Despite his fame, a considerable part of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its revolutionary period of the early 1920s who then wrote Prison Notebooks in Mussolini’s jails, is not available in English.
Joseph Buttigieg’s English translation of Prison Notebooks 1 to 8 was published in three volumes by Columbia University Press in 1992, 1996 and 2007, but Buttigieg died in 2019, and it is not clear when the remaining Notebooks may be fully translated.
However, another volume from the Notebooks has been published in English:Antonio Gramsci, Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25. It adds significantly to our knowledge of this remarkable classical Marxist.
The book, edited and translated by Buttigieg and Marcus Green, provides a valuable overview of the publication of Gramsci’s prison notebooks, new and revised translations, and insight into the later appropriation of Gramsci by the “subaltern studies” strand of postcolonial theory.
Gramsci philology
Gramsci was a founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921. After Mussolini’s fascists seized power, Gramsci led the PCI and was elected to parliament in 1924. He was arrested in November 1926 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released shortly before his death on 27 April 1937.
Gramsci’s original manuscripts consist of 33 notebooks, amounting to 2,848 handwritten pages: four notebooks of translations and language exercises, eight miscellaneous notebooks consisting mostly of first drafts of notes, four mixed notebooks partitioned into distinct sections and 17 monothematic notebooks, or what he described as “special notebooks,” which include second drafts of notes organised according to specific topics.
Gramsci devoted a “special notebook” to the topic of subaltern social groups, inscribing On the Margins of History (The History of Subaltern Social Groups) on the title page. This is the notebook newly translated into English.
The first Italian editions of Gramsci’s notes took the form of six thematically organised volumes, published by Einaudi between 1948 and 1951. Edited by Felice Platone under direct supervision of the Stalinist apparatchik Palmiro Togliatti, they presented Gramsci as the Stalinised PCI wanted.
Platone assembled six of the eight notes from the special notebook on subaltern social groups, along with twenty notes on a range of topics from nine other notebooks and placed them together in the appendix of the volume titled Il Risorgimento. Green argues this meant “Gramsci’s treatment of subaltern groups had secondary importance, was exclusively connected to the Italian Risorgimento [the 19th-century movement for a unified Italian state], and was not necessarily a recurring theme and independent category of analysis”.
The Platone edition served as the primary source for initial English translations of Gramsci’s prison notebooks. A slim volume, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, edited by Louis Marks (1957) put out by the publishers of the Communist Party USA, was the first anthology of Gramsci’s writings to appear in English. Marks translated the Italian subalterno as “subordinate,” instead of “subaltern,” obscuring Gramsci’s category.
The most widely known anthology of Gramsci’s prison writings in English appeared in 1971 as Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (again published by the CP’s International Publishers/Lawrence and Wishart, though Hoare was close to Trotskyism). This text also “broadly speaking, followed the lines laid down in [Platone’s] Einaudi edition”. In 1995 Derek Boothman published Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
In 1975, Gramsci’s complete prison notebooks appeared in print for the first time in Italian. The Quaderni del carcere was edited by Valentino Gerratana (Einaudi, 1975), in coordination with the Gramsci Institute. Gerratana reproduced Gramsci’s eight miscellaneous, four mixed, and 17 thematic special notebooks in the chronological order of their composition, as well as providing detailed descriptions of Gramsci’s four translation notebooks. Gerratana numbered the notebooks in sequential order from 1 to 29.
The Gerratana edition, for the first time, provided a complete reproduction of the special notebook On the Margins of History (The History of Subaltern Social Groups), Notebook 25 in his chronological sequencing. However Gramsci’s treatment of subaltern social groups and classes largely went unnoticed. The thematic index of the Gerratana edition did not include entries for subaltern social groups or subaltern classes.
Gerratana’s critical edition has become the authoritative text. It served as the model for critical editions of the prison notebooks in French, German and Spanish, as well as Buttigieg’s three volumes.
Subaltern social groups
Gramsci started Notebook 25 in July or August 1934 and composed the last note in the first months of 1935. This new, complete translation of Notebook 25 shows the text itself is quite limited. It consists of just 15 pages in the book, eight paragraphs on various topics: 1 Davide Lazzaretti; 2 Methodological criteria; 3 Adriano Tilgher, Homo faber; 4 Some general notes on the historical development of subaltern social groups in the Middle Ages and in Rome; 5 Methodological criteria; 6 The slaves in Rome; 7 Indirect sources. “Utopias” and so-called “philosophical novels”; and 8 Scientism and residues of late Romanticism.
In 2, Gramsci states: “Subaltern groups are always subject to the initiatives of the dominant groups even when they rebel and rise up; only ‘permanent’ victory breaks their subordination, but not immediately. In fact, even when they seem triumphant, subaltern groups are only in an anxious defensive state.”
Gramsci used the term “subaltern classes” (classi subalterne) for the first time in Notebook 3, 14, likely written in June 1930. The phrase appears elsewhere in Notebook 3 and later in Notebook 4, written from June 1930 to May 1933. He referred to slaves, plebeians, common people, the proto-proletariat of the medieval communes, peasants and the modern industrial proletariat as subaltern classes.
After June 1930, the phrase “subaltern classes” (and later “subaltern social groups”) became a permanent element of Gramsci’s lexicon, overlapping with other lines of inquiry. However, Gramsci never provided a precise definition of “subaltern”, “subaltern social groups” or “subaltern classes” in the prison notebooks. Green argues that Gramsci did not conceive them as a single or homogenous entity, which is why he consistently referred to them in the plural.
Gramsci used the word “class” in earlier texts and replaced it with “social group” in texts after mid-1932. Gerratana argued that this change in terminology was likely due to Gramsci’s “increased vigilance against prison surveillance” and not the “replacement of the Marxist concept of class struggle with the sociological methodology of the dynamics of ‘social groups’.”
Green points out that Gramsci clearly did not disguise all references to “class” in the prison notebooks after mid-1932. In some instances, the variants of “subaltern classes” and “subaltern social groups” appear as overlapping categories. Green believes the change in terminology pointed to a greater emphasis on the heterogeneous nature of subalterns, stressing the problematic issue of the categories of “people”, “classes” and “social groups”.
Notebook 25 in context
This book also contains extracts from earlier notebooks, where Gramsci refers to subaltern classes, providing more than 100 pages of translations in the same format as the Buttigieg volumes. There are far too many insights to quote in a short review — read the book to get the full flavour. Two themes — political parties and methodology, suggest Gramsci was still working within the early Comintern paradigm when he was writing about subaltern social groups.
On political parties, Gramsci observed in Notebook 3, 48 that “‘pure’ spontaneity does not exist in history”. He argued: “The elements of ‘conscious leadership’ in the ‘most spontaneous’ of movements cannot be ascertained simply because they have left no verifiable document. One may say that the element of spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the ‘history of subaltern classes’.”
In Notebook 9, 68, Gramsci defined bureaucratic centralism as “indicative of the formation of a small privileged group that seeks to perpetuate its privileges by controlling and even stifling the emergence of oppositional forces at the base, even if those forces have the same interests as the dominant group”. Somewhat cryptically, he stated, “democratic centralism is an elastic form that lends itself to many ‘incarnations’”.
In Notebook 10, 41 Gramsci contrasted faulty conceptions of ideology, treating ideas as “mere illusions, a deception they are subject to”. For Marxism, “ideologies are anything but arbitrary; they are real historical facts that one must fight against and unmask as instruments of domination”.
In Notebook 10, 12 Gramsci stated: “Parties are the elaborators of the new integral and all-encompassing intellectual corps; that is, the parties are the crucibles of the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process.” He argued that “there is always a segment of the mass, including the subaltern mass, that is in a position of leadership and responsibility, and the philosophy of that segment always precedes the philosophy of the whole, not only as a theoretical anticipation but as an actual necessity”.
In Notebook 15, 66 Gramsci observed that “it is possible to have an old generation with antiquated ideas alongside a generation with infantile ideas, a situation, in other words, in which the intermediate historical link — that is, the generation that could have educated the young — is missing”.
The concept of science
In Notebook 11, 15 Gramsci wrote a length exposition on the concept of science. He observed how apparently “the natural sciences enable us to foresee the evolution of natural processes”, and hence methodology has been thought to be “scientific” only if, and insofar as, it abstractly permits us to “foresee” the future of society. Instead, Gramsci argued: “In reality, the only thing one can foresee ‘scientifically’ is the struggle, but not its concrete moments, which are necessarily the results of opposing forces in continuous movement that can never be reduced to fixed quantities.”
Gramsci is highly critical of Bukharin’s book, Historical Materialism (1921), which he referred to as “the popular manual”. “It is, however, the concept of ‘science’ itself as it appears in the Popular Manual that must be critically destroyed. It is taken wholesale from the natural sciences, as if these were science tout court, or science par excellence, as has been determined by positivism.”
Gramsci bluntly defined someone who is not a scientist:
“If he appears to have a poor mastery of his particular criteria; if he lacks a thorough understanding of the concepts he is using; if he is poorly informed about and has a weak understanding of the work that has already been done on the problems he is addressing; if he is not very cautious in his assertions; if he does not proceed in the required manner but is arbitrary and illogical; if, instead of taking into account the gaps that exist in the current state of knowledge, he silently ignores them and contents himself with purely verbal connections or solutions, rather than declaring that he had arrived at provisional positions that can be resumed, developed, etc.”
Gramsci crowned Notebook 11, 15 with a passage similar to others in earlier notebooks, which must be assimilated by every Marxist:
“A broader methodological criterion: namely, it is not very ‘scientific’, or it is simply not ‘very serious’, to choose from among one’s adversaries the most stupid and mediocre ones, or to choose the least essential and the most occasional of their opinions, and then presume to have ‘destroyed’ the enemy ‘completely’ just because one has destroyed a secondary and incidental opinion of his — or to presume to have destroyed an ideology or a doctrine with a demonstration of the theoretical deficiencies of its third- and fourth- rate proponents. Furthermore, ‘one must be fair to one’s enemies’, in the sense that one must make an effort to understand what they really meant to say and not dwell maliciously on the superficial immediate meanings of their expressions. It has to be so, if the proposed goal is to raise the tone and intellectual level of one’s followers, as opposed to the immediate goal of using every means possible to create a desert around oneself. The approach that should be adopted is this: one’s follower has to be able to discuss and uphold his position when debating with capable and intelligent adversaries and not just with unsophisticated and unprepared people who are convinced by ‘authority’ and by ‘emotion’. The possibility of error must be declared and justified without thereby compromising one’s position.”
Subaltern studies
One reason why this Gramsci volume is likely to obtain a wide, global readership is the use made of his term “subaltern social groups” by modern post-colonial theorists. Ranajit Guha and the group of historians who founded the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective are largely responsible for introducing themes related to the Gramscian concept into current intellectual discussions.
In the first issue of Subaltern Studies, published in 1982, Guha credited Gramsci and his notes on subaltern groups as one of the major influences in the founding of the research project. The aim of the collective was to challenge elitist historiography and to illuminate aspects of subaltern history that had been ignored and neglected in the field of South Asian studies. Between 1982 and 2005, the Subaltern Studies Collective published twelve volumes of Subaltern Studies.
There is no space to assess these theories here. Vivek Chibber’s book,Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital (2013), makes a sharp Marxist critique of the evolution of subaltern studies away from Enlightenment universalism, class analysis and Marxism.
The publication of Notebook 25 and other relevant passages from his notebooks indicate that Gramsci himself remained preoccupied with Marxist themes, particularly those of developing a working class ideological worldview and building a Marxist political party committed to working class socialism.
From these texts, post-colonial readings that seek to replace working class agency in the struggle for socialism will find no sustenance. Similarly, those who seek to detach Gramsci from his Marxist politics will also find no succour. In fact, Gramsci gives relentless attention to the importance of the Marxist working class political party and the need to fight the ideological front of the class struggle.