Prison Notebooks
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The Prison Notebooks (
Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. Although written unsystematically, the Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th century
.The notebooks were smuggled out of the prison in the 1930s. The first edition was published in 1947 and won the Viareggio Prize a few months later.[4][5][6] Gramsci's posthumous award of the Viareggio Prize was followed by a memorial from the Constituent Assembly of Italy on April 28, 1947.[7] The first translation into English was printed in the 1970s, by the Scottish poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson.
Ideas in
- Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the capitalist state.
- The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class.
- The distinction between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent.
- "Absolute historicism".
- A critique of economic determinism that opposes fatalistic interpretations of Marxism.
- A critique of philosophical materialism.
Background
A supposed assassination attempt on Benito Mussolini's life on 31 October 1926, on 8 November led to the establishment of secret police powers under Mussolini's regime. These powers were used to arrest Gramsci, in spite of his parliamentary immunity.[8][9] Following a show trial in May 1928, Gramsci was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Following his trial, Gramsci was brought to a prison in Turi, where he spent the first five years of his sentence and began writing the Prison Notebooks in February 1929. By this time, his health had started to decline.[10] When his health permitted, Gramsci spent much of his time in prison reading Marxist texts and commentary on them, though access to these texts was censored by the prison. He wrote extensively during this period, filling his notebooks with small handwriting.[11]
Concepts
Hegemony
The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that
Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to religion, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.
Intellectuals and education
Gramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society. Famously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. Furthermore, he distinguished between a traditional intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks organically. Such organic intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from outside the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical the status quo of the already existing intellectual activity of the masses. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.
State and civil society
Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state, which he claims rules through force plus consent. The state is not to be understood in the narrow sense of the government; instead, Gramsci divides it between political society, which is the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control, and civil society, which is commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, differentiated from both the state and the economy.[12] The former is the realm of force and the latter of consent. He stresses, however, that the division is purely conceptual and that the two, in reality, often overlap.
Gramsci claims that hegemony lies under modern capitalism and that the
Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that the only tactic capable of undermining bourgeois hegemony and leading to socialism is a war of position (analogous to trench warfare); this war of position would then give way to a war of movement (or frontal attack). Gramsci saw war of movement as being exemplified by the storming of the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.
Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a regulated society and defines the withering away of the state as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.
Historicism
Gramsci, like the early Marx, was an emphatic proponent of historicism. In Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or praxis) and the objective historical and social processes of which it is a part. Ideas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. The concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to things, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. As a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature, but only an idea of such which varies historically. Furthermore, philosophy and science do not reflect a reality independent of man, but rather are only true in that they express the real developmental trend of a given historical situation.
For the majority of Marxists, truth was truth no matter when and where it is known, and scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulated historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense. On this view, Marxism does not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure because it is a science. In contrast, Gramsci believed Marxism was true in the socially pragmatic sense, in that by articulating the class consciousness of the proletariat, it expressed the truth of its times better than any other theory. This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce. However, Gramsci's historicism was an absolute historicism that broke with the Hegelian and idealist tenor of Croce's thinking and its tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny. Though Gramsci repudiated the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of relativism.[citation needed]
Critique of economism
In a famous pre-prison article entitled "The Revolution against
His critique of economism also extended to that practised by the syndicalists of the Italian trade unions. He believed that many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach in that they had refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front. While Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organizations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure. Gramsci referred to the views of these trade unionists as vulgar economism, which he equated to covert reformism and even liberalism.
Critique of materialism
By virtue of his belief that human history and collective praxis determine whether any philosophical question is meaningful or not, Gramsci's views run contrary to the
Translations
There have been different English translations of Prison Notebooks.
- .
- Vol. 1 (1992 ed.) – via .
- Vol. 2 (not available online) (1992 ed.). .
- Vol. 3 (not available online) (1992 ed.). ISBN 978-0-2311-3944-1.
- Vol. 3 (2007 ed.). 1992 – via ISBN 978-0-2311-3944-1.
See also
References
Citations
- ^ Gramsci, Selections, 1929–1931, p. 13.
- ^ Rosengarten 2019.
- ^ Sassoon 1991.
- ^ Nel mondo delle lettere: il premio Viareggio [In the world of letters: the Viareggio Prize] (in Italian). Istituto Luce Archives. August 22, 1947. Retrieved June 15, 2021.
- ^ Guadagnini 2017.
- ^ Bucciarelli 2018.
- ^ Bertani 2020.
- ^ Gramsci, Selections, 1929–1931, p. 116.
- ^ Rosengarten 1986, p. 71.
- ^ Rosengarten 1986, p. 120.
- ^ Rosengarten 1986, p. 121.
- ^ Rehmann 1999, p. 5.
- ^ Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Sources
- Bertani, Glauco (October 21, 2020). "Gramsci, in cella l'umanità del politico" [Gramsci, in prison the humanity of the politician] (in Italian). Retrieved June 15, 2021.
- Bucciarelli, Stefano (2018). "1947, il Premio Viareggio alle Lettere dal carcere di Gramsci". Filosofia Italiana (in Italian). XIII (2): 245–265. Retrieved June 15, 2021.
- .
- Guadagnini, Rossella (June 15, 2017). "Il 26 agosto convegno sul politico nel 70° del premio postumo per le 'Lettere dal carcere'" [On August 26, conference on politics for the 70th anniversary of the posthumous prize for "Lettere dal carcere] (PDF) (in Italian). Rome. Retrieved June 15, 2021.
- Rehmann, Jan (1999). ""Abolition" of Civil Society?: Remarks on a Widespread Misunderstanding in the Interpretation of "Civil Society"". Socialism and Democracy. 13 (2): 5. .
- Rosengarten, Frank (1986). "Gramsci's Arrest". Italian Culture. 7 (1): 71–80. .
- Rosengarten, Frank (June 27, 2019). "An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and Thought". International Gramsci Society. Retrieved June 17, 2021.
- Sassoon, Anne Showstack (1991). "Prison Notebooks". In ISBN 0-631-16481-2.
Further reading
- ISBN 0-89608-226-1.
- ISBN 0-631-18082-6.
- ISBN 0-520-05742-2.
- ISBN 0-670-12942-9.
- ISBN 0-19-285109-8.
External links
- Link to the 1971 ed. of Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (PDF). Originally posted online in January 2015 by the College of Justice, Safety & Military Science, Eastern Kentucky University. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 1, 2014. Retrieved October 1, 2015 – via Wayback Machine.