Pre-Prison Writings

by Antonio Gramsci, Virginia Cox (Translator), Richard Bellamy (Editor)

This collection of Gramsci's pre-prison writings, newly translated and including a number of pieces not previously available in English, covers the whole gamut of his journalistic activity, from general cultural criticism to commentaries on local, national and international events. It will be of interest to a broad range of scholars and students concerned with the history of political, social and cultural thought in the twentieth century.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History, Nonfiction, Italy, Sociology

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 1994

About the author

Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926, where he remained until his death in 1937.

During his imprisonment, Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis. His Prison Notebooks are considered a highly original contribution to 20th-century political theory. Gramsci drew insights from varying sources — not only other Marxists but also thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and Benedetto Croce. The notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including the history of Italy and Italian nationalism, the French Revolution, fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, the state, historical materialism, folklore, religion, and high and popular culture.
Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class — the bourgeoisie — use cultural institutions to maintain wealth and power in capitalist societies. In Gramsci's view, the bourgeoisie develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. He also attempted to break from the economic determinism of orthodox Marxist thought, and so is sometimes described as a neo-Marxist. He held a humanistic understanding of Marxism, seeing it as a philosophy of praxis and an absolute historicism that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.

Reviews

[Alvaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. The Communist Party must always be a vanguard group, united through consent and not through coercion. It is a guiding Party that must be built bottom-up, with its intellectuals and members representing mostly, the proletariat. An alliance must be made with the peasants and other classes dialectically opposed to the bourgeoisie and capitalism in order to build hegemony and a counter-offensive.
II. No trust must be given to social-democrats or syndicalists. The former work for capitalism by ameliorating but not eliminating the exploitative practices within the factories and in the countryside. The latter also defend capitalism by being intermediaries between the proletariat and the factory owners. Syndicalists are to be opposed through the Factory Councils seen in Turin and organized by Gramsci himself.
III. Finally, Gramsci’s Pre-Prison Writing show the active (voluntarist) and powerful will of the PCd’I and especially of the Ordine Nuovo Group. Against the left and right-wing attacks of Tasca, Bordiga, Trotsky, Kamenev or Zinoviev, Gramsci proposes centrism and unity as the tactic needed to safeguard the world revolution.
Bandiera rossa, trionfera!

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would recommend reading this before starting his prison notebooks. The writing is predictably a lot more cogent, it is easier to find your feet in. But keep in mind that it is composed of shorter articles, written for political magazines in responses to other works or current events. So a comprehensive philosophy doesn't really emerge from it in the same way as the prison notebooks.

Gramsci believed that trade unions were inherently incapable of bringing about revolution. Because they introduce a mentality of opportunism, with smaller gains prioritised during strike activity. Workers are organised as wage-earners rather than producers - they reinforce the idea of a worker as a 'commodity'. The worker can only see himself as a producer if he develops consciousness of his function in the process of production; he feels what it is to be a member of a class; and subsequently sees capitalists as dead weights.

Gramsci believes that this form of revolutionary class consciousness can only be brought about by soviet-like organisation.. workers must enter into 'cells' as communists, these cells must have a rigid hierarchical order, with the Party at the highest level of command. Which is not to say that they must have a certain level of theoretical understanding of communism; but rather present a united front. And then longer term political and ideological work can begin. Unified action relies on the work of the Party, a collective will.

A lot of the book is dedicated to theorising about the role of the Italian Socialist Party; whether it can participate in bourgeouis parliament; how it should go about organising revolutionary consciousness. The writing is very much grounded in its context. The split between the Italian Socialist Party and the PCd'I is also detailed. I mean, many of his earlier writings seem to attempt to sway the Socialist Party against reformism, which culminates in this split.