Alastair Davidson on Gramsci’s Marxism

Added to the “Links” in the right hand column is an article by Alastair Davidson, “The Archaeology of Marx”. It was written in 1974 and published in issue no.1 of Thesis Eleven magazine, in 1980

Labriola as forerunner of Gramsci: second set of notes

Notes, continued, on Labriola’s “Socialism and Philosophy”.

PHILOSOPHICAL “SUPPLEMENTS” TO MARXISM

Chapter V: “We need not be surprised… if the generic similarity of historical materialism to so many other products of the contemporaneous thought and knowledge has led many, who deal with science in the style of literary men or magazine readers, into… flattering themselves that they could make the Marxian theory more complete by this or that addition. We shall have to put up with such tinkering for a while…”

Comment: This “tinkering” is a big theme of Gramsci’s: he argues that not only the neo-Kantians and such of the Second International, who thought to round out Marxism by adding, for example, Kantian ethics, but also the “orthodox Marxist” opponents were guilty of it. The “orthodox”, declares Gramsci, actually tacked “traditional materialism onto Marxism. Here, Labriola is concerned with those who sought to round out Marxism by reconstructing it as an offshoot of Darwinian evolutionary theory. “Since everybody is talking about evolution, the inexperienced and superficial think that everybody means the same thing”.

THE MERGER OF PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND HISTORY

Chapter V: “Whoever considers historical materialism in its full significance, will find that it presents three lines of study. The first corresponds to the practical requirement of the socialist parties… The second… a revision of the methods of writing history… The third consists in the treatment of the directing principles… It is certain that these three lines of study were combined into one in the mind of Marx, and not only in his mind, but also in his works… His politics were, in a way, the practical application of his historical materialism, and his philosophy was incorporated in his critique of political economy, for this was his method of dealing with history… The perfect identification of philosophy, or of critically self-conscious thought, with the material of knowledge, in other words, the complete elimination of the traditional distinction between philosophy and science, is a tendency of our times…”

Comment: Labriola adds the qualification, “the distinction between science and philosophy will always be maintained as a provisional element, in order to indicate that science is always in process of growth and that this growth is largely accompanied by self-critique”. In a footnote Labriola remarks wryly on a book whose “object is to demonstrate that Philosophy has reached its end. The pity of it is that the book is philosophical from cover to cover”.

But here again we have a theme which Gramsci evidently took from Labriola, the merger of philosophy, politics, and history. Gramsci, however, suggests a tendential merger “into” philosophy, whereas Labriola suggests a tendential merger “into” science. Labriola, chapter VII: “Marxism… is one of the ways in which the scientific mind has freed itself from philosophy as such…” Labriola also decries “the chase after that universal philosophy, into which socialism might be fitted as the central point of everything”, but in some passages at least Gramsci suggests that “the philosophy of praxis” is indeed that “universal philosophy”, for a “present era” measured in hundreds of years.

Labriola, on the other hand, has, at a certain level, a “meta-philosophy”, a “general approach”, which stands above particular science. “Historical materialism… solves the problem of cognition differently from all other philosophies and declares: There are no fixed limits, whether a priori or a posteriori, to cognition, because human beings learn all that they must know by an infinite process of labor, which is experience, and of experience, which is labor… Socrates was the first to discover that understanding is a process of labor, and that man knows only those things well which he can do”. (Chapter VIII).

I would guess that Labriola would reconcile these thoughts by stating that Socrates first sketched the thought which, after centuries of accumulated investigation by scientists, Marx was able to develop to the point of a theory of society which could be free of any speculative and abstract philosophy standing above it, and instead merge with politics and with the making of history.

LABRIOLA ON MONISM

Chapter VI: “If I had to give some sort of an outline… the philosophy, which historical materialism implies, is the tendency toward monism. And I lay a special stress upon the word tendency. I say tendency, and let me add, a formal and a critical tendency…”

The critical and tendential character of the “monism” differentiates it from the thinking which claims “a universal diagram for all things”, like “the imitators of Hegel, with their everlasting rhythm of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”.

“The main principle of critical cognition, by which historical materialism corrects monism, is this: It takes its departure from the practice of things, from the development of the labor process, just as it is the theory of man at work, so does it consider science itself as work. It impresses the empirical sciences definitely with the implicit understanding that we accomplish things by experiment, and brings us to a realisation of the fact that things are themselves in the making”.

Comment: In the next paragraph Labriola acknowledges his debt for the term “monism” to the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, who was also the main promoter of Darwin’s ideas in Germany. Labriola’s warnings against dissolving historical materialism into a grand philosophy extrapolated from Darwin’s biology clearly have Haeckel in mind. One of the strands in Haeckel’s thinking was to use a “monism” extrapolated from Darwin to give “scientific” credence to racism. He would eventually, in 1906, found a “Monist League”, a quasi-political movement.

Plekhanov also used the term “monism” in the title of his 1895 book, The Development of the Monist View of History. He had the term “monism” in the title only in order to make it sound obscure enough to get past the censor, and scarcely used the words “monist” or “monism” in the text at all. What he meant by it was opposition to “dualist systems of one kind or another [as in Descartes] which recognise spirit and matter as separate and independent substances”.

Here we also have Labriola’s characteristic idea that scientific cognition is an active, not a contemplative, process; that knowing the world is inseparable from interacting with it. This idea can be overdone, and perhaps is overdone by Gramsci: our knowledge of the Earth before human history, and of the cosmos beyond the solar system, can scarcely be other than “contemplative”, since we have no way of actively engaging with the object of knowledge. But for knowledge of social affairs, Labriola’s idea has force.

LABRIOLA’S “HEGELIANISM”

Chapter IV: “I remember… the Hegelians of Naples, among whom I lived in my earliest youth… a training hall, and I am not sorry for it. For years my mind was divided between Hegel and Spinoza. With youthful ingenuity I defended the dialectics of the former against Zeller, the founder of neo-kantianism. The writings of Spinoza I knew by heart, and with loving understanding I gave expositions of his theory of affections and passions. But now all these things seem as far away in my recollection as Primeval history”.

Comment: Labriola is described in Trotsky’s My Life as “the old Hegelian-Marxist”. Perhaps uniquely in the Second International, Labriola had a long and intense education in Hegelian philosophy before he came to Marxism. But here he describes his “Hegelianism” as something superseded and rejected. “For twenty years I have detested systematic philosophy”, writes Labriola. And for Hegel philosophy is nothing if it not systematic. “Logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature” – Science of Logic, Introduction.

“LIFE UNDER SOCIALISM WILL NOT BE EASY, I HOPE…”

Chapter IX: “Whether the people of the future, of whom we socialists often entertain such exalted ideas, will still produce any religion or not, I can neither affirm nor deny. And I leave it them to arrange their own lives, which will not be easy, I hope, in order that they may not become imbeciles in paradisian beatitude”.

Comment: Gramsci is, very unusually for a Marxism, concerned to construct from Marxism a sort of “philosophy”, or “ethical basis of the state”, for the future society of working-class rule (until the distant time when the state withers away). Marx and Engels always limited themselves to the thought that the citizens of the future would know much better than we, struggling within capitalist society, can, and will sort things out for themselves. Labriola expresses the same thought in chapter X: “The people of the future will not lay aside their human nature to such an extent as to be no longer comparable to us of the present… they will have enough of the dialectic joy of laughter left to crack jokes over the prophets of today”.

Lenin and Trotsky after 1917 disavowed any claim to be building a new working-class culture: it was a big enough task, they argued, to bring the best of bourgeois culture to the mass of the population, and by the time that could be done, the future citizenry could develop its own new culture.

Labriola here puts a similar thought sharply, with the laconic wish that the lives of the people of the future “will not be easy, I hope”, i.e. that out of new problems and conflicts they will develop new systems of thought.

PEDAGOGY

Chapter X: “Teaching is not an activity which produces a bare effect by means of bare objects. It is rather an activity which generates another activity. In teaching we !earn to understand that the first germ of all philosophic thought is always planted by the Socratic Method, that is, by the accomplished talent of generating ideas…”

Comment: This thought of Labriola’s seems to have influenced Gramsci’s conception of how a revolutionary party must “teach” the working class, in its differences from Bordiga’s views.

THE INEVITABILITY OF SOCIALISM

Chapter X: “[Some] continuously harp on the dogma of the necessity of evolution, which they confound with a certain right to a better condition. And they say that the future society of collectivist economic production, with all its technical and pedagogic consequences, will come because it should come. They seem to forget that this future society must be produced by human beings themselves in response to the demands of the conditions in which they now live and by the development of their own aptitudes”.

Comment: In his In Memory of the Communist Manifesto, Labriola writes of the inevitability of socialism. In this text, around the same time, he makes much less of “inevitability”. He also, pretty much against the grain of contemporary socialist thought at the very end of the 19th century, I’d have thought, argues strongly against expectations of quick and easy socialist victories. “The development of the new era will have to be measured by a standard of time considerably slower than that first assumed by the early socialists who were still tainted with Jacobin memories. It is evident that we cannot look forward across such long stretches of time with very great certitude. We must take into account the enormous complexity of modern life and the vast expansion of capitalism, or of bourgeois society. Who cannot see that the Pacific is now taking the place of the Atlantic Ocean, just as the Atlantic once upon a time took the place of the Mediterranean Sea?”

Labriola as forerunner of Gramsci: first set of notes

Excerpts and comments from Antonio Labriola: “Socialism and Philosophy”.

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Gramsci writes: “Labriola… is the only man who has attempted to build up the philosophy of praxis scientifically” (pp.386-7).

Labriola was the main writer in the Second International on philosophy, after Plekhanov, and the only leading figure in the International with an academic background in philosophy: he notes in this book that “I hold the chair of philosophy at my university [Rome] since 1871″ (p.94). He came to socialism and Marxism later in life, after first being a liberal Hegelian.

In this book (p.94) he dates his socialist “confession of faith” from 1889 (when he was 46). He was generally reckoned to be on the left of the Italian Socialist Party, but in his last years supported Italian seizure of Libya. “Marxist Antonio Labriola saw in the occupation of Tripoli the possibility of a colony for the Italian proletarians dispersed in the world”. Italy did not actually seize Libya until 1911, after Labriola’s death in 1904, but in 1900 Italy entered into a secret convention with France that France should have a free hand as regards Morocco, and Italy in Tripoli. Though the text of the agreement was not published, its outline was made known in the press at the time.

***

The book “Socialism and Philosophy” is available online. It is in the main a collection of letters written by Labriola in 1897 to the French writer Georges Sorel, who apparently was friendly with Labriola (through what connections, I do not know) and had written a preface the French translation of Labriola’s “Essays on the Materialist Conception of History”.

Labriola takes issue with Sorel’s ideas, which were an odd mixture. Sorel considered himself a sort of unorthodox Marxist; was close to the revolutionary syndicalist movement in France of his time (though several studies of that syndicalist movement emphasise that Sorel’s writings had almost no influence on it); also praised Action Francaise and the right-wing ideologue Charles Maurras, and Mussolini too. For now, it seems to be utterly accidental that Labriola’s exposition took the form of letters to Sorel.

***

“A CONCEPTION OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE”

P.14-15 (chapter I): “It seems to me that the whole theory [of historical materialism] in its most intimate bearings, or the whole theory in its entirety, that it to say, as a philosophy, can never become one of the articles of universal popular culture. And when I say philosophy, I know well that I may be misunderstood. And if I were to write in German, I should say Lebens-und-Welt-Anschauung, a conception of life and the universe…”

Comment: Gramsci, by contrast, does seem to argue that when the working class is hegemonic, the outlines of “the philosophy of praxis” can become an “article of universal popular culture”. On the other hand, Gramsci obviously draws on Labriola’s understanding here of what a “philosophy” is.

This is “philosophy” as “general outlook on life” – such as is possessed, even if in implicit and incoherent form, by every person using language – rather than “philosophy” as a special academic discipline. Despite his professional position, Labriola will later make clear that he regards “philosophy” as a special academic discipline as something obsolete.

“EMANCIPATED FROM ABSTRACT REASON”

P.28-9 (chapter II): “When we realise that irrationalities are born of the historical process itself, we are emancipated from the simplemindedness of abstract reason and understand that the negative power of revolution is relatively necessary in the cycle of the historical development. Whatever may be said about this grave and very intricate question of historical interpretation, which I shall not venture to treat exhaustively as an incident to a letter, the fact remains that no one will succeed in separating the premises, the methodical process, the inferences and conclusions of this work, from the actual world in which they are developed and the living facts to which they refer. No one can ever reduce its teaching to a mere Bible, or to a recipe for the interpretation of the history of any time and place”.

Comment: Here Labriola deprecates “abstract reason”, that is, philosophy as a special academic discipline standing above all others, the “queen of the sciences”. Gramsci takes up the same idea of the “philosophy of praxis” being in the warp and woof of historical studies and action, rather than a meta-doctrine arrived at more abstractly. However, Labriola seems clear that this means that Marxism is a theory of historical processes and action, whereas Gramsci sometimes seems to see it as literally an all-embracing “conception of life and the universe”, one that would, for example, shape our understanding of the universe in that great bulk of its time which was before human history.

MARXISM TIED TO THE WORKING CLASS

P. 40-1 (chapter III): “If so many speak nowadays of the triumph of Marxism, such an emphatic expression, when stated in a crudely prosaic form, simply means that henceforth no one can be a socialist, unless he asks himself every minute: What is the proper thing to think, to say, to do, under the present circumstances, for the best interests of the proletariat. The day has gone by for such dialecticians, or rather sophists, as Proudhon…”

Comment: We can find very much the same thought in Plekhanov’s article on the tasks of the socialists in the famine in Russia in 1891. This identification of the working class as the touchstone would later be obscured by the Stalinists, who substituted “socialism” or “revolution” (as defined by them) as touchstones; it is instructive today, as we try to build a new Marxist culture free of Stalinism. But it also implies a rather more focused, limited conception of what Marxism is than some of Gramsci’s grander claims.

“ITS WHOLE PHILOSOPHY”

P.42-3 (chapter III): “Historical materialism will be enlarged, diffused, specialized, and will have its own history. It may vary in coloring and outline from country to country. But this will do no great harm, so long as it preserves that kernel which is, so to say, its whole philosophy. One of its fundamental theses is this: The nature of man, his historical making, is a practical process. And when I say practical, it implies the elimination of the vulgar distinction between theory and practice. For, in so many words, the history of man is the history of labor. And labor implies and includes on the one hand the relative, proportional, and proportioned development of both mental and manual activities, and on the other the concept of a history of labor implies ever the social form of labor and its variations. Historical man is always human society, and the presumption of a presocial, or super-social, man is a creature of imagination. And there we are”.

Comment: In contradistinction to the previous package, Labriola here identifies Marxism with, or perhaps embeds it in, a “philosophy” in a grand sense. It is limited, it is true, to “the history of man [humanity]“, and presumably also to that (rather small so far, it seems) section of the history of the human species which involves systematic labour rather than hunting and gathering of a sort not very different from other animals’. But it is certainly a “view of life” which ranges much wider than the life of the modern working class.

LABRIOLA ON THE SOURCES OF MARXISM

P.51 (chapter IV): “What else is Capital but the critique of that political economy which, as a practical revolution and its theoretical expression, had reached full maturity only in England, about the sixties, and which had barely begun in Germany? What else is the Communist Manifesto but the conclusion and explanation of that socialism which was either latent or manifest in the labor movements of France and England?”

Comment: Gramsci has a discussion (Prison Notebooks p.399ff) of Kautsky’s idea (which Gramsci draws from a famous pamphlet by Lenin, in fact a paraphrase of Kautsky) of the “three sources and three component parts of Marxism”. Gramsci asserts that Marxism is a synthesis of the various strands it draws on, so that, for example, both “political” and “philosophical” strands are integrated into the Marxist critique of economics, rather than standing alongside it.
Gramsci then proceeds to the startling declaration that “the philosophy of praxis equals Hegel plus David Ricardo”.
A bit earlier (p.398-9) Gramsci identifies Marxism as a synthesis of a different sort, between the historicism characteristic of conservative thought in the Restoration period of 1815-1848 and the rationalism of the Jacobin tradition that continued through that period.
Labriola gives a quite different presentation, and one that chimes better with an idea of Marxism as integrally connected with the emergence and action of the modern working class.

LABRIOLA ON HEGEL

P.56-7 (chapter IV): Labriola quotes from a letter of his own to Engels – “For years my mind was divided between Hegel and Spinoza… But now all these things seem as far away in my recollection as primeval history”.

Comment: here is the idea of systematic philosophy (including Hegel’s) being rendered obsolete by the growth of solid, practically-based knowledge. It puts a question mark over the conventional description of Labriola as a “Hegelian Marxist”.

KNOWLEDGE INSEPARABLE FROM A PRACTICAL STANCE TOWARDS REALITY

P.59 (chapter IV): “Every time that we set about producing a new thought, we need not only the external materials and impulses of actual experience, but also an adequate effort in order to pass from the most primitive stages of mental life to that superior, derived and complex stage called thought, in which we cannot maintain ourselves, unless we exert our will-power”.

Comment: Gramsci will draw on this idea too, of knowledge being not contemplative but tied up with an effort to change what is being known. “In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort that thereby 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…”

THE “PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICE” – BEYOND MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM?

P.60-1 (chapter IV): “Historical materialism, then, or the philosophy of practice, takes account of man as a social and historical being. It gives the last, blow to all forms of idealism which regard actually existing things as mere reflexes, reproductions, imitations, illustrations, results, of so-called a priori thought, thought before the fact. It marks also the end of naturalistic materialism, using this term in the sense which it had up to a few years ago. The intellectual revolution, which has come to regard the processes of human history as absolutely objective ones, is simultaneously accompanied by that intellectual revolution which regards the philosophical mind itself as a product of history. This mind is no longer for any thinking man a fact which was never in the making, an event which had no causes, an eternal entity which does not change, and still less the creature of one sole act. It is rather a process of creation in perpetuity”.

Comment: This foreshadows Gramsci’s claims about Marxism superseding both idealism and materialism. Like Gramsci, Labriola limits his rejection of materialism by attaching an adjective to the materialism he rejects, leaving open the idea that another form of materialism, not suiting that adjective, may be valid. Gramsci’s qualifying adjective is generally “traditional”, which is vague enough. Labriola’s is puzzling: “naturalistic”.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “naturalistic” philosophy is that which “urges that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’.” If so, then surely there is nothing wrong with “naturalistic materialism”. Perhaps Labriola means something more like what we would call “mechanical materialism” or “reductionism”. His scathing comments elsewhere in the book on Social Darwinism and the like suggest that interpretation.

VALORISING THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD

P.64-5 (chapter V): “The whole question is to know how these necessary data are handled by us. The… characteristic mark of modern philosophy… is a methodical doubt, a critical attitude which accompanies the use of these concepts like a suspicious and cautious guard and searches them internally as well as externally, in their wider bearings. The deciding factor in the transition from ingenuousness to critical analysis is methodical observation… and even more than observation it is the careful and technically accurate experiment… By experiment we become co-workers of nature. We produce artificially things which nature produces out of itself. Through the art of experiment things cease to be mere rigid objects of vision, because they are generated under our guidance. And thought ceases to be a hypothesis, or a puzzling forerunner of things, and becomes a concrete thing, because it grows with the things, and keeps on growing with them to the extent that we learn to understand them”.

Comment: Both Labriola and Gramsci give themselves out as being anti-”scientistic”. But here (and also in Gramsci) is strong praise for the experimental and empirical methods of modern natural science.

MARXISM AS A SUB-SPECIES OF “CRITICAL THOUGHT”

P.73 (chapter V): “There is no one, I hope, who would place the definite victory over metaphysics entirely to the credit of historical materialism… This victory is rather a particular case in the development of anti-metaphysical thought. It would not have happened, had not critical thought developed long ago.”

Comment: Labriola here identifies Marxism as a sub-species of modern critical, scientific thought, rather than (as Gramsci sometimes has it, and as Gramsci sometimes attributes to Labriola) a completely “self-sufficient” theory.

THE END OF “INDEPENDENT PHILOSOPHY”

p.73 (chapter V): “We have a long history of positive conquests of thought, by which the essence of independent philosophy, which distinguished it from science, namely the theory of cognition, was either absorbed, or eliminated, or otherwise reduced and assimilated.”

Comment: Here again, Labriola suggests that “high” philosophy, philosophy as the “queen of the sciences”, must be a thing of the past, and not just because of Marxism.

(To be continued)

Bordiga’s views on Marxist method

Many of Gramsci’s polemics against “mechanical causalism” and “philosophical materialism” (which he seems to take as the same thing) may be shaped by his criticism of Bordiga. The following is Bordiga’s summary of what he understands by Marxist method.

Method

The basis of all investigation must be a consideration of the historic process as a whole; its development till now, and an objective examination of present social phenomena.
This method has been well stated often, but frequently as misleading in regard to its application. The fundamentals of the investigation of the material means by which human groupings satisfy their needs, that is, by an examination of productive technique, and in connection with the development of which, economic relations arise. In the course of different epochs, these factors determine the superstructure composed of the legal institutions; political, military and the dominant ideologies.
The contradiction between the productive forces and the social forms manifests itself as a struggle between the classes who have antagonistic economic interests. In the final stages, this struggle becomes the armed struggle for the conquest of political power.
This method is denoted by the following expressions: historic materialism, dialectical materialism, economic determinism, scientific materialism and the communist critique.
The important thing is always to apply the results to the facts and not to a priori postulates, to clarify and explain human phenomena; not to myths or divinities; not to principles of “right” or natural “ethics”, such as Justice, Equality, Fraternity and other abstractions similar to them devoid of any sense. Most important, one must not capitulate to the pressure of the dominant ideology, or take refuge in illusory postulates, without a clear perception or without acknowledging it, when action intervenes anew, just at the most burning moments and at the instant of decisive conclusions. The dialectic method is the only one which overcomes the current contradiction between continuity and rigorous theoretical coherence on one hand, and on the other hand, the capacity to face critically old established conclusions in formal terms.
Its acceptance hasn’t got the character of a faith, or a fanaticism of school or party.
The productive forces which consist in the main of the men adapted to production, in their groupings and in addition, the tools and mechanical means that are used, operate within the framework of forms of production.
We understand by forms, the disposition, and the relationships of interdependence within which is developed productive and social activity. We understand these forms to be all the established hierarchies (family, military, theocracy, politics). The state is all of these: the prerogatives and the tribunals connected with them; all the rules and dispositions of an economic and legal character which resist all transgression. Society assumes a given type as long as the productive forces maintain themselves within the framework of its forms of production. At a given moment in history, this equilibrium tends to be broken. From diverse causes, among them the progress of technique, the growth of population, expanding communication, increasing the productive forces. Those in contradiction with traditional forms, tending to break this framework in pieces, and when successful, one finds oneself in the presence of a revolution: the community organises itself into new economic, social and legal relationships. New forms take the place of old.
The dialectic method discovers, applies, and confirms its solutions on the grand scale of collective phenomena, and in a scientific and experimental manner, (methods that the thinkers of the bourgeois epoch applied to the natural world in the course of an ideological struggle which was the reflection of the revolutionary social struggle of their class against the theocratic and absolutist regimes, but which they were unable to extend into the social domain). They drew some conclusions acquired on this plane concerning the solutions of the problem of individual conduct, in opposition to the method employed by the schools of their religious, legal, philosophic and economic adversaries.
These held the standards of collective conduct on the inconsistent basis of the myth of the individual, held that being is individual spirit, mind, soul, and immortal, existing as juridical and civil subjects, existing as unchangeable units of economic policy, etc… Science has endeavoured to go beyond the many hypotheses on the material indivisible individual, to the study of atoms and to reduce them to irreducible units; it has defined complex points of meeting of lines of force radiating from the external field of energy; thus today one can say the cosmos is not the function of units, but that every unit is the function of the cosmos.
Those who believe in the individual and speak of personality, dignity, liberty, of the duties of a citizen, do not employ marxist thinking. That which moves man is not opinions, or beliefs or faiths, nor any phenomena whatsoever of so-called thought, which inspires their will or action. They are moved to act by their needs which are the interests arising from the same material necessities beckoning groups all over simultaneously. They collide with the limitations imposed by the surrounding social structure opposed to the satisfaction of these needs. They react individually and collectively in a sense which for the general average is determined in advance of the play of stimuli and reactions that give birth in the brain to sentiments, thoughts and judgements.
This phenomena is naturally of great complexity and perhaps in some cases are the reverse of the general law that is verified, however. But that as it may, whoever holds that individual consciousness, moral principles, opinions and decisions of the individual or the citizen, intervenes as moving cause in place of social and historic facts, has no right to be called a Marxist.
The contradiction between the productive forces and the social forms is manifested as a struggle between classes who have antagonistic economic interests. In the final stages, this struggle becomes the armed struggle for the conquest of power.

New version of “Questions” posted

I’ve posted a new version of my “Questions” to Peter about his book (see “Links” in right hand column).

Philosophy of Praxis (first instalment)

PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS – FIRST INSTALMENT

SPN 419-472

SUMMARY

This section is a critique of Nikolai Bukarin’s Historical Materialism, a book which Gramsci himself had used as a text for political education in the Italian Communist Party.

Gramsci’s main points:

1. Best to start with a critical analysis of and dialogue with “common sense”.

2. “The critique of systematic philosophies” should not however be neglected. But “it is necessary to engage battle with the most eminent of one’s adversaries”, their best expositions, and the strongest possible reading of their arguments.

3. Bukharin, by contrast, starts by attacking “bourgeois scholars” rather than dealing with common sense; but operates mainly by “picking off” minor ideologues and rubbishing this or that assertion by them, then concluding that all bourgeois thought is guilty of the error just derided. (Two of the first three sections of Bukharin’s introduction start by asserting:”Bourgeois scholars say…” and then scoffing at the views attributed to those scholars).

4. “Statistical laws can be employed in the science and art of politics only so long as the great masses of the population remain… essentially passive… [But] political action tends precisely to rouse the masses from passivity, in other words to destroy the law of large numbers… In reality one can ’scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle… 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’…”

5. Bukharin, in contrast, proposes a “mechanical causalism” and “vulgar evolutionism”.

6. In “the philosophy of praxis”, understanding is thus integrated with activism, with politics, with making history. “Separated from the theory of history and politics philosophy cannot be other than metaphysics, whereas the great conquest in the history of modern thought, represented by the philosophy of praxis, is precisely the concrete historicisation of philosophy and its identification with history”.

7. Further, the philosophy of praxis goes beyond both materialism and idealism.

8. Bukharin counterposes a “materialism” composed of mechanical “causalism” and prediction, and of the assertion that all idealism is really just religion and denial of the existence of the material world. However, the Catholic Church emphatically asserts the existence of the material world!

EXCERPTS FROM BUKHARIN

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/index.htm

“It is evident from the above what relation exists between history and sociology. Since sociology explains the general laws of human evolution, it serves as a method for history. If, for example, sociology establishes the general doctrine that the forms of government depend on the forms of economy, the historian must seek and find, in any given epoch, precisely what are the relations, and must show what is their concrete, specific expression. History furnishes the material for drawing sociological conclusions and making sociological generalizations, for these conclusions are not made up of whole cloth, but are derived from the actual facts of history. Sociology in its turn formulates a definite point of view, a means of investigation, or, as we now say, a method for history.

The working class has its own proletarian sociology, known as historical materialism. In its main outlines this theory was elaborated by Marx and Engels. It is also called ‘the materialist method in history’, or simply ‘economic materialism’…”

“We may therefore answer the fundamental question as to whether the inherent law in the phenomena of nature and society, the uniformity which we observe in these fields, is teleological or causal: Both in nature and in society there exists objectively (i.e., regardless of whether we wish it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not) a law of nature that is causal in character.

What constitutes such a law of cause and effect? Such a law is a necessary, inevitable, invariable and universal relation between phenomena…”

“Prediction is possible in the domain of the social sciences as well as in that of the natural sciences… We know, for example, that astronomers are able to predict with the utmost precision the time of an eclipse of the sun or moon… Now, let us ask whether there is anything similar to this in the social sciences; the answer is in the affirmative…”

“In unorganized society we may set up the following laws

1. Social phenomena are the resultant of the conflict of individual wills, feelings, actions, etc.

2. Social phenomena determine at any given moment the will of the various individuals.

3. Social phenomena do not express the will of individual persons, but frequently are a direct contradiction of this will; they prevail over it by force, with the result that the individual often feels the pressure of social forces on his actions…”

“The individual case is of negligible importance. But just combine a great number of such ‘accidents’, and you will at once see that their ‘accidental nature’ begins to disappear. The function and significance of many actions, their combined action, is at once felt in the sequel. So the individual cases are by no means zero quantities, for zero, however frequently multiplied, will never give more than zero”.

“Idealism (the doctrine based on a fundamental idea underlying all things, a “spirit”), is simply a diluted form of the religious conception… The idealistic point of view, if pursued to its conclusion, leads to a number of absurdities, which are often defined with a serious face by the philosophers of the ruling classes. Particularly, we find associated with idealism such views as deny the external world, i.e., the existence of things objectively, independently of the human consciousness…

“This insane philosophy… is contradicted by human experience at every step. When we eat… none of us ever thinks of doubting the existence of the external world, i.e., the existence – let us say – of the food we eat… None the less, this fallacy is based on the fundamental position of idealism”.

CRITICAL COMMENTS ON GRAMSCI, AND DISCUSSION

1. Common sense

Martin thought that Gramsci’s concept of “common sense” is incoherent. It overestimates the formative influence on “common sense” of formal doctrine: the “principal elements [are] provided by religion”, writes Gramsci, but isn’t it rather the case that religion, preserving only some core ideas of its own (e.g., with Christianity, guilt), adapts itself very flexibly to varied “common senses”? It also overestimates the “realistic, materialistic elements”, claiming that they “predominate”; in fact naive “common sense” has a lot of “magical” rather than materialist thinking in it. (See Dennett, “Breaking the Spell”, chapter 4 and 5, for a good explanation of this).

Allan thought that this criticism was fabricating a problem where none exists. Gramsci is quite right to stress addressing “common sense”: building on insights in it where we can, “therapeutically” dissecting it where necessary. As Robert pointed out, this is now standard pedagogic precept.

2. Philosophy “identified with history”

We all thought that Gramsci’s criticism of Bukharin as regards “mechanical causalism”, social prediction on the model of natural sciences, etc. is telling.

And if the nature of social life means that our understanding of it has to be tied up with our efforts to change it, then “philosophy” is tied up with the making of history.

But from that to the “identification with history” of philosophy is a big step. In fact, if philosophy is tied up with efforts to change the world whose success and outcome is uncertain – as it must be – then it inescapably comprises an element of initiative beyond what history has produced or may soon produce.

Even if one believes, like Hegel and radically unlike Gramsci, that “concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be [...] for such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late… When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering” – even if one believes that, the “painting grey on grey” is still a matter of individual initiative rather than mere generic “history”.

Moreover, Gramsci writes: “To think of a philosophical affirmation as true in a particular historical period… but as superseded and rendered ‘vain’ in a succeeding period, without however falling into scepticism and moral and ideological relativism, in other words to see philosophy as historicity, is quite an arduous and difficult mental operation”. Maybe not just arduous and difficult, but actually impossible. If it is true today that God does not exist, it was true 500 or 1000 years ago.

3. Materialism and idealism

Martin queried Gramsci’s apparent rejection of materialism. Gramsci seems to equate materialism with “mechanical causalism” of the early 19th century sort, but in fact it is much broader.

Allan pointed out that textually Gramsci explicitly rejects only “traditional materialism”.

None of us could make any sense of Gramsci’s proposition that the Marxist “theory of superstructures@ “poses in realistic and historical terms” what traditional idealism posed materially.

4. Dialectic

Gramsci complains that Bukharin does not discuss “the dialectic”.

In fact, there is in Bukharin’s book a chapter headed “Dialectical Materialism”, the only explanation I can see is this:

“Matter in motion: such is the stuff of this world. It is therefore necessary for the understanding of any phenomenon to study it in its process of origination (how, whence, why it came to be), its evolution, its destruction, in a word, its motion, and not its seeming state of rest. This dynamic point of view is also called the dialectic point of view… In the first place, the dialectic method of interpretation demands that all phenomena be considered in their indissoluble relations; in the second place, that they be considered in their state of motion.”

And this: “Hegel observed this characteristic of motion and expressed it in the following manner: he called the original condition of equilibrium the thesis, the disturbance of equilibrium the antithesis, the reestablishment of equilibrium on a new basis the synthesis (the unifying proposition reconciling the contradictions). The characteristic of motion present in all things, expressing itself in this tripartite formula (or triad) he called dialectic”. In fact, of course, Hegel did nothing of the sort; in any case, the presentation of dialectical processes as those of the constant re-establishment of equilibrium is odd.

Further, Bukharin not only subscribes to “the dialectics of nature”, but asserts that the real importance of dialectics is its basis in mechanics. “It is necessary to use the dialectic method, the dialectic mode of thought, because the dialectics of nature may thus be grasped. It is quite possible to transcribe the ‘mystical’ (as Marx put it) language of the Hegelian dialectics into the language of modern mechanics”.

(How? Bukharin’s explanation is puzzling. “We [now] know that the smallest particles of matter, the atoms, consist of still smaller particles, electrons, flying about and revolving within the atom, as the heavenly bodies of the solar system revolve around the sun. But the whole world consists of such particles, and how can anything be considered constant in a universe whose component parts gyrate with whirlwind speed?” The archetype of “mechanical thinking” was Laplace’s Mecanique Celeste: pre-atomic; dealing precisely with planets, stars, etc. moving with ‘worldwind speed’; having as one of its breakthrough propositions that an object moving with ‘worldwind speed’ continues to do so unless disturbed.)

Gramsci’s own terminology is also puzzling. He writes of “the dialectic”. Meaning what? And moreover of it as a “theory of knowledge”. Meaning what, again?

5. Language

Robert picked up on Gramsci’s discussion of language and metaphor. Gramsci argues that “language is always metaphorical”, and rebukes “an arbitrary trend towards neologism”, on the grounds that “language [can only be] transformed with the transformation of the whole of civilisation, through the acquisition of culture by new classes… and what it does is precisely to absorb in metaphorical form the words of previous civilisations and cultures”.

Robert raised the issue of language being used as an instrument of ruling-class hegemony, for example in the authoritative status given to Spanish as against indigenous languages in Latin American states.

We discussed that a bit. It’s true, but maybe not so simple. Gramsci would have grown up speaking Sardinian dialect, and only through schooling learned state-approved standard Italian. In a letter he would encourage his sister to let her son speak Sardinian dialect.

But he also insisted (p.325) that it is necessary for everyone to learn the standard national language, whatever the side-stories in terms of bureaucratic suppression of other popular idioms.

“Someone who only speaks dialect, or understands the standard language incompletely, necessarily has an intuition of the world which is more or less limited and provincial…”

There’s a parallel here with Basil Bernstein’s writings in England in the 1970s. Bernstein studied “codes” of using a fairly standardised language (English in England) rather than dialects, but also came to the conclusion that a populist approach, endorsing local popular “codes” and rejecting the teaching of standard “codes” as ruling-class imposition, actually tends to solidify and double-lock class privilege.

Gramsci study group in Brisbane

From Sunday 8 June we’re running a study group in Brisbane on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. For details, click on “About” (above).