Gramsci and Marxist Theory by Chantal Mouffe

Author:Chantal Mouffe [Mouffe, Chantal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780710003584
Google: Sq89AAAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 2790634
Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Published: 1979-01-01T00:29:31+00:00

6 Conclusion

With the notion of absolute historicism Gramsci pursues a kind of ‘kantian’ theoretical operation in order to re-examine the aims and limitations of philosophy and to stress the consequences of that recurring tendency to transcend these limitations even within marxist philosophy, whenever it loses sight of the concept of social relations of production. Thus, Gramsci sought to make marxism fully conscious of its own identity, to revive its revolutionary spirit, to eliminate the fifth columns nested within it, and to purify it of those old ways of thinking which it tended to reproduce.

The concept of revisionism in Gramsci undergoes an expansion which is related to his way of formulating the general theory of marxism. Far from referring to the interpretations of the doctrine’s theoretical foundation within the labour movement, by revisionism Gramsci means every penetration of bourgeios ideology ‘which sometimes creeps in the teachings of Engels and even of Marx, in the most dangerous way’.88 Already in the Lyons theses we read:89

After the victory of Marxism, the tendencies of a national character over which it had triumphed sought to manifest themselves in other ways, re-emerging within Marxism itself as forms of revisionism.… The process of degeneration of the Ilnd International thus took the form of a struggle against Marxism which unfolded within Marxism itself.

In the prison writings we find the thesis that the revision of the doctrine can be understood only by analysing the relation between ‘the philosophy of praxis and modern culture’. Since for Gramsci ‘orthodoxy’ means the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the philosophy of praxis, i.e. that it contains ‘all the fundamental elements for building a total and integral world-view’,90 he leaves behind the concept of revisionism as it had been understood within the internal debates of German Social Democracy. The most dangerous revisionists are the orthodox marxists precisely because the theoretical essence of revisionism does not consist in distinguishing between what is dead and what is alive in Marx but, rather, in using his analytical framework according to criteria foreign to it.

To redefine the limits of philosophy means to outline the limits of the world and to furnish a more complete theoretical consciousness of its on-going contradictions. Not even marxism can go beyond the limitations of the mode of production. It would mean a falling back into utopianism (and every ‘systematic’ vision of marxism is utopian) but with this difference: while the old utopianism was the ideal expression of a new social class struggling against the existing order, the new utopianism threatens to reabsorb marxism into the old philosophy. The main concern of marxist philosophy will be to guard against the temptation to propose purely logical solutions to real contradictions. Its only task is to make them as clear as possible. It cannot add or take anything away. On the other hand, it is fatal to take that road which has already led the labour movement to become subaltern at the moment it claimed to offer alternative solutions. In 1929 Gramsci claimed that91

there is already a ‘proletarian’ intellectuality for the socialists, and it is constituted by the working petit bourgeoisie.

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