Levy, Carl
Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism Syndicalism and Sovversivismo.
The relationship between Antonio Gramsci's Marxism and the anarchist and syndicalist traditions is complex and intriguing but it is overlooked by most of his scholarly interlocutors. I have argued that there are a number of elective affinities between the young Gramsci's unorthodox Marxism and the libertarian socialist tradition, and that Gramsci's concept of industrial democracy, elaborated during the era of the factory councils in Turin (1919- 1920), was shaped through his encounters with anarchists, self-educated workers and formally educated technicians employed by Fiat and others. His relationship to the anarchists runs far deeper than an Italian variation of the tactical political ploy, which Lenin indulged in his anarchist-sounding pronouncements in revolutionary Russia during the spring and early summer of 1917.Here I focus on the pre- Biennio Rosso Gramsci', in order to show that Gramsci's amalgam of libertarian and authoritarian thought was already formulated before he encountered the Leninist model. Three aspects of the pre-Leninist Gramsci's Marxism serve as benchmarks to evaluate the interaction of libertarian thought and action with Gramsci's social thought: voluntarism, prefiguration and his nascent conception of hegemony as is evident in his attitudes towards language, education and free thought.Gramsci's introduction to Marxism was filtered through a philosophical culture of voluntarism that permeated the Italian universities of antebellum Italy, whose myriad variations on the theme were found in European and North American philosophy (actualism, pragmatism, Bergsonism and so on) and were rigorously denounced by Lenin and later by Bukharin (who was roasted for naïve materialism by Gramsci in Prison Notebooks).
| Language | eng |
| Names |
[author] Levy, Carl |
| Subjects |
Anarchismo
Sindacalismo Marxismo
Anarchism
Syndicalism Marxism |
