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THE ELGAR COMPANION TO ANTONIO
GRAMSCI
ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS
This vital series brings together cutting-edge scholarship that critically
explores the work of social sciences’ most influential thinkers in light of key
contemporary issues and topics. Edited by leading international academics,
each volume focuses on an eminent figure and aims to stimulate discourse
and advance our understanding of their ideas and the enduring significance of
their intellectual legacy. From Arendt to Weber, economics to sociology, this
series will be essential reading for all academics, researchers and students of
the social sciences seeking to understand the profound impact of these great
thinkers and how they continue to influence contemporary scholarship.
For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series,
visit our website at www.e-elgar.com.
The Elgar Companion
to Antonio Gramsci
Edited by
William K. Carroll
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria,
Canada
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
EEP BoX
Contents
List of contributorsviii
Acknowledgementsxi
v
vi The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
Index469
Contributors
Francesca Antonini is an Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought
at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
Derek Boothman is a Full Professor (retired) in the Dipartimento di
Interpretazione e Traduzione (DIT) at the Università di Bologna, Italy.
Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna,
Austria.
Marco Briziarelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
United States of America.
William K. Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the
University of Victoria, Victoria Canada.
Alexandros Chrysis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Panteion
University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Laurence Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National
University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.
Daniel Egan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of
Massachusetts Lowell, USA.
Marco Fonseca is an Instructor in the Department of International Studies at
Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Carlos L. Garrido is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois
University, Carbondale, USA.
George Hoare in an independent researcher in political theory, based in
London, UK.
Elizabeth Humphrys is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social and Political
Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Didarul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Communication &
Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
viii
Contributors ix
xi
1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for
our times
William K. Carroll
INTRODUCTION
Particularly since the 1970s, when Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the
Prison Notebooks was published in Italian (Gramsci, 1975) and anthologies
of his work began to appear in translation (e.g. Gramsci, 1971), Gramsci’s
thought has permeated a great range of scholarship and has informed the stra-
tegic thinking of left-wing activists (and also right-wing intellectuals (George,
1997)) around the world. Nearly a century after his arrest and imprisonment
(and nine decades after what Peter Thomas (2009) has called the Gramscian
moment of 1932, when the Italian political prisoner reached particularly stun-
ning theoretical and strategic insights after years of incarceration and reflective
writing) Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic political and intellectual figure,
on a global scale (Dainotto and Jameson 2020).
Although the main reason for Gramsci’s continuing influence stems from
the perspicacity of his thought, a contributing factor has been the critical ‘open-
ness’ of his approach to analysing the human condition (Marzani, 1957, p. 6).
1
2 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
original work but with the various streams of broadly Marxist scholarship that
have flowed directly from that work.
A further consideration in framing and compiling this collection is that
Antonio Gramsci, although remarkably well read in the social sciences and
humanities of his time, was not an academic. Mentored at the University
of Turin by Matteo Bartoli, one of Italy’s leading comparative philologists,
Gramsci dropped out of his Bachelor’s programme in 1915, to pursue full-time
activism and journalism (see Chapter 2). Although his incarceration neces-
sitated a shift from writing newspaper articles on the immediacies of the
day-to-day struggles to the ‘disinterested’ writing strategy he adopted in the
Notebooks, removed from the pressures of the contingent and immediate (see
Chapter 18), those notes were not written for a detached academic readership.
In consideration of Gramsci’s insistence on a philosophy of praxis, linking
theory and practice, this Companion intends to be of maximal value and inter-
est not only to a wide range of scholars, but to activists and to students (many
of whom may be in the process of becoming activists).2 This objective further
underlined the need for a treatment that begins with a close engagement with
Gramsci’s world and worldview, but extends to the subsequent development
of his ideas, up to and including contemporary issues. This volume, therefore,
is divided into three parts.
In Part I, contributing authors situate Gramsci’s thought within the broad
context of his life and times. These chapters engage closely with Gramsci’s
work in ways that accentuate and reflect on the context of his life, his influ-
ences and in turn his immediate influence, particularly within historical mate-
rialism. The contents of Part I, especially when read alongside Gramsci’s own
writing on philosophy, politics and history, provide a foundation for the chap-
ters comprising Part II. These chapters present key themes within Gramsci’s
perspective, connecting them to the wider framework of his thought, but also
tracking their further development within the subsequent Gramscian stream
of historical materialism. Part III offers the most contemporary analyses.
Complementing Part I, which places Gramsci’s breakthroughs in context,
and Part II, which focuses on key concepts and traces theoretical threads
from Gramsci forward, these chapters are organized around major fields of
scholarship in which Gramscian perspectives are particularly salient in the 21st
century. They connect Gramsci’s original problematic with specific domains
within recent and contemporary scholarship, wherein Gramscian scholars have
applied that problematic in the analysis of late capitalist modernity.
Placing Gramsci in the context of his time means situating him in the Europe
and more specifically, the Italy, of the 20th century’s early decades. Gramsci
4 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
and intellectual production, from his early political writing in 1914 to his trans-
fer to a clinic in Rome, extremely weak and exhausted, in 1935. Incarcerated
from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, with the intent ‘to stop this
brain from working for twenty years’, the unintended consequence was the
Prison Notebooks, a pursuit of politics ‘by other means’, in a novel melding of
theory and action and a profound contribution to revolutionary strategy.
The four chapters that follow Sperber and Hoare’s biographical overview
dive into Gramsci’s oeuvre, setting it within the context of his times. In
two highly complementary companion pieces, Robert Jackson and Derek
Boothman focus attention on intellectual currents with which Gramsci engaged
in developing his own approach to philosophy and politics. These careful read-
ings add nuance to our understanding of Gramsci’s Marxism.
Of course, no one is born a Marxist, or a liberal or a fascist. Moreover, these
worldviews are neither static nor homogeneous. As Gramsci observed in the
Prison Notebooks (and as Robert Jackson recounts in Chapter 3), Marx’s own
concept of the organization of collective agency remained entangled within
elements such as Jacobin clubs, trade organization and ‘secret conspiracies of
small groups’ (Gramsci, 2011, vol 1, p. 154). In the decades surrounding the
turn of the 20th century, the prevailing tendency within Marxism, codified in
the Second International (1889–1916) offered a deterministic, ‘stagist’ account
of history, within which mass political agency was subordinated to a faith in
the inevitability of a final economic crisis, provoked by capitalism’s structural
contradictions, which would usher in socialism.
Jackson notes how Gramsci’s newspaper article, ‘The revolution against
Capital’, published a few weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of state power
in November 1917, rejected Marxism as a deterministic orthodoxy but cele-
brated how the Bolsheviks were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying
Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’
(Gramsci, 1994, p. 40). In Chapter 4, Derek Boothman’s close reading of this
article, its reception and its reverberations in the Prison Notebooks, tracks the
development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist, open Marxism, which Gramsci
eventually called the philosophy of praxis. While rejecting positivist readings
of Marx (including Nicolai Bukharin’s reduction of Marxism to sociology,
in his Historical Materialism (1925)), Gramsci embraced the dialectic at the
centre of Marx’s thinking – that people make their own history, though not in
conditions chosen by them. Gramsci’s Marxism was rooted in his appropria-
tion of Marx’s (2002 [1845]) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which open by criticizing
the one-sidedness of ‘all hitherto-existing materialism’, namely, the omission
of human sensuous activity – praxis – as integral to materiality itself. As Marx
went on to note, this ‘active side’ of material reality was grasped philosophi-
cally by idealism, which Hegelian dialectics took to its limit.
6 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
the proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that
it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the
majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In
Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it suc-
ceeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990, p. 443)
Perry Anderson (1976) avers that Western Marxism emerged out of the defeat
of the left in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Gramsci participated. That defeat
brought the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass
8 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into
historical reality’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 134).
In Chapter 8, Marco Fonseca begins from the concept of historical bloc,
and proceeds to examine its mutually-constitutive, historically emergent
elements. Gramsci saw state, capitalism and civil society as interpenetrating
fields of capitalist modernity, furnishing the terrain upon which a distinct way
of life takes shape and is reproduced, contested and transformed. Marx and
Engels (and Lenin) had conceptualized the state primarily as an apparatus of
political coercion, protecting the private property at the core of capitalism.
Gramsci retains this insight, but extends our understanding of the capitalist
state, which he called the integral state, to comprise a dialectical ensemble of
state apparatus and civil society, blending coercive and persuasive forms of
power. As for capital, in Fordism (see also Chapter 16) – the mass production
of commodities for mass consumption, entailing deskilled labour, relatively
high wages calibrated to increasing labour productivity, and the burgeoning
of consumer goods – Gramsci recognized the predominant form that industrial
capital would take in the 20th century. This not only produced a plethora of
commodities, it also required and thus came to produce new forms of proletar-
ian subjectivity. This latter production process ramified from early managerial
efforts to inculcate discipline into the mass workforce by promoting puritan-
ical values to the active, educative role of the state, through schooling and
social programmes, in creating conditions for a new type of worker: a worker
who ‘feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as
measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental
indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to
live successfully in the modern world’ (Fonseca, this volume, p. 143. Key
to creating such internal equilibrium are the ‘private’ associations of civil
society, formally distinct from the ‘public’ realm of the state yet intimately
tied to it. The former, including clubs, church groups and worker associations,
comprise the sphere of ethical life, where people acquire the ‘common sense’
that informs their voluntary subjection to market society as a matter of ‘free
choice’. Increasingly, the state depends on its
dialectical unity with civil society understood as a system of “trenches and forti-
fications” or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic
process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for
both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. (Fonseca, this
volume, p. 139)
Factory Councils movement in Turin drew his attention to the need to create
the embryonic structure of socialism, ‘to weld the present to the future, sat-
isfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create
and “anticipate” the future’ (Gramsci, 1919). This concern with prefigurative
politics, including the importance of moral and intellectual reformation (con-
necting with themes explored in Chapter 9) is at the centre of this chapter.
After reviewing critiques of the anti-statist, nonstrategic and often co-optative
tendencies in prefigurative politics as practised today, particularly in the global
North, Schoppek revisits Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for further insight.
She concludes that prefigurative politics should be conceptualized not as
a free-standing project but ‘as an integral strategic part of a war of position in
the struggle for hegemony’ (Schoppek, this volume, p. 215).
Alexandros Chrysis carries these ideas further in his incisive account of
Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. As
we have seen, Gramsci’s thinking is predicated on his dialectical conception
of the integral state, as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ – a unity of coercion
and consent, extending well beyond the state apparatus per se. In building
a counter-hegemony, the proletariat and its allies must develop capacity for
both forms of power. The Modern Prince, the revolutionary party, is the vehicle
for this. In view of the tendency for subaltern consciousness to be fragmented
and focused on immediate interests, this political party must function as ‘the
collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups’ (Chrysis, this volume,
p. 227). Yet in view of the coercive power concentrated in the capitalist state,
this party must combine ‘the power of ideas with the power of arms’ (ibid.),
providing organization and direction within the counter-hegemonic historical
bloc and thereby enabling the collective use of force in a war of maneuver.
Chrysis goes on to critique several strands of recent scholarship (and activ-
ism) – epitomized in Holloway’s (2002) notion of changing the world without
taking power – that underestimate the need for a revolutionary party capable of
leading both a war of position and a war of maneuver. Instead, and in view of
the failures of anti-capitalist movements detached from revolutionary parties
to ‘change the world’ in real, substantive terms, Chrysis concludes that it is
time to reach the ‘critical balance’ between movement and party.
Our current setting is, in many ways, different from the Europe Gramsci knew
in the first three decades of the 20th century. Yet, compelling similarities
also stand out. Like us, Gramsci lived through a global organic crisis. In
Gramsci’s time, this took the form of a ‘crisis of European civilization that
had been building since 1870’, ignited by the collapse of the world market
with World War I (Vacca, 2020b, p. 29). His activism, journalism and later
14 The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci
carceral writing took place amid the ensuing political crisis, including the
Russian Revolution and the crisis-ridden interwar years (punctuated by the
Great Depression) during which fascism took hold in Italy and other capitalist
states. In our time, no less a hegemonic authority than the World Economic
Forum has announced a ‘polycrisis’, a convergence of cascading crises marked
by geopolitical confrontations, resource rivalries, economic instability and
climate breakdown, ‘with compounding effects, such that the overall impact
exceeds the sum of each part’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p. 57). When
we ponder the relevance of Gramsci in the context of our times, we need to
keep both the divergences and the parallels in mind.
More than any other Marxist of the early 20th century, and particularly since
the Prison Notebooks became more widely available in the 1970s, Gramsci’s
ideas have influenced a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and
humanities. This Companion’s third part tracks the application of Gramsci’s
approach to the philosophy of praxis across these fields, conveying a sense of
continuing relevance and power of these ideas – as tools for understanding the
changing complex of hegemonic apparatuses and the struggles and collective
agencies pressing for transformative change in the world today.
The first three essays in Part III are of broad theoretical significance as they
take up central philosophical and political–economic issues surrounding
hegemony and hegemonic struggle today. Jonathan Joseph, in Chapter 14, crit-
ically engages with poststructuralist readings of Gramsci (most influentially,
Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxism), and then turns to recent work that
resituates Gramsci’s thought within an influential philosophical movement
linked to contemporary historical materialism: critical realism. In Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rescue Gramsci from the
economic reductionism they viewed as essential to Marxism. But, as Joseph
notes, their constitutive conception of discourse tends to reduce reality to the
ideas we have about it, with deleterious analytical and political ramifications.
Alternatively, through a critical-realist lens, hegemony is conceived ‘in
relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent
its conditions of possibility’ (Joseph, this volume, p. 250). Along these lines,
Gramsci’s thought can be viewed as a post-positivist intervention that attends
to both the social structures through which hegemony is reproduced (structural
hegemony) and the concrete hegemonic projects through which collective
agency is formed in defence of or in opposition to the ruling order (surface
hegemony). On the latter, Joseph points to recent work (e.g. Davies, 2011)
that draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how
Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times 15
Si no gano manteniendo
más que en mantener la fe,
pocos precios ganaré.
El que de mí se desvía,
á sí y á mi madre enfía.
En quererte,
y tan en blanco mi suerte.
Soneto.
Por más que el viejo
segador usado
la hoz extienda por la mies
amiga,
no puede tanto que de alguna
espiga
no se quede el rastrojo
acompañado.
Aunque el corvo arador con
más cuidado
los bueyes rija y el arado siga,
no le hace tan diestro su fatiga
que no vaya algún sulco
desviado.
Y tú, Pastor, que con tan
pobre apero,
de los humildes campos te
retiras,
lleno de faltas, sin enmienda
alguna,
Si te llamaren rústico y
grosero,
tendrás paciencia, pues, si
bien lo miras,
aquesta es mi disculpa y tu
fortuna.
DE PEDRO DE MENDOZA
Soneto.
Este Pastor en quien el
cielo quiso
resumir el primor de los
pastores,
que aunque son de los
campos sus primores,
do vive Amor no ha de faltar
aviso.
Por tal Pastor se vuelve
paraíso
la ribera, caudal de amor y
amores:
por tal Pastor merecen más
loores
los pastores del Tajo que el de
Anfriso.
¡Oh tú sola, sin par Filida
bella,
y tú, Pastor, gentil que su
renombre
tomaste por triunfo verdadero,
Ella es digna por ti, más tú
por ella,
ella de ser del Tajo eterno
nombre
y tú de sus pastores el
primero!
DE DIEGO MESSIA DE
LASSARTE
Soneto.
Agradar al discreto, al más
mirado,
al necio, al maldiciente, al
envidioso,
medir los gustos de cortés
curioso,
¿cómo podrá un Pastor con
su cayado?
En su querido albergue del
ganado
trate y cuide, si el pasto le es
dañoso,
de Filida su bien, sólo
cuidoso,
y de otro fin ajeno y
descuidado.
Pastor, este es oficio de
pastores:
pero quien os leyere, dirá al
punto
que sois un nuevo cortesano
Apolo.
Con fama tal, del uno al otro
polo,
viviréis agradando á todos,
junto
discretos, envidiosos,
detractores.
DE DON LORENZO SUÁREZ
DE MENDOZA
Soneto.
Pastor, si estáis de serlo
tan ufano,
¿cómo en las cortes os habéis
metido? y si sois cortesano
conocido, ¿para qué es bueno
el traje de villano? Si tocáis
el rabel con ruda mano,
¿cómo sale de cíthara el
sonido? y si sois con los
árboles nacido, ¿quién os
mostró el lenguaje ciudadano?
Pastor, quiero deciros lo
que siento,
después de descifrar vuestros
primores y de llegar con vos
casi á las manos, Que
Filida os ha dado ser y aliento
para ser el mejor de los
pastores y el más discreto de
los cortesanos.
DE GREGORIO DE GODOY
Soneto.
Pastor, que por ovejas ha
escogido
dulces cuidados, altos
pensamientos,
aunque la leche y queso sean
tormentos,
sola firmeza su cayado ha
sido.