by JONATHAN STRAUSS
Among those who are sympathetic to the views of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), two views have developed about the significance of his political theorising.
One is that Gramsci — a leader of the Turin workers’ movement in the years at and immediately after the end of World War I, a founding member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and later the PCI secretary from 1923 until his jailing by the fascists in 1926, and author of the Prison Notebooks — was “of the early-1920s Lenin-Trotsky stripe” (Thomas 2010). Beyond upholding these Marxists’ common revolutionary commitment, however, this view proceeds from a partial reading not so much of Gramsci as of Lenin, and especially on a particular understanding of his What Is to Be Done? (1902), which in turn prevents a more profound understanding of Gramsci’s relationship with Lenin’s thought.
Thus, for example, Paul Le Blanc (2011) discusses Gramsci’s and Lenin’s shared “Leninist” organisational orientation. He refers first to Lenin’s assertion, half a decade after his book was published, that “the working class is instinctively, spontaneously socialist, and more than ten years of work put in by the socialist movement has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness” (cited in Le Blanc 2011). Le Blanc continues, Gramsci “warn[s] that the revolutionary organisation must not fall into ‘neglecting, or worse still despising, so-called “spontaneous’ moments” of mass action among the workers and oppressed’.”
The recent scholarship of Lars T. Lih (see, for example, Lih 2007, 2012), following that of Harding (1981), however, has shown the continuity of Lenin’s thoughts on organisation at the time of What Is to Be Done? with the experience of the German Social Democrats and these ideas’ subsequent development. Systematic organisation of the party was needed in Russia so that, like “the Germans” were doing, workers and “intellectuals” alike would be drawn to their common path of revolutionary training (Lenin 1902: 472-73).
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