Antonio Gramsci Research Paper

Taken to the prison of Turi in the province of Bari, he remained there until 1933 when he was moved to Formia due to poor health. Obtaining a conditional discharge, in 1935 he was admitted to the Quisisana hospital in Rome, where he died following a stroke. Thanks to his sister-in-law Tatiana, his Quaderni del carcere (‘Prison Notebooks’), written between 1930 and 1935, were sent underground to Moscow and delivered to Palmiro Togliatti. Published after the collapse of the Fascist dictatorship, they revealed a leading theoretician who, albeit following the path of Marxist–Leninist tradition, had elaborated an original concept of society and history underpinned by the theory of hegemony.

Gramsci’s political thinking was deeply influenced by the October Revolution. He immediately saw it as confirming his activist and voluntaristic reading of Marxism, induced by Giovanni Gentile’s neo-idealism. For Gramsci, Marxism was something more than a simple, empirical interpretation of history, as Benedetto Croce had defined it; it was a complete philosophy containing, in nuce, a new civilization to be constructed over a long and dramatic process. The industrial proletariat or, more specifically, its conscious vanguard, the Communist party, would be its protagonists. So Gramsci enthusiastically greeted the Bolshevik October as ‘the revolution against the Capital.’ The revolution against the positivistic and deterministic interpretation of Marxism which the parties of the Second International had adopted while awaiting the inevitable, catastrophic collapse of capitalism. Gramsci also considered that Lenin had been able to grasp the systematic link between Marxism and German classical philosophy, of which Hegelianism had been the speculative summit. Thus Gramisci was prompted to see Lenin not only as the greatest strategist of the international workers’ movement but also its greatest theoretician. In his deeds, even before his thoughts, he had expressed a higher degree of consciousness. Therefore, the unity of the theory and practice incarnated by Lenin and by the movement he had created had to be emphasized. Cultural work was thus a priority, to demonstrate that Communism was the positive response to the world crisis of capitalism and the moral dissolution of the bourgeois civilization, precisely because it had, thanks to Marxism, reached a higher degree of theoretical awareness. It was no coincidence that Bolshevism arose from the claim that the workers’ consciousness should prevail over their spontaneity and that without a revolutionary theory no really revolutionary action was even conceivable. For Gramsci, the Communist revolution had to be seen as a philosophy which was being put into practice or, more precisely, as an ethical-political will enlightened by a theory whose aim was the reconstruction of the world.

Up to the end of 1923, Gramsci’s thinking, expressed in a myriad of short articles on the political situation, was nothing else but an intelligent adaptation of Leninism to the Italian situation. All the typical elements of the Bolshevik model were to be found in it: the supremacy of theory over spontaneity, the concept of the party as a nucleus of activists devoted heart and soul to the revolution and submitted to iron discipline, the intransigent defense of orthodoxy against any form of revisionism, the military vision of the class war, the revolution as a declaration of war on the existing, the regime of transition focused on the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by its conscious vanguard, the edification of Socialism as a substitution of the anarchy of the market with a single production and distribution plan; one can even find the idea, already expressed by Lenin to justify the red terror, that the Communists’ historic mission was to ‘purify the social environment with iron and fire,’ exterminating the lower and middle bourgeoisie, ‘corrupt, dissolute and putrescent humanity.’ But, drafting his program-letter of February 1924, Gramsci started to work out the revolutionary theory that, in his Quaderni del carcere, was to be called the ‘war of position’ in opposition to the ‘war of movement.’

Gramsci was the first Communist leader to realize that the Bolshevik strategy had few possibilities of success in Western Europe, with its robust civil society, rich in counter-powers and institutions relatively independent of the state. The Third International was founded on the hypothesis that the world capitalist system had entered a phase of rapid and uncontrollable disintegration and that, therefore, the Communists’ task would be that of accelerating this disintegration, mobilizing the proletarian masses against the bourgeois state, and enabling the Bolsheviks to take power. But the Comintern leaders had underestimated the vitality of capitalism that, despite the great postwar crisis, had shown it was strong enough to suffocate any revolutionary attempt before it was born. The ‘war of position’ was Gramsci’s idea for rescuing the Communist movement from the blind alley down which it had gone. He had realized that the dominance of the bourgeoisie was based more on the consensus of the masses than on control of the coercive machinery. The celebrated theory of hegemony, developed in his Quaderni del carcere, says that the ‘supremacy of a social group is shown in two ways, as dominance and as intellectual and moral leadership.’

Which is like saying that a class is hegemonic only insofar as it is capable of increasing the material and spiritual patrimony of society and obtaining the consensus of the working classes. Therefore there is no hegemony that is not founded on a ‘historical bloc,’ that is on an organized system of social alliances cemented by a common ideology. The historic bloc is the social basis of hegemony. It is not only a political phenomenon, it is also, and in a certain sense above all, a cultural phenomenon. This led Gramsci to claim that the superiority of a hegemonic class lasts insofar as it is able to keep its system of alliances united and bring in other social groups by satisfying, albeit within precise limits, their material and moral interests. Then, and only then, will it become the ‘driving force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the national energies.’ Gramsci’s approach to the problem of social order was typical of the sociologies of consensus, stamped by a certain Marxism as interesting ideological distortions of reality, and he grafted their fundamental theorems on the trunk of historical materialism. He also took over Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca’s elitist theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His central premise was that the historical existence of a society is, always and necessarily, concentrated on the minorities–masses dialectic.

In Quaderni del carcere, society is conceived along Marxist lines as a hierarchical structure of classes, differing according to their position and function in organizing the production and reproduction of material life. But, for a class to make history, it must distinguish itself and become independent; it has to acquire a critical knowledge of itself. This happens gradually, transforming a class, an immediately corporate reality, into an ethical–political force with a national character that imposes its leadership on society. This is precisely the stage in which ideologies confront each other and enter into battle until one of them, or a combination of them, takes the upper hand and unites not only the economic and political, but also the intellectual and moral, aims of society. Vice versa, a dominant class starts to decline when it gradually loses its ability to interpret the needs of the dominated classes and to mobilize national energies. It is true that a dominant class can keep its power even when it has lost its ability to rule, thanks to its control of the state’s coercive machinery; but in the long run it is destined to be replaced by a new ruling class.

This led Gramsci to a conclusion which is, basically, the reformulation of Pareto’s famous theory of revolution as a violent and traumatic substitution of an old aristocracy with a new aristocracy. But where Pareto only saw ideologies as rhetorical stratagems through which an elite justified its desire to dominate, Gramsci ascribed an enormously important function to them. Ideologies are not mere derivations, as Pareto called them; they are global visions of reality, essential for constructing a civilization. There is no civilization without an ideology, and without this ideology being absorbed by the lower classes and transformed into popular culture. So it can be said that history is dominated by the clash between ideologies, between hegemonic principles competing for the consensus of the masses. And the theatre of this clash is civil society. Gramsci saw this differently from Marx, that is as the society of industry and general competition, material base of the state and the ideological superstructures. For Gramsci, civil society is the theatre of intellectual and moral relations, where a social group that aspires to dominance constructs its own hegemony by soliciting the consensus of the dominated classes. Civil society, therefore, is a cultural rather than an economic reality: it is where rival hegemonic principles confront each other until one of them eliminates the others and becomes the impersonal engine of historical development.

Now, if what is decisive in history is not economic but spiritual power, then to move the middle classes out of the city of command, you first of all and above all have to earn the active consensus of the lower classes. That is, you have to incite a critical attitude to the existing order and persuade the workers to support the new type of society implicit in Marxist philosophy. The second consequence drawn from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony was that the Bolsheviks’ Jacobin strategy was not applicable to the type of war that had to be waged in Western societies. It presumed the power vacuum which had effectively occurred in Russia in 1917; in other words, it presumed the disintegration of the ruling class and the general collapse of the political system. Lenin and Trotsky’s Blitzkrieg tactics had not, therefore, any possibility of success if there was a sufficiently cohesive historic bloc to repel frontal assault by the armies of the revolutionary movement. It was necessary to change the line of action, to work out a long-term strategy for gaining power.

The Italian Communist leader’s answer to this problem is to be found in his Quaderni del carcere. Studying the history of Western civilisation, Gramsci found a perfect model in the victory of Christianity over the Greco-Roman culture. Christianity had been, in its way, a revolutionary movement that had introduced a spiritual scission in ancient society and had triumphed thanks to its intellectual and moral superiority, to the indefatigable teaching of its apologists and to its organization. If it was impossible to conquer the bourgeois citadel manu militarti, it was possible, as the history of the expansion of Christianity indicated, to conquer it by wearing away the ideological defenses of the middle classes. Thus the Communists had to imitate the early Christians by eroding from within, by a methodical, silent and all-embracing conquest of the ideological superstructures and the existing order until the working classes stopped supporting the ruling class. One of the fundamental theorems of Gramsci’s sociological theory was that a class which wants to win power has first of all to be hegemonic. That is, it has to be able to exercise a firm and united, intellectual and moral leadership over the working masses and then to dominate them. It has methodically to take possession of the ‘fortresses’ and ‘casemates’ of civil society and transform them into the operational bases of its march towards the city of command. Thus, whereas Leninism had theorized the occupation of society through the violent conquest of the state, Gramsci proposes an inverse procedure: the conquest of the state through the cultural occupation of society. To this end, it was all-important to penetrate the mass-media, schools, universities and publishing houses and convert them into agencies for the socialization of Marxism.

In Gramsci’s model for the conquest of power, violence was relegated to the background. Nonetheless, the strategic goal remained that of the Bolshevik Revolution: the institutionalization of the mono-party dictatorship as an indispensable condition for totally remodeling the social body. On this point Gramsci remained faithful to Lenin’s teaching. The party, and only the party, had to be the leading light of the intellectual and moral reform for creating the new civilization whose institutional foundations had been laid in the Soviet Union. So that Gramsci, after having indicated the Communist party as the only institution which could be compared to the Catholic church, did not hesitate to define Marxism as the ‘religion which could kill Christianity’ by building the City of Man. And he saw the modern prince (the party of the professional revolutionaries, conscious vanguard of the working classes) as the historical agent. He who, overthrowing the entire intellectual and moral system of liberal civilization with his impassioned teaching, would have ‘to take, in people’s minds, the place of the divinity and the categorical imperative’ (Quaderni del carcere).

Gramsci’s is a rigorous theorization of the charismatic nature of the revolutionary party, not unlike Gyorgy Lukacs’ in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein, where the Communist party is described as the cosmic–historic agent which, in virtue of its superior theoretical knowledge, will have to achieve the ‘salvation of humanity.’ Gramsci defines the modern prince as the ‘focus of the faith’ and the ‘custodian of the doctrine of Socialism’ destined to introduce an epochal caesura in universal history. This prince has to ensure that he becomes the source of all the satisfaction his militants had previously found in a multiplicity of organizations. He must also destroy all these other organizations or incorporate them into a system in which this modern prince will be the ‘only regulator.’ Hence the distinction, spelt out in Quaderni del carcere, between two types of totalitarianism: the regressive kind, with a party opposing the drive of history, and the progressive one, which is precisely that of the modern prince bringing a new and superior culture.

This led Gramsci to affirm peremptorily that ‘everything is politics,’ and that, consequently, it is not possible to separate politics from philosophy, since the latter is the driving force of history in the making. A history that is always ‘between two hegemonic principles, between two religions,’ each of which aspires to regulate human life in all its material and spiritual manifestations. The idea of a competitive coexistence between a plurality of social forces and cultural models, so typical of liberal civilization, is not only entirely extraneous to Gramsci’s political philosophy but even explicitly rejected. The final aim of his philosophy is the construction of the future city, conceived by Marxism as a ‘harmonious society.’

The role of the intellectuals is of fundamental importance within this vision of the Communist revolution. They are the protagonists of history, since history is nothing else but the dramatic process through which a determinate philosophy takes over the world. Gramsci sees the revolutionary party as a ‘collective intellectual’ and gives the ‘organized intellectuals’ framed within the rigid discipline of Leninist centralism the function of ‘permanent persuaders.’ This explains why Gramsci’s philosophy, in the decades following the publication of the Khrushchev Report (1956), had such a powerful influence on the Communist intelligentsia. The latter found in the Quaderni del carcere what they needed to liberate Marxism from Stalinist dogmatism and to conceive the fight for socialism as a magnificent pedagogical operation to conquer spiritual hegemony by changing how the subordinate classes felt and thought. But after the crisis of Marxism in the 1980s, Gramsci’s theory of the peaceful conquest of power rapidly lost its fascination, despite the fact that some basic concepts of this theory—and first of all the concept of hegemony—have entered the lexicon of contemporary sociology.

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