Reading Gramsci

197 Pages·2015·0.794 MB·English

by  Francisco Fernández Buey

Reading Gramsci
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen (Paris)
Steve Edwards (London)
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)
Peter Thomas (London)
VOLUME 88
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
Reading Gramsci
By
Francisco Fernández Buey
Translated by
Nicholas Gray
LEIDEN | BOSTON
This work has been published with a subsidy from the Directorate General of
Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fernández Buey, Francisco.
 [Leyendo a Gramsci. English]
 Reading Gramsci / by Francisco Fernández Buey ; translated by Nicholas Gray.
  pages cm. — (Historical materialism book series ; volume 88)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-22356-1 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23136-8 (e-book) 1. Gramsci, Antonio,
1891–1937. I. Title.
 HX289.7.G73F4713 2014
 335.43—dc23
2014032778
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For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1570-1522
isbn 978-90-04-22356-1 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-23136-8 (e-book)
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Contents
Prologue  vii
1 Love and Revolution  1
2 The Ethico-Political Project of Antonio Gramsci  60
3 The Plan, Structure, and Themes of the Prison Notebooks  98
4 Language and Politics in Gramsci  143
Appendices
1 Brecht, ‘To Those Born Later’  165
2 Guide to Reading Gramsci  168
References  177
Index  181

Prologue
The studies included in this volume expand, develop ideas from, and occa-
sionally correct what I wrote on the work of Antonio Gramsci between 1973
and 1975, which was compiled in Ensayos sobre Gramsci (Barcelona: Editorial
Materiales, 1978). Those essays were based on a reading of Gramsci before the
publication of the critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere produced by
Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975).
In the intervening period (i.e. up to the year 2000), many previously unpub-
lished items from Gramsci’s correspondence with Giulia and Tatiana Schucht,
his wife and his sister-in-law (who was the person closest to Gramsci between
1927 and 1937) have come to light, along with a considerable number of docu-
ments which illuminate little-known aspects of his biography and permit a
better interpretation of certain obscure passages from the Prison Notebooks.
Among these latter documents, it is the correspondence between Piero Sraffa
and Tatiana Schucht, published in 1991, which is of the greatest importance for
an appreciation of Antonio Gramsci’s evolution during the prison years.
Moreover, Gramscian studies have grown exponentially across the world,
partly as a consequence of this newly available documentation. In the final
third of the twentieth century, Gramsci went from being ‘fashionable’ (a status
conferred upon him by a certain politicism of the 1970s) to being studied as a
classic political thinker. Politicos stopped citing his name in vain, and oppor-
tunists discovered that his name could no longer be used for their daily business
ventures. By contrast, Gramsci’s intellectual influence has been consolidated
among serious people engaged in the social sciences, cultural studies and the
critique of politics. The same is true, of course, for those who appreciate truth-
fulness in politics; people who, with the vagaries of time, have become those
with the closest connection to what used to be called ‘revolutionary spirit’.
It is true that there is no longer any talk of the contemporary relevance
of Gramsci, but this is an advantage for an appreciation of his work, which
was never ‘of contemporary relevance’ in the trivial sense usually given to this
phrase by the dominant culture industry. In Gramsci there are no formulae. In
the majority of his writings, there are ‘unsparing truths’ which already in his
time piqued autocrats, conformist intellectuals and devotees of catechisms.
The demagogues of the era decreed that this was a brain which should be pre-
vented from continuing to think; the learned members of the establishment
ignored him on the basis that he was not an expert in anything which would
have given him a title (he was neither a professional philosopher, nor a his-
torian of a certain school, nor a sociology graduate, nor a posing intellectual,
viii prologue
nor a rising politician); and the followers of doctrine felt uncomfortable in his
presence and ostracised him on account of his irony, his self-critical tendencies,
or what they called ‘his antinomies’. As such, the best Gramsci will always have
been a posthumous author.
Such an author would reject any attempt to make a hagiography out of his
life and his work, even as a corrective to the oblivion to which he had been
condemned. He considered all of his mature writings to be a ‘first approxima-
tion’, irrespective of the theme under consideration (whether this was the his-
tory of Italian intellectuals, political theory, the knowledge of the structure of
Inferno, Canto X of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the interpretation of Machiavelli,
or the evolution of Americanism). On several occasions, he wrote that he had
the impression that he had gone astray in his life. However, on none of these
occasions did he say that he had gone astray in those things that earned him
the criticism of despots, starchy academics and the upholders of orthodoxy.
Anyone reading Gramsci today will probably reach the conclusion that
he was wrong in some important things that he considered to be certainties,
in some of his convictions that he deemed well-founded or that he thought
would be borne out. I am also of this opinion. I think that he was wrong on
some things, which, decades later, others of us continue to consider impor-
tant, and on which we continue to be wrong, perhaps like Gramsci himself.
However, I also consider it a pity that he was wrong in his predictions about
what could have been a great moral and intellectual reform in the vast and
terrible world of the twentieth century, because the descendants of those
who were proved right in opposition to Gramsci have not left us with a bet-
ter world. Accordingly, something similar to what Brecht said of good people
could be stated with regard to Gramsci: even when they take the wrong path
at a crossroads, they make us think what might have been the right one. That
there might yet be a path, even an oblique one, to a regulated and peaceful
society of equals, like the one that Gramsci wanted, no longer depends on the
Italian thinker. It depends on us, the readers of Gramsci in the current epoch.
That is, an epoch of post-Fordism, the fragmentation of the working class, the
inducement of cultural uniformity, the society of the spectacle, neo-slavery,
and rampant prostitution – the rampant prostitution of the daughters and
granddaughters of those who expected so much from moral and intellectual
reform, but also from an epoch of protest against imperial globalisation.
Gramsci chose to see the philosophy of praxis as a heresy of the ‘religion
of freedom’, of the liberalism of the nineteenth century and of part of the
twentieth. Furthermore, he sensed that the democratic and lay philosopher of
the future would precisely have to confront the religion of freedom by deepen-
ing the sense of this heresy. That other great lone theorist, Simone Weil, was
Prologue ix
thinking something not too different in France, in a different linguistic register,
but with a similar sensibility vis-à-vis the misfortunes of the poor. It is no coin-
cidence, then, that the names of Gramsci and Simone Weil should frequently
appear together in the Latin America of today when thoughts turn once again
to the liberation of the exploited, the oppressed and the destitute.
One of the great errors at the turn of the century has been the generalised,
uncritical acceptance of what has erroneously been called ‘neoliberalism’,
which has as little to do with historic liberalism as has Machiavellianism with
the historic Machiavelli, or some of the Marxisms with the historic Marx. This
generalised acceptance of ‘neoliberalism’ is creating such confusion in our
societies that the very word ‘freedom’ runs the risk of converting itself into
a discredited concept, so identified is it with the freedom of the market and
the free circulation of commodities, while the free movement of those human
beings who find themselves obliged to emigrate is curtailed. The only com-
modity that is denied the freedom of circulation nowadays is precisely ‘the
commodity’ into which capitalism has – according to Marx – converted the
human being.
The fact that this is being done precisely in the name of ‘liberalism’ lends an
extra significance to Gramsci’s reflections, in his last prison notebooks, on the
lay and democratic philosopher in a critical dialogue with the ‘religion of free-
dom’. These notes of his were also tentative, a ‘first approximation’, but, in their
brevity and fragmentedness, there are some suggestions that ought to help us
give a new value to the word ‘freedom’ in the present. This is of course to be
done by taking the heretical intent further, to continue speaking like Gramsci,
and with Gramsci. This would necessitate a shaking off of mental cobwebs and
an intellectual effort in order to call the things which are ranged under the
heading ‘neoliberalism’ by their true name: capitalism, which not only com-
modifies and exploits the human being, as it did in Gramsci’s time, but also
speculates with what the worker produces, metamorphoses these products
into assets on the stock exchange, spreading the contagion of speculation to
the workers themselves, and enslaves or prostitutes the surplus population –
i.e. all those girls, boys, women and men who no longer find a place within
the legal regulation of the international division of labour within the Empire.
Instead of seeing ‘neoliberalism’ as a mere extension of historic liberalism,
this alternative characterisation of the status quo, of how things are in the glo-
balised world, would certainly facilitate a fruitful dialogue with the heirs of his-
toric liberalism, who, like Piero Gobetti, the editor of La Rivoluzione Liberale,
were able to appreciate the thought and action of Gramsci, and, through them,
with all those true liberals who discovered some time ago that, in this world, it
is not enough to be liberal: we have to be libertarian at the least.
x prologue
In this final paragraph I must declare, albeit indirectly, an intellectual
debt to the two people from whom I learned most about Gramsci: Valentino
Gerratana and Manuel Sacristán. The above comments and the arguments
of the following four essays owe much to these two scholars’ way of reading
Gramsci. Between the lines, I am in dialogue with what they wrote on Gramsci,
for which I have the same gratitude as when they were alive and they taught
us how to engage with the classical thinker who remains so close to our ideals
in spite of the time which has passed since the Prison Notebooks were written.
The four essays included in this volume are the reworking of four interven-
tions of mine at Gramsci conferences held in Italy (in Sardinia, in Turin and in
Trieste) between 1987 and 2000. They would not have progressed beyond the
spoken word without the generosity of Antonio A. Santucci, Giorgio Baratta,
Guido Liguori, Alberto Burgio and Giuseppe Petronio. I would like to express
my gratitude to all of them here for their kindness in inviting me to those con-
ferences, and in making bibliographical suggestions.
Barcelona, August 2001
[Translator’s note: here and there in the text, Francisco Fernández Buey’s notes
are supplemented by my own. These latter can be identified by a dagger (†).]