A conference on Gramsci in London on 28 May 2010 showed that recent research has fatally undermined interpretations of Gramsci as a “post-Marxist” or loyal forerunner of “Eurocommunism”.
Speaking at the one-day conference on “New Insights into Gramsci’s Life and Work” organised by Alessandro Carlucci, Peter Thomas, author of The Gramscian Moment, argued that Gramsci was a Marxist of the Lenin-Trotsky Third International who criticised and opposed the Stalinist degeneration.
Both the interpretations which say that Gramsci was a “loyal” forerunner of the orthodoxy of the later Communist Parties, and those who say that his Prison Notebooks delineate a de facto break with Lenin’s type of politics, or with Marxism altogether, are wrong.
Presentations of Gramsci as a forerunner of “post-Marxism” have had much academic play-time in recent years. But at this conference – attended by about 100, mostly academics, with AWL the only organised activist-left presence – no-one rose to defend that presentation, or to contest the main lines of Peter Thomas’s argument.
Peter Thomas pointed out that Gramsci wrote on hegemony, in his Prison Notebooks, at around the same time as we know that he was rejecting and criticising Stalin’s “Third Period” turn. The concept “genuinely of Gramsci’s own coinage” is not so much that of “hegemony” but that of “hegemonic apparatus”. The concept of hegemony is “pallid” without a linkage to building a political party.
The conference was opened by Alessandro Carlucci, with a short introduction emphasising Gramsci’s commitment to pluralism. Derek Boothman, speaking on the influence of Gramsci’s academic studies of linguistics on his politics, argued there was much justice in Franco Lo Piparo’s thesis that the language/dialect relationship in the writings of Gramsci’s university teacher Matteo Bartoli provided a template for the hegemony/subaltern relationship in Gramsci. But in my view any analogy must be very loose. Gramsci fought for the subaltern classes to overthrow ruling-class hegemony, but not for dialects to overthrow national and world languages.
Craig Brandist spoke on linguistic research in the USSR in the early 1920s, and how its emancipatory explorations had been crushed by the Stalinist counter-revolution.
Adam Morton spoke about textual research which he and Derek Boothman are doing on the Lyons Theses. Other papers were presented by Fabio Frosini on Gramsci’s use of the concepts of Renaissance and Reformation and by James Martin on Gramsci’s relationship with Piero Gobetti.
Carl Levy’s paper recapitulated the argument of his 1999 book, Gramsci and the Anarchists, to the effect that, though “Gramsci was no anarchist or syndicalist”, the basic template of all the distinctive features of his later Marxist thought was set by the influence on him of anarchists and syndicalists in his early years.
Levy summarised his own politics as having a “maximum programme” of anarchism, which he sees as impossible but nonetheless a valuable benchmark for his practical “minimum programme”, “wimpy liberal social democracy”. It is a conglomerate of views with, I think, quite a wide quiet influence.
Peter Thomas spoke from the floor against Levy’s censure of Lenin as “authoritarian”, but by then the conference had overrun its scheduled time, and the debate never gathered momentum.
