This article explores the impact of the VASKhNIL conference upon the cultural policy of the Italian Communist Party and Italian communist biology, with particular attention to the period between 1948 and 1951. News of the Moscow session did not appear in the Italian news media until October, 1948, and for the next three years party biologists struggled over whether to translate the official transcript of the proceedings, The Situation in Biological Science, into (...) class='Hi'>Italian. This struggle reveals the complex efforts of the PCI to confirm the ideological and political connection with the Soviet Union, without completely alienating significant milieus of the democratic and antifascist culture in Italy. The apparent impossibility of doing both is indicated by the fact that the project was finally abandoned in March–April, 1951. The article is divided into three sections, each focused on different actors and their response to Lysenkoism. The first section outlines the features of the PCI’s pro-Lysenko campaign, with particular regard to the intellectual militancy and organizational commitment of Emilio Sereni, head of PCI’s Cultural Commission between 1948 and 1951. The second section analyzes the reaction of the three most important figures in Italian communist biology during this period, Massimiliano Aloisi, Franco Graziosi and Emanuele Padoa. The third section interprets the decision not to publish a translation of The Situation in Biological Science as a consequence of the conflicts between PCI cultural program and the editorial policy of the left-wing publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore. (shrink)

In these pages a significant effort is undertaken to bridge the perennial gap between Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. Maria Antonietta Macciocchi is particularly suited to this task. She has been a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) for over twenty years. She participated in the underground during World War II and has served as a foreign correspondent for L'Unità. In 1968, eager to re-establish contact with the Italian working class, Macciocchi accepted the Party's proposal (...) that she become a candidate from parliament from Naples. Before departing from Paris where she had been serving as L'Unità's correspondent she suggested to her friend Louis Althusser that they conduct a political correspondence. (shrink)

This contribution aims to outline the birth and development of the Unione Donne Italiane in regard to its relations with the Partito Comunista Italiano from 1944 to 1963.The present research has drawn mainly from archival sources.UDI was born as a multi-party women’s organization but the hegemony of the Communist women would de facto bring it under the influence of the PCI. The Italian Communist Party tried to perform a normative and normalizing task. By the logic (...) of the Cold War, women were relegated to deal mainly with the defence of peace, both nationally and internationally.From the international point of view, UDI was among the founding organizations of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Gradually, the Unione began to accrue dissent even within the WIDF, leading to an internal struggle on the path to emancipation that the organization was already developing within its national context. (shrink)

This article examines a case study of international Communist propaganda during the Cold War. The Institute of Historical and Socio-Political Research, a historical propaganda organization affiliated to the Romanian Communist Party, succeeded in penetrating the Iron Curtain by distributing its works through a social network provided by the Italian Liberation Movement Institute, and in publishing its works in Italy, with the help of the Gramsci Institute, as well as publishers like Editori Riuniti and Nicola Teti. The (...) ISISP established a mutually beneficial partnership with various Italian actors: ISISP and the regime succeeded in publishing international propaganda; the Italian publishing houses were paid by ISISP to print and distribute their edited volumes, with the double advantage of keeping political ties with the RCP while also protecting their own limited finances. (shrink)

Between the 1960s and the 1970s, Marxism reached its maximum success in Italy, but that phase also corresponded to the crisis of the Italian Communist Party’s cultural hegemony, challenged by both the attacks coming from the New Left and innovative readings of Marx’s works. Marxist historicism, on which the Italian Communist Party had based its cultural policy after the the Second World War, consequently suffered heavy attacks. This article illuminates one of the responses to (...) historicism’s decline, providing an account of the book series La Scienza Nuova, issued by the publishing house Dedalo in Bari and edited by the communist intellectual Mario Spinella, who was able to remain loyal to his party demonstrating, at the same time, cultural autonomy. Also grounding on archival documents, the article posits that Spinella’s aim was to attract New Left readers by selecting books on topics and by authors that were in fashion in Italy and abroad, but incorporating them into a theoretical framework based on Marxist historicism, in order to preserve the latter in an evolving cultural environment. (shrink)

The resiliency and independence of Italian Marxism is often attributed to the influence of Gramsci. This influence arises in part from Gramsci's role as a founder and theoretician of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Yet, his significance arises from his identification with Western Marxism. Gramsci is considered to be a prime representative of this tradition by virtue of his roots in Hegelianism, which is often used to explain how the PCI was spared many of the worst (...) aspects of Stalinism. It is also credited with allowing the PCI to develop its “third way” or “via italiana,” which abandons the accepted Marxist-Leninist approaches to the acquisition of political power and makes the pursuit of parliamentary politics a legitimate enterprise for the communist movement. (shrink)

By analysing the policies and ideas of German social democracy, the British Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party, this article explores their attitude towards science and their imagination of the future in the 1950s. Deeply different, social democrats and communists shared a positivist attitude in favour of scientific progress and high modernity. This painted their attitude towards the space race, peaceful nuclear power and automation. Science was conceived as a neutral power to be supported, but (...) it required political guidance to harness it and turned it into social progress. Thus, their disagreement was over the political implications for capitalist societies experiencing growing prosperity. Science was also a powerful rhetorical argument to castigate the conservatives for failing the nation and allowing it to decline and fall behind its competitors. The article combines comparison and transnational history, innovating the latter by introducing the concepts of horizontal, vertical and antagonistic transnationalism. (shrink)

Within a one-dimensional spatial framework, we deduce that partiesto go negative’, by blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values, increase with their ideological proximity. We test our hypothesis by considering the long period of no-cabinet alternation that characterized both Italy and Japan. In particular, we focus on the (spatial) incentives of the Italian Communist Party and of the Japanese Socialist Party to emphasize on a particular topic related to negative campaigning, i.e. political corruption (...) issues. The status of the perennial opposition held by both parties, together with the existence of several political corruption scandals during the period considered, makes the Italian and the Japanese political systems particularly apt to test our hypothesis. The results, based on data derived from electoral programs, support our theoretical insights. (shrink)

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in (...) general, and political ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an ‘ideology of transition’ which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy. (shrink)

This is an interpretative and evaluative study of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of the Italian Communist Party who died in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment in Fascist jails. It proceeds by a rigorous textual analysis of his Prison Notebooks, the scattered notes he wrote during his incarceration. Professor Finocchiaro explores the nature of Gramsci's dialectical thinking, in order to show in what ways Gramsci was and was not a Marxist, as well as (...) to illustrate correspondences with the work of Hegel, Croce, and Bukharin. The book provides a critical reappraisal of Gramsci as a thinker and of the dialectical approach as a mode of inquiry. (shrink)

This essay focuses on recent autobiographies written by Italian women born in the 1920s who engaged in revolutionary politics during and after the Second World War: Luciana Castellina (La scoperta del mondo, 2011), Bianca Guidetti Serra (Bianca la rossa, 2009), Marisa Ombra (La bella politico, 2010), Marisa Rodano (Del mutare dei tempi, 2008) and Rossana Rossanda (La ragazza del secolo scorso, 2005). In these autobiographies, personal narratives of passionate engagement are entangled with the urgency of antifascist resistance, and with (...) the social and political conflicts that traversed Cold War Italy. Women's multiple forms of political engagement within the Italian Communist Party are analysed, as well as the contradictory, ambivalent connection between Western European communist activists and Eastern European socialist regimes. The intersections between antifascist, communist and women's rights politics are also explored, since some of the authors were leaders of the nation-wide left-wing Union of Italian Women. The autobiographies tell the story of an antifascist, left-wing ‘middle wave’ that fought pioneering battles for women's political and social rights, and narrate its complex, conflictual encounter with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. These writings, therefore, allow us to reflect on changes in gendered subjectivities and revolutionary politics across time and generations. (shrink)

Giovanni Gentile is widely acknowledged as the foundational philosopher of Italian Fascism. He worked in academia as well as government, contributing to the formation of the Italian corporate state and education system under Bennito Mussolini. Gentile continued writing and contributing to the Italian Fascist state until his assassination by the Italian Communist Party in 1944. In The Philosophy of Marx, Gentile critiques the failures of Marxist philosophy as presented by numerous thinkers including Marx himself. (...) Gentile argues that Marx erred in his conception of historical materialism, which led to flaws in Marxist praxis, and presents his view of a more authentically Hegelian philosophy of dialectics and epistemology. According to Gentile, who promoted what he termed "actual idealism," the dialectic was not a mystical, external force, but rather an organic element of life, and required a strong, central state, which could coordinate and fulfill otherwise competing and struggling identities and interests. Antelope Hill is proud to present its original translation of Giovanni Gentile's The Philosophy of Marx originally published in 1899, updated in 1937. This work is fundamental to understanding the politics of the early twentieth century and will remain invaluable to future generations looking to understand the past. (shrink)

This is a concise introduction to the life and work of the Italian militant and political thinker, Antonio Gramsci. As head of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s, Gramsci was arrested and condemned to 20 years' imprisonment by Mussolini's fascist regime. It was during this imprisonment that Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks – over 2,000 pages of profound and influential reflections on history, culture, politics, philosophy and revolution. An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci retraces the (...) trajectory of Gramsci's life, before examining his conceptions of culture, politics and philosophy. Gramsci's writings are then interpreted through the lens of his most famous concept, that of 'hegemony'; Gramsci's thought is then extended and applied to 'think through' contemporary problems to illustrate his distinctive historical methodology. The book concludes with a valuable examination of Gramsci's legacy today and useful tips for further reading. George Hoare and Nathan Sperber make Gramsci accessible for students of history, politics and philosophy keen to understand this seminal figure in 20th-century intellectual history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article deals with the early career of the literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa, one of the founders of the operaismo movement, a Marxist tendency advocating the management of factories by workers through bottom-up councils. It outlines the role he assigned to literature and culture, investigating his criticism first against the non-revolutionary cultural politics of the Italian Communist Party, notoriously through his book Scrittori e popolo and his writings for the periodical classe operaia, then identifying a (...) transition from a destructive approach against any culture based on values to the use of cultural disciplines purely as techniques. The article posits that this instrumental understanding of culture depended on Asor Rosa’s political choice to take the perspective of the working class, in order to use culture itself for social analysis. In the second half of the decade, contributing to the periodicals Angelus novus and Contropiano, he still considered culture ineffective as a way towards revolution, but he began to value the great works of ʻbourgeois’ literature for their ability to penetrate the middle-class spirit and undermine capitalist society. The article concludes that, despite his changing idea of culture, Asor Rosa’s opinions on the intellectual’s task fit the traditional concept of it. (shrink)

Born in 1891 in Sardinia, Gramsci studied in Turin and in 1919 founded, together with Palmiro Togliatti, the Ordine Nuovo, a journal which tried to give expression to the aims of the council movement, which developed during those years in the industrial cities of northern Italy. In 1921 he was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party and, after the fall of the ultra‐leftist leadership headed by Bordiga, became in 1924 the Party's general secretary. Imprisoned (...) by the Fascist regime in 1926, he spent the rest of his life in jail. He was freed in 1937, a few days before his death. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Quaderni piacentini, set up in 1962 by Piergiorgio Bellocchio and Grazia Cherchi, was probably the most iconic leftist periodical in Italy before 1968. Its criticism against both the Italian Communist Party for its non-revolutionary policy and the reformist centre-left coalition, its uncompromising ethics, and its exploring into non-orthodox Marxist approaches made it representative of the intellectual New Left in Italy, against the background of advanced industrialization. This article explores the changing perception of the role of intellectuals (...) in society from classic forms of an elitist political involvement to the desired identification with the masses. It argues that between the two different ways to approach culture that intersected in Quaderni piacentini and characterized the debate around 1968, namely the one expressed by Franco Fortini – advocate of the function of intellectuals and of the use of literature for political purposes – and the one supported by Alberto Asor Rosa – convinced of the need for a self-destruction of traditional ʻbourgeois' disciplines – the periodical tended to side with the former, in order to keep culture a credible and legitimate tool for militancy. (shrink)

This essay critically reconstructs the concept of ‘democratic dictatorship’ which Georg Lukács’s outlines in Blum Theses of 1928. The essay tackles the birth of the Communist Party of Hungary, particularly focusing on its factional struggles during the 1920s. Secondly, the main contents of the Blum Theses, compared with the debate on the ‘Republican Assembly’ in the Italian Communist Party will be discussed. Finally, the essay examines the two most rooted interpretive prejudices concerning the Blum Theses, (...) i.e. their alleged forecasting character towards ‘Popular Front’ strategy and their purported distance from ‘Socialfascism’. (shrink)

Tra le figure più importanti del dibattito filosofico italiano del Novecento, Antonio Banfi ha svolto nell'Italia del secondo dopoguerra anche un ruolo politico di rilievo come senatore del PCI. La sua interpretazione del marxismo ha presentato una forte accentuazione umanistica. Tra i suoi scolari filosofi e storici della filosofia come Giulio Preti, Enzo Paci, Remo Cantoni, Paolo Rossi. Il saggio prende in esame la prima fase della riflessione filosofica di Banfi, nella quale ha una importanza decisiva la conoscenza diretta del (...) dibattito tedesco tra le due guerre mondiali, in primo luogo della fenomenologia di Husserl e della ontologia di N. Hartmann. I Principi di una teoria della ragione - libro apparso alla fine degli anni '20 - e poi una serie di incisivi saggi degli anni '30 documentano una conoscenza approfondita e critica di un dibattito di cui mostrerà di nutrirsi in misura decisiva l'interpretazione di Banfi non solo di Hegel, ma anche di Marx. Among the leading philosophers in Italy during the 20th century, Antonio Banfi played an important role not only in the cultural debate during the 1930s and the 1940s, but also in the political scene of post-war Italy, advocating - as a representative of the Italian Communist Party in Italian Senate - a liberal, humanist view of Marxism. Among his students were influential philosophers and historians of philosophy such as Giulio Preti, Enzo Paci, Remo Cantoni and Paolo Rossi. This paper investigates the first phase of Banfi's philosophical development, an analysis of which must include a scrutiny of Banfi's deep indebtedness to German debate between the two World Wars, primarily Husserl's phenomenology and Hartmann's critical ontology. Banfi's phenomenological apprenticeship at the school of Husserl, and the sensitive and critical attitude of his presentation of the German debate in his Principi di una teoria della ragione, are of substantial importance in nourishing his later interpretation of Hegel and Marx. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci is one of those philosophers, like Socrates, whose philosophizing consists in the critical examination of particular practical problems in terms of certain fundamental concepts. To Socrates' well known moral problems correspond Gramsci's concern with such things as improving the condition of subaltern classes, the interaction between intellectual elites and popular masses, the democratic operation of a political party, the viability of alternative models of revolution which differ from Bolshevism, and the religious component of political activity and political (...) aspects of religions. And to the Socratic concepts that are so familiar to philosophers correspond Gramsci's notions of hegemony, passive revolution, the modern "Prince," philosophy of praxis, integral journalism, Americanism and Fordism, the national-popular, Jacobinism, and folklore. Thus the proper philosophical appreciation of Gramsci has to overcome the widespread equation of philosophy with system, as well as two more external obstacles: the Franco-German hegemony over "continental philosophy" has the effect of relegating this Italian giant to the status of an unavoidably minor, however quaint, figure; and Gramsci's personal involvement with the political fortunes and misfortunes of the Italian Communist Party leads many philosophers to dismiss him as being merely a political leader. (shrink)

Della Volpe was a professor of philosophy, one of the leading theoreticians of the Italian Communist Party in the 50s and 60s, and one of the few prominent intellectuals to retain party membership following the Hungarian revolt. Nonetheless, his Marxism is distinctly heterodox. The main thrust of Rousseau and Marx, which contains an essay of that name as well as several short papers on Soviet legality and "materialist methodology," is to establish certain continuities between Marx’s thought (...) and earlier philosophy. Marx is here depicted as attempting to solve a problem first stated by Rousseau, the problem of egalitarian liberty, and as applying the logic of modern experimental science to moral and political questions. (shrink)

The diffusion of Vygotsky’s work in Italy was analysed by first considering the issues related to the translation of his texts since the 1970s, particularly with regard to the project promoted by the publishing house of the Italian Communist Party and supervised by the author of this article. Second, the reception of cultural-historical theory was discussed in the context of Italian psychology and medicine in the 1970s and 1980s. After an early acceptance of Pavlovian theory by (...) a few Italian psychologists linked to the Communist Party, the need was felt to overcome physiological reductionism in relation to the new social and psychological problems connected with the development of Italian society. Finally, a brief reference was made to Italian neo-Vygotskyan trends in various areas of contemporary psychological research. (shrink)

This book has appeared in the Italian Literature and Thought Series of Yale University Press, and not by chance the cover bears the green, white, and red of the Italian flag. The book is on political philosophy, although its subject matter is restricted to the role of culture. Finocchiaro investigates two Italian thinkers: the conservative Gaetano Mosca, author of The Ruling Class, and the communist Antonio Gramsci, founding father of the Italian Communist Party (...) and author of the Prison Notebooks. While Mosca is a classic source for the elitist school in political sociology, Gramsci is the originator of a cultural version of Marxism that proved to be immune to the intellectual criticism and economic failures that have rendered other versions obsolete. The point Finocchiaro makes is that Mosca and Gramsci belong to the same tradition of political theory, namely “democratic elitism” and that their differences are eventually far smaller than assumed. According to Finocchiaro, Gramsci is much less of a political revolutionary, and Mosca much closer to the political center and Gramsci and Mosca are closer to each other than commonly supposed. Besides, Finocchiaro’s interpretation also implies that “theoretically, intellectually, and conceptually they are much more radical than is ordinarily believed because democratic elitism represents an extremely distinctive orientation in political theory”. Hence Finocchiaro’s interpretation “also undermines the viability of the dichotomy between the Left and the Right,” which also explains the reference to what is “beyond right and left” in the title. (shrink)

Contents: The Communist Party and the politics of cultural change in postwar Italy, 1945-50 / Stephen Gundle -- Writing and the real world : Italian narrative in the period of reconstruction / Michael Caesar -- The making and unmaking of Neorealism in postwar Italy / David Forgacs -- The place of Neorealism in Italian cinema from 1945 to 1954 / Christopher Wagstaff -- Tradition and social change in the French and Italian cinemas of the reconstruction (...) / Pierre Sorlin -- Humanism and national unity : the ideological reconstruction of France / Michael Kelly -- Les Lettres Franca̜ises and the failure of the French postwar "Renaissance" / Nicholas Hewitt -- The reconstruction of culture : Peuple et Culture and the popular education movement / Brian Rigby. The chameleon rearguard of cultural tradition : the case of Jacques Laurent / Colin Nettelbeck -- German literature in 1945 : liberation for a new beginning / Helmut Peitsch -- Continuity or change? : aspects of West German writing after 1945 / Keith Bullivant -- West German theatre in the period of reconstruction / Ursula Fries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

This study begins by briefl,y examining the methodological premises underlying many post-war studies of communist parties by Western scholars. The analysis proceeds to consider the phenomenon of Eurocommunism and how many traditional studies of European communism have not allowed for the rich national and political traditions in Italy, Spain and France. The brief history of Eurocommunism - culminating in the events leading up to the 1977 Madrid «summit» - is seen as the accumulated need of the Italian, Spanish, (...) and French Communist Parties to assert their national identitiesand adapt to the changing demands of their individual national political contexts. The analysis continues with a resumé of the current strategies of the PCI, PCE, and PCF in the late 1970s, comparing and contrasting similarities and differences on domestic levels. Lastly, the relations between the Eurocommunist parties and the Soviet Union are examined. (shrink)

In the present paper we analyze the formation and the development of Antonio Gramsci, Italian Marxist theoretician, ideas during and after the 1917 Russian revolution. Beginning as journalist and militant in the Italian Socialist Party Turin branch, Gramsci saw in the revolutionary events in Russia the presence of the working class' "strength”, as the main actor in transforming the society in a "collective body”. After 1917, during the "Biennio rosso” in 1919-1920, Gramsci was the chief redactor of (...) "Ordine Nuovo” review, from which appealed to the Italian workers to follow the Bolshevik experience, emphasizing their "spiritual strength”. Then, during his days jailed as political prisoner by Fascists, the Communist leader reflected on the concepts of "hegemony”, "passive revolution”, and on the role of the intellectuals into the society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

In the last five years, the Italian political system registered its most important crisis. All parties, existing since the second world war, disappeared or were greatly transformed. The main purpose of this article is to analyse the deepest causes of the first Italian republic's collapse, following some specific interpretations of ltalian political observers.L. Ricolfi bases his theory on the emergence of "Lega" and the return of laïque culture in Italy. The old christian democratic and communist parties will (...) suffer the most from these changes.A. Sofri emphasizes the identity of northern regionalism between the "Lega" and the "Pool of Milan". A real opposition emerges between the judges of Milan and the politicians of Rome.S. Romano and M.L. Salvadori prefer the historical approach: for them, the events of1990-1994 are very similar to what happened in 1922-1926and in 1943-1945. The absence of a pacific alternative and the "ideological war" among political forces produce the effect that every change in Italian politics implies an end of regime.L. Ornaghi and V.B. Parsi deal with the "values" of citizens which, very often, do not correspond to the values of old politicians. For them, a democracy for the political parties -as structured in the last 45 years- must give priority to a democracy for the citizens. (shrink)

THE ITALIAN CASE - FROM LABRIOLA TO GRAMSCITaking The Communist Manifesto as a point of departure, this article intends to emphasize the aporia in the works of Marx between Marx the scientist og Marx the politician, that furthermore reflects some of the main fractures between on one hand the theoretical interpretation of the capitalistic mode of production and on the other hand the strategic approaches characterizing the attempts of the European Socialist parties and the early European labour movement (...) to overcome the ever returning crisis and the deep-rooted class conflicts. The specific Italian experiences offer the opportunity not only to discuss the philosophical and scientific contents of historical materialism but also to reactualize the political categories of democracy vis-à-vis the dictatorship of the proletariat and permanent revolution. In this respect, Antonio Labriola was a leading figure in the Italian debate of Marxism in the years between the 18th and the 19th Centuries, while Antonio Gramsci in the 1930ies revised the Marxist-Leninist tradition in the light of Fascism and the Stalinistic impasse of the Russian revolution. (shrink)

Ten years after they were set up, the Italian regions have fallen into general discredit. They are discredited by the central government who regards them as a source of support for the opposing Communist Party and has sought to undermine this reform by depriving the regions of all true autonomy. The regions are discredited by the public opinion by not fulfilling the expectations placed in them. Such an assessment does not stand up to a close examination of (...) regional practices : some geographical differences rapidly become obvious, but especially evident are the political differences. In fact, the regions are the product of an apparent agreement between the political parties and have always suffered from political bargaining which explains the national scale of the issues raised at the last elections. Strengthened by the favorable results obtained in certain regions, the Communist Party was quick to turn this statement of the electoral opinion into a « referendum » about the newly formed Cossiga government. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 495 Perhaps a word should be added about those who deny that Sein und Zeit (or any of Heidegger's later work) has any bearing on theology. Both K. LOwith and H. Jonas claim that Heidegger operates under certain ontic-ontological presuppositions that are taken from and lead to an ontic negation of theology.'2 In a lecture delivered at Drew University Jonas even accused Heidegger of paganism and fatalism.'3 (...) Anybody familiar with Heidegger's thinking knows, of course, how wrong this is. In an interview Heidegger granted to the magazine der Spiegel in 1966, mainly to clarify his political activity during the Nazi period, the question of God entered into the discussion. (The interview was published only after his death in 1976 as Heidegger had stipulated.) In connection with the dangers involved in our technological society Heidegger said, "Only a God may save us. For us there remains the only possible way to prepare, through thinking and poeticizing, a readiness for the appearance of God or the absence of God [and our] doom: that we will perish in the face of the absent God.",4 These are only a few examples of the many authors Siefert discusses in her instructive book. The language is complicated, but the richness of the material as well as Siefert's keen insight reward the reader. An extensive bibliography and an index are added. ELISABETHFE1STHIRSCH Trenton State College On Materialism. By Sebastiano Timpanaro. (London: NLB, 1975. Pp. 254. $15.50) Sebastiano Timpanaro has published as a classical philologist, has been a militant member of Italian socialist parties since 1945, and has been most influenced by Leopardi, a nineteenthcentury Lucretian hedonist and materialist. His socialist and Leopardian interests are brought together in this work, which is a criticism of the tendencies in Western European Marxism (dominated by the Frankfurt school, existentialists, and structuralists) toward idealism and humanism, and their "erroneous rejection" of the biological and physical aspects of Marxism, to leave only historical materialism. Timpanaro claims that the interpretations of the Frankfurt school and Althusser "allow very little of Marxism to survive"; they are falsely antiscientific and adopt a Platonistic conception of science. From materialism he takes as his own point of departure certain hedonistic and pessimistic themes (is that the genuine Marxism?) that reached their height in Leopardi: a social and historical optimism regarding "communism as a now certain goal of human history" (in this he ignores that Marx in the Manuscripts said that communism is not the goal of, but only a stage in, human history); and "pessimism with respect to nature's oppression of man, which would continue to be a cause of unhappiness even in communist society." Again Timpanaro ignores the Manuscripts and Grundrisse where Marx reminds us that nature is our body with which we are in interaction. Timpanaro's pessimism can be understood as a result of the alienation we experience because of the attitudes of conquest and domination of nature--attitudes still endorsed by him in his claim that the animal merely uses nature, while man, who can set goals for himself and use means to his ends, can master nature. But we are in a position, historically, where our very survival depends on our moving back into harmony with nature, by overcoming that alienation. Timpanaro is not yet free of that outdated, bourgeois worldview; his is in accord with the view of capitalism, of which the final contradiction may be the ecological crisis of pollution and the depletion of resources in the name of "necessary" growth. Leopardi's materialist pessimism predicated human solidarity 12On LOwithsee Siefert, pp. 173-180. "On Jonas see Siefert, pp. 180-184,esp. p. 181 n. where Siefert refers to Father Richardson's answer to Jonas. 14May 31, 1976, p. 209. 496 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY upon the foundation of the struggle against nature, whereas Marx based the overcoming of our alienation from nature on the reestablishment of an equilibrium and solidarity with nature, our body. In his treatment of structuralism, Timpanaro is not only wallowing in his nineteenthcentury worldview, but he stoops to the lowest level of labeling and name calling, often without supporting arguments, of which dogmatic Marxists are... (shrink)

The history of genetics and the evolutionary theory in the USSR is multidimensional. Only in the 1920s after the October Revolution, and due in large part to that Revolution, the science of genetics arose in Soviet Russia. Genetics was limited, but not obliterated in the second half of the 1950s, and was restored in the late 1960s, after the resignation of Nikita S. Khrushchev. In the subsequent period, Soviet genetics experienced a resurgence, though one not as successful as geneticists would (...) have liked. The Communist party bodies interfered constantly, but with different consequences for the development of genetics than when the earlier periods. The main troubles for Soviet genetics occurred during the unique, well-known, most contradictory, and tragic Stalinist period. The start date for the defeat of genetics is also known—August, 1948. In the social history of science and especially in the history of evolutionary biology it is natural, necessary, and even expected to adopt an evolutionary approach. In particular, historians of science need to consider and explain the evolution and dependence of Soviet science in regards to the evolution of Soviet society, the Soviet state, and the Communist party. This evolutionary perspective reflects the standards of evolutionary biology, evolutionary macrosociology, and also the history of science. (shrink)

Exhibitions dedicated to the theme of "Red China" occupy an important place in the dissemination of "red" culture, the continuity of the "red" gene and the intensification of "red" education. They reflect the political agenda, have a distinct content and the uniqueness of the text material. Being an important element of the spread of "red" culture, exhibitions on the theme of "Red China" integrate elements of this culture into people's daily lives and play an active role in preserving and multiplying (...) the "red" gene. In this article, the systematization and generalization of knowledge in the field of narrative strategy of exhibitions on the theme of "Red China" is carried out from the point of view of ontology, structure and narrative carrier, which at the present stage is important for building a strong socialist ideology. Exhibitions on the theme of "Red China" are an important way of materialization, visualization and dissemination of "red" culture, as well as an effective means of its popularization. The study found that the "Red" exhibitions should have a "revolutionary content", have a "political character", be "mutually recognized by the authorities and the people", take on the main responsibility for providing people with common access to material and spiritual culture. From the point of view of the communication function of the "red" exhibitions, they are an important means of organizing ideological and political education by the Communist Party of China, strengthening social harmony and promoting basic values. (shrink)

Based on qualitative analysis of the Soviet press and official state documents, this article argues that the Communist Party was, counter intuitively, an agent of capitalist dispositions in the Soviet Union during 1970s-1980s. Understanding the spirit of capitalism not simply as an ascetic ethos but in broader terms of the cult of individualism, I demonstrate that the Soviet party-state promoted ideas and values of individuality, self-expression, and pleasure seeking in the areas of work and consumption. By broadening (...) our conception of the spirit of capitalism, tracing the formation of capitalist dispositions as well as institutions, and showing that the culture of capitalism can come from within the old regime, I further the agenda of neoclassical sociology of studying varieties of origins, paths, and destinations of modern capitalisms. (shrink)

The Communist Party USA's reputation for being in the forefront of the fight against African American oppression was forged in the 1930s as the result of the adoption of the Communist International's position that African Americans were an oppressed nationality. According to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, this entitled African Americans to the right to self-determination in that area of the country where they were a majority (the Black Belt South) and equal social and political rights throughout the country. The (...) organizational internalization of this position was accomplished through numerous articles in the Party's press, which were used as educational tools for the membership. The most sustained organizing work in the South occurred in Alabama with the organizing of the Share Croppers Union (SCU). A study of the Party and the SCU in Alabama during the 1930s helps demonstrate the significance of the self-determination position and its importance in shaping the work of the Party among African Americans. (shrink)

The paper aims at tracing a collective portrait and the trajectories of a group of about forty women active in the communist movement after Poland had regained independence, and after the Second World War. I explore the relations between gender, communist activity, and the changing circumstances of the communist movement. I argue that interwar activities shaped women communists as radical, uncompromising, and questioning traditional femininity political agents, accepted as comrades at every organisational level. This image and identity, (...) though, contributed to the creation of the gender division of political work after the war, when women were assigned specific roles as guardians of revolutionary past. The post-war situation of state socialism with the communist party as the ruling party assigned women mainly to invisible, secondary positions. (shrink)