions of method to matters of substance, came to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures. . .In other words, it was not the State or Law which provided the typical objects of its research. It was culture that held the central focus of its attention.
Above all, within the realm of culture itself, it was Art that engaged the major intellectual energies and gifts of Western Marxism.
Anderson sees Gramsci as an exception to the above--p. 45: "[Gramsci] alone [among the leading figures of Western Marxism] embodied in his person a revolutionary unity of theory and practice, of the type that had defined the classical heritage."
5. From Letters from Prison, vol. II, letter of September 7, 1931 to his sister-in-law Tania Schucht:
The research I have done on the intellectuals is very broad and in fact I don't think that there are any books on this subject in Italy. Certainly there exists a great deal of scholarly material, but it is scattered in an infinite number of reviews and local historical archives. At any rate, I greatly amplify the idea of [END PAGE 35] what an intellectual is and do not confine myself to the current notion that refers only to the preeminent intellectuals. My study also leads to certain definitions of the concept of the State that is usually understood as a political Society (or dictatorship, or coercive apparatus meant to hold the popular mass in accordance with the type of production and economy at a given moment) and not as a balance between the political Society and the civil Society (or the hegemony of a social group over the entire national society, exercised through the so-called private organizations, such as the Church, the unions, the schools etc.), and it is within the civil society that the intellectuals operate (Benedetto Croce, for example, is a sort of lay pope and he is a very effective instrument of hegemony even if from time to time he comes into conflict with this or that government, etc.).
6. From Selections from the Prison Notebooks, on "State and Civil Society," pp. 237-38:
It seems to me that Ilich [Lenin] understood that a change was necessary from the war of maneuver applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only form possible in the West--where, as Krasnov observes, armies could rapidly accumulate endless quantities of munitions, and where the social structures were of themselves still capable of becoming heavily-armed foritifications. This is what the formula of the "United Front" seems to me to mean, and it corresponds to the conception of a single front for the Entente under the sole command of Foch.
Ilich, however, did not have time to expand his formula--though it should be borne in mind that he could only have expanded it theoretically, whereas the fundamental task was a national one; that is to say, it required a reconaissance of the terrain and identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the elements of civil society, etc. In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying--but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconaissance of each individual country. [END PAGE 36]
7. From Selections from the Prison Notebooks, "Problems of Marxism," p. 435:
The true fundamental function and signfiicance of the dialectic can only by grasped if the philosophy of praxis is conceived as an integral and original philosophy which opens up a new phase of history and a new phase in the development of world thought. It does this to the extent that it goes beyond both traditional idealism and traditional materialism, philosophies whch are expressions of past societies, while retaining their vital elements. If the philosophy of praxis is not considered except in subordination to another philosophy, then it is impossible to grasp the new dialectic, through which the transcending of old philosophies is effected and expressed.