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Italian Marxism
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.
210 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1982
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July 31, 2023
"With the eventual publication of almost all of the available documents, the myth of the uninterrupted continuity from Gramsci to the present had to explode, but not until it was too late to rectify the political and organisational consequences of the Italian Communist Party" (166).
"Only if translated into a political project of socialist modernisation, continuous with the Spaventa-Labriola tradition of which it is an integral component, can the Gramscian root of the Italian Communist Party resurrect as a qualitatively distinct alternative to the various strategies capitalist rationalisation now under consideration in Italy and Europe in general" (200).
This is a good study of the Italian Marxist tradition. Whilst the history of the Partito Comunista Italiano (or PCI) isn't outlined, it is clear that this book is for Piccone an attempt to resurrect the humanistic spirit of Gramsci, Labriola, and Spaventa and inject that very spirit into the PCI. During the 1980s, Marxism was in a crisis. The high point of academic theory was in decline, and rather than debate Althusser, Poulantzas, and Miliband, Marxist political parties were vying for power. The PCI, like the Parti communiste français (PCF), was losing the electoral gains that it had in the 1970s, and the oncoming tide of neoliberalism was in the air.
The PCI was moving towards a Eurocommunist position, pushing against the Soviet Union, and instead embracing the legacy of Antonio Gramsci. Yet, whilst this was happening Marxist theory was becoming even more absorbed and academicised by educational institutions. "[...]Marxism had turned into an intellectual fad or simply another academic oddity[...] in terms of a more general exhaustion of thought, which, in the desperate effort to hang onto a reef of pseudo-originality in a sea of conformity, exploits ambiguity and confusion to recycle worn-out ideas as fresh insights" (ix). This crisis, for Piccone was evident in the tradition he sought to revive.
It is here that Piccone seeks to place Italian Marxism within the general trajectory of Western, that is non-Soviet, and Hegelian-Marxism. It is here that Piccone points out the similarities between Gramsci, Lukacs, Spaventa, and Karl Korsch. From the post-Hegelian tradition, Bendetto Croce, Bertrando Spaventa, Atonio Labriola, like their German counterparts during this period, saw the decline of liberalism and mapped this onto their political and philosophical radicalisation. Whilst Croce's students like Giovanni Gentile fell for fascism, Spaventa and Labriola moved to Marxism.
Now, whilst I don't know much about the history of Italian philosophy, I can only commend Piccone on his ability to combine deep scholarship with readability. Like his colleague and friend Russell Jacoby, (whose Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism he cites) Piccone writes for educated and interested readers, and not just the four specialists who would read this.
Chapter 1: The Cultural Background sees Piccone outlining the roots of 19th century Hegelianism within Italy, and the difficulty for Marxists to actually read the works of the master. Arising out of an anti-state and anti-Catholic, the left Hegelians sought to read Hegel not as a defender of the status quo, but as an intellectual of the French Revolution. Spaventa stood out as Hegel's chief Italian interpreter, and Labriola stood as Italy's leading philosopher. These combined figures influenced both Palmiro Togliatti and Antonio Gramsci who were the leaders of the Italian Communist Party.
Chapters 2: Marxism in Italy and 3: From Philosophy to Politics continues his explanation of this trend of thought, where figures like Labriola saw liberalism and utopian socialism as failing to fully comprehend the state and Italian society that they lived in. Togliatti, Bordiga, and Gramsci's views are all expounded, and the tactics which arose from the philosophical outlook (or simply put praxis) explained.
Chapter 4: Gramsci's Marxism versus Lenin sees Piccone 'demystify' Gramsci. He outlines the sociohistorical context of Gramsci's works, and attempts to bat away the popular misconceptions of Gramsci as either a submissive follower of Lenin and Stalin, and as a reformist social democrat. Lukacs described orthodox Marxism as fidelity to method, and Gramsci took a similar view, noting that the Russian Revolution was a "revolution against Capital". By this he meant that the idea that capitalism must be developed in Russia for a revolution to occur was shattered. The Russians proved that Marxism didn't consist of a set of religious texts and iron-clad predictions, but a spirit, a perspective, a dialectical one.
"Only if translated into a political project of socialist modernisation, continuous with the Spaventa-Labriola tradition of which it is an integral component, can the Gramscian root of the Italian Communist Party resurrect as a qualitatively distinct alternative to the various strategies capitalist rationalisation now under consideration in Italy and Europe in general" (200).
This is a good study of the Italian Marxist tradition. Whilst the history of the Partito Comunista Italiano (or PCI) isn't outlined, it is clear that this book is for Piccone an attempt to resurrect the humanistic spirit of Gramsci, Labriola, and Spaventa and inject that very spirit into the PCI. During the 1980s, Marxism was in a crisis. The high point of academic theory was in decline, and rather than debate Althusser, Poulantzas, and Miliband, Marxist political parties were vying for power. The PCI, like the Parti communiste français (PCF), was losing the electoral gains that it had in the 1970s, and the oncoming tide of neoliberalism was in the air.
The PCI was moving towards a Eurocommunist position, pushing against the Soviet Union, and instead embracing the legacy of Antonio Gramsci. Yet, whilst this was happening Marxist theory was becoming even more absorbed and academicised by educational institutions. "[...]Marxism had turned into an intellectual fad or simply another academic oddity[...] in terms of a more general exhaustion of thought, which, in the desperate effort to hang onto a reef of pseudo-originality in a sea of conformity, exploits ambiguity and confusion to recycle worn-out ideas as fresh insights" (ix). This crisis, for Piccone was evident in the tradition he sought to revive.
It is here that Piccone seeks to place Italian Marxism within the general trajectory of Western, that is non-Soviet, and Hegelian-Marxism. It is here that Piccone points out the similarities between Gramsci, Lukacs, Spaventa, and Karl Korsch. From the post-Hegelian tradition, Bendetto Croce, Bertrando Spaventa, Atonio Labriola, like their German counterparts during this period, saw the decline of liberalism and mapped this onto their political and philosophical radicalisation. Whilst Croce's students like Giovanni Gentile fell for fascism, Spaventa and Labriola moved to Marxism.
Now, whilst I don't know much about the history of Italian philosophy, I can only commend Piccone on his ability to combine deep scholarship with readability. Like his colleague and friend Russell Jacoby, (whose Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism he cites) Piccone writes for educated and interested readers, and not just the four specialists who would read this.
Chapter 1: The Cultural Background sees Piccone outlining the roots of 19th century Hegelianism within Italy, and the difficulty for Marxists to actually read the works of the master. Arising out of an anti-state and anti-Catholic, the left Hegelians sought to read Hegel not as a defender of the status quo, but as an intellectual of the French Revolution. Spaventa stood out as Hegel's chief Italian interpreter, and Labriola stood as Italy's leading philosopher. These combined figures influenced both Palmiro Togliatti and Antonio Gramsci who were the leaders of the Italian Communist Party.
Chapters 2: Marxism in Italy and 3: From Philosophy to Politics continues his explanation of this trend of thought, where figures like Labriola saw liberalism and utopian socialism as failing to fully comprehend the state and Italian society that they lived in. Togliatti, Bordiga, and Gramsci's views are all expounded, and the tactics which arose from the philosophical outlook (or simply put praxis) explained.
Chapter 4: Gramsci's Marxism versus Lenin sees Piccone 'demystify' Gramsci. He outlines the sociohistorical context of Gramsci's works, and attempts to bat away the popular misconceptions of Gramsci as either a submissive follower of Lenin and Stalin, and as a reformist social democrat. Lukacs described orthodox Marxism as fidelity to method, and Gramsci took a similar view, noting that the Russian Revolution was a "revolution against Capital". By this he meant that the idea that capitalism must be developed in Russia for a revolution to occur was shattered. The Russians proved that Marxism didn't consist of a set of religious texts and iron-clad predictions, but a spirit, a perspective, a dialectical one.
May 11, 2023
Paar brauchbare historische Informationen drin, besonders über den Hegelianismus in Italien und dessen Einfluss auf die italienischen Marxismus. Hier werden in Deutschland wenig bekannte Personen dargestellt, nicht nur Labriola und Croce, die man noch vom Namen her kennt, sondern besonders auch die Spaventa-Brüder.
Ansonsten allerdings ist das Buch fürchterlich. Piccone hat offenbar das Selbstbild eines großen Denkers, aber jedes Mal, wenn er von der einfachen Reproduktion geschichtlicher Ereignisse oder des Denkens anderer abweicht, blamiert er sich mit seinen philosophischen Versuchen (Vulgär-Hegelianismus verbindet sich hier mit Vulgär-Marxismus, dazu kann der Mann auch kein klares geschweige den gründliches Arguement entwickeln, wenn sein Leben davon abhinge) und historischen Deutungen, von den widerwärtigen politischen Interpretationen ganz zu schweigen (er sagt an einer Stelle ausdrücklich, dass die UDSSR der Stalin-Zeit schlimmer war als alles, was das Bürgertum getan hat; da sind wir dann schon bei Holocaust-Relativierung und Kolonialismus-Relativierung angekommen). Lenin versteht er ungefähr so gut wie jeder andere Bourgeois.
Es kündigt sich in den politischen Anschauungen des Autors schon hier das Ende dieser gesamten Gruppe rund um das Telos-Magazin in der Rehabilitation Carl Schmitts an.
Ansonsten allerdings ist das Buch fürchterlich. Piccone hat offenbar das Selbstbild eines großen Denkers, aber jedes Mal, wenn er von der einfachen Reproduktion geschichtlicher Ereignisse oder des Denkens anderer abweicht, blamiert er sich mit seinen philosophischen Versuchen (Vulgär-Hegelianismus verbindet sich hier mit Vulgär-Marxismus, dazu kann der Mann auch kein klares geschweige den gründliches Arguement entwickeln, wenn sein Leben davon abhinge) und historischen Deutungen, von den widerwärtigen politischen Interpretationen ganz zu schweigen (er sagt an einer Stelle ausdrücklich, dass die UDSSR der Stalin-Zeit schlimmer war als alles, was das Bürgertum getan hat; da sind wir dann schon bei Holocaust-Relativierung und Kolonialismus-Relativierung angekommen). Lenin versteht er ungefähr so gut wie jeder andere Bourgeois.
Es kündigt sich in den politischen Anschauungen des Autors schon hier das Ende dieser gesamten Gruppe rund um das Telos-Magazin in der Rehabilitation Carl Schmitts an.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews