Gramsci’s Patrimony

Abstract

No Marxist thinker, apart from Marx himself, is so universally respected and admired as Antonio Gramsci, one of the originators of what Merleau–Ponty called ‘Western Marxism’, a tradition including Lukacs, Korsch, Sartre and Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno and Marcuse. In their different ways, these thinkers all attacked Marxist positivism for its determinism and its objective materialist theory of history. Marxism, they thought, would have to admit the importance of human agency, of creative human action, of the ‘subjective factor’. Disenchantment with the deterministic modes of analysis championed by classical Marxists began to gather momentum by the turn of the century. Economic depressions had come and gone without producing a general systemic collapse; rather than increased misery, the working classes were experiencing higher living standards and shorter working hours as the capitalist economy expanded; socialist parties, reflecting the demands of their constituents, became less and less revolutionary and more and more concerned with the melioration of conditions within the framework of capitalism. This stabilization of the bourgeois regime evoked grave disquiet within the Marxist community, bound together as it was by the firm belief that capitalism would crumble under the weight of its inherent contradictions. The outbreak of war in 1914, and the subsequent disintegration of proletarian internationalism, further nourished the suspicion that the European masses had ceased to be a revolutionary force. With the ignominious defeats of the post–war rebellions in Germany and Hungary, and the rapid rise of popular right-wing movements, it became progressively difficult to cling to the optimistic Marxist assumption that ‘history is on our side’.