Abstract
In the several phases of his analytical and political activity, Gramsci always identified the origin of Italian socialism’s many shortcomings in the philosophically narrow conceptions of the theorists of the Second International. Although he joined the Italian workers’ party, that did not mean close and organic adherence to its ideological and cultural horizons precisely because Gramsci only got to socialism after engaging in intellectual debates: that can be confirmed by the type of magazine he had already collaborated with or the periodicals he had read during his years in Sardinia. Thus, we do not agree with the statement that, in his first phase in Turin, Gramsci was influenced not only by “Croce and Italian idealism, but also by the theoretical legacy of the party in which he was active, still linked to the myths, vocabulary and worldview originating from evolutionary positivism”.
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Notes
- 1.
Michele Filippini, Una politica di massa. Antonio Gramsci e la rivoluzione della società (Rome, Carocci, 2015), 39.
- 2.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (Turin, Einaudi, 1977), 1233.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid., 1235.
- 5.
Bologna, Zanichelli, 1915.
- 6.
Sillabo is the pontifical document published by Pius IX in 1864, together with the encyclical Quanta cura. The document condemned dozens of “errors” of thought seen as the evil of those times, among them rationalism, scientism, socialism, etc.
- 7.
Domenico Losurdo, Antonio Gramsci dal liberalismo al comunismo critico (Rome, Gamberetti, 1997), 19.
- 8.
Ernesto Ragionieri, Socialdemocrazia tedesca e socialisti italiani 1875–1895 (Milan, Feltrinelli, 1961); ibid., Il marxismo e l’Internazionale (Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1968).
- 9.
Ibid., Alle origini del marxismo della Seconda Internazionale (Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1968), 47.
- 10.
Marcello Mustè, Marxismo e filosofia della praxis. Da Labriola a Gramsci (Rome, Viella, 2018), 19.
- 11.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, cit., 309.
- 12.
Marco Vanzulli, Il marxismo e l’idealismo. Studi su Labriola, Croce, Gentile e Gramsci (Rome, Aracne, 2013), 23.
- 13.
Ibid., 24–5.
- 14.
Marcella Ferrara e Maurizio Ferrara (eds.), Conversando con Togliatti. Note biografiche (Rome, Editori di Cultura Sociale, 1953), 29.
- 15.
“In my youth, I witnessed the Neapolitan revival of Hegelianism. For a long time, I was divided between glossology and philosophy. When I came to Rome as a professor, I was an unconscionable socialist and an avowed opponent of individualism solely on abstract grounds. Then I studied public law and, between 1879 and 1880, was already practically converted to a socialist conception, but much more by the general conception of history than by the internal impulse of a true personal conviction. A slow and continuous approach to the real problems of life, a disgust for political corruption, and contact with workers gradually transformed the scientific socialist in abstracto into a true socialist.” (Antonio Labriola, “Lettera a F. Engels”, April 3, 1890, in Scritti filosofici e politici, Turin, Einaudi, 1973, v. I, 256).
- 16.
“In the three thousand pages he has published so far, [Loria] has always fought socialism and at least three hundred times accused Marx of being a sophist, a mystifier, etc. Loria is not a politician, has no popularity, does not speak to the general public, has no influence and, as a professor, has only one remarkable characteristic, the unwillingness to teach. His writings are rarely read because they are illegible, and the man is not at all esteemed: quite the contrary! This cheering squad was created—and in bad faith—by the ignorant priests of socialism, and he adapted to it because, as he himself told me, ‘great men (sic), such as Bismarck, take care of their ideas and not of their followers’. He said this to me in response to the question I had asked him: ‘Why do you tolerate socialists calling you a socialist if you are not a socialist?’” (Ibid., “Lettera a F. Engels”, August 11, 1894, in Scritti filosofici e politici, cit., 401).
- 17.
Ibid., “Lettera a F. Engels”, June 13, 1894, in Scritti filosofici e politici, cit., 393.
- 18.
Ibid., 402.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, cit., 1858.
- 21.
Marcello Mustè, Marxismo e filosofia della praxis, cit., 47.
- 22.
Antonio Labriola, La concezione materialistica della storia (Bari, Laterza, 1965), 62.
- 23.
Ibid., 200.
- 24.
In this letter, Labriola polemically responds to an article by Antonio De Bella, published in Critica Sociale on June 1, 1897, which mentioned him.
- 25.
Luigi Dal Pane, Antonio Labriola nella politica e nella cultura italiana (Turin, Einaudi, 1975), 340.
- 26.
Antonio Labriola, In memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti (Rome, Newton Compton, 1973).
- 27.
In this regard, we recommend the book by Domenico Losurdo, Dai Fratelli Spaventa a Gramsci. Per una storia politica della fortuna di Hegel in Italia (Naples, La Città del Sole, 2006).
- 28.
Antonio Labriola, Opere, v. I, v. II and v. III (ed. L. Dal Pane, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1959–1962).
- 29.
Ibid., La concezione materialistica della storia, cit., 240.
- 30.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, in MECW (New York, International Publishers, 1996, vol. 35, 19–20.
- 31.
This is what Ernesto Ragionieri affirmed in this regard: “on the other hand, it is not strange that at the end of this text on Feuerbach, Engels claimed, in the famous sentence the German workers’ movement is heir to German classical philosophy, a relationship of ideal heredity that official science rejected or left aside. The linkage between the proletariat and German philosophy, which runs throughout the activity of Marx and Engels and often reappears in their texts, is here formulated in such a way that reaches a critical point as it explains and updates one of the terms of the German workers’ movement, that is, the politically organized and unionistic German working class, and with this announcement, it calls on the Social-Democratic Party to prove theoretically equal to this historical legacy” (Ernesto Ragionieri, Il marxismo e l’Internazionale, cit., 147).
- 32.
Friedrich Engels, Engels to Conrad Schmidt, 5 Aug 1890, in MECW (New York, International Publishers, 2001, vol. 49, 63).
- 33.
Friedrich Engels, Engels to Marx, 8 May 1870, in MECW (New York, International Publishers, 1988, vol. 43, 509).
- 34.
Karl Marx, Marx to Engels, 10 May 1870, in MECW (New York, International Publishers, 1988, vol. 43, 511).
- 35.
Friedrich Engels, Engels to Bloch, 21–22 Sep 1890, in MECW (New York, International Publishers, 2001, vol. 49, 33–34).
- 36.
Gianni Fresu, Lênin leitor de Marx: dialética e determinismo na história do movimento operário (trans. Rita Matos Coitinho, São Paulo, Anita Garibaldi, 2016).
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Fresu, G. (2023). Dialectics Versus Positivism: The Young Gramsci’s Philosophical Background. In: Antonio Gramsci. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15610-6_2
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