Class, Party, Revolution by Leo Panitch Greg Albo

Author:Leo Panitch,Greg Albo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

GRAMSCI AND LENIN 1917–1922

Alastair Davidson

I.

Antonio Gramsci was twenty-six at the beginning of 1917.1 The “sewer of his past” on whose seething resentments he had built a “Sardist” view of the world (“Into the sea with the Italians”) only showed in too many coffees and cigarettes and an enormous capacity for work. He had given up his “Sardist” worldview for what he and a great many other educated Italians regarded as a satisfactory view of the world: “Crocianism.” Throughout 1917 Gramsci was still “Crocian in his views,”2 although he had been a socialist for over three years and was working full-time for the socialist newspapers Avanti and Grido del Popolo, although his “Crocian” friends of university days had gone to war, and although he had considerable contact with workers, who were always dropping in from the nearby Casa del Popolo to see him because he “had the great gift of knowing how to talk to everybody.”3

Theoretically, he agreed with the views in Benedetto Croce’s recent Teoria delle storia della storiografia. In particular, these were: 1) a rejection of positivism as inverted idealism; 2) a consequent rejection of any history that claimed to relate what truly happened once and for all; and therefore 3) a belief that all immanent worldviews had been “thought up” in terms of the contemporary level of knowledge.4 It followed that Gramsci believed that men were never the prisoners of their past in the sense that they could not free themselves through their own willful actions, but only be freed by some structural conjunction of events. They could, of course, well be the prisoners of their understanding of that past, and therefore fail to comprehend the realities of their present situation. Gramsci’s theoretical and emotional beliefs are summed up in words he wrote in early 1917: “For natural laws, the fatal progress of things of pseudoscientists has been substituted the tenacious will of men,” and in rather more moralizing tones: “Some people whimper pitifully, others curse obscenely, but none, or few, ask themselves: if I had done my duty, if I had attempted to impose my will, my opinion, would what has happened have happened?—I hate the apathetic.”5

This theoretical rejection of determinism was, however, only a “starting point” for Gramsci, who proceeded through the Crocian view that contemporary levels of knowledge were based on contemporary needs, and through the theory of Giovanni Gentile of the “act,” to that variety of Marxism which best accorded with the notion that the revolution would not come automatically but would have to be made in a conscious willful act by men who understood that the cause of their misery was capitalism. By 1917 he had found this in the interpretation of Antonio Labriola, who denied that Marxism described the “apocalyptic” workings of history and claimed that it was a theory based on the historical need for socialism and marked a stage in men’s understanding of their situation. Labriola typified this view overall as a “philosophy of praxis,” thus stressing the affinity between his concerns and those of the early Croce, who had also written a Philosophy of Practice.

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