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Gramsci as Icon
| Article
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12657 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
4,435 Words |
| Author
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Paul Piccone
Paul Piccone is the editor of Telos, a scholarly journal. |
Fifty years after his death, Antonio Gramsci is finally being recognized as one of the twentieth century's leading social thinkers, and his fragmentary works are finding their place among the classics of social thought. His imprisonment from 1926 until his death and the advent of both fascism and Soviet communism caused an eclipse of his writings lasting until the end of World War II. Thereafter, the Gramscian heritage became the theoretical support for the dubious policies of the Italian Communist Party. This contributed significantly to keeping his work away from the wider public it is now attracting.
What happened to Gramsci parallels to a great extent what happened to Marx after his death. Engels, in further elaborating and popularizing Marxism, flattened Marx's thought, politicized the dialectic, and generally paved the way for rigid interpretation. Gramsci found his Engels in Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party from Gramsci's imprisonment in 1926 until his death in the 1930s. Gramsci and Togliatti worked closely together, first as students in Turin before and during World War I, and then as communist militants. In both cases, the two survivors of the lifelong friendship, Engels and Togliatti, became the leading interpreters of Marx and Gramsci respectively. Both Togliatti and Engels were more modest thinkers than their friends, with the unfortunate consequence that Marx and Gramsci remained in obscurity for about fifty years. And both have a multiplicity of interpretations. Because Gramsci was a founder of the Italian Communist Party and a lifelong member, it is not surprising that is picture of Gramsci became the one that many intellectuals had to confront.
The official communist Gramsci was born when Togliatti returned to Italy from political exile in Russia after the war. He used Gramsci's thought as the main ideological pillar of the party's practical social democratic policies and its theoretical revolutionary orientation. After World War II, communist ideology was under Stalin's uncontested control. Marxist theory was unproblematically presented as an uninterrupted development of a single theoretical trend. Gramsci has to be presented as a follower of Lenin in order to fit into official party chronology. By then Lenin had been tailored as a precursor of Stalin. This forced grouping of Lenin, Gramsci, and Stalin was necessitated by the particular political predicament of post-World War II Italy. During the Cold War, international communism had to present itself as monolithic, internally coherent, and growing irresistibly both in theory and in practice. Gramsci's Marxism was ideal for this task. Not only had Gramsci always been seen as orthodox, but he also had deep roots in Italian
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