Carl Levy

Introduction

The relationship between Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism and the anarchist and syndicalist traditions is complex and intriguing but it is overlooked by most of his scholarly interlocutors. I have argued that there are a number of elective affinities between the young Gramsci’s unorthodox Marxism and the libertarian socialist tradition, and that Gramsci’s concept of industrial democracy, elaborated during the era of the factory councils in Turin (1919–1920), was shaped through his encounters with anarchists, self-educated workers and formally educated technicians employed by Fiat and others. His relationship to the anarchists runs far deeper than an Italian variation of the tactical political ploy, which Lenin indulged in his anarchist-sounding pronouncements in revolutionary Russia during the spring and early summer of 1917.

Here I focus on the pre- ‘Biennio Rosso Gramsci,’ in order to show that Gramsci’s amalgam of libertarian and authoritarian thought was already formulated before he encountered the Leninist model. Three aspects of the pre-Leninist Gramsci’s Marxism serve as benchmarks to evaluate the interaction of libertarian thought and action with Gramsci’s social thought: voluntarism, prefiguration and his nascent conception of hegemony as is evident in his attitudes towards language, education and free thought.

Gramsci’s introduction to Marxism was filtered through a philosophical culture of voluntarism that permeated the Italian universities of antebellum Italy, whose myriad variations on the theme were found in European and North American philosophy (actualism, pragmatism, Bergsonism and so on) and were rigorously denounced by Lenin and later by Bukharin (who was roasted for naïve materialism by Gramsci in Prison Notebooks).[405] The theme of voluntarism is directly connected to Gramsci’s concept of prefiguration.[406] Simply put, prefiguration implies that the institutions of the future socialist society should be foreshadowed in the democratic institutions of the working class in civil society under capitalism. Not only does this solve the dilemma of how one gets from the capitalist to socialist stage of history, it also implies the libertarian potential of working-class self-organization. For Gramsci, theoretical Marxist voluntarism is embodied in self-organization in civil society.

Gramsci was no anarchist or syndicalist, but anarchism and syndicalism served as foils to forge Gramscian social thought and political action. In his arguments with the libertarians before his encounters with Lenin and what became known as Leninism, Gramsci had already opened his thought to a ready acceptance of the authoritarian solutions proposed in Russia. The authoritarian aspects of the young Gramsci, however, paradoxically are derived from the libertarian-like voluntarism of his political thought, not from the determinism of Second Internationalist Marxism, even Lenin’s radical variant.[407] In the remainder of this chapter, among other things, I will examine how the early Gramsci’s concept of prefiguration and his master term, hegemony, are fleshed out in this dialogue with anarchist, syndicalist, and libertarian culture more broadly conceived. But it is his form of pedagogical socialism, drenched in Gentilean assumptions, which demonstrates the theoretical gulf separating his apparent libertarian socialism from the positivist culture of the anarchists and syndicalists.

A second theme of the discussion, relevant to Gramsci’s relationship with the anarchists, is his concept of the subaltern. The term ‘subaltern’ relates to Gramscian keywords: common sense, good sense, and sovversivismo (‘subversivism’),[408] and it reopens the controversy between Marxists and anarchists concerning the class basis of revolutionary politics. Is the Gramscian concept of the subaltern merely a more sympathetic but ultimately patronizing and paternalist version of that old Marxist canard, the lumpenproletariat?[409] And is Gramsci’s seemingly sympathetic account of ‘primitive rebels’ just an open-minded version of the anthropological gaze?[410] Indeed, the gaze Eric Hobsbawm adopted, since he claimed Gramsci inspired his 1959 study of ‘primitive rebels’?[411] Were the anarchists and syndicalists merely politically pernicious modern versions of less threatening (to Marxist political hegemony) earlier religious-based millenarians? Thus a discussion of Gramsci’s encounter with anarchists and syndicalists is inherently interesting for his intellectual biography and his type of Marxism, and echoes an earlier pattern of encounters by Marx with Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin.[412] The question of Gramsci’s take on the subaltern and the primitive rebels is also a fruitful way of interrogating Gramsci’s relationship to the historiography of Italian anarchism, which I have discussed elsewhere.[413]

Prefiguration and the ‘libertarian Gramsci’

Gramsci, Antonio Labriola and the anarchists Gramsci employed the daily concerns of Turin’s labor and cooperative movements as laboratories to develop and illustrate his more complex theoretical conceptions very early in his career — one or two years before Gramsci began to promote the ‘Sovietist,’ Western European or incipient Turinese versions of Council Communism.[414]

It was precisely during his discussion of the cooperative that Gramsci carried out a sustained analysis of Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola (1843–1904).[415] It was Labriola’s reading of the philosophy of praxis that allowed Gramsci to use a distinguished if politically marginal Marxist scholar to challenge the orthodoxies of Second Internationalist Marxism during the war years (1915–1918).

Although they were from different generations, their relationships with the anarchists were strikingly similar. Both men worked with proletarian anarchists, but just like Gramsci, Labriola differentiated between Jacobinical ‘capi’, the spostati della borghesia (bourgeois dropouts), the intellectual proletariat, in contrast to the anarchist workers whom Labriola had helped during the Roman builders’ strike in the early 1890s. Although Labriola was capable of differentiating between the ‘reasonable’ anarchism of Errico Malatesta and terrorist bombers and assassins, he never took the intellectual premises of anarchism very seriously.

Gramsci and Labriola based the superiority of Marxism over other forms of socialism on its ability to forge a world view that required little borrowing from other systems of philosophical thought, and this caused them to fight against the marriage of positivism and Marxism. They denied the intellectual validity of other systems of socialism, particularly anarchism, but in their search for autonomous working-class institutions immersed in civil society and with a shared hostility to state help or interventionism, they found an appreciation in the work of Georges Sorel, a close correspondent of Labriola in the 1890s and, in his last years, an admirer of Gramsci and his young comrades in Turin in 1919–1920.

The young Gramsci, Sorel and the anarchists

Most accounts of Gramsci emphasize his sharp differentiation between the trade union, a reformist institution immersed in the logic of the capitalist marketplace and the factory council, representative of the rank and file, subversive of labor as a commodity, reflecting the productivist and functionalist prerequisites of future socialized industry.

An article on consumer co-operatives by Gramsci, ‘Socialism and Cooperation’ (30 October 1916, published in the local journal of the Turinese socialist cooperative movement, L’Alleanza Co-operativa), is bathed in Sorelian allusions and thought patterns.[416] First, he made it abundantly clear that socialism had to be productivist, echoing Sorel. Consumer co-operatives were not, nor could they be, central to these politics. Socialism, he wrote ‘is not simply to solve the distribution of finished products,’ but one must accelerate production, so that, ‘collectivism will serve to accelerate the rhythm of production itself, by eliminating all those artificial factors of productivity.’[417]

Socialist co-operatives had to steer clear of the meddlesome and corrupting influences of bourgeois legislation and the state. If co-operatives did not serve the entire working class they were protectionist, parasitical organizations that gave rise to a group of privileged workers, who were successful at freeing themselves partially from capitalist exploitation, but whose actions were harmful to their class specifically and costly to production more generally. Thus Gramsci’s early radicalism can be placed within the cultural context of the pre-war syndicalist wave, which enveloped the globe and embraced a critique of crony and state capitalism. Similarly, in London the exiled Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, adapted Hillaire Belloc’s critique of a ‘Servile State’ and imported it into the Italian Left’s opposition to statist reformism, mirroring the early Gramsci.[418]

Gramsci’s general tenor of discussion is linked to his earlier connections with free-trade socialists and syndicalists in Sardinia and Turin.[419] Previously, Gaetano Salvemini, the free-trade socialist who criticized ‘the dictatorship’ of the north of Italy over the downtrodden south, had been a major influence, and during the war Gramsci edited a special issue of the local Turinese socialist newspaper, Il Grido del Popolo, devoted to the necessary connections between free trade and socialism. Free trade, Gramsci believed, would help to lessen the north/south divide but it was also central to the definition of his form of socialism.

Gramsci was also attracted to the English radical liberals who founded the Union for Democratic Control, and particularly Norman Angell, whose wartime writings, Gramsci claimed, showed that protectionist state socialism or state capitalism were universal evils arising from the inherent demands of the world conflict. This pervasive ‘Prussianism’ (his revealing synonym for the Servile State), Gramsci felt, threatened democratic liberties won before the war.[420] But free trade was not only the guarantor of civil rights; free trade also served as a metaphor for Gramsci’s maximalist program. Concurrently, Lenin, who appreciated the mechanics of power and production, was praising the wartime German Empire as being a step closer to socialism: cartels, trusts and indeed state-assisted cartels and trusts preparing the way for socialism; these did not corrupt the workers, but trained them for a future socialist industrial society. For the early free trade and ‘libertarian’ Gramsci, trusts, cartels and state capitalism undermined the unity of the working and peasant classes in Italy and also stunted the productivity of the capitalist economy and thus delayed the socialist stage of history.[421]

He also believed that ‘reform from above’ or ‘state socialism’ had too long been uncritically accepted within pre-war socialism and even within Marxist theory itself. This became evident in an article written on 8 April 1917 when Gramsci argued:

Many of our comrades are still imbued with doctrines concerning the state that were fashionable in the writings of socialists twenty years ago. These doctrines were constructed in Germany, and perhaps in Germany might still have their justification. It is certain that in Italy, a country even less parliamentary than Germany, due to the prevailing political corruption and the lack of parliamentary consciousness, the state is the greatest enemy of citizens (of the majority of citizens) and every growth of its powers, of its activity, of its functions, always equals a growth of corruption, of misery for citizens, of a general lowering of the level of public, economic and moral life.[422]

Gramsci’s complex, and at times confused, form of anti-statism is further shaped by his appropriation of Sorel’s concept of cleavage, namely the sharp separation of the working-class from bourgeois culture and lifestyles.[423] But while there were similarities with Sorel, differences were also evident in the early ‘libertarian’ Gramsci.

Gramsci and Sorel shared a belief in a non-Jacobinical transition to socialism based upon the daily experiences of workers in their own trade unions and co-operatives, with Gramsci alluding to Sorel’s highly influential book l’Avenir socialiste des syndicats, circulated by Italian left-wing socialist and syndicalist activists before the war.[424] This work predates Sorel’s departure into myth-making and the celebration of violence, and is firmly grounded in his encounters with Eduard Bernstein, Antonio Labriola and the former Italian anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino, which arose during the so-called revisionist debate (concerning the revision of Marxism) at the turn of the century.[425] From diverse starting points these three thinkers sought institutions within civil society, which might temper or suppress state socialism.

Italian anarchists became sharply critical of Sorel, especially after he showed little regret for the execution in 1909 of Francisco Ferrer, the anarchist Spanish educationalist (who he considered a muddle-headed Freemason), but in any case Gramsci’s ‘Sorel’ was different from the majority of pre-war Italian syndicalists, who remained attracted to the Frenchman’s works, albeit, it has been argued, that a certain reading of Sorel helped shaped Gramsci’s concept of hegemony during his prison years — the young ‘libertarian’ Gramsci’s transition to socialism relied upon the conscious, reasoned intervention of social actors, rather than myths. He did not share the fascination expressed by syndicalist intellectuals with the exotic, indeed the ‘Orientalist,’ imagery of raw, anti-intellectual and uneducated workers such as the syndicalist professor Enrico Leone.[426]

Gramsci’s early libertarianism is not merely found in his ‘free-trade socialism,’ as discussed previously, it can also be seen as Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxist praxis, which he deployed to undermine the Second Internationalist concept of scientific socialism — a concept embraced by social democrats and Bolsheviks — or equally the alternative positivist determinism of Kropotkinite anarcho-communism, which some Italian anarchists, most notably Malatesta, believed the Russian advanced.

This led Gramsci to passionate denunciations of the division of socialism between a leadership caste imbued with the correct formulas and followers who were easily manipulated by their ‘scientific’ magic tricks. So he imbibed cautiously the ideas of the sociologist Robert Michels, especially the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ from the exiled German professor of politics at the University of Turin;[427] and indeed Gramsci sometimes advanced anarchist-like critiques of the Italian socialist party machine:

The proletariat is not an army; it does not have officers, subalterns, corporals and soldiers. Socialists are not officers of the proletarian army, they are part of the proletariat itself, perhaps they are its consciousness, but as the consciousness cannot be divided from an individual, and so socialists are not placed in duality with the proletariat. They are one, always one and they do not command but live with the proletariat, just as blood circulates and moves in the veins of a body and it is not possible for it to live and move inside rubber tubes wrapped around a corpse. They live within the proletariat, their force is in the proletariats’ and their power lay in this perfect adhesion.[428]

We have seen how libertarian themes permeated Gramsci’s thought even before the Council Communist phase of 1919–1920. His socialism was anti-statist. He was suspicious and on guard against the creation of a socialist hierarchy: he was against Jacobinical socialism. He promoted socialism grounded in civil society and prefiguration. But he was also ill at ease with syndicalist workerist arguments concerning socialist and working-class movements. But neither should the socialist leadership patronize or order about the rank and file, flaunting their well-developed consciousness over the less well-educated grass roots. However, that did not mean that conscious socialists did not have a duty to educate the movement. And it was over the question of education and the anarchist concept of ‘free thought’ and the ‘free thinker’ that Gramsci engaged in his most extended theoretical debate with the anarchists before his clashes during the Factory Council Movement of 1919–1920.

Free thought and educated thought

Turin, Gramsci argued, lacked a cultural organization controlled by and acting on behalf of workers. The Università Popolare was, he felt, a purely bourgeois humanitarian venture. In contrast, his proposed Association of Culture would supply trained intellectuals suitably socialized for adequate tasks within the socialist movement, to help workers in their struggles. Although he did not quote Robert Michels directly, he was certainly thinking of his pre-war study of German socialism, particularly Michels’ description of the ways in which rootless intellectuals became the object of an unhealthy hero worship within the movement.[429] Gramsci equated the authoritarianism of the movement with the generally low level of education enjoyed by the rank and file of the Italian socialist movement.

Against Michels, he argued that an Italian socialist party, filled with educated comrades, would be sustainably democratic and libertarian because it would function through the spontaneous rationality he detected in the micro-institutions (such as the Clubs of Moral Life, the suburban circles and newspaper editorial groups) in which he was involved in these first years of socialist activism.

Gramsci’s conception of socialist education and culture was democratic, participatory and libertarian, but it had little in common with the rationalist free thought that dominated socialist and anarchist political culture in Liberal Italy.[430] Gramsci believed that fuzzy-minded rationalist free thought played into the hands of the fickle and bombastic leadership of the pre-war Italian Socialist Party, because it denied the rank-and-file critical faculties to control this leadership. An educated party would be more democratic and libertarian because it would function through a spontaneous ‘socratic’ rationality acquired in such micro-institutions as the ‘Clubs of Moral Life.’

For Gramsci, the educators could not be found among the pre-war leaders of the socialist movement — Enrico Ferri, Filippo Turati or Claudio Treves — since they had been corrupted by positivist social thought and shared with working-class popular culture, including anarchist culture, the misleading assumptions of free thought. During the war Gramsci drew these concerns together in a vitriolic attack on the favorite shibboleth of pre-war anarchism and socialism: Esperanto. Esperanto was prominent at the Università Popolare and among the anarchists, for example, Tolstoy.

Gramsci’s attacks on Esperanto highlighted an aspect of Gramsci’s training as a very promising student of linguistics at the University of Turin.[431] Umberto Cosmo, his professor of linguistics at the University of Turin, had taught him that languages were unique representations of national or regional culture; thus he dismissed Esperanto as nonsense, and argued that the attachment to Esperanto by Italian anarchists and socialists merely represented an artificial form of cosmopolitanism that was likely to prevent Italian socialism from developing a realistic form of internationalism.[432] Yet Gramsci’s savaging of Esperanto was just part and parcel of the broader syndrome known as ‘free thought,’ his chief target, which he associated with the intellectual weakness of anarchist and socialist culture in Italy.

As a follower of both Croce and Sorel, who were well known for their attacks on masonic free thought, it is not surprising that Gramsci would be extremely hostile to one of the Italian Left’s most long-cherished beliefs.[433] In March 1918 Gramsci’s ideal typical Free-Thinker happened to be the anarchist editor of Milan’s L’Università Popolare, Luigi Molinari, who had published in pamphlet form, a lecture he gave in 1917 on the Paris Commune (Il dramma della Comune), which Gramsci thought was a perfect example of the culture of free thought.[434] Gramsci received a drubbing in the anarchist press, but in response to Molinari’s final rejoinder (he died soon after) Gramsci revealed a deeper argument which lifted the debate from personalities and particulars to high theory.

In ‘Libero Pensiero and Pensiero Libero’ (‘Free Thought and Liberated Thought’),[435] Molinari’s world-view is characterized as ‘libero pensiero’ (‘free thought’): a philistine, bourgeois expression associated with Jacobin individualism — an association ‘that,’ Gramsci writes, explains ‘why we find grouped around it Freemasons, Radicals and … libertarians.’ Free thought was equated with pre-war bloccardismo (the front that included the socialists and the free thought radicals, liberals and libertarians). In contrast, his Marxist ‘pensiero libero’ (‘liberated thought’) was a form of libertarian historicism that broke with this tradition and looked to Benedetto Croce and Antonio Labriola for its inspiration.

Gramsci advanced the opinion that the anarchists, or at least their leaders and theoreticians, were less libertarian than the Marxist socialists of the anti-positivist historicist stamp because they were incapable of thinking critically: ‘historistically,’ and dialectically, digesting contradictory arguments and enriching their own thought by overcoming them. He argued: ‘in as much as the libertarians are intolerant dogmatists, slaves to their own particular opinions,’ they ‘sterilize’ debate with their petty arguments.’[436]

The debate with Molinari also reveals that the mental apparatus behind that key couplet found in the Notebooks (1929–1935) — senso comune (common sense as naïve sense) and buon senso (‘good sense’ meaning educated and critical sense) — was already present by 1918 in the contrast between pensiero libero and libero pensiero.[437] Anti-positivist historicist socialism is imbued with buon senso and libero pensiero whereas, ‘subversive,’ immature socialists and anarchists (even if they might argue between themselves about the need for the state) shared assumptions which reflected their banal culture of senso comune and pensiero libero. Such mindsets could never create counter-hegemony, which would lay the foundations for a new workers’ state and in turn this culture shared much with the superstitious folkways of the powerless subaltern classes.

Thus Gramsci’s encounters with the free thinkers helped more clearly to define his unique position within Italian socialist political culture. At his best, on the one hand he refused to accept a patronizing spoon-feeding of culture to the working classes, and on the other he refused to be hoodwinked by a simple-minded celebration of populism, the provincial and the parochial. His conclusion was that the workers needed to master the humanist and scientific codes of educated Italy in order to develop the mental equipment and self-confidence to challenge the ruling classes and the threat of the ‘dictatorship’ of the socialist professors within the Italian Socialist party.[438] Having said this, there is more than a dose of authoritarian condescension in Gramsci’s remedies. Gramsci dismissed Molinari’s efforts at vulgarization, but Molinari’s efforts in the fields of science and history for over 20 years had been enormously influential among the less educated socialists and trade unionists.[439]

Gramsci’s type of socialism was more libertarian than Lenin’s scientific socialism, but it too assumed that an elite of educated socialists was needed to set the tone and parameters for effective politics. Furthermore, although Gramsci was prepared to work with and argue against the anarchists and syndicalists in a more tolerant and engaging manner than Lenin had done, nevertheless his attitude did have some similarities with Lenin’s vigilant guardianship of orthodoxy. Lenin’s orthodoxy was his version of Second Internationalist gospel — Gramsci’s odd mixture of Gentile, Croce, Sorel and Antonio Labriola may have made him appear wildly unorthodox to other Italian socialists, but this did not prevent Gramsci from invoking orthodoxy when he discussed the potential for the formation of political alliances with the libertarians. In fact, in order to expose the muddleheaded nature of Italian positivist socialism, he argued that his approach was more Marxist and therefore more rigid in its conditions for accepting alliances with the libertarians than the mainstream socialists. As we have seen, Gramsci argued that the culture of free thought had defined the pre-war socialists and the libertarians and that his form of socialism transcended this murk and thus there was always a limit to the alliances with anarchists and syndicalists of which Gramsci was willing to countenance.

Gramsci and the anarchists: the barriers to alliances

During the war a new international Left arose from a fortuitous combination of formerly mutually hostile groups: some were pacifist, some social democrat, some anarchists or syndicalist.[440] Intellectuals and journalists such as Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Jacques Mesnil and Max Eastman transmitted ideas from one part of the network to another, sustained by reportage in Avanti!, L’Humanité, the Liberator or the Workers’ Dreadnought, by private correspondence, but above all by the imagery and myths surrounding international conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, as well as over the controversies stirred by the never convened Stockholm Congress, called by the Petrograd Soviet in 1917.

While politicians and intellectuals attempted to mold mass movements from the initial radicalization of 1916–1918, differences quickly reappeared. Gramsci’s debate with the anarchists and syndicalists is symptomatic of a broader story played out against the backdrop of events unfolding in Russia. But his peculiar theoretical background presents an interesting variation on a continental, indeed global, theme.

For the young Gramsci, the bustling working-class suburbs of Turin were proletarian unity-in-action and one of its earliest manifestations was the march of the suburbanites on the bourgeois center during the Red Week of 1914, when anarchists, syndicalists, left-wing socialists and republicans united in a quasi-insurrectionary movement against militarism and the Italian monarchy. Recalling the events of 1914 in an article of 1916, Gramsci remembered how ‘our city made through military order and tradition,’ a city center of looming piles of aristocratic townhouses, arrayed ‘like a regiment of the army of their old Savoyard Dukes,’ witnessed the march past of well-ordered proletarian ranks.[441] ‘Coarse men descended on the city boulevards and marched in front of the closed shop shutters, past the pale little men of the city police who were consumed by anger and fear.’[442]

These Sorelian images of the gruff, productive working class marching from its suburban strongholds to challenge the clerical or parasitical café society were present in much of Gramsci’s writings.[443]

However, Gramsci opposed politically inspired united fronts of socialists and anarchists in Turin or nationally. Between 1916 and early 1918, Gramsci took part in a debate in the Italian socialist press on this subject, sparked off by the private and public exchanges of the anarchist Luigi Fabbri and the leading maximalist socialist Giacinto Menotti Serrati, as well as other discussion between anti-war anarchists, syndicalists and socialists.[444] Fabbri was inspired by a letter from Errico Malatesta to Armando Borghi (the anarchist leader of the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI)) written from his exile in London, which proposed a new international (La Mondiale) that would include anti-war socialists, anarchists and syndicalists. It would heal the schism caused by the expulsion of the libertarians from the Second International in 1896 but would have had little in common with the militarized disciplined organization that Lenin would found in 1919.

Gramsci contested the commonly held opinion in the Italian socialist Left that anarchists or syndicalists were more revolutionary and ‘purer’ socialists than the socialist themselves. Gramsci also wanted to distance his socialism from the anarchists’ heterodoxy. Here he argued that the antiparliamentarianism of Malatesta and the anarchists posed an obstacle to formal unity and, recalling his arguments against Free Thought, that their mentality was ahistorical and doctrinaire. International organizations such as Malatesta’s La Mondiale undermined Gramsci’s prefigurative conception of socialist politics. The concept of prefiguration may have evolved in Gramsci’s theory by 1917, before he encountered the Soviet model, but his type of prefiguration, while not Leninist, was still linked to a well-organized and distinctive socialist party, though this was a party not founded on the culture of free thought or positivist socialism. Rather, the consensual discipline of a party based on the educational principles of Gramsci’s ‘clubs of moral life,’ linked to the creativity of prefigurative institutions such as the co-operatives, would produce a distinctive socialist politics.

The early Gramsci and the Gramsci of the Biennio Rosso

I have argued that just as Gramsci’s key conceptions were already operating in his mind before 1918, his attitudes towards the anarchists and syndicalists were already operationalized before he worked closely with them in L’Ordine nuovo. Thus Gramsci’s thought before his encounter with Lenin did not signal a break between a libertarian and an authoritarian viewpoint; rather, his youthful ‘libertarianism’ was based on first premises, which tended towards a critique of the ideologies of anarchism and syndicalism, even if superficially he seemed close to these camps. Thus, as I have shown elsewhere, anarchist ‘organic intellectuals’ were cultivated but anarchist ‘traditional intellectuals,’ the friends and colleagues of Molinari, were denounced as muddled demagogues; anarchist workers as organically tied to the point of production, could be saved from their misguided ideas, anarchist ideologues were beyond redemption. Just as the Sorelian and productivist legacies were so important to catalyze Gramsci’s prefigurative and civil-society-based socialism of pre-1917–1918, his Council Communism of 1919–1920 was merely a variation on this theme reinforced by international examples. The libertarian productivist Taylorism of the anarchist engineer Pietro Mosso was the linchpin, which held together the Council Communism of 1919–1920; meanwhile anarchist metalworkers in FIOM (the socialist engineers and metalworkers union) were essential to propagate the ideas of L’Ordine Nuovo throughout the movement in its Turinese industrial heartland. When Gramsci fell out with his colleagues, Angelo Tasca and then Palmiro Togliatti in 1920, over the boundaries between the trade union and factory council, his only remaining allies were the anarchists.[445] The arguments Gramsci advanced in the early war years were merely repeated and placed in a more super-charged and propitious atmosphere, the vehicle of prefiguration — the factory council came into its own, even if the theory was fleshed out in his discussion of co-operatives in 1916.

One benchmark did change, however, and is a clue to his uncritical acceptance of Lenin’s way, even after his earlier misinterpretation of Lenin (temporary, necessary charismatic capo of a system of soviets and workers’ councils) seemed to be discredited by the reality: Lenin as the dictator of a monopoly party-state. The change in his attitude towards Jacobinism is linked to his criticism of masonic free thought, which reformist socialists, most maximalist socialists and the anarchists all suffered from. Gramsci’s evaluation of Jacobinism changed drastically from the war years to 1920.[446]

At first Jacobinism was not used in the context of Russian politics, but that of pre-war Italian political culture. He used it in the same breath as his invocation of Sorel’s and Croce’s attacks on the culture of Masonic Free Thought. Jacobinism ‘is a messianic vision of history: it always responds in abstractions, evil, good, oppression, liberty, light, shade, which exist absolutely, generically and not in historical forms.’[447] In other words, like Free Thought, Jacobinism lacked grounding in historicism.

But by 1920 he associated Jacobinism with Paris heroically seeing off the internal and external enemies of the Revolution, and finding a parallel in the Bolsheviks’ civil and foreign wars with the myriad enemies of their new state.[448] Jacobinism took on another positive, different valence when Gramsci approached the question of the city and the countryside in Italy (in various and indeed contradictory forms appearing in his essay on the Southern Question, his approach to the New Economic Policy (NEP) and even War Communism and later forced collectivization). Jacobins were then cast as pitiless against the enemies of the revolution but also strengthened by forming alliances with those elements in the countryside willing to accept the political hegemony of the Bolsheviks as the representatives of the urban working-class. Similarly, in the mid-1920s Gramsci argued for the hegemony of the Italian Communist Party over peasant, syndicalist or autonomist movements in the south, not for an open-ended cooperative support for competitors in the rural Left: he was not a pluralist. His early mistaken praise of Chernov was replaced by venomous attacks on the Socialist Revolutionaries and Makhno’s ‘anarchist experiment’ in Civil-War Ukraine.[449] The anti-Jacobinical socialism of pre-1918 and the negative interpretation of the Jacobins he learned from Croce, Salvemini or Sorel was replaced by a praise of the Jacobins’ rigor and their successful linkage to the ‘healthy’ forces in the countryside. No longer socially divorced pedants, arid ideological fanatics or the imbibers of shallow anti-clerical positivist nostrums, Jacobins were the models for the creative but implacable Bolshevik elite. Gramsci did not abandon this revision before his death in 1937, even if he probably agreed that Stalin had become a cruel tyrant, a Genghis Khan with a telephone, as Bukharin, his former ally in the 1920s, described him.

As Gramsci endorsed all things Bolshevik, particularly the Twenty-One Points, he became increasingly militantly anti-anarchist. However, throughout the early 1920s, he was placed in a tactical dilemma. Before the Kronstadt rebellion, the suppression of all factions in the Russian Communist Party, and the failure of negotiations between various syndicalist trade unions and the Comintern, Gramsci had to tread carefully. While he mercilessly criticized the leadership of the USI, he could not burn all his bridges, since the Russians saw merit in cultivating the Italian anarchists and syndicalists, especially when a pro-Comintern faction was formed in the USI itself. In Turin his anarchist allies were marginalized in FIOM after the occupation of the factories and some were murdered by the Fascists in late 1922, but before the March on Rome, and indeed until 1925–1926, Gramsci saw the advantage in keeping feelers open to the social interventionist Left, Gabriele D’Annunzio and even briefly with the suspiciously libertarian Arditi del Popolo, the only anti-Fascist militia in these years which caused Mussolini and the Fascists some concern. But while Gramsci and his comrades maintained a nonstop tirade against the ‘child-like’ antics of Malatesta and Borghi, Zinoviev and even Lenin, recognized in Malatesta a revolutionary and in Borghi a man to be wooed in Moscow. Gramsci reverted to the same twin-track approach he used in 1916 — organic intellectual anarchists good, ‘traditional’ intellectual anarchists bad — and chose to finesse the tactical cunning of the Russians as much as possible.[450]

Anarchism as the highest form of sovversivismo[451]

In the Notebooks, Gramsci engaged in historical and comparative sociological examination of the modern world and particularly the collapse of liberal Italy and the destruction of the Left within it. Thus the nature of Italian Fascism and its enduring success was the red thread, which ran throughout his notes. The failure of the Left and the triumph of Fascism and its transformation of the Italian state were understood through the term sovversivismo. This term may be taken as a tool of historical and sociological analysis, but it is drenched with highly partizan political first premises that assume that Gramsci’s historicist Marxism offered a master-key for unlocking the secrets of the past as well as the solutions for the future. He may have been writing his notes for eternity, and it is unlikely he would have sanctioned their publication in the form they were produced, but he certainly had not left his politics at the cell door. Even if there was good deal of frustration and perhaps justifiable paranoia about party comrades and the murderous ways of the Georgian tyrant, he was still a militant Marxist who wrote in such a spirit.[452] The troubling aspect of Gramsci’s historicizing Marxism is that mere empiricism and ‘information’ is looked upon as the greatest of mortal sins. In short, unlike the rather inelegant, plodding notes of Angelo Tasca on utopian socialism and anarchism that are deposited in Milan’s Biblioteca Feltrinelli, for example, Gramsci did not let facts get in the way of theory.[453]

Gramsci was less concerned with an in-depth account of the anarchists and syndicalists, more in using them in his construction of the all-purpose analytical term sovversivismo. But this had been honed from his debates with the anarchists and syndicalists before 1922, and bore all the traces of a political term of art or an artifice of historicist metaphysics. Just as detailed knowledge of the factory councils and soviets and the Bolsheviks did not prevent Gramsci from creating a fantastically libertarian Lenin in the early years of the Russian regime, lack of detailed analysis of the anarchists and syndicalists before 1926 in Italy did not prevent him from shoe-horning them into his neat and politically charged term, sovversivismo. This is frustrating, because the term certainly has its uses as a tool to interrogate that anarchist past, but as a provisional probe, an ideal-type, not as a form of political abuse.

For Gramsci, the Italian concept of the subversive and sovversivismo were based on a populist positioning of the people pitched against the ill-defined signori. This sovversivismo was a product of Italy’s bastard modernity. Subversives could come from the Left and Right, and there was even a sovversivismo from above. Subversives could be reversible, as was the case of the social interventionists, who interested Gramsci when he was a newspaper editor in Turin in 1921 and 1922. Thus, Gramsci argued, a lack of modern political institutions, a weak ethical political culture and an incorrect reading of Marxism or social theory, especially among the anarchist and syndicalist subversives, characterized these currents. The touchstone of Gramsci’s early radicalism, the Red Week of 1914, and Malatesta, one of its leaders, became symbolic of this ‘subversive’ type of Italian radicalism. But the ghost at this banquet was his jailer, and Gramsci felt this personally, for he had been drawn into politics partially by the socialist and ‘Stirnerite’ Mussolini, and he almost spoiled his copy book by his torturous flirtations with Mussolini’s war interventionism in 1914.[454]

Sovversivismo, Gramsci argued, had fed off the role of volunteers from the Risorgimento and the example of Garibaldi and ‘the Thousand’ toppling the Bourbon Kingdom and setting in train the Piedmont conquest of the peninsula. The anarchists were merely one variation on this theme, which included the republicans but also of course the Fascist militia of the early 1920s. The Italian state was also nourished by reformed sovversivi from Crispi to Mussolini. So, Gramsci concluded that the dependence on charismatic politics, reflected in the political culture of anarchist and socialist leaders of pre-Fascist Italy, demonstrated the low level of education of the Italian people and weakly constructed institutions of the socialist and labor movement.

But contrary to Gramsci’s generalizations, Italian anarchists such as Errico Malatesta were well aware of the dangers of hero worship.[455] Malatesta preached organization, organization and more organization. Anarchism, Malatesta argued, was not about the lack of organization, which was essential if anarchists were serious about dealing with the exigencies of the modern industrial city. He may have been naïve, but Malatesta pleaded with the factory occupiers in 1920 to recommence trade with other factories without the aid of the capitalist system. For Gramsci, the lesson one learned from the factory occupations was that ‘the spontaneity in the factory council movement was not neglected, even less despised. It was educated, directed, purged of extraneous contamination; the aim was to bring it into line with modern theory.’[456] But nowhere in Gramsci do we find an open acknowledgment of the authoritarianism of ‘modern theory’ (communism) and possibility that socialism had failed to take another more libertarian path in the way the tarnished Tasca (he was accused of collaboration with Vichy France during the Second World War) did in the preface to his postwar edition of his wonderful history of the rise of Fascism, where he invoked the libertarian potential of the pre-Fascist Chambers of Labor.[457] When Gramsci recalled another exemplar of Italian grass roots socialism, the factory councils, their most important contribution was not their inherent democracy, but their contribution to ‘modern theory.’

One can flesh-out a Gramscian critique of the Stalinist Soviet Union but he never questioned the Marxist monopoly of legitimate thought and action and he never even granted the anarchists the title of gadflies of the revolution, their warnings about the untrammeled powers of the new Soviet state were never accepted by Gramsci even in his deepest pessimistic moments, because their way of thinking was alien to his very being.

Conclusion: Gramsci in the twenty-first century

Much of this chapter has been an exercise in historical reconstruction. However, it is not without its contemporary applications. For the anarchist Richard Day Gramsci is dead because the politics of hegemony can have no place in the alter-globalization movement.[458] Day argues that the concept of hegemony in both its international relations realist and Gramscian interpretations share a similar attachment to the state as prime actor. Day’s book is inspired by aspects of post-anarchism, which disowns the concept of the revolutionary moment and draws on the maverick classical anarchist Gustav Landauer’s earlier formulation of anarchism.[459] Day’s proposals involve changes in personal relations, in casting out the spooks in our heads and starting to build anarchism at the interpersonal level, or as the recently deceased British anarchist Colin Ward argued,[460] creating reformist projects, which undermine the solidity of state power, or, to paraphrase another alter-globaliser, ‘change the world without taking power.’[461] But this is different to creating counter-hegemony: the building of an alternative form of hegemony involves state formation or reformation. Gramsci would not have disagreed with Day’s criticism, he would have embraced it: libertarian tools in the Gramscian intellectual toolkit were used to create a new state and not to abolish state power, at least until some distant point in the future when the state would be replaced by the rather disturbing sounding formulation in the Quaderni, ‘regulated society.’

Another aspect of Gramsci’s thought is relevant to an encounter between varieties of post-anarchism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, Gramsci and the ‘classical anarchists.’ If the concept of hegemony has launched a thousand academic Gramscian boats since the 1960s, the term subaltern, used by the self-same school of studies from the Indian subcontinent and present of course in the work of the Palestinian American Edward Said, revived the study of Gramsci, so that after 1989 and the fall of State Communism, Gramscian studies outside of Italy did not miss a heartbeat, while the increasingly moribund conditions of Gramscian studies inside Italy experienced a renaissance through the importation of cultural and post-colonial studies, which in turn had been supercharged by this rearranged ‘diasporic Gramsci.’[462] As I mentioned in the introduction, even if the recent popularity of the concept of the subaltern in Gramsci is not without its problems, because it is unclear whether Gramsci uses this term as a synonym for the Italian male working-class, for those at the margins of society (women, minorities and poor peasants) or merely as the lumpenproletariat, a certain reading might allow one to interrogate Italian anarchist culture and history more sympathetically — although this may merely be Gramsci’s elaborate reworking of a mode of reasoning already evident in his early polemics with Luigi Molinari and the ‘subversive’ advocates of Esperanto.

Gramsci is also attractive to modern thought because of his post-positivist position. The theoretical foundations of Gramsci’s voluntarism are in sharp contrast to the determinism of Lenin’s social thought. Lenin’s political activism was informed by the problem of power, how to seize and conserve it.[463] Lenin was a political voluntarist of the first order, but his social thought never left the straitjacket of the most rule-bound ‘scientific socialism,’ except perhaps in the late Philosophical Notebooks. Indeed Lenin spent an inordinate amount of time throughout his life stamping out a bewildering variety of ‘heresies,’ which threatened his love affair with ‘scientific socialism’: monists, ‘God-builders’ and infantile communists were all chosen targets.[464] Unorthodox and ruthless in seizing and holding power, his political thought was perhaps more rule-bound and orthodox than his fallen idols,’ Kautsky and Plekhanov. It should be remembered that in 1916 and 1917 Lenin (and Bukharin) argued that historical time could be sped up precisely because of the emergence of a new stage of history: world war that flowed from the imperialist capitalist stage of historical development sanctioned his anarchist-like heretical political behavior in the spring of 1917. But it did not sanction a rethinking of the orthodox Marxism he had mentally ingested before 1914 — the Marxism of historical stages was never disavowed, imperialism was merely the highest stage of capitalism, which sanctioned anarchist-like direct action on the part of the scientific Bolsheviks. Karl Kautsky was a ‘social traitor’ because he had betrayed his political principles, not because their mutually shared theory of scientific socialism was incorrect.

Gramsci’s approach was different. He read Lenin through his own synthesis of Italian neo-idealist voluntarism, which owed more to Giovanni Gentile and Georges Sorel than early twentieth-century orthodox Marxism. Indeed Gramsci’s first lengthy analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution was titled the ‘The Revolution Against Capital,’ that is, Marx’s Das Kapital.[465] Thus this anti-capitalist revolution was also a theoretical revolution against the positivist encrustations, which had enveloped Marxism and implicitly might have tarnished the master himself. In Italy reformist and maximalist socialists were outraged by this article and Gramsci earned an unsavory reputation as a Bergsonian, which just reinforced a general suspicion about his soundness due to his earlier flirtation with the pro-war interventionism of the former Duce of Italian maximalist socialism, Benito Mussolini. In this case, Gramsci’s behavior might have been understandable to Lenin,[466] who liked to shape events, not to be the passive recipient of beneficial outcomes; Gramsci, it can be argued, thought that socialists could not be above the fray in a world historical event such as world war, without becoming utterly marginalized. Indeed, the Italian Socialist Party ended by taking a confusing temporizing position, which ill-prepared it for the tumultuous Biennio Rosso (1919–1920).

However, if we turn the telescope around and imagine a counterfactual history in which Gramsci had encountered Lenin’s Marxist orthodoxy before he had successfully piloted the Bolsheviks to state power, Gramsci would have certainly had a dim if not sarcastic reaction to it. Therefore in 1917 and 1918 Lenin was a fantastical projection of Gramsci’s radicalism, not the flesh and blood Lenin in command of the new Soviet state. In the Quaderni Lenin is praised as the prime innovator of the concept of hegemony. While this had led many commentators (most famously Perry Anderson)[467] to discount the myriad sources of the concept and essence of hegemony,[468] which preceded Gramsci’s deepening knowledge of Russian Marxism during his sojourn in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, the ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Gramsci both thought Lenin’s most important contribution to the theory of Marxism was Lenin’s actions in the autumn of 1917, action not thought, which is equated to the Marxian conception of praxis. Whether this is an accurate description of what Marx meant by praxis is questionable: at the end of the day it seems a case of the old adage of ‘nothing succeeds like success.’ Gramsci’s Gentilean actualism, his politics of pragmatism, were finessed by verbal acrobatics, which were never adequately reconciled with his grander version of what he called the philosophy of praxis. The disjunction between his political thought and the model, which proved successful in actually gaining power in the Soviet Union, would threaten the coherence of his project for the rest of his life.[469]