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Gramsci, the Via Italiana, and the Classical Marxist‐Leninist Approach to Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Joseph V. Femia
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IT IS NOW COMMON (AND QUITE CORRECT) TO PRAISE ANTONIO Gramsci as the first Marxist theorist to understand that the revolution in Western Europe must deviate sharply from the strategic path taken by the Bolsheviks in Russia. With characteristic disdain for old and rigid formulae, he pointed to the crucial differences between advanced capitalist countries and the Russian Empire of 1917, and he attempted in his prison notebooks (Quaderni) to develop criteria of orientation and action appropriate to modern circumstances. What he offered was a new What is to be done? for the developed West, a fundamental reassessment and revision of the accepted Marxist approach to revolution. The nature of this enterprise has prompted many – critics and admirers alike – to lay emphasis on the tie between Gramsci and Togliatti-ism. Gramsci put forward ideas, it is claimed, whose logic is manifest in the ‘Italian (read “constitutional”, “parliamentary”, “democratic”, “pacific”) road to socialism’. It is now casually assumed in many circles that he was the ideological progenitor of what has come to be known as Eurocommunism, the increasingly influential body of doctrines that purports to marry liberalism and Marxism. In the following pages, this assumption, and other related ones, will be closely examined and evaluated.

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Government and Opposition , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1979 , pp. 66 - 95
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1979

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References

1 Note sul Machiaaelli, sulla politica e sullo stato moderno (henceforth Mach.), Vol, V, Collected Works, Turin, Einaudi, 1949, p. 68.

2 Ibid., p. 84.

3 Ibid., p. 68.

4 For detailed discussion of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, see Anderson, P., ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100, double issue, 11 1976 Google Scholar ‐ January 1977; Boggs, C., Gramsci&s Marxism, London, Pluto Press, 1976 Google Scholar, ch. 2; and my own ‘Hegemony and Consciousness in the thought of Antonio Gramsci’, Political Studies, XXIII, March 1975, pp. 29–48.

5 Mach., p. 66.

6 Ibid., p. 161.

7 Passato e presente (henceforth PP), Vol. VII, Collected Works, 1951, p. 71.

8 Mach., pp. 114–15.

9 Lisa’s report has been published in Rinascita, 12 December 1964, pp. 17–21; the substantial correctness of his account is confirmed by another prisoner at Turi, Giovanni Lay; see his ‘Colloqui con Gramsci nel carcere di Turi’ in Rinascita, 22 February 1965.

10 Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotations in this paragraph are from Lisa’s report (pp. 18–19), not from Gramsci directly.

11 In a letter of 13 July 1931 to his sister‐in‐law, Tania, Gramsci remarked on his growing solitude: ‘It is as if, every day, another thread tying me to the past breaks, and it becomes ever more impossible to knot these threads together again’. Antonio Gramsci: Letters from Prison, translated by L. Lawner, New York, Harper and Row, 1973, p. 201.

12 At least one left‐wing critic, however, sees the reformist rot beginning to set in as early as 1924; see Sechi, S., ‘Gramsci a Turi’, Rinascita sarda, 1–15 10 1966.Google Scholar

13 ‘II Partito Comunista’, Ordine Nuovo, 4 September 1920, now reprinted in L'Ordine nuovo 1919–1920, Vol. IX, Collected Works, 1954, pp. 154–58.

14 For an example of such an erroneous approach, see Tarrow, S., Peasant Communism in Southern Italy, London, Yale University Press, 1967, ch. 5.Google Scholar

15 Tamburrano, G., Antonio Gramsci: La vita, il pensiero, I' arione, Bari, Laterza, 1963, pp. 173–76.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., pp. 284–97. For example, Tamburrano cites the famous passage where Gramsci, discussing the post‐revolutionary society, maintains: ‘It seems necessary to leave the task of searching for new truths… to the free initiative of individual scholars, even though they may continually question the principles that seem most essential’.

17 ‘Fasi di sviluppo del pensiero politico di Gramsci’, in Caracciolo, A. and Scalia, G. (eds.), La città futura, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1959, pp. 131–32Google Scholar. Tamburrano makes the same point in Antonio Grarnsci, pp. 257–58.

18 See, for example, Giolitti, A., Rifoma e rivoluzionre, Turin, Einaudi, 1957.Google Scholar

19 Antonio Gramsci, pp. 260–61, 267.

20 Ibid., p. 267.

21 Pietro Nenni was an indefatigable Socialist Party activist and leader, whose political career spanned half a century. ‘Nennian’ was used as a term of abuse by Tambunano’s critics on the Left.

22 Amadeo Bordiga was the ‘leftist’ leader of the PCI, who clashed with the Comintern over the ‘United Front’ policy.

23 Perlini, T., Gramsci e il Gramscismo, Milan, CELUC, p. 55.Google Scholar

24 ‘I nostri conti con la teoria della “rivoluzione senza rivoluzione” in Gramsci’, Giovane critica, 17, Autumn 1967, pp. 61–77.

25 Ibid., p. 70.

26 See, for example, Perlini, Gramsci e il Gramscismo, pp. 36–66; Marramao, G., ‘Per una critica dell’ ideologia di Gramsci’, Quademi piacentini, XI, 46, 03 1972, pp. 74–92 Google Scholar; Cortesi, L., ‘Un convegno su Gramsci’, Rivista storica del socialismo, 30, 01 – 04 1967, pp. 159–73Google Scholar; and Riechers, C., Antonio Gramsci: Marxismus in Italien, Frankfurt, Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1970.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 46.

28 Ibid., p. 61.

29 Togliatti, P., La via italiana al socialismo, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1964, p. 197.Google Scholar

30 From a speech delivered in April 1944 to the recently liberated people of Naples. Reprinted in Rinascita, 29 August 1964, pp. 4–5.

31 See Sul movimento operaio internazionale, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1964, pp. 343–44.

32 For an especially disconcerting example of this, see his Partito Comunista Italiano, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1961, p. 70.

33 See Berlinguer, Enrico, La proposta comunista, Turin, Einaudi, 1975 Google Scholar, where references to Lenin are conspicuous by their absence.

34 Statuto del PCI, 1966 edition, p. 3.

35 Reprinted in Rinascita, 29 August 1964, pp. 15–17.

36 See, for example, V. Genatana’s spirited attack on Giolitti’s pamphlet (cited in note 18 above), an attack which set the tone for later Party theorizing on the relationship between dictatorship and hegemony. ‘Una deformazione del pensiero di Gramsci e della politica del partito comunista’, L'Unità, 19 May 1957.

37 Natta, A., ‘Egemonia, cultura, partito nel pensiero di Antonio Gramsci’, Rinascita II Contemporaneo, 29 01 1971 , p. 19.Google Scholar

38 Rinascita‐II Contemporaneo, 14 April 1967, p. 4. The basic interpretation set out in this editorial is elaborated upon by Party leader, Amendola, G., in ‘Rileggendo Gramsci’, Prassi rivoluzionaria e storicismo in Gramsci, Quaderni N. 3 Google Scholar, Supplement of Critica Marxista, Rome, 1967, pp. 37–45.

39 Calamandrei, F., ‘L’ iniziativa politica del partito rivoluzionario da Lenin a Gramsci e Togliatti, Critica Marxista, 07‐10 1967, p. 101.Google Scholar

40 The standard line on Gramsci’s contemporary ‘relevance’ has not changed significantly in the past decade, though one can perhaps discern a slightly greater stress on the ‘historical limits’ of his prescriptions. Typical is the recent and concise formulation of Leonardo Paggi, a leading PCI theoretician, who states that Gramsci’s theory, while it supplies no ‘political recipe for today’, nevertheless ‘constitutes a critical point of reference’. ‘Dopo la sconfitta della rivoluzione in Occidente’, Rinascita, 4 February 1977, p. 14.

41 Mach., pp. 59, 81–2, 159; PP, p. 158.

42 Mach., p. 84.

43 Ibid., p. 66, my emphasis.

44 Ibid., p. 63.

45 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

46 PP, p. 38.

47 Ibid.

48 II Risorgimento (henceforth R), Vol. IV, Collected Works, 1949, p. 72.

49 PP, p. 188.

50 See, e. g., Piotte, Jean‐Marc, La pensée politique de Gramsci, Paris, Editions Anthropos, 1970, p. 169 Google Scholar: ‘The war of position must precede and prepare the way for the war of movement: it is necessary to deprive the ruling class of the direction of civil society before attacking its state power; it is necessary to count on the help and support of the popular masses before taking arms against the dominant class; the struggle for hegemony must prepare for the military struggle’. Piotte does capture a part of Gramsci’s meaning. It is true that the proletariat must win the battle for cultural supremacy before launching a full‐scale armed attack on the last bastion of bourgeois control: the state apparatus. Yet Gramsci provides no textual warrant for assuming that the war of movement is valid only after the war of position is won. Indeed, as we have seen, his actual words on the subject imply otherwise. The problem may be that Piotte and other commentators interpret the war of movement too narrowly, viewing it solely as full‐blown armed struggle. Gramsci gets so carried away by his use of military concepts that he never spells out in any detail the content of their political counterparts. The war of movement is especially hazy. But it is a reasonable supposition that Gramsci would include under this heading less cataclysmic acts, such as mass strikes, sabotage, demonstrations, factory seizures, etc.

51 Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp. 471–75.

52 Mach., p. 68.

53 Mancini, G. and Galli, G., ‘Gramsci’s Presence’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 3, No. 3, Summer 1968, p. 334.Google Scholar

54 ‘La crisi italiana’, Ordine Nuovo, 1 September 1924; reprinted in A. Gramsci, Scritti Politici, edited by P. Spriano, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1973, p. 104.

55 II materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (henceforth MS), Vol. II, Collected Works, 1948, p. 185.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., p. 221.

58 It is worth pointing out that, around the turn of the century, Croce was the leading Italian revisionist, a position he staked out in his collection of essays entitled Historical Materialism.

59 See, in particular, MS, pp. 219–22.

60 Ibid., p. 184.

61 Ibid., p. 222.

62 In a short but cutting note, Gramsci explicitly criticizes Bernsteins’s evolutionist belief that ‘the movement is everything, the final goal nothing’, and yet Merli ascribes this very belief to Gramsci himself! See PP, pp. 190–91.

63 ‘Antonio Gramsci and the Italian Revolution’, New Left Review, 65, p. 94.

64 Jocteau, G. C., Leggere Gramsci, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1975, p. 74.Google Scholar

65 For a defence of the PCI’s radical socialist commitment, see The Italian Road to Socialism, an interview by Eric Hobsbawm with Giorgio Napolitano of the Italian Communist Party, London, Lawrence Hill & Co., 1977, especially pp. 29–31.

66 R, p. 90.

67 Mach. p. 115.