Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Alternative Modernities Antonio Gramscis Twentieth Century by Giuseppe Vacca
Alternative Modernities Antonio Gramscis Twentieth Century by Giuseppe Vacca
Alternative
Modernities
Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century
Giuseppe Vacca
Translated by
Derek Boothman · Chris Dennis
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assis-
tant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions,
reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published
in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political
perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas,
producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse
and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre
of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th
centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary
issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
Alternative
Modernities
Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century
Giuseppe Vacca
Fondazione Gramsci
Rome, Italy
Translated by
Derek Boothman Chris Dennis
Perugia, Italy Modena, Italy
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Titles Published
1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx
and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology”
Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique
of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History,
2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read
Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl
Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the
Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018.
10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving
Marx for the Future, 2018.
11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of
Capitalism, 2018.
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the
21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
v
vi TITLES PUBLISHED
Titles Forthcoming
Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary
Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction
Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30 th Anniversary Edition
Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya
Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of
Liberation
Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a De-alienated
World
Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Self-organisation and
Anti-capitalism
Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction
Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment
Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century
Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space
Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism
Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of
Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism
Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures:
On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism
TITLES PUBLISHED vii
Gramsci was a theorist of politics but above all a practical politician, that is
a combatant […] The whole of what Gramsci wrote should be approached
with [this] in mind, but this task will only be accomplished by those having
such a detailed knowledge of the concrete moments of his activity that
makes it possible for them to see how these concrete moments correspond
to each of his general doctrinal definitions and statements. They must also
be sufficiently impartial to resist the temptation to let false doctrinal gener-
alizations obscure the clear connection linking thought to concrete facts
and real movements. (Togliatti 2001 [19581 ], pp. 213–4: cf. Togliatti
1979, pp. 161–2).
Since the mid-1970s I have, then, lent myself to reconstructing the life
and thoughts of Gramsci through their insertion into the history of the
twentieth century.
ix
x PREFACE
1 This bibliography is available for consultation on the site of the Fondazione Gramsci,
www.fondazionegramsci.org.
2 To denounce this incongruence, in April 1987 the then head of the Cultural Commis-
sion of the Italian Communist Party, Giuseppe Chiarante, and I were responsible for
a special number of the monthly Contemporaneo supplement to Rinascita devoted to
the diffusion of Gramsci throughout the world. A short time afterwards, on becoming
Director of the Foundation, I organized an international conference on the worldwide
studies and translations of Gramsci. This conference was held on 25–28 October 1989
in Formia (where Gramsci had spent two years in a prison-approved clinic), the proceed-
ings being published some time later in 1995 (Gramsci nel mondo, ed. Maria Luisa Righi,
Rome: Fondazione Istituto Gramsci). During the conference John Cammett presented the
brochure of the International Gramsci Bibliography, on which he had been working alone
for years. This Bibliography was published in the Annali (Yearbooks) of the Foundation
(Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1991), and then transferred on line and continued, again under
the editorship of John Cammett, by Maria Luisa Righi and Francesco Giasi, who are still
currently responsible for its update.
3 These correspond to the first three chapters of the volume edited by Marcello Musté:
G. Vacca In cammino con Gramsci (Vacca and Musté, 2020), appearing under the titles
‘La “quistione politica degli intellettuali” nei “Quaderni del carcere”’, ‘Dal materialismo
storico alla filosofia della praxis’ and ‘I “Quaderni” e la politica del Novecento’ respectively.
PREFACE xi
5 The National Edition got underway in 1999 and 2007 saw the publication of the
Translation Notebooks (Quaderni di traduzioni), up to then unpublished, after which there
followed the first two volumes of Correspondence (the Epistolario) between Gramsci and
others, the 1917–1918 Writing s (Scritti), the Notes on Glottology (Appunti di glottologia),
the first volume of the Miscellaneous Notebooks, and the 1910–1916 Writings, published
in 2019. Currently underway are the two volumes of the Correspondence of Tat’jana
Schucht, which contain her exchanges with Piero Sraffa and with her own family members.
Regarding the plan of the entire series and the publication criteria used cf. Studi Storici
52(4), 2011.
6 Cf. G. Vacca (with Chiara Daniele) Togliatti editore di Gramsci (2005); F. Giasi
‘L’eredità di Antonio Gramsci’ in P. Togliatti (2014), pp. 919–962.
xiv PREFACE
not solely this (Ciliberto 1982, 1999, 2016; Ciliberto and Vasoli 1991;
Izzo 2009; Montanari 1997). In any case, the task that I set myself in the
first chapter of this book was to follow the development of the concept
of hegemony from when the term first appeared (in 1919) to the drafting
of the ‘special notebooks’, attempting to shed light on the historical situ-
ations to which it referred. This seems to me the main highway for clari-
fying the meaning of the conception of politics as the struggle for hegemony,
around which the philosophy of praxis is pivoted. And the same procedure
is followed in the second chapter in analysing the concept of passive revo-
lution which constitutes a historiographical complement to the concept
of hegemony.7
From the 1970s onward, ‘hegemony’ and ‘passive revolution’ have
been the concepts towards which the greater number of Gramsci’s inter-
preters have directed their efforts, together with those who have him
as their point of reference for reconstructing national histories and
world events. In this exceptionally wide literature, there appear concep-
tual couplings of the hegemony-‘counter hegemony’, passive revolution-
‘active revolution’ type which reveal quite evident misunderstandings of
his thought. These are almost always born from an urgency to find recipes
for immediate political use.
The third chapter has, instead, the nature of an essay. Its aim is to bring
out the more properly philosophical dimension of Gramsci’s thought by
shedding light on the translatability of languages which he indicates as
the distinctive feature of his own reflections. However I have not wished
to give an exposition of the entire system of the philosophy of praxis,
but rather bring into focus his fundamental problem, meaning that of
the subject, around which the whole of modern philosophy revolves. In
the Prison Notebooks this culminates in the question of how ‘permanent
collective wills are in fact formed’ (Q8§195, p. 1057; PN Vol. 3, p. 346),
giving rise to a processual conception of subjectivity: in other words, for
Gramsci the subject is not given but is the result of ‘relations of force’
and dynamic combinations of the relations between ‘intellectuals’ and
‘masses’. In the theory of the constitution of subjects, hegemony, passive
revolution and the translatability of languages are cardinal concepts and
7 For a corroboration of this way of posing the question see the introductions to the
anastatic edition of the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 2009) by G. Francioni, G. Cospito and
F. Frosini, which taken together comprise an illuminating history of the Notebooks.
PREFACE xv
References
Ciliberto, M. (1982). La fabbrica dei Quaderni (Gramsci e Vico). In Filosofia e
politica del Novecento italiano da Labriola a “Società”. Bari: De Donato.
Ciliberto, M., & Vasoli, C. (Eds.). (1991). Filosofia e cultura. Per Eugenio Garin
(Vol. II, pp. 759–788). Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Ciliberto. (1999). Cosmopolitismo e Stato nazionale nei Quaderni del carcere. In
G. Vacca (Ed.), Gramsci e il Novecento (Vol. II, pp. 157–176). Rome: Carocci.
Ciliberto, M. (2016). Gramsci e Guicciardini. Per un’interpretazione “figurale”
dei Quaderni del carcere. In Attualità di Gramsci (pp. 59–75). Rome: Bardi.
Coen, F. (Ed.). (1977). Il marxismo e lo Stato, new series of the ‘Quaderni di
Mondoperaio’, No. 4, 1976.
Coen, F. (Ed.). (1977). Egemonia e democrazia, new series of the ‘Quaderni di
Mondoperaio’, No. 7, 1977.
Daniele, C. (Ed.). (2005). Togliatti editore di Gramsci. Rome: Carocci.
Ferri, F. (Ed.). (1977). Politica e storia in Gramsci. Proceedings of the
International Conference on Gramsci (Florence 1977). Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere (V. Gerratana, Ed.). Turin. Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks (J. A. Buttigieg, Ed.). New York: Columbia
University Press.
Gramsci, A. (2009). Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti
(18 Vols., G. Francioni, Ed.). Rome and Cagliari: Istituto della Enciclopedia
Italiana-L’Unione Sarda.
Izzo, F. (2009). Democrazia e cosmopolitismo in Antonio Gramsci(Chapters 2, 4,
and 5). Rome: Carocci.
Montanari, M. (1997). Introduzione a Gramsci, Pensare la democrazia. Turin:
Einaudi.
Togliatti, P. (1979). Leninism in the Theory and Practice of Gramsci. In id., On
Gramsci and Other Writings (pp. 161–181). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Togliatti, P. (2001 [19581 ]). Il leninismo nel pensiero e nell’azione di A. Gramsci
(appunti.) In id., (2001).
Togliatti, P. (2001). Scritti su Gramsci (G. Liguori, Ed., pp. 213–234). Editori
Riuniti.
PREFACE xvii
xix
xx CONTENTS
5 Afterword 243
1 Gramsci Studies in Italy 243
References 259
Index 265
Translators’ Note
The list following this note contains the abbreviations used in the textual
and bibliographical references for the most widely quoted selections of
Gramsci’s writings used in the current volume. Taking account of the
needs of an international readership, which may have access to either
English or Italian publications but usually not both, the references give
information in both languages for Gramsci’s writings. We use the cita-
tions given in Giuseppe Vacca’s Italian text for the pre-prison writings, but
often readers may have access to these in other anthologies of Gramsci’s
writings. For Togliatti’s articles on Gramsci, we normally use as the Italian
source Guido Liguori’s 2001 anthology Scritti su Gramsci, as being the
most widely available one, but readers can also find them in the 2014
Togliatti anthology La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione. Scritti e discorsi
1917–1964, edited by Michele Ciliberto and Giuseppe Vacca, used in the
present volume when necessary.
Note that the greater part of Gramsci’s newspaper and journal articles
have not been translated into English and so, for them, only an Italian
source can be mentioned. Titles of articles discussed by the author are
given in English in the text, and found under that name in the alphabeti-
cally arranged references lists, followed by theoriginal title in Italian, with
indications of where they were published. Given that the author normally
follows a chronological reconstruction of the early writings, in particular,
we include the date of their first publication. There then follow the refer-
ence to the volumes in which these articles may now be consulted, first
xxi
xxii TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
in Italian and then, where possible, in English; for the latter, we give the
translation used and, as help to readers alternative sources where these
exist.
As regards letters, in Italian we use for purposes of completeness
the published volumes of correspondence between, as needed, Tanja
(Tat’jana) Schucht and Gramsci (Gramsci-Schucht 1997) or Tanja and
Piero Sraffa (Sraffa 1991). For Gramsci’s exchanges of letters with other
members of the Italian communist leadership, use is made of Palmiro
Togliatti’s 1962 volume Formazione del gruppo dirigente del partito comu-
nista italiano nel 1923–1924; as with the newspaper articles, these may be
accessed in other Italian anthologies. In English we use the most complete
translation of the prison letters available, not listing other partial selec-
tions. For well-known Russian figures and organizations, we use the form
of names familiar to Anglophone readers; elsewhere we follow the ISO
rules for transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet.
Occasionally earlier ‘standard’ translations of Gramsci quoted have
been ‘silently’ updated since a few lexical choices have now undergone
modification in the light of later work; this is the case especially with
‘corporative’ rather than ‘corporate’ and the difficult term ‘determinate’,
often previously glossed rather than translated. Sometimes readers will
encounter ‘soviet’ written with a small initial letter; this occurs when the
emphasis is on the meaning of the term as a council, hence the ‘republic
of soviets’ means quite literally the ‘republic of councils’.
Abbreviations Used in References
to Volumes
xxiii
xxiv ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERENCES TO VOLUMES
PN Vol. 3 Prison Notebooks Vol. 3 (2007), ed. and trans. J.A. Buttigieg,
New York: Columbia University Press.
PPW Pre-Prison Writings (1994), ed. R. Bellamy and trans. V. Cox,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SPN Selections from the Prison Writings (1971), ed. and trans.
Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
SPW 1910–1920 Selected Political Writings 1910–1920 (1977), ed. Q. Hoare
and trans. J. Mathews, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
SPW 1910–1926 Selected Political Writings 1910–1920 (1978), ed. and trans.
Q. Hoare, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
CHAPTER 1
1 Cf. M. Girardon, ‘Le libertà coloniali dopo la guerra europea’, published in the
Bologna daily paper Il resto del carlino on 9 April.
2 N. Angell, La grande illusione. Studio sulla potenza militare in rapporto alla prosperità
delle nazioni (1913), with a preface (‘Proemio’) by Arnaldo Cervesato (Bari: Humanitas),
pp. v–xii, here p. v; see also Cervesato’s preface to the Voghera (Rome) edition also of
1913, p. vii and Angell’s use of the words ‘economic interdependence’ on p. viii of his
own ‘Synopsis’ of the book, enlarged edition of 1914 published by Heinemann (London).
4 G. VACCA
The article comments on the armistice with Germany and the start of
the Paris Conference, where Gramsci sees a clash between two representa-
tives of post-war capitalism, with the Wilson-Lloyd George ‘bloc’ destined
to prevail over militarism à la Foch. To his mind this clash constituted
‘the supreme revolution of modern society, the genesis of the capitalistic
unification of the world, under the discipline of a hierarchy of States,
who are equals under a juridical fiction’. The prediction and presage of
the prevalence of the Anglo-American bloc induced him to ask a radical
question, i.e. whether perhaps the time was ripe for the supersession of
the nation-State’s principal function, the construction of citizenship:
But when the Paris Conference concluded with the restoration of the
irreconcilable contrast between French and German nationalisms, Gram-
sci’s thought underwent a sudden about-turn. Already mentally inserted
into the newly-formed Communist International (March 1919), he saw
in ‘Anglo-American capitalism’ a ‘global monopoly’ which proletarianized
subaltern nations and above all destroyed all traces of sovereignty. In that
year he wrote (15 May, referring to Italy) that
‘advent of the International’ and believing that the main problem raised
by the war was that of adapting the ‘spaces’ and forms that regulated
politics to the spaces of a world economy that was increasingly one and
interdependent.
His conviction sprang from the widening of the crisis of national
economies. Gramsci was taking his cue from the wave of strikes and
the depression that had struck the US economy, which was therefore
no longer capable of financing a European economic recovery, and
contrasting the globalization of the nineteenth century’s final decade with
twentieth-century Europe’s nationalisms, which had been responsible for
the catastrophic war:
articles about the world that was coming into being. The first one, in a
cultural and ethical tone, took no position on the Bolsheviks’ conquest of
power and focused on the psychological changes occasioned by the war:
Three years of war have certainly caused changes in the world. But perhaps
the most significant change of all is this: three years of war have made the
world sensitive to change. We feel the world, are sensitive to it; previously
we simply thought it. We felt our little world, we took part in its sadness, in
its hopes, in its wishes and in the interests of the little world in which we
were most directly immersed. We welded ourselves to the wider collectivity
only through the effort of thought, with an effort of abstraction. Now this
weld has become more intimate. We see distinctly what before was indis-
tinct and vague. We see people, multitudes of people where yesterday we
saw only States or single representative people. (‘Readings’ in CF , p. 452)
In this way Gramsci set forth a theme that would characterize the
entirety his thought: the nexus between understanding and feeling, the
inspiring principle behind the philosophy of praxis.3 But no less impor-
tant appears his emphasis on war as the accelerant of the globalization
of the collective conscience. This argument had been developed in the
celebrated article ‘The Revolution against Capital’ (CF , pp. 513–517;
SPW 1910–1920, pp. 34–37 and PPW , pp. 39–42). The article is too
well known for us to analyse it in detail but we would like to focus on
one point. The October Revolution surprised and disconcerted Euro-
pean socialism because none of the currents of Marxist thought of the
time, including Lenin up to the eve of the war, had predicted that the
‘socialist revolution’ could start in a backward country. But the war, by
also involving Russia, had created the subjective conditions for a ‘prole-
tarian revolution’ there. It had ‘aroused the popular collective will’, which
‘normally’ would have required a lengthy experience of capitalist devel-
opment, class struggles, the creation of an industrial proletariat and the
formation of a widespread socialist conscience. ‘In Russia’ Gramsci writes
‘the war has served to galvanize the people’s will. As a result of the suffer-
ings accumulated over three years, they found themselves very rapidly in
unanimity’ and the Russian proletariat, although it had not known Euro-
pean capitalist development, once in power ‘made use of the Western
capitalist experiences to bring itself rapidly to the same level of production
Four years of the trenches and exploitation of his blood have radically
changed the peasant psychology. This change has occurred especially in
Russia, and has been one of the essential factors in the revolution. What
industrialism had not brought about in its normal process of development
was produced by the war. The war forced those nations which were less
advanced in capitalist terms, and hence less endowed with technological
equipment, to enrol all available men and to oppose wave after wave of
living flesh to the war instruments of the Central Powers. For Russia, the
war meant that individuals who had previously been scattered over a vast
territory came into contact with each other. It meant that humans were
concentrated together uninterruptedly for years on end under conditions
of sacrifice, with the ever present danger of death, and under a uniform
and uniformly ferocious discipline. The lengthy duration of such condi-
tions of collective living had profound psychological effects and was rich
in unforeseen consequences (…) Within four years, in the mud and blood
of the trenches, a spiritual world emerged that was avid to form itself into
permanent and dynamic social structures and institutions. (‘Workers and
Peasants’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 157–158)
from there: ‘The experience of the revolutions’ he writes ‘has shown how,
since Russia, all other two-stage revolutions have failed’. The possibility
that arose in Russia for the proletariat, through the effect of the war,
not only to conquer power, but also successfully to hold onto it, had
not been replicated elsewhere. This showed that the ‘two-stage revolu-
tion’ could not provide a model for the proletarian revolution. Unlike
what had happened in bourgeois revolutions, the proletariat could not
plan to conquer the power of the State and then ‘construct’ a socialist
society in a ‘second stage’. These failures therefore proved the anachro-
nistic character of the ‘permanent revolution’ theory. The other salient
theme of the article was European experiences with Councils, which
Gramsci considered inconceivable without the pressure of the war and
the October Revolution. As he wrote immediately afterwards in the
article ‘The programme of L’Ordine Nuovo’, there were mainly two
problems that had arisen from the founding of the weekly with Togli-
atti: first, whether the soviet was not ‘a purely Russian institution’, but
instead, ‘a universal form’, that is to say, ‘wherever there are proletarians
struggling to win industrial autonomy’, whether the soviet was not the
most appropriate institution form for realizing it. The second concerned
the possibility of identifying the equivalent of the soviet in Italy (‘The
Programme of L’Ordine Nuovo’ ON 1919–1920, pp. 619–620; PPW ,
p. 179). The Turin experience with Councils constituted in his opinion
the demonstration of the universality of the soviets inasmuch as they had
‘translated’ ‘the Russian experiment’ into an industrial situation among
the most advanced in Europe. However it is useful to underline the moti-
vation that Gramsci provides for these claims to demonstrate that the
Turin experience had highlighted the possibility of separating capitalism
and industrialism thus rendering superfluous both capitalist command
over production and the very figure of the ‘capitalist’ (‘The Programme’,
cit., ON 1991–1920, pp. 623–624 and 626–627; PPW , pp. 182–183 and
185–186). In the soviet, Gramsci recognized the organ of the working
class’s ‘industrial autonomy’ and ‘historical initiative’, which however
could only be acquired by means of adequate preparation under the
guidance of communist parties (which found therein their principal justi-
fication), so as to create the conditions for socializing production before
conquering power (‘Two Revolutions’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 569–574;
PPW , pp. 168–172 and New Left Review I/51, pp. 45–48).
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 11
The World War, won by the Entente, should have been able through the
Peace of Versailles and the League of Nations to install a monopoly regime
over the globe; an unchallenged hegemony ought to have succeeded
to the system of inter-State equilibrium and competition. The Russia of
12 G. VACCA
the soviets, acceding to the position of a great power has breached the
hegemonic system. (‘Russia, a World Power’, ON , p. 618)
The tactic of the united front, laid down with considerable precision by
the Russian comrades, both technically and in the general approach to its
practical application, has in no country found a party or the men capable of
applying it in concrete terms. (…) Obviously, all this cannot be accidental.
There is something that is not functioning in the international field as
a whole, there is a weakness and inadequacy of leadership. The Italian
question must be seen in this framework. (CPC, p. 457; SPW 1921–1926,
p. 155)5
4 The criticism of ‘inertia’ via-à-vis Bordiga was formulated by Togliatti in his letter to
Gramsci of 1 May, 1923. Cf. P. Togliatti (1962, pp. 53–60); SPW 1921–1926, pp. 132–
137.
5 From manuscript notes, probably dating to June 1923 while Gramsci was still in
Moscow.
6 Letter of Gramsci from Moscow to the PCI Executive (12 September 1923).
14 G. VACCA
The reasons why the tactic of the United Front made it necessary to
specify the form of the workers’ State are not limited to the particular-
ities of the ‘peasant question’. The main reason why the party needed
to have its own position on the nature of the State was the presence of
fascism. Although the government still maintained the political appear-
ances of a parliamentary regime, fascism had achieved power thorough
violence and, through the government, was continuing and intensifying
its destruction of working class organizations and of democracy (Vacca
1994, pp. xxiii–xxv). The conditions for uniting the working classes and
for leading them could only be created if the party adopted the strategy
of a democratic revolution. In his letter from Vienna of 5 January 1924
to Mauro Scoccimarro, Gramsci wrote:
Fascism has posed a very sharp and cruel dilemma in Italy, that is to say
that of the revolution in permanence, and of the impossibility not only of
changing the State form, but simply of changing government, except by
armed force. (Togliatti 1962, pp. 152–153; GTW , pp. 199–200 and SPW
1921–1926, p. 176)7
In the political field we have to establish with precision the theses on the
Italian situation and on the possible stages of its future development. (…) I
think that, in any revival, our Party will still be in a minority position, that
the majority of the working class will go with the reformists and that the
liberal bourgeois democrats will still have much to say. I do not doubt that
the situation is actively revolutionary and that therefore, in a given period
of time, our Party will have the majority on its side; but if this period
will perhaps not be long in terms of time, it will undoubtedly be dense in
secondary stages, which we shall have to foresee with a certain precision in
order to be able to manoeuvre and not fall into errors that would prolong
the experiences of the proletariat. (Togliatti 1962, pp. 199–200; GTW ,
pp. 229–230 and SPW 1921–1926, pp. 201–202)9
The concept of hegemony of the proletariat appeared for the first time
during this research. As is known, when Gramsci wrote his letter from
Moscow on founding L’Unità, he was preparing the plan for the first issue
of the third series of L’Ordine Nuovo (Somai 1989, pp. 53–54), which
appeared in March 1924. Together with the renowned editorial, ‘Capo’
(‘Leader’), dedicated to a comparison between Lenin and Mussolini, the
fortnightly journal contained a biography of the recently deceased Soviet
leader, translated from Russian but adapted by Gramsci to the Italian situ-
ation. The text which he drew on was Zinov’ev’s introduction to the first
volume of his Works, comprising an ‘outline history of Bolshevism’ and
written as a polemic against Trotsky (Paggi 1970, pp. 43–44). The origi-
nality of Bolshevism, wrote Zinov’ev, consists of the fact that for the first
time, ‘in the international history of the class struggle’ it had ‘developed
the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat and (…) addressed in a prac-
tical manner the principal institutional problems that Marx and Engels
had explored in theoretical terms. The idea of the hegemony of the prole-
tariat’, Zinov’ev continued, ‘for the very reason that it was conceived
historically and concretely, brought with it the need to find an ally for the
working class: Bolshevism found this ally in the mass of poor peasants’.
9 Letter of Gramsci from Vienna of 9 February 1924 to Togliatti, Terracini and others.
16 G. VACCA
Gramsci added that in this way, ‘theoretically and practically the histor-
ical task of the peasant class’ had been established, whereas international
socialism had not yet succeeded in doing this. But what appears even more
important from a theoretical viewpoint is that, in his reconstruction of
the genealogy of the concept of ‘hegemony of the proletariat’, he based
himself on the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Demo-
cratic Revolution, in which Lenin, elaborating the experience of the 1905
Russian revolution, had not only introduced that concept but had also put
forward a conception of the democratic and socialist revolution, summed
up in the slogan democratic dictatorship of the workers and the peasants.
This was no casual choice. The salient point of the Bolshevik vision of the
hegemony of the proletariat was the need for the working class to ‘make
concessions’ of an economic nature to the peasants (Di Biagio 2008,
pp. 397–402). That had indeed happened in the October Revolution,
with the adoption of the Social-Revolutionaries’ agrarian policy, which
aimed to assign the land to the peasants; and with the New Economic
Policy (NEP), which introduced a limited market economy to the coun-
tryside. At the centre of Gramsci’s approach there was instead the need
to ‘make concessions’ to the peasantry that were also political. Indeed,
as we have seen, in the letter about founding L’Unità Gramsci proposed
replacing the slogan ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ with ‘Federal
Republic of the Workers and Peasants’, thus placing the two classes on
the same level.
For Gramsci, the alliance between workers and peasants in Italy thus
involved not only the problem of the government, but also the form of
the State. The State of the dictatorship of the proletariat could not be
solely the State of the workers, but needed, unlike the Soviet State, to
be a workers’ and peasants’ State. Therefore the leadership function of
the working class vis-à-vis its principal ally ought to assume the character
of influence and political and intellectual leadership, not that of subordi-
nation and coercion. In an unpublished study, the much missed Anna Di
Biagio reconstructed the variations of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’
concept in Lenin’s writings, from his What Is to Be Done? of 1902 to the
last article On Cooperation of 6 January 1923: only in Two Tactics was
the hegemony of the proletariat conceived of as the political leadership of
an alliance between classes of equal importance and rank; instead, in his
other writings where the concept appeared or was operationally present,
hegemony of the proletariat assumed the character of predomination by
the working class over the peasant masses and, from 1920, of more or
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 17
less flexible coercion exercised by the working class to induce the peas-
ants to accept the programme of the workers’ party. Between 1920 and
1923, discussion on this point in the Russian Party had been very heated
and after the launch of the NEP, had ended in favour of coercion of the
peasants by the workers. The theses of the Comintern, instead, went in
the opposite direction, especially after Lenin, in launching the ‘United
Front tactic’, had invited ‘fraternal’ parties to study the Russian expe-
rience in-depth, but not to follow it slavishly, and instead to ‘adapt’ it
to national particularities (Di Biagio, unpublished research). As already
mentioned, in June 1923 Gramsci started to re-elaborate the ‘tactic of
the United Front’ in order to adapt it to Italy. It is not surprising that
in handling Lenin’s biography he should have taken Two Tactics as his
point of reference: the proletarian revolution in Italy was to be at the
same time a democratic and a socialist revolution, not only because of the
presence of fascism but also because Italy is a western European country.
The ‘translation into Italian historical language’ of the United Front tactic
was not just the search for a ‘national way’, but part of a wide-ranging
reflection on the differences between East and West as illustrated in his
letter to Togliatti and Terracini of 9 February 1924. Commenting on
the discussion that had commenced in the Bolshevik leadership imme-
diately after the failure of the insurrection in Germany, Gramsci showed
that while he shared Zinov’ev’s reaffirmation of the actuality of revolution
(Pons 2008, pp. 403–407), the problem of the ‘intermediate phase’ was
acquiring particular significance throughout western Europe:
November 1917. (Togliatti 1962, pp. 196–107; GTW , p. 227 and SPW
1921–1926, pp. 199–200)10
In the course of 1923, Gramsci had reached the conviction that fascism
was undergoing a process of dissolution (Somai 1989, pp. 805–824) and,
for an effective intervention by the proletariat, he thought its alliance
with the peasantry was indispensable. Attention has correctly been drawn
to the impulse given by the Comintern to this reflection via the creation
of the Krestintern (the Peasant International) and by the Soviet State’s
transformation in a federalist direction (Paggi 1970, pp. 151–160). But
Gramsci went beyond that impulse, evoking the West’s morphological
complexity. The fusion between the PCI and the Maximalists was also the
subject of a comparison which highlighted above all the differences with
respect to the ‘Russian experiment’, attributing to the tactic of the United
Front the significance of a ‘limiting idea’ (Togliatti, pp. 223–227; GTW ,
pp. 239–246).11 In fact workers and peasants, rather than as the levers for
a revolutionary process on the Russian model, were considered as being
the potential protagonists of a rationalization of the Italian economy in
a productivist perspective which would remedy the nation’s fragile unity
and weak competitiveness. Then, in August of 1924, in the very middle of
the Matteotti crisis, Gramsci put forward the idea of a popular revolution
that could reinsert Italy into the European circuit from which fascism had
excluded it:
10 Letter of Gramsci from Vienna of 9 February 1924 to Togliatti, Terracini and others.
11 Letter of Gramsci from Vienna of 1 March 1924 to Scoccimarro and Togliatti.
12 At this meeting Gramsci’s nomination by the 5-strong Executive as the General
Secretary of the Party was accepted by the Central Committee.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 19
We must illustrate all the probable solutions that the current situation may
give rise to, and for each one of these probable solutions we must establish
14 As is known, this theme had been at the centre of political debate immediately after
the end of the war: Cf. A. Tasca (1995).
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 21
The constituent assembly slogan could allow the party to overcome its
strategic weaknesses and offer the proletariat a new opportunity to play
its cards:
there must be a political solution to the present situation: what is the most
likely form for such a solution to adopt? Is it possible to think that we can
go from fascism to the dictatorship of the proletariat? What intermediate
phases are possible or probable? We have to carry out a political examina-
tion, we have to do it for ourselves, for the masses of our Party and for the
masses in general. In my opinion, in the crisis that the country is going
to go through, the party that comes out on top will be the one which
has best understood this necessary process of transition. (Togliatti 1962,
p. 246; GTW , p. 256 and SPW 1921–1926, p. 221)
along with a certain amount of success for the PCI.15 Elected to parlia-
ment, Gramsci returned to Italy and had his first tests as a leader in
dealing with the Matteotti crisis. The reaction of the country to the
finding of Matteotti’s body, the attitude of all the anti-fascist parties and
fascism’s initial discomfiture induced him to conclude that, from that time
‘the fascist regime entered its death-agony’ (‘The Italian Crisis’ CPC,
pp. 28–39; SPW 1919–1926, pp. 255–266, here p. 258). The commu-
nists participated in the Aventine secession, proposing a fiscal strike and
the mobilization of the masses to resolve in an anti-fascist direction the
dualism of powers towards which the situation seemed to be tending.
But power relations were extremely unfavourable, so we find Gramsci
writing on 13 August, ‘we can only foresee an improvement in the polit-
ical position of the working class, not a victorious struggle for power’
(SPW 1921–1926, p. 262). The Aventine secession was not willing to
challenge fascism for fear that any intervention by the worker and peasant
masses in the crisis would turn into a revolution. At the same time, the
PCI could not detach itself from the other anti-fascist parties because it
would have risked self-destruction. It had to manoeuvre in such a way
as to attempt to modify the situation fighting on two fronts: against
fascism, and within the anti-fascist camp, exposing the Aventine seces-
sion’s subalternity to fascism and trying to attract the majority of the
proletariat to its side (op. cit.). The proposal that the party elaborated
on the eve of the re-opening of parliament was an Antiparliament: a
two-pronged proposal, aiming to legitimate the communists’ return to
parliament if, as was more than likely, the other anti-fascist parties refused
the proposal; and a weak proposal, because it also aimed to set the party
apart from the substantially impotent and passive opposition bloc (the
parties of the Aventine secession had placed their trust in Crown inter-
vention) so as to have at its disposal a parliamentary platform from which
to conduct the struggle on the two fronts. What was however realistic was
the fear that, should the opposition parties not return to parliament, the
PNF would be able to transform it into a ‘fascist Constituent Assembly’
(Spriano 1967, pp. 405–408).16 In any case, the Matteotti crisis clar-
ified unequivocally the ‘Constituentism’ of 1924–1926. A Constituent
15 Compared with the 1921 elections the communists lost 10% of their votes, with the
reformists and Maximalists losing three-fifths of theirs. On the character of the elections,
cf. Spriano (1967, pp. 324–341).
16 Cf. Gramsci ‘The Italian Crisis’, CPC, esp. p. 37; SPW 1921–1926, p. 264.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 23
The Corriere and La Stampa (…) have not allowed themselves to be occu-
pied because there are three categories of national “institutions” that have
not been occupied or allowed themselves to be occupied: the General
Staff, the banks (…) and the National Confederation of Industry. (CPC,
p. 172; PPW , p. 261)
The Corriere (…) would even form an alliance with the reformists, but
only after having subjected many of them to humiliating conditions; the
Corriere wants an “Amendola” government – that is, it wants the petite
bourgeoisie of the South and not the working-class aristocracy of the North
to be incorporated into the effectively dominant system of forces. It wants
to see a rural democracy in Italy, with Cadorna as its military leader rather
than Badoglio, as La Stampa would prefer, and with a kind of Italian
Poincaré as its political leader, rather than a kind of Italian Briand. (CPC,
p. 173; PPW , p. 262; translation modified)
South was not based solely on economic or even exclusively political rela-
tions of power, but depended on the specific function of the ‘intellectuals
as a mass’ who provide the sinew of the relations between the classes
in ‘civil society’. Gramsci started to go deeper into this subject between
the summer and autumn of 1926, introducing a decisive variant to the
dichotomy of historical materialism.
The essay on the ‘Southern question’ is an investigation into how the
problem of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ was posed in Italy. As we
have seen, for Gramsci the year 1926 marked a crisis in ‘capitalist stabi-
lization’, which was proceeding differently along a centre–periphery axis.
Italy was one of European capitalism’s peripheral countries, characterized
by a significant presence of rural and urban middle classes; the strongest
of these was the intellectual petty bourgeoisie because, faced with an
acute social crisis, it was able to orient the peasant masses and prevent
them from allying with the industrial proletariat. Naturally at the origin of
this analysis was the experience of fascism, which demonstrated how the
petty bourgeoisie too was capable of ‘historical initiative’; but from the
report to the Executive of 2 August onward, Gramsci’s observations were
placed within a wider analytical framework, where once again the theme
of the morphological differences between East and West underlined the
distance between the Italian situation and that of revolutionary Russia.
The problem of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ shifted even more
significantly to the political terrain and Gramsci, accentuating the ideo-
logical role of the middle classes, for the first time mentioned the theme
which in the Notebooks he would formulate as the ‘political question of
the intellectuals’:
There is no one who does not perceive the originality of these analyses
compared with the schemata of the Comintern (Pons 2008, pp. 420–
421), but in the essay on the ‘Southern question’ Gramsci made a further
step forward, claiming that for the proletariat to be able to exercise its
hegemony, it must achieve the ability to lead not only the peasants but
also the intellectuals; its leadership function thus assumes ever more signif-
icance as opposed to the exercise of domination. Developing a crucial
theme of the Leninist conception, according to which the proletariat
should ‘sacrifice’ its ‘corporative’ interests (Di Biagio 2004),17 in ‘Some
Aspects of the Southern Question’ Gramsci writes:
17 This study, commenting on the origin of this concept, reconstructs the influence of
Georgij Valentinovič Plekhanov on Lenin due to the famine of 1887, which could not
leave the working class indifferent to the dramatic plight of the peasant masses.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 29
The proletariat will destroy the Southern agrarian bloc (…) but only if
it has the ability to break up the intellectual bloc that is the flexible, but
extremely resistant, armour of the agrarian bloc. (CPC, p. 158; SPW 1921–
1926, p. 462)
Intellectuals develop slowly, far more slowly than any other social group, by
their very nature and historical function. They represent the entire cultural
tradition of a people, seeking to resume and synthesize all of its history.
This can be said especially of the old type of intellectual: the intellectual
born on the peasant terrain. To think it possible that such intellectuals, en
masse, can break with the entire past and situate themselves totally upon
the terrain of a new ideology, is absurd. (CPC, p. 158; SPW 1921–1926,
p. 462)19
Until the summer of 1926, Gramsci’s horizon of ideas was the ‘actu-
ality’ of world revolution. As we have seen, albeit with all the variants
suggested by the differences between East and West, the hegemony of
the proletariat formula was inscribed within a transition strategy which,
all things being equal, would repeat the sequence of the two Russian
revolutions of 1917—the democratic one in February and the socialist
one in October.20 But with the essay on the Southern question Gramsci
seems to want to leave this approach behind him and it is possible to
imagine that he did not publish this text immediately, not because he
considered it incomplete (Giasi 2007), but because he was aware of the
radical innovation that the ‘political question of the intellectuals’ intro-
duced to the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ schema. Probably the new
research that he had started was inspired by his preoccupation, which had
been growing during 1926, about the turn being taken by the political
struggle within the Bolshevik leadership and the ever more authoritarian
and restrictive character that the Soviet State was assuming, in his view
to the point of compromising the construction of socialism. As we have
already mentioned, the essay on the Southern question was contempo-
rary with his correspondence with Togliatti of October 1926. Towards
the end of the essay there is a passage in which the overlap of themes
between the two texts is particularly marked: ‘The proletariat, as a class’,
writes Gramsci ‘is poor in organizing elements. It does not have its own
stratum of intellectuals, and can only create one very slowly, very painfully,
after the winning of State power’ (CPC, p. 158; SPW 1921–1926, p. 462).
This concept is essential within the general conception of the letter. His
fear, transparent and not to be underestimated, was that after the death
of Lenin, the Bolshevik élite might be incapable of developing a cultural
hegemony, of creating a new stratum of intellectuals capable of attacking
19 Cf. also CPC, pp. 144–145 and 150–158; SPW 1921–1926, pp. 448–489 and 453–
462.
20 On Gramsci’s collocation in international communism between 1924 and 1926, cf.
Vacca (1999b, pp. 94–98 and 123–127).
32 G. VACCA
21 A. Gramsci, ‘Political Bureau of the PCd’I to the Central Committee of the Russian
Communist Party’ (14 October 1926): ‘The questions that today are being posed to
you, may be posed tomorrow to our Party. In our country, too, the rural masses are the
majority of the working population. Furthermore, we shall find ourselves faced with all
the problems inherent in the hegemony of the proletariat in a form that will certainly be
more complex and acute than in Russia itself, since the density of the rural population in
Italy is enormously greater, since our peasants have a very rich organisational tradition and
have always succeeded in making their specific weight as a mass felt very considerably in
the political life of the nation. This is because in Italy the organisational apparatus of the
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 33
In Russia the sacrifice was far greater because the economic develop-
ment and modernization of the countryside was a long-term task and
the working class in power constituted but a tiny minority of the popula-
tion. As he himself writes, the clash taking place within the Bolshevik élite
allowed the adversaries of communism to make shrewd use of the social
contradictions that were shaking Soviet power to undermine the Western
proletariat’s trust in Soviet Russia, and in the possibility of constructing
socialism (Daniele 1999, pp. 406–407; GTW , p. 371 and SPW 1921–
1926, p. 428). His condemnation of the harshness of the clash and alarm
about the risks of a split in the party arose from his conviction that the
NEP was indeed the right way forward, and from the acknowledgement
that the processes of economic and social differentiation generated by the
introduction of limited capitalist development in the countryside involved
a small minority of the peasantry who, thanks to the workers’ State’s
control over banks, industry and foreign trade, did not represent a real
risk for the alliance between the proletariat and the immense masses of
poor peasants. (‘In What Direction is the Soviet Union Developing?’,
CPC, pp. 319–323; ‘The Peasants and the Dictatorship of the Prole-
tariat’, CPC, pp. 324–328, SPW 1921–1926, pp. 412–416). Were the
‘Bolshevik nucleus’ to split however, the risks of economic and corpora-
tive regression would involve all its components; indeed, the tone of the
discussion highlighted a fracture—common to all the factions—between
the ‘Russian question’ and the destiny of world revolution, and this cast
doubt upon both the possibility that Russia would continue with the
construction of socialism, and upon the international proletariat’s orien-
tation towards Russia. By placing majority and opposition on the same
plane, Gramsci was attacking Stalin’s vision of ‘socialism in one coun-
try’ and accusing the entire Soviet leadership of ineptitude because to a
varying extent it was saturated in nationalism:
Comrades, in these last nine years of world history you have been the
organisational element and driving force of the revolutionary forces of
all countries. The role you have played has no precedent in the entire
history of humankind that equals it in breadth and depth. But today you
are destroying your own work, you are degrading and running the risk of
nullifying the leading role that the CP of the USSR had gained through the
church has two thousand years of tradition behind it and is specialised in propaganda and
the organisation of the peasants in a way that bears no comparison with other countries’.
34 G. VACCA
impetus of Lenin. In our opinion the violent passion of the Russian ques-
tions is making you lose sight of the international aspects of the Russian
questions themselves, is making you forget that your duties as Russian mili-
tants can and must be carried out only within the framework of the interests
of the international proletariat. (Daniele 1999, p. 408; GTW , p. 373 and
SPW 1921−1926, pp. 429–430; emphasis in Gramsci’s original manuscript
letter)
22 Although it is not fundamental here to examine in depth the elements of the differen-
tiation that developed between Gramsci and Togliatti on the ‘Russian question’, it should
be remembered that the clash within the Bolshevik élite concerned above all the prospects
of the USSR’s foreign policy as the European political situation changed from Rapallo
to Locarno, the differing perceptions of the ‘war risk’ and the different evaluations of
the need, and the manner in which, to accelerate the construction of the Soviet State.
Furthermore, their disagreement was based on differing evaluations of the prospects for a
‘world revolution’, which both Stalin and Bukharin thought was at that point blocked, at
least in the short term. The differentiation between Gramsci and Togliatti derived above
all from Togliatti’s adhesion to the positions of Stalin and Bukharin, which matured in
an increasingly convinced manner in the course of 1926. Cf. Vacca, ‘Gramsci a Roma,
Togliatti a Mosca’ in Daniele (ed.) (1999a); Pons (2009, pp. 209–228); and Vacca (2014).
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 35
Today, nine years after October 1917, it is no longer the fact of the seizure
of power by the Bolsheviks that can revolutionise the Western masses,
because this is already taken for granted and has had its effect; today the
conviction (if it exists) is politically and ideologically active that, once the
proletariat has taken power, it can build socialism. The authority of the
P[arty] is bound up with this conviction, that cannot be inculcated into
the broad masses by the methods of scholastic pedagogy but only through
revolutionary pedagogy, in other words only through the political fact that
the R[ussian] P[arty] as a whole is convinced and is fighting in united
fashion. (Daniele 1999, pp. 438–439; GTW , p. 381 and SPW 1921–1926,
p. 440)23
directly involved the State itself, might have arisen from the difficul-
ties inherent in the original approach to the alliance between workers
and peasants. We have seen how Gramsci, in ‘translating’ that alliance
‘into Italian historical language’, had not limited himself to the economic
content of the ‘concessions’ to be made to the peasants, but had projected
them onto the form of the State. In the essay on the Southern ques-
tion an awareness surfaces that Lenin’s theory of the hegemony of the
proletariat, which arose on the terrain of backward Russia, posed the
problem of the alliance between the workers and the peasants in simpli-
fied and inadequate terms. Of course, given the collapse of the Tsarist
Empire, it had not been necessary to decipher and disaggregate the hege-
monic scaffolding that bound the peasants to the Tsar’s power. But when
the construction of the new State began, the ‘primordial and gelatinous’
society of peasant Russia had made its weight felt and Lenin’s embry-
onic outline of the hegemony of the proletariat had turned out to be
inadequate. While no civil society even remotely comparable to that in
the West had existed in Russia, in the construction of socialism—of an
advanced industrial society based on an alliance between city and coun-
tryside—the problem of the relationship between State and civil society
erupted in all its complexity. By introducing the theme of the intellec-
tuals into the theoretical schema of historical materialism in his study on
the Southern question, Gramsci was beginning to show his awareness of
the inadequateness of the different currents of Marxist thought, including
Bolshevism, regarding the problems of the State. Unequal development
and differential analysis were paradigms of Leninism. But the ‘translation
into Italian historical language’ of Leninism upset and complicated its
parameters. The innovation of the theoretical schema of historical mate-
rialism had been elaborated on a national terrain and this emphasized
its particularities; but it appears evident that Gramsci, spurred on by the
crisis of the Russian Party, had undertaken a theoretical revision which
concerned the international workers’ movement as a whole.
24 For dating of the second and third indexes, entitled Raggrupamenti di materia, see
Francioni (1984a, p. 142).
25 In a letter to her family, datable to 12–16 November 1926, Tanja Schucht, sending
detailed information about Gramsci’s last week in freedom, had already talked of the possi-
bility of having him set free, as if in the milieux of the Russian Embassy (for whom she
worked) and of the Italian party this was considered a matter of course: letter published
in L’Unità, 7 November 2008, G. Vacca (ed.).
38 G. VACCA
26 Both authors base upon new philological research the hypothesis that the reference to
Pascoli is to his poem entitled Per l’eternità and that with the expression für ewig Gramsci
wanted to inform the Party’s Foreign Centre that his intellectual research, of which he was
beginning to perceive the heterodoxy, would be oriented toward continuing the struggle
for communism.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 39
In addition, given the close link between the essay and the correspon-
dence of October 1926, it is possible to imagine that he wanted to add
new arguments to back up his position. The separation of the Notebooks
from Gramsci’s political biography is a result of the criteria adopted for
the first edition (1948–1951), and it was done on purpose, to render
them less explosive vis-à-vis the dominant Stalinist orthodoxy. After the
publication of the critical edition (1975), of the first editions of Gramsci’s
correspondence and of that between his correspondents, this separation
and the idea that the Notebooks contained thought that was disconnected
from political matters have now finally been abandoned. Nevertheless,
their isolation from Gramsci’s political biography warped their interpre-
tation for a great length of time; the legacy of the thematic edition still
weighs upon the reception of Gramsci’s thought (especially outside Italy);
and the copious legends about für ewig accumulated over time have
contributed to no small degree to this deformation. For me, the most
likely hypothesis would seem that the plan of studies outlined in the letter
to Tanja of 19 March 1927 was formulated in such a way as to suggest to
a watchful gaoler (i.e. Mussolini) that Gramsci might abandon his polit-
ical commitment, in order to facilitate his judicial situation and all the
attempts to obtain his release. The reference to für ewig appears only
twice in Gramsci’s letters, at the beginning of his detention. However
after he was sentenced to twenty years in prison and was able to conceive
of a ‘systematic’ programme of research, he made no further use of this
metaphor. There is therefore more than one reason to suppose that his
emphasis on ‘disinterested’ study and the reiteration of für ewig was a
dual message, directed at both his political interlocutors and his captors,
rather than the main characteristic of his subsequent prison writings.
It is certainly true that the study topics announced in that letter are in
the notes of the Notebooks and they all revolve around the history of the
intellectuals. However I do not believe it possible to start the interpreta-
tion of the Notebooks (which Gramsci began to write two years later) from
March 1927. As a source for the Notebooks project however, the corre-
spondence can be used in a linear fashion, starting from when Gramsci
was sentenced, after which his letters could no longer have any influ-
ence on the outcome of his trial; having received the authorization to
write in his cell (January 1929), he was able to devise a real, long-term
plan of studies. In our opinion the most important indication contained
in the letter of 19 March 1927 is instead the reference to the essay on
the Southern question. After having declared that he wanted to develop
40 G. VACCA
27 On the relations between Gramsci and Sraffa and on the political role of the latter,
cf. Vacca (2012, pp. 47–62).
28 Sraffa’s wrote: ‘Some years ago Nino (…) wrote you a letter detailing his plan of
readings and studies. It would be interesting to know how he developed that programme;
and (…) to know what his present one is. Try asking him’.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 41
taste in literature’, Gramsci went on to add: ‘if you examine them thor-
oughly, there is a certain homogeneity among these four subjects: the
creative spirit of the people in its diverse stages and degrees of develop-
ment is in equal measure at their base’. He then asks Tanja: ‘What do
you say of all this? (…) Let me know your impressions; I have great faith
in your good sense and in the soundness the validity of your judgment’
(Gramsci and Schucht 1997, p. 63; Gramsci LfP, p. 84).29 We know that
Gramsci had informed Sraffa of his studies and via him Togliatti, who
continued to be his main interlocutor (Sraffa 1991, p. 225).30 It is hard
to believe that Gramsci was interested in the opinion of Tat’jana on such
complicated topics; in particular, the reference to ‘popular creative spirit’
anticipates a crucial theme of Gramsci’s thought on politics and the party:
the reflections on the relation between ‘spontaneity and conscious lead-
ership’ which recur in the Notebooks. As we will see later (Chapter 2),
those notes foreshadow a sharp critique of the transformation undergone
by the Soviet party between the end of the Twenties and the early Thir-
ties. How can we not detect in that expression of March 1927 the will to
confirm the positions expressed in the correspondence of October 1926
and the intention to explore in greater depth the themes outlined in the
essay on the Southern question? And to whom could they have been
addressed if not to Togliatti? Further, up until Gramsci’s arrest the essay
had remained unknown to Togliatti, who at the time was in Moscow. But
in March 1927 Togliatti was in Paris directing the party’s Foreign Centre,
Grieco had taken charge of Gramsci’s essay and the leadership of the party
must have studied it thoroughly. It is therefore possible to give credit to
the hypothesis that Gramsci mentioned it because he thought it should
be published and was asking the party to do it (Rossi and Vacca 2007,
pp. 16–17).
However I must repeat that if, as is correct, use is made of the corre-
spondence to reconstruct the origin of the Notebooks, the first letter to
which we can refer without excessive caution is that of 25 March 1929:
this is both because it follows only a brief interval after the drafting of the
list of 16 topics for study outlined on the first page of Notebook 1, and
29 Translation modified to read ‘good sense’ (‘buon senso’) rather than ‘common sense’
(senso comune’), often used by Gramsci with negative connotations.
30 Sraffa, letter to Palmiro Togliatti, 4 May 1932.
42 G. VACCA
because the topics are grouped into three lines of research which regard
the most important innovations of the Notebooks. In fact Gramsci wrote:
I’ve decided to concern myself chiefly and take notes on these three
subjects: (1) Italian history in the nineteenth century, with special attention
to the formation and development of intellectual groups; (2) the theory
and history of historiography; (3) Americanism and Fordism. (Gramsci and
Schucht 1997, p. 333; Gramsci LfP Vol 1, p. 257)
The first topic groups together points 2 and 3 of the initial index
of the Notebooks: ‘Development of the Italian bourgeoisie up to 1870’
and ‘Formation of Italian intellectual groups: development, attitude’. The
second topic is a literal reference to the first point of the index written at
the beginning of Notebook 1, while the third refers to point 11 of the
Index. It is hard to believe that the selection and ordering of the topics
was casual. In the letter of 19 March 1927 Gramsci had already made
it known that he wanted to ‘develop in an ordered manner the thesis’
‘outlined’ in the essay on the Southern question, and two years later
he was announcing that he was doing precisely that. Further, by placing
‘the theory of history and historiography’ at point 2, he was communi-
cating in code that he intended to rethink the materialistic conception of
history, with regard to which the topics mentioned in the essay of 1926
represented a significant innovation. Finally, by indicating ‘Americanism
and Fordism’ as the third topic he signalled that his field of research was
world history and that he intended to study the potentialities of Amer-
ican industrialism in greater depth as a possible answer to the emerging
problems of the great crisis. There was enough here to arouse Togliatti’s
interest, but a few months later the tenth Plenum of the International
was held and the Italian party was forced to abandon Gramsci’s strategy.
The ‘turning point’ of 1930 was rejected by Gramsci and, from the redis-
covery of the two reports that his brother Gennaro wrote for the Foreign
Centre of the Party after the visit to Turi, we know that Gramsci was
requesting greater political communication with the party, but also that
Togliatti was informed of Gramsci’s opposition to the ‘turning point’ and
possessed sufficient elements to be able to guess his most profound moti-
vations (Rossi and Vacca 2007, pp. 207–218). We also know that the
subterfuge excogitated by Gramsci to inform Togliatti of how his research
was proceeding was the suggestion that topics should be proposed to him
on which they could communicate in code. The topics were proposed to
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 43
Gramsci by Sraffa, who had agreed them beforehand with Togliatti (Sraffa
1991, p. 225). This is the context in which on 11 July 1931, Sraffa began
to ask Gramsci to inform him about the point of arrival of his research on
the intellectuals and he asked again with insistence on 23 August (Sraffa
1991, p. 23). Gramsci replied on 7 September that at the centre of his
reflection were the theme of hegemony and its connection with the theory
of the intellectuals. The drift of his research had already been condensed
in a note in Notebook 6, dated August 1931 and entitled ‘Concept of
State’, where he had written that the ‘State does not mean only the appa-
ratus of government, but also the “private” apparatus of hegemony or
civil society’ (Q6§137, p. 801; PN Vol. 3, p. 108). In the letter to Tanja,
he summed up his thought as follows:
I greatly amplify the idea of what an intellectual is, and do not confine
myself to the current notion that refers only to the preeminent intellec-
tuals. My study also leads to certain definitions of the concept of the State
that is usually understood as political Society (or dictatorship; or coercive
apparatus meant to mold the popular mass in accordance with the type
of production and economy at a given moment) and not as a balance
between the political Society and the civil Society (or the hegemony of
a social group over the entire national society, exercised through the so-
called private organizations, such as the Church, the unions, the schools,
etc.), and it is within civil society that intellectuals operate especially (Ben.
Croce, for example, is a sort of lay pope and he is a very effective instru-
ment of hegemony even if from time to time he comes into conflict with
this or that government, etc.). (Gramsci and Schucht 1997, pp. 791–792;
LfP Vol. 2, p. 67)
The letter continued listing further crucial topics of the Notebooks; but
here we need to attend to the part concerning the theory of the intel-
lectuals. It confirms that the focus of the Notebooks is the development
of the theory of hegemony, that its cornerstones are the theory of the
intellectuals, the theory of civil society and the theory of the State, and
above all, it indicates the trajectory along which Gramsci was developing
a general theory of hegemony. This trajectory is summarized at the end
of the digression on the topics of study, where Gramsci signals that the
concept of hegemony was being developed as a general analytical tool
for politics and history: ‘I present these comments’ he wrote to Tanja
‘to convince you that every period of history that has unfolded in Italy,
44 G. VACCA
from the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento, must be viewed from this
monographic standpoint” (loc. cit.).
Compared with the Marxist vulgate, Gramsci’s research displayed its
original and heterodox character writ large. The concept of State summa-
rized in the letter, from a Leninist viewpoint, was momentous. The
most immediate confirmation of this would appear to come from Sraf-
fa’s response, in which he invited Gramsci to condense the results of
his research on intellectuals into an essay so it could be transmitted to
the party; on the theses illustrated in his letter, he limited himself to
writing: ‘The latest letters from Nino, although very interesting, require
no response’ (Sraffa 1991, p. 36).
What reply could Togliatti have given to a letter in which Gramsci was
informing him about his revision of Leninism? Yet Sraffa’s understatement
makes it clear that the message had been received.
The position that Hegel ascribed to the intellectuals has been of great
importance, not only in the concept of politics (political science) but also
in the entire conception of cultural and spiritual life; (…) With the advent
of Hegel, thinking in terms of castes and “States” started to give way to
thinking about the “State”, and the “aristocrats” of the State are precisely
the intellectuals. (Q8§187, p. 1054; PN Vol. 3, p. 343)
Credit must be given to Croce’s thought for (…) forcefully [having] drawn
attention to the study of the factors of culture and ideas as elements of
political domination, to the function of the great intellectuals in political
life, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the necessary form of
the historical bloc. Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons
of historical interpretation that must always be borne in mind in the
study and detailed analysis of history as it unfolds if the intention is
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 45
One can say that not only does the philosophy of praxis not exclude ethico-
political history, but that, indeed, in its most recent stage of development
it consists precisely in asserting the moment of hegemony as essential to
its conception of the State and in attaching ‘full weight’ to the cultural
factor, to cultural activity, to the necessity for a cultural front alongside the
merely economic and political ones. (Q10I§7, p. 1224; FSPN , p. 344)
31 The heading given in Gerratana’s critical edition of the Notebooks (Gramsci 1975)
omits the words after ‘Intellectuals’, here reinstated after consultation of the anastatic
edition of Gramsci’s manuscript.
32 On this theme, Cf. E. Garin (1997).
46 G. VACCA
the change in the historical situation upon which Gramsci was reflecting
between the end of the Twenties and the early Thirties. His salient data
were as follows: the fall of the myth of the ‘world revolution’, the rise of
the economic power of the United States, the consolidation of the Soviet
State, the birth of the corporativist State and the strengthening of fascism
thanks to the Lateran Pacts, the world crisis of 1929–1932 and the rise
of Hitlerism in Germany. These events determined a shift in perspective
which impacted on the conception of hegemony, linking it to the concept
of ‘war of position’.
The concept of war of position is brought into focus in a group of
notes written between November 1930 and the end of 1931, and in a
subsequent note in summer 1932, where the concept of ‘civil hegemony’
is introduced. The ‘war of position’ concept, Gramsci wrote in October
1931, ‘is also (if one can say so) the point of intersection of strategy
and tactics, both in politics and in the art of war’ (Q6§155, p. 810; PN
Vol. 3, p. 117 and SPN , p. 239). The military metaphors that charac-
terized Bolshevik language from which Gramsci drew the notion of ‘war
of position’ bear witness to the cultural influence exerted by the Great
War (Procacci 1981; Pons 2012). In any case, he continues, ‘in politics
the error’ of not understanding the passage to the ‘war of position’ as
the present-day form of the struggle for power ‘stems from an inaccurate
understanding of the nature of the State (in the full sense: dictatorship
+ hegemony)’ (Q6§155, pp. 810–811; PN Vol. 3, p. 117 and SPN ,
p. 239). This reflection is part of the revision of the concept of State
about which Gramsci had informed the Foreign Centre in the already
cited letter of 7 September 1931. But the concept of ‘war of position’
also redefines his relationship with Lenin and ‘Leninism’.33 Only a few
days earlier he had written a note significantly entitled ‘Past and Present.
The transition from the war of maneuver (frontal attack) to the war of
position – in the political field as well’ (Q6§138, pp. 801–802; PN Vol.
3, pp. 109 and SPN , pp. 238–239),34 in which his critique of Trotsky’s
‘permanent revolution’—with Trotsky defined as ‘the political theorist of
frontal assault, at a time when it could lead only to defeat’—would seem
rather to be addressing Stalin’s policy and the Comintern’s strategy after
have seen, for Gramsci constituted the link between the construction of
socialism in Russia and ‘revolutionizing’ the masses of the world. We have
drawn attention to this passage because Gramsci has been (and partially
still is) interpreted as the theorist of ‘revolution in the West’ as much by
those who posit his presumed conversion in prison to social democracy
or liberalism (Tamburrano 1963; Anderson 1976; Lo Piparo 2012), as by
those who have claimed that the theory of hegemony was nothing more
than a cosmetic makeover of the dictatorship of the proletariat (Salvadori
1977; Pellicani 1977).35 But Gramsci’s revision of Marxism knew no
geopolitical limits. Indeed, in a more advanced phase of his reflection,
returning in Notebook 13 to the comparison between ‘war of position’
and ‘war of manoeuvre’, he wrote that the October Revolution consti-
tuted the last episode of a victorious ‘war of assault’, because at this
point the ‘war of position’ should be considered the universal form of
the struggle for power. ‘The last occurrence of the kind [‘war of manoeu-
vre’] in the history of politics’ he wrote ‘was the events of 1917. They
marked a decisive turning-point in the history of the art and science of
politics’ (Q13§24, p. 1616; SPN , p. 235). Clearly we have before us the
reformulation of a concept that he had already put forward in the article
‘Two Revolutions’ in L’Ordine Nuovo, 3 July 1920; but while then, his
preoccupation had been to relativize the Russian Revolution in order to
enhance the movement of the Councils, now that world revolution was
no longer on the agenda, ‘war of manoeuvre’ and ‘war of position’ desig-
nated not only geo-strategical differences but also two diverse historical
periods. This conclusion is confirmed by another note in the same Note-
book, which we shall have time to focus on in the final section, dedicated
to summarizing the changes that had made the ‘permanent revolution’
formula anachronistic and led to its being replaced by the ‘civil hegemony’
formula (Q13§7, p. 1566; SPN , pp. 242–243).
35 On the use of this interpretation by Latin American military élites in the cycle of
dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, cf. J. Aricó (2011).
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 49
on the concept of ideology, which in that text Marx had only mentioned
in passing.36 It concerns the assertion that since historical change arises
from the contradiction between the development of the ‘material forces
of production’ and ‘existing relations of production’, it is on ‘the terrain’
of ‘ideological forms’ that ‘men become conscious of this conflict and
resolve it’ (Gramsci 2007, Vol. 2, p. 746). Reference to this principle
first occurs in paragraph 15 of Notebook 4, and Gramsci, going beyond
Marx’s thought, transforms it into the concept of the reality of ideolo-
gies;37 then, in August 1932, in polemic with Croce, he links it to the
concept of hegemony. For Croce, he writes, ‘ideologies for the governed
are mere illusions, a deception they are subject to, while for the governors
they are a willed and conscious deception’.
For the philosophy of praxis [on the other hand], ideologies are anything
but arbitrary; they are real historical facts which must be combated and
their nature as instruments of domination exposed, not for reasons of
morality and so on, but precisely for reasons of political struggle so as to
make the governed independent of the governors, in order to destroy one
hegemony and create another as a necessary moment of the overturning
of praxis. (Q10II§41xii, p. 1319; FSPN , p. 395)
36 It should be noted that Gramsci was not familiar with Marx and Engels’s German
Ideology, written between 1845 and 1846 but published in Moscow in 1932, although
he had read a summary of the first essay, made by Gustav Mayer for the anthology of
texts by Marx that was published in Moscow in 1924, edited by Vladimir Adoratskij: cf.
Antonini (2018).
37 ‘Marx explicitly states that humans become conscious of their tasks on the ideological
terrain, (…) which is hardly a minor affirmation of “reality”’ (Q4§15, p. 437; PN Vol.
2, p. 157).
50 G. VACCA
But in 1930 the Risorgimento had not yet been analysed in terms
of hegemony; Gramsci tended rather to derive theoretical generaliza-
tions from the historical analysis of a national event, and this does not
imply the emancipation of the concept of hegemony from its sociolog-
ical bonds. Indeed paragraph 44, specifically dedicated to placing the
Risorgimento within a wider historical context, is entitled ‘Political class
leadership before and after assuming government power’. In the re-
elaboration contained in Notebook 19 the paragraph is instead entitled
‘The Problem of Political Leadership in the Formation and Development
of the Nation and the Modern State in Italy’. Gramsci therefore places
at the centre of his analysis the problem of the ‘connection between the
various political currents of the Risorgimento, and of their relations with
the homogeneous or subordinate social groups existing in the various
historical sections (…) of the national territory’ (Q19§24, p. 2010; SPN ,
pp. 55–56). It is clear that this reformulation of the theme reflects a
substantial evolution of the concept of hegemony. What Gramsci intends
to emphasize is that deeper study of the ‘connection between the various
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 51
The most important conclusion that Gramsci draws from this analysis
contains the nucleus of the theory of the intellectuals:
other classes and creating an environment of solidarity among all the intel-
lectuals, with ties of a psychological (…) and often of a caste character.
(Q1§44, p. 42; PN Vol. 1, pp. 137–138)
But it is not our intention here to follow all the developments of this
conception. Rather we are interested in taking note of its implications
concerning the State and ‘civil society’. In a ‘B text’ (i.e. a single draft
text) in Notebook 6, datable to December 1930, Gramsci writes that in
his notes the concept of civil society is ‘… often used (…) in the sense
of political and cultural hegemony of a social group over the whole of
society, as the ethical content of the State’ (Q6§24, p. 703; PN Vol. 3,
p. 20 and FSPN , p. 75). For Gramsci, unlike for Marx, civil society does
not embrace all production relations, but is situated between them and
the State: ‘Between the economic structure and the State with its legis-
lation and its coercion stands civil society’ (Q10II§15, p. 1253; FSPN ,
p. 167). If the State is posited as the union between ‘political society’
and ‘civil society’, the distinction between them must be clarified. Now,
writes Gramsci, although ‘in actual reality, civil society and State are one
and the same’, nevertheless the two concepts concern different aspects of
the life of the State. Schematically they can be indicated as the moment of
‘force’ and the moment of ‘consent’, which however cannot be separated
and exist intertwined in various ‘combinations’. The distinction between
State and civil society is therefore ‘methodological’, and not ‘organic’
(Q13§18, pp. 1589–1590; SPN , p. 160).39
It is natural that, in developing the concept of hegemony, Gramsci
should formulate a conception of the State which is neither that of the
State as force of liberal ‘realism’, nor that of the State as machine of the
Marxist and Leninist tradition:
The State is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create
favourable conditions for the latter’s maximum expansion. But the devel-
opment and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and
presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a develop-
ment of all the “national” energies. In other words, the dominant group
is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate
groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process
39 For Gramsci the fundamental error of liberalism consists in the fact that it transforms
the ‘methodical’ distinction between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ into an ‘organic’
one.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 53
7 Interdependence, ‘Civil
Hegemony’, ‘International Hegemony’
The nexus between hegemony and interdependence comes over as partic-
ularly effective in the analysis of the Risorgimento because the birth of
the Italian nation-State was accomplished at a time when the European
panorama was already dominated by a constellation of states that had
come into being thanks to the impulse of the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars. The Italian Risorgimento therefore constitutes an
emblematic case of the birth of a modern State within the framework of
a ‘European nexus’—the ‘Concert’ of Nations—which made the Italian
State possible but at the same time irremediably conditioned it. The
note which we are about to examine, in its initial drafting, is entitled
‘The Conception of the State according to the Productivity [Function]
of the Social Classes’. Gramsci emphasizes here the fact that, unlike
in the processes of national State formation in other countries (espe-
cially France), the protagonists of the process in Italy had been not
the economic bourgeoisie, but the intellectual strata, who thus became
the interpreters of the most advanced political and economic situa-
tions in Europe (Q1§150, pp. 132–133; PN Vol. 1, pp. 229–230). In
the re-elaboration contained in Notebook 10, the ‘European nexus’ is
investigated more in detail and interdependence is analysed in greater
depth.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 55
In my view Ilyich understood the need for a shift from the war of maneuver
that had been applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position,
which was the only viable possibility in the West (…) This, I believe, is the
meaning of the term “united front” (…) Ilyich, however, never had time to
develop his formula. One should also bear in mind that Ilyich could only
have developed his formula on a theoretical level, whereas the fundamental
task was a national one. (Q7§16, p. 866; PN Vol. 3, pp. 168–169 and
SPN , pp. 237–238)
Reading the rest of the note, it might appear that Gramsci is reiterating
the relativization of Lenin’s work on the basis of the East-West paradigm;
but in reality in the course of three years his thought had evolved so much
that a lexical innovation was required to distinguish his theory of politics
from that of Lenin. In fact the ‘historical break’ from which Gramsci now
moves is war alone. The elements that characterize the change do not
go back to the war-Russian Revolution coupling, but to the historical
period of 1870–1915, and the accent falls on the degree of development
achieved by the European workers’ movement in the pre-war decades.
42 Chapter 3 in this volume is dedicated to the development of this theme. Cf. also
Q10II§41v, p. 1308 (FPSN , p. 390) for the use of this specific phrase.
43 On these themes I suggest the writings of Francesca Izzo and Fabio Frosini which
are analysed in the ‘Afterword’ (‘Gramsci studies in Italy’), the last part of the current
volume.
60 G. VACCA
the war itself is a manifestation of this crisis, even its first manifestation;
the war was in fact the political and organisational response of those who
were also responsible for the crisis (…) One of the fundamental contradic-
tions is this: that whereas economic life has internationalisation or rather
cosmopolitanism as a necessary premiss, State life has developed ever more
in the direction of ‘nationalism’, of ‘self-sufficiency’, and so on. One of
the most apparent features of the ‘present crisis’ is nothing other than
the intensification of the nationalistic (nationalistic State element) in the
economy. (Q15§5, pp. 1755–1756; FSPN , pp. 219–220)
unleashed a world war for the control over markets. Thus both in the case
of the great crisis and that of the Great War, a deficit of political hege-
mony was evidenced and at the same time, the instrument to surmount
it was identified in the principle of interdependence. Among the most
significant consequences of this assumption was the change in the notion
of ‘great power’, in which military force appeared to be a substitute for
economic and cultural power. There are three ‘elements for calculating
the hierarchy of power among States’ writes Gramsci: ‘1) extension of
territory, 2) economic power, 3) military power’. The latter ‘sums the
value of territorial extension (with an adequate population, naturally) and
the economic potential’. But ‘military power’ is not a primary attribute
of a ‘great power’, both because it is subordinate to economic power and
because that which characterizes a ‘great power’ is its ‘ability to imprint
upon its activities an autonomous direction, of which all other powers,
great and minor, have to undergo the influence and repercussions’. The
ranking of a power therefore derives not from military supremacy, but
from the influence that the country succeeds in exerting over all the
others. The concept of hegemony, projected onto the system of inter-
national relations, subtracts it from the presumed ‘anarchy’ of traditional
‘realism’. In the international arena, States do not act solely in the name
of force but according to their capacity to influence and condition the
life of other peoples. This renders consent decisive even in international
relations; in fact ‘the great power is the hegemonic power’ inasmuch as
it is at the head of ‘a system of alliances and accords of greater or lesser
extension’ (Q13§19, pp. 1597–1598).
The power factor cannot be separated from the logic of war; indeed
Gramsci writes, ‘these elements are calculated within the perspective of
a war’ (loc. cit.). But the application of hegemony to the system of
international relations tends to exclude the inevitability of war. Gram-
sci’s knowledge of Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege was second-hand, but in the
conception of war as the continuation of politics by other means, he finds
confirmation of his political vision; therefore, in an only apparently para-
doxical fashion, he reads into this a confirmation of the possibility of
avoiding war.45 Moving in the same direction are the considerations on
the concept of the ‘great power’, whose prerogative consists in being able
to irradiate such economic, political and cultural influence as to achieve
its objectives without needing to resort to war: ‘… to possess all the
elements which, within the limits of the predictable, provide the certainty
of victory, means having the potential of diplomatic pressure of a great
power’ capable of ‘obtaining part of the results of a victorious war without
needing to fight’ (loc. cit.).
Finally, his attention towards cultural power must be underlined. ‘An
“imponderable” element’ Gramsci observes ‘is the “ideological” position
a country occupies in the world at any given moment, inasmuch as it is
considered to represent the progressive forces of history’; and he cites the
example of France ‘during the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic
period’ (loc. cit.). Thus in his eyes, the only country possessing the
attribute of ‘great power’ then was the United States of America. As
we have seen, in 1920, with President Wilson’s project defeated and
the United States once again isolationist, Gramsci thought revolutionary
Russia might exercise world ‘ideological’ primacy. But at that point, world
history revolved around the dialectic between the United States and
Europe, and in the heart of the great crisis it was the United States that
emerged as the only power capable of representing ‘the progressive forces
of history’. Gramsci, reacting in a celebrated note from Notebook 22 to
the widespread anti-Americanism among the European cultured classes,
claims that:
Thus the Germans won almost all the battles brilliantly, but lost the war’ (Q19§28,
p. 2052, SPN , p. 88).
64 G. VACCA
In our times there is almost no happy day (but is this crisis not linked,
rather, to the collapse of the myth of limitless progress and the optimism
that depended on it; in other words, is it not linked to a form of reli-
gion rather than to the crisis of historicism and critical consciousness? In
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 65
the crisis of national economies, affecting even the heart of the world
system, the United States, and the British Empire, which was shaken by
uprisings by its colonial peoples (‘Italy and the United States’, ON 1919–
1921, pp. 302–305). The forms of economic and political dependence
that had seemed to have taken the place of the system of interdependence
existing before the war thus revealed themselves to be precarious and
unsustainable. Given the degree of integration that had been achieved by
the world economy, interdependence might be temporarily modified into
exasperated forms of asymmetry, but these did not create a new system
of equilibria, indeed they made the crisis of the structure of the world
more widespread, more serious and longer lasting. A solution could only
be found by reactivating the circuits of globalization.
The manifestations of the crisis appeared even more numerous and
complex within the State. The most significant of these concerns the
political subjectivity of the worker and peasant masses analysed in the
first section of this chapter.46 The changes mentioned exerted pressure
in favour of socialism, which however could not be a force for the recon-
struction of the State because socialism ‘is against the national economies,
which stem from the national State and are conditioned by it’ (‘The State
and Socialism’, L’Ordine Nuovo, 28 June–5 July 1920, ON 1919–1920,
p.118; PPW , p. 102). What is more, the war had bureaucratized and
militarized economic and civilian life, mobilized the petty bourgeoisie
and conferred upon it undeserved command functions which it had no
intention of giving up, and which is why it turned its weapons against
the proletariat (‘The Events of 2–3 December. The Petty Bourgeoisie’,
ON 1919–1920, pp. 350–352). The petty bourgeoisie lay at the origin
of the Fiume [Rijeka] affair47 which unleashed the ‘civil war’, and it
was preparing to become the mass base of fascism, with backing from
State apparatuses and big capital, thus demonstrating that the liberal
bourgeoisie’s ‘national function’ had evaporated (‘National Unity’, ON
1919–1920, pp. 230–233).
a crisis of the parties and Gramsci took as his point of reference the Italian
experience of the post-war period (Q4§69, p. 513; PN Vol. 2, pp. 241–
242). But when—two or three years later—he returned to the theme,
framing it within a general reflection on politics, his analysis extended
to include Europe and presupposed the development of the concept of
hegemony as a general theory of politics and history. The paradigmatic
form of the crisis of the State is the crisis of the hegemony of the ruling
classes, and while the process presented in different ways in each country,
the content was the same.
The fact that the crisis happens in all countries more or less simul-
taneously is further proof of the pervasiveness of interdependence. The
judgement configured by a crisis of hegemony, i.e. the loss of trust by
those represented in the old élites of the representatives, brings us back
to the nexus between the theory of intellectuals and theory of hegemony
which constitutes the fulcrum of our reconstruction.
However the crisis of the State is at the centre of the politics of the
twentieth century not only because it manifests itself everywhere, but
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 69
also because it finds no solution. The main reason why it has no solu-
tion resides in the economic-corporative limit shared by the fundamental
classes. In the case of the bourgeoisie, it derives from the crisis of the
State, which determines the loss of the shell within which its ability to lead
was formed: ‘The “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical
terrain of the parliamentary regime’ writes Gramsci ‘is characterised by a
combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally,
without force predominating excessively over consent’. But ‘in the period
following the World War, cracks opened up everywhere in the hegemonic
apparatus, and the exercise of hegemony became permanently difficult
and aleatory’ (Q13§37, p. 1638; SPN , p. 80, note). The reason is that
in the post-war period the bourgeoisie was not, and no longer perceived
itself as being, the hegemonic subject of world history. With the war, and
because of the events that it sparked—from the Russian Revolution to
the break-up of colonial empires—the globalization of capitalism reached
a historical limit. On the other hand, the conflict between the cosmopoli-
tanism of the economy and the nationalism of politics appeared to the
liberal bourgeoisie to be insoluble, clinging as it was to the nation-State
and to its traditional form of domination, namely oligarchic democracy.
The ethical underpinning of the equilibrium between force and
consent was the belief in the universality of bourgeois civilization and
the worldwide projection of its élites in ‘a period in which the spreading
development of the bourgeoisie could seem limitless, so that its ethicity or
universality could be asserted: all mankind will be bourgeois’ (Q8§179,
pp. 1049–1050; SPN , pp. 258–259). But with the war, this epoch came
to an end because ‘competitive capitalism’ was finished and there was ‘a
return to the concept of the State as pure force (…). The bourgeois class
is “saturated”: it has not only stopped growing – it is breaking down; not
only has it stopped assimilating new elements, but it is losing part of itself”
(Q8§2, p. 937; PN Vol. 3, p. 234 and SPN , p. 260). Among those he
holds responsible for this phenomenon are the ‘great intellectuals’, among
whom the figure of Benedetto Croce stands out: terrified by the spread
of mass society, he attempted to contrapose a new European cosmopolis
of the cultured classes against the crisis of the nation-State; but in this
way he assisted the detachment of the intellectuals from the dominant
classes and contributed to making the crisis of the State ‘catastrophic’. For
its part, the proletariat was also without historical initiative because the
Soviet Union limited the proletariat’s action to the economic-corporative
sphere:
70 G. VACCA
48 As is known, of Trotsky’s work, Gramsci in prison was only able to read La mia
vita [My Life], published by Mondadori (cf. ibid., pp. 365–366), but received a great
deal of information about his activities and his thought from the press that he followed
habitually. Among the daily newspapers he was allowed to read was Corriere della Sera,
from which the articles from Moscow by Salvatore Aponte have been gathered together
in volume form (Aponte 2010). But Gramsci habitually read the Foreign Ministry press
review and until 1932 he was able to continue to read the daily newspapers. On Trotsky’s
criticisms of the Comintern’s policy in that period see his 1931 pamphlet La chiave della
situazione è in Germania (Germany, the Key to the International Situation), in L. Maitan
(ed.) (1962, pp. 272–293) and in various English-language reprints.
72 G. VACCA
class. He dwells ‘on certain key points of the science and art of politics’
raised by the Stalin interview.
The reader will recall that in 1923 the ‘translation into Italian histor-
ical language’ of the tactic of the United Front had started out from
criticism of the Comintern’s centralism, to which Gramsci attributed at
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 73
The metaphor seems to suggest the idea that the Comintern not only
did not work, but could not work in any case because internationalism
cannot be expressed through a centralized body.
So how should the ‘international perspective’ be understood? Or the
‘international directives’ that define it? We need to turn our gaze towards
the concept of ‘democratic centralism’, which in Gramsci’s opinion,
49 The first draft of this paragraph (Q1§54, p. 67), containing slight variations from
the second one here, may be consulted in English in PN Vol. 1, p. 164.
74 G. VACCA
This analysis gives rise not only to a productivist strand that could be
used in the debate opened up among the currents of fascism and those
of Italian economic thought, but also to a reconsideration of internation-
alism which, though based on ‘the Italian question’, assumed the value of
an indication that was valid for the entire communist movement. Indeed
Gramsci suggests cosmopolitanism as the true antidote to nationalism,
and what is more important, links the national function of the prole-
tariat to this concept. He denies that the Risorgimento ‘of necessity led
to nationalism and militaristic imperialism’, recalling that the traditions
of the Italian people are cosmopolitan and that Mazzini and Gioberti
had even attempted to ‘graft the nationalist myth onto the cosmopolitan
tradition (and) create the myth of reborn Italy’s mission within a new
European and world Cosmopolis’. But above all to nationalists and fascists
he objects that ‘the conditions of a military expansion in the present and
the future do not exist and do not appear to be in the process of forma-
tion’. ‘Modern expansion is of a financial-capitalist nature’. Then, linking
together ‘theory of war’ and the theory of crises, he continues:
50 The FSPN translation is a very short excerpt from Q19§5, nowhere near Gramsci’s
entire paragraph (trans. note).
76 G. VACCA
It is clear to me that this reasoning concerns not only the Italian ‘case’,
but also the mission of the modern proletariat. The distance that separates
this position from the catastrophic interpretation of the crisis and the
bandying of the ‘risk of war’ that characterized the Comintern’s policy
is abyssal (cf. Romano 1999; Di Biagio 2004) but we would see as even
more important his assertion that ‘modern cosmopolitanism’ consists in
the attempt ‘to collaborate in the reconstruction of the world in an
economically unitary fashion’. This is the point of arrival of the reflec-
tion that began with the World War and sedimented in the analysis of
the contradictions between the ‘cosmopolitanism of the economy’ and
the ‘nationalism of politics’. It is a point of arrival that redefines the
line of action of the workers’ movement because to ‘to collaborate in
the reconstruction of the world in an economically unitary fashion’ is
an effective response to the crisis of the post-World War I period both
from a national point of view, and an international perspective. It is
clear why the concept of cosmopolitanism is a better fit than that of
internationalism: given the global dimension of the then-contemporary
crises and wars, communist internationalism—the only internationalism
that had a worldwide network—appeared unable to formulate definite
proposals; indeed, it remained caught up in a vision of the inevitability
of war, was forced to repeat the ‘Russian experiment’ and—despite the
outward show of the ‘voluntarism of the third period’51 —inertly awaiting
the recreation of those conditions. It is hardly necessary to underline how
this reflection returns to the theme of the relation between the bour-
geoisie and cosmopolitanism that we mentioned in the first section when
analysing the 1916 article, ‘The Great Illusion’. The fact that Gramsci
had finally decided to replace the formula of ‘proletarian international-
ism’ with that of a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ would appear to confirm his
conviction that globalization of the economy might mark the historical
limit of the bourgeoisie. In fact the crisis of the nation-State raises the
theme of superseding it: the theme of supranational sovereignty, not of
the dictatorship of the proletariat. Returning to the considerations on the
interview with Stalin, Gramsci specifies in terms of what, and to what
extent, the proletariat must ‘nationalize’ itself:
1970). With the end of the myth of ‘world revolution’ any Europeanist
perspective seemed to have fallen away; instead in the Notebooks it resur-
faces, based on an analysis of the processes of integration of the world
economy stimulated by ‘Americanism’. I believe it can be said that it was
the dialectic between the United States and Europe that drew Gramsci’s
attention to the processes of economic regionalization as articulations of
the new world economy, of which he was trying to pick up the premoni-
tory signs. Supranational sovereignty is considered a concrete opportunity
for overcoming the contradiction between the ‘cosmopolitanism of the
economy’ and the ‘nationalism of politics’, and therefore also for resolving
the crisis of the State.
References
Agosti, A. (1979). La Terza Internazionale. Storia documentaria (Vol. III.i).
Roma: Editori Riuniti.
Anderson, P. (1976, November–December). The Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci. New Left Review I/100, 5–78.
Angell, N. (1910). The Great Illusion (original [1909] Europe’s Optical Illusion).
London and New York: Putnam’s.
Angell, N. (1913). La grande illusione. Studio sulla potenza militare in rapporto
alla prosperità delle nazioni (Preface by Arnaldo Cervesato). Bari: Humanitas.
Antonini, F. (2018). Gramsci, il materialismo storico e l’antologia russa del 1924.
Studi Storici, 59(2), 403–435.
Aponte, S. (2010). Il “Corriere” fra Stalin e Trockij 1926–1929 (L. Canfora,
Ed.). Milano: Fondazione Corriere della Sera.
Aricó, J. (2011). Il ruolo degli intellettuali argentini nella diffusione di Gramsci
in America Latina. In Kanoussi et al. (Eds.), Gramsci in America Latina
(pp. 93–130).
Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1975). Gramsci et l’État. Paris: Fayard; Eng. trans.
Gramsci and the State (1980). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Carlucci, A. (2014). Gramsci and Languages. Chicago: Haymarket.
Daniele, C. (Ed.). (1999). Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca. Il carteggio del
1926. Torino: Einaudi.
Di Biagio, A. (2004). Coesistenza e isolazionismo. Mosca, il Comintern e l’Europa
di Versailles (1918–1928). Roma: Carocci.
Di Biagio, A. (2008). Egemonia leninista, egemonia gramsciana. In F. Giasi
(Ed.), Gramsci nel suo tempo (Vol. I, pp. 379–402).
Di Biagio, A. (unpublished). L’egemonia leninista. Roma: Fondazione Istituto
Gramsci.
1 THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY 79
Togliatti, P. (1962). La formazione del gruppo dirigente del PCI . Roma: Editori
Riuniti.
Togliatti, P. (1994). Sul fascismo. Roma-Bari: Laterza.
Trotsky, L. D. (1962 [19311 ]). La chiave della situazione è in Germania. In L. D.
Trockij, Scritti 1929–1936 (L. Maitan, Ed., pp. 272–293). Torino: Einaudi.
Vacca, G. (1991). I “Quaderni” e la politica del ’900. In id., Gramsci e Togliatti.
Roma: Editori Riuniti.
Vacca, G. (1994). La lezione del fascismo. In P. Togliatti, Sul fascismo. Roma-
Bari: Laterza.
Vacca, G. (1999a). Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca. Introductory essay in
Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca (C. Daniele, Ed.). Torino: Einaudi.
Vacca, G. (Ed.). (1999b). Gramsci e il Novecento (2 Vols.). Roma: Carocci.
Vacca, G. (2012). Vita e Pensieri di Antonio Gramsci 1926–1937 . Torino:
Einaudi.
Vacca, G. (2014). Togliatti e Gramsci. Raffronti. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore.
The Great Illusion (La grande illusione), Avanti!, 24 July 1916, in CT , 446–
448.
The Italian Crisis (La crisi italiana), L’Ordine Nuovo, 1 September 1924 (report
to the Central Commttee of the PCI of 13–14 August), in CPC, 28–39; SPW
1921–1926, 255–264.
The Italian Situation and the Tasks of the PCI—The “Lyons Theses”, in CPC,
pp. 488–513; SPW 1921–1926, 340–375.
Italy and the United States (La settimana politica [xi]. Italia e gli Stati Uniti),
L’Ordine Nuovo, 8 November 1919 (written jointly with Palmiro Togliatti),
in ON 1919–1920, pp. 302–305.
The League of Nations (La Lega delle Nazioni), Il grido del popolo, 19 January
1918, in CF , 569–572.
The Mezzogiorno and Fascism (Il Mezzogiorno e il fascismo), L’Ordine Nuovo,
15 March 1924, in CPC, 171–174; PPW , 260–264.
National Unity (La settimana politica [viii]. ‘L’unità nazionale’), L’Ordine
Nuovo, 4 October 1919, in ON 1919–1920, 230–233.
Norman Angell, Il grido del popolo, 23 March 1918, in CF , 773–774.
The New Religion of Humanity (La nuova religione dell’umanità), Il grido del
popolo, 13 July 1918, in NM , 172–177.
The Party’s First Five Years (Cinque anni di vita del partito), L’Unità 14 May
1926, CPC, 89–113; SPW 1921–1926, 379–399.
The Peasants and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Notes for Il Mondo) (‘I
contadini e la dittatura del proletariat [Noterelle per il Mondo]), L’Unità, 17
September 1926, in CPC, 326–328; SPW 1921–1926, 412–416.
The Populars (La settimana politica [x] I Popolari). L’Ordine Nuovo, 1
November 1919, in ON 1919–1920, 272–274.
The Problem of Power (Il problema del potere), L’Ordine Nuovo, 29 November
1919, in ON 1919–1920, 338–343.
The Programme of L’Ordine Nuovo (Il programma dell’Ordine Nuovo), L’Ordine
Nuovo, 14 and 28 August 1920, in ON 1919–1920, 619–628; PPW , 178–
186.
Readings (Letture), Il Grido del Popolo, 24 November 1917, in CF , 451–455.
Towards a Renewal of the Socialist Party (Per un rinnovamento del partito
socialista), L’Ordine Nuovo, 8 May 1920, ON 1919–1920, 510-517; PPW ,
155–162, and New Left Review I/51, September–October 1968, 51–56.
A Return to Freedom, Avanti!, 26 June 1919, in ON 1919–1920, 105–108.
The Revolution Against “Capital” (La rivoluzione contro il “Capitale”), Avanti!,
24 December 1917, in CF , 513–516; SPW 1910–1921, 34–37 and PPW ,
39–42.
Russia and Europe (La Russia e l’Europa), L’Ordine Nuovo, 1 November 1919,
in ON 1919–1920, 267–271.
84 G. VACCA
Vincenzo Cuoco called the revolution that took place in Italy as a reper-
cussion of the Napoleonic wars a passive revolution. The concept of passive
revolution, it seems to me, applies not only to Italy but also to those other
countries that modernize the State through a series of reforms or national
wars without undergoing a political revolution of a radical-Jacobin type.
Examine how Cuoco develops the concepts with regard to Italy. (Q4§57,
p. 504; PN Vol. 2, p. 232)
1 This paragraph bears the title ‘The historical relation between the modern French
State created by the Revolution and the other modern European States’.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 87
… express the historical fact that popular initiative is missing from the
development of Italian history, as well as the fact that “progress” occurs as
the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebel-
liousness of the popular masses – a reaction consisting of “restorations”
that agree to some part of the popular demands. (Q8§25, p. 957; PN
Vol. 3, p. 252)
If writing history means making history of the present, the great book of
history is the one which in the present moment helps emerging forces to
become more aware of themselves and hence more concretely active and
effective. (Q19§5, pp. 1983–1984)
indifferentism, since the whole way of posing the question may induce
a belief in some kind of fatalism, etc. Yet the conception remains a dialec-
tical one—in other words, presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary, a
vigorous antithesis which can present intransigently all its potentialities
for development’ (Q15§62, p. 1827; SPN , p. 114). Therefore not only
is the submission of subaltern classes reversible, but the elaboration of the
concept has the aim of increasing their awareness of the reasons for their
subjection and preparing their liberation from it. As with the concept
of hegemony, we are in the ambit of a revision of Marxism elaborated
via a reinterpretation of Marx’s philosophy. Indeed the concept of ‘pas-
sive revolution’ is deduced from the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy, and while the concept of ‘hegemony’
is linked to the Marxian theory of ideology, that of ‘passive revolution’
arises out of the two other methodological canons contained in this text:
Yet to apprehend the real extent of the innovation introduced with the
concept of ‘passive revolution’ we need first of all to compare the anal-
ysis of the history of Italy developed in the Notebooks with the outlines
contained in Gramsci’s writings prior to his arrest.
defines the historical problem of the Italian nation, which despite becoming
a unitary State remains territorially divided into a North and a South.
‘The newly-formed Italy had found in absolutely antithetical conditions
the two stumps of the peninsula that were being unified after more than
a thousand years’, but after Cavour’s policy was abandoned, both the
internal and the external policy of the new State aggravated this dualism:
‘Industrial protectionism raised the cost of living for the Calabrian peasant
without agricultural protectionism (…) being capable of re-establishing
the equilibrium’, while the colonial wars of the previous thirty years had
dissipated the remittances of emigrants, thus aggravating the public debt
problem, a historical legacy of unification. The Mezzogiorno was aban-
doned to great landed estates (latifundia), while industrial development
was concentrated in the North thanks to the ‘colossal profits’ of the war
industry. To govern Italian dualism, Gramsci concluded, it was necessary
first of all to abandon protectionism and secondly, to ‘ensure that the
war for so-called political liberty (…), instead of punishing Germany, too
strong and too well organized industrially to fear any harm, does not
instead strike that part of Italy whose redemption and elevation is always
the subject of so much lip service’ (‘The Mezzogiorno and the War’, CT
228–231).2
Consistent with this approach is his characterization of national polit-
ical forces, both the traditional ones (liberals and socialists), and those
that emerged shortly before or immediately after the war (the national-
ists and the Popular Party). Let us start with the socialists. The historical
function of Italian socialism is described in the article ‘Socialism and Italy’
(CF 350–351), published in Il Grido del Popolo on 22 September 1917.
While the liberal ruling class had made the North—South dualism perma-
nent, socialism had been the one unifying force of the nation, above all
because of its role in the realm of ideas:
Fifty years ago there was no such thing as an ‘Italian people’ – it was just
a rhetorical expression. There was no social unity in Italy then; there was
only a geographical unity. There were just millions of individuals scattered
throughout Italian territory, each leading his own life, each rooted in his
2 More in-depth research is needed on the influence upon this schema of Antonio Labri-
ola’s ‘fourth essay’, Da un secolo all’altro. Considerazioni retrospettive e presagi. Frammento
(From One Century to the Next. Retrospective Considerations and Presages. A Fragment ),
Labriola (1925, pp. 97–128) and of Labriola’s Storia di dieci anni (1975).
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 91
own soil, knowing nothing of Italy, speaking only his own local dialect,
and believing the whole world to be circumscribed by his parish boundary.
(…)
Italy has become a political unity, because a part of its populace has
united around an idea, a single programme. And socialism, socialism alone,
was able to provide this idea and this programme. Socialism has meant that
a peasant farmer from Puglia and a worker from Biella have come to speak
the same language; that, in spite of the distance that separates them, they
have come to express themselves in the same way when confronted by the
same problem and to arrive at the same judgement of men and events.
(‘Socialism and Italy’, CF , pp. 350–351; PPW , pp. 28–29)
The origin of the situation described resides in the fact that the bour-
geoisie of the Risorgimento was not an ‘economic class’, as in Great
Britain or the United States, but was weak, fragmented and corpo-
rativist owing to the ‘retarded’ capitalist development of the country.
Whence the authoritarian character of the State and protectionism, the
political projection of the ‘corporativism’ of the national bourgeoisie. In
two highly important articles of 5 and 21 December 1917, ‘Bourgeois
Reformism’ and ‘To Clarify Ideas on Bourgeois Reformism’, Gramsci
turned his attention to the Nationalist Party, founded in 1910, suggesting
a significant comparison with reformist socialism, since they seemed to
be mirror-image manifestations of ‘corporativism’—bourgeois the former
and working class the latter—united in their protectionism. But what was
novel about the nationalists was that they gave the Italian bourgeoisie a
unitary political conscience, in other words, for the first time, a party:
‘The development of nationalism in Italy’ he writes in the first article
‘has marked and continues to mark the rise of the bourgeois class as a
combative, conscious body’. Nevertheless
… the Italian bourgeoisie, in its development, had just reached the corpo-
rativist stage. The nationalists are the paladins of the “rights” of the
bourgeois corporations, which they make coincide with the “rights” of
the nation, just as many reformists identified a single category of workers
with the whole of the proletariat, for whom they tried to obtain benefits.
(‘Bourgeois Reformism’, CF , pp. 470–471)
The split between politics and economics is the greatest cause of the confu-
sion and the corruption of behaviour which have characterized the last fifty
years of Italian history. The bourgeoisie has had no backbone, no clear and
rectilinear programmes, because it was not a real class of producers, but an
assembly of shabby politicians
(…)
Economic nationalism—Gramsci concludes—thus performs the same
function in the bourgeois camp as reformism has performed in the prole-
tarian one. (‘To Clarify Ideas on Bourgeois Reformism’, CF , pp. 481–482)
and his first reactions lingered on, because they gave rise to a whole series
of reflections, research, and attempts which subsequently prepared medi-
tated and well-ordered action’. Finally, he underlined the fact that Cavour
‘freely approached parties other than his own, did not retreat from inter-
mediate solutions, nor disdain bargaining with his adversaries, yet in doing
this he was never inspired by a generic desire to gag the opposition, to
wear it down and to achieve senseless and servile unanimity, quite the
opposite. (…) From Cavourian politics the parties exited better defined
and more distinct while no politician of the time was thereby belittled’
(‘Behind Giolitti’s Scenario’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 290–291).
While the liberals and nationalists are accused of corporativism, the
birth of the Italian Popular Party (PPI) was hailed as a great progres-
sive event—as the birth of a ‘national’ party which, flanking the socialists,
favoured the development of the democratic nation with a backbone
provided by big popular parties. A little after Don Luigi Sturzo’s speech
in Milan, which heralded the founding of the PPI,3 Gramsci published a
long article in the Piedmont edtion of Avanti! containing one of the most
lucid and far-sighted analyses of his ‘early writings’. ‘That the Catholics
should constitute a political party’ he writes ‘is the greatest event of Italian
history after the Risorgimento’. The arguments underpinning so signifi-
cant a judgement led to a prediction that the PPI would be able to take
the Liberal Party’s place, thus offering the Italian bourgeoisie a modern
party of government. In the crisis of the liberal State ‘the cadres of the
bourgeois class break formation: domination of the State will be harshly
contested, and it cannot be excluded that the catholic party, thanks to its
powerful national organization concentrated in a few able hands might
achieve a victory in the competition for the lay liberal and conservative
strata of the bourgeoisie, who are corrupt, lack bonds of discipline in
ideas, lack national unity, and constitute a noisy hornet’s nest of lowlife
gangs and private interest cliques’. But even greater attention is deserved
by his evaluation of the historical process that led to the founding of the
PPI: in Gramsci’s opinion the emergence, with the birth of the unitary
State, of the Roman question, had had deleterious consequences:
The religious myth, as the widespread consciousness that informs the activ-
ities and organisms of individual and collective life with its values, dissolves
– in Italy as elsewhere – and becomes a given political party. It becomes
laicized, gives up its universality, in order to become the practical will
of a particular stratum of the bourgeoisie which proposes, by conquering
State government, not only the preservation of its general class privileges,
but also the preservation of the particular privileges of its members. (‘The
Italian Catholics’, NM , p. 459)
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 95
4 Cfr. E. Fattorini (1999), ‘Gramsci e la storia della chiesa novecentesca’, in Vacca (Ed.),
Gramsci e il Novecento, pp. 145–156; id. (2008), ‘Gramsci e la questione cattolica’, in
Giasi (Ed.), Gramsci nel suo tempo, Vol. I, pp. 361–378.
96 G. VACCA
5 The article analyses popular reaction to the monarchist nationalist paramilitary squads
against the socialist deputies who at the inaugural sitting of the 25th legislature had
demonstrated against the monarchy.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 97
For ease of exposition we have left to one side the subject of foreign
policy; yet it is perhaps more important than domestic policy because it
is inscribed within a vision of world history that is inspired, as we have
already seen (Chapter 1), by the global interdependence paradigm. The
conditionalities of the international context become ever more binding
for the life of nations and, qualitatively if not quantitatively, foreign
policy assumed a preponderant role in the analysis of the history of Italy.
Between 1919 and 1920 foreign policy was a crucial theme and first of
all, Gramsci turns his attention to the international changes due to the
war. We have already examined the question of the crises of national
sovereignty generated by the formation of the Anglo-American ‘bloc’ and
the consequences for Italy of the strangling of Germany. The other prob-
lems that Gramsci addressed in L’Ordine Nuovo concern the Balkan policy
and relations with Russia, protesting against the nationalistic foreign
policy of the senior ministers Sidney Sonnino and Vittorio Emanuele
Orlando. The Balkan projection of Italy’s foreign policy was inspired by
the ideas of Mazzini: equal international dignity, liberty, independence
and solidarity among all European nations. But it was also justified by the
economic needs of the country and the legitimate objective of exerting an
equilibrating function in the ‘Europe of nations’. The project for a Danu-
bian customs union, supported by France in an anti-German perspective
and opposed by Italy for equally nationalistic reasons, provided him
with the opportunity for the sarcastic article of 18 May 1920, ‘Pietà
per i venturi nipoti’, Gramsci’s criticism is ferocious because, with the
aim of exerting ‘imperialist’ influence in the Danubian and Balkan area,
Orlando’s government had increased the isolation of Italy enshrined in
the Treaty of Versailles. Gramsci observes that by ‘opposing the aspira-
tions of the Danubian peoples to join in a customs union, opposing the
national resurgence of Yugoslavia and Greece, Italy has come to find itself
completely isolated in the Mediterranean area’, while it should have been
making itself the paladin of the rights of the minor nationalities (‘Pity
on the Grandchildren of the Future’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 28–30). The
problem of relations with Russia was more complex. In this case his target
was the Orlando government’s adhesion to the coalition formed by Great
Britain, France, the United States and Japan to suffocate the republic
of the soviets. In June 1919, Orlando had supported recognition of the
counter-revolutionary government of Admiral Kolčak. Gramsci criticized
this decision harshly not only for the ideology underlying it but because
it ran counter to the geostrategic interests of Italy:
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 99
The problem of relations between Italy and Russia is less about the
Republic of the soviets and more about Russia as a great power, and
can be inscribed within a highly significant vision of relations between
Russia and Europe. Gramsci casts his gaze over the last two centuries and
develops a geopolitical argument centring on two categories—land and
sea. Joining the debate of the time, he sides with those who criticize the
supremacy of the powers that dominate the seas. Here we find the first
elements of the notion of ‘great power’ which, as we have seen, was to be
the basis of his concept of international hegemony; in addition, he asserts
that despite British ‘thalassocracy’, its maritime supremacy, Russia has
been the decisive power for European equilibria since the time of Peter
the Great. Peter had moved ‘the political axis of the North, by shifting
primacy over that northern Mediterranean which is the Baltic Sea, from
the Vasa ships of Sweden to the Romanovs of Russia’. Then, by opposing
Islamic power in the eastern Mediterranean, ‘and in the regions of the
major European rivers’ he had made Russia the dominant economic and
political power of ‘this new line of force, which extends from the Baltic
to the Black Sea’. Gramsci defines this as the ‘the line of internal seas,
which are indeed the vital lungs of the continent’. Since then, Europe
had been dominated ‘by the political and economic activity of the new
social body of modern Russia, and therefore the entire European polit-
ical and economic set-up had not ceased (…) to feel the influence of
this formidable new power, which acted and exerted pressure from the
east’. The validity of this analysis is proven by the decisive events of
European history, from the Seven Years’ War to the Napoleonic wars,
at the conclusion of which Russia had been the true arbiter of Euro-
pean equilibria. But if we look closer, Gramsci continues, this had also
happened in the Great War, since Russia’s function had been decisive both
at its beginning (‘without the Russian alliance, Great Britain would never
have undertaken the struggle’ against Germany), and at its end, since
‘only the Russian collapse determined America’s effective and positive
100 G. VACCA
intervention. And when the armed conflict was over, the Russian Revo-
lution took the place of the war as the decisive element in the present
European situation’. He concludes his analysis with the hypothesis that
the ‘Russian experiment’ might give rise to a historical cycle in Europe
comparable with the Age of Restoration. Observing the influence of the
Russian Revolution on the ‘proletariat of the Two Worlds’ and on Euro-
pean public spirit, Gramsci wrote: ‘Something similar took place in the
spirits of the European middle and cultured classes in reaction to the
events of revolutionary France, which marked the third estate’s attack on
the privileged orders and monarchical absolutism’ (‘Russia and Europe’,
ON 1919–1920, pp. 267–271).
∗ ∗ ∗
7 In this article Gramsci draws attention to the role of D’Annunzio, Giolitti and naturally
of fascism.
8 Gramsci, ‘Il popolo delle scimmie’. The title is a reference to the monkey people
(‘Bandar-log’) of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, one of his favourite authors.
102 G. VACCA
9 The system of leadership of local fascist squads by a ‘ras’, a word used in Italian from
around the time of Menelik II’s anti-imperialist victory, and borrowed from the Ethiopian
title for a leader or dignitary.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 103
i.e. an ‘organic crisis’ (Q13§23, pp. 1602–1613; SPN , pp. 210–218 [last
part on pp. 167–168]).10
Politically, the broad masses only exist insofar as they are organized within
political parties. The changes of opinion which occur among the masses
under pressure from the determinant economic forces are interpreted
by the parties, which first split into tendencies and then into a multi-
plicity of new organic parties. Through this process of disarticulation,
neo-association, and fusion of homogeneous entities, a more profound and
intimate process of decomposition of democratic society is revealed. This
leads to a definitive alignment of classes in conflict for the preservation or
conquest of State power and power over the productive apparatus. (‘Parties
and Masses’, SF , p. 353; SPW 1921–1926, p. 71)
This initial period of the analysis of fascism concludes with the article
published in La Correspondance Internationale on 20 November 1922,
when Gramsci had already been in Moscow for six months, in which he
comments on the success of the March on Rome. The principal causes
of the advent of fascism are identified in the fusion between industrial
capitalism and agrarian squadrist violence, and in the manner in which
the army was demobilized by Bonomi, who channelled the entire officer
class, discharged with four-fifths of their salaries, towards squadrist orga-
nizations. Fundamental events are the birth of the Confindustria (General
Confederation of Italian Industry) in March 1920, in reaction to the
occupation of factories and to prevent agrarian capitalism from gaining
the upper hand; the return of Giolitti and the formation of a new bloc
between industrial and agrarian capitalism, guaranteed by a reprise of a
policy of compromise with the ‘working-class aristocracies’ alongside the
legitimization of fascist violence (cf. reprint ‘The Mussolini Government’,
International Gramsci Journal, 1(3), 2011, p. 30).11
10 Gramsci gave this paragraph the title ‘Osservazioni su alcuni aspetti della struttura
dei partiti politici nei periodi di crisi organica’ (‘Observations on Certain Aspects of the
Structure of Political Parties in Periods of Organic Crisis’).
11 The original English translation is in International Press Correspondence (Inprecorr)
3(102), 1922: 824 (now republished online as indicated in the text). The Italian version
referred to is a retranslation into Italian from the French (La Correspondance Interna-
tionale, 20 November 1922) as ‘Le origini del gabinetto Mussolini’, SF , pp. 528–30.
There is also an English translation from the Italian, in turn retranslated from the French,
under the title ‘Origins of the Mussolini Cabinet’, SPW 1921–1926, pp. 129–131.
104 G. VACCA
∗ ∗ ∗
12 The CPC version is retranslated from the French text published in La Correspondance
Internationale on 28 December 1923; English volumes of International Press Correspon-
dence are incomplete and this article is unfortunately missing from those we have been
able to consult in specialist libraries.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 105
13 Gramsci’s article ‘The Vatican’, published in March 1924 is missing from the
collections of International Press Correspondence that we have been able to consult.
14 The original English translation, the extract of which is reproduced here verbatim
was first published in International Press Correspondence, 4(25), p. 231 and is somewhat
different from the retranslation from the French of La Correspondance Internationale,
which reads: ‘The new Chamber will seek to assume the nature of a Constituent Assembly,
to create a fascist legality, to abrogate the Statute and the democratic liberties’. Variations
in translation and editorial freedom in this journal lead to different versions of the same
original text transmitted for publication. The ‘Statute’ referred to by Gramsci is the one
granted in 1848 by Carlo Alberto of Savoy, king of Sardinia, which then became the
National Constitution when the unified Kingdom of Italy came into being in 1861.
106 G. VACCA
of fascism that he developed after his return to Italy were initially system-
atized in the sole speech he made in the Chamber of Deputies (16 May
1925), in which he linked the crisis of the middle classes to the phases
that international capitalism was going through. The crisis was character-
ized by a deepening of the ‘general crisis of capitalism’ and harshened
stabilization policies. In Italy, as in Great Britain with the Conservative
government and in Germany with the Hindenburg presidency, the equi-
librium among the forces then in power shifted to favour agrarian reaction
while the middle classes were affected ever more seriously. This situa-
tion favoured the authoritarian turn of European political regimes and
Gramsci interpreted the draft bill on dissolving secret associations as proof
that the more fascism consolidated its power, the more it would incorpo-
rate freemasonry within its ranks; therefore the law’s real function was to
dissolve workers’ organizations (‘Origins and Aims of the Law on Secret
Associations’, CPC, pp. 75–84; Cultural Studies, 2007, 21(4/5), 779–
795). Over the years he had accumulated analytical elements that enabled
the identification of fascism’s tendency to transform itself into a regime.
Thus, in an article in L’Unità on 24 November 1925, he summed up
the evidence and delineated the salient features of a vision of the PNF
that communist tradition would sculpt into the formula of ‘a new type of
party of the bourgeoisie’, indicating in the creation of the corporativist
State the means for organizing and controlling the masses:
Fascism continues with ever greater determination to carry through its plan
of organic unification of all the forces of the bourgeoisie under the control of
a single centre (leadership of the Fascist Party, Grand Council and govern-
ment), and has achieved results in this sense which cannot be doubted.
(…) In the economic field, the plan of unification and centralization is
being accomplished through a series of measures which aim to guarantee
the unchallengeable supremacy of an industrial and land-owning oligarchy,
ensuring its control over the whole economy of the country (restoration
of the duty on grain; unification of banking; changes in mercantile law;
agreements for payment of debts to America, etc.). The second aspect of
fascist policy concerns the repression that is exercised upon the workers,
in order to prevent any kind of organization of their forces and to exclude
them systematically and permanently from any participation in political life.
(‘Elements of the Situation’, CPC, pp. 86; SPW 1921–1926, pp. 306–307)
In this regard Gramsci cites the law on trade unions, the law on associa-
tions, at this point already approved by the Senate, the introduction of the
108 G. VACCA
17 An obvious reference to the Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891.
18 The ‘Fasci siciliani di lavoratori’ were Sicilian workers’ organizations that came into
being on a democratic, libertarian and socialist basis mainly among the urban, rural and
sulphur-mining proletariat in the early 1890s.
19 The Vatican, refusing to recognize the unitary Italian State, decreed that it was ‘not
expeditious’ for catholics to vote in national political elections; the ban did not however
extend to local elections.
110 G. VACCA
convinced the Vatican to authorize the birth of the PPI. The situation
seemed to favour a ‘reformist’ solution to the post-war crisis.
All the ideological propaganda and the political and economic activity
of fascism are crowned by its tendency to “imperialism”. This tendency
expresses the need felt by the industrial/landowning ruling classes of Italy
to find outside the national domain the elements to resolve the crisis of
Italian society. It contains the germs of a war which in appearance will
be fought for Italian expansion, but in which fascist Italy will in reality
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 111
the party on the other. Of the former he highlights the plan to liquidate
the PNF or at least to neutralize it, by making fascism coincide with the
State, with Catholic Action acting as its mass base. The corollary of this
strategy was the solution of the ‘Roman question’. The party’s strategy
instead corresponded to pressure from its petty bourgeois base and aimed
to weld the party totally to the State. The upshot of this tendency might
be an exasperation of nationalism and of fascism’s ‘imperialist’ vocation
(‘A Study of the Italian Situation’ [Part I], CPC, pp. 113–120; SPW
1921–1926, pp. 400–411).20
Until the summer of 1926 his analysis of the history of Italy was mainly
based on the materialistic conception of history, that is to say, on a ‘class
analysis’. Moreover, his vision of fascism was determined by his conviction
of its instability. As we saw in the previous chapter, this schema started
to crumble in the essay on the Southern question, but its coordinates
would change profoundly only in the Notebooks, thanks to the introduc-
tion of the concept of ‘passive revolution’, which enabled him to elaborate
an organic vision of Italian history, and to revise many of his previous
opinions.
20 Part I of the preliminary text for Gramsci’s report, A Study of the Italian Situation,
to the PCI Executive Committee of 2–3 August 1926; this part was first published in Lo
Stato Operaio, March 1928 while Part II saw the light only in Rinascita, 14 April 1967.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 113
La Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 and the Storia d’Europa nel secolo
decimonono.21
The ‘loose notes’ and ‘jottings’ that he made each day soon ended
up in a ‘monographic’ interpretation of the Risorgimento sketched out
in paragraphs 43, 44 and 150 of Q1 (December 1929–May 1930).
These allow us to shed light on the epistemological depth of the ‘passive
revolution’ concept and its heuristic effectiveness.
A first sign of the innovation that sprang from combining the concepts
of ‘hegemony’ and ‘passive revolution’ can be seen in the changes to the
titles and collocation of those notes in the subsequent drafts of Q19 and
Q10. In Q1§43 the heading was ‘Types of Periodicals’. The re-elaborated
parts of Q19§26 are instead entitled ‘The City-Country Relationship
during the Risorgimento and in the National Structure’ (SPN , pp. 90–
102). Even more significant is the difference between the headings of
Q1§44 and of Q19§24: in the first draft the heading was ‘Political Class
Leadership before and after Assuming Government Power’ (PN Vol. 1,
pp. 136–51), in the second ‘The Problem of Political Leadership in the
Formation and Development of the Nation and the Modern State in Italy’
(SPN , pp. 55–84). Finally, Q1§150 was entitled ‘The Conception of the
State from the Standpoint of the Productivity [Function] of the Social
Classes’ (PN Vol. 1, pp. 229–230), while in the subsequent draft, the
text is incorporated into the final paragraph of Q10§61, entitled ‘Mate-
rial for a Critical Essay on Croce’s Two Histories, of Italy and of Europe’
(SPN , pp. 115–118). But before we analyse the variants more closely,
we should observe that these modifications bear witness to a progres-
sively more nuanced historiography compared to his original approach,
which had been faithful to the materialistic conception of history (the class
standpoint). This is not only a symptom of a more detached attitude, of
the progression of thought that is less influenced by an immediate polem-
ical urgency and is aimed at lasting analytical results. It is a sign that the
‘passive revolution’ concept introduces a very real paradigm shift. This is
apparent above all in Q19§24, which contains the point of arrival of his
21 The book by Ciasca, published in 1916, was in Gramsci’s possession before his arrest;
he requested it from Tanja during his preventive arrest on Ustica and second time after he
had started writing the Notebooks, so it was in his possession again; L’Italia in cammino
is among the books that Gramsci had with him in the San Vittore prison; he had the
1931 third edition of Omodeo’s book with him in prison; and had the 1928 edition of
Croce’s Storia d’Italia and the 1932 second edition of Storia d’Europa.
114 G. VACCA
base and the only person who intuited the importance of the agrarian
question was Carlo Pisacane (Q19§24, p. 2016; SPN , p. 65).25 Besides,
Gramsci did not think that the democrats, by calling on the peasant
masses to act, would have been able to lead the Risorgimento; instead
he believed—as we have seen in writings from before the Notebooks —that
if they had done so, the ‘compromise’ of the Risorgimento would have
been realized on more advanced bases (Q15§19, p. 1776; cf. Carlucci,
2014, p. 21 and note 119, p. 50).
Therefore the fundamental reasons why the leadership of the Risorg-
imento was firmly in the hands of the Moderates can be obtained from
the way Gramsci interprets their ‘European nexus’, from consideration of
the role played by Piedmont, and lastly from the ideological content of
the Moderates’ hegemony. The Risorgimento took place during the Age
of Restoration. In polemic with Omodeo, Gramsci argues that ‘from a
European viewpoint, it is the age of the French Revolution, not of the
Italian Risorgimento, of laissez-faire liberalism as a general conception
of life and as a new form of State and cultural civilization, and not only
of the “national” aspect of liberalism’ (Q19§2, p. 1961). Re-elaborating
Q1§150 and inserting it into Q10§61, he defines the Age of Restora-
tion as the exemplary cycle of passive revolutions. All the ‘modern States
of continental Europe’ which came into being during that period were
formed ‘by “successive waves” of reform (…) made up of a combination
of social struggles, interventions from above of the enlightened monarchy
type, and national wars – with the latter two phenomena predominating’.
This had allowed the bourgeoisie to ‘to gain power without dramatic
upheavals’, without any need of Jacobin terror, and if it had had to
come to terms with ‘the old feudal classes’, they had been ‘demoted from
their dominant position to a “governing” one’ (Q10II§61, p.1358; SPN ,
p. 115). The Italian Risorgimento was one of the last episodes of the
period; therefore the ruling class could only have been the liberal bour-
geoisie. Moreover, political direction of the unification process had been
in the hands of a State, not a ‘social group’, not the bourgeoisie, but Savo-
yard Piedmont; and this, Gramsci underlines, had given rise to its own
peculiar form of ‘passive revolution’, both because the delegation of lead-
ership to Piedmont was a consequence of the particularistic character of
25 The writings of Marx and Engels were an important influence on Gramsci’s approach:
cfr. F. Giasi, ‘I giudizi di Marx and di Engels sul Risorgimento e la loro fortuna’, in F.
Rocchetti (Ed., 2011), pp. 43–60.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 117
the bourgeoisie existing in the various States of the peninsula, and because
one State’s urge to play the leading role, a State endowed with a dynasty,
an army and a diplomatic corps, had given an authoritarian character to
the ‘historical bloc’ of the Risorgimento: ‘the fact that a State replaces
the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal […] is one of the
cases in which these groups have the function of “domination” demoted
from their dominant position to a “governing” one without that of
“leadership”: dictatorship without hegemony’ (Q15§59, p. 1823; SPN ,
pp. 105–106). Finally, the Moderates had unchallenged influence over the
democrats since, after 1848, ‘independence and unity’ had become the
shared objectives of all the forces of the Risorgimento, and therefore also
oriented the action of the democratic intellectuals (Q19§20, pp. 2006–
2007). To conclude, ‘[i]n any case Cavour acted eminently as a party
man. Whether in fact his party represented the deepest and most durable
national interests, even if only in the sense of the widest extension which
could be given to the community of interests between the bourgeoisie
and the popular masses, is another question’ (Q19§24, p. 2034; SPN ,
p. 84).
Gramsci warns that the ‘criteria’ ‘for investigating the respective polit-
ical “wisdom”’ of the Moderates and the democrats were obtained from
‘the analysis of certain elements of Italian history after unity’ (Q19§24,
pp. 2023–2024; SPN , p. 74). The need to explore the history of the
Risorgimento in greater depth stems from the need to understand the
origins of fascism better; let us see then how he reassesses the figures
of Crispi and Giolitti. Of Crispi’s period, he no longer limits himself to
criticizing the protectionism and anachronistic colonialism, but justifies
them, because they were consequent on the progressive aim of acceler-
ating the North’s industrial development. Crispi’s characteristic trait was
his unitary ‘obsession’, shared by the greatest Southern intellectuals of
the Risorgimento. Thus the true objective of his exasperated tariff protec-
tionism was the creation of a strong industrial base that could make Italy
more independent of international conditioning. Crispi, writes Gramsci,
‘did not hesitate to plunge the South and the Islands into a terrifying
commercial crisis, so long as he was able to reinforce the industry which
could give the country a real independence and which would expand the
cadres of the dominant social group’; this decision appears to be justified
because ‘it is the policy of manufacturing the manufacturer’, unlike that
of the historic Right which had ‘merely, and timidly, created the general
external conditions for economic development’. Despite the price paid by
118 G. VACCA
the Mezzogiorno, Gramsci recognizes that ‘Crispi gave the new Italian
society a real heave forward: he was the true man of the new bourgeoisie’
(Q19§24, pp. 2017–2018; SPN , p. 67).
In a more reflective vision of the history of Italy, less conditioned
by anti-Giolittian polemics and the struggle against fascism, Gramsci is
thus able historically to justify not only protectionism but also, to some
extent, Crispi’s colonial policy, because although Crispi had been unable
to give land to the peasants, he had involved them in the unification
of the country with the mirage of the colonies. Gramsci’s change of
mind extends to Giolitti, whom he considers to have continued Crispi
with ‘some corrections’ regarding economic and colonial policy (Q19§24,
pp. 2018–2019; SPN , pp. 67–69). His picture of Giolitti appears rather
bland compared with that of Crispi, but the virulence of his post-war
writings gives way to a more balanced judgement.
Crispi’s merits regarding the Mezzogiorno are instead the result of
a heterogenesis of ends. Industrial growth in the North had made the
‘misery’ of the rural masses of the Mezzogiorno incomprehensible to the
urban classes and fed the stereotype of the Southerners’ ‘biological infe-
riority’, which had been popularized by positivist sociology. It was not
the last among the reasons for neoidealist reaction, and for its influence,
which spread rapidly all over the country among the new generations of
a liberal and democratic orientation. With a noteworthy change of posi-
tion compared with ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, Gramsci
acknowledges that Croce and Fortunato had the merit of attempting ‘to
pose the Southern Question as a national problem capable of renovating
political and parliamentary life’ (Q19§24, pp. 2022–2023; SPN , p. 72),
and downplays his accusation that they detached the petty bourgeois
intellectuals of the Mezzogiorno from the peasant masses. This outcome
is instead attributed to Giolitti’s policy, which used State machinery to
support ‘ascarism’, that is, Giolitti’s control over the liberal deputies of
the Mezzogiorno, while Croce and Fortunato were blocked by a ‘fetishist
conception of unity’ (Q19§26, pp. 2038–2039; SPN , p. 95). This seems
to us a particularly significant change of opinion: it can be framed within
more general reflection on the centres of political leadership of the
intellectuals: compared with his position in the essay on the ‘Southern
question’, he retrenches the role of ‘great intellectuals’. His change of
opinion is due to the development of the theory of hegemony, which led
him to explain the moderates’ political supremacy in the Risorgimento by
the fact that, unlike the democrats, they were ‘condensed intellectuals’.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 119
Extending this approach to liberal Italy, the function of Croce and Fortu-
nato comes over as organic to Giolitti’s policy and subordinate to his
leadership. Instead, in the essay on the ‘Southern Question’, Croce and
Fortunato were the hegemonic figures of the Giolittian bloc and inas-
much as they were ‘great intellectuals’, they appeared to be superordinate
to it. This representation suffered from the limits of the traditional soci-
ology of the intellectuals, which Gramsci had removed from his research
programme in the Notebooks (Q19§26, p. 2041 and Q19§27, pp. 2046–
2047; SPN , pp. 93 and102–103, respectively).26 In conclusion, his vision
of Risorgimento and post-unitary Italy becomes more balanced. Recon-
sidering the ‘Southern initiative’ both in the Risorgimento and in the
political struggles of unified Italy, Gramsci now asserts that ‘the relative
synchronism and simultaneity’ between the political dynamics of North
and South ‘on the one hand shows the existence ever since 1815 of
a relatively homogeneous politico-economic structure; on the other it
shows how in periods of crisis it is the weakest and most marginal sector
which reacts first’ (Q19§26, p. 2037; SPN , p. 93). The definition of the
‘structure of Italian society’ therefore appears to be much more nuanced
than that outlined in the ‘The Lyon Theses’ and in ‘Some Aspects of the
Southern Question’.
∗ ∗ ∗
26 See also the letter to Tat’jana of 19 March 1927, in Gramsci (with T. Schucht),
Lettere. 1926–1935, op. cit., pp. 61–62; in English: Gramsci, Letters from Prison (1994a)
Vol. 1, pp. 83–84.
27 This theme is dealt with in great detail with a wealth of metaphors and analogies in a
paragraph written in 1933 and entitled Passato e presente. Storia dei 45 cavalieri ungheresi
(Past and Present. Story of the 45 Hungarian knights ); Q15§35, pp. 1788–1789.
120 G. VACCA
It should be borne in mind that the last two dates mark the begin-
ning of the Russian Revolution and the failure of the ‘March Action’
in Germany, and as Gramsci was writing these notes, Hitler was about to
take power. In any case, here Gramsci defines the conceptual frame within
which the analysis of fascism takes place in the Notebooks, and the centre of
his attention is corporativism. At the world level, Gramsci perceives a way
out of the crisis through the growth of American economic power and the
spread of Fordism; his analysis of fascism is therefore connected to that of
‘Americanism’. The passage we have quoted was written at the same time
as, and perhaps as a comment on, the second Ferrara conference28 : corpo-
rativism appears to Gramsci to be the economic policy with which fascism
could guide Italy towards a form of ‘programmed economy’ that would
not upset the fundamental inter-class relations of power and, even though
it did not give rise to any unambiguous and effective policies (Aquarone
2003, Chapters iii and iv; Santomassimo 2006, Chapters iii and vi), he
took it seriously and studied it with attention.
The first considerations on corporativism appear in a note that can be
dated to between December 1929 and February 1930, shortly after the
New York Stock Exchange crash. Gramsci hypothesizes that, through the
then ‘current corporativism’, fascism might realize a way of leading the
masses and the economy that was more unifying and modern than the
one followed by the ruling classes of the Giolittian era (Q1§43, pp. 35–
36; PN Vol 1, p. 131).29 Q1§135, the first devoted to Americanism,
in which Gramsci begins to analyse precisely in relation to corporatism
also dates from the same period. The idea came from two volumes by
N. Massimo Fovel, Rendita e salario nello Stato sindacale (1928) and
Economia e corporativismo (1929) about which he had learned from
an article by Carlo Pagni, ‘A proposito di un tentativo di teoria pura
del corporativismo’ (in Riforma Sociale, September–October 1929). In
1919 Fovel had tried to collaborate with L’Ordine Nuovo and was now
writing for the Corriere Padano of Ferrara, supporting corporativism as
the ‘premise for the introduction into Italy of the most advanced Amer-
ican systems of production’. In a note of Spring ’31, Gramsci defines him
as ‘that well-known political and economic adventurer’ (Q6§82, p. 754;
FSPN , p. 436), but precisely for this reason he paid particular attention
to his writings, because Fovel might be ‘backed (practically, not only
theoretically) by economic forces which support him and spur him on’
(Q1§135, p. 123; PN Vol. 1, p. 220). It is not easy to specify who they
might have been, but in any case the Corriere Padano was surrounded
by a coterie of supporters of the most dirigiste version of corporativism
and some of them, starting with Giulio Colamarino and Nello Quilici,
who edited the paper, were familiar with the Turin experience of the
Councils as a possible solution for the problems of industrial modern-
ization (Santomassimo 2006, pp. 68–73). ‘What I find interesting in
Fovel’s thesis’ writes Gramsci ‘is his conception of the corporation as an
autonomous industrial-productive bloc destined to resolve in a modern
way the problem of the Italian economic apparatus in an emphatically
capitalist manner, opposing the semi- parasitic elements of society which
take an excessively large cut of surplus value and the so-called “producers
of savings”’. Thus he seems to find in Fovel a supporter of Fordism in
tune with the positions adopted in his scattered notes on Americanism,
later collected in Notebook 22:
29 ‘… the current corporativism, with its consequent diffusion on a national scale’ of the
‘social type’ represented ‘by the trade-union organizers and political parties’, was creating
a link between the masses and the State ‘in a more systematic and consistent way than
the old trade-unionism could have achieved’ thus realizing ‘an instrument of moral and
political unity’ between North and South.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 123
Fovel’s error consists in his failure to take into account the economic func-
tion of the State in Italy and the fact that the corporative regime had its
origins in economic policing, not economic revolution. (loc. cit.)
Grandi, foreign minister since 1929, had illustrated to the Chamber and
Senate the strategic lines of fascism’s international policy, posing
The problem goes back to the unification of the country, which took
place, as we have seen, more under international than domestic pressure
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 127
30 I intend in the following pages to correct this thesis, with which previously I was in
agreement. It was put forward in dubitative form by Franco De Felice in a contribution to
the conference ‘Politica e Storia in Gramsci’ in 1977 (Id., ‘Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo,
Americanismo in Gramsci’, esp. pp. 162–163 and 174–175), in Ferri (Ed.) (1979), and
then radicalized by Mario Telò in his contribution, ‘Note sul futuro dell’Occidente and
la teoria delle relazioni internazionali’, at the 1997 conference Gramsci e il Novecento,
in Vacca (Ed.), Gramsci e il Novecento, Vol. I (1999b), pp. 51–74; but I believe I also
contributed to its diffusion with my 1991 essay ‘I “Quaderni” e la politica del 900’,
pp. 67–68 and 71–74.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 129
on study of the third volume of Capital which Gramsci had been able
to read in prison immediately after its publication (Q10II§36, pp. 1281–
1282; FSPN , pp. 430–433), and is therefore founded on further study
of Marx’s theory of relative surplus value as an explanation for so-called
‘technical progress’. Moreover, a detailed study of Capital had helped
him to confute Croce’s thesis on the theoretical unsustainability of the
law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, considered an ‘elliptical
comparison’, and it was precisely the polemic with Croce that sparked
the intuition that ‘Americanism’ could be interpreted as a reaction to
the increasing difficulty for capitalist enterprises to maintain a rate of
exploitation adequate for accumulating profits and competing with other
enterprises (Q7§34, pp. 882–883; PN Vol. 3, p. 184).31 The ‘American
phenomenon’ cannot therefore be compared with the sequence French
Revolution-Napoleonic Wars, which generated the spread of liberal civi-
lization in Europe; it is only an effective but not decisive reaction to the
contradiction between the development of productive forces and capi-
talist relations of production. The fact that Gramsci considers it to be
an ‘ultimate stage’ of the attempts to neutralize the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall, implies that Fordism, even if it should turn out to be
the most effective vehicle for spreading industrialism on a world scale,
could only accelerate the formation of the premises for a new mode
of production. This does not detract from the fact that Fordism is an
extremely progressive phenomenon because it is based on a wider and
more advanced use of scientific rationality in labour processes (Taylorism),
on improving—with productivist aims—the living conditions for workers
(‘high wages’), and on more advanced technical skills of the labour force.
‘The problem arises’, Gramsci writes, of ‘whether the type of industry
and organisation of work and production typical of Ford is rational;
whether, that is, it can and should be generalised, or whether, on the
other hand, we are not dealing with a malignant phenomenon which must
be fought against through trade-union action and through legislation’.
Continuing, he says ‘[i]t seems possible to reply that the Ford method
is rational, that is, that it should be generalised’. In the same paragraph,
entitled ‘High Wages’ (Q22§13, pp. 2171–2175; SPN , pp. 310–313)
he points to the comparison with Europe and the Soviet Union, where
31 Taken up again in the second draft ‘C’ texts Q10II§§41vi and vii; FSPN , pp. 426–
428 and 435–437.
130 G. VACCA
…a long process is needed (…), during which a change must take place
in social conditions and in the way of life and the habits of individuals.
This however cannot take place through coercion alone, but only through
tempering compulsion (self-discipline) with persuasion. (Q22§13, p. 2173;
SPN , p. 312)
32 On the militarization of the trade unions between war communism and the beginning
of the NEP, cf. E. H. Carr (1966, esp. p. 217).
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 131
In the case of Americanism, we are not dealing with a new type of civil-
isation. This is shown by the fact that nothing has been changed in the
character of and the relationships between fundamental groups. What we
are dealing with is an organic extension and an intensification of Euro-
pean civilisation, which has simply acquired a new coating in the American
climate. (Q22§15, p. 2180; SPN , p. 318)
∗ ∗ ∗
raised and social democracy was defined as being ‘the left wing of fascism’;
it was then abandoned altogether at the sixth Congress (1928) which
declared that social democracy and fascism were identical (the theory of
social fascism) and instituted the ‘class against class’ tactic (Agosti 1976,
pp. 67–97 and 879–931). The Comintern’s strategic change had started
with the rise to power of Stalin, who in 1927 (at the Eighth Plenum of
the International), with the aim of consolidating internal consensus and
his own personal power, had begun to emphasize the risks of a war of
aggression of the Western powers (Di Biagio 2000, pp. 83–102). At the
Sixth Congress Bukharin’s ‘Report on the World Economy’ had provided
the coordinates of the ‘catastrophic’ interpretation of the great crisis and
predicted a ‘new 1914’ (Procacci 1981, pp. 555–557). During the Tenth
Plenum (July 1929) this policy was even imposed on the PCI and from
January 1930 Togliatti started applying it with rigour (Spriano 1969,
pp. 244–261; Agosti 1996, pp. 131–146). Gramsci reacted strongly to
the abandonment of the Lyon strategy and in the Autumn of 1930 initi-
ated a series of ‘conversations’ with his comrades of the Turi ‘collective’,
contesting the analyses and slogans of the new strategy. As we now know,
his aim was to communicate his opinion to the Foreign Centre of the
party (Rossi and Vacca, pp. 75–80) and during the ‘conversations’ with
his comrades a harsh confrontation took place which led to his exclusion
and perhaps to a temporary expulsion (Vacca 2012, pp. 119–126). This
did not induce Gramsci to change his position and, after relations were
resumed, he continued to confirm it, recommending his comrades who
were released from prison because they had served their time, or thanks
to the amnesty of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, to let
his thought be known to the party. It cannot be excluded that this was
the situation that induced Togliatti to turn Gramsci into an iconic martyr
of fascism at the Cologne Congress of the PCI (April 1931) in order to
safeguard both him and the party; but it irritated the prisoner intensely
not least because it made his release impracticable (Vacca 2012, pp. 253–
258). In any case, this was the context in which Gramsci, between the
beginning of 1930 and mid-1932 wrote the first notes on the policy of
the Comintern and the USSR. It goes without saying that above all on
these themes his language was ‘Aesopian’ (as Tanja Schucht wrote to her
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 135
family), i.e. in code,34 and it needs decoding on the basis of the categories
which form the network of his thoughts.
The first category is ‘economic-corporative’, which applied to a polit-
ical movement indicated its inability—whether because of primitivism or
erroneous policies—to struggle for hegemony. The note from which we
can start is Q6§10, ‘Past and present’, datable to between November and
December 1930 (the months of the disputes at Turi), which we have
already analysed in connection with the crisis of the modern State. The
passage which attention is now drawn to is the one in which Gramsci
considers the crisis of the State to be ‘catastrophic’, because neither the
liberal ruling classes nor the communist movement had a solution: ‘The
regressive and conservative social groups are shrinking back more and
more to their initial economic-corporative phase, while progressive and
innovative groupings are still in their initial phase – which is, precisely,
the economic-corporative phase’ (Q6§10, p. 690; PN Vol. 3, p. 9). His
view seems unequivocal: the Soviet Union had adopted an unexpansive
political form—as Gramsci had feared four years earlier—and the political
line of the Comintern was economistic: neither were on the terrain of
the struggle for hegemony. Obviously, the cause was the nature of Soviet
power, of which the Comintern was only a projection. But before dealing
in more depth with this point let us look at his assessment of the policy
of the International. The theme is analysed in greater depth in Q13§23,
‘Observations on Certain Aspects of the Structure of Political Parties in
Periods of Organic Crisis’, of January 1933, which in the section we are
considering here is the second draft of Q9§40, dating back to June 1932.
The first observation concerns the slogan ‘class against class’ and ‘the
aversion on principle to compromise’. These are clear manifestations of
‘economism’ because their basis is the conviction of the catastrophic char-
acter of the world crisis. The gravest consequence, says Gramsci, is inertia,
masked by propaganda about an imminent revolution; thus a ‘belief in
a predetermined teleology like that of a religion’ which made ‘political
initiative’ useless.
34 On the communication and writing of codes for the Letters and the Notebooks, cf.
Vacca (2012, pp. 105–118).
136 G. VACCA
part of one’s own side which one wishes rapidly to assimilate, and whose
“good will” and enthusiasm one needs. (Q13§23, pp. 1611–1613; SPN ,
pp. 167–168 [in part])
These words reveal not only his extreme disapproval of the manner
in which the alliance between workers and peasants had been liquidated
and the ‘extermination of the Kulaks as a class’ (cf. Romano 1999) had
been put into operation, but also his opposition to the authoritarian form
assumed by the Soviet State.
In several notes transparently comparing the Soviet and fascist regimes,
Gramsci defines the USSR as a totalitarian State. The definition is
based on the single party system, on the internal regime of the party
and the identification of the party with the State. However he distin-
guishes between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ totalitarianism, based on
the opposite function of the Soviet Communist Party and the National
Fascist Party:
35 Cf. also Gramsci (with Schucht), Lettere. 1926–1935, p. 791 and LfP Vol. 2, p. 67.
138 G. VACCA
Policy. Indeed, a little earlier, pointing to the change of the social bases of
the Soviet Union, Gramsci had described it as ‘an extreme form of polit-
ical society’ (Q7§28, p. 876; PN Vol. 3, p. 178) and, as is known, this
formula denotes power based on a fracture between those who govern
and the governed, and the authoritarian compression of civil society.
To these judgements must be added the observation that in totalitarian
States the single party no longer has ‘functions that are directly political,
but merely technical ones of propaganda and public order, and moral
and cultural influence’; and since they are mass parties, the masses ‘have
no other political function than a generic loyalty, of a military kind, to
a visible or invisible political centre’ (Q17§37, pp. 1939–1940; SPN ,
pp. 149–150).
It is however true that in Q14§34, ‘Machiavelli. Political Parties and
Policing Functions’, dating to January 1933, Gramsci justifies, in prin-
ciple, the ‘policing functions’ of the Communist Party in the USSR since
they are necessary ‘to keep the dispossessed reactionary forces within the
bounds of legality, and to raise the backward masses to the level of the
new legality’ (Q14§34, pp. 1691–1692; SPN , p. 155). These are observa-
tions of merciless realism if seen in relation to his personal history. From
October 1922 Julija Schucht, who had become his partner, started to
collaborate with the GPU (Gosudarstvennoe Političeskoe Upravlenie), the
intelligence body of the Soviet government, and continued that activity
until the end of 1930, when she was forced to give up work because of
a serious illness. From the outset Gramsci was aware and consented, and
in any case it would have been strange that a functionary of a commu-
nist party, already under consideration for becoming its leader, should not
have justified historically the need for police control in the Soviet State,
even with regard to imself. But when he was writing those notes, his
suspicions were at their peak regarding the possibility that Julija, perhaps
because of the political conditioning she was undergoing, had been an
involuntary accomplice in his failure to be released, even to the point of
writing as much in the tragic letter to Tanja of 27 February 1933.36
In any case, while condemning the policy of the USSR, he attempted
to justify its origin, and from this viewpoint his notes on Soviet Marxism,
the dominant economic culture in the USSR and the role of ideology are
Some social groups rose to autonomous State life without first having had
an extended period of independent cultural and moral development of their
37 See the letter on Futurism to Trotsky of 8 September 1922, in Gramsci, A., Epis-
tolario I , pp. 248–250. In English GTW , pp. 121–123, and alternative translation in
Gramsci (1994b, pp. 244–246).
38 S. Tagliagambe (1978, Chapters ii and iii), and the documents published on
pp. 261–298; see also D. Kanoussi (2007, pp. 80–82).
140 G. VACCA
own (…). [F]or such social groups a period of statolatry is necessary and
indeed appropriate. Such “statolatry” is nothing other than the normal
form of “State life” or, at least, of initiation into autonomous State life
and into the creation of a “civil society” which it historically could not be
created before the ascent to independent State life. Nevertheless, this kind
of “statolatry” must not be abandoned to itself, it must not become theo-
retical fanaticism or come to be seen as “perpetual”. (Q8§185, p. 1020;
PN Vol. 3, p. 310)
… possessed of the herd instinct, who basically could not care less about
the question [under consideration – author’s note] are launched on the
study of economic problems, any scientific development thus being made
impossible.
39 The lack of expansivity of the USSR through the inability of the Bolshevik élite
to construct a new type of hegemonic power and the nexus with the theory of the
intellectuals and the conception of Marxism had been a theme for Gramsci immediately
before his arrest: cf. G. Vacca (2012, pp. 23–38).
40 Paragraphs 75 and 77 are not as yet in a standard English translation in English of
the Notebooks.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 143
and the USSR of the Thirties considered singly since, in each of the
three countries, there were ‘molecular changes which in fact progres-
sively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become
the matrix of new changes’ (Q15§11, p. 1767; SPN , p. 109). In the
same days that he had drawn attention to the ‘catastrophic’ character of
the crisis of the modern State, Gramsci was describing the phenomenon
in another note in even simpler and clearer words. In Q7§12, ‘Man as
Individual and Man as Mass’, which we have already mentioned, he wrote:
The old intellectual and moral leaders of society feel the ground giving
way under their feet; (…) Since the particular form of civilization, culture,
morality that they have represented is decomposing, they shriek at the
death of all civilization, of all culture, of all morality and they demand
that the State take repressive measures, or, secluded from the real process
of history, they constitute themselves into groups of resistance and by so
doing prolong the crisis (…). The representatives of the new order now
in gestation, full of “rationalistic” hatred for the old, are disseminating
utopias and crackpot schemes. (Q7§12, pp. 862–863; PN Vol. 3, p. 165,
and FSPN , p. 276)
References
Agosti, A. (1976). La Terza Internazionale. Storia documentaria (Vol. II).
Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Agosti, A. (1996). Palmiro Togliatti. Turin: UTET.
Aquarone, A. (2003 [19651 ]). L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario. Turin:
Einaudi.
Boyer, R., & Mistral, J. (1983 [19781 ]). Accumulation, Inflation, Crisis. Paris:
PUF. In Italian: Accumulazione, inflazione, crisi (1985) (S. Scotti, Trans.).
Bologna: Il Mulino.
Carlucci, A. (2014). Gramsci and Languages. Chicago: Haymarket.
144 G. VACCA
Carr, E. H. (1966 [19521 ]). The Bolshevik Revolution 1917 –1923 (Vol. 2).
Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Ciasca, R. (1916). L’origine del “Programma per l’opinione nazionale italiano”
del 1847–’48. Milan: Dante Alighieri.
Ciocca, P. (2015). Storia dell’Iri. Rome and Bari: Laterza.
Croce, B. (1928). Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915. Bari: Laterza.
Croce, B. (1932). Storia dell’Europa nel secolo decimonono. Bari: Laterza.
De Felice, F. (1977). Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo, Americanismo in Gramsci.
In F. Ferri (Ed.), Politica e storia in Gramsci (pp. 161–220).
De Rosa, G. (1977). Luigi Sturzo. Turin: UTET.
Di Biagio, A. (2000). Moscow, The Comintern and the War Scare 1926–1928.
In S. Pons & A. Romano (Eds.), Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914–1928.
Milan: Feltrinelli.
Di Biagio, A. (2004). Coesistenza e isolazionismo. Rome: Carocci.
Fattorini, E. (1999). Gramsci e la storia della chiesa novecentesca. In G. Vacca
(Ed.) (1999b), pp. 145–156.
Fattorini E. (2008). Gramsci e la questione cattolica. In F. Giasi (Ed.), (2008),
Vol. I, pp. 361–378.
Ferri, F. (Ed.) (1977). Politica e storia in Gramsci (2 Vols.). Proceedings of the
International Conference on Gramsci, Florence. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Füllöp-Miller, R. (1930). Il volto del bolscevismo. Milan: Bompiani.
Gagliardi, A. (2010). Il corporativismo fascista. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
Giasi, F. (2007). Egemonia e direzione politica nella “Quistione Meridionale”.
Speech at the conference Gramsci a setenta años de la muerte, IV Confer-
encia Internacional Estudios Gramscianos, Città del Messico, 29 novembre–1
dicembre 2007, awaiting publcation.
Giasi, F. (Ed.). (2008). Gramsci nel suo tempo (2 Vols.). Rome: Carocci.
Giasi, F. (2011). I giudizi di Marx and di Engels sul Risorgimento e la
loro fortuna. In F. Rocchetti (Ed.), Con gli occhi di Gramsci. Letture del
Risorgimento.
Gramsci, A. (1966). Socialismo e fascismo (1921–1922). Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1971a). La costruzione del partito comunista 1923–1926. Turin:
Einaudi.
Gramsci A. (1971b). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G.
Nowell-Smith, Eds. and Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere (V. Gerratana, Ed.). Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1980). Cronache torinesi (S. Caprioglio, Ed.). Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1982). La Città futura (1917–18) (S. Caprioglio, Ed.). Turin:
Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1984). Il nostro Marx 1919–1920 (S. Caprioglio, Ed.). Turin:
Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1987). L’Ordine nuovo 1919–1920. Turin: Einaudi.
2 THE NATURE OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION 145
Rocchetti, F. (Ed.). (2011). Con gli occhi di Gramsci. Letture del Risorgimento.
Rome: Carocci.
Romano, A. (1999). Contadini in uniforme. Florence: Olschki.
Rossi, A., & Vacca, G. (2007). Gramsci tra Mussolini e Stalin. Rome: Fazi.
Santomassimo, G. (2006). La terza via fascista. Il mito di corporativismo. Rome:
Carocci.
Spriano, P. (1969). Storia del Partito comunista italiano. Vol. II, Gli anni della
clandestinità. Turin: Einaudi.
Stolzi, I. (2007). L’ordine corporativo. Poteri organizzati e organizzazione del
potere nella riflessione giuridica dell’Italia fascista. Milan: Giuffré.
Tagliagambe, S. (1978). Scienza, filosofia, politica nell’Unione Sovietica 1924–39.
Milan: Feltrinelli.
Telò, M. (1999). Note sul futuro dell’Occidente e la teoria delle relazioni
internazionali. In G. Vacca (Ed.), Gramsci e il Novecento. Rome: Carocci.
Traniello F. (2007). Dal Risorgimento al secondo dopoguerra. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Vacca, G. (1991). I “Quaderni” e la politica del ’900. In id., Gramsci e Togliatti.
Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Vacca, G. (1999a). Appuntamenti con Gramsci. Rome: Carocci.
Vacca, G. (Ed.). (1999b). Gramsci e il Novecento. Rome: Carocci.
Vacca, G. (2011). Gramsci interprete del Risorgimento: una presenza controversa
(1949–1967). In A. Bini, C. Daniele, & S. Pons (Eds.), Farsi italiani. La
costruzione dell’idea di nazione nell’Italia repubblicana. Proceedings of the
Conference ‘La nazione vissuta, la nazione narrate’, Cortona, 2–4 December
2010. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Vacca, G. (2012). Vita e Pensieri di Antonio Gramsci 1926–1937 . Turin: Einaudi.
Volpe, G. (1927). L’Italia in cammino. L’ultimo cinquantennio. Milan: Treves.
Bonomi and His Friends (Bonomi e i suoi amici), L’Ordine Nuovo, 15 March
1924, in CPC, 169–171.
Bourgeois Reformism (Il riformismo borghese), Avanti!, 5 December 1917, in
CF , 470–472.
On the Centenary of a King (Nel centenario di un re), Avanti!, 13 March 1920,
in ON 1919–1920, 461–463.
A Chain of Scoundrels (Una catena di ribaldi), Avanti!, 13 October 1919, in
ON 1919–1920, 242–245.
To Clarify Ideas on Bourgeois Reformism (Per chiarire le idee sul riformismo
borghese), Avanti!, 11 December 1917, in CF , 481–484.
The Crisis of the Petty Bourgeoisie (La crisi della piccola borghesia), L’Unità, 2
July 1924, in CPC 1923–1926, 25–28.
The Elections (Le elezioni), in L’Ordine Nuovo, third series, Vol. 1(1), March
1924, in CPC 1923–1926, 162–165.
Elemental Forces (Forze elementari), L’Ordine Nuovo, 26 April 1921, in SF. ON
1921–1922, 150–151; SPW 1921–1926, 38–40.
Elements of the Situation (Elementi della situazione), in CPC 1923–1926, 85–88;
SPW 1921–1926, 306–309.
The Events of 2–3 December (Gli avvenimenti del 2–3 dicembre), L’Ordine
nuovo, 6–13 December 1919, in ON 1919–1920, 350–357 (written jointly
with Palmiro Togliatti).
The Fall of Fascism (La caduta del fascismo), L’Ordine Nuovo, 15 November
1924, in CPC 1923–1926, 208–210: SPW 1921–1926, 273–275.
Fascism: A Letter from Italy (Il fallimento del sindacalismo fascista), in CPC,
520–522: International Gramsci Journal, 1(3), March 2001, 31: originally in
International Press Correspondence, 4(1), 3 January 1924.
The Force of the State (La forza dello Stato), Avanti!, 11 December 1920, in
ON 1919–1920, 776–778.
The Historical Role of the City (La settimana in politica [xvi]. La funzione
storica della città), L’Ordine Nuovo, 17 January 1920, in ON 1919–1920,
386–390; SPW 1910–1920, 150–153.
The Italian Catholics (I cattolici italiani), Avanti!, 22 December 1918, in NM ,
455–460.
The Italian Crisis (La crisi italiana), L’Ordine Nuovo, 1 September 1924 (report
to the Central Committee of the PCI of 13–14 August), in CPC 1923–1926,
28–39; SPW 1921–1926, 255–264.
The Italian Situation and the Tasks of the PCI (La situazione italiana e i compiti
del PCI), Part I, in CPC 1923–1926, 488–498; SPW 1921–1926, 340–375.
The Italian State (Lo Stato italiano), L’Ordine Nuovo, 7 February 1920, in ON
1919–1920, 403–408; PPW , 141–145.
Italy and Spain (Italia e Spagna), L’Ordine Nuovo, 11 March 1921, in SF. ON
1921–1922, 101–103.
148 G. VACCA
1 My reading of Gramsci’s writings in the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo owes much to Franco
De Felice (1971).
The myth created in the war – world unity in the League of Nations – has
been realized in the ways and forms in which it could be realized under a
regime of private and national property: in the global monopoly exercised
and exploited by the English-speaking world. The economic and political
life of States is under the close control of Anglo-American capitalism (…)
This is the death of the State, which exists in so far as it is sovereign
and independent; national capitalism is reduced to a vassal status (…) The
world is ‘unified’ in the sense that a global hierarchy has been created
which disciplines and controls the whole world in an authoritarian fashion.
(‘The Unity of the World’, ON 1919–1920, p. 20)
One might say that, in this period of the life of the world, there no longer
exists any individual person undisturbed by political anxiety, in other words
there is no one who does not understand and does not feel how the destiny
of every single individual is linked to the form of the national State, to the
form of the international equilibrium within which States are coordinated
and subordinated. (‘A Breakdown and a Birth’, ON 1919–1920, p. 3)
exchange, have lost any significance and useful function they might have
had. The centre of gravity of the whole society has been removed to a new
field: the institutions have been left as mere shells, devoid of any histor-
ical substance, or animating spirit. The bourgeois class no longer governs
its vital interests through parliament. The working class is trying out new
avenues in search of its institution of government, outside the trade union;
it has found that institution of its government in the Factory Council and
system of Councils. (‘Proletarian Unity’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 439–440;
SPW 1919–1920, pp. 174–175)
For the first time in history, there was an example of a proletariat which
engaged in struggle for control over production, without being driven into
action through hunger or unemployment. Furthermore, it was not just a
minority, a vanguard of the working class which undertook the struggle,
but the entire mass of the workers of Turin took to the field and brought
the struggle, heedless of privations and sacrifices, right to the end. (‘The
Turin Factory Council Movement’, ON 1991–1920, pp. 599–600)2
The determining element in the crisis is, then, the change in subjec-
tivity which regards as much productive forces as social relations and
institutions. And Gramsci was not loath, in polemics with Angelo Tasca,
to emphasize that for the Ordine Nuovo group the recognition of changes
generated by the development of finance capital and by the war consti-
tuted one of the most important conditions for the industrial independence
of the working class, a condition which consisted in the fact that the
2 [The version quoted (from L’Ordine Nuovo, 14 March 1921) differs somewhat from
the one that Gramsci sent to the Comintern journal Communist International (no. 14.
1920), which in SPW 1919–1920 is retranslated from other non-English languages of the
journal. The wording used here is taken from the abridged translation (by M. Carley,
Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1921/03/turin_
councils.htm) of the later newspaper article. Gramsci’s original manuscript is available
online in its full Italian transcription (‘Il movimento comunista a Torino’) and English
translation from the Italian (‘The Turin Communist Movement’) in the International
Gramsci Journal, 2(2), 2017, here pp. 17 and 40 respectively—trans. note.]
154 G. VACCA
The ‘actuality’ of the revolution has its origin in the fact that indus-
trialism and capitalism tend to separate from each other and new social
hierarchies, a new system of relations between the rulers and the ruled,
between the governors and the governed, may be constructed (‘The
Factory Worker’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 432–435).
The analysis of the ‘morbid’ phenomena generated by finance capital in
the ‘demographic composition’ and organization of the State is also very
detailed, but it is of use to draw attention to the fact that, in Gramsci’s
view, in order to respond to the needs of an extreme centralization and of
an unheard-of productive effort, the war had accelerated and intensified
the split between industrialism and capitalism. The change in subjectivity
had extended far beyond the direct producers: on the one hand it had
involved the ‘intellectuals of production’ and, on the other, it had radically
changed the historical position of the peasant masses. The former had
undergone a progressive assimilation with the workers:
The figure of the technician too has changed. His relations with the
industrialist have been completely transformed. He is no longer a trusted
employee, an agent of capitalist interests: since the worker can do without
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 155
the technician for a great number of jobs, the technician becomes redun-
dant as a disciplinary agent. The technician too, is reduced to the status
of a producer, linked to the capitalist via the naked and savage relationship
of exploited to exploiter. (‘The Instruments of Labour’, ON 1919–1920,
pp. 414–415; SPW 1910–1920, p. 164)
As for the peasants, the war had dragged them out of the country-
side and brought them into contact with the world of industry. It had
connected them to the working class and made them aware of their role in
the State, transforming them into an active mass which would no longer
be disposed to return to the old social and political conditions.
Four years of the trenches and of exploitation of his blood have radi-
cally changed the peasant psychology (…). The peasants came to see the
State in all its complex grandeur, in its measureless power, in its intricate
construction. They came to see the world no longer as something infinitely
vast like the universe and small as the village bell-tower, but as a concrete
reality consisting of States and peoples, social strengths and weaknesses,
armies and machines, wealth and poverty. Links of solidarity were forged
which otherwise would have taken decades of historical experience and
intermittent struggles to form. Within four years, in the mud and blood
of the trenches, a spiritual world emerged that was avid to form itself into
permanent and dynamic social structures and institutions. (‘Workers and
Peasants’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 157–158; SPW 1910–1920, pp. 84–85)
During the war and as a result of the necessities of the war, the Italian
State took over regulation of the production and distribution of material
goods as one of its functions. A sort of industrial and commercial trust
has been set up, a sort of concentration of the means of production and
exchange, an equalization of the conditions of exploitation of the prole-
tarian and semi-proletarian masses – which have had their revolutionary
effect. (‘Workers and Peasants’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 156; SPW 1910–1920,
p. 83)
Since all sectors of the labour process are represented in the Council, in
proportion to the contribution each craft and each labour sector makes to
the manufacture of the object the factory is producing for the collectivity
(…) [i]ts raison d’être lies in the labour process, in industrial production,
i.e. in something permanent. It does not lie in wages or class divisions,
i.e. in something transitory and, moreover, the very thing we are trying to
supersede.
The revolution as the conquest of social power on the part of the prole-
tariat can only be conceived as a dialectical process, in which political power
makes possible industrial power and industrial power makes possible polit-
ical power. The soviet is the instrument of revolutionary struggle that
provides for the autonomous development of the communist economic
organization (…) The Factory Council, as an expression of the autonomy
of the producer in the industrial sphere and as the basis for communist
economic organization, is the instrument for the final struggle to the death
with the capitalist order. (‘Two Revolutions’, ON 1919–1920, p. 573; SPW
1910–1920, p. 308, PPW , pp. 171–172 and New Left Review I/51, p. 46)
The nature of the communist party stems directly from that of the prole-
tarian revolution. The protagonist of the process is the mass of producers,
which has reached a level of ‘industrial autonomy’ and ‘historical initia-
tive’ such as to be able to shape a new economic and State order. It is
a mass in fusion which in the course of the process acquires a new ‘psy-
chology’, recognizing and asserting itself as part of a whole constituted
concretely by a new ‘power of initiative over production’. The party is
therefore configured as the mind of the process which, on the one hand,
can carry out a leading role putting itself in a dialectical relation with the
mass and avoiding crystallization in the bureaucratic apparatuses of the
new State and, on the other, working continuously to foster the political
conditions of the process itself.
Under the first of these aspects, ‘the party remains the superior hier-
archy of this irresistible mass movement’ on condition that it does not
attempt to ‘fix in mechanical forms of immediate power an apparatus
governing the masses in movement’ (‘The Party and the Revolution’,
ON 1919–1920, p. 370; New Left Review I/51, pp. 43–44, and SPW
1910–1920, p. 144).3
Under the other aspect,
In so far as it can shape reality, the party must create conditions in which
there will not be two revolutions, but in which the revolution against
the bourgeois State will find organized forces capable of beginning the
transformation of the national productive apparatus from an instrument of
plutocratic oppression to an instrument of communist liberation. (‘Two
Revolutions’, ON 1919–1920, pp. 573–574; SPW 1910–1920, p. 309, and
New Left Review I/51, p. 48)
3 [The New Left Review translation quoted here follows more exactly the Italian
wording—trans. note.]
160 G. VACCA
Who can imagine and foresee what the immediate consequences will be,
when the countless multitudes who today have no will and power finally
make their entry into the arena of historical destruction and creation? (…)
They will find everything that exists mysteriously hostile and will seek to
destroy it utterly. But it is the very immensity of the revolution, its quality
of being unforeseeable, its boundless freedom, that makes it impossible to
hazard so much as a single definitive hypothesis on what feelings, passions,
initiatives and virtues are being moulded in such an incandescent furnace.
(‘The Communist Party’ ON 1919–1920, p. 652; PPW , p. 188, and SPW
1910–1920, p. 331)
The party can guide the revolutionary process to the extent that it
assumes a mass character and follows the principle at the basis of the
proletarian revolution: the progressive formation of a ‘will of the protag-
onists’ among the ‘producers’, of an attitude of ‘initiators’ and ‘leaders’.
In carrying out its role as guide, then, it strives for a general modification
of the relations between leaders and led, and for the creation of new ways
of life.
4 [Here we prefer the literal ‘will’ of the PPW translation to the one of ‘purpose’ in
SPW 1919–1920, given the prominence that the concept of ‘will’ has acquired in Gramsci’s
prison writings: see also below in this chapter—trans. note.]
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 161
5 Both Izzo’s and Rapone’s essays give a periodization of Gramsci’s political thought;
Rapone’s covers in detail the 1914–1920 period.
162 G. VACCA
7 [By an oversight the word “will” is omitted from the PN translation—trans. note.]
164 G. VACCA
8 As Silvio Pons (2012) has amply demonstrated, after Stalin’s advent to power ‘the
construction of socialism in one country’ presupposes abandoning the perspective of a
‘world revolution’. This does detract from the fact that the growth of the international
communist movement constituted a basic resource for Soviet ‘power’, and the spectre of
world revolution therefore not only survived in international communism but continued
at length to feed its rhetoric.
9 In this regard Q4§3, entitled ‘Two Aspects of Marxism’, is fundamental and will be
the subject of analysis later on.
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 165
I believe that, when something really new is discovered in the sciences, one
must adopt an entirely new term for it so that the idea remains precise and
clear. If you give new meaning to an old term – no matter how strongly
you profess that the old idea attached to the term has nothing in common
with the idea newly assigned to it – human minds can never be expected to
refrain entirely from thinking that there is some resemblance or connection
between the old idea and the new one. This confuses science and leads to
useless controversies. (Q4§34, pp. 452–453; PN Vol. 2, p. 174)
The new lexis chosen by Gramsci for the revision of Marxism is the
‘philosophy of praxis’ and it is not by chance that the above passage is
taken up again two years later, without variation, in concluding paragraph
27 of Notebook 11, entitled ‘The Concept of “Orthodoxy”’, dedicated to
posing the subject of the philosophical autonomy of Marxism (Q11§27,
pp. 1434–1438; partially in SPN , pp. 462–465).10
Marxism had two tasks: to combat modern ideologies in their most refined
form; and to enlighten the minds of the popular masses, whose culture was
medieval. This second task, which was fundamental, has absorbed all its
strength, not only “quantitatively” but also “qualitatively”. For “didactic”
reasons, Marxism became mixed with a form of culture that was some-
what superior to the popular mentality but inadequate to combat the other
ideologies of the educated classes; yet, at its inception, Marxism actually
superseded the highest cultural manifestation of the time, classical German
philosophy. What has emerged is a “Marxism” in “combination” (…) inad-
equate for creating a broad cultural movement that embraces the whole of
man, whatever his age or his social conditions, and that brings about the
moral unification of society. (Q4§3, pp. 422–423; PN Vol. 2, p. 141)
10 [This is a ‘C’ text, identical in Gramsci’s wording to the ‘A’ text: see SPN ,
p. 452 footnote 99 for a partial translation with slightly alternative wording to the PN
translation—trans. note.]
166 G. VACCA
Putting this succinctly, one may say that in his turn Gramsci, over-
turning Croce’s ‘reduction’ of Marxism to a methodological ‘canon of
historical research’12 proposes doing likewise with the ‘ethico-political’
conception of history. The reply to the question ‘How does the historical
movement arise on the structural base?’ is evinced from the general prin-
ciples outlined in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, which we may here fruitfully recall:
1. Society does not set itself problems for whose solution the necessary
and sufficient conditions have not already been realized
2. No form of society disappears before having exhausted all its
possibilities of development
3. Men acquire consciousness of the conflicts of their time on the
terrain of ideologies
For Croce a religion is any concept of the world that puts itself forward
as an ethic. But has this happened for “liberty”? Liberty was a religion
for a limited number of intellectuals but among the masses it took on
the appearance of one of the elements constituting an ideological meld or
amalgam, whose main constituent was the old-style catholic religion and
of which another important – if not decisive – element, from the secular
point of view, was one’s “fatherland”. (Q10I§10, p. 1230; FSPN , p. 352)
‘intellectual and moral’ ones, in other words values, culture, the ideolo-
gies that give symbolic form to the relations between the dominant and
the dominated, the leaders and the led. In short, the asserting of the
primacy of politics contains the nucleus of a critical theory of social repro-
duction. Fundamental, then, to the philosophical autonomy of Marxism
is the concept of ‘determinate market’:
How did the founder of the philosophy of praxis arrive at the concept
of regularity and necessity in historical development? (…) Concept and
fact of determinate market: i.e. the scientific discovery that specific deci-
sive and permanent forces have risen historically and that the operation
of these forces presents itself with a certain “automatism” which allows a
measure of “predictability” and certainty for the future of those individual
initiatives which accept these forces after having discerned and scientifi-
cally established their nature. “Determinate market” is therefore equivalent
to “determinate relation of social forces in a determinate structure of the
productive apparatus”, this relationship being guaranteed (that is, rendered
permanent) by a determinate political, moral and juridical superstructure.
(Q11§52, p. 1477; SPN , p. 401)17
on the other hand assumes as the object of investigation and critique not
only the economic consequences of determinate relations of force but
also the historical conditions that generate them. The critique sets off
from the conditioned and moves to the conditioning situation, assuming
as historical problem the reproduction of the prerequisites of production:
The “critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical
character of the “determinate market” and of its “automatism”; (…) the
critique analyses in a realistic way the relations of forces determining the
market, it analyses in depth their contradictions, evaluates the possibilities
of modification connected with the appearance and strengthening of new
elements and puts forward the “transitory” and “replaceable” nature of
the science being criticized; it studies it as life but also as death and finds
at its heart the elements that will dissolve it and supersede it without fail,
and it puts forward the “inheritor”, the heir presumptive who must yet
give manifest proof of his vitality. (Q11§52, p. 1478; SPN , p. 411)
This does not mean that there is no common denominator for the
empirical sciences, but that this is conceivable only as a ‘generic and
174 G. VACCA
The most generic and universal methodology is nothing more than formal
or mathematical logic, i.e. the ensemble of those abstract instruments of
thought that have continuously been discovered, improved and refined
throughout the history of philosophy and culture. (Q6§180, p. 826; PN
Vol. 3, p. 131 and FSPN , p. 296)
Scientific work has two facets: one is tirelessly rectifying the method of
knowledge, and it rectifies or reinforces the organs of sensation; the other
applies this method and these increasingly refined organs in order to
establish what is fundamentally present in the sensations as opposed to
what is arbitrary and transitory. Thus one establishes what is common
18 The two quotations come from the ‘A’ and ‘C’ texts covering the same argument;
‘esperienza’ in the original Italian covers both ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’—trans. note.
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 175
to all humans, what all humans can see and feel in the same manner,
provided that they all adhere to the scientific conditions of verification.
(…). (Q4§41, p. 466–467; PN Vol. 2, p. 189)
But, also in order for it to bring its work to full fruition, it must
be incorporated into the process of the political unification of humankind,
which constitutes the mission of communism and Marxism. It therefore
becomes necessary to examine the position of the sciences as the object
of analysis of the philosophy of praxis.
Gramsci poses the problem through a discussion of the concept of
‘matter’ present in Bukharin’s Popular Manual, by defining identity
and difference of method and contents in historical materialism and in
the natural sciences. While in the individual sciences ‘matter’ is consid-
ered in relation to its dynamic, physical, chemical, etc. particularities,
Marxism takes into consideration the properties that show up as the
product of the activity of the sciences. Thus it considers those properties
‘only to the extent that they become a “productive economic element”.
Matter as such therefore is not our subject but how it is socially and
historically organised for production, and natural science should be seen
correspondingly as essentially an historical category, a human relation’
(Q11§30, p. 1442; SPN , pp. 465–466). Marxism takes the sciences into
consideration only in that they are ‘material forces of production’:
19 The translation has been adjusted to bring it more into line with Gramsci’s original—
trans. note.
176 G. VACCA
But the productive forces are not separate from the social relations of
production, and therefore their theory consists in the acknowledgment of
the antagonisms that run through them and of the forms of consciousness
that condition their dynamics:
[In historical action] one can “scientifically” foresee only the struggle, but
not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results
of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to
fixed quantities since within them quantity is continually becoming quality.
In reality one can “foresee” to the extent that one acts, to the extent
that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely
to creating the result “foreseen”. Prediction reveals itself thus not as a
scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort
made, the practical way of creating a collective will. (Q11§15, pp. 1403–
1404; SPN , p. 438)
One may add that this type of knowledge, inseparable from the action
of a collective subject, is part of political action:
For the modern proletariat the creation of its own ‘organic intellec-
tuals’ is posed on both the economic terrain and the political terrain.
Under the first aspect, the sphere of industrial production is paramount,
and at this point Gramsci calls to mind the Ordine Nuovo experience,
indicating this as an exemplary case of such a creation. But, passing on to
the political terrain, the problem of the creation of the proletariat’s own
intellectuals is the problem of the party:
The political party, for all groups [i.e. social groups – G.V.], is precisely the
mechanism which carries out in civil society the same function as the State
carries out, more synthetically and over a larger scale, in political society. In
other words it is responsible for welding together the organic intellectuals
of a given group – the dominant one – and the traditional intellectuals. The
party carries out this function in strict dependence on its basic function,
which is that of elaborating its own component parts – those elements
of a social group which has been born and developed as an “economic”
group – and of turning them into qualified political intellectuals, leaders
[dirigenti] and organisers of all the activities and functions inherent in
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 179
20 [Note that here as in the next quotation, the translation “qualified / qualification”
might, as in many contexts, be rendered more exactly as “skilled / skill”—trans. note.]
180 G. VACCA
One sees, quite evidently a particular (and more acute) method way
of structurally describing the processes of laicization of modern societies
that has nothing to do with totalitarianism. For the moment, delaying
a broader treatment until Chapter 4, it is worth noting here that the
sense of these statements cannot but locate the ‘modern Prince’ at the
centre of the ‘intellectual and moral reform’ that characterizes the transi-
tion to socialism as conceived by Gramsci; it is therefore of use to clarify
the contents of this by now celebrated, and almost always misunder-
stood formula. The passage quoted above cannot be isolated from the
two statements, already met with, which precede it. The first is Gramsci’s
rhetorical question ‘can there be cultural reform, and can there be a civil
improvement of the depressed strata of society be improved in the civil
sector without a previous economic reform and a change in their position
in the social and economic fields?’. The second is that ‘intellectual and
moral reform has to be linked with a programme of economic reform
– indeed the programme of economic reform is precisely the concrete
form in which every intellectual and moral reform presents itself’ (loc.
cit.). ‘Intellectual and moral reform’ thus is a metaphor, borrowed from
Ernest Renan, to emphasize that socialism is a process of historical tran-
sition in which, starting from the sphere of production and permeating
every sphere of society and of the State, the entire network of relations
between the dominant and the dominated, between the leaders and the
led, is transformed. This requires that, in the concrete manifestations of
life, there should be a change in the mode of being both of the ‘intellec-
tuals’ and of the ‘simple’. Putting this another way, a new ‘common sense’
should be formed that promotes their unity, constituted by an uninter-
rupted communicative and representative circuit. The unity between a
programme of the economic, the political and the cultural can be guar-
anteed only by a ‘general vision of the world’, by a ‘philosophy with a
conformant moral’, in other words by the diffusion of a shared and stable
way of thinking, whose ‘proclaimer’ is the political party. This is the sense
in which Gramsci states that in human consciousness, the ‘Prince takes the
place of the divinity or the categorical imperative’.
With the extension of mass parties and their organic coalescence with the
intimate (economic-productive) life of the masses themselves, the process
whereby popular feeling is standardized ceases to be mechanical and casual
(that is produced by the conditioning of environmental factors and the
like) and becomes conscious and critical. Knowledge and a judgment of
the importance of this feeling on the part of the leaders is no longer the
182 G. VACCA
No one can fail to see that Gramsci does nothing other than theoret-
ically elaborate the experience of the mass parties, already very advanced
in the first decades of the twentieth century, rejecting the theory of
charisma of Max Weber and Robert Michels, and anticipating the modes
of existence and meaning of the ‘party democracies’ that would come
to characterize the life of western Europe in the ‘thirty glorious years’
that succeeded World War Two. For a communist party, the emergence
of the masses from passivity is equivalent to their development of human
awareness in the government of the economy and of society according to
determinate goals, synthesized in the mission to collaborate in the histor-
ical and political unification of humankind. The first step is the ‘fusion’
within it of intellectuals and ‘the simple’, in order to foster new relations
between intellectuals and people in society. This implies a radical change
in the function and role of the intellectuals, and only in this sense does
the task of the party have a ‘totalitarian’ nature:
The parties recruit individuals out of the working mass, and the selection
is made on practical and theoretical criteria at the same time. The relation
between theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception
is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For
this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral
and totalitarian intelligentsias [intellettualità totalitarie] and the crucibles
where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical
process, takes place. (Q11§12, p. 1387; SPN , p. 335)21
21 [The translators of SPN correctly add here that the use of totalitarie ‘is to be
understood not in its modern sense but as meaning simultaneously ‘unified’ or “all
absorbing”’—trans. note.]
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 183
If one purges the term ‘totalitarian’ of the negative emotive nature that
it assumed after the experience of fascism, Nazism and Soviet commu-
nism, if one gets rid of the ‘passionality’ with which it was charged during
the ‘age of extremes’, one may soberly admit that the political party, espe-
cially one that aims at the formation of a new type of society, cannot
absolve its task and cannot even be born and last without being inspired
by a general vision of the world, without a general theory of history
and politics, and without extreme coherence between theory and prac-
tice, programmes and behaviour. We are dealing, no more and no less,
with the rendering rigorous of processes that are a natural corollary of
the birth of mass parties, in so far as their advent in itself brings about
a profound modification in the modus operandi of the mentality of the
‘educated’ and the ‘simple’. The birth of these parties reveals a change
in the relations between intellectuals and masses, a change in common
sense.
Different from the process of transition to bourgeois society, in
which—as Gramsci underlines—the archetype of the ‘organic intellectual’
is the capitalist entrepreneur (Q12§1, p. 1513; SPN , pp. 5–6),22 in the
transition to socialism there appear different types of ‘organic intellectu-
als’. In complex societies the elaboration of ‘organic intellectuals’ involves
the whole of their functions incorporated into productive and cognitive
roles. But the task of the ‘modern Prince’ is not that of dictating the
contents of this molecular and unpredictable process of transformation.
That task is allotted to the protagonists of the process, who are the direct
producers and the ‘intellectuals as a mass’, while the communist party has
the task of promoting and orienting it so as to arrive at the formation
of a new ‘historical bloc’. This concept is frequently confused with that
22 The ‘capitalist entrepreneur’ is the archetype of the modern intellectual not only
because he ‘creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political
economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.’ but also because
‘he must have a certain technical capacity, not only in the limited sphere of his activity
and initiative but in other spheres as well, at least in those which are closest to economic
production. He must be an organiser of masses of men; he must be an organiser of the
“confidence” of investors in his business, of the customers for his product, etc. If not all
entrepreneurs, at least an élite amongst them must have the capacity to be an organiser
of society in general, including all its complex organism of services, right up to the state
organism, because of the need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion
of their own class’.
184 G. VACCA
The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without
understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not
only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge): in other
words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant)
if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling
the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and there-
fore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation
and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a supe-
rior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated—i.e.
knowledge. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without
this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In
the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 185
In January 1932, Gramsci dated the origin of the crisis back to the
great war, but by June 1933 he was considering the war itself as a
consequence of the crisis generated by the growing initiative of the
masses organized within the European States, who as from the end of
the nineteenth century had disrupted the equilibria of bourgeois society
(Q15§59ii, p. 1824; SPN , p. 106).
The different periodization represents the outcome of the elaboration
of a general theory of crises which he arrived at in February 1933 by
observing the developments of the crisis of 1929. Among the salient
points of his theory there stand out the repudiation of the doctrine of
the ‘inevitability of war’ propounded by the ‘official Marxism’ of both the
Second and the Third International. As we have already seen (Chapter 1),
for Gramsci war is not the unavoidable consequence of capitalism or impe-
rialism, but is caused by the specific political choices made by the ruling
classes, such as protectionism and nationalism. The explanation of the war
and the crises may be summarized, then, in the incapacity or the refusal of
the ruling classes to resolve the ever more strident asymmetries between
the cosmopolitan nature of the economy and nationalism in politics, tran-
scending the horizon of the national State as the hegemonic subject of the
political sphere (Q15§5, pp. 1755–1756; FSPN , pp. 219–220).
It is of use to emphasize that, in posing the subject of supranationality
(Rapone 2011b, pp. 189–258), Gramsci is here elaborating theoreti-
cally an interpretation of the origin of the great war that he had already
advanced in 1916–1918. Then, the question of supranationality came to
him as the alternative between the League of Nations put forward by
Woodrow Wilson and the world revolution prefigured by Lenin. Now the
problem was formulated in different terms: world history was now char-
acterized by the intensification of economic ‘cosmopolitanism’ as much
as it was by political nationalism, and the question of the equipollence of
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 187
23 [In English, this long paragraph of Q19 is excerpted and not yet translated in its
entirety—trans. note.]
24 The initial phrase defining the relations between structure and superstructures as the
crucial problem of historical materialism is found on p. 455 of the Quaderni and p. 177
of the PN English translation.
3 FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY … 189
development that are more or less long; sudden, “synthetic” explosions are
rare. (Q8§195, p. 1057; PN Vol. 3, p. 346)25
the unity of theory and practice is not (…) a matter of mechanical fact, but
a part of the historical process (…). A human mass does not “distinguish”
itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest
sense, organising itself; and there is no organisation without intellectuals,
that is without organisers and leaders, in other words, without the theo-
retical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely
by the existence of a group [strato] of people “specialised” in conceptual
and philosophical elaboration of ideas. (Q11§12, pp. 1385–1386; SPN ,
pp. 333–334)
In the modern world the protagonists of this creation are the political
parties (Q11§12, p. 1387; SPN , p. 335). Gramsci’s conception of the
political party is not sociological but historico-philosophical. The task of
the party is in fact to promote the unity of theory and practice by selecting
the leading strata (ceti) of the different social groups. The concept of
‘party’ is closely connected with that of ‘collective will’ of which it consti-
tutes, rather, a function; we are not however dealing with separate entities
but with two moments of a processual conception of the subject as the result
of multiple interactions between intellectuals and the masses. Indeed the
functions of the political party may also be absolved by other protago-
nists, as for example newspapers or great, particularly active, intellectual
figures such as Benedetto Croce was in Italy (Q1§116, p. 104; PN Vol. 1,
pp. 200–202). Gramsci defines the party as a ‘complex element of society
in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to
25 The translation is here integrated to include the phrase at the end of the first sentence,
possibly not thought necessary in the original translation.
190 G. VACCA
some extent asserted itself in action’ (Q13§1, p. 1558; SPN , p. 129). The
fundamental role of the political party is, then, to foster the development
of a collective will that is capable of unifying the people-nation (Q13§33,
p. 1630; SPN , pp. 150–151).
We have already mentioned the national function of the political party
in regard to the ‘modern form of cosmopolitanism’; here it is worth
specifying the way in which the party has to operate to foster the best
combination of national and international factors in the life of the State.
Its action
References
Bukharin, N. I. (1926). Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Cospito, G. (2011). Il ritmo del pensiero. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Cospito, G. (2016). The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci: A Diachronic Inter-
pretation of Prison Notebooks. Leiden and Boston: Brill; Chicago: Haymarket
(Original Cospito, 2011).
Croce, B. (1934). History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (H. Furst, Trans.).
New York: Harcourt and Brace.
De Felice, F. (1971). Serrati, Bordiga, Gramsci e il problema della rivoluzione in
Italia 1919–1920. Bari: De Donato.
Gramsci, A. (1948). Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (F.
Platone). Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere (V. Gerratana, Ed.). Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920 (Q. Hoare, Ed.
and J. Mathews, Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, A. (1984). Il nostro Marx (1919–1920) (S. Caprioglio, Ed.). Turin:
Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1987). L’Ordine Nuovo 1919–1920 (V. Gerratana & A. A. Santucci,
Eds.). Turin: Einaudi.
Gramsci, A. (1994a). Letters from Prison (F. Rosengarten, Ed. and R. Rosenthal,
Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1994b). Pre-prison Writings (R. Bellamy, Ed. and V. Cox Trans.).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1995). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (D. Boothman,
Ed. and Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, A., & Schucht, T. (1997). Lettere. 1926–1935 (A. Natoli & C. Daniele,
Eds.). Turin: Einaudi.
Izzo, F. (2009). Democrazia e cosmopolitismo in Antonio Gramsci. Rome:
Carocci.
Izzo, I Marx di Gramsci (Gramsci’s Marxes). In id., Democrazia e cosmopolitismo
in Antonio Gramsci, Rome: Carocci.
Lapidus, I. A. & Ostrovityanov, K. V. (1929). Précis d’économie politique
(L’économie politique et la théorie de l’économie sovietique) (V. Serge, Trans.).
Paris: Editions sociales internationales. English translation: An Outline of
Political Economy (London: Martin Lawrence).
Marx, K. (1976). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (S. W.
Ryazanskaya, Trans.). In Marx-Engels Collected Work (Vol. 29).
Paggi, L. (1974). La teoria generale del marxismo in Gramsci. In Annali
Feltrinelli xv 1973 (pp. 1319–1370). Milan: Feltrinelli.
Paggi, L. (1984). Da Lenin a Marx. In Le strategie del potere in Gramsci
(pp. 427–498). Rome: Editori Riuniti.
192 G. VACCA
Platone, F. (1946). Relazione sui “Quaderni del carcere”. Per una storia degli
intellettuali italiani. Rinascita, III (4), 81–90.
Pons, S. (2012). La rivoluzione globale. Storia del comunismo (1917–1991). Turin:
Einaudi.
Rapone, L. (2011a). Gramsci giovane: la critica e le interpretazioni. Studi Storici,
52(4), 974–991.
Rapone, L. (2011b). Cinque anni che paiono secoli. Antonio Gramsci dal
socialismo al comunismo. Rome: Carocci.
Salvadori, M. L. (1970). Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia. Turin:
Einaudi.
Spriano, P. (1975). The Occupation of the Factories (G. A. Williams Trans.).
London: Pluto. Original: Spriano, P. (1964). L’Occupazione delle fabbriche.
Turin: Einaudi.
Thomas, P. D. (2010). The Gramscian Moment. Chicago: Haymarket.
Vacca, G. (2012). Vita e Pensieri di Antonio Gramsci 1926–1937 . Turin: Einaudi.
Vacca, G. (2016). Il Marx di Croce e quello di Gentile. In Croce e Gentile. La
cultura italiana e l’Europa. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.
For Gramsci too, Bobbio observes, as for Marx, it is not the State but
civil society that is ‘the true focus and the theatre of all history’ (Marx
and Engels 1976, p. 50). Taken by itself the observation would not have
particular importance since for any Marxist thinker the history of the State
is part of the history of society. But, in Gramsci, according to Bobbio,
by changing the sphere of the relations that belong to civil society, the
‘active and positive moment of historical development (…) is superstruc-
tural’ (Bobbio 1988, p. 83) and in the sphere of the superstructures ‘the
relation between institutions and ideologies, though remaining within
2 Bobbio had earlier (p. 246) listed in a bibliography he had prepared for the conference
in his honour a first group of authors comprising Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and
Hegel, followed by a second group of more modern ones—Cattaneo, Pareto, Croce,
Weber and Kelsen, saying he was uncertain whether or not to put Marx among the
classical authors.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 197
3 [Cf. the Italian text regarding civil society in Marx, in Hegel and in Gramsci in
Bobbio’s collected essays on Gramsci (Bobbio 1991, pp. 42–55); the translation published
in (Bobbio 1988) is modified to reinstate the Hegelian term ‘moment’ and uses Bobbio’s
1967 original (including Bobbio’s emphasis), rather than a slightly modified later one—
trans. note.]
198 G. VACCA
action, the sense of his research escapes us. This sense lies instead in the
assumption that ‘the concrete analyses of the relations of force’, which are
the heart of political science ‘cannot and must not be an end in themselves
(…), but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular prac-
tical activity, or initiative of will’ (Q13§17, p. 1588; SPN , p. 185). For
Bobbio instead, ‘knowing’ and ‘willing’ belong to two separate spheres
and the method of political science is that of the natural sciences (Bobbio
1985, Chapter 1). It is from here, I believe, that his misunderstanding of
Gramsci’s concepts is born.
To understand Gramsci’s thought, the point of departure is the theory
of hegemony, not the conception of ‘civil society’. But it is only in a
conception of politics that starts from the crisis of the State, and which is
able to explain the expansion of the State beyond the conventional sphere
of the institutions that the definition of the State—as the unity of polit-
ical society and civil society—assumes all its significance. In Gramsci, then,
the conception of ‘civil society’ is part of the theory of hegemony and not
vice versa. By inverting this logico-historical nexus, through the concept
of ‘civil society’ Bobbio erases its originality. Everything is then reduced
to recognizing that Gramsci gave great importance to the problem of
consent. It is true that in the exercise of power the problem of consent
functions as a dividing line; but if the whole of Gramsci’s political reflec-
tion were to reduce to this, the Notebooks would be of little value and
those who maintain that there is a ‘totalitarian’ nature to his thought
would in part be correct.4
4 This characterized the debate, initiated by Bobbio a decade after the Cagliari confer-
ence (see the Quaderni di Mondoperaio, n. 7, 1977), in which the interventions of Lucio
Colletti, Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Massimo L. Salvadori were distinguished by the
attempt to demonstrate the ‘totalitarian’ nature of Gramsci’s thought.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 199
It is true that the State is seen as the organ of one particular group,
destined to create favourable conditions for the latter’s maximum expan-
sion. But the development and expansion of the particular group are
conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expan-
sion, of a development of all the “national” energies. In other words, the
dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the
subordinate groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a contin-
uous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria (on the
juridical plane) between the interests of the fundamental group and those
of the subordinate groups – equilibria in which the interests of the domi-
nant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of
narrowly corporative economic interest. (QdC, Q13§17, p. 1584; SPN ,
p. 182)
State: ‘In the period following the World War, cracks opened up every-
where in the hegemonic apparatus, and the exercise of hegemony became
permanently difficult and aleatory’ (Q13§37, p. 1638; SPN , p. 80, note
49 [emphasis added—G.V.]). What was the origin of the crisis? Gramsci
has it date back to the Great War, analysing its sources in an original
manner. As we have been at pains to point out more than once, he
does not share either Lenin’s view of imperialism as ‘the highest stage
of capitalism’ or the historical vision of the communist movement that
justified its mission with the theory of the ‘general crisis of capitalism’.
Gramsci instead develops a politico-historical interpretation of the origins
of the war. With the creation of a ‘world economy’ in the last decades of
the nineteenth century, political history had begun to be marked by the
growing contrast between the ‘cosmopolitanism of economic life’ and the
‘nationalism of the life of the State’. The war had been generated by the
incapacity of the ruling classes to bring the latter into line with the former
and to ensure that the beneficial effects of the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the
economy were propagated through the promotion of ever more advanced
forms of world unification. The ‘order of Versailles’ had brought back that
contrast, aggravating the situation.
How had the characteristics of politics changed? Since when had they
begun to change and for what reasons? Gramsci argues that the whole
of the period after the French Revolution must be reconsidered and
locates the morphological change of politics in the passage to the ‘epoch
of imperialism’. But he proposes a non-conventional vision of this. In
the period that goes from the French Revolution to 1870 the European
liberal-democratic élites had had the experience of Jacobinism as their
model, re-worked ‘scientifically’ in the ‘political concept of the so-called
“permanent revolution”’ (Q13§7, p. 1566; SPN , p. 242). The ‘formula’
had ‘found its juridical constitutional “completion” in the parliamentary
regime. The latter, in the period in which “private” energies in society
were most plentiful, realized the permanent hegemony of the urban class
over the entire population in the Hegelian form of government with
permanently organised consent’ (Q13§37, p. 1636; SPN , p. 80, note 49).
It was possible for the exercise of hegemony to be consolidated since the
dominant class was able to renew and expand the conditions of its domi-
nation: ‘The economic base for industrial and commercial development
was continually enlarged and reinforced. Those social elements which
were most highly endowed with energy and spirit of enterprise rose from
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 201
the lower classes to the ruling classes. The entire society was in a contin-
uous process of formation and dissolution, followed by more complex
formations with richer potentialities’. But this ‘lasted until the epoch of
imperialism and culminated in the world war’ (loc. cit.).5 The golden
era of the ‘parliamentary regime’ presupposed a ‘historical context’ which
began to dissolve around 1870: ‘In the period after 1870, with the
colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change’. The reasons
for this change are of both an internal and an international order: ‘the
internal and international organisational relations of the State become
more complex and massive’. In the internal life of the State we have
the formation of ‘massive structures of the modem democracies, both
as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil life’; in
international relations the change consists in a greater dependency ‘of the
national economies [on] the economic relations of the world market’, that
is to say there is a growth of various aspects of interdependence which
characterize the development of an effectively world economy (Q13§7,
pp. 1566–1567; SPN , p. 243).6
The post-World War I crisis was a ‘crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony’
(Q13§23, pp. 1602–1603; SPN , p. 210) and of ‘the massive structure of
the modern democracies’ (Q13§7, p. 1567; SPN , p. 243): the rupture
of an equilibrium between rulers and ruled that could not be rebuilt
on the old bases and was manifested as the crisis of a fossilized political
nomenclature:
5 [The first part of the quotation is integrated to bring the English into line with the
original—trans. note.]
6 [The wording ‘civil life’, following the Italian ‘vita civile’, here replaces that of ‘civil
society’ of the SPN translation—trans. note.]
7 [Translation modified to replace the SPN gloss “classes” with “groups”, corresponding
to Gramsci’s original—trans. note.]
202 G. VACCA
But, Gramsci asks himself how, in the first place, do there arise ‘these
situations of conflict between ‘represented and representatives’ [which]
reverberate out from the terrain of the parties (…) throughout the State
organism?’ (loc. cit.). The response is ‘to be sought in civil society’ and
therein ‘one cannot do without studying’ the developments of ‘the trade-
union phenomenon’. This expression does not refer solely to the diffusion
of ‘organizations of special interest’ but also to the emergence of ‘newly
formed social elements, which previously had no say in affairs and, by
the sole fact of uniting together, modify the political structure of soci-
ety’ (Q15§47, p. 1808). And in a note penned only a little later,8 he
brings together in the ‘trade-union phenomenon’ the whole develop-
ment of democratic life of the three pre-war decades. This is an ensemble
of processes that the war had accelerated and intensified, which were
destined, more than the war itself, to ‘mark a watershed’ since thanks
to these processes the peoples’ subjectivity had become a permanent fact
lodged within them and, beyond a certain extent, not subject to coercion
(Q15§59, p. 1824; SPN , p. 106).
The crisis is generally ‘presented’ as a ‘crisis of the principle of authority
[and] dissolution of the parliamentary regime’. These are in Gramsci’s
view the ‘most trivial’ representations (Q13§37, p. 1638) since they
ignore the fundamental aspect, namely that the crisis [of power] ‘is also
widespread [and] will bring about a new, more secure and stable “hege-
mony”’ (Q1§76, p. 84; PN Vol. 1, p. 181); but they are ‘trivial’ above all
because they describe ‘only the “theatrical” manifestations on the terrain
of parliament and political government’ (Q13§37, p. 1638).9 They do
not however see the phenomenon of deeper historical importance, gener-
ated by the underlying changes in world structure (i.e. by the increasing
contrast between the cosmopolitanism of the economy and the nation-
alism of politics). Gramsci thus poses at the centre of his analysis the crisis
of the nation-State which we analysed in Chapter 1 (Q6§10, pp. 690–691;
SPN , pp. 270–271).
8 For the dating of the paragraphs in the Notebook, readers are referred to Gianni
Francioni, L’officina gramsciana (1984) which, taking as its starting point Gerratana’s
chronological edition, goes into greater depth as regards the chronology itself; see,
furthermore, Vacca (2011).
9 [The whole of Q13§37 is not in a standard English translation; here see PN Vol. 1,
p. 156 for the first draft (‘A’ text) which differs from the later ‘C’ text in the use of
‘common’ for ‘trivial’ and ‘central’ for ‘“theatrical”’—trans. note.]
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 203
… one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the
population to a certain cultural and moral level, (…). [Hegel’s concep-
tion] belonged to a period when the widespread growth of the bourgeoisie
might have seemed limitless, and therefore one could affirm its ethical and
universal character: the entire human race will be bourgeois. (Q8§179,
p. 1049; PN Vol. 3, p. 338)
The explosion onto the scene of the First World War demonstrated on
the other hand that ‘when things come to a standstill [of the development
of the hegemonic capacities of the bourgeoisie] there is a return to the
concept of the State as pure force’:
SPN , pp. 262–263), a State which is the regulator of the economy which
operates indirectly on it by intervening in the organization of society:
10 Perhaps the most significant passage on this score is devoted to the dialectic between
complexity and (the necessity for) organization. This is contained in Q6§109 (pp. 780–
781), a paragraph entitled ‘Past and Present. The Individual and the State’, where Gramsci
writes: ‘How the economic situation has changed to the “detriment” of the old liberalism:
Is it true that very individual citizen knows his own affairs better than anyone else in
today’s environment? Is it true that meritocracy prevails under the present circumstances?
The “individual citizen”: insofar as he cannot know (and, most important, cannot control)
the general conditions in which business is conducted given the size of the world market
and its complexity, in reality he does not know his own affairs, either – the need for big
industrial organizations, etc.’ (PN Vol. 3, p. 90 and FSPN p. 247; the italicized words
here seen are taken from the FSPN translation to integrate the PN one for a phrase
inadvertently omitted—trans. note).
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 205
under the technico-procedural aspect, but one must also have a realist-
historical notion that may be ‘extracted’ only in relation to the concept
of hegemony:
Among the many meanings of democracy, the most realistic and concrete
one, in my view, is that which can be brought into relief through the
connection between democracy and the concept of hegemony. In the hege-
monic system, there is democracy between the leading group and the
groups that are led to the extent that the development of the economy
and thus the legislation which is a development of that expression favours
the molecular transition from the groups that are led to the leading group.
(Q8§190, p. 1056; PN Vol. 3, p. 145, and SPN , note 5 to pp. 56–57)
11 Above all else, the whole of modern public law. Indeed, Gramsci writes ‘the revo-
lution that the bourgeois class brought about in the concept of law and therefore in
the function of the State consists primarily in the will to conformism (hence the ethical
character of law and the State)’ (Q8§2, p. 937; PN Vol. 3, p. 234).
12 For the link between hegemony and pluralism at the origins of modernity, cf. Gramsci
(1997), Pensare la democrazia. Antologia dei “Quaderni del carcere” (Ed. M. Montanari).
13 Cf. footnote 3, above [‘Cassandras’ was the term used by the Mondoperaio authors
as a self-description—trans. note].
206 G. VACCA
of the ‘urban forces’. But the city can lead the countryside only by real-
izing a balanced exchange with it and fostering its economic development.
For this reason, Gramsci observes acutely that Machiavelli anticipates in
politics the thought in economics of the physiocrats (Q8§162, pp. 1038–
1039; PN Vol. 3, pp. 326–327, and FSPN , pp. 163–164). If then we
go on to the contemporary era, there cannot be any doubt regarding his
thought: the concept of democracy is contraposed to that of dictatorship:
The modern State substitutes for the mechanical bloc of social groups
their subordination to the active hegemony of the directive and dominant
group, hence abolishes certain autonomies, which nevertheless are reborn
in other forms, as parties, trade unions, cultural associations. The contem-
porary dictatorships legally abolish these new forms of autonomy as well,
and strive to incorporate them within State activity: the legal centralisation
of the entire national life in the hands of the dominant group becomes
“totalitarian”. (Q25§4, p. 2287; SPN , pp. 53–54 footnote 4)
This theme leads into the study of the totalitarian regimes present in
Europe between the two world wars: fascism, Stalinism and Nazism. But
Gramsci cannot be aligned with the theorists of ‘totalitarianism’. All three
of these regimes are based on a single party and on the identification with
the State, but they are contraposed and in order to understand them one
cannot limit oneself to cataloguing their institutional analogies. Gramsci
considers the fascist regimes to be ‘regressive’ and the Soviet State to
be ‘progressive’ (Q6§136, p. 800; PN Vol. 3, pp. 107–108, and SPN ,
pp. 264–265); he does not however approve of the general structure.
For Gramsci, dictatorship, whatever the ruling class, is the expression
of a hegemonic incapacity, and represents a ‘primordial’ form of politics
corresponding to an ‘economic-corporative’ stage of the ruling group
and is not only pathological but also necessarily transitory. It is of use
in this context to quote a note on the ‘actualism’ of Giovanni Gentile.
In Gramsci’s view, the difference between Gentile’s thought and Croce’s
philosophy is that while the latter ‘wants to maintain a distinction between
civil society and political society’, Gentile on the other hand dissolves the
former within the latter since for him ‘history is entirely history of the
State’. Apparently this represents an advantage for Gentile’s actualism,
since ‘“unity in the act” allows Gentile to recognize as “history” that
which for Croce is “antihistory”’, in other words fascism. But, if ‘it is
impossible to distinguish political society from civil society’, the notion of
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 207
the State becomes impoverished: only the State exists and. of course. [it
is] the State-as-government, etc.’ ‘Hegemony and dictatorship [become]
indistinguishable, force is no different from consent ’. There thus comes
about a regression of the ‘ethical phase’ to the ‘[economic]-corporative
phase’ of politics (Q6§10, p. 691; PN Vol. 3, pp. 9–10 and SPN , p. 271).
‘Totalitarianism’ is born from a State of exception and thus cannot
constitute a rule of life of the State. In this State of exception the ‘single
party’ carries out the functions normally attributed to the Head of State
(Q13§21, p. 1601; SPN , pp. 147–148): it functions as an ‘element that
balances the various interests’ in conflict, ‘[w]ith the difference however
that in terms of traditional constitutional law the political party juridically
neither rules nor governs: it has “de facto power”, it exercises the hege-
monic function, and hence the function of balancing various interests in
“civil society”’, which obviously no totalitarian State can suppress. Civil
society ‘is in fact so intertwined with political society that all citizens feel
instead that the party rules and governs’. Under this aspect, the ‘totali-
tarianisms’ are identical and for them the assertion is valid that ‘it is not
possible to create a constitutional law of the traditional type based on this
reality which is in continuous movement’ (Q5§127, p. 662; PN Vol. 2,
p. 382).
In the totalitarian State even the (totalitarian) party ends up by losing
its political function. ‘Is political action (in the strict sense) necessary –
Gramsci wonders in a late note in Notebook 1714 – for one to be able
to speak of a “political party”?’. His reply is obviously in the affirmative,
and refers back to the ‘normal’ situation of democratic regimes. ‘In coun-
tries where there is a single, totalitarian governing party’ its functions are
‘no longer directly political, but merely technical ones of propaganda and
public order, and moral and cultural influence’. Gramsci further notes that
in the parties that govern them, the predominance of ‘cultural functions’
gives rise to ‘political language becom[ing] jargon’, which deadens the
perception of reality: ‘political questions are disguised as cultural ones,
and as such become insoluble’ (Q17§37, p. 1940; SPN , p. 149).
Hence there is no hegemony without democracy, nor can there be
democracy if the ‘“normal” exercise of hegemony’ is interrupted or begins
to crumble. The presupposition of democracy is pluralism of modern
societies (not only of social groups but of their economic and political
14 In its reference to totalitarian mass parties this paragraph (Q17§37, p. 1939) should
also be borne in mind in the consideration of the experience of Nazism.
208 G. VACCA
15 For the concept of ‘public sphere’ cf. Habermas (1992); original 1962 and Italian
translation 1971; see also Williams (1961).
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 209
Public opinion is the political content of the public’s political will that
can be dissentient; therefore, there is a struggle for the monopoly of the
organs of public opinion – newspapers, political parties, parliament – so
that only one force will mold public opinion and hence the political will
of the nation, while reducing the dissenters to individual and disconnected
specks of dust. (Q7§83, p. 915; PN Vol. 3, p. 213)
16 Cf. Gramsci’s letter from Vienna to Togliatti, Terracini (Urbani) and others of 9
February 1924 in Togliatti (1961, p. 197) (Gramsci GTW , p. 227, and SPW 1921–1926,
p. 199).
210 G. VACCA
18 [Croce’s first published essay (1893), defining much of his subsequent output was the
paper read before the Pontanian Academy in Naples, ‘La storia ridotta sotto il concetto
generale dell’arte’ (‘History subsumed under the general concept of art’)—trans. note.]
212 G. VACCA
But if ‘passion’ is but one aspect of the struggle for hegemony,19 is the
reduction of the whole of politics to ‘passion’ a ‘disinterested’ theoretical
error or is it born from a contingent practical conditioning? In actual fact,
Gramsci notes, Croce’s conception is directed against the subaltern classes
since only they have the ‘need’, in order to conquer power, for ‘per-
manent’ voluntary organizations (parties, trade unions, etc.); the ruling
classes, instead, already have in their hands the State, the market and
‘hegemonic apparatuses’. They have all the armament necessary for exer-
cising power and therefore for them ‘political initiative’ can even be only
of an ‘individual’ and ‘molecular’ nature.20 Croce, like all the upholders of
‘politics-as-power’ argues that the subaltern classes should never be trans-
formed into ruling classes and, if they intend to do this, they represent
a serious threat to society. The locus where this aspect of his philosophy
is most evident is the conception of the different role played by ideolo-
gies for the élite and for the mass. Indeed, as Gramsci observes, ‘political
19 Although Gramsci rejects the identification of ‘passion’ with politics, he does however
recognize an essential value in Croce’s concept. The ‘reduction’ operated by Croce ‘runs
into difficulties when it comes to explaining and justifying permanent political formations,
such as the parties and, even more so, the national armies and General Staffs, since
it is impossible to conceive of a permanently organized passion that does not become
rationality and deliberate reflection – in other words, that ceases to be passion’. Hence
the solution to the problem ‘can be found only in the identification of politics and
economics’. Expressed in other words, Croce’s ‘passion’ is to be understood as ‘interest’.
The ‘translation’ of Croce’s thesis into Gramsci’s language brings the problem back to
the dialectic between the ‘economic-corporative’ and the ‘ethico-political’ and. in this,
‘passion’ occupies an essential role as the mainspring which leads to the transcendence
of the economic-corporative interest given that it introduces disinterest into the action,
which can go as far as the sacrifice of one’s life. Indeed, if politics, in so far as it is rational
calculation and utilitarian action, is identified with economics, it is however distinct from it
by the intervention of passion’: ‘it is possible to speak of economics and politics separately.
One can speak of “political passion”, that it is an unmediated impulse toward action that
is born on the “permanent and organic” terrain of economic life but goes beyond it,
bringing into play emotions and aspirations in whose incandescent atmosphere even the
calculations of individual human life will follow laws different from those of individual
profit, etc.’ (Q8§132, p. 1022; PN Vol. 3, p. 312, and SPN , pp. 139–140). What
specifies politics is therefore its ethical nature, its intrinsic relation on the one hand with
economics and, on the other, even stronger, with ethics. The latter ‘supersedes’ the former
and introduces a universalistic tension into political action.
20 This subject is clarified in an exemplary manner in the analysis of the action of the
‘Moderates’ and ‘democrats’ in the Italian Risorgimento (Q19§24, pp. 2011–2013; SPN ,
pp. 59–61.)
214 G. VACCA
21 This judgment is found in various places scattered through the Prison Letters and
Notebooks. For the Letters, see Gramsci’s of 18 April 1932 and Tanja’s of 5 July 1932; for
the April letter, see Gramsci (1994a, Vol. 2, p. 164), while Tanja’s is in Gramsci-Schucht
(1997, pp. 1041–1042). For references in the Notebooks, on the other hand, see Q10I
Sommario [Summary], p. 1207 and Q10I§2, pp. 1213–1214 in Gramsci (1975); FSPN ,
pp. 328 and 335 respectively.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 215
The ‘peasant war’ had therefore fatal consequences for the Soviet State
and demonstrated that Stalin’s ruling group had a military conception
of politics. Gramsci emphasized above all its anachronism given that in
the era of the ‘war of position’ the military element in the real and
proper sense had a secondary and uncertain role, the power of arms
being eminently dissuasive (Q13§24, pp. 1615–1616; SPN , pp. 235–
236). But the militarization of politics also brings out another side of
‘economism’ to which we have already drawn attention. This regards the
‘so-called intransigence theories’ characterized by the ‘rigid aversion on
principle to what are termed compromises – and the derivative of this,
which can be termed “fear of dangers”’. That the ‘aversion on principle to
compromise is closely linked to economism’ is in his view clear ‘[f]or the
conception upon which the aversion is based can only be the iron convic-
tion that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in
kind to natural laws’. This therefore involves ‘a belief in a predetermined
teleology like that of a religion’ which nullifies ‘any deliberate initiative
tending to predispose and plan these conditions [for success]’ (Q13§23,
pp. 1611–1612; SPN , pp. 167–168).
Apparently the criticism of the ‘so-called intransigence theories’ is
retrospective in so far as it refers to the conceptions of Bordiga, which
Gramsci had already defeated between 1924 and 1926. But it is known
that in the ‘Third Period turn’ of 1930, he recognized a regression of the
whole communist movement to those positions. The target of his criticism
was therefore Stalin. Militarization concerned both the domestic policy of
the USSR and the Comintern, now firmly in Stalin’s grasp. Gramsci refers
to the PCI but probably has the German situation in mind. The 1930
‘turn’, the ‘class against class’ policy (Agosti 1976, Vol. III) is consid-
ered as the cause of ‘collective disasters’ and ‘useless sacrifices’ (Q15§4,
p. 1753; SPN , p. 240): a line based on a mistaken analysis of the Italian
situation (Q15§35, pp. 1788–1789) which originated from the ‘political
which Gramsci here makes reference, reads as follows ‘it has never been seen in history
that a dominant class, in its entirety, has been subject to living conditions that were lower
than given elements and strata of the subjected and dominated class […] And yet the
proletariat cannot become the dominant class if, through the sacrifice of its corporative
interests, it does not transcend this contradiction, it cannot maintain its hegemony and its
dictatorship if, even when it has become dominant, it does not sacrifice these immediate
interests for its general and permanent class interests’ (P. Togliatti 1961, pp. 129–130;
GTW , pp. 374–375, the emphasis being shown there belonging to the original manuscript
letter; see also SPW 1921–1926, p. 431 and PPW , p. 311).
218 G. VACCA
25 Luigi Cadorna was the general held responsible for the catastrophic defeat of Italian
army forces at Caporetto in the World War I. An authoritarian who, once he had decided
on a plan, adhered to it and expected his men do so unquestioningly, despite a real
situation that might give contrary indications. His name is used metaphorically by Gramsci
to describe leaders who expect their followers to carry out plans worked out in advance,
whatever the reality or the cost.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 219
26 Gramsci here refers to the positions maintained by Stalin in the philosophical debate
in the Soviet Communist Party in 1930–1931. He had read (and appreciated) a summary
in D. P. Mirsky [Mirskij], ‘The Philosophical Discussion in the CPSU in 1930–31’ in The
Labour Monthly, October 1931.
220 G. VACCA
27 [The quotation here follows the original Italian wording by using “groups” instead
of SPN ’s gloss of “classes”—trans. note].
28 [Bernstein’s words are cited by Gramsci in the form given here—trans. note.]
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 221
p. 1387; SPN , p. 335). This does not mean that political action must
stem from a philosophical system but, if the parties do not have their own
theory of history and politics, they cannot develop. The basic question, I
repeat, is ‘How does the historical movement arise on the structural base?’
(Q11§22, p. 1422; SPN , p. 431). That is to say, how does the constitu-
tion of the hegemonic subjects and in particular the parties come about?
The principles indicated in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy are insufficient, but from the ‘reflection on these two
principles, one can move on to develop a whole series of further principles
of historical methodology’ (Q13§17, pp. 1578–1579; SPN , p. 177). In
Gramsci’s view the philosophy of praxis and the theory of hegemony can
only develop through a permanent juxtaposition with liberalism. The idea
is not new, but rather a principle of the Marxist tradition according to
which ‘It is affirmed that the philosophy of praxis was born on the terrain
of the highest development of culture in the first half of the nineteenth
century, this culture being represented by classical German philosophy,
English classical economy and French political literature and practice’.
Thus, ‘[t]hese three cultural moments are at the origin of the philosophy
of praxis’ (Q10II§9, p. 1246; SPN , p. 399).32 But Gramsci draws atten-
tion to the risk of dissolving this philosophy into the genealogy of its
sources, making it subaltern to other philosophies. According to Gramsci
this happened with Lenin and probably, when he sheds doubt on this
formula, he has in mind Lenin’s Three Sources and Three Component Parts
of Marxism (Q11§27, pp. 1436–1437; SPN , pp. 464–465).
As was already noted in Chapter 3, for Gramsci the fundamental inno-
vation in the philosophy of praxis consisted in the fact that Marx had
singled out what was also the ‘epistemological value’ of the Ricardian
concepts of the ‘law of tendency’, the ‘homo oeconomicus’ and the
‘determinate market’, and had thus ‘universalised Ricardo’s discoveries,
extending them in an adequate fashion to the whole of history’. In other
words he had drawn from this principles ‘a new “immanence”’ and a ‘new
concept of “necessity” and of freedom’. The claim that ‘the philosophy of
praxis equals Hegel plus David Ricardo’ (Q10II§9, pp. 1246–1247; SPN ,
pp. 400–401) implies a new interpretation of Hegelian philosophy and of
32 [The SPN translation is here modified twice to read “economy” rather than “eco-
nomics”—the latter being a later nineteenth century positivistic interpretation of the
science, alien to the Marxist tradition—and to reinstate “moment” rather than SPN ’s
“movement”, a distinction between the two being made by Gramsci—trans. note.]
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 223
33 [The wordings quoted in these lines in inverted commas are included by Gramsci in
a bracketed addition in the margin of Q10II§61 and unfortunately not included in the
English translation (SPN , pp. 114–116) of the rest of this paragraph—trans. note.]
224 G. VACCA
34 This variation, Gramsci writes, ‘in the actual process whereby the same historical
development manifests itself in different countries [has] to be related not only to the
differing combinations of internal relations within the different nations, but also to the
differing international relations’, going on to state that ‘international relations are usually
underestimated in this kind of research’ (Q19§24, p. 2033; SPN , p. 84). Gramsci also says
in an even clearer way—in his critique of Adolfo Omodeo’s Età del risorgimento italiano
(1931)—that the fulcrum of world historical processes is the national-international nexus:
‘National personality (…) is a mere abstraction if it is considered outside the international
context. National personality expresses a “distinct” of the international complex and is
therefore bound to international relations’ (Q19§2, p. 1962).
226 G. VACCA
they are different in principle from the State since they are voluntary
organizations whose specific functions are the development of ‘political
orientation’, the fostering of a ‘collective will’ that supports it, and the
selection of the ruling classes. These functions are exercised in civil society
rather than in the State
every member of the party, no matter what place or office he might occupy,
remains a member of the party and subordinated to its leadership. There
cannot be subordination between trade union and party; if the union
has voluntarily chosen a member of the party to be its leader, it means
that the union [freely] chooses the directions of the party and therefore
freely accepts (indeed desires) the party’s [political – G.V.] control over its
officials. (Q3§42, p. 321; PN Vol. 2, p. 42)
36 The critique of the sociology of the political party is carried out mainly in Notebook
12 (Q12§§15 and 25, pp. 1403–1404 and 1429–1430 respectively; SPN , pp. 437–439
and 429–430 respectively), but in a slightly later note, datable to February 1933 (Q14§29,
pp. 1687–1688), Gramsci again takes up the descriptive value.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 229
Gramsci goes on to add that in this respect ‘it must be allowed that
parliamentarism has become inefficient and even harmful’. But the reme-
dies are, on the one hand, that of ‘modifying the training of technical
political personnel, completing their culture in accordance with the new
necessities’ (Q12§1, p. 1532; SPN , p. 28) and, on the other, that of
bringing the State officials, including those at the summits of the bureau-
cratic apparatuses, up to the needs of social complexity, by using different
criteria of election. The model is British self-government which is not
however easy to export to other European countries, since ‘each type of
society has its own way of posing or solving the problem of bureaucracy;
each one is different’. ‘[I]n non-Anglo-Saxon countries’ self-government
may be realized by challenging the ‘centralism of the higher echelons’ of
the bureaucracy with the expansion of ‘institutions that are controlled
directly from below’ (Q8§55, p. 974; PN Vol. 3, p. 268).37 ‘It has
to be considered whether parliamentarism and representative system are
synonymous, and whether a different solution is not possible – both for
parliamentarism and for the bureaucratic system – with a new type of
representative system’ (Q14§49, SPN , p. 254).
The new State that Gramsci is thinking of must conform to the ‘great
transformation’ that was underway in Europe between the two wars and
37 [Cf. also the extracts from this paragraph in SPN , p. 186, note 32—trans. note.]
232 G. VACCA
38 [Translation integrated with the words ‘the capacity of’, not included in the SPN
text—trans. note.]
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 235
5 Epilogue
Between hegemony and democracy there is therefore a reciprocal implica-
tion, so much so that in Gramsci’s view the theory of democracy can only
be fully developed within a conception of politics as hegemony. Here we
refer to the above-mentioned Notebook 8, paragraph 191 (Gramsci 1975,
p. 1056) entitled precisely ‘Hegemony and Democracy’, in which—as
seen—he writes that ‘among the many meanings of democracy, the most
realistic and concrete one’ may be determined in connection ‘with the
concept of hegemony’ since there exists ‘democracy between the leading
group and the groups that are led to the extent that the development of
the economy and thus the legislation (…) favors the molecular transition
from the groups that are led to the leading group’ (PN Vol. 3, p. 345).
Up to what limit may social ‘mobility’ be extended? This is a problem
that subjects democracies to a radical tension:
This has been the line of tendency of all European democracies since
the Second World War. Gramsci however poses not only the problem of
the ‘coincidence of the rulers and the ruled’, but that of creating the
conditions in which the ‘necessity’ of the division of humanity into rulers
and rules may be superseded.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 237
The first element is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and
led. The entire science and art of politics are based on this primordial,
and (given certain general conditions) irreducible fact. [But] (…) in the
formation of leaders, one premiss is fundamental: is it the intention that
there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the
conditions in which this division is no longer necessary? In other words, is
the initial premiss the perpetual division of the human race, or the belief that
this division is only an historical fact, corresponding to certain conditions?
(Q15§4, p. 1752; SPN , p. 144)
The link between the conception of ‘civil society’ as the ‘theatre of all
history’ and the theory of politics as the struggle for hegemony indicates the
perspective in which the idée-force of the ‘withering away of the State’ can
238 G. VACCA
41 The thesis of the incoercibly ‘anarchic’ nature of the international order, stemming
from so-called ‘political realism’ is argued by Norberto Bobbio but effectively challenged
in a review article by Luigi Bonanate (1979) and again by Bonanate (1992). On this
question, I refer readers to my essay ‘Tertium non datur. Norberto Bobbio e il dilemma
della liberaldemocrazia’, in Vacca (1994).
42 Cf. paragraph 61 of Notebook 10, pp. 1358–1361 (partially in SPN , op. cit.,
pp. 114–118), devoted in the main to the ‘conception of the State according to the
productive function of the social classes’ and the critique of the book Età del Risorgimento
by Adolfo Omodeo in Q19§3, pp. 1961–1963.
240 G. VACCA
References
Agosti, A. (1976). La terza Internazionale. Storia documentaria (Vol. III).
Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Benvenuti, F., & Pons, S. (1999). L’Unione Sovietica nei Quaderni. In G. Vacca
(Ed.), Gramsci e il Novecento (pp. 93–124). Rome: Carocci.
Bobbio, N. (1955). Politica e cultura. Turin: Einaudi.
Bobbio, N. (1969). Gramsci e la concezione della società civile. In P. Rossi (Ed.),
Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea (Vol. I, pp. 75–100). Rome: Editori
Riuniti.
Bobbio, N. (1979). Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace. Bologna: Il
Mulino.
Bobbio, N. (1984). Congedo (Valediction). In L. Bonanate & M. Bovero (Eds.)
(1986), pp. 243–253.
Bobbio, N. (1985). Stato, governo, società. Per una teoria generale della politica.
Turin: Einaudi.
Bobbio, N. (1988). Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society (C. Mortera,
Trans.). In J. Keane (Ed.), Civil Society and the State (pp. 73–100). London
and New York: Verso.
Bobbio, N. (1991). La società civile in Gramsci. In Saggi su Gramsci (pp. 42–
55). Milan: Feltrinelli.
Bonanate, L. (1986). Review: ‘Un labirinto in forma di cerchi concentrici,
ovvero: guerra e pace nel pensiero di Norberto Bobbio’ of Bobbio (1979).
In Bonanate & Bovero (1986), pp. 15–47.
Bonanate, L. (1992). Etica e politica internazionale. Turin: Einaudi.
Bonanate, L., & Bovero, M. (Eds.). (1986). Per una teoria generale della politica,
Essays in honour of Norberto Bobbio. Firenze: Passigli.
Boothman, D., Giasi F., & Vacca G. (Eds.). (2015). Gramsci in Gran Bretagna.
Bologna: Il Mulino.
Boyer, R., & Mistral, J. (1978). Accumulation, Inflation, Crises. Paris: PUF. In
Italian: Accumulazione, inflazione, crisi (1985) (S. Scotti, Trans.). Bologna:
Il Mulino.
De Domenico, N. (1991). Una fonte trascurata dei Quaderni del carcere. Il
“Labour Monthly” del 1931. Atti della Accademia Peloriana de Pericolanti,
LXVII , 1–34 (preprint).
Di Biagio, A. (2004). Coesistenza e isolazionismo. Mosca, il Comintern e l’Europa
di Versailles (1918–1928). Rome: Carocci.
Francioni, G. (1984). L’officina gramsciana. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Gervasoni, M. (1977). Georges Sorel. Una biografia intellettuale. Socialismo e
liberalismo nella Francia della Belle Époque. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-
Smith, Eds. and Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere (V. Gerratana, Ed.). Turin: Einaudi.
4 HEGEMONY AND DEMOCRACY 241
Afterword
At nearly half a century’s distance from this piece, I believe that, while
allowing for exaggerations in this author’s cultural position,5 it faithfully
reflects a trait common to Gramsci studies in the period preceding the
Critical Edition of the Notebooks, that is to say the prevalent inclination
to dissolve Gramsci’s thought in the genealogy of his sources following
an inveterate combinatory custom of an academic type.
The thematic edition of 1948–1951 did not impede a diachronic
reading of the Notebooks but made it very difficult and to the best of my
knowledge it was only Franco De Felice who succeeded in so doing (De
5 Asor Rosa’s reading of Gramsci retraced the lines of Mario Tronti’s essay ‘Tra mate-
rialismo dialettico e filosofia della praxis: Gramsci e Labriola’ (Tronti 1959), a valid link
between criticism, originating from Galvano della Volpe, of ‘Crocio-Gramscism’ and the
elaboration of the philosophical bases of workerism. Together with the essay by Emilio
Agazzi (1959), ‘Filosofia della praxis e filosofia dello spirito’, Tronti’s essay constituted the
most clearly philosophical contribution in the volume edited by Alberto Caracciolo and
Gianni Scalia (1959) La città futura., whose aim was to offer an alternative to the direc-
tion mapped out by Palmiro Togliatti in the First International Conference of Gramsci
Studies, in January 1958.
246 G. VACCA
6 In this pioneering essay, Franco De Felice revolutionized the perception of the research
programme followed in the Notebooks (De Felice 1972b).
7 See Francioni (1979), a contribution elaborated on in his 1984 volume that outlined
the results of his philological research (Francioni 1984). Francioni also took seriously into
consideration Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Gramsci et l’État (1975; in English 1980)
which, although coming out slightly before the Critical Edition of the Notebooks (1975),
was able to use it, and demonstrated the untenability of the interpretation of the Grams-
cian conception of both ‘civil society’ and ‘hegemony’ as put forward by Norberto Bobbio
in one of the main speeches at the 1967 Cagliari International Congress of Gramscian
Studies (Rossi 1969, Vol. I, pp. 75–100), for an English version of which see Bobbio
(1988); cf. also the Gramscian conception of hegemony as argued by Perry Anderson
(1976 and, in Italian, Anderson 1978).
8 To quote only a few of the essays of that period, I recall here F. De Felice (1977) and
L. Mangoni (1977), both in conference proceedings edited by Franco Ferri (1977, Vol.
I, pp. 391–438 and pp. 161–220 respectively), while that of M. R. Romagnuolo (1987–
1988, pp. 123–166) put an end to the interchangeability of the two terms, demonstrating
that from the middle of 1932 onward, with the expression ‘philosophy of praxis’, Gramsci
intended to stress the originality of his own thought.
9 From the 1980s, I limit myself to recalling the essay by M. Ciliberto (1982 [19801 ]),
La fabbrica dei Quaderni. Gramsci e Vico, which compared the various drafts of the notes
devoted to this subject; to a volume of mine, which analysed the category of ‘world
history’ in the Notebooks, singling out the paradigm of the theory of hegemony within
the national-international nexus (Vacca 1985); and to Luisa Mangoni’s contribution at
the Gramsci studies conference of 1987, which shed light on the importance of the
‘Catholic question’ following the concordats in Germany and Italy, regarding as much the
developments of Gramsci’s interpretation of fascism as the elaboration of the theory of
hegemony (Mangoni 1987).
5 AFTERWORD 247
the 1922–1937 period (cf. Daniele 1999; Rossi and Vacca 2007; Vacca
2012, 2014).11 Taken as a whole, the research begun in 1988–1989 and
the results obtained in over fifteen years of work have confirmed the
criteria that lay behind the National Edition (cf. Cospito 2010; Vacca
2011) and favoured the maturing of a new season of Gramsci studies.
If we return to considering our starting point, the work of Alessandro
Carlucci, it is of use to recall that 2007, the seventieth anniversary of
Gramsci’s death, saw the start not only of the National Edition of his
writings, but the Foundation bearing his name devoted the traditional
ten-yearly conference to the subject of ‘Gramsci in his time’. The confer-
ence proposed a political and intellectual reconstruction of Gramsci’s
biography, and called into the arena contributions not only from students
of his thought but students of political history, of economic history,
of cultural history and of linguistics, all with the aim of restoring the
different contexts. The choral and polyphonic nature of the research
presented does not allow us here to summarize the results, but it is suffi-
cient to leaf through the contents of the two volumes to realize how the
framework of Gramsci studies has changed: if we go back to the cata-
logue compiled by Asor Rosa in 1975 (op. cit.), we can easily see how,
for each subject matter, we no longer proceed by suggestion, assonance
and analogy (Gramsci’s Sorelianism, Bergsonism, Croceanism, etc.); the
different contributions bring sources, comparisons and combinations into
the reconstruction of a historical individuality, to the formation of a
culture and a character that outlines the uniqueness and unitary nature
of the figure of Gramsci (cf. Giasi 2008a).
Among the most significant results of the previous research, there was
first of all the possibility of separating Gramsci’s thought out into distinct
and well-characterized periods. The majority of these researches were
dedicated to a diachronic reading of the Notebooks and, by reconstructing
the lexis, the semantic shifts and the progressive refinement of his basic
categories, brought to light the formation of an original, open but system-
atic, thought which could not be read in continuity with the preceding
period. In its turn Gramsci’s thought between 1914 and 1926 no longer
lent itself to being looked at teleologically with the aim of defining real
11 The basic points regard the differences with the Comintern, the break with the PCI
and Gramsci’s suspicions about the failure to free him; among the references given here
in the text I draw attention to my introductory essay to Daniele (1999).
5 AFTERWORD 249
filter the sources that flow profusely into his formation, allowing the origi-
nality of the ‘translations’ and the combinations in which Gramsci reworks
them in developing his own thought. If the Marxian matrix of the nexus
between laissez-faire liberalism and ‘intransigent socialism’ has already for
some time been clear,12 the complete reconstruction that Rapone makes
of the ‘doctrine of war’ is totally new. This is a crucial theme in Gram-
sci’s formation, both for its influence that his reflection on the Great War
had in the succeeding developments of his thought, and because it lay at
the base of a way of analysing history founded on the dynamics of inter-
national relations. But it is of use to draw attention to the originality of
Gramsci’s position in the panorama of European socialism for the absence
from his thought both of a theory of imperialism and of the thesis of
the inevitability of war. In Gramsci’s analysis of capitalism from the end
of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Great War, together
with the Marx of the Manifesto and Capital, there is the liberal thought
à la Hobson and Norman Angell rather than the Marxism of Kautsky,
Hilferding or Jaurès. The accomplishment of a world economy for him
constituted the infrastructure of a global and interdependent world in
which the task of the socialists was that of challenging capitalism and fully
completing its mission since the more capitalist relations of production
were extended the faster the conditions would be created for the advent
of the International. War therefore was not the inevitable consequence of
imperialist capitalism but had its origin—as he would emphasize in the
Notebooks —in the contrast between the cosmopolitanism of the economy
and the nationalism of politics (Q15§5, pp. 1755–1759; FSPN , pp. 219–
223). Expressed in other words, it was the consequence of economic
protectionism and political nationalism, stemming from the ‘economic-
corporative’ regression of the European ruling classes and the incapacity
to bring together the ‘spaces’ of politics and those of the economy.
We cannot take account here of all the innovatory aspects of Rapone’s
volume but we should draw attention to the fact that chapter on the
war, with its pre-publication version in Studi storici (Rapone 2007), gave
rise to various contributions at the 2007 conference on ‘Gramsci in his
time’ (see above). Among these, there was that of Roberto Gualtieri who,
adopting the paradigm of international history, brought out the influence
of Capital on Gramsci’s thought from the ‘early writings’ to those of
13 But to give an exact picture of Gramsci’s 1926 position, it is also of use to recall
Francesco Giasi’s essay ‘I comunisti torinesi e l’egemonia del proletariato nella rivoluzione
italiana. Appunti sulle fonti di “Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale” di Gramsci’, in
A. D’Orsi (2008, pp. 147–186).
14 On the nexus between the Russian Revolution and Gramsci’s more detailed inquiry
into Marx, one should also see Rapone (2012, pp. 267–280).
252 G. VACCA
15 In those years, amongst the ex-‘Ordinovisti’, it was not only Gramsci who proposed
a revision of Marxism by returning to Marx. Between 1930 and 1934, Angelo Tasca, too,
starting from the same problems but arriving at different conclusions, was involved in a
re-reading of the works of Marx and Engels. Cf. G. Berti (1968), A. Tasca (1934), and
D. Bidussa (1987, pp. 81–119).
5 AFTERWORD 253
1932 on the other hand, in the third series, he asserts that the problem
pose by Marx in the Preface was that of finding out ‘how (…) collec-
tive wills are in fact formed’ (Q8§195, p. 1057; PN Vol. 3, p. 346).
The change in the problem indicates the distance between the begin-
ning of a revision of Marxism that still assumes the subject as a given
and the point of arrival which, instead, considers the subject as a process
which requires a theory of its constitution. The guiding thread of Cospi-
to’s research is the progressive liberation of Gramsci’s thought from all
forms of determinism, up to the point of dismantling the ‘architectural
metaphor’ of base and superstructure, while—as regards the concept of
‘historical bloc’—his merit is that of having shown its marginal and provi-
sional presence, and finally its disappearance after the middle of 1932
(Cospito 2011, pp. 218–225; 2016, pp. 162–167), with however the
reservation that its abandonment regards solely its theoretical use, while
it remains in operation as a historiographical category. For example the
paragraphs in the Notes on Philosophy and Notebooks 9 and 19 devoted
to the Risorgimento in Italy revolve around the thesis that the hege-
mony of the ‘Moderates’, who led the movement, gave birth to a fusion
between a national—dualistic and asymmetrical—market, and a corre-
sponding form of State which crystallized the relations of force between
social groups, transforming the hegemony of the victors into a lasting
domination. There is no one here blind to the appropriateness in this case
of the concept of a ‘historical bloc’ of the Risorgimento. But it is useful to
recall that from the Spring of 1932, deepening the Marxian concept of the
‘translatability of languages’ (economic, political, philosophical) Gramsci
had worked out as an alternative to the various applications of the ‘archi-
tectural metaphor’ the concept of ‘regulation’. Cospito takes this as a cue
in reconstructing Gramsci’s critique of the ‘command economy’, of the
despotic nature and the cultural primitivism of the USSR of the 1930s
(Cospito 2011, pp. 127–182; 2016, pp. 91–132).
The concept of ‘regulation’ is a very wide-ranging one and leads us
directly into the heart of the ‘philosophy of praxis’. As we know, Gramsci
was stimulated to deepen the understanding of the concepts of classical
political economy by his study of fascist corporativism and the disputes
given rise to by the theorists of the ‘proprietary corporation’ (Macca-
belli 1998, 2008). A second-hand knowledge of the Principles of David
Ricardo led him to formulate the hypothesis that the concepts of ‘deter-
minate market’, ‘law of tendency’ and ‘homo oeconomicus’ [‘economic
man’], categorizing the historical conditions that made the postulates
254 G. VACCA
of ‘pure economy’ plausible, had also had a decisive influence not only
on the critique of political economy but on Marx’s philosophy. Starting
off from these notes of April–May 1932 (Q10II§9, pp. 1246–1248,
Q10II§32, pp. 1276–1278, and Q11§52, pp. 1477–1478 [Autumn
1932]; SPN , pp. 399–402, FSPN , pp. 170–71, and SPN , pp. 410–412,
respectively),16 in which Gramsci concludes that the notion of ‘deter-
minate market’ implies a general theory of consciousness founded on
the concept of ‘determinate abstraction’, Fabio Frosini concentrated his
reflection on Gramsci’s translation of the Marxian concept of ‘material-
ism’ into that of ‘immanence’ and makes it the Leitmotiv of his research
(Frosini 2010). Frosini’s is the most organic work on Gramsci’s ‘phi-
losophy of praxis’ currently available. The phrase lends itself to various
misinterpretations both through the difficulty of distinguishing ‘praxis’
as used by Gramsci from its use, for example, by Labriola or Mondolfo,
and because ‘praxis’ may also mean ‘action’, ‘act’ or ‘experience’, and
if one does not shed light on the specificity of Gramsci’s thought it is
difficult to challenge the tendencies to dissolve it in the genealogy of its
sources, real or presumed as may be. From Frosini’s reconstruction it
clearly emerges that for Gramsci praxis is equivalent to politics, but in the
historical period immediately following the Great War and the October
Revolution, in which the modern political subject—the State—entered
into crisis, and neither the traditional riling classes nor the working class
movement were able to resolve it, the foundation of the new political
subject could not be entrusted to ‘particular sciences’: it was a specifically
philosophical problem. Frosini poses it by looking closely at the existing
Italian and international literature that emerged from the publication of
the Critical Edition of the Prison Notebooks onward and offers us a work
that in many aspects constitutes the crowning achievement of the research
we have dealt with up to now.
The identification of praxis with politics does not make this latter
into the object of a philosophy; it instead postulates the equation
between politics and philosophy. Equation, however, is does not mean
identification, but translatability, in a historically determinate era and
environment, namely those of capitalist modernity. In the philosophy
of praxis, the principle of truth is therefore the political effectiveness of
its postulates. But that does not mean that the philosophy of praxis is
16 See also the letter to Tanja of 30 May 1932: Gramsci (1994, pp. 177–179).
5 AFTERWORD 255
17 [Editorially headed in the Critical Edition of the Notebooks ‘Appunti e note sparse per
un gruppo di saggi sulla storia degli intellettuali’ (‘Notes and Loose Jottings for a Group
of Essays on the History of the Intellectuals’). Notebook 12 is found in English translation
(editorially rearranged) in the sections of SPN , pp. 5–23, headed ‘The Intellectuals. The
Formation of the Intellectuals’, and pp. 26–43 by ‘On Education’. The remainder of
Notebook 12 is found in FSPN (pp. 145–147) in a note on ‘Universities and Academies’
which, in Gramsci’s original, follows after the SPN sub-section that finishes on p. 33—
trans. note.]
18 As is known, the most representative passages on this are Q19§24, pp. 2010–2034,
and Q19§26, pp. 2035–2046 (SPN , pp. 55–84 and 90–102 respectively), devoted to the
Italian Risorgimento.
256 G. VACCA
19 On this subject the fundamental pages of the Notebooks are those dealing with the
critique of economism (Q13§18, pp. 1589–1597; SPN , pp. 158–167).
5 AFTERWORD 257
20 Readers are referred to the Cagliari conference of 1967 (Rossi 1969), on which see
Izzo (2009a, pp. 192–194).
21 It is not by chance that Lo Piparo operated within the reading of Gramsci that
Bobbio had proposed ten years beforehand (Bobbio 1969, pp. 75–100; 1988, pp. 73–
100) and did not take into account either the political biography or the historical events
in which Gramsci’s thought had had its origin.
22 Through his illuminating Introduction Schirru put his researches to fruitful use in
editing Gramsci’s transcription of the Notes on Glottology 1912–1913 of Matteo Bartoli:
see Schirru (2016).
258 G. VACCA
the importance of his Sardinian origins, the influence of Italian and Euro-
pean glottology in his formation, and the encounter with Lenin’s thought
and with Bolshevism. These are not only three periods but three aspects
of Gramsci’s biography which characterize its entire itinerary.
References
Agazzi, E. (1959). Filosofia della praxis e filosofia dello spirito. In A. Caracciolo
& G. Scalia (Eds.), La città futura (pp. 187–269). Milan: Feltrinelli.
Anderson, P. (1976). Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. In New Left Review
I/100, pp. 5–78; in Italian (1978), Ambiguità di Gramsci (I. Pedroni,
Trans.). Bari: Laterza.
Asor Rosa, A. (1975). La cultura, Vol. IV.ii of Storia d’Italia. Dall’unità ad
oggi. Turin: Einaudi.
Berti, G. (Ed.). (1968). Problemi del movimento operaio. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Bidussa, D. (1987). Alla ricerca di Marx. Angelo Tasca e la riflessione sul marx-
ismo negli anni del fuoriuscitismo (1930–1934). Quaderni della Fondazione
Micheletti (3), 81–119.
Bobbio, N. (1969). Gramsci e la concezione della società civile. In P. Rossi (Ed.),
Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea (pp. 75–100) Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Bobbio, N. (1988). Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society (C. Mortera,
Trans.). In J. Keane (Ed.), Civil Society and the State (pp. 73–100). London
and New York: Verso.
Boothman, D. (2004). Traducibilità e processi traduttivi. Un caso: A Gramsci
linguista. Perugia: Guerra.
Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State (D. Fernbach, Trans.).
London: Lawrence and Wishart; Original (1975): Gramsci et l’État. Pour une
Théorie Matérialiste de la Philosophie. Paris: Fayard.
Cammett, J. M. (1989). Bibliografia gramsciana. Rome: Fondazione Istituto
Gramsci.
Caracciolo, A., & Scalia, G. (Eds.). (1959). La città futura Saggi sulla figura e
il pensiero di Antonio Gramsci. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Carlucci, A. (2013). Gramsci and Language. Unification, Diversity, Hegemony.
Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Ciliberto, M. (1980). La fabbrica dei Quaderni. Gramsci e Vico; Republished
(1982) in Filosofia e politica nel Novecento italiano. Da Labriola a “Società”
(pp. 263–314). Bari: De Donato.
Ciliberto, M., & Vacca, G. (Eds.). (2014). Togliatti: La politica nel pensiero e
nell’azione. Scritti e discorsi 1917–1964. Milan: Bompiani.
Cospito, G. (Ed.). (2010). Gramsci tra filologia e storiografia, Scritti per Gianni
Francioni. Naples: Bibliopolis.
260 G. VACCA
Cospito, G. (2011). Il ritmo del pensiero. Per una lettura diacronica dei
“Quaderni del carcere” di Gramsci. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Cospito, G. (2016). Gramsci. The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci (A. Ponzini,
Trans.). Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Daniele, C. (Ed.). (1999). Gramsci a Rome, Togliatti a Mosca. Il carteggio del
1926. Turin: Einaudi.
Daniele, C. (Ed.). (2005). Togliatti editore di Gramsci. Rome: Carocci.
De Felice, F. (1972a). Serrati, Bordiga, Gramsci e i problemi della rivoluzione in
Italia 1919–1920. Bari: De Donato.
De Felice, F. (1972b). Una chiave di lettura in “Americanismo e Fordismo”.
Rinascita [supplement Il contemporaneo], 29(42), 33–35.
De Felice, F. (1977). Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo, americanismo in Gramsci. In
F. Ferri (Ed.) (1977), pp. 161–220.
Di Biagio, A. (2008). Egemonia leninista, egemonia gramsciana. In F. Giasi (Ed.)
(2008a), Vol. I, pp. 379–402.
D’Orsi, A. (2008). Egemonie. Proceedings of the conference ‘Egemonie. Usi e
abusi di una parola controversa’, Naples and Salerno 27–28 October 2005.
Naples: Dante & Descartes.
Ferrata, G., & Gallo, N. (Eds.). (1964). 2000 pagine di Gramsci (2 Vols.). Milan:
Il Saggiatore.
Ferri, F. (Ed.). (1977). Politica e Storia in Gramsci (2 Vols.). Proceedings of the
International Conference on Gramsci, Florence 9–11 December 1977. Rome:
Editori Riuniti.
Finelli, R. (2006). Tra moderno e postmoderno. Saggi di filosofia e di etica del
riconoscimento. Lecce: Pensa Multimedia.
Francioni, G. (1979). Per la storia dei “Quaderni del carcere”. In Politica e storia
in Gramsci II (pp. 369–394). Roma: Editori Riuniti.
Francioni, G. (1984). Egemonia, società civile, Stato. Note per una lettura della
teoria politica di Gramsci. In id. L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura
dei “Quaderni del carcere” (pp. 147–228). Naples: Bibliopolis.
Frosini, F. (2003). Gramsci e la filosofia. Saggio sui Quaderni del carcere. Rome:
Carocci.
Frosini, F. (2010). Le religione dell’uomo moderno. Politica e verità nei “Quaderni
del carcere” di Antonio Gramsci. Rome: Carocci.
Gagliardi, A. (2008). Il problema del corporativismo nel dibattito europeo e nei
Quaderni. In F. Giasi (Ed.) (2008a), Vol. 2, pp. 631–656.
Giasi, F. (Ed.). (2008a). Gramsci nel suo tempo (2 Vols.). Rome: Carocci.
Giasi, F. (2008b). I comunisti torinesi e l’egemonia del proletariato nella
rivoluzione italiana. Appunti sulle fonti di “Alcuni temi della quistione
meridionale” di Gramsci. In A. D’Orsi (Ed.), Egemonie (pp. 147–186).
Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere (V. Gerratana, Ed.). Turin: Einaudi.
5 AFTERWORD 261
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 265
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
G. Vacca, Alternative Modernities, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47671-7
266 INDEX
Carley, Michael, 153 Di Biagio, Anna, 16, 17, 28, 76, 134,
Carlo Alberto di Savoia (King of 136, 218, 251
Sardinia), 105 D’Orsi, Angelo, 251
Carlucci, Alessandro, 45, 116, 243,
248, 257, 258
Cattaneo, Carlo, 196 E
Cavour, Camillo Benso (Conte di), Engels, Friedrich, 15, 49, 116, 196,
87, 90, 92, 93, 97, 100, 115, 252
117
Cervesato, Arnaldo, 3
Chiarante, Giuseppe, x F
Churchill, Winston, 73 Fattorini, Emma, 95
Ciasca, Raffaele, 112, 113 Ferrata, Giansiro, 244
Ciliberto, Michele, xiv, xxi, 246 Ferri, Franco, 128, 246
Ciocca, Pierluigi, 124 Finck, Franz Nikolaus, 40
Clausewitz, Carl von, 62 Finelli, Roberto, 243
Coen, Federico, xi Fiocco, Gianluca, xii
Colamarino, Giulio, 122 Foch, Ferdinand, 6
Colletti, Lucio, 198 Fortunato, Giustino, 29, 30, 118, 119
Cospito, Giuseppe, xiv, 188, 248, Fouillet, Alfred, 238
252, 253 Fovel, Nino Massimo, 122, 123
Cox, Virginia, xxiv Francioni, Giovanni, xiv, 37, 53, 202,
Crispi, Francesco, 108, 109, 117, 118 246
Croce, Benedetto, xv, 2, 29, 30, Frosini, Fabio, xiv, 59, 243, 254, 256
43–45, 49, 69, 112, 113, 118, Fülöp-Miller, René, 139
119, 129, 166–168, 189, 196, Furst, Henry, 168
197, 206, 210–215, 245, 255,
256
Cuoco, Vincenzo, 85, 86
G
Gagliardi, Alessio, 121
D Galli della Loggia, Ernesto, 198
Daniele, Chiara, xiii, 33–35, 115, 247, Gallo, Niccolò, 244
248, 258 Gangale, Giuseppe, 30
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 66, 101 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 51, 97
De Domenico, Nicola, 238 Garin, Eugenio, 45
De Felice, Franco, 128, 151, 245, Gentile, Giovanni, 206, 212, 245
246, 250 Gentiloni, Vincenzo Ottorino, 109
della Volpe, Gaetano, 245 Gerratana, Valentino, 45, 202
De Mauro, Tullio, 257 Gervasoni, Marco, 238
De Nicola, Enrico, 23 Giasi, Francesco, x, xiii, 31, 53, 95,
De Rosa, Gabriele, 93 116, 195, 248, 251
De Sanctis, Francesco, 245 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 75
INDEX 267