Antonio Gramsci: Negative Aspects of His Politics, Research Paper Example

Gramsci’s life and politics are now known mainly to scholars and Italian socialist/labor intellectuals. I would bet that most young Italians know Gramsci at best only vaguely. In the United States, he is unknown to the general public. There was no agreement in his lifetime on his contributions, positive or negative (he was both praised and arrested). There is today still no standard by which to judge him. So I can only add my own thesis on a subset of Gramsci’s general Marxist ideas. He wrote of the different economic fates of northern and southern Italy.[1] In this paper I try to show his long-lasting negative impact in that area of thought. To this day he wanders the hallways of academia like a ghost, unrenounced and occasionally alarming ideologues.[2] I will then compare his thinking with those of the late writer Jane Jacobs on the same subject.[3] It is part of my thesis that her ideas provide an illuminating contrast to Gramsci’s. After briefly comparing the two positions, my reader(s) can ponder their relative merits.

I will review Gramsci’s position first. It was a frankly socialist/communist one, and expressed in the language used by writers and activists working within that political spectrum. Gramsci himself was born on Sardinia, an island that since medieval times the world wanted only one thing from: cheese.[4] Later, Italy wanted from Sardinia what it wanted from anywhere: cheap labor to work in the automobile factories of Turin, located in northern Italy. Some capitalists got rich, and the poor got jobs if they left their homes. Southern Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily, having no jobs to hold them, were left in the lurch. The solution to southern dependency, according to Gramsci, was to provide for farming and manufacturing jobs in the south instead of in the “parasitic” industries of the north.[5] That could be done by introducing worker control over banks and industry. That done (presumably by the gun if necessary), workers would “smash” the factory autocracy, “smash” the oppressive capitalist state, “smash” the “chains” that bind the peasant to his landlord’s estate. After all this smashing the plan was to direct industry to make its products for the farmers, workers, and peasants of the south, instead of for the world market for cars and other market-priced products. Machinery, clothing, electrical lighting, would be made for southerners who could now afford it, thanks to the credit that the new government would supply at reasonable (subsidized) rates. Public works, such as for reclamation and irrigation, would be initiated. The southern peasants would support this action. Or so Gramsci believed.

The underlying problem, which Gramsci never fully resolved, was deciding how the north and south could work together equally to achieve this. The revolutionary vanguard was in the north, led by intellectuals but manned by many displaced southern workers now earning wages in factories in Turin and Milan. Just as in this period the northern capitalists were calling the shots, so would educated labor/socialist/communist intellectuals living in the northern world call the shots in implementing revolutionary changes in the south. The peasants there, without education and a tradition of work (and stereotyped as lazy and thieving), would have to take orders or reinvent themselves fast — a practical impossibility. The north would retain hegemony.

Jane Jacobs agreed, but for different reasons. She believed that the problem of northern and southern Italy could be seen in the differing effects of the Marshall Plan on Italy, and indeed throughout Europe. The Marshall Plan was potentially revolutionary in its impact, as it provided as close to an actual implementation of practical new ideas on the scale of Gramsci’s as Italy is ever likely to have, and certainly provided more funds than his plan could have. Both the north and the south of Italy received Marshall Plan aid, but the outcomes were strikingly different. It totally failed to revive southern Italy, but it worked as advertised in the north. Yet, Jacobs writes, the “Marshall Plan was seized upon as a demonstration that aid could metamorphose stagnant economies into developing, self-generating economies.” Like Gramsci’s own ideas, failed post–Marshall Plans have never been disavowed and even get funding to this day via the World Bank. Nevertheless, according to Jacobs, the reason there is prosperity in northern Italy is because wealth is earned in its cities. Wealth is created by earning it in environments where innovation can be inserted economically into daily life. That can only happen in vibrant cities and their immediately surrounding regions. Southern Italy, lacking its own robust cities, can’t act on its own. The Marshall Plan disproved, as well as anything can, Gramsci’s thesis of radical aid.

In my first paragraph I wrote that Antonio Gramsci is today known only to a few scholars and activists, yet that his negative effects linger on. He provides a historically significantly intellectual validation to policies still very much alive and destructive. By remaining a respectable historical entity, he acts as a stamp of approval for Marxist ideas that the working world has long since left by the roadside. The best thing that his supporters could do is admit as much, and refute his legacy. Aid doesn’t transform economies, be they Marxist or capitalist.

Sources Cited

Barkulis, Kathy. “Communist Antonio Gramsci Resides In The White House.”    newsrealblog.com. David Horowitz Freedom Center, 24 Nov 2010. Web. 7 Jun 2012.

Gramsci, Antonio. The Southern Question. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005. Book.

Jacobs, Jane. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House, 1984. Book.

Quintin, Hoare, ed. “Some aspects of the southern question.” Communist University. Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926). Lawrence and Wishart, 1978. Web. 7 Jun 2012.

[1] Gramsci, Antonio. The Southern Question. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005. Print.

[2] Barkulis, Kathy. “Communist Antonio Gramsci Resides In The White House.” newsrealblog.com. David Horowitz Freedom Center, 24 Nov 2010. Web. 7 Jun 2012.

[3] Jacobs, Jane. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House, 1984. Pg. 8. Print.

[4] Jacobs, p. 64.

[5] Quintin, Hoare, ed. “Some aspects of the southern question.” Communist University. Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926). Lawrence and Wishart, 1978. Web. 7 Jun 2012.