Chapter One The Gramsci-Trotsky Question

Gramsci’s reactions to the personality and political views of Leon Trotsky offer valuable insights into the history of the Third International from 1922 to 1932. The evidence of a Trotskyist influence on Gramsci is rather persuasive,1 and sheds light on the encounter between the ‘classical’ (Trotsky) and ‘Western’ (Gramsci) traditions of revolution- ary Marxism, to use Perry Anderson’s terminology in Con- siderations on Western Marxism.2 Some of the recent scholarly work done on Gramsci, and a preponderance of the references to him that one comes across in left periodicals published during the last ten to fif- teen years have tended to downplay his connections with the makers and events of the Bolshevik Revolution, and to privilege those aspects of his ideas that fit into the frame- work of what has been loosely called ‘cultural radicalism’. Gramsci has become a kind of role model to many radical literary intellectuals, academic Marxists, and left-leaning social democrats. No doubt, Gramsci has much to offer people interested in consciousness, subjectivity, and culture. But it should always be remembered that, for Gramsci, the study of how we understand phenomena and of how and why particular conceptions of the world are mediated by institutions and filter down into the consciousness of the masses was part of a larger enterprise whose aim was the socialist restructur- ing of capitalist society. His ‘pessimism of the intellect’, so

1. For some aspects of this essay, whose initial arguments reflect the time in which it was writ­ ten (the early 1980s), I am especially indebted to Leonardo Rapone and Giancarlo Bergami. 2. Anderson calls Gramsci, Karl Korsch, and György Lukács ‘the real originators of the whole pattern of Western Marxism’. See Anderson 1976, p. 29. 16 • Chapter One widespread today, was counterbalanced by an ‘optimism of the will’, which seems sorely lacking in the Left circles of the 1980s. Had Gramsci lived on into the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps he would have sympathised with the skepticism of New Left intellectuals today who ask ‘What is socialism, anyway’ or who are rereading Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky with the insights provided to them by Foucault and Derrida. It is not unreasonable to see Gramsci as, in some respects, a precursor of deconstructionism. One can accept the view of Gramsci as a thinker who provided a ‘new and unique reformulation of Marxian theory’.3 His reflections on the role of intellectuals in rationalising systems of politi- cal control and domination would be sufficient – even if he had not had anything else original to say – to make him attractive to the New Left. I would argue, however, that a balanced view of Gramsci requires that we not only acknowledge his contribution to cur- rent ‘cultural radical’ discourse, but that we also situate him unequivocally in the context of the revolutionary struggle to build a new society in accordance with the principles of socialist democracy. To remove him from the struggles and ferment of the 1920s is to neglect a decisive stage in his personal and political development. In Italy, Gramsci wrote in October 1924, the only battle cry that made sense was ‘neither Fascism nor liber- alism: Sovietism!’4 This was the lesson he wanted to teach his co-militants and the Italian people who were being seduced in droves by the rhetoric of nationalism and Fascism. None of the various contemporary appropriations of Gramsci are entirely convinc- ing. New Left emphasis on the anti-authoritarian content of Gramsci’s socialist project, to the exclusion of his tough-minded, resolute stands from 1917 to the 1930s in defence of the Bolshevik Revolution, is matched in its onesidedness by the arguments of Euro- communists and groups to the left of Eurocommunism, including some Trotskyists. At the same time, I would say that orthodox, uncritical defenders of the present system in the Soviet Union are not entitled either to lay undisputed claim to Gramsci’s ideas, since such defence implies a forma mentis that can reconcile rigid bureaucracy and intolerance of even loyal dissent (as in the case of Roy Medvedev) with socialist democracy. Gramsci did believe in unfettered discussion and debate of ideas, although he did not flinch from imposing restraints on openly counterrevolutionary propaganda. James Joll makes this assertion:

Gramsci not only suggested the possibility of a more humane and a more diversified form of Marxism than that used to justify the bureaucratic dictatorship and cruelty of the Soviet régime; he has also given indications of how a communist party in a liberal democratic state might actually hope to attain power.5

3. Piccone 1983, p. 197. 4. Gramsci 1971, pp. 542–4. The article appeared in the semi-clandestine L’Unità on 7 October 1924. 5. Joll 1978, p. 19.