Between Russia and Italy, from Bogdanov to Gramsci, the cultural path towards the Revolution - Noemi Ghetti (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Romance Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, , 2012
Gramsci spent almost two years living in Moscow in 1922–23 and 1925, where he was closely involved in the work of the Comintern as representative of the Italian Communist Party. While information on Gramsci's time in Russia is still sketchy, we know that in addition to attending official events, he travelled to several Russian cities, including Petrograd, where he gave lectures. A trained linguist, Gramsci achieved a significant level of competence in Russian and was exposed to a wide range of political and intellectual debates where the cultural and linguistic dimensions of hegemony were central concerns. This pertained to questions of mass literacy, the standardization of languages and public discourse, the national question and questions of agitation and propaganda. The traces these debates left on Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have not been subjected to adequate scrutiny. This article will discuss these points of contact and correspondence, delineating how Gramsci was able to preserve and develop some of the most important critical thinking on the question of hegemony in the 1930s, when in Russia this had been severely stifled by Stalinism.
Bogdanov: his tributes to Marx and Lassalle
2022
In February 1913 Aleksandr Bogdanov, then resident in Belgium and France, agreed to be a regular contributor to the St. Petersburg newspaper, Pravda, and in April 1913 to submit works to an associated social-democratic publishing house, Priboi. Whereas Bogdanov’s exclusion from Pravda by the end of 1913 can be attributed to Lenin’s having acquired influence over the paper’s editorial board, different circumstances were responsible for his dispute, the following year, with Priboi. These included problems of epistolary communication, police censorship, and Bogdanov’s mistaken conviction that he was being discriminated against by Priboi, as he had been by Pravda. This article traces the development of Bogdanov’s relations with Priboi, provides translations of commemoratory articles that he contributed on Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, and examines the publishing history of these articles.
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”.
Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Concept of Culture: From Workers’ Circles to the Proletkult Movement
Cultural Science Journal, 2021
This paper analyses the historical genesis of Aleksandr Bogdanov’s conception of proletarian culture. In particular, the author deals with Bogdanov’s activity during his exile in Vologda, his organization of the Vpered group, and the debates over cultural politics amongst Russian Marxism in emigration. The systematic focus of the paper is on the concept of culture as based on the material and non-material capacities of the comprehension and the working and living conditions of the worker. The role of art in a system of culture is another important systematic focus of this analysis.
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.
unpublished, 2018
In 2011 Eric Hobsbawm published his final book: How to Change the World. In it Hobsbawm take almost no account of Russian Marxists (excepting Lenin), who are most important for understanding the history of Marxism after Marx’s death. Even when referring to them, he typically does so negatively. Instead Hobsbawm takes up Italian Marxists like Togliatti and Gramsci in a very positive way. But many of what we think are original views of Gramsci, in fact originated in ideas of the Russian Marxists, especially of Trotsky. Indeed, we can never understand the real significance of Gramsci’s theory without understanding his close relationship with Russian Marxism.
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...