Praxis and Method (Rle: Gramsci): A Sociological Dialogue With Lukacs, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School by Richard Kilminster

Author:Richard Kilminster [Kilminster, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, History & Theory, Political Ideologies, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317744412
Google: Vb1wAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 22148861
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1979-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

13 Inequality and the unity of mankind

The Crocean inseparability of thought and action in Gramsci means that ideas are a practical material force in a given configuration of civil society not only when, as Marx said, they “seize the masses” as a whole; indeed Gramsci’s work throws into question what at later stages of development a material force might even constitute. The act of becoming aware (as mentioned earlier in regard to conscious molecular transformism within politicizing organizations such as the party) or changing one’s world conception is initially enshrined in a practical individual, who is a philosopher, an intellectual, indefinable outside his relations with other men in civil society. And civil society is life itself, since life can only be hegemonic social life in a given historical bloc. Quantitatively multiplied and extended through group coalescence such a change in consciousness becomes a qualitative institutional aspect of the process of reality, embodied in practical activity. And should the conceptions in men’s minds become disjoined from their practical activity in the process, this only serves as a necessary condition for a future change in that activity. As part of a cultural movement aimed at replacing old conceptions of the world at all levels in order to create elites of intellectuals (in Gramsci’s sense), this activity ultimately gives “personality to the amorphous mass element” which is what “really modifies the ‘ideological panorama’ of the age.”1

Gramsci was, as we have seen, well disposed towards the idealists’ view that we only know what we do and he wished to bring into existence the unity of man which the idealists had expressed as Spirit. But it would be erroneous to see Gramsci’s activistic cultural Marxism as idealist in any Platonic or Berkeleian sense, for he saw consciousness and reality as inseparably unified in practice, not as separate domains.2 Furthermore, it would also be wrong to argue that Gramsci’s aim of modifying the ideological panorama floats above the ‘economic base’ and is therefore of no avail for changing society, for such a view assumes a crude base/superstructure dualism which Gramsci was trying to move beyond. In so far as the change of ideological horizon is a process (not an unconditioned leap) embodied in acting individuals and groups, then such achievement, in Gramsci’s terms, of a higher, critical, conception of the world (on all levels) qualitatively and cumulatively changes the very practical stuff of social reality. And since this reality is a hegemonic one, constituted over time in the image of a ruling class, such acts are political; either in so far as they change activity or in so far as they prepare a foundation of dual consciousness which anticipates and can by its presence in the society hasten the new social reality with which the changed conception of the world will be congruent. The linkage of this process to the “economic moment” is dialectically presupposed, otherwise modifications of the ideological panorama could not exist. (More on this shortly.) This view means, as we have seen, that

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