Gramsci's Political Thought

215 Pages·2012·1.734 MB·English, Portuguese

by  Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Pedro Sette-Camara, Joseph A. Buttigieg

Gramsci’s Political Thought
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London
VOLUME 38
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/hm
Gramsci’s Political Thought
By
Carlos Nelson Coutinho
Translated from the Portuguese by
Pedro Sette-Câmara
With a foreword by
Joseph A. Buttigieg
LEidEN • BOSTON
2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Coutinho, Carlos Nelson.
Gramsci’s political thought / by Carlos Nelson Coutinho ; translated from the Portuguese by
Pedro Sette-Camara.
p. cm. — (Historical materialism book series ; v. 38)
includes bibliographical references and index.
iSBN 978-90-04-22866-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937—Political and
social views. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Communism. i. Sette-Camara, Pedro. ii. Title.
JC265.G68C68 2012
320.53’2—dc23
2012008347
iSSN 1570-1522
iSBN 978 90 04 22866 5 (hardback)
iSBN 978 90 04 23025 5 (e-book)
Gramsci. Um estudo sobre su pensamento politico, Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1999
(reprinted in 2003) (The text from which the English translation was made has been revised and
augmented.)
Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
idC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
For Andréa,
my wife

Contents
Foreword ......................................................................................................... ix
Joseph A. Buttigieg
Preface .............................................................................................................. xv
1. Youth, a Contradictory Formation: 1910–18 ......................................... 1
1.1. Sardinia ............................................................................................... 1
1.2. The encounter with Croce and Gentile .......................................... 3
1.3. Gramsci turns away from the Marxism of the Second
international ...................................................................................... 7
2. Workers’ democracy and Factory-Councils: 1919–20 ......................... 13
2.1. L’Ordine Nuovo ................................................................................... 13
2.2. Gramsci and Bordiga ........................................................................ 17
2.3. The defeat of the councils ................................................................ 20
3. Passage to Maturity: 1921–6 .................................................................... 23
3.1. From the foundation of the PCd’I to the fight against
fascism ................................................................................................ 23
3.2. The struggle against sectarianism .................................................. 31
3.3. The first formulations of the concept of hegemony ..................... 37
4. Methodological Observations on the Prison Notebooks ........................ 46
4.1. The systematic nature of the Notebooks .......................................... 47
4.2. Gramsci’s place in the evolution of Marxism ............................... 50
4.3. Gramsci as a critic of politics ........................................................... 54
4.4. On the relations between politics, economics and social
totality ................................................................................................. 61
4.5. Gramsci’s philosophical conceptions ............................................. 66
5. The ‘Extended’ Theory of the State ........................................................ 77
5.1. The concept of ‘civil society’ ........................................................... 77
5.2. ‘Regulated society’ and the end of the state .................................. 87
viii • Contents
6. Socialist Strategy in the ‘West’ ................................................................ 93
6.1. War of movement and war of position .......................................... 93
6.2. On the concept of passive revolution ............................................ 100
6.3. From Gramsci’s proposal of a ‘constituent assembly’ to
Togliatti’s ‘progressive democracy’ ............................................... 105
7. The Party as ‘Collective intellectual’ ...................................................... 110
8. The Current Relevance and Universality of Gramsci .......................... 120
8.1. Another socialist model ................................................................... 121
8.2. A radical conception of democracy ................................................ 125
8.3. With Gramsci, beyond Gramsci ...................................................... 130
Appendix 1 General Will and democracy in Rousseau,
Hegel and Gramsci ................................................................................... 137
1.1. The priority of the public ................................................................. 138
1.2. Rousseau and the general will ........................................................ 140
1.3. Hegel and the determinations of will ............................................ 144
1.4. Gramsci and hegemony as contract ............................................... 150
Appendix 2 The Neoliberal Age: Passive Revolution
or Counter-Reformation? ......................................................................... 156
2.1. Counter-reformation ........................................................................ 157
2.2. The welfare-state as passive revolution ......................................... 158
2.3. Neoliberalism as counter-reformation ........................................... 160
2.4. Transformism .................................................................................... 161
Appendix 3 Gramsci and Brazil ................................................................ 163
3.1. Reception ............................................................................................ 164
3.2. Uses ..................................................................................................... 174
References ....................................................................................................... 189
index ................................................................................................................ 195
Foreword
On several occasions in the course of his superb
exposition, elucidation, and critical analysis of
Antonio Gramsci’s political thought, Carlos Nelson
Coutinho draws the reader’s attention to the sterility
of dogmatism and much self-styled Marxist-Leninist
‘orthodoxy’. There are many reasons for this, chief
among them that throughout his work, from the
earliest journalistic articles to almost the very last
notebook-entries, Gramsci repeatedly attributed
the theoretical poverty and ineffectual politics of
the socialist movement to its rigid embrace of pos-
itivist philosophy and its blind faith in the immu-
table laws of history. Celebrating the success of the
October Revolution, Gramsci characterised it as a
triumph over dogma and a rejection of positivist
philosophy. ‘These people, are not “Marxists” ’, he
wrote of the victorious Bolsheviks. ‘They have not
used the works of the Master to compile a rigid doc-
trine of dogmatic utterances never to be questioned.
They live Marxist thought – that thought which is
eternal, which represents the continuation of Ger-
man and Italian idealism, and which in the case of
Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist
encrustations’. To be sure, as Coutinho rightly points
out, one cannot fail to notice here the strong influ-
ence of idealist philosophy on the young Gramsci.
About fifteen years later, however, in a long series
of notes on philosophy, Gramsci would compose an
extensive and detailed critique of both idealist and
positivist distortions of Marxism. In one of the first
notes on the subject he posed the question: ‘Why
has Marxism, in some of its elements, ended up