Reading Antonio Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks

This reading group is open to people who have never read Gramsci all the way through to seasoned Gramsci specialists.

All reading materials will be supplied digitally but if you want your own hard copy our main text is Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith.

It is not necessary to keep pace with the weekly reading to join in but the more you can read the more you will get out of it.

The course is 12 weeks long with a one week break and is led by Mike Wayne.

Week One: (Feb 28) : Editors’ Introduction.

We need a bit of context before we dive into Gramsci’s Prison notes so we will start with the introduction by the editors of SPN which covers Gramsci’s political life before his arrest in 1926. We will also get a feel of Gramsci directly by reading two short articles by him: ‘The Revolution against Capital’ (1917) and ‘To the Workshop Delegates of the Fiat Centro and Brevetti Plants’ (1919).

Week Two: (Mar 6th): ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1926)

This is Gramsci’s last essay prior to his arrest by the Fascist authorities and it anticipates a number of key themes that would be taken up in the Prison Notebooks, especially the concept of Hegemony.

Week 3 & 4: (Mar 13th/20th): ‘Notes on Italian History’.

We will depart from the strict sequential ordering of the essays in Selections, and start with the ‘Notes on Italian History’ which follows on logically from the ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’. Here Gramsci constructs an extended comparison between the French Jacobins of the French revolution and the leaders of the Italian Risorgimento. He indicts the latter for a failure to build a revolutionary hegemonic project. However, as the Southern Question shows, an elite model of hegemony was developed at the turn of the century.

Week Break

Week 5 (Apr 3rd) : ‘The Intellectuals’ and ‘On Education’.

Recognising the importance of intellectuals in organising the modern world was a distinctive feature of Gramsci’s Marxism as was his awareness of how central education is as a general principle of modern life as well as a specific formal institutional function.

Weeks 6 and 7: (Apr 10th/17th): ‘Notes on Politics: The Modern Prince’.

Here Gramsci develops his historiography (e.g. the concept of passive revolution) and his thinking on politics and parties and how to conceptualise their relationship to economics and classes within Marxist thought. He develops further his master concept of hegemony as part of his understanding of the changing nature of capitalist state formation from the late nineteenth century onwards.

Weeks 8 and 9: (Apr 24th/May 1st): ‘State and Civil Society’.

Gramsci elaborates further on the concept of hegemony as he discusses the relationship between state and civil society. The state as the law of force and the force of law enters into complex relationships with civil society in the modern era. Gramsci also discusses the crisis of hegemony, when the law of force becomes accentuated. This chapter is full of methodological innovations that Gramsci brings to Marxism such as his ‘molecular’ analysis, concept stretching and ‘dialogic’ method.

Week 10: (May 8th) ‘Americanism and Fordism’

This is Gramsci’s most extended analysis of the ‘economic base’ and its relationship to state and civil society. It is pretty unorthodox compared to standard Marxist economic analysis of the time, although there are echoes of Trotsky’s thematics (psychoanalysis and combined and uneven development). Here Gramsci explores how monopoly capitalism in America has transformed state and civil society and creates pressures on Europe to also change.

Week 11: (May 15th) ‘The Philosophy of Praxis: The Study of Philosophy’

This essay picks up on themes from week 5. Gramsci’s fascinating reconceptualization of philosophy and its relationship with politics and everyday life, entails a radical democratisation of philosophy. This in turn is the basis for what Gramsci calls ‘the philosophy of praxis’, a non-economistic, democratic Marxism working through the problems and tensions between what we know and what we do as classes, class fractions and as an entire civilisation (think climate change for example). Key concepts to consider here are organic intellectuals, common-sense, subalternity and a historicist understanding of what it is to be human.

Week 12: (May 22nd) The Philosophy of Praxis: ‘Problems of Marxism’.

Gramsci begins with another incredibly rich account of how different types of intellectuals have shaped the ‘idealist’ and ‘materialist’ currents of Marxism but typically without synthesising these currents into a coherent philosophy (of praxis). This chapter explores further Gramsci’s conception of the philosophy of praxis that overcomes the antinomy between the separation of morality and culture from material forces in idealism and the exclusion of consciousness from the natural and social forces of life in materialism. Gramsci’s essay culminates in a devastating critique of an example of ‘metaphysical’ Marxism offered by Russian revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin in his Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology. Here Gramsci offers a completely different model of how Marxism should conduct itself as a 'counter-hegemonic' political practice.