Prison Notebooks


The Prison Notebooks are a series of essays written by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926. The notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935, when Gramsci was released from prison to a medical center on grounds of ill-health. His friend, Piero Sraffa, had supplied the writing implements and notebooks. Gramsci died in April 1937.
Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. The original Prison Notebooks are kept at the Fondazione Gramsci in Rome. These notebooks were initially smuggled out of prison, catalogued by Gramsci's sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, and sent to Moscow for safekeeping. They were returned to Italy after World War II and have since been preserved by the Gramsci Foundation.
Although written unsystematically, the 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. His notebooks cover a wide range of topics, including Italian history and nationalism, the French Revolution, Fascism, Taylorism and Fordism, civil society, folklore, religion and high and popular culture.
Smuggled out of the prison in the 1930s, the first edition was published in 1947 and won the Viareggio Prize a few months later. Gramsci's posthumous award of the Viareggio Prize was followed by a memorial from the Constituent Assembly of Italy on April 28, 1947. The first published translations in English of some of the notebooks were made by Louis Marks in 1957, with more extensive Selections from the Prison Notebooks translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith printed in 1971.
Ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory that are associated with Gramsci's name include:
  • Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the capitalist state.
  • The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class.
  • The distinction between political society which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent.
  • "Absolute historicism".
  • A critique of economic determinism that opposes fatalistic interpretations of Marxism.
  • A critique of philosophical materialism.

    Background

A supposed assassination attempt on Benito Mussolini's life on 31 October 1926, on 8 November led to the establishment of secret police powers under Mussolini's regime. These powers were used to arrest Gramsci, in spite of his parliamentary immunity. Following a show trial in May 1928, Gramsci was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Following his trial, Gramsci was brought to a prison in Turi, where he spent the first five years of his sentence and began writing the Prison Notebooks in February 1929. By this time, his health had started to decline. When his health permitted, Gramsci spent much of his time in prison reading Marxist texts and commentary on them, though access to these texts was censored by the prison. He wrote extensively during this period, filling his notebooks with small handwriting.

Concepts

Hegemony

was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci's view, any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic-corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership, and to make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a ‘historic bloc’, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations and ideas. In this manner, Gramsci developed a theory that emphasized the importance of the superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the base.
Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to religion, and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over people's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people's spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.

Intellectuals and education

Gramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society. Famously, he stated that all people are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all people have the social function of intellectuals. He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. Furthermore, he distinguished between a traditional intelligentsia which sees itself as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks organically. Such organic intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from outside the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical the status quo of the already existing intellectual activity of the masses. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.

State and civil society

Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state, which he claims rules through force plus consent. The state is not to be understood in the narrow sense of the government; instead, Gramsci divides it between political society, which is the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control, and civil society, which is commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, differentiated from both the state and the economy. The former is the realm of force and the latter of consent. He stresses, however, that the division is purely conceptual and that the two, in reality, often overlap.
Gramsci claims that hegemony lies under modern capitalism and that the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in Passive revolution by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. Gramsci posits that movements such as reformism and fascism, as well as the 'scientific management' and assembly line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford respectively, are examples of this.
Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that the only tactic capable of undermining bourgeois hegemony and leading to socialism is a war of position ; this war of position would then give way to a war of movement. Gramsci saw war of movement as being exemplified by the storming of the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.
Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a regulated society and defines the withering away of the state as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself.