My article Rosa Luxemburg on renewing Marxism (Solidarity 769) mentioned at the end the interest shown by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) in Rosa Luxemburg's 1903 Vorwärts article Stillstand und Fortschritt im Marxismus.
Gramsci knew about this because David Riazanov had reprinted it in his 1927 book (English title: Karl Marx. Man, Thinker and Revolutionist). In the English translation of this, by Eden and Cedar Paul, Luxemburg's article is titled Stagnation and Progress of Marxism. To my knowledge this is still the only English translation of her article. However, "standstill" would be a better translation of "Stillstand", and when Gramsci referred to it in Italian he used the phrase arresti nello sviluppo (arrested development).
In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci referred several times to Luxemburg's article, each time using this as a starting point for a wider and deeper analysis. I will try here to relate Gramsci's interest in it to the broader development of his thinking, especially with regard to the collective socialist self-education of working-class adults.
In 1913, without graduating, Gramsci dropped his studies at the University of Turin to become an activist of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). He rapidly gathered round himself a group of working-class young people whose evenings were spent talking passionately about socialism. This group included some who would later become activists in their own right.
Within a short time Gramsci became a prolific journalist writing in the PSI national paper Avanti!, and later for the Turin-based Il Grido nel Popolo (The People's Cry). In the 29 December 1916 issue of Avanti! he wrote a substantial unsigned critique of the Popular University (Universita Popolare) in Turin.
The first popular university was set up by leftwingers in Paris in 1898. Similar institutions spread rapidly through France and Spain. In November 1900, Turin became the first city in Italy to have one, followed within a year by fourteen other centres, including Rome, Milan, Bologna, Genoa, Venice, Naples and Palermo.
In his Avanti! article, Gramsci claimed that the Turin Popular University was "neither a university nor popular". Drawing on his experience of what was best in his own degree-level studies, he claimed that, like Popular Universities elsewhere, the one in Turin was run by people who failed to consider the needs of people who went to it, i.e. working-class people excluded from mainstream higher education. As a result, it offered shallow courses that failed to satisfy workers' thirst for knowledge and understanding.
A year later (December 1917) Gramsci wrote in Avanti! an article supporting a proposal by other PSI members to set up a "Cultural Association" in Turin. He dismissed the Popular University as "bourgeois in origin" whereas what was needed was "an institution of the proletariat" which, starting in Turin, "would become, along with the Party and Confederazione del Lavoro [equivalent to a trades council), the third organ in the Italian working class's drive to assert its rights". He argued, that in this activists should be able to "discuss everything which regards the proletarian movement, or which might regard it in future", particularly "problems - philosophical, religious and moral - which underlie political and economic action, but which economic and political organisms are not equipped to discuss or to promote solutions for".
In line with this idea, Gramsci also organised something that he hoped would offer in a small way a better setup for young workers wishing to study. He called this the Club of the Moral Life. In March 1918 he wrote to the prominent educationist G. Lombardo Radice, seeking his support for this project. He described the Club's procedure as follows. Each of the young workers involved would be assigned a text to read and required to give a presentation about this at the next meeting, leading to a discussion "which ideally continues until all those present have been enabled to understand and absorb the most important results of this collective work". Examples of the assigned texts Gramsci gives in his letter include writings by Benedetto Croce (then still regarded as on the left), by Gaetano Salvemini (an intellectual spokeperson for peasant struggles) and the Manifesto of the Communist Party. (Radice's reply dismissed the proposal as insufficiently patriotic.)
In May 1919, Gramsci was involved in setting up the publication L'Ordine Nuovo. Financed by Angelo Tasca from union contacts, this rapidly built up 3,000 paying subscribers and a readership of industrial workers across Turin, many of whom were women. (The secretary of Ordine Nuovo was Pia Carena.) It played a central organising role in the near-insurrectionary strikes and factory occupations of the 1919-20 biennio rosso ("two red years"). In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci would later describe practice in the Ordine Nuovo editorial board in this way:
"The group criticises as a body, and thus helps to define the tasks of the individual editors, whose activity is organised according to a plan and division of labour arranged in advance. By means of collective discussion and criticism (made up of suggestions, advice, comments on method, and criticism which is constructive and aimed at mutual education) in which each individual functions as a specialist in his [sic] own field and helps to complete the expertise of the collectivity, the average level of the individual editors is in fact successfully raised so that it reaches the altitude or capacity of the most highly-skilled - thus not merely ensuring an ever more select and organic collaboration for the review, but also creating the conditions for the emergence of a homogeneous group of intellectuals, trained to produce a regular and methodical 'writing' activity... "
In December 1919, the Ordine Nuovo editors also set up a School of Propaganda in Turin.
In January 1921 in the aftermath of the biennio rosso, which was demobilised and basically betrayed by the C.G.L. (Italian equivalent of the TUC), Gramsci and other Ordine Nuovo board members, along with the Neapolitan activist Amadeo Bordiga, a main figure in the "maximalist" (i.e. left) faction of the PSI, combined in the setting up, under Comintern supervision, of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I). With the 1922 fascist takeover in Italy, this required him to spend much of his time in Moscow. In 1923 the Comintern imposed him as general secretary of the PCd'I, displacing Bordiga.
While in Russia, Gramsci was impressed by the way in which Bolshevik party schools had led to "Marx's doctrine" becoming "incarnated in the consciousness" of "simple workers" who he now saw heading "sections and divisions of the Commissariats" (i.e. government ministries). With this in mind, in 1925, when he moved first to Vienna and then to Italy itself to take responsibility for the anti-fascist struggle, Gramsci attempted to organise a party school there, to be conducted by clandestine correspondence. The intention was to use Nikolai Bukharin's 1921 book, Historical Materialism. A System of Sociology as a central text for this school. However, the whole scheme was undermined by Gramsci's arrest and imprisonment.
When first convicted, Gramsci was exiled to a prison on the island of Ustica (off the coast of Sicily). During the year that he was there he and Bordiga cooperated to run a political school for the other prisoners. But then in 1926 Gramsci was given a 20-year prison sentence, to be served on the mainland.
In 1930, the Comintern dictated the exclusion of three out of the eight members from the PCd'I executive on the grounds that they opposed the "Third Period" Stalinist denunciation of PSI members as social fascists. (This policy was to lead in Germany to the failure to oppose the Nazis' 1933 assumption of state power.) Gramsci was made aware of this exclusion soon afterwards by his brother Gennaro, and declared his opposition to it. He argued that the replacement of fascism in Italy would entail joint work by Communists and democratic forces to the right of them. This standpoint led to him being victimised by some other prisoners who were loyal to the Stalinist line.
It was in this context that Gramsci now came to devote a long section of what would become his Prison Notebooks to a critique of Bukharin's book, on the grounds that it was a positivistic falsification of Marxism. In the same context he also began to think about Luxemburg's 1903 "standstill" argument. He praised Luxemburg for drawing attention to the possibility of standstill, but maintained that "to a large extent" all her article had done was to "present an abstract formulation of the fact to be explained as an explanation of the fact itself".
He developed the idea that after Marx's death his ideas had, on the one hand, been adopted in a diluted form by some prominent non-Marxist thinkers (for example, in France, Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel, in Italy Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile) and that on the other hand the Comintern was spreading to workers as Marxism a form of crude, pre-dialectical materialism. He now saw Bukharin's book as a version of this, and hence as a symptom of "standstill".
By this time, Gramsci was much more knowledgeable about Marx's thinking than he had been in 1917 or 1918. For example he was aware of the 1844 critique of the Young Hegelians in The Holy Family, of Marx's 1845 "theses" on Feuerbach, and of Marx's 1859 Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the last of these, he was particularly struck by the reference to "the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men [sic] become conscious of [economic] conflict and fight it out" [my emphasis. CW]
Basing himself on this, Gramsci now revisited his earlier criticisms of the Popular University and formulated a model of workers' education that could contribute to undoing and reversing the political as well as theoretical standstill to which Stalinist domination of the Comintern had given rise.
In putting forward this model, Gramsci argued as follows. First, there must be a drive to develop towards "good sense" (i.e. a consciousness informed by socialist assumptions) the "commonsense" of the vast mass of workers and peasants, which he saw as currently both crudely materialistic and shot through with pre-rational superstitions. Second, this could only be done by a layer of industrial workers produced by the movement itself as "intellectuals" - i.e. thinkers and organisers already imbued with such "good sense". (Gramsci characterised these as "organicamente gli intellettuali di quelle masse" - "organically the intellectuals of those masses".)
Thirdly, the Comintern's approach of of forcibly holding such intellectuals down to the ideological level of the mass of people was like a throwback to that used traditionally by the Catholic Church and must be scrapped. Lastly, despite appropriating some Marxist ideas, the mainstream intelligentsia, by refusing to play any part in institutions like the Popular University, had disqualified itself, along with those institutions, from playing any role in this educational drive.
Along these lines, so Gramsci argued, it would be possible for socialists to create "a philosophical movement properly so-called". This would be sharply different from the education envisaged by mainstream intellectuals such as Croce. Thus instead of being focused on "creating a specialised culture among restricted groups", this movement would "never forget to remain in contact with" - in Catholic terms - "the simple" - i.e. workers. By "finding in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study and to resolve", it would be able to "work out and make coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity" (understood to include both labour processes and work-related struggle). And through doing so it could also "elaborate a form of thought superior to common sense and coherent on a scientific plane".
So by interacting with broadening circles of workers such a movement could move Marxist thought forward when this might otherwise be at a standstill.
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