Currently viewing the tag: "Antonio Gramsci"
“‘Educate yourselves because we’ll need all your intelligence. Agitate because we’ll need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we’ll need all your strength.” – slogan of the Italian communist newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), organised by Antonio Gramsci
For further reading check out:
Lenin’s “Where to Begin?” (May 1901) and “What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement” (autumn 1901 to February 1902)
“It is further to be recognised that, since a deterministic and mechanical conception of history has wide currency (a common-sense conception bound up with the passivity of the great popular masses), single individuals (seeing that, despite their non-intervention, something nonetheless happens) are led to think that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collective organism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yet nevertheless thinks, that moves, not with the real legs of a person, yet still moves, and so on. [...]
A collective consciousness, which is to say a living organism, is formed only after the unification of the multiplicity through friction on the part of the individuals; nor can one say that ‘silence’ is not a multiplicity. An orchestra tuning-up, every instrument playing by itself, sounds a most hideous cacophony, yet these warm-ups are the necessary condition for the orchestra to come to life as a single ‘instrument’.” – Antonio Gramsci, Q15§13
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
“Naturally, no one thinks they form part of the ‘common herd’, but that each of their neighbours is common, and they therefore say that it is necessary for them, too, to pretend to be religious, so as not to perturb the minds of the others and cast them into doubt. Thus it is that many people no longer believe, everyone of them being persuaded that they are superior to the others because they no longer need superstition, but every one of them is persuaded that they have to show they ‘believe’ out of respect for the others.” – Antonio Gramsci, Q8§155
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
“(…even the most radical constitution could be exploited by the Revolution’s enemies and hence the necessity for the dictatorship, i.e., a power not limited by fixed and written laws).” – Antonio Gramsci, Q3§56
“Consensus is imposed on everyone. The Constitution is sacred and it absolutely unimaginable that it is possible to replace it with another one (which is not the case in Europe!) and private property provides the inviolable foundation for the permanence of this mode of social organization (no horizon beyond capitalism is imaginable).” Samir Amin, “Consensus or Inventive Democracy?”
Here in the United States we must deal with an incessant worship of the Constitution. Upon this document rests a whole load of claims of the exceptional nature of the nation and its people, who, through divine inspiration, forged the most libertarian document of governance ever conceived. Having reached the ideal form of government, the constitution is worshiped and change is seen as both impossible and undesirable.
As Gramsci points out in the above note, whatever advances the U.S. constitution ushered into the world, it has been used primarily as a tool by reactionaries to prevent further progress. In revolutionary periods, only a new power not limited by the rigid and formalistic methods of operation can successfully ensure the success of the Revolution, the suppression of its enemies, and the permanent stability of a new society.
Only this new power – a democracy of the vast majority, i.e. a “dictatorship of the working class / proletariat” over and against the old exploiting classes and in the interests of the immense majority – can ensure the stabilisation of a new form of socialist democracy and the destruction of all forms of oppression and exploitation which comes along with the current dictatorship of capital.
All of us must struggle against the fetish of outdated forms, of documents and habits of old, if we wish to see birth of the final and most emancipatory stage of human history.
“My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall… that is my strength, my only strength.”
“Too much” (therefore superficial and mechanical) political realism often leads to the assertion that a statesman should only work within the limits of “effective reality”; that he should not interest himself in what “ought to be” but only in what “is”. This would mean that he should not look farther than the end of his own nose… But Machiavelli is not merely a scientist: he is a partisan, a man of powerful passions, an active politician, who wishes to create a new balance of forces and therefore cannot help concerning himself with what “ought to be” (not of course in a moralistic sense). Hence the question cannot be posed in these terms, it is more complex. It is one, that is to say, of seeing whether what “ought to be” is arbitrary or necessary;
whether it is concrete will on the one hand or idle fancy, yearning, daydream on the other. The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams. He bases himself on effective reality, but what is this effective reality? Is it something static and immobile, or is it not rather a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium? If one applies one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are operative—basing oneself on the particular force which one believes to be progressive and strengthening it to help it to victory—one still moves on the terrain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it (or to contribute to this). What “ought to be” is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics.” – Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince
Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks can be downloaded from Diary of a Walking Butterfly HERE for educational purposes.
For those interested in reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, note that Joseph Buttigieg’s translation of Volumes 1-3, Notebooks 1-8 of 30, of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were just released in a 3-volume paperback set. You can buy it through Amazon.com for $60 (down from $60 per volume for the hardcover copies). Socialists everywhere should read Antonio Gramsci!
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
“The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own.” – Antonio Gramsci
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
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