What Is Leninism?

Table 1: Selected Events

1853 - 1856	Crimean war.
1861	Emanicpation of the serfs under Alexander II.
1877 - 1878	Russo-Turkisk war.
1881	Alexander II assassinated by a Narodnik conspiracy.
1883	Plekhanov founds Emancipation of Labor Group, struggles against Narodniks.
1898	Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founded, first congress.
1900 - 1901	First publications of Iskra, an all-Russian underground newspaper for the RSDLP.
1902	Lenin publishes What is to be done?
1903	Second party congress of RSDLP, splits into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
1904 - 1905	Russo-Japanese War
1905	Russian revolution (failed).
1906	First election to the Duma.
1914	Start of Worl War I, with assassination on 28 June of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
5 to 8 September 1915	Zimmerwald conference.
February (old style) 1917	Revolution, Nicholas adbicates. Provisional government formed.
April (old style) 1917	Lenin and companions arrive through Germany in sealed car; publishes April Theses.
June? 1917	First congress of soviets
August (old style) 1917	Failed Kornilov coup attempt.
October (old style) 1917	Bolshevik revolution.
October (old style) 1917	Second congress of soviets.
1917 - 1923	Russian civil war
March 1918	Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
11 November 1918	Armistice day.
5 to 12 January 1919	Spartacist Revolution.
2 to 6 March 1919	Founding of Communist International (Third International) at congress in Moscow.
21 March to 1 August 1919	Hungarian Soviet Repulbic.
28 June 1919	Signing of Treaty of Versailles.
27 February 1921	Founding of International Union of Socialist Parties (Second and One-Half International).
March 1921	Kronstadt Rebellion.
1921	New Economic Policy replaces War Communism.
May 1922	Lenin's first stroke
December 1922	Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)
21 January 1924	Lenin dies.

1.0 Introduction

A prior question is when did Leninism become a recognized tendency? Presumably, it was not immediately with the 1902 publication of What Is To Be Done? But certainly by the year of his death, as can be seen in Stalin's lectures, delivered at Sverdlov University in April 1924. I think 'Leninism' or 'Marxism-Leninism' became a name in the early 1920s.

2.0 A Definition and Remarks on Russia's Backwardness

Stalin defines Leninism:

"Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular."

Several scholars in the second international had provided analyses of imperialism, trusts, and finance capital. Lenin was not even the only Bolshevik to write extensively about imperialism; Bukharin also had a book.

The theory of imperialism provided a justifaction for why the first socialist revolution need not occur in the most advanced, industrialized capitalist country. Capitalism became a global system, including colonies. A revolution outside the metropole could be a strike at the weakest link.

Others knew that, according to classical Marxism, the proletariat revolution was supposed to first happen in advanced capitalist economies. Here is a bit from Gramsci, before he was the leader of the Italian Communist Party:

"That is what happens under normal conditions. When events are repeated with a certain regularity. When history develops through stages which, though ever more complex and richer in significance and value, are nevertheless similar. But in Russia the war galvanized the people's will. As a result of the sufferings accumulated over three years, their will became as one almost overnight. Famine was imminent, and hunger, death from hunger, could claim anyone, could crush tens of millions of men at one stroke. Mechanically at first, then actively and consciously after the first revolution, the people's will became as one.

Socialist propaganda put the Russian people in contact with the experience of other proletariats. Socialist propaganda could bring the history of the proletariat dramatically to life in a moment: its struggles against capitalism, the lengthy series of efforts required to emancipate it completely from the chains of servility that made it so abject and to allow it to forge a new consciouness and become a testimony to a world yet to come. It was socialist propaganda that forged the will of the Russian people. Why should they wait for the history of England to be repeated in Russia, for the bourgeoise to arise, for the class struggle to begin, so that class consciousness may be formed and the final ctastrophe of the capitalist world eventually hit them? The Russian people - or at lest a minority of the Russian people - has already passed through these experiences in thought. It has gone beyond them. It will make use of them now to assert itself just as it will make use of Western capitalist experience to bring itself rapidly to the same level of production as the Western world. In capitalist terms, North America is more advanced than England, because the Anglo-Saxons in North America took off at once from the level England had reached only after long evolution. Now the Russian proletariat, socialistically educated, will begin its history at the highest level England has reached today. Since it has to start from scratch, it will start from what has been perfected elsewhere, and hence will be driven to achieve that level of economic maturity which Marx considered a necessary condition for collectivism..." -- Antonio Gramsci, The revolution against Capital, 24 December 1917.

I think this points to a recurring tension in anti-colonial struggles. Should socialists support bourgeois and liberal positions and rebellions, without an immediate proletarian government conducting socialist planning?

3.0 The Start of Marxism in Russia

Plekhanov introduced Marxism to Russia. His 1891 book argues against the Narodniks, who were intellectuals championing the peasants, only recently freed from serfdom. Later, the Socialist Revolutionaries was a party championing the peasants. Some Left Socialist Revolutionaries entered the government after the October revolution. But Marxists like Plekhanov championed the working class. The peasants, although numerically superior, could only be allies.

Here I should mention that this history is mostly a history of illegal movements. Many of those important in the struggles leading up to the October revolution spent time in internal exile, in Siberia, or in external exile. Conferences and congresses were held outside Russia. Legal publications used 'Aesopian' language. Nevertheless, legal Marxism was a movement in Russia in the 1890s, with Pyotr Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky as the most prominent members.

4.0 A Vanguard Party, What is to be Done, and the Founding of Iskra

I think an important component of Leninism as the orgainization of a revolutionary party, as specified in his 1902 pamplet, What is to be done? Like the overwhelming majority of Lenin's major works, he spends a lot of time arguing against other comrades, often with personal remarks. Here his target is 'economism', the idea that socialists should concentrate on strikes and organizing industrial sites, trying to increase pay, decrease hours, and improve working conditions.

Lenin argued that social democrats should agitate on all fronts. This comprehensiveness seems to fit his personality, where he devoted his life to being a professional revolutionary. He was capable of dropping somebody after decades of friendship if that person was advocating something important he disagreed with. His arguments extended to the philosophy of science, as was being impacted by, say, the theory of relativity.

Trade unions can only bring trade union consciousness, according to Lenin. What is needed is a vanguard, a party with close connections to the workers that brings a social-democratic consciouesness.

Lukúcs, in his essay, 'Towards a methodology of the problem of organisation' (September 1922), discusses the "dialectical relation between 'final goal' and 'movement', i.e. between theory and practice." "Organisation is the form of the mediation between theory and practice." "The Communist Party is the organised form of - the first conscious step towards the realm of freedom." "The process of revolution is - on a historical scale - synonymous with the process of the development of proletarian class consciousness." The communist party is supposed to be an objective expression of the most advanced class consciousness of the workers, not a replacement. Communists need to pay close attention to all strata in the working class. The workers are supposed to be no longer be merely the object of history, but its subject as well. In his essay 'Class consciousness', Lukúcs writes "For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organise the whole of society in accordance with those interests." In his book, he also discusses vulgar Marxism, which is deterministic.

As an immediate task, Lenin argued for the publication of an all-Russian newspaper, Iskra.

5.0 The Split at the Second Congress of the RSDLP and Democratic Centralism

The start of a major split in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party arose at the second party congress, held initially in 1903 in exile in Brussels. Participants included representatives of the editorial board of Iskra; Makhov, representing two votes of the Nikolayev Committee; the Bund (Jewish Workers' Union); and Rabocheye Dyelo, which was a newspaper for social democrats in exile.

The split was ostensibly focused on paragraph 1 of the party rules. Lenin's draft had the following:

"A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations."

Paragraph 1 as formulated by Julius Martov at the Congress and adopted by the Congress stated:

A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations.

Lenin wanted a tighter focus on professional revolutionaries, and this goes along with his concept of democratic centralism. At party congresses and meetings of the central committee, there should be the freest discussion. Once a vote has been conducted, all groups and circles, organizations and members of the party are expected to follow the direction decided upon. Martov's formulation was much looser. As Lenin put it, any professor or striker could call themselves a party member, despite not being bound by party discipline or working with a party organization.

Even though Martov prevailed on paragraph 1, he and his Mensheviks ended up in the minority. Apparently, Bolshevik means 'majority' in Russian, and Menshevik means 'minority'. Lenin was in the majority only because the Bund and the Rabocheye Dyelo group walked out. Plekhanov and Trotsky sided with Lenin at the Second Congress. But Plekhanov soon joined the Mensheviks, and Trotsky went his own way until rejoining the Bolsheviks in 1917. As late as spring 1906, an attempt at re-unification was tried at an unity congress of the RSDLP. The Mensheviks were in the provisional government formed in the February 1917 revolution, but not in the soviet government established in the October revolution.

6.0 The 1917 Russian Revolutions

The Tsar abdicated in the February revolution. The parliamentary government found themselves in charge as the provisional government. Kerensky eventually became prime minister. Political parties included the constitutional democrats (Cadets), Mensheviks, and the Socialists Revolutionaries. The SRs followed in the tradition of the Narodniks, without the terrorism. Some Left Socialists Revolutionaries joined the government established by the October revolution, since the Bolsheviks was implementing the SR agrarian program.

The soviets constituted a parallel government. A soviet is a council, perhaps for a village, a regiment, or a factory. Such soviets elected delegates to a regional soviet which, in turn, elected delegates to a more wide-ranging body, eventually to a national soviet. The Petrograd and other soviets sprang up during the 1905 revolution. The members were promptly arrested when that revolution failed. In Lenin's April theses, he implicitly draws some parallels to the Parisian communards, which Engels famously declared to be what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like. Lenin also called for the Bolshevik party to change their name to the Communist Party and for the establishment of a new international, the Communist International (Comintern).

7.0 The Revolutionary Government

Leon Trotsky was the chairman of the Petrograd soviet, which set up the Military Revolutionary Committee. Petrograd was the Russian capital at the time. The October Revolution occurred when the Military Revolutionary Committee took over key sites in Petrograd, including the Winter Palace, and arrested the members of the provisional government. Moscow had its own uprising.

The Second Congress of Soviets met, with 670 delegates, as the October revolution unfolded. They needed some smaller sort of body to act as an executive. That would be the Council of People's Commissars, and that was the new soviet government. Lenin was its chairman. Other members included Trotsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Stalin. The congress proclaimed the revolution:

"TO WORKERS, SOLDIERS, AND PEASANTS

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies has opened. It represents the great majority of the Soviets. There are also a number of Peasant deputies. Based upon the will of the great majority of the workers, soldiers, and peasants, based upon the triumphant uprising of the Petrograd workmen and soldiers, the Congress assumes power.

The Provisional Government is deposed. Most of the members of the Provisional Government are already arrested.

The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations, and an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free transfer of landlord, crown, and monastery lands to the Land Committees, defend the soldiers' rights, enforcing a complete democratization of the Army, establish workers' control over production, ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly at the proper date, take means to supply bread to the cities and articles of the first necessity to the villages, and secure to all nationalities living in Russia a real right to independent existence.

The Congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order.

The Congress calls upon the soldiers in the trenches to be watchful and steadfast. The Congress of Soviets is sure that the revolutionary Army will know how to defend the Revolution against all attacks of Imperialism, until the new Government shall have brought about the conclusion of the democratic peace which it will directly propose to all nations. The new Government will take all necessary steps to secure everything useful to the revolutionary Army, by means of a determined policy of requisition and taxation of the propertied classes, and also to improve the situation of the soldiers' families.

The Kornilovtsi-Kerensky, Kaledin, and others, are endeavoring to lead troops against Petrograd. Several regiments, deceived by Kerensky, have sided with the insurgent People.

Soldiers! Make active resistance to the Kornilovets-Kerensky! Be on guard!

Railway men! Stop all troop-trains being sent by Kerensky against Petrograd!

Soldiers, Workers, Clerical employees! The destiny of the Revolution and democratic peace is in your hands!

Long live the Revolution!

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies Delegates from the Peasants' Soviets"

The Constituent Assembly met on 5 January 1918. Its dissolution was justified by the claim that its election was based on ballots drawn up before the October revolution and thus outdated, not reflecting the split between the Socialists Revolutionaries and the Left Socialists Revolutionaries.

8.0 Lenin's Influence on How to Read Marx

Above, I have not said much about Marx at all. I suppose I would find something about political economy in Lenin's 1899 book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

In his 1913 pamphlet, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Lenin says that the three sources of Marxism are German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism. I do not know how influential this claim was; the first two sources are obvious. I would like to emphasize so-called Ricardian socialists, who were not French, for the last source. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels were part of a socialist movement that predated them.

Somewhere, probably in notes not published in his lifetime, Lenin says that you cannot understand Marx's Capital if you have not read Hegel's Logic. I do not like Hegel. I have read a bit of Christopher Arthur.

I suppose I am not the only one to read Marx's Remarks on the Gotha Program with Lenin's State and Revolution in mind, and vice versa.

9.0 Conclusion

Elements of Leninism include a workers' vanguard party, democratic centralism an alliance with peasants in anti-imperialist struggles,and a government of soviets dominated by the communist party.

References

• Christopher Hill. 1971 (1947). Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Penguin Books.
• Leszek Kolakowski. . Main Currents of Marxism (3 volumes). New York: W. W. Norton.
• Vladimir Lenin. 1902. What is to be done? Collected Works: Vol. 5
• Vladimir Lenin. 1904. One step forward, two steps back. Collected Works: Vol. 7
• Vladimir Lenin. 1908. Materialism and empirio-criticism. Collected Works: Vol. 14
• Vladimir Lenin. 1914 - 1916. Conspectus of Hegel's book The Science of Logic. Collected Works: Vol. 38
• Vladimir Lenin. 1917a. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Collected Works: Vol. 22
• Vladimir Lenin. 1917b. The tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution ('April Theses'). Collected Works: Vol. 24
• Vladimir Lenin. 1918. The state and revolution. Collected Works: Vol. 25
• Vladimir Lenin. 1920. 'Left-wing' communism: an infantile disorder. Collected Works: Vol. 31
• Georg Lúkacs. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Merlin Press.
• Julius Martov. 1938. The State and Socialist Revolution.
• Georgi Plekhanov. 1891. The Materialist Conception of History.
• John Reed. 1966 (1919). Ten Days that Shook the World. Penguin Books.
• Joseph Stalin. 1945. The foundations of Leninism, in Problems of Leninism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Engels To Bloch in 1890

Engels had a lot to do with formulating orthodox interpretations of Marx in the period after Marx's death. So it is interesting to see what he says. I have transcribed another letter before, about the law of value. The following is about historical materialism and the relation of the superstructure to the economic base:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations - which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant - the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals - each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) - do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusions to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism which, as far as I know, exists.

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too.... -- Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890

I expected to see the phrase, "In the last instance" here. I guess that is how Lenin phrased the idea that the material base ultimately explains or determines the course of history. If you read Lenin as not so determinist, is Engels' letter consistent with Gramsci's ideas? One can see that Engels is almost quoting the second paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living..."

As I understand it, Engels' Anti-Dhüring was easier to obtain than even most of Marx's published writings during the period of the Second International and the founding of German social democracy. Engels has something to say about the application of dialectics to natural sciences in this book, an idea I find questionable. He does say that he needs to address a broad range of topics because "Herr Dhüring ... dealt with all things under the sun and then a few more." What should one make of Engels' mechanical analogy about about a parallelogram of forces? I like the idea that the result is not something anybody is necessary conscious of willing.

I also like the first three chapters of the last part of Anti-Dhüring, in which Engels (I gather with Marx's help) writes about the distinction between utopian and scientific socialism. These chapters were published as a stand-alone pamphlet. My take is that the experience of the Soviet Union, of no-longer-actually existing socialism, cannot discredit Marx's plans for a post-capitalist society, not because it was not "true communism", but because he refused on principle to draw up such plans. I suppose I ought to have a caveat about The Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Program. You might think those who want to abolish or transcend capitalism should draw up such plans, especially after these terrible experiences. And Marx and Engels do have somewhere, I guess, some naive comments about all that is needed for successful economic planning is widespread knowledge among the workers of arithmetic and accounting, and these comments should be criticized. I do not necessarily take issue with some criticisms. But, still, the position of Marx and Engels was not to draw up such plans.

Origins of Selection from the Prision Notebooks?

This is C27 in Sraffas archives.

97 Fortis Green
London N2
Tudor 0214

6th August 1966

Dear Piero,

I do not know whether you know Roger Simon, who is Secretary of the Labour Research Department. At all events he is a great admirer and enthusiast of Gramsci. Thanks to his initiative, plans are afoot (in which I too am collaborating) to publish a new volume of Gramsci's works translated into English and Lawrence & Wishart have agreed, in principle, to undertake publication.

We would very much welcome views and suggestions from you on how this should be done. The general idea at present is a bigger book than the L & W. 1957 translation (which is now out of print), including, if appropriate, passages already translated on that occasion. One line of thought that we are pursuing is that the volume should comprise mainly longer writings from the Notebooks and should be so presented that, if successful, it could be followed by further volumes, with the possible aim of ultimately translating all Gramsci's works. It would be good if the publication of this volume could sow the seeds of a growing interest in and knowledge of this outstanding political thinker, and so it is probably worth giving quite a bit of thought as to how this first step in that direction should be taken.

One problem is the choice of a translator; the ideal might be a young don specialising in twentieth century Italy and an admirer of Gramsci who would be keen to make a scholarly study of him, his times and his work. Do you know any such person?

Also do you by any chance know, or know anything of, Gwyn A. Williams who wrote a very interesting and scholarly article on Gramsci in the Journal of the History of Ideas, 1960, and who was at that time at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth?

Are there other Gramsci scholars known to you?

I hope that we may have a chance of meeting some time in the Autumn.

With best wishes

Yours,

Stephen Bodington

Piero Sraffa Esq., M. A.,
Trinity College,
CAMBRIDGE.

Reference

• Antonio Gramsci (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith ed. and trans.), London: Lawrence & Wishart

Gramsci Should Be Difficult To Understand

Fact: If you use the word "carceral" instead of "prison" your argument immediately becomes more persuasive.

Good praxis is to use words like "praxis" that nobody understands. -- Matthew Yglesias (5 April 2019, on Twitter)

A large academic literature exists around Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Topics discussed include the relationship of civil society to the state, hegemony, the contrast between consent and coercion, class alliances in political parties, Fordism, the contrast between a "war of position" and a "war of movement", the contrast between organic intellectuals and traditional intellectuals, and the concept of a passive revolution.

When writing his notebooks, Gramsci had to be concerned with Fascists guards reading them and tearing them up in displeasure. Thus, he wrote in a kind of code. The communist party becomes the "modern prince". Machiavelli wrote to advise the ruler of Florence how to obtain rule over Italy; Gramsci was thinking about how communists could rule with the consent of the governed. Marxism or Marxist-Leninism becomes "the philosophy of praxis." As I understand it, praxis is practice informed by theory or theory embodied in practice, in some sense. Gramsci is referring to the last of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. -- Karl Marx

As you can see, these code words are not a mechanical substitution. To understand Gramsci, one would want to think about these choices.

Gramsci never thought of his notebooks as complete. You can find him often writing about what a study on some topic should contain. I saw this in the selection titled, "The Modern Prince", for example. Gramsci could order books. Piero Sraffa provided an unlimited account at some bookstore. Nevertheless, he hoped to complete his work, which was to be "for forever", sometime in the future. Given the circumstances of their writing, the Notebooks were not required to be internally consistent.

Despite the abstractions used by Gramsci, his writing is often quite concrete. But to appreciate it, one would need to know about Italian intellectuals before he entered prison. Myself, I am no expert on Amadeo Bordiga, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Labriola, or Achille Loria. Nor can I easily check claims about arguments on how to standardize Italian, whether focused on the dialect in Florence or also allowing for influence of other dialects. I suppose to understand Gramsci, one should also know about Giuseppe Garibaldi, Sardina and the southern question, and lots more about Italian history.

For me, there is a language issue. I rely on Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith's Selections from the Prison Notebooks, not Joseph Buttigieg's comprehensive translation. The literature on Gramsci also contains attempts to translate his concepts to times and places, other than the Italy of Gramsci's day.

Should Liberals Want A Coalition With Conservatives Or Labor?

This is current events, but this post is about current events in Britain in 1920. Lenin comments on reports of a dispute between Lloyd George and H. H. Asquith, both leaders of the Liberal party:

[In] the speech delivered by Prime Minister Lloyd George on March 18, 1920... Lloyd George entered into a polemic with Asquith (who had been especially invited to this meeting but declined to attend) and with those Liberals who want, not a coalition with the Conservatives, but closer relations with the Labour Party. (In the above-quoted letter, Comrade Gallacher also points to the fact that Liberals are joining the Independent Labour Party.) Lloyd George argued that a coalition — and a close coalition at that — between the Liberals and the Conservatives was essential, otherwise there might be a victory for the Labour Party, which Lloyd George prefers to call "Socialist" and which is working for the "common ownership" of the means of production. "It is . . . known as communism in France," the leader of the British bourgeoisie said, putting it popularly for his audience, Liberal M.P.s who probably never knew it before. In Germany it was called socialism, and in Russia it is called Bolshevism, he went on to say. To Liberals this is unacceptable on principle, Lloyd George explained, because they stand in principle for private property. "Civilisation is in jeopardy," the speaker declared, and consequently Liberals and Conservatives must unite. . . . -- Lenin (1920).

We see here centrists justifying an alliance with the right by calling those to their left "socialists" and "communists". Lenin, of course, was to the left of the British Labour party and did not consider them communists or Bolsheviks. Rather, he grouped their leaders with those like Karl Kautsky, who could not be counted on to stand up for the workers when World War II started. Or maybe Lenin considered the British soft left as worse, for Kautsky, according to Lenin, had previous achievements, including in theoretical works.

The context of this argument was Lenin arguing with those to his left. I think he is talking about anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. He was criticizing them for arguing that, as a matter of principle, communists should not participate in such compromised institutions as parliaments and labor unions. Lenin asserts that this rules out the tactical flexibility the Bolsheviks exhibited in Russia through the 1905, February 1917, and October 1917 revolutions and so on. Lenin thinks British communists should support Labour, although he does say this support should be like the noose supports the hanged man. He continues the Marxist view that anarchism is a petty bourgeois tendency.

Lenin always wanted to agitate everywhere and on everything, including in labor unions, in parliaments, on economic questions, on land redistribution, on non-economic issues. The working class, according to him, need an external vanguard to elevate their consciousness from just trying to get more under capitalism, instead of throwing over capitalism. This approach worked for Lenin. But perhaps his attempt to generalize from Russia to Western Europe exhibited the need for the development of Antonio Gramsci's ideas.

References

• Vladimir Lenin (1902). What Is To Be Done?
• Vladimir Lenin (1920). "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Obscure Postmodern Language

I try here to outline certain postmodern¹ doctrines that, in a full development, might result in one using obscure terminology. None of this is to say that every postmodern writer using polysyllabic terminology is expressing complicated ideas in the most effective way. Nor do I want to argue that it is impossible to ever write clearly² about (some subset) of these ideas.

People have a tendency towards reification³, towards talking as if certain abstract ideas are concrete realities. For example, they might tend to confuse relationships between people with relationships between things⁴. And people tend to think dualistically, or at least to categorize things into pre-existing categories. And with dividing things into two categories, one may tend to elevate one over the other, or to define the inferior in terms of the negation of the properties of the superior⁵. One might think that these confusions become embedded in our language⁶. It is not as if we have access to a language appropriate for a "view from nowhere", where nature is carved at its joints⁷.

Furthermore, current classifications and fundamental ideas embodied in current language have a history; our current language does not reflect how people always thought. In looking at past patterns of language and governance, one should try not to read our current way of thinking into the past⁸.

One might also think current classifications have a functional relationship to class structure, hegemonic⁹ ethnicities, patriarchal relationships, or whatever¹⁰.

I have deliberately been abstract here. But, I suppose, I might mention some examples. In economics, I think one is confused if one looks at capitalism as catallaxy, that is, purely in terms of market relationships, in which all parties are free. Furthermore, many things have been said to be socially constructed. I think here of money¹¹, race¹², gender¹³, and sex¹⁴.

In fully trying to explicate these ideas, one can be expected to struggle with bewitchments brought about by language. One might look for multivocalities in past texts. How have current suppositions been read into them? How might they be read from a subaltern position? How might language be expanded so as not to deny normalcy to currently marginalized groups? So reasons exist why academics thinking along postmodern trends might express themselves obscurely.

The above is not to say that these ideas cannot be criticized¹⁵.

Update (21 December 2015):

• Am I agreeing or disaggreeing with what Robert Paul Wolff says here?
• Noah Smith has a knee-jerk reaction to postmodernism.
• The blogger with the pseudonym "Lord Keynes" has often complained about left-leaning postmoderns.

Footnotes

1. For purposes of this post, I do not distinguish between deconstruction, post structuralism, various trends in the social studies of science, etc.
2. Richard Rorty is an example of a postmodern philosopher known for clear - but not necessarily easy - writing.
3. The popularity of the term "reification", in postmodern discourse, comes from Georg Lukás.
4. This is how Marx defined commodity fetishism.
5. I am thinking of how Simone de Beauvoir, early in The Second Sex, describes women being defined as the Other.
6. Here I point to Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, unpublished in his lifetime.
7. I guess this relates to Jacques Derrida's claim, "There is no outside the text."
8. Michel Foucault, in particular, offers provocative studies of changing European thought in the classical age, between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century.
9. The popularity of the term "hegemony", in postmodern discourse, comes from Antonio Gramsci.
10. As Marx said, "The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes."
11. This is an example of how something can both be socially constructed and real. Obviously, money has quite real effects in modern societies.
12. Think of the use of the words "Black" and "Colored" in South Africa and in the USA. In the former, they are not synonyms, while among older Americans of a certain sort, they are.
13. I gather Judith Butler originated the concept of gender as performative.
14. Judith Butler also questions whether sex is necessarily a biological division. People might be classified based on chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics. More than two categories exist in many of these classifications, and they do not always line up. Philip Mirowski observes somewhere that, for the International Olympic Committee (and the International Association of Athletics Federations), these classifications are a quite practical issue. After all, they are structured to find exceptional humans.
15. For explicit references below, I only give critiques. I am sympathetic to the idea that the popularity of postmodernism among academics was connected to an inability to successfully improve material conditions for many.

References

• Samir Amin (1998). Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions, Monthly Review Press.
• Terry Eagleton (1996). The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell.

Gramsci: Laissez Faire As State Regulation

I am of the opinion that talk of more or less government intervention in markets is incoherent in, for example, the United States today. It is not as if some configuration of property rights, contract law independent of the state, corporations with limited liability, and markets of various types are all natural constructs, existing prior to all human interventions. I have gone on about this before. I might also note Philip Mirowski's view that sophisticated neoliberals recognize that a capitalist market order must be constructed; it does not come about naturally. I do not know that he would now think that all those in, for example, think tanks inhabiting the outer layers of the russian doll structures that neoliberals have build for propagandizing would recognize the role of government in constructing a market order.

Anyways, I have recently stumbled on Antonio Gramsci making a closely related point:

"The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of state 'regulation', introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a political programme, designed to change - in so far as it is victorious - a State's leading personnel, and to change the economic programme of the State itself - in other words the distribution of the national income." -- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, "The Modern Prince", Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of 'Economism'

Given the current conjuncture in, say, the United States, that bit about income distribution is of contemporary relevance. I think a study comparing and contrasting the ideas of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci on how ideas become dominant in society would be interesting to read.

Reproducing Civil Society

"Civil Society - an association of members as self-subsistent individuals in a universality which, because of their self-subsistence, is only abstract. Their association is brought about by their needs, by the legal system - the means to security of person and property - and by an external organization for attaining their particular and common interests." -- G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right

"...in the case of the most advanced States, ...civil society has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic incursions of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare. ... In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying - but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country." -- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

There exist at least two approaches to economics:

• One focused on the allocation of given scarce resources among alternative ends.
• One focused on the conditions for the reproduction of society.

The first is the approach of the so-called neoclassical theory, and the second is the approach of classical political economy.

I like to write about price theory, a field in which one can formulate certain definite quantitative relationships. But the investigation of conditions that facilitate the reproduction of society can extend well outside of price theory and even of economics, as the above Gramsci quote suggests. I suggest the following are examples of components of civil society, whatever your definition: churches, labor unions, charities, civic groups, professional societies, and athletic clubs.

I am not at all sure that anybody has drawn attention in the literature to this commonality between the works of Gramsci and Sraffa: both analyzed the conditions for the reproduction of society, one concentrating on political theory and the other on price theory.

Fordism

In keeping with my amateur status, I like the support of references. Other bloggers have different styles.

I think I'll even provide references for an Eric Nilsson post, which I'm almost sure that he is aware of.

The term "Fordism" was used by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. As I understand it, the phrase is also used by those developing the theory of economic regulation and describing social structures of accumulation. A standard reference here, on my list of books to read some time, is Michael Aglietta's A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience (Verso, 1979, first published in French in 1976). Lots of work has been done here since 1976.

Sraffa Angers Mussolini

And not for the first time.

Apparently Sraffa, an Italian living in England, probably only wrote the first sentence of the following letter. Angelo Tasca, an Italian communist, wrote the bulk of the letter after discussion with Sraffa. Maurice Dobb translated Tasca into english.

"Sir, - In view of the discussion which has been taking place in your columns on the methods of Fascism, it seems opportune to bring before your readers the facts of a recent case which can hardly be included within Mr. Shaw's category of crimes justified by 'necessity'.

Antonio Gramsci, a Communist deputy in the Italian Parliament and a journalist, was arrested in November, 1926, in spite of the immunity attaching to a deputy, and was banished, along with other members of the Opposition, to the Italian island of Ustica. Signor Gramsci had always been an invalid owing to a pronounced curvature of the spine, and had only been able to indulge in continuous intellectual activity - an academic study of philology at the university prior to the war and a study of Italian politics since the war - by virtue of a special regime of life and a special diet. Even the milder rigours of prision life were therefore likely to be in his case particularly serious.

A few months after his initial arrest Signor Gramsci was taken from the island and sent to Milan. This journey was by means of the extraordinarily slow and painful process by which prisoners in Italy are transferred from place to place: cramped in a small cell of a special prison coach on a crawling train all day, and breaking the journey on the way at various places - at Palermo, Reggio Calabria, Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, - to be housed in the dirty and vermine-infested detention cells of the local prison for days on end. In Milan he has been awaiting trial since early February. The diet of a political prisoner is usually little more than a pound of bread and soup per day. Usually this can be supplemented by gifts and by food bought in the canteen by money received from friends and deposited with the prison governor. In Signor Gramsci's case, however, this has not been allowed; both gifts of food and money from friends have been intercepted by the prison authorities and prevented from reaching Signor Gramsci. Friends have been prevented from seeing him, even though he has legally a perfect right to receive such visitors.

A delicate invalid from the first, Signor Gramsci has been reduced to a state of extreme emaciation byt the harhness of his treatment since his arrest - treatment which would have shaken the constitution of the strongest man. Unable to digest even the meagre and poor food he receives, he is in a state of literal semi-starvation. He has several times had to be removed to the prison infirmary, and the state of his helath, affecting his mouth, has caused him to lose most of his teeth in the last few weeks, so that his ability to eat the coarse prison fare is still further lessened. After nine months of such treatment this man has now to undergo a further journey to Rome to stand his trial, at which he is likely to be sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, probably twenty or thirty years, for the crime of organizing opposition to the Fascist regime. - Yours, &c,, An Italian in England" -- Piero Sraffa (1927). Manchester Guardian, (October 21)

It was at this trial that the Fascist prosecutor, pointing to Gramsci, said, "We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years." Sraffa opposed this.

References:

• Nerio Naldi (1998). "Some Notes on Piero Sraffa's Biography, 1917-27", Review of Political Economy, V. 10, N. 4: 493-515
• Jean-Pierre Potier (1987). Piero Sraffa: Unorthodox Economist (18989-1983): A Biographical Esay, Routledge

Gramsci Quote, At Least Some Recited At Sraffa's Funeral

I know, from reading Geoff Harcourt, that at least some of this was quoted at Sraffa's funeral:

"It would be worth compiling a 'reasoned' catalogue of the men of learning whose opinions are widely quoted or contested in the book, each name to be accompanied by notes on their significance and scientific importance (this to be done also for the supporters of the philosophy of praxis who are certainly not quoted in the light of their originality and significance). In fact there are only the most passing references to the great intellectuals. The question is raised: would it not have been better to have referred only to the major intellectuals on the enemy side, leaving aside the men in the second rank, the regurgitators of second-hand phrases? One gets the impression that the author wants to combat only the weakest of their positions (or the ones which the weakest adversaries have maintained least adequately), in order to obtain facile verbal victories - for one can hardly speak of real victories. The illusion is created that there exists some kind of more than formal and metaphorical resemblance between an ideological and a politico-military front. In the political and military struggle it can be correct tactics to break through at the points of least resistance in order to be able to assault the strongest point with maximum forces that have been precisely made available by the elimination of the weaker auxiliaries. Political and military victories, within certain limits, have a permanent and universal value and the strategic end can be attained decisively with a general effect for everyone. On the ideological front, however, the defeat of the auxiliaries and the minor hangers-on is of all but negligible importance. Here it is necessary to engage battle with the most eminent of one's adversaries. Otherwise one confuses newspapers with books, and petty daily polemic with scientific work. The lesser figures must be abandoned to the infinite casebook of newspaper polemic.

A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems.

It is true that an historical epoch and a given society are characterised rather by the average run of intellectuals, and therefore by the more mediocre. But widespread, mass ideology must be distinguished from the scientific works and the great philosophical syntheses which are its real cornerstones. It is the latter which must be overcome, either negatively, by demonstrating that they are without foundation, or positively, by opposing to them philosophical syntheses of greater importance and significance. Reading the Manual one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear." (Gramsci 1971, pp. 432-433, "Critical Notes on an Attempt at Popular Sociology")

(The attempt being considered here is The Theory of Historical Materialism: A Manual of Popular Sociology, a book by Nikolai Bukharin.)

References

• Harcourt, G. C. (1986). "On the Contributions of Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa to Economic Theory", in Controversies in Political Economy: Selected Essays, New York University Press
• Gramsci, Antonio (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Anonio Gramsci (Trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith), International Publishers.

Lectures On Gramsci

Piero Sraffa is one of my favorite economists. I have been listening to a couple of mp3 files. Piero Sraffa appears in the stories these lecturers have to tell, and rightly so.

The lecturers don't bring it up, but apparently Sraffa did not make a big deal out of his heroic anti-fascist work. Nicky Kaldor, who knew Sraffa for decades, apparently didn't find out about the side of Sraffa's life mentioned in these lectures until after Sraffa's death.

My Space has an entry for Antonio Gramsci.