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ОглавлениеGramsci – on the person and the work
Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891: Among the people of contemporary history who were also born in those years are, for example: the American politicians Dwight Eisenhower (1890) and Henry Morgenthau (1891), the Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong (1893) and Nikita Khrushchev (1894), the leading National Socialists Adolf Hitler (1889) and Hermann Göring (1893), the Austrian linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889) and the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889), who was close to the National Socialists, and the American comedians Charlie Chaplin (1889) and Groucho Marx (1890).
Gramsci’s youth in Sardinia and Turin: Gramsci’s family belonged to the Albanian minority in southern Italy. Antonio Gramsci grew up in a petty bourgeois milieu in Sardinia. An accident in childhood caused a hump to form on his back. Gramsci grew to only about 5 feet tall and struggled with health problems throughout his life. With the help of a scholarship, Gramsci was able to begin studying literature and philosophy in Turin in 1911. In 1913, Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialisto Italiano – PSI), and from 1914 he wrote articles in socialist newspapers such as Il Grido del popolo and later for the party newspaper Avanti!
The following paragraphs briefly place Antonio Gramsci in the history of Marxist philosophy and politics and present “Gramsci’s Plan” in its main features. Such a condensed presentation presents a difficult task for readers with less background knowledge. This group of readers is advised either to skip these paragraphs or to read with the awareness that one or another ambiguity will arise.
The revolutions in Europe after World War I: In early August 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire started a war against Serbia and Tsarist Russia in the East. Only a few days later, Germany invaded Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in the West. Great Britain then declared war on Germany. World War I, thus unleashed, cost the lives of some 17 million people and devastated large parts of Europe. In February 1917, the Tsar in Russia was overthrown by an impoverished and war-weary population. The October Revolution of the same year brought the left wing of Russian social democracy – the Bolsheviks with their party leader Lenin – to power. The Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic was founded in November 1917. The new state relied on new kinds of mass organizations: The Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Councils. After a separate peace between Russia and Germany in March 1918, a revolution broke out in Germany just 8 months later in November. The newly formed Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils were also instrumental in the overthrow of the monarchy in Germany. The November Revolution resulted in the abdication of the German Emperor and the establishment of a democratic republic, the Weimar Republic. Also in November 1918, the Emperor of Austria had to renounce all state functions. After more than four years of war, the overthrow of three great monarchies in Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary and the establishment of a first socialist state, it seemed possible for a short time to impose in Europe a new society, a socialist society without oppression and exploitation, without war, imperialism and colonialism. The Kingdom of Italy, where universal suffrage had been successively enforced, was among the victorious powers, but faced economic ruin. Antonio Gramsci, in retrospect, describes his feeling about life at the end of 1918 in the following words: “The only feeling that united us during these meetings of ours resulted from a vague passion for a vague proletarian culture; we wanted to do something, to undertake something; we felt cramped, without orientation, immersed in the hectic life of those months after the armistice, when the collapse of Italian society seemed near.”37
From 1919, Gramsci took part in the factory councils movement in Turin: as a measure against the economic crisis and the possible collapse of the Italian state, workers in the industrial centers of northern Italy, and especially in Turin, founded workers councils from 1919 on, similar to those in Russia and Germany. The workers councils were called factory councils in Italy. The goal and purpose of the factory councils was to gain control over industrial production in Italy to define an independent way out of the postwar crisis. Antonio Gramsci participated in the founding of the Factory Councils’ newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), in Turin in 1919 and emerged as a mastermind of the Factory Councils movement in Italy. In the two red years of 1919 and 1920 – the so-called Biennio Rosso – Italy was marked by several general strikes and large-scale factory occupations. For the defeat of the factory councils movement at the end of 1920, Gramsci blamed the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party, which had opposed the spread of the strike movement throughout Italy. As a result, he became one of the co-founders of the Italian Communist Party (CPI) in 1921 and was immediately elected to its Central Committee. In October 1922 – after the Fascists’ march on Rome – the Italian king appointed Mussolini, the leader of the Fascists, as prime minister. In the years that followed, the fascist government destroyed democracy in Italy, beginning with the banning of newspapers, the murder and arrest of opposition figures, and finally the banning of political parties.
Gramsci married in Moscow and became the father of two sons: In May 1922, Gramsci had traveled to the Soviet Union to represent the CPI at the Communist International in Moscow. After an attack of weakness, Gramsci had to go to a sanatorium. While in the sanatorium, Gramsci met the Russian violinist Julia Schucht. In 1923, the two married. The couple had two sons: Delio was born in 1924 and Giuliano in 1926.
Gramsci became leader of the Italian Communist Party (CPI) in 1924: After being elected in absentia to the new Italian Parliament in 1924, Gramsci returned to Italy. That same year he became the general secretary (chairman) of the CPI. At the third congress of the PCI in Lyon in 1926, Gramsci presented his theses on Italian fascism. The party congress confirmed him as general secretary. In October 1926, Gramsci wrote a letter on behalf of the PCI Politburo to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) under Stalin, warning against destroying the work begun by Lenin and against taking too harsh measures against the opposition around Trotsky. Gramsci shaped the development of the Italian Communist Party from 1924 to 1926, orienting himself toward the idea of an anti-fascist united front. In early November 1926, Gramsci was arrested in defiance of his parliamentary immunity and a few months later was sentenced by a special court to 20 years in prison for “incitement to civil war” and other offenses.
Gramsci spent the last 11 years of his life in prison, where he wrote his “Prison Notebooks”: During his 11 years in prison, Gramsci wrote more than 1300 pages on the history, politics, and culture of Italy and Europe, as well as on Marxist philosophy. Reading these “Prison Notebooks” is complicated by the fact that they are poorly organized thematically and that he often used camouflage language – for example, “group” instead of “class” – to avoid attracting the attention of prison censors, who neatly stamped his handwritten pages. In prison, Gramsci worked deeply into the philosophical questions Kant had proposed: Into epistemology, into the ethics and political philosophy of modern democracies, into the philosophy of history, and the question “What is man?” This gave rise to his philosophy of praxis, with which he restored to philosophy that distinctive importance which it had held in the days of Kant and Hegel, the most important exponents of classical German philosophy. As an independent scientific discipline, it produces in the first place the concepts of cognition, reason, emancipation, liberation, and freedom that can then ground and guide social practice, political strategy, and tactics for transforming conditions. The significance of the Prison Notebooks can hardly be estimated. Numerous concepts Gramsci coined in the “Prison Notebooks” have become common vocabulary in political science, sociology, and philosophy over the past several decades. Gramsci’s reflections on the relationship between civil society, hegemony, intellectuals, education, language, and culture are constant reference points in scholarly publications and have been reflected in many discussions of socialist strategies.
Does Gramsci’s work contain the philosophical core of an alternative form of communism? Crucial for an understanding of Gramsci’s practical-political work, as well as of his entire theoretical work, are the “Biennio Rosso,” the two red years of 1919 and 1920 in Italy. In this phase, Gramsci had only a vague idea of Lenin’s theoretical work and of the emerging Soviet philosophy. Thus, in those years he was able to develop the first building blocks of his philosophy of praxis, which related in an independent way to Marx and the legacy of classical German philosophy in Marx’s philosophy. Gramsci’s early writings also influenced discussions in the Communist International about workers’ control. It is only in the holistic conception of his practical and theoretical work in the Turin factory councils movement in the years 1919 to 1921 and after, as well as his theoretical work in prison, that the real philosophical explosiveness of Antonio Gramsci’s work appears. If the years of revolt in the Italian labor movement, the years as general secretary of the PCI, and the work in prison are torn apart, then the “Prison Notebooks” threaten to lose their actual theoretical and practical relevance and become a treasure trove for academic reflection. Gramsci’s epistemological interest in prison consisted in coming to terms with the defeats of the revolutionary workers’ movement in Italy and Germany in the years 1917 to 1921, in order to draw lessons for future politics and the further development of Marxist philosophy. Which defeats are we talking about here? First, there was the defeat in Italy: within two years, the Italian workers’ movement, which had organized a general strike and factory occupations as late as 1920, was largely crushed by a militant fascist movement. After the March on Rome, the Italian king appointed Benito Mussolini, leader of the fascist movement, as prime minister of a coalition government in October 1922. In Germany and Hungary, the socialist soviet republics were crushed militarily later in 1919. Later uprisings in 1921 and 1923, initiated by the KPD, failed completely. Gramsci approached the study of the causes of these defeats in several ways. On a strategic level, Gramsci will try to grasp the significance of this phase with his well-known metaphors of the war of movement and the necessary transition to the war of position. Crucial to the significance of the “Prison Notebooks,” however, is that Gramsci will critically examine the entire philosophical presuppositions of future revolutions. Gramsci’s thinking in prison related in particular to the question of how to conceive of modern bourgeois society, which draws its political stability from the democratic parliamentary form of government; he chose the concept hegemony for this purpose. Hegemony in this context means first of all the leadership of society by the bourgeois classes. The opposition to bourgeois hegemony is formed by the emancipation of the subaltern classes, composed mainly of the working class and the peasants. “Subaltern” is a dazzling concept for which over 100 synonyms are given. Marx used “subaltern” in the sense of “without self-will,” that is, without will. With Gramsci, “subaltern” took on the meaning of intellectually subordinate and without historical initiative.38 Based on his experiences in the two red years, Antonio Gramsci elaborated in the “Prison Notebooks” a philosophy of praxis that presents itself as a continuation of the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. This philosophy illuminates the struggle for the emancipation of the subaltern classes under the modern conditions of bourgeois hegemony. It focuses on the increasing social control and power of disposal over the means, conditions, and results of social labor. The process of liberation of the subaltern classes leads in result to the abolition of classes and thus to a communist society, which Gramsci called the “regulated society.” For Gramsci, as for Marx and Engels, the overturning of the economic relations of bourgeois society was conceivable only as a global process. In Gramsci’s philosophy, however, history did not become a modified continuation of natural history. In this process, the communist parties do not have a scientific worldview superior to the consciousness and activity of the subaltern classes. Gramsci conceived the communist revolution as a historically open process that can only be advanced by the subaltern classes themselves as self-transformation in the course of changing social circumstances. On the basis of these features, which stand out sharply from the philosophy in the Engels-Lenin-Stalin line, the Polish philosopher Kolakowski, in his 1200- page account of the “Main Currents of Marxism” in 1976, concluded that “Gramsci created the ideological nucleus of an alternative form of communism …”39 The goal of the process of emancipation of the subaltern classes is the realization of a historically new quality of freedom, a new quality of social self-determination. Gramsci’s thought leads out of the bourgeois epoch, in which the relationship between wage labor and capital, the competition of capitals and the nation-states competing with each other are decisive, into a world without exploitation and without wars between nations, in which people, according to a determination of Marx, “rationally (i.e., according to their reason, the author), bring their metabolism under their common control, instead of being dominated by it as by a blind power; carry it out with the least expenditure of force and under the conditions most worthy and adequate to their human nature.”40
On the 70th anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death – An obituary by Rossana Rossanda from 2007: On April 21, 1937, Gramsci was released from prison. He died 6 days later on April 27, 1937, at the age of 46, from illnesses that had not been adequately treated as a result of his stay in prison. 70 years later, Italian communist Rossana Rossanda wrote an obituary of Antonio Gramsci.41 The first two paragraphs read, “70 years ago Antonio Gramsci died – thinker of the defeats of the European revolution. 70 years ago, Antonio Gramsci died in a hospital. No one came to the funeral except his sister-in-law Tatiana and the police. He had been arrested in 1926 and released a few weeks earlier, exhausted by illness and not only by it. If dying is ever with consent, the awareness that no one wanted him must have made it easy for him: not in Moscow, where his wife and children and comrades were, not in Ghilarza (Sardinia), where his parental family lived. He did not say anything about this to the loving, not beloved Tatiana, and if he confided it to Piero Sraffa, Sraffa did not leave us any testimony about it. Nevertheless, about what had happened in the world between the year 26 and the year 37, the two must have talked for a long time in the clinic, finally without police, and Gramsci must have learned a lot about what he had been able to guess. In the USSR, the collectivization of agriculture, then the murder of Kirov and the beginning of the liquidation of the Central Committee elected in 1934, and in 1936, just a year before his death, the first of the great trials. Outside the USSR, the crisis of 1929, the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, and in 1936 the Popular Front in France, then Franco’s attack on the Spanish Republic. What did he think about it? What could he hope for the return to freedom? Hard to imagine a more suffering existence – because of the hardships of the body, because of the defeat, the loneliness, the clear-sightedness.”
Notes on the obituary: Gramsci’s sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht supplied him with books and periodicals; she also smuggled the Prison Notebooks out of prison. A lively correspondence developed between the two, which makes up a large part of Gramsci’s “prison letters.” Piero Sraffa (1898-1983) was a friend of Gramsci’s since 1919; he later became a university professor and an internationally known economist who worked with John Meynard Keynes at Oxford. Sergei Kirov (1886-1934) was a Soviet state and party functionary who had risen to high office as an acolyte of Stalin. Kirov was assassinated in 1934. Now and then, the claim was made that he could have become an adversary of Stalin and that Stalin had ordered his murder. Of the 139 CC members and candidates elected at the 17th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1934, the Stalinist regime killed about 100 in the years that followed. In 1936, the first of the Moscow trials of veteran Bolshevik Party members took place. In this show trial, the two party leaders Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had already participated in the October Revolution as members of the Bolsheviks, were tried, convicted and later executed. The “1929 crisis” refers to the Great Depression that began in October 1929 with the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. The crisis manifested itself in a sharp decline in industrial production and world trade. There was an international banking crisis, which caused the insolvency of many companies and, in Germany, up to 6 million unemployed, social misery and political crises. The “Italian invasion of Abyssinia” refers to the Abyssinian War, a war of aggression launched by fascist Italy under Mussolini in 1935 against what is now Ethiopia. Italian forces made massive and systematic use of poison gas during the course of the war. Up to ¾ million Ethiopians fell victim to the war. The war officially ended in May 1936 with the annexation of Abyssinia. Gramsci’s release from prison took place during one of the darkest periods in European history. Italy, Hungary, Austria and Germany were already under fascist rule in 1937, and fascism would also triumph in Spain two years later. The 2nd World War and the Shoa were already casting their shadows.
Marx completed the farewell to philosophy
The attempt to write a book on Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis faces two almost insurmountable challenges: First, Marx announced his departure from philosophy in 1845 with the famous sentence, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; what matters is to change it.” There are also other interpretations of this famous sentence, which will be discussed later. Marx’s works after 1848 – such as the “Fundamentals of a Critique of Political Economy,” “The Capital,” and the writings on France – have a philosophical content, but he no longer wrote any work with an explicitly philosophical character. The philosophical work begun by Marx in the years 1843 to 1848 was expounded and, to a certain extent, continued by his companion Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) from 1878 onward and by Social Democratic party philosophers thereafter. Against Engels’ interpretation of the common work, there was no objection from Marx, no critical remark. It must seem futile to try to proceed with a fundamental critique against this insofar authorized interpretation. The second almost insurmountable challenge consists in the fact that with the Soviet Union for 71 years a state existed that pretended to put Marx’s teachings and their further development by Engels and Lenin into practice. The collected works of Marx and Engels – the 43 blue volumes – were standard literature in the socialist countries. Both – Marx’s de facto departure from philosophy and the temporary existence of a worldwide real existing socialism – allowed little room for the emergence of other readings and contributed to producing the desolate state in which Marxist philosophy, as well as philosophy as a whole, finds itself in the 21st century. Gramsci thus attempted in prison to bypass the interpretation of Engels and Soviet philosophy in order to expose the real content of Marx’s philosophy. This attempt must be briefly explained here.
Marx de facto made a farewell to philosophy: Marx wrote some important works with undisputed philosophical content in the years 1943 to 1948. Some were never published, others bear a polemical character. In these works, Marx was particularly concerned with Hegel’s dialectics, the philosophy of history, and the Young Hegelians, that is, the various followers of Hegel after his death in 1831. The “Manifesto of the Communist Party” of 1848 was – as will be shown – the result of efforts to create an independent philosophy. After 1848, Marx devoted his labor to his main work, “The Capital,” to other scientific works, to political analysis, and to political practice within the framework of the International Workingmen’s Association and the Social Democratic labor movement. Because of this individual emphasis of Marx, a gap opens up in his philosophical work. Thus, today there are very different views on whether there is such a thing as Marxist philosophy at all and, if so, what does it consist of? The predominantly followed path to the philosophical content of Marx’s early work is the one via the works of his friend and political companion Friedrich Engels. In 1878, Engels attempted to present the philosophical foundations of the materialist conception of history in a book entitled “Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science” – called “Anti-Dühring” for short. Marx himself wrote a section of this book, so that also from his side sufficient authority was given to Engels’ remarks. In 1886, three years after Marx’s death, Engels, in a perspective article on Marx’s philosophy, declared the German labor movement to be the “heir of classical German philosophy.”42 In fact, and in contradiction to this claim, Engels took a devastating turn in philosophy with this article, which had already become apparent in the “Anti-Dühring.” The setting of the course consists in a rejection of the heritage of classical German philosophy, that is, the denial of the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of development. The impact of Friedrich Engels’ work continues to this day. The two leading Social Democratic party theorists at the end of the 19th century – Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) in Germany and Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) in Russia – followed the path laid out by Engels. Their Marxism accentuated in a very definite way a philosophical materialism that was incompatible with classical German philosophy. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, continued along this path of Marx interpretation and laid the foundation for the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Gramsci placed himself in the tradition of Italian philosophy and especially that of Antonio Labriola (1843-1904): Gramsci took a different path from the beginning of his political life and thus also in the “Prison Notebooks”. He thus followed a specifically Italian line of development in philosophy after Marx. Thus, he insisted on the difference in the thinking of Marx and Engels and even claimed that Engels’ contribution to philosophy had been of secondary importance.43 Gramsci placed himself in the tradition of Italian philosophy when he quoted Antonio Labriola (1843-1904) in the “Prison Notebooks” as saying that the philosophy developed by Marx himself was autonomous and “independent of any other philosophical current, self-sufficient …”44 Gramsci wrote in summary: “On the theoretical level, the philosophy of praxis cannot be confused with or traced back to any other philosophy: It is original not only because it overcomes the preceding philosophies, but above all because it opens up an entirely new path, that is, renews the way of conceiving philosophy itself from top to bottom.45 The presentation of the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of development presupposes in this respect that Marx’s philosophy is reconstructed from Marx’s original works and in connection with the texts of Kant and Hegel, without detours via other authors. The latter in order to show how Marx took on this legacy and at the same time overcame these philosophies by creating a “new synthesis.”46 The way in which Marx wanted to grasp philosophy, as indicated by Gramsci, points to the question posed at the beginning: why and what for philosophy?
Marxism gained worldwide importance only as Stalinism
In the territory of the Soviet Union, the PR China and the other Stalinist regimes, about 1/3 of humanity lived at the beginning of the 1960s: Marxism as a philosophical conception of the world, from which certain political strategies and tactics can be derived, had its starting point in the writings of Marx and Engels in the 1940s. With the publication of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in 1848, this preliminary work came to a certain conclusion. The political grouping that stood behind the Manifesto in Germany and fought for a democratic republic was decisively defeated by troops of the Prussian king in the German Revolution of 1848/9 and expelled all over the world. Its leading head – Karl Marx – went into exile in London. Marxist philosophy began to influence European history in the years that followed with German Social Democracy, the International Workers’ Association from 1864 to 1872, and the Paris Commune in 1871. All the historical impulses that emanated from Marx’s work became knotted in World War I and the revolutions and uprisings that took place in Europe at its end from 1917 to 1921. Out of this global crisis of bourgeois society emerged, after the October Revolution of 1917, the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic as the first state to call itself socialist. Already under Lenin, the bourgeois, social democratic and peasant democratic opposition, as well as the rebellious sections of the Russian workers’ movement, were suppressed and disenfranchised. The elimination of all democratic rights was followed in 1921 by the military annihilation of the opposition on the occasion of the Kronstadt uprising and in 1922 by the establishment of the Soviet Union, which was enforced by force. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin was able to consolidate and expand his position of power in the party and the state and to preserve it until his death in 1953. Historically significant crimes of the Stalin regime included the forced collectivization of the peasants beginning in 1929 and the accompanying famines, the political purges and the murder of the old Bolshevik party leaders beginning in 1936, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and the division of territory in Eastern Europe decided therein, and the punishment of peoples through resettlement – for example, the Crimean Tatars – in the course of World War II. The Soviet Union and the Stalinist regimes installed in Eastern Europe after World War II, as well as a number of states that emerged from anti-colonial revolutions – including the People’s Republic of China in 1949 – grew into a world political force on whose territory almost a third of humanity lived as of the early 1960s. Maoism, which had developed into the dominant current within the Chinese Communist Party, did not offer an alternative to Stalinism, but directed against the revisionism of the Soviet leadership, demanded a return to the political and philosophical foundations of Stalinism. The systemic competition between capitalism and socialism and the resulting Cold War formed one of the most important axes in world politics for about 4 decades. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this period in world politics ended.
The first historical attempt to build a socialist society failed: The uprising that the Russian workers, peasants, and soldiers undertook against tsarism and its war in February 1917 was continued in a certain way with the October Revolution led by the Bolsheviks in the same year, but finally ended in Stalin’s party dictatorship. This first historical attempt to build a socialist society did not fail from its end, from its results, for example, because of the political, economic, and military attacks of the bourgeois world, because of economic backwardness compared to the West, a “certain lack” of democracy and the rule of law, or because of mistakes in political leadership. The whole project, launched in January 1918 with the closure of the Constituent Assembly – the Russian Constituent Assembly – was a break from several hundred years of bourgeois Enlightenment that had barely arrived in Russia. The Bolsheviks broke with the concept of the democratic republic that had been advocated by the social democratic, socialist, and communist movements, including Marx and Engels, in the 19th century. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fortified their position by dictatorial means because they conceived of capitalism in its imperialist stage at the beginning of the 20th century as a rotting, parasitic and dying capitalism. This was the Soviet Union’s life lie, which was not corrected until its end. In the “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci countered this self-deception, which was philosophically indebted to a historical determinism, with an analysis of Americanism and Fordism. Gramsci recognized already in the 1930s that the American nation would become the rising and later all-dominating force of 20th century bourgeois society. The Bolsheviks acted in 1917 and in the following years in the expectation that revolution would break out in Europe and especially in Germany and that socialism could triumph worldwide. This assessment was initially also confirmed by the revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Hungary at the end of 1918. Only the young democratic republics that emerged from these revolutions did not take the Soviet path. The socialist soviet republics in Bavaria, Bremen, and Hungary were crushed within months of their proclamation in the summer of 1919. In Russia, a nation of some 130 million people in which about 80% of the population were peasants, a return to bourgeois democracy with universal suffrage and free elections would have been tantamount to political suicide for the Bolsheviks. Thus, the measure of seizing power and formally placing it in the hands of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets to put down the counterrevolution turned into a permanent dictatorship against the great mass of the Soviet population. The “Russian tragedy,” which Rosa Luxemburg accurately captured in character, had its roots in Russia’s social conditions and in a philosophy that emerged under those conditions. Today, in almost every nation in the world, there is a political current, more or less relevant, more or less alive, disintegrating into different facets, which refers to the philosophical heritage of Karl Marx. In many nations in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Marxists have been or are involved in democratically elected governments; in others, such as China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, they rule in an authoritarian manner. The People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, is poised to overtake the United States as the world’s leading economic power in the coming decades.
Marx in the twilight: Lenin and his successor Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and from 1941 head of government of the Soviet Union, established the dictatorship of a political minority in the Soviet Union in the name of Marx and Engels. Lenin had laid the philosophical and political foundations for this with his writings. In the 1920s, there had still been a lively debate in the Soviet Union between several factions within the CPSU. Now that socialism had become a state, the question arose: how were its philosophical foundations to be understood, that is, how were the dialectical materialism and historical materialism of Marx and Engels to be grasped accurately? In 1938, after the years of the “Great Terror,” to which over a million people fell victim beginning in 1936, Stalin, as the undisputed leader, summarized Soviet philosophy in his writing “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism.”47 In addition to many quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Stalin also incorporated in it an important passage of about 2 pages from Marx’s “Preface to the Critique of Political Economy” of 1859.48 The “Preface” is generally regarded as a central document of Marx’s materialist conception of history and also contains the famous dictum “social being determines consciousness.” In this way, Stalin was able to successfully demonstrate the unity of Marx’s philosophy and his own philosophical materialism. His 1938 summary became the authoritative interpretation of Marx’s philosophy for the “world communist movement” after World War II. China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, the Eastern European states, the vast majority of anti-colonial liberation movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and the Soviet- and Chinese-influenced parties in Western Europe adopted this core of Stalinist philosophy. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the CPSU leadership initiated a cautious movement away from the “excesses” of the Stalinist regime. At the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956, the “personality cult” around Stalin was criticized and, in the aftermath, some reforms were made to the political system of the Soviet Union. Certain modifications were also made to Soviet philosophy, but these are only recognizable to specialists. After the split of the communist world movement at the beginning of the 60’s, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and in its wake the Marxist-Leninist parties in Western Europe from 1968 onward, defended Stalin’s achievements and Stalinist philosophy against the revisionist deviation that the CPSU was accused of. Under the common philosophical umbrella created by Stalin, a variety of currents operates to this day and continues to shape the understanding of Marx’s texts. Marxism became a state only as Stalinism and gained worldwide significance in the everyday minds of 20th century people only as Stalinism. With few exceptions, the philosophical opinions of Marxists who deviated from this mainstream of world politics remained insignificant in political practice. In order to be able to discuss the Soviet Union positively, but at the same time to express a certain distance from Stalin’s crimes and the Stalinist regimes, Stalin’s philosophy was alternatively criticized as a flattening, a vulgarization, a canonization, or as a dogmatic version of Marx’s philosophy. The impression that these formulations are intended to create to this day is that Stalin’s philosophy was essentially within the Marxian line of tradition. However, his substantive remarks, it is apologetically conceded, could have been more profound and complex here and there. Marx remains in the twilight through these formulations, philosophically and politically responsible for the states founded in his name and the crimes they committed.
Gramsci called for the burial of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which had emerged from German-Russian cooperation at the beginning of the 20th century and later became state doctrine in the Soviet Union: Gramsci dealt intensively with the peculiarities of Soviet philosophy in the 1920s in his “Prison Notebooks.” He was not able to trace the emergence of this philosophy in detail. For this, he lacked many writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Kautsky, and Lenin. In his opinion, the most important features of this philosophy were fatalism – the surrender to fate –, determinism – the belief that social developments were determined by laws – and the mechanistic view, according to which the mind and will of man must be explained by the movement of matter, by being. Gramsci wrote in the “Prison Notebooks,” referring to the Marxism prevalent in Europe and the Soviet Union: “It can be observed how the deterministic, fatalistic, mechanistic element was an immediate ideological ‘flavoring’ of the philosophy of praxis, a form of religion and stimulants (but in the nature of drugs), historically made necessary and justified by the ‘subaltern’ character of certain social strata.”49 A few pages later he concludes that it is time to bury this philosophy “with all due honors.”50 After the reconstruction of Marx’s philosophy in the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of development has been carried out based on Antonio Gramsci’s guidelines, it becomes possible in a second step to trace the history of the emergence of Stalinist philosophy and to work out how it differs from Marx’s philosophy. It becomes a glimpse into a philosophical “abyss” that makes one shudder. Hegel chose the term “abyss” for the philosophical system of Spinoza; it will be shown what meaning is hidden behind it.51 The term “difference” is often used in German to mark a gradual difference on a common scale. The Marxist-Leninist philosophy of the Soviet Union and the Marxian philosophy, however, are separated by a difference in essence. The difference in the essence of the two philosophies shows up as a continuous difference in the concepts of the two philosophies, covering all areas of philosophy, all answers to the four Kantian questions. The pointing out of these differences of essence allows a conceptually exact cut opposite to that philosophy, which arose from a German-Russian cooperation, which founded the Stalinist practice and which drags on – until today – in many political groupings and socialist states calling themselves Marxist. Humanity will not make a second attempt to build a socialist society without a thorough self-critique of the first attempt and its philosophical foundations having been convincingly worked out.
What distinguishes Gramsci as a Marxist philosopher?
The real content of all epoch-making systems is the needs of the time in which they were created: The revolutionary process in Europe at the end of World War I took place mainly in the geographical triangle of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Three political leaders of historical importance emerged: Lenin in Russia, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Antonio Gramsci in Italy. All three were united by their practical and theoretical leadership in the communist parties founded after the October Revolution of 1917. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Antonio Gramsci each represent in different ways the social, political, and philosophical development of their nation. Marx and Engels wrote in 1846: “The real content of all epoch-making systems are the needs of the time in which they arose. Underlying each of them is the whole previous development of a nation, the historical formation of class relations with their political, moral, philosophical and other consequences.”52 To avoid any miSunderstanding here: Only Lenin’s system, in the form that Stalin gave it, has been truly epoch-making. Following the conception of Marx and Engels, a proper understanding of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci can only be gained if his work is embedded in the development of the Italian nation and specifically of Italian philosophy.
The rebirth of the Italian nation as a bland compromise between monarchists and republicans: The era between 1815 and 1870 is known in Italy as the Risorgimento, the rebirth of the Italian nation. Under the common umbrella of the Risorgimento, different social and political forces united to strive for an independent nation-state of Italy. Some of these forces wanted to establish a democratic republic, others a monarchy. Common to all factions of the Risorgimento was the desire to achieve independence specifically from the Habsburg monarchy based in Vienna. A democratic revolution also took place in Italy in 1848/9, which Austrian and French troops eventually put down. The leading republican politicians – Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), for example – were then forced into exile, as were Marx, Engels and the German republicans. After a long series of local uprisings and wars of independence against the Catholic powers of Austria, France, and Spain, a meeting took place in October 1860 between Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia-Piedmont, and Garibaldi. The result of this meeting was that the Republicans withdrew from their claim to a republic and Victor Emmanuel II accepted the title of King of Italy a few months later. After further battles with the Austrians and the Pope, Italy became a unified nation in the form of a parliamentary monarchy after a total of 10 referendums. The national unification of Italy was proclaimed by royal decree on October 6, 1870. This marked the completion of the unification of Italy. The most important goal of the Risorgimento had been achieved. Catholicism, to which more than 90% of the population subscribed, remained a determining factor in the life of the Italian nation, both as a religion and as a political factor. Suffrage in the Italian kingdom was initially interpreted in an overly restrictive manner, with only about 2% of the population able to vote in elections to the national parliament. Over the decades, the electoral law was extended more and more. With the electoral reform of 1912, there was a move toward universal suffrage for men. The Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano = PSI) was founded in 1892 and developed into a strong and militant workers’ party, receiving one million electoral votes by 1913. On the occasion of the Italian-Turkish War of 1911/2, the PSI expelled members of a current that had welcomed the Italian government’s declaration of war. On the eve of World War I, in June 1914, there was a general strike and large anti-militarist demonstrations, which were suppressed by the Italian military. The Italian Socialist Party split from the nationalist war supporters around Mussolini in 1914. The PSI was the only party of the 2nd International to publicly oppose the war during the World War. In the September 1919 elections, the PSI received 32.4 percent of the vote, making it the strongest faction in the Italian parliament. In the years 1917 to 1921, political developments in Italy exhibited an important difference from Germany and Russia, one that was rooted in the preceding history of that nation and was to fundamentally determine Gramsci’s practice in those years. At no time during this period in Italy were there political workers’ or soldiers’ councils or other organizations comparable to the Russian soviets or the German workers’ and soldiers’ councils that would have opposed the parliamentary monarchy in Italy by calling for a soviet republic. No political revolution took place in Italy that would have challenged the constitutional compromise of 1861. The “two red years” in Italy in 1919 and 1920 were, in substance, a workers’ uprising against the power of capital. The factory council movement, in which Gramsci played a leading role, was an attempt to bring about a revolution in economic conditions within the framework of parliamentary democracy.
The Italian special path in philosophy: The very own Italian path to a nation state also conditioned the development of philosophy in Italy. Remarkable was the turning of the Italian national movement to classical German philosophy. This expressed the attempt to create effective arguments in the struggle against the feudal-religious powers and the Pope, as well as for the justification of a secular authority. German idealist philosophy came to Italy mainly through the philosopher Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883). Spaventa was the founder of a Hegel-oriented school in Naples, and between 1867 and 1876, he was also practically active as a member of the Italian parliament. From the Neapolitan school of Hegelianism emerged Italy’s first Marxist philosopher, Antonio Labriola (1843-1904), who also achieved some international prominence.53 An Italian philosophy professor, Antonio Labriola was an excellent connoisseur of both Kant and Hegel and turned to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels beginning in 1890. Labriola became one of the most important representatives of Italy’s philosophical special route (in German: Sonderweg) and can be considered one of the mediators between the philosophy of Karl Marx and that of Antonio Gramsci. Labriola developed an independent interpretation of Marx’s philosophical work, which differed significantly from the versions represented in Germany by Kautsky and in Russia by Plekhanov. Labriola gave his interpretation the name “philosophy of praxis.” His conception intended to capture the core of historical materialism as a transformation and unfolding of classical German philosophy. One of Professor Labriola’s students was Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Croce had originally come to Hegel via Marx and Labriola. Around the turn of the century, however, he turned away from Marxism and became an important Italian liberal philosopher in the first half of the 20th century. To underscore Croce’s international importance, Gramsci stated in the “Prison Notebooks” that Croce’s further development of Hegel’s philosophy “represents the present world moment of classical German philosophy.”54 This statement means that the living further development of idealist philosophy did not take place in Germany, but mediated through Labriola and Croce in Italy. And indeed, it is difficult to find philosophical thinkers in Germany, Russia, or the rest of Europe around the turn of the century who would have been comparable to Labriola’s or Croce’s position in the history of philosophy. In the “Prison Notebooks,” therefore, Croce becomes an important intellectual adversary of Gramsci. He underlined this by claiming that a work directed against Croce – an anti-Croce – was necessary.55 The term anti-Croce refers to Friedrich Engels’ book against the anti-Semitic German philosopher Eugen Dühring, the “Anti-Dühring”.
The heritage of classical German philosophy must not be inventoried, but must become active life again: Compared to Russia and Germany, two aspects in the development of the Italian nation stand out: The first difference was that in the movement for a Risorgimento of Italy there was a republican faction of the bourgeoisie that had waged a struggle against feudalism for decades with its own military formations. However, this faction was eventually forced to agree to a poor compromise with the monarchy in 1860. Nevertheless, democratic republicanism entered as a moment in the birth of the Italian nation-state. This explains the tradition, importance and vitality of classical German philosophy in the culture and philosophy of Italy, as opposed to Germany and Russia. In Italy, largely universal suffrage was won in 1912. While in Germany and Russia oppositionists and war opponents were in prison or lived in exile, in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century a legal militant workers’ movement and a socialist party could develop, which stood against colonial conquests and participation in World War I. These two differences were reflected in Gramsci’s intellectual formation in a sustained engagement with classical German philosophy. The reference to German idealist philosophy runs as a characteristic feature from Gramsci’s youth in Turin to his “Prison Notebooks.” One of his biographers wrote of Gramsci in the post-World War I period: “With almost missionary zeal, Gramsci tried to reproduce the Enlightenment and modify its contents so that they were in harmony with the aims of the proletarian revolution.”56 The censuring undertone inherent in the phrase “with almost missionary zeal” is at all characteristic of most historians around the Italian Communist Party (CPI). The later party leader and after World War II celebrated freedom fighter and philosopher should be protected from his idealistic youthful sins. In the “Prison Notebooks,” however, Gramsci repeated this position: “The heritage of classical German philosophy must not be inventoried, but must become active life again …”57 Thus, he formulated the leitmotif of his far-reaching philosophical excursions in prison.
Marxism as a reform of Hegelianism: Gramsci’s complete works are classified as a manifestation of “Western Marxism” – a non-Stalinist Marxism.58 The term “Western Marxism” is inaccurate, since it only adds a geographical feature to the term Marxism. The term “Hegelian Marxism” does more justice to Gramsci’s claim. For Gramsci, the pivotal point in the interpretation of Marx’s philosophy was his relationship to Hegel and thus to classical German philosophy. Marx referred to himself several times, and again in 1873 in a prominent place, as a disciple of Hegel.59 The central aspect of Gramsci’s thought was based on the conviction that Marx’s philosophy should be conceived as a reform, a revision of Hegelianism. Gramsci wrote: “In a certain sense, therefore, the philosophy of praxis is a reform and a development of Hegelianism, is a philosophy freed (or trying to be freed) from any one-sided and fanatical ideological element, is the full consciousness of the contradictions in which the philosopher himself, taken individually or as a whole social group, not only grasps the contradictions, but sets himself as the element of contradiction, elevates this element to the principle of cognition and consequently of action.”60 This thought of Gramsci will be explored piece by piece in the following. The first three chapters will therefore be devoted to a reconstruction of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx in their time and their inner context in the sense of Antonio Gramsci. In particular, it will become apparent that Kant’s philosophy was not only an indispensable prerequisite for Hegel’s epistemology, but also for Marx’s understanding of democracy and conception of history. In this respect, Gramsci’s statement about Marxism as a reform of Hegelianism must be extended to include Kant’s philosophy.
Gramsci’s philosophy contradicts Soviet Marxism in all its essential components and thus what is understood by Marxism today: Gramsci did not follow the path that Engels had pointed. Drawing on the Italian philosophical tradition, he took up the legacy of classical German philosophy theoretically and practically. He saw this heritage actualized in the practice of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919 and 1920, and later, in the “Prison Notebooks,” he also made it the guideline for the construction of his philosophy of praxis. Gramsci’s philosophy contradicts in all its essential components what dialectical and historical materialism was supposed to mean according to Engels and later according to Stalin. The philosophy of praxis breaks with the conception of philosophical materialism as the antithesis of bourgeois idealism, deterministic scientific socialism, the model of the October Revolution, and the party- and state-centeredness of the communists. Lenin’s theory of imperialism and the theory of a general economic crisis as determining the historical perspective of bourgeois society is replaced by an open process in which various social forces wrestle with each other, but the bourgeoisie as a whole exercises its hegemony. Gramsci’s interpretation of the philosophical line of development from Kant to Hegel and from there on to Marx treads a path that fundamentally questions what is commonly known about Marxism. Therefore, the following remark of Hegel should be given to the readers: “The known in general is not known because it is known. It is most ordinary self-deception as well as deception of others to presuppose something as known when recognizing it, and to put up with it in the same way.”61 In order to give the readers a basic orientation on the long way from the known to the recognition, it is necessary for this introduction to give some information about the tasks Gramsci set himself in his “Prison Notebooks.”
37 Gramsci, 1920, The Program of the Ordine Nuovo, in: Christian Riechers (ed.): Antonio Gramsci, Philosophie der Praxis, Eine Auswahl, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1967, p.72/3. By the armistice is meant the armistice of Villa Gusti in November 1918 between Italy and the Kingdom of Austria-Hungary.
38 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1378, and ibid. vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1387, and ibid. vol. 8, issue 16, § 9, p. 1812. Marx wrote in 1845 that Napoleon regarded bourgeois society “as his subaltern, which must have no will of its own.” See Marx/ Engels, 1845, The Holy Family, MEW 2, p. 130.
39 Kolakowski, 1976, Main Currents of Marxism, W. W. Norton & Company, Erstausgabe in Polnisch, deutsch 2005, p. 988
40 Marx, 1894, The Capital, vol. 3, MEW 25. According to the 1894 edition edited by Friedrich Engels, p. 828
41 Rossana Rossanda, 2007, 70 years ago Antonio Gramsci died, first published in Il Manifesto (Rome), May 1, 2007, translation by Angela Klein http://www.praxisphilosophie. de/gramsci70.pdf. Rossana Rossanda is an Italian writer who held a leading position in the Italian Communist Party in the 1960s. She co-founded the independent left wing daily Il Manifesto in 1971.
42 Engels, 1886, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Exit of Classical German Philosophy, MEW 21, p. 307
43 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, §1, p. 458 and vol. 6, issue 11, §34, p. 1441 and vol. 6, issue 11, §50, p. 1463 as well as vol. 8, issue 16, §2, p. 1796. Objections to the assertion of an identity of thought between the two founders of the philosophy of praxis
44 On Labriola and the Italian special path in philosophy, more in a moment
45 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 27, p 1430
46 Ibid.
47 Contained in “History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) – Short Course,” approved by the CPSU (Bolshevik) Central Committee in 1938, Verlag Neuer Weg GmbH, Berlin 1945
48 Marx, 1859, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, MEW 13, pp. 7-11.
49 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1386 Unfortunately, Gramsci more often referred to both his own philosophy and the prevailing party Marxism as the “philosophy of praxis,” as in this passage, for example.
50 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p 1392 “As for the historical function exercised by the fatalist conception of the philosophy of practice, one could give its eulogy, claiming its usefulness for a certain period of history, but for that very reason advocating the necessity of burying it with all due honors.”
51 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel works, vol. 18, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p. 166
52 Marx/Engels, 1846, The German Ideology, MEW 3, p. 449
53 Antonio Labriola should not be confused with Arturo Labriola. Arturo Labriola (1873-1959) was a revolutionary syndicalist at the turn of the century, then a reformist Marxist who advocated Italy’s entry into World War I, and finally a senator for a liberal party in the Italian Republic from 1948.
54 Gramsci, 1929 –1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 11, p. 1248
55 Ibid.
56 Fiori, 1966, The Life of Antonio Gramsci, Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin, 1979, p. 95
57 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 11, p. 1248.
58 Anderson, 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, Verso, London, 1989
59 Marx, 1873, Afterword to the Second Edition of Capital, MEW 23, p. 27 “I therefore openly confessed myself to be a disciple of that great thinker and even flirted here and there in the chapter on the theory of value (in “Capital,” MEW 23, the author) with the idiom peculiar to him.”
60 Gramsci, 1929 –1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 11, § 62, p. 1474/5
61 Hegel, 1807, Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel works, vol. 3, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p. 35
