Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and the European Crisis

ABSTRACT

This research is based upon three interrelated elements: the European crisis, Italian Fascism and the analysis of the two carried out by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, that is, the notes he wrote during his detention in Fascist prisons from 1929 to 1935. However, the aim of this contribution is to shed light not on Gramsci’s analysis of the European crisis and the regime in Italy as such, but on the way in which this analysis interacts with the constellations of political power and of hegemonic social forces existing in Italy and in Europe at the time. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are in fact not reflections on a defeat, made far away—both physically and mentally—from the on-going struggle (as they have often been interpreted in the past), but a strategic analysis of opportunities for communist political initiative presented by the new European and Italian situation of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

KEYWORDS:

• Antonio Gramsci
• fascism
• war of position
• passive revolution
• Benedetto Croce

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to the second anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive comments. An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Conference “Mapping North and South in Europe: Images, Identities and Space,” organised by the Center for Nordic Studies (CENS), Helsinki, September 25–27, 2014.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Fabio Frosini is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Urbino. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci (Gramsci Institute Foundation) since 2008 and of the Board of the International Gramsci Society Italia since 2001. His research interests include Renaissance philosophy and culture, Marxist thought, and political philosophy. His most recent books are Da Gramsci a Marx: Ideologia, Verità e Politica (From Gramsci to Marx: Ideology, Truth and Politics) published in 2009 and La Religione dell’uomo Moderno: Verità e Politica nei Quaderni del Carcere di Antonio Gramsci (The Religion of Modernity: Truth and Politics in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) published in 2010.

ORCID

Fabio Frosini http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4977-2314

Notes

1. See Platone and Togliatti (1948, XIX), Togliatti (2001, 214).

2. See Rossi (2001, 2003, 2010, 2014), Rossi and Vacca (2007), Frosini (2011, 2013), Vacca (2012).

3. See Sraffa (1991, 225): “[…] a topic, whose political content can be disguised as literature.” In this letter to Palmiro Togliatti, dated May 4 1932, Piero Sraffa reflects on the topics that can be proposed to Gramsci, through Tatiana Schucht, for a further discussion in his correspondence.

4. A collection of studies on several aspects of the crisis inside and outside Europe is Konrad and Maderthaner (2013).

5. On fascist “corporatism” see Rafalski (1984) and, more recently, Santomassimo (2006) and Gagliardi (2010).

6. The notion of “totalitarian democracy” was introduced into political science by Bertrand de Jouvenel (1945) in his Du Pouvoir: Histoire Naturelle de sa Croissance (On power: A Natural History of its Growth) and developed by Jacob L. Talmon (1952) in his The Origin of Totalitarian Democracy. According to both authors, “totalitarian democracy” means an extremely anti-liberal, authoritarian and holistic version of democratic thought. As such, it can be found equally in Jacobinism, fascism, communism and in the post-World War II Western European democratic regimes. In this article the notion of “totalitarian democracy” is used in a much more restricted and, in my opinion, rigorous way: as an attempt to face the problem represented by the presence of the masses inside the state, without really questioning the class relations. For a reconstruction of the historical genealogy (Rousseau and Mazzini) of the idea of a “true democracy” in fascist culture see Belardelli (1994) and, in connection with Gramsci, see De Felice (1977, 179–97), Portantiero (1981, 42–59) and Paggi (1984, 267–80).

7. On the intricate issue of fascism as an “export item” see Scholz (2001).

8. On fascist polyarchy see De Bernardi (2006, 161–66), and Gagliardi (2010, 70–105).

9. See Santarelli (1981, 568–73) and, for Gramsci’s assessment, Mangoni (1977, 423–28).

10. On the Ferrara Congress see Perfetti (1988), Santomassimo (2006, 141–67); on its effects see Santomassimo (2006, 167–80). See also Martone (2006, 493–518) and Priester (2013, 62–63).

11. See Santomassimo (2006, 176). In the following years, what still remained alive of the whole of the corporatist movement, was absorbed and transferred into a public strategy of modernisation, consisting in the concentration of savings through the issuance of public bonds and their reinvestment through the IRI (Istituto per la ricostruzione industriale [Institute for Industrial Reconstruction]), a state holding established in 1933. Gramsci takes note of this new trend in a text written in April 1932 (Notebook 9, § 8) and transcribed in the second half of 1934 (Notebook 22, § 14). Here he presents the following question:

The State thus finds itself invested with a primordial function in the capitalist system, both as a company (state holdings) which concentrates the savings to be put at the disposal of private industry and activity, and as a medium and long-term investor (creation in Italy of various mortgage houses, industrial reconstruction, etc., transformation of the Banca Commerciale, consolidation of the savings banks, creation of new forms of Post-Office savings, etc.). But once, through unavoidable economic necessity, the State has assumed this function, can it fail to interest itself in the organisation of production and exchange? Will it leave it, as before, up to the initiative of competition and private initiative? (Gramsci 1975, 2176; Engl. transl. Gramsci 1971, 314; the reference to the IRI is added in the second draft of the text)

12. That is, the topics discussed in the first 13 notebooks. See Francioni (1984, 85–93).

13. For a late discussion of the corporatist movement see Notebook 15, § 39, written in May 1933 and Notebook 22, § 6 (Gramsci 1975, 2156), written in the second half of 1934.

14. For the “pathology” thesis, formulated by Benedetto Croce, see Ciliberto (1983) and Conte (2005, 141–236).

15. See Notebook 4, § 15, where Gramsci resorts to “Sorel’s concept of the ‘historical bloc’” (Gramsci [1975, 437], Engl. transl. Gramsci [1996, 158]) with the purpose to show “the concrete value of superstructures in Marx.”

16. Quoted in Notebook 8, § 128 (Gramsci 1975, 1018; Engl. transl. Gramsci 2007, 308).

17. Quoted in Notebook 10, § 9 (Gramsci 1975, 1228; Engl. transl. Gramsci 1971, 120).

18. See Notebook 8, § 236 (Gramsci 1975, 1089). For the first of these expressions (“economia secondo un piano”) I adopt the translation by David Forgacs (Gramsci 2000, 265) and not “economy according to a plan,” proposed by Joseph A. Buttigieg (Gramsci 2007, 378), because in the latter the allusion to contemporary debate becomes less visible. The expression “economia diretta” is preferably left in Italian, since it is the translation from the French économie dirigée and from the English planned economy. Forgacs’s (“command economy”) and Buttigieg’s (“administered economy”) translations tend to hide this link. See the unsigned article “Economia Diretta,” ([Unsigned] 1932), a report of the World Social Economic Congress held in Amsterdam in August 1931), which is the source for Gramsci’s statement in Notebook 8, § 236.

19. See Notebook 15, §§ 11, 17, 25, 56, 62. For an English translation of most of these texts see Gramsci (1971, 106–14).

20. Quoted in Notebook 8, § 240 (Gramsci 1975, 1091; Engl. transl. Gramsci 2007, 381).

21. In his review Blanshard (1930), describes the reaction of those present to Croce’s somehow metaphorical category of “antistoricismo” (anti-historicism):

Between the lines one could read Croce’s reference to what America stands for in European eyes, and to what he considers the wild experimentation in Russia. The second form of futurism is an exaltation of the absolute, of system and uniformity, which in art would return to a rigorous classicism, and in social matters would suppress individual enterprise by an inflexible rule from above. (Surely, said his hearers to themselves, this is Fascism or nothing). (Blanshard 1930, 592)

22. See especially the “Epilogue” (Croce 1932, 425–38; Engl. transl. Croce 1933, 351–62).

23. Quoted in Notebook 6, § 10 (Gramsci 1975, 690; Engl. transl. Gramsci 2007, 8).

24. Interview given to the Giornale d’Italia (The newspaper of Italy) on July 9 1924, quoted in De Napoli, Bolognini, and Ratti (1985, 35; translated from Italian). On the Croce–Fascism relationship see Garin (1963, 22–23).

25. Quoted in Notebook 10, Part I, § 3 (Gramsci 1975, 1214; Engl. transl. Gramsci 1995, 335–36).

26. See Notebook 8, § 235 (Gramsci 1975, 1088; Engl. transl. Gramsci 2007, 378).

27. In Anglophone literature, it means the period 1848–71 that led to the political unification of Italy.

28. Quoted in Notebook 9, § 127 (Gramsci 1975, 1190). The second version of this text (Notebook 19, § 5) is in English translation in Gramsci (1995, 253–54).

29. For the tension between an initial polycentric approach and the later rise of a hard Grand–Russian Nationalism in the USSR see Hirsch (2005) and Martin (2001).

30. See Notebook 1, § 58 (Gramsci 1975, 68) (February–March 1930), on Enrico Corradini’s and Giovanni Pascoli’s representation of Italy as a “proletarian nation,” and the link between Revolutionary Syndicalism and Nationalism in the “Mezzogiorno” (that is in Southern Italy). Notebook 2, §§ 51–52 (June 1930) on Pascoli’s political ideas. Notebook 6, § 129 (Gramsci 1975, 796–97) (March–August 1931) on D’Annunzio’s political ideas as a right-wing and imperialistic “national-socialism.” Notebook 6, § 144 (October 1931) entitled “G. Pascoli and Davide Lazzaretti.” Notebook 7, § 82 (Gramsci 1975, 914) (December 1931), on Corradini’s “proletarian nation” in its fight against “plutocratic and capitalist nations,” and the link between these ideas, Revolutionary Syndicalism and the massive emigration from the Mezzogiorno to the United States. Notebook 9, § 4 (Gramsci 1975, 1099) (April–May 1932) entitled “History of Subaltern Classes: De Amicis” on De Amicis’s “social–nationalism and social–patriotism.” Notebook 14, § 14 (Gramsci 1975, 1670) (December 1932–January 1933), again on Corradini’s and Pascoli’s “folksy and naive nationalism.” All the paragraphs of the first eight Notebooks may be found, in the same order as in Gramsci (1975), in the presently available three translated volumes provided by J. A. Buttigieg (see Gramsci 1992, 1996 and 2007).

31. See Maier (1975). See also Salsano (1987, 2003).

32. Fascism can be seen as the confluence of different cultural trends:

[…] nationalist syndicalism and popular colonialism, and also the polemic against the ‘injustice’ of peace treaties, seen as a consequence of imperialistic relations of power, and the controversy over the ‘redistribution’ of raw materials and of exploitation territories, that were claimed by Italian bourgeoisie. (Santarelli 1981, 441)