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    of 2

    Chapter 17

    Gramsci’s “Philosophy of Praxis”

    This essay appeared as the “Two Worlds” column in the November 1977 issue of
    News & Letters.

    The philosophy of praxis is consciousness full of contradictions in which


    the philosopher himself, understood both individually and as an entire
    social group, not merely grasps the contradictions, but posits himself as
    an element of the contradictions and elevates this element to a principle
    of knowledge and therefore of action.
    a. gramsci, “Problems of Marxism” in Prison Notebooks

    Fifty-one years ago this month, on November 8, 1926, Antonio Gramsci, revo-
    lutionary leader of the Turin Factory Councils, a founder of the Communist
    Party of Italy, a Marxist theoretician-activist, was arrested by Benito Musso-
    lini’s police. When, after nearly a year of incarceration, Gramsci was brought
    to face fascist courts, the Prosecutor, demanding condemnation of Gramsci,
    mouthed Mussolini’s injunction: “We must prevent this brain from functioning
    for twenty years!”
    It meant a life sentence for the frail revolutionary. Indeed, he died before
    the twenty-year sentence had expired. But fascism could not stop the brain
    from functioning. The eleven years of brutal fascist imprisonment produced
    profound philosophic-political writings that retain relevance for our day. Natu-
    rally, that was not the lived revolutionary life any Marxist would have wished,
    much less one who had experienced the Biennio Rosso (the Two Red Years,
    1918–1920) of the General Strike, the Factory Councils, the near-revolution that
    turned into the failed revolution. But it was the period that laid the ground
    for working out anew the integrality of philosophy and revolution as Gramsci
    thought through the experiences of the Biennio Rosso as well as its philosophy,
    history as well as triangular relationship of class, factory councils, party. That is
    to say, spontaneity and organization, to Gramsci, could no more be narrowed
    to an elitist party ordering the masses around than spontaneous actions could
    be squeezed dry of the creative thought that produced the action of masses in
    motion.

    © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi:10.1163/9789004383678_019


    Gramsci’s “Philosophy of Praxis” 151

    1 Factory Councils in Italy

    Rather than either only a vanguard party to lead, or philosophy sans revolu-
    tion, what had to be worked out was the inseparability of philosophy and
    revolution. So solidly grounded in philosophy was Gramsci’s concept of the
    Russian­Revolution and the soviets which brought the Bolsheviks to power
    that he hailed them as opening a “new stage of humanity.” And when he wrote
    of the Factory Councils in Italy as “the model of the proletarian state,” he knew
    that, far from arising from his head, it was the Fiat factory workers who had
    spontaneously formed them during the summer of 1919; that universalism and
    the anti-state would concretize State and Revolution: “The Russian Revolution
    is the triumph of freedom; its organization is based on spontaneity, not on the
    dictates of a ‘hero.’ …”1
    Consider, then, the irony that among Gramsci’s detractors are not only state-
    capitalists in power calling themselves Communists, as in Russia, or those who
    hunger for state power in the existing parliamentary, bourgeois states (with
    or without a King, be it Spain or Italy or France) who are busy attempting to
    make that great revolutionary Gramsci sound like a Eurocommunist class-
    collaborationist.­2 No, the detractors also include those who fight Eurocommu-
    nism and try to restore Gramsci as the revolutionary he was, like the Trotskyists
    (all varieties), as well as some from the New Left. The latter try to intellectual-
    ize Gramsci as if he, as philosopher who had a certain concept of the function
    of intellectuals, could possibly have assigned a revolutionary role to intellectu-
    als who kept themselves apart from the proletariat, from masses in motion. It
    all adds up to fear, on the one hand of philosophy and on the other of proletar-
    ian revolution, thus reducing the proletariat to robot. It therefore is essential,
    though in very abbreviated form, to restore the wholeness of Gramsci’s “phi-
    losophy of praxis.” Indeed, the very phrase itself shows how inseparable are
    thought from action, theory from practice, philosophy from revolution.
    By no stretch of the imagination can one excuse moving away from the cen-
    tral core of Gramsci-ism—“philosophy of praxis”—on the ground that since
    the fascist prison guards were looking over his shoulder, and since many a time
    when Gramsci would have used the word, revolution, he had to use the phrase

    1 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, edited by Quintin Hoare, trans-
    lated by John Mathews (London: International Publishers, 1977), p. 54.
    2 This is especially ludicrous in view of Gramsci’s singling out for criticism class collabora-
    tionism as well as the then existing Socialist Party. See Selections from the Political Writings,
    1910–1920, p. 43: “The political decadence which class collaboration brings is due to the spas-
    modic expansion of a bourgeois party which is not satisfied with merely clinging to the state,
    but also makes use of the party which is antagonistic to the state….”

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