Translated by Mark Falcoff
Editor’s note: Socialists in Latin America easily concede these days that socialism has lost the economic argument with capitalism. Richardo Lago, leader of the Socialist Party in Chile says openly, for example, that the idea of socialism as an economic idea is a relic of the nineteenth century; socialism today, he adds, is a theory about education and culture. The intellectual father of this doctrine is Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist, whose name seems to be on everyone’s lips in Latin America in recent years (as Marxist economics have declined in prestige). Who is Antonio Gramsci? What are the main points of his thought? Jaime Antunez, the distinguished editor of the cultural section of El Mercurio in Santiago, Chile — with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the three or four most highly intellectual sections among the newspapers of the world — recently edited a book of essays entitled, Gramsci: La Nueva Forma de Penetracion Marxista (Santiago, 1988). Herewith his introduction to that volume, translated by Mark Falcoff, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Falcoff’s most recent book is Modern Chile, 1970-1989: A Critical History (Transaction).
Born in Sardinia in 1881 of a lower-middle-class family, in spite of having led a relatively obscure existence, Antonio Gramsci in time was transformed into a crucial figure of European political life, above all with respect to the development of Western leftist ideologies. In 1914 he joined the Italian Socialist party, and in 1919 together with Togliatti, Tosca, and Terracini, he founded L ‘Ordine Nuovo, which two years later was transformed into a Communist daily. He lived in Russia in 1922 and 1923, where he assimilated the Leninist conception of what a Communist party ought to be. Returning to Italy, he plunged into the internal struggles of the Socialist party and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1924. Arrested in 1926, in confinement he wrote his Prison Notebooks.
At the time of his death at the age of 46 in 1937, Gramsci had established the basis of what would become the Italian Communist road — subsequently imitated by other European parties — in contrast to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the CPSU. A democratic and pluralist physiognomy was thus imposed upon the struggle for power; terms like “consensus,” “national unity,” or “national pacification” were frequently used in place of “revolution” or “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Today, 50 years after his death, the Italian Communists recognize in Antonio Gramsci their party’s authentic founder and theoretician, the strategist of a successful political party — essentially atheist in a country of ancient religious tradition, in a certain way virtually consubstantial with Roman Catholicism. The resonance of his thesis is apparent today in parties like the Socialists who currently govern Spain, as well as other parties affiliated with the Socialist International, particularly in Spanish-speaking countries.
What is the particular innovation which Gramsci brings to traditional Marxist orthodoxy?
Gramsci is faced with the need to implant Communism in a country with a large middle class, where there is no acute, frontal opposition between capitalists and proletarians, and where, as in Italy, there is considerable homogeneity with regard to the spiritual and intellectual patrimony; there is, in effect, a common philosophical culture. This is, obviously, very different from the situation of Russia in 1917, as Gramsci himself undertook to clarify. Lenin had found in the old Czarist empire a society in which the state and its apparatus were proportionately much more important than in the West, which stood in opposition to a civil society at once “primitive and spineless,” as Gramsci characterized it. In the West, by way of contrast, culture, ideology, politicians, and religion tended then — and still do tend — to have an importance of their own, separate and apart from the state itself.
To carry forward his objectives, then, Gramsci saw it necessary to transform culture itself, starting, obviously, with the elimination of all belief in the transcendent. Once Marxism permitted one to achieve ideological hegemony, revolutionary power would follow of its own accord.
In this, precisely, consists Gramsci’s doctrinal innovation. In effect Gramsci reversed the relationship between structure and superstructure. “For Lenin,” he writes, “given the primacy of the structure, Communism had to achieve power through the violent conquest of the state; the abolition of the bourgeois superstructure and its substitution by Marxist thought would follow as a consequence.” For Gramsci, however, in countries sharing the societal characteristics of Italy, the revolution would triumph only after first conquering civil society; from there, control of the state would be a short and easy step. Not only is it not necessary, thus, to achieve the support of a majority of wage-earners, but in fact this can be dispensed with for a time. The task instead is to change the way the entire society thinks about problems. Thus Marxism-Leninism will have achieved not only hegemony over the physical existence of citizens, but what is much more important, over their minds.
Marxist Christianity
Gramsci’s approach in no way constitutes, then, a watering-down of Lenin’s principles. Rather, it imparts to them a much higher degree of sophistication, making it possible for Marxism to advance under circumstances very different from Czarist Russia. Far from abandoning the notion of revolution, Gramsci merely charts a different path to power, in which socialism replaces as a belief-system any competing religious tendency. In other words, Christianity must be abolished by putting something else in its place.
In no way should Gramsci’s philosophy be confused with social democracy. Quite the contrary: Gramscism takes advantage of the growth of social democracy within society and within the “bourgeois” culture itself to occupy spaces which it will later control and exceed with the inflexibility of its own philosophy, imposing within that culture the Communist revolutionary sense of immanence. This is what in fact is presently occurring in certain European countries where so-called “renovated” or “liberal” socialist tendencies prevail.
Another important matter to take into account is the Marxist-Christian dialogue. Above all other things, it is this which has given Gramsci influence in certain Western intellectual sectors, including above all Catholic intellectuals. As Gianfranco Morra quite properly points out, “if Gramsci wishes to kill (that is, eliminate and substitute) the Catholic religion, this means that nothing could be further from his intention than to effect a convergence between the Christian religion and Marxist philosophy — a thesis which in the years after the Second Vatican Council was destined to be used as an element of decomposition, above all for Catholics.”
The notion of convergence can therefore be nothing other than a tactical maneuver — which is precisely how Gramsci himself presents it — leading to the eventual removal of genuine religious sense from religious institutions. “The Communists, for example, will willingly collaborate in the process of the popularization of religion, and will view with sympathy all anti-institutional movements,” Flavio Cappucci points out with great clarity. Arid he continues, “Once religion is deprived of its supernatural content, it will be replaced by political consciousness.”
The latter will prevail over the former. The new heresies will not speak of worship, of faith, of the sacraments, of prayer, but rather of human solidarity, the hope of this world; they will denounce social injustices, invoking a generic liberation of an equally generic oppression — converting religion into a point of support for class struggle. In a later phase, the masses will abandon whatever residual religious feeling they still possess, finding in Marxism itself the most efficient means of advancing the new agenda. First, the faithful gather around the priest in some base community; afterwards, they emigrate to the cell, leaving the priest behind or perhaps “converting” him as well to the new cause, when it is not the priest who from the very beginning is leading the migratory movement.
Democratic Vulnerability
In view of the essential characteristics of the Gramscian process, it is worth asking what political defenses remain to Western societies. We have already indicated that the process itself is a form of advanced secularism, impregnated with an immanentist sense, and that its purpose is to change social or economic relations, with a view to producing a new man; fully liberated from “old moral ties,” which are none other than Western Christian civilization. As such, its influence is felt, as is obvious, in the field of culture. And in the task of consolidating the same, the anti-metaphysical and atheistic element is united to the dream of a total liberation.
These dreams or promises converge with important energies and impulses of the liberal culture which already prevails in Western democracies, the very same which the Gramscian uses to extend his hegemony — divorce, abortion, decriminalization of drugs, socialist educational policies, etc. In effect, as Augusto del Noce has pointed out, what we have here is a convergence between the most deleterious and decadent aspects of Western culture, the most important factors producing its rapid dissolution, and the worst elements of Marxist culture.
From this it should be evident how the Western politicians who lead the fight against Communism have, in most cases, been in error. They have underestimated the struggle in the culture field; at the same time, they have not recognized the true nature of the enemy they are facing. Flavio Cappucci writes:
Believing that they were confronted by the classic Marist-Leninist model, they have responded by reaching for the arms employed by Leninism itself — the economic structure. They have trusted in the philosophy of welfare as an alternative to Communism. At the same time, ignoring the Gramscian investment in the relationship between structure-superstructure, they have failed to elaborate a political philosophy of their own. They have focused exclusively on economics, leaving to the Marxists the entire field in all of the places where culture is elaborated and diffused, from the school to the university — where intellectual elites are created — and gradually, the entire mass-media, from which emerges popular culture itself. The Marxists have not merely had at their disposition all of the means necessary for cultural penetration, but have been able to operate in that area with no adversary at all.
If the countries of Western culture truly desire to arrest the growth of Marxism, they have no choice but to confront it in its Gramscian version, combating it above all in the fields of culture, philosophy, and ideology.