Selections from the Prison Notebooks Later printing Edition

This selection from Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" contains his most important work written during his imprisonment from the italian fascist regime. It includes "the Intellectuals", texts on Education, Notes on Italian History, "The modern Prince", "State and Civil Society", "Americanism and Fordism" and notes on the philosophy of praxis, together with a very informative introduction on the italian Communist Movement in the first decades of the 20th century. In this collection Gramsci's theory of "hegemony" in class societies is fully presented, together with his intepretation of Marxism both in philosophy and in the analysis of the modern world.
Gramsci was on of the foremost leaders of the Italian Communist Party; in his trial in 1927 the fascist Public Prosecutor proclaimed that his brain must be stopped from functioning for twenty years. Fortunately, Gramsci proved to be a devoted fighter in prison and his Notebooks furthered -in many points- the analysis of Marx and Lenin of how capitalism functions and how it could be overthrown.

This volume was the first to present a coherent selection of Gramsci's thought in English. However, it was published over 40 years ago and times have certainly changed, making it necessary to complement it with other writings. In the first place this was translated at a time when the critical edition of Gramsci's Notebooks did not exist even in the original Italian. Thus the excerpts here are taken from many different volumes of his writings, some of which had different editors and hence different priorities. Initially the Notebooks were brought out in part to facilitate the Italian CP's transition to reformist strategy after the war, so the reader should bear this in mind.

Scholarship on Gramsci has advanced to the point as to discredit the editors' introduction and most of their notes. Hoare and Nowell Smith maintain that Gramsci's often obscure style was born out of a desire to hide what he was writing about from the prison censors, a widespread misconception that spread in English at least partly from their notes and partly from the influential essay by Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci." More recently it has been noted that given Gramsci's career it was highly likely he was writing about Marxism, and even his fascist guards would have realized this. His literary style has been deeply underestimated because of this conception. While he was constrained by material limitations such as not having access to a library and only being able to keep a certain number of notebooks in his cell at one time (plus the fact that they were notebooks, rather than fully fleshed-out works he intended for publication immediately), his writing is much clearer than he is given credit for.

Another limitation of this volume is the translators often seem to misunderstand Gramsci's philosophical and political thought. At the time they were working this was understandable, as his concepts were often veiled behind the academic and political needs of his successors in the CPI and European communist movement. Gramsci is using a lot of concepts from thinkers like Machiavelli, Vico, Spinoza, Labriola, Croce, Gentile etc that require some work on the part of the reader to parse. In the notebooks he usually says how and why he is using different concepts to frame a particular understanding. But the selection here is necessarily limited so it diminishes his clarity at times.

Given their objective limitations, the parts these editors have included from the notebooks are a pretty good selection. "Notes on Italian History" is a superb application of Marx's historical method to the unique historical development of the Italian peninsula, from where he introduces the concept of passive revolution, which historians have found quite useful elsewhere. "The Modern Prince" and "State and Civil Society" remain brilliant and fertile works on the nature of the bourgeois state and its overthrow. Despite attempts by Eurocommunists and others to read reformism into these works any objective reading of Gramsci will put the lie to this, even in such a limited volume. Somewhat odd is the inclusion of Gramsci's essay on "Americanism and Fordism," which deploys and idealized conception of American capitalism in the early 20th century and tries to contrast it with less developed economies like that of Italy. Unlike other pieces this has not inspired significant work or debate within Marxism and history.

Michel Foucault remarks that Gramsci is one of those thinkers having the dubious honor of being cited much more often than he is read. In this respect one of the tragedies of the absorption of his thought into academia is that his work is abstracted from the revolutionary Marxist tradition which he intended his notebooks as a specific part of. Readers should therefore be willing to engage with and read Marx, Engels and especially Lenin if they want to really understand Gramsci's thought.

Overall I would say this is not a bad place to start. It is only just now that the full breadth of Gramsci's work is coming to be appreciated in the English-speaking world. The Notebooks are now being fully translated into English (the first eight, about a third of the total, are already out), and we have seen the publication of biographies and exegeses that speak directly to Gramsci's vitality and relevance to anyone seeking to both understand the world and to change it. I highly recommend in particular Peter Thomas' "The Gramscian Moment" and Carlos Nelson Coutinho's "Gramsci's Political Thought," the latter of which is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series. Everyone interested in Gramsci should take a look at these as well.

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks marks one of the nodal points of Western Marxism's break with Leninism and the breed of marxism born of the Bolshevik Revolution. Exploratory and incomplete, the insights contained in this volume marked a turning point in marxist thinking, indeed leading many right through the marxist fold and out the other side. Gramsci's insights into philosphy, cultural criticism, political economy, and politics make this a crucial resource for anyone interested in any of these themes today ... marxist or otherwise. And for those interested in the 'fall' of marxism, Gramsci is perhaps the most important starting point. A veritable critical goldmine!!!!

Michel Foucault once remarked that Antonio Gramsci is a figure much cited and little read. Once upon a time (in the 90s, when things seemed more dismal, then they really were) neoconservatives were warned that Gramscianism was conducting a "long march through the institutions": leftists of a freethinking and free-wheeling bent threw around "organic intellectual" as denoting indigenous members of collective subjects not quite proletarian, and wondered whether "hegemony" was being orchestrated by hip-hop provocateurs.

But in yet another retrenchment of yet another cruel decade, Gramsci has fallen off the map. The neocons wonder if Hillary Rodham Clinton is "angry" about things other than her man and Whitewater; the bohemian leftists wonder about Empire, or stay silent. Which is probably well enough, when it comes to the Gramscian corpus. For although this is the work of an ill-deserved confinement courtesy of one of the world's more notable totalitarian regimes, its stated aim is to be itself "totalitarian" in conception. Antonio Gramsci was something much more complex than a "freedom fighter", and his pronouncements regarding a multitude of subjects in this selection from his *Quaderni del carcere* deserve to be analyzed critically rather than merely sympathetically.

"Open Marxism" this is not: Gramsci has three major tasks, all of which are compatible with Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy (whether Gramsci would have been in full sympathy with fully developed Stalinism is a question his being imprisoned moots). Firstly, to analyze the "passive revolution" which has put forth another alternative to progressive political change yet left the productive forces of the economy modernizing with all due speed; secondly, to celebrate the fact of the Communist Party's Russian dominance by studying not-necessarily-democratic "hegemony" as a form of political expression throughout modern history; thirdly, to advocate a form of Marxism thoroughly divorced from the materialist scruples of mechanics and keeping its eyes focused firmly on the historical here and now.

All of which are interesting projects, worthy of the best political science and historical ontology that the bourgeois world has to offer, but all of which compete with more explicitly liberatory ideologies (Trotsky's "permanent revolution", representative democracy, Encylopedic enthusiasm for a truly popular science) and offer nuance rather than redemption. Gramsci's communism is, cliched though it may be, somewhat Jesuitical and overly "disciplined" in the face of historical setbacks and core organizational shibboleths of the Comintern: we are offered only details filling out a party line we should believe in anyway, rather than a stirring defense of people power. This book is brilliant, rather than inspirational, and its theses should be troubling, if enlightening, for a member of the democratic left; though it is famously powerful reasoning, redeeming the promise of popular sovereignty will require another approach.

[Addendum: The "complete" translations of the *Prison Notebooks* by Joseph Buttigieg are now available in a three-volume set. Although seeing Gramsci at work is interesting, Buttigieg has only covered Notebooks 1-8 of 29; the extant translations are primarily of reviews of magazine articles. Many of the Gramscian ideas with contemporary currency (in, for example, cultural studies) cannot be easily gleaned from the new volumes, so this collection is still of some importance.]