Subalterns, Religion, and the Philosophy of Praxis in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to reconstruct the relationship between subalterns, religion, and philosophy in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. With the birth of mass society—that is, with the entry onto the political scene of the popular masses, and above all of the peasantry—politics entered directly into relation with irrational passions bound up with the religious mentality, and hegemony was constructed not thanks to the institution of a “filter” for the passions (as was the parliament of “notables”) but through the mastering of those “passions” using forms of Caesarist and charismatic democracy. In Gramsci’s view, the political action of the subaltern classes had to confront this new form of hegemony by recognizing the value of the profound content of religious ideas (which always indicate the need for a unification of theory and practice) and by working on a “translation” of those ideas into the forms of self-organization and self-emancipation.

Key Words:

• Fascism
• Antonio Gramsci
• Philosophy of Praxis
• Political Myth
• Religion

Notes

1 See Gramsci (1995, 390) and also Gramsci’s point of reference—i.e., Croce (1932, 21; 1933, 18): “Now he who gathers together and considers all these characteristics of the liberal ideal does not hesitate to call it what it was: a ‘religion.’ He calls it so, of course, because he looks for what is essential and intrinsic in every religion, which always lies in the concept of reality and an ethics that conforms to this concept. It excludes the mythological element, which constitutes only a secondary differentiation between religion and philosophy.”

Note that citations of content from the Prison Notebooks in this essay generally list the critical edition (Gramsci 1975) of the Istituto Gramsci, by notebook and section number, and then one of the various English translations from which the English quotations are taken. Any alterations from the English translations are noted. Citations of the works of Croce and others likewise often list first the original source and then an English translation.

2 For the dating of texts in the Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), see Cospito (2011, 896–904).

3 For an analysis of the concept of the subaltern in the Prison Notebooks, see Francioni and Frosini (2009), Green (2011), Zene (2011), and Liguori (2015a, 2015b).

4 For a comment on this text see Frosini (2012c, 71–2). In the second draft of this text (Q25§4, Gramsci 1975, 2287), written in 1934, “all-consuming” is replaced by “totalitarian,” which Gramsci places in inverted commas in order to emphasize the technical nature of the word.

5 See De Felice (1977) and Portantiero (1981, 10–22, 42–59, 161–71).

6 In two texts written in May–June 1933, Gramsci (Q15§47, 1975, 1807–8; Q15§59, 1975, 1822–4; 1971b, 104–6) went as far as defining the “trade-union phenomenon” (i.e., the complex processes of the self-organization of subaltern classes) as the origin of the crisis of bourgeois hegemony that broke out after the war, a crisis expressed on the one hand in the decadence of parliamentarism and on the other in the more general economic crisis.

7 See Portantiero (1981, 22).

8 See Rossi and Vacca (2007, 108–9). Gramsci (1971a, 486; 1978, 331) and Togliatti had already formulated this idea in the intervention of the political commission of the Lyon Congress in 1926: “It is necessary to examine the stratifications of fascism itself: for given the totalitarian system which fascism tends to install, it will be within fascism itself that the conflicts which cannot express themselves in other ways will tend to re-emerge.”

9 On this assessment of Gramsci's, see De Felice (1977), Mangoni (1977), and Frosini (2012a). In general, see also Maier (1975) and De Felice (2007).

10 On this category see Kanoussi (2000, 66–81), Voza (2004), and Thomas (2006).

11 See note 6 above.

12 Not by chance was it only after August 1931 (when he wrote Notebook 6, §138, on the “reciprocal siege”) that Gramsci began to append explanatory adverbs to the adjective “private” when referring to the organisms of civil society (specifications such as “so-called” or “commonly called”), which emphasize civil society's real character of being “public-State.” See Gramsci and Schucht (1997, 791; and see Q8§179, Gramsci 1975, 1049; 2007, 338; Q12§1, Gramsci 1975, 1518–9; 1971b, 12).

13 See Gramsci (Q1§43, 1975, 35–6; 1992, 131): “The current corporativism, with its consequent diffusion of this social type [namely, “the factory ‘technician’” and the “trade-union organizer”] on a nation scale in a more systematic and consistent way than the old trade unionism could have achieved, is in a certain sense an instrument of moral and political unity.”

14 For the first of these expressions (“economia secondo un piano”) I adopt the translation by David Forgacs, “planned economy” (see Gramsci 2000, 265), and not “economy according to a plan,” proposed by Joseph A. Buttigieg (see Gramsci 2007, 378), because in the latter the allusion to contemporary debates becomes less visible. I prefer to leave the second expression, “economia diretta,” in Italian since it is the Italian translation of the French “économie dirigée” and of the English “planned economy.” Forgacs's (“command economy”) and Buttigieg's (“administered economy”) translations tend to hide this fact. See the unsigned article “Economia diretta” (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.

15 Beside the English translation (Weber 1994), I also make reference to an Italian translation of Weber’s (1919) Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland since it is the one used by Gramsci.

16 See Gramsci (Q3§319, 1975, 388; 1996, 105–6; 1971b, 227–8).

17 See Weber (1919, 21–63; 1994, 145–77).

18 See Portantiero (1981, 47–59).

19 Relevant here are Gramsci's reflections on the relation between “self-government” and bureaucracy. See Gramsci (Q8§55, 1975, 974; 2007, 268; Q13§36, 1975, 1632–5; 1971b, 185–90).

20 In prison Gramsci read with interest Weber's (1931–2) Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

21 See Portelli (1974), Luporini (1979), Fulton (1987), and Adamson (2013). See also Lombardi Satriani (1970), Cristofolini (1976), Sobrero (1976), Frosini (2003, 168–82), Boninelli (2007), and Liguori (2009).

22 See, for example, Gramsci (1982 [1918]).

23 See Gramsci (Q4§3, 1975, 472; 1996, 141): “Marxism had two tasks: to combat modern ideologies in their most refined forms; and to enlighten the minds of the popular masses, whose culture was medieval.”

24 See Croce (1931, 23–5, 45, 102–4) on “faith” as thought that becomes “action”; Croce (1931, 283; 1945, 110) on religion as “every mental system … every concept of reality, which, transformed into faith, has become the basis for action and also the light of moral life”; and Croce (1932, 21; 1933, 18) on religion as “the concept of reality and an ethics that conforms to this concept.” As Croce states, the idea stems from Goethe.

25 “Formal definitions of religion are of little significance for Gramsci. Religions for him are not fixed entities but dynamic forces that are constantly changing as they both shape and respond to a wide complex of historical events and processes” (Adamson 2013, 471).

26 See, in general, La Rocca (1996).

27 See Gramsci (Q4§11, 1975; 1996, 152–3); see also Thomas (2009, 244–306) and Frosini (2010, 50–111).

28 See Gramsci (Q4§14, 1975, 435–6; 1996, 155–6). And see, in its rewritten form in translation, Gramsci (1971b, 462–3).

29 See Gramsci (Q4§3, 1975, 421–5; 1996, 141–5).

30 See Weber (1919, 139–40; 1994, 230–1): “The danger which mass democracy presents to national politics consists principally in the possibility that emotional elements will become predominant in politics. The ‘mass’ as such (no matter which social strata it happens to be composed of) ‘thinks only as far as the day after tomorrow.’ As we know from experience, the mass is always exposed to momentary, purely emotional and irrational influences … as far as national politics are concerned, the unorganised mass, the democracy of the street, is wholly irrational.”

31 See Villari (1987, 1–48).

32 “One derives great satisfaction (or at least I derive such) in being able to recognize the substantial agreement of proverbs and common sayings with the highest and most difficult philosophical propositions” (Croce 1926, 210).

33 There is “no greater satisfaction for the philosopher than to find his philosophemes in the sayings of good sense” (Croce 1926, 211).

34 See Croce (1931, 195–6).

35 See Croce (1921; the first edition dates to 1900).

36 See Gramsci (Q10§3, 1975, 1214–5; 1995, 335–6).

37 Summarizing his previous reflections, this is the definition of religion given by Croce in 1932 in his History of Europe (see notes 1 and 24 above).

38 Of this work Gramsci was able to read only the first three chapters. See Frosini (2012b, 65).

39 See Gramsci (Q13§1, 1975, 1556–7; 1971b, 127–9).

40 Croce, according to Gramsci, reduces politics to “passion” insofar as he intends to make impossible even the thought that the subaltern classes, whose action is “impassioned” because it is of a “defensive” nature, may ever come out of this state. “In consequence, one can say that, in Croce, the term ‘passion’ is a pseudonym for social struggle” (Q10§56, 1975, 1350; 1995, 392).

41 See Sorel (1999, 113).