Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds), Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (original) (raw)
Related papers
Antonio Gramsci: the roots of Italian communism
Political Studies Forum , 2022
Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, based on the importance of consensus, is the antecedent of the recognition of the democracy by the Italian Communist Party (terrain that would be fully acquired by its successors, Togliatti and Berlinguer). Gramsci takes the word and the concept from the debates at the top of international communism and –adapting it to his theory of the “revolution in the West” – changes and innovates it profoundly in the Prison Notebooks, making it an idea that is today widespread and used throughout the world. Palmiro Togliatti, who returned to Italy in 1944, became a protagonist in the writing of the post-war democratic Constitution and theorized on the “national ways” to socialism and polycentrism; Enrico Berlinguer theorized on the universal value of democracy and the acceptance of many liberal principles for the construction of an idea of “communism in freedom”.
2018
This book review discusses the recent volume of Giancarlo de Vivo, which offers a documented reconstruction of the role of the economist Piero Sraffa as the link between the prisoner Gramsci and the Italian Communist Party leadership in exile. Sraffa is shown to have acted autonomously of the party when Gramsci’s wishes, as expressed in two letters in particular to his sister-in-law, Tat’jana, were for caution to be adopted in regard to the leadership’s positions. There is also an analysis and defence of Sraffa’s position in regard to the controversial 1928 letter from a party leader abroad (Grieco), before Gramsci was sentenced, which the prisoner considered to have worsened his position. This seems not to be true, but what did worsen attempts to ameliorate his position was publication in translation in L’Humanité of Professor Aracangeli’s medical report on him. The stances of Sraffa and Gramsci on questions regarding the nature of historical materialism and the philosophy of praxi...
Selections from Political Writings (1910-1920), with additional texts by Bordiga and Tasca
Telos, 1977
During the decade preceding his arrest by Mussolini's police in November, 1926, Antonio Gramsci, by his own account, "wrote enough words to fill up fifteen to twenty volumes of four hundred pages apiece." Later, he modestly judged these writings as "stuff written for the day it appeared and I always thought it would be dead the day after." ' Quintin Hoare's new edition of Gramsci's journalistic writings, as well as an earlier selection by Cavalcanti and Piccone, however, proves that Gramsci was mistaken about the worth of the "stuff he wrote for the days during World War I and the ensuing Biennio Rosso. Instead, as even Hoare acknowledges, a "profoundly original body of thought" (p. xiii) can be discovered in Gramsci's daily and weekly contributions to the journals II Grido del Popolo, Avanti!, and L'Ordine Nuovo. His theoretical vision, as it unfolds in these publications from 1914 to 1921, ranges through a broad spectrum of issues: popular culture, working class education, the Russian revolution, the politics of the PSI and the CGL, the political significance of workers' councils, the failure of the Risorgimento, colonialism, and the Mezzogiorno, the class basis of the fascist reaction, and the creation of the PCI. Much of the political and social theory elaborated more fully in the Prison Notebooks finds its initial articulation in these journalistic articles. Yet, most importantly, this selection concentrates strongly on the Biennio Rosso period. In doing so, the assemblage of Gramsci's writings documents his changing assessment of the roles to be played by workers' councils and mass parties in an Italian socialist revolution. He accentuates the importance of popular politics for altering mass consciousness which falsely accepts notions of culture as undigested factual knowledge, history as de-humanized natural process, and education as mechanical conditioning. Apolitical men, especially those in the fold of the PSI and the CGL, view history as if "events are hatched offstage in the shadows; unchecked hands weave the fabric of collective life-and the masses of citizens know nothing" (p. 17). Gramsci's writings combat uncritical thinking-both mechanistic Marxism and positivistic liberalism-that permits the political fortunes of the working class to be "manipulated in the interests of narrow horizons, of the immediate ends of small groups of activists-and the mass of citizens know nothing" (p. 17). To prompt the working class to realize that "events should be seen to be the intelligent work of men, and not the products of chance, of fatality" (p. 18), Gramsci asserts the mediation of a new popular culture, 2 based upon active class will, can be discovered in the workers' council. Gramsci's commitment to enact the ethical moment as political practice through the mediation of the workers' councils has several derivations. Frustrated by the parliamentary strategy of the PSI, Gramsci's vision of the PSI as a party committing suicide through its electoral struggles with the bourgeois parties initially prevented him from appreciating its significant strengths as well as its potential for playing a
'The Life of a Reflective Revolutionary,' Introduction to Antonio Gramsci (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
There are some political thinkers whose ideas are so inseparable from their political action, that to neglect the latter would be to fail to grasp the full significance of their intellectual endeavors. It is arguable that the political thought of Antonio Gramsci belongs to this genre. Indeed, most if not all of his writings were either intended as a direct intervention in the politics of his day, or a more sober reflection on the nature of politics and society and how best to pursue the objectives and principles to which he dedicated his life in light of his own experience of political struggle. As Giuseppe Fiori's pithy synopsis neatly puts it, Gramsci's life was 'the life of a revolutionary,' 1 a revolutionary Marxist to be precise. Indeed, he was prepared to pursue his political and ideological objectives to the point of imprisonment and death -a commitment he was forced in the end to make good on.
"Forme cinesi": Gramsci's Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism
Estetica: Studi e ricerche, 2017
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are a crucial reference for postcolonial thought. What is perhaps less known outside of Italy, is that Gramsci’s writings were also instrumental for the development of historical Italian Third-Worldism, or what is known in Italy as "terzomondismo." In this essay, I show how, during the Cold War, Gramsci’s writings became central for Italian writers, filmmakers, and politicians in their engagement with the geopolitics of decolonization. I examine in particular how Gramsci’s writings shaped Palmiro Togliatti and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s encounter with Maoist anticolonial politics and culture in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split. My analysis is framed by a reading of Gramsci’s notes on education, language learning, and translatability (traducibilità). The question I put forward is to what extent Gramsci’s thought was “translatable” into the discursive context of "terzomondismo." I argue that, along with his reflections on translatability, Gramsci’s aesthetic of the unfinished Notebook complicated these ulterior political and cultural translations.
International Critical Thought, 2017
This research is based upon three interrelated elements: the European crisis, Italian Fascism and the analysis of the two carried out by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, that is, the notes he wrote during his detention in Fascist prisons from 1929 to 1935. However, the aim of this contribution is to shed light not on Gramsci's analysis of the European crisis and the regime in Italy as such, but on the way in which this analysis interacts with the constellations of political power and of hegemonic social forces existing in Italy and in Europe at the time. Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are in fact not reflections on a defeat, made far awayboth physically and mentally-from the ongoing struggle (as they have often been interpreted in the past), but a strategic analysis of opportunities for communist political initiative presented by the new European and Italian situation of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Beyond the Crisis of Marxism: Gramsci’s Contested Legacy
2008
Discussion and research on Gramsci have for a long time been a predominantly Italian issue, or rather a question intrinsic or mainly referring to the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It has seemed obvious then, for a whole generation of studies on Gramsci, to link his legacy to the history of the party that he had helped to found.
Antonio Gramsci, Scritti (Writings), 1, 1910-1916
International Gramsci Journal, 2020
The first volume of the early writings (largely his journalism-the specific form of his political militancy in this period) has come out after the second one, covering 1917, due to the even greater complexity of assembling and ascertaining authorship to the articles. These often appeared anonymously, sometimes with initials or an abbreviated name, and were sometimes subject to rigid censorship. In the latter case all efforts have been made to trace and reinstate the missing sections. In all, about 400 texts of various kinds are included in the volume, which supersedes previous collections dating back to the last quarter of last century. At the start of the volume is a transcription of Gramsci's very first journalistic article, published in 1910, as correspondent during his summer vacation, from the township of Aidomaggiore, near Ghilarza. The review pays particular attention to Gramsci's involvement in education, and especially to the adult educational question, long-ignored by successive governments from unity of the country on to the period covered. There are comments on his own formative school experience. Essays that he wrote at the high school (lycée) in Cagliari are included in the volume, but in the review we also transcribe, as an important key to his later thinking, the essay that marked the end of his elementary school period, a text not published in the volume since it lies outside the time period dealt with. Closely allied to the question of education is that of culture and the type of culture that remained to be acquired by the subaltern classes in order to transform their living conditions.