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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1
Gramsci’s Plan and the Legacy of German Classical Philosophy
A book about Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy?
This book is intended for all those who wish to orient themselves in today’s world, who wish to learn from which philosophical disputes our present world emerged, and who are looking for suggestions as to how today’s world can be changed in a humanistic, progressive and socialistic sense. It was written with the intention to bring philosophy as a whole closer to our contemporary life; to reclaim it for today’s social disputes. Philosophy deals very fundamentally with human life and the world in which it takes place. With Kant, philosophy can be fundamentally divided into epistemology, ethics, philosophy of history, and the final question, “What is man?” The issues philosophers address are in some ways “beneath” current political disputes, yet all social and political actors – from a citizens’ initiative to governments – are constantly guided by philosophical considerations. In the 21st century, a new generation has set out to avert the looming ecological catastrophes and fight the misery in the world. It is about nothing less than slowing down the capitalist world economy, which is designed for profit and growth under competitive conditions and to initiate an ecological reconstruction of the world economy based on solidarity. This task permanently raises philosophical questions today and in the future, such as the question of the cognitive capacity of meteorological science, the possibilities of human action as producer and consumer in a globalized economy, or the general chances of humanity to avoid a warlike or ecological catastrophe. Because of this situation, a study of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci seems to make sense, because his work refers to the historically unique attempt to transcend the bourgeois social order as a whole and to build a new world without war, exploitation, and colonial oppression. This attempt was made in the years 1917 to 1921 by the revolutionary movements in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, because they drew consequences from the hell of World War I and wanted to put an end to the capitalist world economy.
Oppressors and Oppressed – An essay by Antonio Gramsci from 1911: Antonio Gramsci’s generation was also confronted with a very specific world political issue. In Gramsci’s case, this was European colonialism and the threat of war that it posed. In the late 19th century, the great European states had begun to divide the entire world among themselves and build colonial empires. In the process, considerable tension arose between the imperial powers. After France occupied Morocco in April 1911, the German Kaiser sent gunboats off the coast of Morocco. With this threatening military maneuver, Wilhelm II wanted to obtain quid pro quos for accepting French rule over Morocco. Following these events, which made headlines as the “Moroccan Crisis,” large demonstrations against the impending war took place throughout Europe. The largest mass rally took place in Berlin in September 1911, with about 200,000 participants. In the same month, the Italian government, emboldened by a nationalist and pro-colonialist mood, declared war on Libya. Libya was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, that is, Turkey. During the course of the Turkish-Italian war, massacres of Libyan civilians were carried out by Italian troops, who dropped bombs from the air for the first time. In October 1912, victorious Italy annexed Libya and named this colony “Italian North Africa.” Also in 1911, Antonio Gramsci, then 20 years old, wrote an essay in school entitled “Oppressors and Oppressed.” In it, he protested the colonial conquests of Europeans around the world and placed resistance to them philosophically in the tradition of the Enlightenment as established by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). “The struggle waged by humanity from time immemorial is truly amazing. It is an incessant struggle, one in which mankind strives to tear off and break the chains with which the lust for power on the part of a single man, or a single class, or even an whole people, attempt to shackle it. This struggle is an epic that has had innumerable heroes and has been written down by historians all over the world. Men, when they come to feel their strength and to be conscious of their responsibility and their value, will no longer suffer another man to impose his will on them and claim the right to control their actions and thoughts.”1 A year later, Lenin (1870-1924) wrote an article in the Russian newspaper Pravda about the Turkish-Italian war. Lenin, the then still largely unknown leader of the Russian Social Democrats (Bolsheviks), would later become an important guiding figure for Gramsci in the years of the uprising of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919/20, as well as in his “Prison Notebooks.” In 1912, Lenin commented on the outcome of the Turkish-Italian war as follows: “Italy ‘has won.’ A year ago, it invaded the Turkish territories in Africa like a brigand, and from now on Tripoli will belong to Italy. It will not be out of place to take a closer look at this typical colonial war of a ‘civilized’ state of the 20th century. What was the cause of this war? By the greed of the Italian financial magnates and capitalists who need a new market, the successes of Italian imperialism.” Lenin continued as follows, “What kind of war was this? A perfected, civilized massacre, a slaughter of the Arabs with ‘most modern’ weapons. The Arabs were desperately fighting back. (…) Despite the ‘peace’, in reality, the war will continue, because the Arab tribes in the interior of the African continent, far from the coast, will not submit. They will be ‘civilized’ for a long time to come – by bayonet, by bullet, by rope, by fire, by the rape of their women.”2 Lenin will be right in his prediction. Only towards the end of the 20th century will colonialism have been defeated everywhere on Earth. The international peace movement could not prevent the outbreak of World War I three years after the Moroccan crisis. For 4 years, the war raged over zones of influence, colonies, and national prestige, costing the lives of 17 million people. It was followed by economic crises, famine, widespread misery, and revolutions and uprisings throughout Europe, one of which took place in Italy.
Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy of praxis: Antonio Gramsci was Italian and lived from 1891 to 1937. He was born in Sardinia and grew up in modest circumstances. Because of a scholarship, he was able to begin studying literature in Turin in 1913. In the same year, he joined the Italian Socialist Party. Later he wrote articles in socialist daily newspapers. When World War I broke out in 1914, Gramsci was 23 years old. After the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918 helped end World War I, he participated in a leading position in the Italian factory councils movement in 1919/20. Gramsci was thus a contemporary of Lenin (1870-1924) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), only about 20 years younger. Like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, he was one of the leading figures of the communist parties that had just been founded. Gramsci became general secretary of the Italian Communist Party in 1924, and in 1926, the police of the fascist Prime Minister Mussolini arrested him. Gramsci spent the next 11 years in prison, where he wrote the “Prison Notebooks” on philosophy, politics and culture in Italy and Europe in 29 notebooks of over 1300 pages. In 1937, shortly after his release, Gramsci died because of his stay in prison. His “Prison Notebooks” and the philosophy of praxis they contain continue to be considered a treasure of 20th century European philosophical history. In it, Gramsci undertook a critical reappraisal of the philosophy and practice of the labor movement and its social democratic and communist parties to explain the defeats of the years 1917 to 1921 and to draw conclusions from them. In his “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci took a hard line with the entire Marxist philosophy as it had been developed after Marx’s death in 1883, from Friedrich Engels to Georgi Plekhanov, the theoretician of Russian social democracy, to Lenin and Bukharin, the leaders of the Russian Bolsheviks. His investigations culminated in the statement that this philosophy must be laid to rest.
Did Gramsci create the philosophical core of an alternative form of communism? The literature on Antonio Gramsci and his work has become unmanageably large in recent decades. His “Prison Notebooks” in particular have been the starting point for a great deal of discussion on the political left and in universities about Marxist philosophy, European history, the concept of hegemony, and his comments on language, culture, and the school system. So why yet another book on Antonio Gramsci? Everybody knows it: there are certain sentences that stay in your head. This is what happened to the author with a sentence formulated by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in his 1200-page account of the “Main Currents of Marxism” in 1976: “One may say that Gramsci created the ideological core of an alternative form of communism, which, however, never existed as a political movement and even less as a real regime.”3 Instead of “ideological core“, it should better read “philosophical core”. And the second part of the sentence also needs correction: Gramsci was part of a social movement; he processed the struggles and defeats, the goals and forms of organization of the Turin factory councils movement in his theories as an activist and later as leader of the Italian Communist Party. If his early writings from the years of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919 and 1920 are read in the context of the “Prison Notebooks,” they contain the philosophical core of an alternative to Stalin’s philosophy, which was predominant, with certain exceptions, in the Soviet Union until its demise in 1991. The philosophical alternative to Stalinism does not consist mainly in the exposition of the principles of a future society, but it formulates those principles that are to be applied in a constantly developing bourgeois society to be able to take an emancipatory path out of it. Gramsci derived these principles from an independent reconstruction of Marx’s philosophy and the struggles of the Italian workers’ movement under the conditions of a democratic constitution in the years following World War I. Based on Kolakowski’s thought that Gramsci had created the philosophical “core of an alternative form of communism,” the author resumed reading the “Prison Notebooks” after the Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, published them in German.
Gramsci’s plan and the legacy of classical German philosophy: In the course of this second reading, the philosophical leitmotif that Gramsci had pursued in his “Prison Notebooks” emerged piece by piece. According to this, his plan was to make Marxism fruitful again as a practical philosophy for the modern world, beyond the philosophical materialism developed by Lenin and codified in the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin (1878-1953). Gramsci provided his plan with the practical goal of achieving the “emancipation of the subaltern classes” in a global perspective. Accordingly, Gramsci’s philosophy, which he himself gave the name “philosophy of praxis,” is presented here as an attempt to think a way out of world capitalist society based on the practical experience of the years 1917 to 1921. What makes Gramsci unique in the tradition of Marxist philosophy is that he considered classical German philosophy, and specifically the philosophies of Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831), to be the key to understanding the philosophy of Karl Marx. He conceived of Marx’s philosophical work as a reform of Hegelianism. In this context, Gramsci also explored the question of whether Kant’s philosophy was the “first annual ring of a new philosophy that goes beyond the philosophy embodied in the French Revolution.”4 Gramsci thus intended to uncover the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of philosophical development, a line of philosophical thought that Stalinism and its precursors had fought against, successfully destroyed, and replaced with a different approach to Marx. This book intends to fill this gap in the literature on Gramsci by systematically tracing the breadcrumbs he scattered on the subject in the “Prison Notebooks.”
Gramsci’s Plan Part 1: Kant and the Enlightenment: The title says it all: The focus of this book, to be followed by others, is the presentation of Antonio Gramsci’s philosophical thoughts on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In “Kant and the Enlightenment,” the original works of Kant are presented, accompanied by Gramsci’s comments, and embedded in the historical drama that took place before, during, and after the French Revolution. To reconstruct the Kant-Hegel-Marx lineage, the writings of Kant and Hegel had to be reread, which meant, especially with respect to Kant, breaking through traditional Marxism’s deep-seated political defense mechanism against Kant. Kant and Marx are indisputably among the greats in the history of philosophy. They are considered to represent diametrically opposed currents: Kant is assigned to idealism, Marx to materialism. In the main part of this book, which follows immediately, it is explained in detail that Kant had determined the inner core of the Enlightenment as the self-thinking of man. Marx had written that the social being determines consciousness. Then, it could be assumed, it cannot have much to do with self-thinking. Moreover, Kant is undisputedly considered an important philosophical founder of modern bourgeois democracy, while Marx is considered a proponent of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By reconstructing the heritage of classical German philosophy in the philosophy of Marx, all of his theories, as well as those of Gramsci, are cast in a new light and can thus be made useful for an understanding of today’s world.
Gramsci proposed to write a dramatic book about philosophy. The emergence of philosophical thoughts should be embedded in a historical drama taking place at the same time: The purpose of bringing philosophy closer to contemporary life gives rise to some unusual aspects of form and content for a philosophical book. The linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of academic philosophical literature have been dispensed with. The course of the argumentation has been substantiated throughout with quotations from the originals, not only for hedging purposes, but also to encourage further reading. The presentation of Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts is always in the foreground. The incorporation of critical statements from the secondary literature on this or any problem at the edge of the path has been largely dispensed with in favor of this stringency. Only in this way, a long ascending line in the argumentation can be realized without fraying. In this way, readers are taken on a journey to ever more complex philosophical constructions. Although the ambition was to develop the concepts systematically, it was in no way intended to write a textbook. A superior position was given to Gramsci’s proposal to write about philosophy “a book that is in a sense ‘dramatic,’ a historical drama taking place at the same time …”5 Accordingly, the presentation of the development of the thoughts of the individual philosophers is largely chronological and embedded in the historical reality in which they arose. This also takes into account a reference by Hegel, who described philosophy as the thought of its time. At this point, it is hoped that a variety of new and perhaps surprising insights and perspectives should emerge even for readers who are familiar with the material. What is known of Marx’s philosophy corresponds to the standard Marxist interpretation of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. This everyday knowledge, which has congealed into solid form and is also highly valued by bourgeois literature, must be broken up in order to pave a way for the emancipatory content of Marx’s philosophy into the 21st century. With Kant and Hegel, the highest peaks of classical German philosophy will be climbed in the first books and the processing of this heritage by Marx will be presented, in order to then dive into a philosophical abyss with Engels, Lenin and Stalin, in which parts of the world still find themselves today. This will be followed by an exploration of Gramsci’s thoughts on the defeats of the workers’ movement in the years 1917 to 1921, bourgeois hegemony and his perspective of an emancipation of the subaltern classes.
It is confusion that philosophy has to start with in the first place: A book with philosophical content is written at a certain time. It carries the spirit of the time in which it is written, and this spirit of the time includes the position of philosophy itself. In the 21st century, philosophy has continued the decline that was already evident in the preceding decades. Philosophy today is far from shaping social debates, people’s social actions, or politics, or even from being a kind of guiding science for the natural sciences and the humanities. Doubts about its own raison d’être, about its own effectiveness, and about the tasks to be tackled plague the discipline. Thus, the question is discussed whether philosophy is on the verge of abolishing itself? A book like “Why Philosophy?” published in 2008 is a symptom of a deep-seated crisis in the self-image of this science, which was already practiced by the ancient Greeks before our era.6 A contributing factor was that with the Soviet Union in 1991, the most historically significant variant of Marxist philosophy perished theoretically and practically in a great implosion, without any new emancipatory approaches emerging from it. Postmodern philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard (1923-1998) began to declare all “grand narratives” about the history of humanity invalid as early as the late 1970s.7 This reinforced the already existing doubts about the meaning of the “grand narratives,” that is, especially about the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.8 Among many postmodern philosophers, it is considered a foregone conclusion that in world history the principles of the Enlightenment have not been implemented in the sense of Kant, and that the possibility of realizing Marxian socialism/communism is no longer even conceivable. As a reflex to the state of the academic debate, on the German-language page “Philosophy” on Wikipedia, the philosophy of history was removed completely from the canon of the disciplines of philosophy. But perhaps in this precarious situation of philosophy in the 21st century, there also lies an opportunity, which Hegel aptly expressed in the sentence: “It is confusion with which philosophy must begin at all and which it produces for itself; one must doubt everything, one must give up all presuppositions, to recover it as something produced by the concept.”9 The impulse to break out of the confusion to acquire a philosophical view of history and a historical view of philosophy was the main motivation for beginning the study of Gramsci’s “Philosophy of Practice.”
On the genesis of this book: This book owes its genesis to the author’s interest in Gramsci’s writings, – an interest that already developed during his studies in Hamburg in the 1980s. The author completed these studies with a master’s thesis in the U.S. on Gramsci’s concept of international hegemony. The subsequent doctoral thesis dealt with the International Monetary Fund and the precursors of the World Trade Organization from the point of view of American international hegemony after World War II. The originally planned work on a habilitation failed in the mid-1990s due to the circumstances of the time and a number of personal reasons, the best of which is now 24 years old. The author then switched to the IT industry. Around 2010 the interest in the old notes and raw sketches awoke. Further elaboration became an intense leisure activity. A first draft, focusing on Gramsci’s writings, was nearly finished when, upon review, the realization set in that all the statements made so far hung strangely in the air. Gramsci’s central intention, to conceive of Marxism as a reform of Hegelianism and Kant’s work as the first annual ring of this new philosophy, had been far from accomplished. Marx, in this first version, was not grounded in Hegel and both together were not grounded in Kant. Therefore, the author began his intellectual journey again, reading the originals of Kant and Hegel in the context of the breadcrumbs Gramsci had scattered in his “Prison Notebooks.” Only by going back to Kant, from there to Hegel, and then on to Marx, did the deviation that began with the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and was continued by Engels, Lenin, and Stalin present itself no longer as a deviation but as a path into a philosophical abyss that could explain the disastrous development after the October Revolution and the murderous practice of the Soviet regime under Stalin. This course of investigation has multiplied the scope of the entire work and made it necessary to divide it into several volumes. Throughout the years, the elaboration of the findings that will be presented below has always been and remained an intellectual pleasure for me.
What does it mean to philosophize?
To philosophize means to want to give one’s own activity a conscious direction: How is the concept philosophy used today? It has become fashionable to speak of the philosophy of a soccer team, a company or an individual style in nutrition. Philosophy in such contexts means that a set of intellectual principles should guide the actions of the soccer team, the company or the individual in order to achieve a certain purpose or to be able to successfully solve a certain task. Gramsci wrote about this in the “Prison Notebooks,” “They say’ take things with philosophy’ have one’s philosophy, take it philosophically, etc.” In these sayings, Gramsci continued, the concept philosophy takes on a very precise meaning: “elemental and animal passions,” impulsive and irrational actions are to be overcome by a “reasoned conception of things” and “one’s own activity is to be given a conscious direction.”10 A look at the great philosophers and academic philosophy today shows that this use of language is not wrong. Hegel formulated the concept of philosophy in its briefest form as “the idea thinking itself.”11 For more than 2500 years, philosophy has been that discipline of the humanities that attempts to provide answers, in the form of principles, to fundamental questions of human life, of historical man with his peculiarities, abilities, and possibilities, and of human development in general. The ancient Greeks before our era, the theologians in the Middle Ages, the bourgeois rebels in the times of Enlightenment as well as the liberals, the conservatives, the socialists, and communists in the 19th and 20th centuries – they all developed principles, theories, conceptions of life and the world, which are all counted as philosophy.
The core topics of philosophy are the foundations of social orders and the great upheavals in the history of humankind: Philosophy is somehow always present in all current social, moral, and political conflicts. This is because philosophy deals with the foundations of social orders and the great upheavals in the history of humankind. Anyone who reads Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks enters an intellectual terrain that is concerned with grasping the historical continental shifts that have taken place since the Renaissance in Italy in the 16th century. Over centuries, under the sign of the Enlightenment, new forms of social coexistence emerged in Europe – at first barely discernible – which were then condensed by philosophers into principles in their own unique way. At a certain point in the development, the new principles of the bourgeoisie clashed with the existing feudal order, i.e. with the conservative forces that wanted to secure the existence of this order. The conflict ultimately erupted in a severe eruption in the global structure of the world. This eruption was the French Revolution of 1789. In the course of the revolution, a democratic republic with universal suffrage was briefly formed. The French Revolution, after many previous attempts in other nations, brought down the feudal world with its monarchs, nobles, and serfs, first in France and then almost throughout Europe. Gramsci discusses this turning point in European history in detail in the “Prison Notebooks,” referring to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant had drafted an epistemology, ethics, and a philosophy of history of bourgeois society, each of which, individually and as a whole, contradicted the principles of the feudal world. The October Revolution of 1917 and the revolutions that followed it in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were also a serious eruption in the fabric of the world. Based on Marx’s philosophy, an upheaval of epochs, a transition from bourgeois to a socialist society was to be brought about. Gramsci participated in this attempt through his involvement in the Italian factory council movement. His thinking in the “Prison Notebooks” focuses on the question of how the revolutionary events of the years 1917 to 1921 are to be evaluated and what consequences must be drawn from the defeats.
The great upheavals of the last 30 years: The last 30 years have also seen a number of serious developments that have brought down firmly held conceptions of life and the world. These include the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the end of colonialism, and the formation of a fundamentalist Islam that in the 21st century attempted to plunge the world into a war of religions. In the 21st century, the 4th Industrial Revolution is upending the relations of production. Today, global communication is based on the Internet, which is predicted to have a similar revolutionary significance in the long term as letterpress printing. The world in the 21st century can no longer be captured with the categories of the world between 1917 and 1991. Another very long-term development is that China and other large developing countries are preparing to break up the dominance of Europeans and North Americans in world markets, a dominance that has existed since the emergence of the world market in the early 19th century. As a result of the ecological crisis of the last few decades, there has been a worldwide realization that the way the highly developed capitalist industrialized countries in Europe and North America produce cannot be applied to all of humanity. Without a fundamental transformation of the global economy, the social and ecological symptoms of crisis could intensify dramatically and assume incalculable proportions. The climate catastrophe is not only casting its shadow ahead, but is already visibly taking place. With the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals” and the Paris Climate Agreement, a global consensus was reached in 2015 on necessary measures to improve the social and environmental conditions under which people must live. With the election of Trump as the president of the United States in 2016, the just started new phase of international cooperation was pushed aside. Trump’s policies subsequently grew into a threat to world peace and democracy specifically in the U.S. and Europe. All of these long-term developments and upheavals affect our familiar perceptions of life and the world and challenge previously valid patterns of thought and norms of behavior.
Philosophies as conceptions of life and the world
For Gramsci, every articulation of a certain conception of the world and life is a partial aspect of a philosophy. Religions also articulate such conceptions of life and the world. Philosophies and religions are not arbitrary opinions that one may or may not have. The great historically relevant philosophies and religions express binding principles of human societies designed for the long term. The behavioral norms derived from them are actively implemented by people in their practical everyday life, otherwise the existing social network threatens to break apart. Theoretical principles and practical norms of behavior are the subjects of countless conversations between people in every society at all times. In Europe before the Enlightenment, the priests were responsible for firmly anchoring such a conception of the world and life in everyday mind and for maintaining it. With the decoupling of philosophy from religion in the course of the Enlightenment, philosophy became an academic discipline and thus, as Gramsci observed, the “culture of a limited intellectual aristocracy” that failed to convey the “moral and scientific content” of philosophy as a whole.12
What questions does a philosopher deal with at a professional level? A philosopher tries to answer such basic questions as: Why do I know that a table is a table or why do we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun? Under what conditions can a particular scientific statement be considered true? Are there eternal truths or are all truths only relative, that is, historically bound knowledge? Does God or a higher being exist who guides or at least influences our destinies? Does man possess free will and can therefore act historically independently, or is he a being controlled in his actions by nature or a god? How do social norms and laws come about? Which of these norms should I abide by and which should I rebel against? What holds a society together at its core? By coercion and punishment, economic necessity, delusion, bribery, or certain social consensuses? Is human history forever characterized by a war of religions, of peoples, and “races” in the struggle for survival and a “place in the Sun”? Is there any progress in history or is humanity moving in circles in ever-new catastrophes and massacres? Has the end of history been reached with the liberal bourgeois society or are approaches to an overcoming theoretically presentable and practically recognizable? Finally the question: How can the nature of man be determined? Has it remained constant over the centuries or has it changed? Based on the answers to such questions, the great philosophical drafts of Kant, Hegel, Marx and many others were developed, in which also directly practical consequences for the actions of humans were pointed out.
In philosophy, there have been different currents, schools and systems from the beginning: Each current in philosophy strives to present its own conception of life and the world in a bundle of principles free of contradictions (consistent) and in their inner connection (coherent). Thus, there were and still are theologians and atheists in philosophy. For some, it is impossible to gain an understanding of human life without God, for others a being superior to man cannot and must not be a principle of explanation of the world. In the last two centuries, the history of philosophy has been marked above all by the dispute between idealists and materialists. The idealists are those who hold God or the human mind to be the primary thing from which life and the world are to be explained. Materialists are those who hold matter or nature to be the primary. Often, within these currents, schools of a great philosopher are formed, such as the Kantian school or the Marxist school. In the 20th century, i.e. before the general loss of importance of philosophy, it was quite common to determine the relationship between philosophy and politics in such a way that philosophy provided the basic answers. Politics then had the task of translating the principles and goals provided by philosophy into practical strategies and tactics. Thus, in the Cold War period, the bourgeois and communist worldviews confronted each other. Philosophy was an assurance for the politicians in both camps that they were on the right path.
Philosophy continually develops solutions to practical problems raised by the historical process: Gramsci’s conception of philosophy differed gravely from ideas common today. For him, philosophy did not consist of airy mind games or conversations at the regulars’ table. Philosophy for him was not a hodgepodge of highly intellectual texts, not a matter for experts at universities. In fact, in the “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci develops step by step the conception that every truly significant philosophy arose from the thoughts and actions of people in their time. Philosophers of profession grasp only a historical need, a problem, a task, a question, which has arisen from the thinking and doing of people in their time, and express it in an individual way. In doing so, the individual philosopher relies on a particular current within philosophy and usually proceeds “as if his philosophy were an examination of or an unfolding of the preceding philosophy, of the concrete individual works of the preceding philosophers.”13 However, according to Gramsci, this circumstance, which produces a language and content of its own, should not obscure the fact that “philosophy does not develop out of other philosophy, but is a continuous solution of problems which historical development prescribes …”14 In this respect, the great philosophical works are characterized by the fact that they addressed very specific pressing problems in their time. They struck a social chord precisely because they provided answers to the needs of a very particular everyday life, that is, answers to the needs of those who actually make history. With this conception, Gramsci brought philosophy back from the world of abstract intellectual explorations to the ground of history, to the ground of human needs, their satisfaction, and the necessities associated with them.
History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his purposes: Kant’s work represents a profound turning point in the history of philosophy because he rejected all evidence for the existence of God as unfounded and reduced God to a moral quantity in which the individual may or may not believe. Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy proclaimed man’s self-determination beyond religion. In Hegel’s philosophy, religion again took on a prominent role. Hegel undertook a fusion of God and human reason, the result of which was to lead to a history of man whose goal had been determined in advance by God. In 1845, in their first book together, Marx and Engels defined their position regarding the relationship between religion and history as follows: “Once man has been recognized as the essence, the basis of all human activity and conditions,” the conception of history must be purged of all divine or other comparable factors of influence. “It is rather man, the real, living man, who does, possesses, and struggles through it all …” Human history “is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his purposes.”15 A few years later Marx returned to this thought and clarified his conception of history as follows: “Men make their own history, but they make it not of their own free will, not under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances immediately found, given and handed down. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an alp on the brains of the living.”16 For Gramsci, this principle of the conception of history developed by Marx and Engels had fundamental significance; it permeates his entire work. History is the history of social conditions created by human beings. People make their own history, but always under certain mental and material conditions created by themselves.
All men are philosophers and only they make human history: It is a concern of this book to develop in readers an understanding of what philosophy in Gramsci’s sense really is and can be today. Gramsci had nothing to do with an academic discipline plagued by self-doubt and marked by a loss of meaning. In the “Prison Notebooks,” philosophy was given an overriding importance and practical relevance by the lives of people, and thus for the lives of all people. Thus, he wrote in the “Prison Notebooks”: “One must destroy the prejudice that philosophy is something very difficult due to the fact that it is a special activity of a certain category of scientists, the professional philosophers or system-atists.
It will therefore be necessary to show that all men are philosophers.”17 Philosophy and history of philosophy do not exist because a philosopher thinks in a particular way and puts that thinking on paper in a book. Human history and social relations are produced and brought forth by all men themselves in daily practical work. Thus, “it becomes clear that in the practical work of making history, ‘implicit’ philosophy is also made, which will be ‘explicit’ insofar as philosophers work it out coherently (…).”18 Individual as well as social life – history making in this sense – already contains a certain philosophy, may it be present and clear or blurred and inconsistent. Every human being realizes, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, in the shaping of his relations with his fellow human beings, in his political ideas and decisions, and in his intellectual and representational work, a set of principles that can be assigned in one way or another to a particular philosophy. Gramsci wrote about this: “By one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a certain grouping. One is a conformist of some conformism … (…) One’s conception of the world responds to certain problems posed by reality, which are quite definite and ‘original’ in their actuality.”19 People express the meaning of their individual actions, their significance and their position in the social context in philosophical terms, – each with quite different practical consequences. If history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his purposes, then it must have been the fundamental philosophical decisions of men in their time that in one way or another made the world what it is today. The world at the beginning of the 20th century that Gramsci wrote about was also a product of people’s activity, and this includes the philosophical conceptions that came into play in their everyday lives as well as their decisions at the turning points of history. This guiding idea will be illustrated below by looking at the importance of the Enlightenment in the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, and later by looking at the “Great October Socialist Revolution” of 1917, that is, the failed attempt to find a way out of bourgeois and into a socialist society.
1 Gramsci, 1911 (probably), Oppressors and Oppressed, in: Antonio Gramsci – Selections of Political Writings 1910-1920, selected and edited by Quentin Hoare, International Publishers, New York, 1977, p. 3. This is Gramsci’s first article in the “Selections”.
2 According to a note from Wikipedia on the page “Turkish-Italian War”. Lenin, 1912, The End of the War between Italy and Turkey, Lenin Works, vol. 18, Pravda, no. 129, September 28, 1912, p. 329/30
3 Kolakowski, 1976, Main Currents of Marxism, W. W. Norton & Company, first edition in Polish, quoting from the English edition, 2005, p. 988.
4 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, ed. Klaus Bochmann and Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, 1991-2002, vol. 6, issue 11, §49, p. 1461
5 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 10, p. 471.
6 Sandkühler, 2008, What for Philosophy? Ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main
7 Lyotard, 1979, The postmodern knowledge, ed. by Peter Engelmann, Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 9th ed. 2019. In the 2009 preface (p. 18), the editor Bernd Engelmann quite rightly wrote: “Socially effective, however, the book became not so much through these analyses (about “postmodern knowledge”; the author), but through the use value of its basic thesis of the dissolution of grand narratives as recognized patterns of legitimation” of knowledge.
8 See in Lyotard, 1979, the section “10. Delegitimization.” P. 99 “The grand narrative has lost its credibility whatever mode of unification has been assigned to it: speculative narrative or narrative of emancipation.”
9 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel works, vol. 18, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p. 445/6
10 Gramsci, 1929-935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 21, p. 1272 and vol. 6 issue 11, § 12, p. 1379
11 Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel works, vol. 10, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p. 393, § 574
12 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, issue 4, § 3, p. 461
13 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 6, issue 10, § 31, p. 1284/5
14 Ibid, p. 1284
15 Marx/Engels, 1845, The Holy Family, MEW 2, all on p. 98
16 Marx, 1852, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, MEW 8, p. 115. In the “German Ideology” (MEW 3, p. 20) Marx and Engels wrote already in 1846: “It is the real individuals, their action and their material conditions of life, both those found and those produced by their own action. These conditions can thus be stated in a purely empirical way.”
17 Gramsci, 1929-1935, Prison Notebooks, vol. 5, issue 8, § 204, p. 1055/6 and similarly Gramsci, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1375
18 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 10, § 31, p. 1285
19 Ibid, vol. 6, issue 11, § 12, p. 1376
