Reading Of Gramsci Research Articles

Revisiting the Passive Revolution

Abstract Passive revolution is one of the most debated notions to come out of the Prison Notebooks. It belongs to the notions that have been used as ‘established’ descriptions of historical and political sequences. However, a reading of Gramsci’s texts suggests that passive revolution is not a ‘historical phase’ and is not limited to the historical interpretation of a particular historical period. Nor is it part of an historical ‘canon’ that would suggest that, in the absence of a ‘proper’ Jacobin revolution, the only alternative is passive revolution. Rather it points to the experimental character of the Prison Notebooks and Gramsci’s confrontation with the profound changes in state apparatuses (and hegemonic apparatuses) and practices of politics and hegemony after WWI, in particular the new ‘mass’ forms of politics and ideological interpellation, and his attempt to elaborate a strategic–theoretical thinking suited to revolutionary politics in such a context.

An interventionist sociologist: Stuart Hall, public engagement and racism

While Stuart Hall is often acknowledged as a public intellectual, it is argued here that a better way of understanding his practice is as an interventionist, whose public engagements are always set in a specific context. This way of seeing Hall draws on his own words and from approaches to intellectual work that foreground how scholars present themselves. Combining this approach with Hall’s own reading of Gramsci as a grounded intellectual, this article then illustrates the idea of Hall as an interventionist sociologist through three examples of his public works on race and racism, exemplifying his well-known use of conjunctural analysis. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold: first it seeks to ‘disambiguate’ Hall from the public intellectual label; and secondly in resituating him it highlights his public engagements on race as interventions in and as sociology.

Cirese 101: Rereading Antonio Gramsci’s “Observations on Folklore”

This Anniversary Forum commemorates the figure and work of Alberto Mario Cirese (1921-2011), a prominent Italian anthropologist, on the 101st anniversary of his birth. Cirese’s reading of Gramsci has been highly influential. For this reason, the forum is built around the re-edition of the English translation of Cirese’s essay Gramsci’s Observations on folklore: Conceptions of the world, spontaneous philosophy and class instinct. The essay is followed by short critical interventions of attentive readers of Gramsci’s anthropology: Kate Crehan, Riccardo Ciavolella, Giovanni Pizza. The forum ends with a contribution by Jorge A. González, who recalls his encounter and relation with Cirese, while offering new historical insights on Cirese’s teaching, study and research activities in Mexico.

Of Horses and Water: On the Power of the Fragment

Joseph Buttigieg’s seminal 1990 article “Gramsci’s Method” argues that the fragmentary nature of the Prison Notebooks cannot be explained simply by the constraints under which they were written. Rather, the notebooks’ fragmentariness is at the heart of an innovative approach to the understanding of history and the mapping of possibilities for change. Characteristic of Gramsci’s innovative approach is what could be termed an ethnographic sensibility, a determination to seek out, and treat seriously, the narratives others use to make sense of the world. A similar ethnographic sensibility is also central to anthropology’s classic methodology of participant observation, developed and popularized by Bronisław Malinowski, one of the founding fathers of Anglophone anthropology. A comparison between these two apparently dissimilar thinkers underlines the value of Buttigieg’s reading of Gramsci’s notebooks, and suggests how a classic anthropological approach might enrich Marxism.

Philological Method and Subaltern Pasts

This essay argues that Antonio Gramsci should be considered a postcolonial thinker. This is not an exercise in presenting the “legacy” of a European Marxist’s thought in the Third World. The aim here, rather, is to determine how Gramscian thought can be read as anticolonial, and how he related empire to the hegemonic-subaltern dialectic that structured his political theories. I engage with Joseph Buttigieg’s well-known essay “Gramsci’s Method” in order to explore how the philological method adopted in the Prison Notebooks offers several important insights for postcolonial studies, and bears obvious connections to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, especially in terms of how it is central to the retrieval of subaltern pasts. I further argue that Gramsci’s interest in the national-popular and in forms of progressive nationalism that were grounded in internationalist solidarity suggests strong connections with Third Worldist theories of liberation struggles, such as tricontinentalism and the work of Frantz Fanon. Applying Buttigieg’s way of reading of Gramsci’s anti-dogmatic philological method to Third Worldism allows us to see how it renovated Marxism’s revolutionary aims and emancipatory futures, and ultimately helped to decolonize Marxism.

Gramsci’s Influence on Antonio La Penna From Gentile training to Empiriomaterialism

This article aims at clarifying Antonio Gramsci’s influence on Antonio La Penna, one of the most important Italian Classicists. It will show how Antonio Gramsci’s works provided La Penna with several categories which were fundamental in his analysis of both Latin literature and Roman society. Moreover, I will argue that Gramsci’s thought represented for La Penna a doorway to Marxism in the postwar period, and subsequently a way to overcome it. In fact, the reading of Gramsci’s work determined La Penna’s constant attempt to emancipate himself from Idealism. As matter of facts, this philosophy deeply characterised the training he received during his childhood and youth in the Italian school system which was dominated by the figure of Giovanni Gentile throughout the thirties and the early fourties.

Revolutionary Weakness in Gramscian Perspective: the Arab Middle East and North Africa since 2011

: This article sets out a Gramscian perspective on revolutionary weakness in the MENA. It aims not at a top-down analysis of how activists were crushed, but at a bottom-up analysis evaluating activist activity. Drawing on a reading of Gramsci, fieldwork in Egypt, and recent research on MENA protest, it adopts a Gramscian concept of transformative activity and applies it to the MENA since 2011. It argues that the basic elements of transformative activity in Gramsci include subaltern social groups, conceptions of the world, collective will, organisation, strategy/tactics, and historical bloc. It argues that transformative activity involves the organic articulation of these distinct moments in a complex, differentiated unity. On the basis of this view, the article shows how sense can be made of revolutionary weakness in the MENA since 2011 through a critical analysis of problems in the organic articulation of revolutionary mobilisation.

Gramsci and Althusser Encountering Machiavelli: Hegemony and/as New Practice of Politics

Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in the form of Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977–1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism.

Racist morbidities: a conjunctural analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This article outlines an argument about the morbid character of racism in the time of COVID-19. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's famous characterisation of the crisis as an ‘interregnum’ in which various ‘morbid phenomena’ appear, we suggest that one of the main underpinning logics of the current crisis could be thought of in terms of racist morbidities. Framing the article within Stuart Hall's reading of Gramsci and David Theo Goldberg's understanding of the postracial, we discuss two empirical cases: the disproportionate morbid effects of the pandemic on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) in the UK – that we name ‘political morbidities’, and the Moscow municipality's measures addressing migrant workers during the pandemic – that we name ‘socio-spatial morbidities’. The COVID-19 crisis, we conclude, seems to elicit racist morbidities in post-racial guises.

Antonio Gramsci: An introduction to his 'notebook' legacy

Despite the abundance of material available to those educationists intent upon acquainting themselves with the Gramscian legacy, there exists a singular deficiency within the literature of any concise overview of Gramsci combining detail of the man, his times and the significant theoretical developments associated with his pre-'Notebook' era. This paper therefore attempts to address this omission by presenting the reader with a concise, yet theoretically rigorous, overview of the historical, political and cultural context against which any reading of Gramsci's 'Notebooks' must necessarily be located. 'Education for liberation' is the predominant theme of Gramsci's lifetime commitment. To ignore this theme, as many educationists have done previously, 2 is to deny the 'Leitmotiv' or rhythm of thought which was so integral to the Gramscian project itself.

Mario Dal Pra lettore e interprete di Gramsci: tra filosofia della praxis e storiografia filosofica

The essay deals with the interpretation of Gramsci’s thought proposed by Mario Dal Pra from the 1950s to the 1980s. The author maintains that Dal Pra was in a constant dialogue with Gramsci despite the lack of explicit references to Prison Notebooks in his published works. This dialogue can be reconstructed through an examination of unpublished material. In his opinion, the theory-praxis relation is the main issue in Dal Pra’s reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The essay is divided into three parts: the first part discusses the connections between Gramsci’s of praxis and the philosophical perspective called transcendentalism of praxis in Dal Pra’s published and unpublished writings; the second part analyzes Dal Pra’s assessment of Italian historicist Marxism; and the third part is concerned with the influence of Gramsci’s conception of philosophy on Dal Pra’s reflections on the methodology of historiography.

Evo Morales and the political economy of passive revolution in Bolivia, 2006–15

While the government of Evo Morales rules in the name of indigenous workers and peasants, in fact the country’s political economy has since 2006 witnessed the on-going subjugation of these classes. If the logic of large capital persists, it is legitimated in and through petty indigenous capitalists. This article argues that Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of passive revolution offers a superior analytical point of departure for understanding contemporary Bolivian politics than does Álvaro García Linera’s more widely accepted theory of creative tensions. However, the dominant manner in which passive revolution has been employed in contemporary Latin American debates has treated the socio-political and the ideological as relatively autonomous from the process of capital accumulation. What is necessary, instead, is a sharper appreciation of the base/superstructure metaphor as expressing a dialectical unity of internal relations between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’, thus avoiding one determinism or another. Through a reading of Gramsci that emphasises such unity, this article interrogates the dynamics of ‘extractive distribution’, class contradictions of the ‘plural economy’, and transformations in the urban labour market which have characterised Bolivia’s passive revolution under Evo Morales between 2006 and 2015.

Book review: Gramsci’s Political Thought, by Carlos Nelson Coutinho

Carlos Nelson Coutinho Gramsci's Political Thought, trans. Pedro Sette-Camara Brill: Leiden, 2012; xvi+198 pp: 9789004228665, 102 [euro] (hbk) Brill's 'Historical Materialism Series' has been providing regular insights into Marxist theory developed in non-Anglophone settings, including two by Brazilian authors. This latest text, volume 38 in the series, complements Ricardo Amtunes's contribution, The Meanings ofWork (2012), and casts light upon the roots of the Gramscian tradition in Brazil. Carlos Nelson Coutinho is recognised alongside Marco Aurelio Nogueira as one of the first to translate Antonio Gramsci's works into Portuguese. Working with the publishing house Civilizacao Brasileira, Coutino led the dissemination of Gramsci's thought in Brazil from 1966 onwards, in the process becoming the most renowned interpreter of his thought in the Lusophone world. Brazilian Marxism seized upon the categories offered by Gramscian analysis, not least due to the need to re-assess the strategies of the left following the military coup of 1964. Prior to the coup, Brazilian Marxism had been consumed by the debate concerning the origins and development of Brazil's mode of production. The two sides of this conflict were crystallised in the texts Formafdo Historica do Brasil (1968 [1963]) by Nelson Werneck Sodre, and A Revolugao Brasileira (1966) by Caio Prado Junior. The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) ultimately followed the line set out by Sodre, acknowledging the pre-capitalist state of the Brazilian countryside and asserting the need for an etapist (stagist) strategic alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This Stalinist pact for bourgeois-democratic revolution was to precede a socialist revolution at the proper stage of capitalist development. When subsequently defeated and cast into disarray by the 1964 coup, Brazil's Marxists acknowledged the increasingly industrialised capitalist character of the national economy. The questions of the left therefore came to mirror Gramsci's own: namely, how to formulate a leftist strategy when frontal assault was no longer possible, and how to understand the role of the state in capitalist development. As a consequence, Coutinho's work has formed as much a part of the intellectual heritage of Brazil's modern Marxism as did the more widely recognised dependency theory which has A Revolufdo Brasileira as its forebear. It would be unjust to relegate Coutinho to the role of mere translator or interpreter of Gramsci. Indeed, Coutinho not only provided tools for the renovation of Brazilian Marxism, but actively participated in its reshaping. This engagement with Gramscian thought formed the basis for an analysis of the specific conditions of Brazil's social struggles, and a political practice dedicated to the formation of a socialist alternative. With regard to the latter, Coutinho was one of the main theorists behind the formation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party), which has held the presidency since 2003. Accordingly, the essays collected in Gramsci's Political Thought reflect both Coutinho's philological tracings of Gramsci's concepts and his application of this analysis to Brazilian politics. The text can be divided into two parts, with the initial eight chapters devoted to diagramming Gramsci's thought, and much of the remainder of the book directed towards applying Gramscian analysis to the Brazilian context. Chapters 1 to 3 offer a biography of Antonio Gramsci, tracing the development of his thought from 1910-1926, with a particular focus on his gradual assimilation of Leninism. Subsequently, Coutinho attempts a thematic reading of Gramsci's ouevre, lucidly drawing out the concepts of the extended state, hegemony, passive revolution, the role of intellectuals, and the war of manoeuvre and war of position. In this aspect, the text sits well alongside works such as Peter Thomas's (2010) The Gramscian Moment. The author's reading is often insightful, and makes great use of comparison between the differing developments of classical Marxism offered by Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and Jurgen Habermas. …

On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the world’

Antonio Gramsci is widely celebrated for his conceptualisation of hegemony. This paper elucidates a related concept that appears frequently in Gramsci’s prison notebooks yet has been surprisingly under-emphasised: ‘conceptions of the world’. By conceptions of the world, Gramsci refers to things that inform our understanding of the world and our place in it. Each conception of the world is inherently practical and philosophical, relational and political. Gramsci argues that producing a new, effective conception of the world is the key to successfully building communism. It is therefore important to situate this concept in Gramsci’s thought. That is the aim of this paper, which elaborates on the implications of ‘conception of the world’ through a reading of Gramsci’s prison notes – particularly his commentaries on humanity and worldliness.

Alter-Globalism as Counter-Hegemony: Evaluating the ‘postmodern Prince’

This article seeks to provide a critical analysis of the alter-globalisation movement as a potential ‘postmodern Prince’ as advanced by Stephen Gill. The article proposes that the social forces aligned under the rubric of alter-globalism have always had intractable difficulties articulating a postmodern Prince, and that in contrast to Gill's appropriation of Gramsci, these difficulties can be usefully understood through a reading of Gramsci which is attentive to the problems of collective political action. Recent debate among key participants at the World Social Forum (WSF) is used as a case study for analysing the possibility of formulating a common master-frame or strategy for social transformation. It is at the WSF that the problems of articulating a postmodern Prince have been most clearly confronted. It is shown that the weaknesses of alter-globalism can be understood, pace Gill, through Gramsci's own theory of social transformation as evinced in the modern Prince. This underlines the need for further investigation of the agents of progressive politics in an era of global social transformation. Este artículo busca proveer un análisis crítico a la propuesta de Stephen Gill, sobre el movimiento alter-globalización como un potencial ‘Príncipe posmoderno’. El artículo propone que las fuerzas sociales alineadas bajo la rúbrica del alter-globalismo han tenido siempre dificultades intratables en plantear a un Príncipe posmoderno y que en contraste con Gil y su apropiación de Gramsci, estas dificultades pueden entenderse útilmente a través de una lectura de Gramsci, quien está atento a los problemas de acción colectiva política. Un debate reciente entre los participantes principales al Foro Social Mundial, (FSM) se ha usado como un estudio de caso para analizar la posibilidad de formular un marco maestro o estrategia para una transformación social. En el FSM, es donde más claramente se han confrontado los problemas de plantear a un Príncipe posmoderno. Se ha indicado que las debilidades del alter-globalismo se pueden entender, con el respeto a la opinión de Gill, a través de la propia teoría de Gramsci sobre la transformación social como se evidencia en el Príncipe moderno. Esto enfatiza la necesidad de una mayor investigación de los agentes de una política progresiva en una era de transformación social global.

Post-hegemony?

This article responds to Lash and Thoburn's articles in this volume by arguing for the value of Gramsci's strategic concept of hegemony today. It places post-hegemony theories as replicating one particular reading of Gramsci as a theorist of ideology and politics only, a reading that was deepened by certain appropriations of post-structuralist theory in the 1980s. It argues that the Prison Notebooks contain a richer legacy of concepts and historical methods, many of which are applicable to today's global reach of power and communication. In particular, Gramsci was concerned with the relations between Fordist innovation and changes in state, civil society, intellectual formations and ways of living. He was especially interested in popular 'common sense', which, in his view, was the starting point of political work and could be the product of a renovative political activism. His ideas remain relevant to understanding recent transitions, especially since 11 September 2001, and the reach and limits of global neo-liberal hegemonies today, including the role of neo-liberal intellectuals and of a deepened individualism in everyday life. They also offer resources for counter-hegemonic strategies. Although Lash and Thoburn grasp a crucial coagulation of power today, their superseding of hegemony is based on an impoverished reading of the history of Gramscianism in cultural studies, and on a collapse of key complexities and local differences which is typical of some versions of social theory.

A Double Reading of Gramsci: Beyond the Logic of Contingency

In criticising the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce – described by Eric Hobsbawm as the first ‘post‐Marxist’ – Antonio Gramsci elaborated a distinct theory of history. For Gramsci, philosophers such as Croce developed a subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than problems posed by historical development. This essay develops a ‘double reading’ of Gramsci. First, it presents an overview of a dominant post‐Marxist reading of Gramsci’s approach to historical materialism, which constructs a closed and particularistic understanding of his theory of history. Second, it offers a reading that exposes and unsettles problems within post‐Marxism by demonstrating how Gramsci’s focus on changes in social relations threatens the assumptions about both traditional idealism and materialism. It is this theory of history that throws into relief certain features necessary to understanding history as more than just a completely contingent system of articulatory practices. The method of a double reading therefore affords insight into the internal tensions and questionable assumptions of history understood as an association of discourses (first reading). It also avoids developing an account that relies on an ‘extrinsic history’ of objective forces by combining an appreciation of ethico‐political principles alongside economic factors within the struggle over hegemony relevant to contemporary global political economy (second reading).

Language, Agency and Hegemony: A Gramscian Response to Post‐Marxism

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have attempted to save the concept of ‘hegemony’ from its economistic and essentialist Marxist roots by incorporating the linguistic influences of post‐structuralist theory. Their major Marxist detractors criticise their trajectory as a ‘descent into discourse’ – a decay from well‐grounded, material reality into the idealistic and problematic realm of language and discourse. Both sides of the debate seem to agree on one thing: the line from Marxism to post‐Marxism is the line from the economy to language, from ‘reality’ to discourse. This article focuses on Gramsci’s writings on language to argue against both sides of this debate. It illustrates how language is central to Gramsci’s historical materialism and that he does not oppose it to materiality. It argues that Gramsci adopted the very term hegemony substantially from his university studies in linguistics – the debates from which Ferdinand de Saussure also developed structuralism. For Gramsci, such linguistic issues were directly related to the ‘questione della lingua’ and Italian unification. Moreover, language lies at the centre of Gramsci’s understanding of the relationship between coercion and consent. This not only troubles Laclau & Mouffe’s reading of Gramsci, but it illuminates a more productive conception of hegemony that can address recent debates around post‐structuralism and the use of ‘hegemony’ to analyse globalisation and an increasingly technological and electronic world.

Reading Gramsci in an Era of Globalising Capitalism

It is possible to read Gramsci – and through him, the tradition of historical materialism – in such a way that we are enabled to realise a potentially transformative politics of solidarity in a world where capitalist relations are extending and deepening, but which is nonetheless plural. A Gramscian‐inflected historical materialism enables an understanding of globalising capitalism, its relations of power and structures of governance, as the product of struggles – at once material and ideological – among concretely situated social agents. When viewed in terms of a dialectical reading of Gramsci, these struggles may be seen as reassertions of situated knowledges and process‐based understandings of social reality, antithetical to the abstract individualism residing in capitalism’s core, and embodying possibilities for critical engagement, dialogue, and transformative politics in an era of globalising capitalism.

Introduction: Sport and Politics

In his contribution to this collection of articles Guttmann remarks: 'The intersection of sports and politics has been a major focus of contemporary sports history.' He goes on to provide a perceptive overview of some of the 'broad areas' in which engaged historians (as he describes them) have worked. It is important to be reminded of this activity, and of its extent, which is considerable. However, what Guttmann's discussion also reveals is an unevenness in the coverage. Three characteristics in particular stand out from the field he surveys. First, a great deal of the activity he comments on has been non-British; second, much of its emphasis has been on the politics of sport rather than the contribution of sport to wider political processes; and third, the intersection has mostly been approached from the direction of sports history, rather than from that of 'mainstream' political history. In Britain, where academic sports history has a rather shorter lineage than that of North America, whence many of Guttmann's examples are drawn, the focus on politics is less marked. Whilst it would be unfair to say that sports historians have followed the convention of the sports journalists whose copy has so often provided their sources, and kept sport apart from normal life, there is nonetheless a case for saying that much of what has been written in Britain is 'history with the politics left out'. There are, to be sure, some notable exceptions to this tendency. The names of Grant Jarvie, Lincoln Allison, Barrie Houlihan and James Riordan immediately stand out as pioneers of a politically-attuned study of sport (though, arguably, only one of them might claim to be a historian).' Moreover, many theoretical approaches to sport and leisure, whether Marxist or Weberian, have been avowedly political. John Hargreaves's Sport, Power and Culture is a fine example, informed by a reading of Gramsci.2 Equally, though, there is an inclination in some of the newer forms of social and cultural history to eschew the political, at least in the sense of politics with a capital 'P'. The flight into the cultural, which is warmly to be encouraged for many reasons, has nonetheless often transformed 'politics' into something more broadly to do with 'power relations', with the result that the political process in its institutional governmental and party guises, and at its various