Stefano Procacci

READING SUGGESTIONS: The Prison Notebook of Antonio Gramsci

As Norberto Bobbio wrote: There is no personality in the history of the workers movement of these last fifty years whose person and work have aroused greater interest than Gramscis. Indeed, we must recognize that this interest, instead of slowing up has grown rapidly in recent years, and is spreading ever more widely from Italy overseas. Nowadays, even in the field of International Relations, interest in Gramscis writings is second to none, and his heritage is claimed by rival schools. Like Machiavelli, he has become part of Italys national cultural patrimony. The troubled history of the Notebooks, their meaning, their political and practical genesis, have developed through different stages of

interpretation: from the instrumental and ideological use inside the communist orthodoxy to the acknowledgement of their philosophical autonomy, original purpose and approach to the study of Political Economy. From our historical point of view, we can thus recognize Gramscis work as a contribution to the intellectual endeavour which flourished at the beginning of XX century about the crisis of Marxism in explaining contemporary history, due to the rise of the second industrial revolution, the

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underestimation of the State as a political institution and the need to provide new materialist tools of analysis in this field. The debate involved concepts such as leadership, party organization, hegemony, political consciousness and ideology, and collected contributions of authors such as Kautsky, Sorel, Lenin, Lukacs and, from a different perspective, Max Weber, stimulating subsequent reflections by Polanyi, Mannheim, Benjamin and the Frankfurter School.
Antonio Gramsci

The Gramscian argument, founding on the critique of Sorelian political myth and spontaneity, introduces elements of strategic thinking (the wellknown distinction between war of movement and war of position) in the theoretical and practical conceptualisation of class struggle. So, whence it comes its today success, after the end of the Cold War and the failure of traditional working class ideology? Actually, Gramscis thought about the relationship of forces among economy, the State, social classes and civil society helps to resume the thread of a discussion exactly in the point where it has been broken many years ago, due to its codification in the Soviet imperial orthodoxy and the subsequent dichotomy with the West, with its corollary of the German black hole, since its past position of natural point of mediation between the geopolitical and ideological extremes. Indeed, the Prison Notebooks seems to provide analytical categories for the long period, very needed and valued commodity after the bipolar

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drunkenness, in the crisis of post-war hegemony (Gill, 1993:5). In fact, Gramscian insights have dealt with typical issues of contemporary Political Economy: the shifting of political supremacy location from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the emerging role of China and India as potential leading actors in the global economy, the positive and not simply anti-liberal concept of protectionism, the economic regionalism including the Paneuropean perspective, with its related Franco-German ambiguity up to the conceptualisation of what is called in contemporary terms asymmetrical war, namely concerned, in Gramscian view, with the historical separation of social structures and economic production from the military logic and capabilities, which would allow Andorra to exterminate the entire French population. The movement towards the extension of gramscian ideas to the study of IR and IPE has been slow and recent, and has involved relatively few ambitious studies concerned to define the origins, development and dynamics of the emerging global political economy (Gill, 1993: 4). The intellectual project of exporting Gramscian counter-hegemonic analysis in the current global dimension entails a suggestive but difficult way to go. It could not simply be a theoretical effort to translate the strategy of the historical bloc in global terms, since Gramscis way of thinking, experience, style and lexicon very strictly belong to a national tradition, which is even unknown to and far from contemporary Italy. Thus, it must fully grasp the dialectical, dual concept of the nation and the State, manifesting the need for the critique to restart from the nation for really being cosmopolitan again. It is not only

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useless, but impossible to codify Gramscian thought in a text: it is an experience, and one should trust in the hermeneutical flux in which it can speak. We do not have to abstract, but to critically follow real historical abstractions, then we can accept the invitation to think on an international scale (su scala internazionale). There is a general condition of Gramscian praxis of intellectual political agency to accept, before agreeing with a Gramscian theory of IR and its categories, specially with those concerning the spatial dimension of political structures. In this context IR can face the challenge to become the framework-discipline of social sciences, giving up any idea of causal primacy :

Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through its technical military expression, modify organically absolute and relative relations in the international field too.

Just two instances from the section called The Modern Prince, showing their usefulness to contemporary practice: the ironic attitude (or sarcasm, in very Gramscian terms) towards complaints about social conformism and mechanisation of social reproduction seems to address to the present kritische Kritik on globalisation; the critique of education and distrust as explanatory concepts, used during the main economic crises, sounds like a sober exhortation to get serious to those who nowadays say that we are living a crises of market ethics.

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Bibliography:

Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, International Publishers, New York, 1971 (Quaderni dal Carcere, Einaudi, Torino, 1975).

Davidson A., Antonio Gramsci: towards an intellectual biography, Merlin press, London, 1977. Forgacs D. (ed.), An Antonio Gramsci Reader, Schocken Books, New York, 1988. Gill S. (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge university Press, Cambridge, 1993.

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