Mario Tronti

Tra materialismo dialettico e filosofia della prassi: Gramsci e Labriola, in La citt

futura: Saggi sulla figura e il pensiero di Antonio Gramsci, eds. Alberto Caracciolo and
Gianni Scalia, (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1959), 13962.

It is difficult to speak about Gramsci, remaining closed within the scope of his personal
problematic. In him one finds all the cultural world of his era interpreted and
translated. Any research on his thought returns necessarily to research on the thought
that surrounds him. In his work, it is always easy to distinguish the roots of the problem
from the problem itself; to distinguish between the material that his era offers to him
and his singular reflections. This is why, through Gramsci, it is possible today to reach a
general rethinking of the history and culture that are immediately behind our shoulders
and which constitute our recent past. This is possible on the condition that within this
past one includes Gramscis own work. I mean that a re-examination of our current
cultural consciousness should take Gramsci as an instrument of critique and, at the same
time, as an object which is itself implicated in the critique. In doing so it may seem that
the problem becomes more broad, but on the contrary it is specified and deepened; it
may seem that the meaning of the discourse is uselessly lost, while on the contrary one
finds it again, indeed, with a stronger certainty.

Within the scope of the philosophical problematic alone, all this becomes extremely
obvious. Gramsci understands theoretical Marxism as a philosophy of praxis. Well we
see that the entire debate within Marxism, in Italy, concludes precisely on this
definition. The term must not be conceived, therefore, as another name that is given to
Marxism, but as another interpretation that is given of Marxism. Behind the different
definition lies a different content of thought. We are pushed then, inevitably, to retrace
the phases of these formulations which lead to the Gramscian formulation. Gramscis
Marxism pushes us to rethink the main lines of Italian Marxism, the nature of his
introduction into the national culture, the function he ended up fulfilling for it, the
distinguishing marks that he himself absorbed, the form in which he was understood
and popularized.

I have the impression, therefore, that we will need a long introduction in order to arrive
at a short conclusion.

1.

We should acknowledge to Rodolfo Mondolfo a consistent position of thought.

Between his essay on Feuerbach e Marx from 1909 and his Intorno a Gramsci e alla
filosofia della prassi from 1955, there is a single orientation [senso unico] in his
research: a consideration of Marxs thought that has the merit of an explicit clarity,
within the framework of a well-defined theoretical horizon. One can easily isolate,
therefore, the core of this position. It starts with a polemic that has, at its core, one of the
dogmas of socialism: consciousness does not determine the being of man, but the being
of man determines his consciousness. From this principle he obtains an essentially
materialistic and fatalistic conception; in this there is no place for a theory of reflection
except as product of the environment in the form of passive adaptation. But in this
passive adaptation the will finds no place, and it does not reveal class consciousness.
Furthermore, consciousness and the will are an essential moment of history, in so far as
they are elements conditioning action and the very historical process. Metaphysical
materialism cannot contain within its own framework the principle of class struggle; on
the contrary, it results from this principle being overcome implicitly. Another
philosophical conception is made necessary. This, after all, was already formulated.

Subject and object do not exist as limits of a necessarily reciprocal relationship, whose
reality is in praxis: their dialectical opposition is not the dialectic of their process of
development, of their life. Therefore the subject is not a passively receptive tabula rasa;
it is (as idealism asserts) an activity that is affirmed by another (and here against
idealism) in the human subjective sensibility or activity, which establishes, molds, or
transforms the object, and with which it is forming itself.1

For Marx, thought is praxis and his object is praxis; that is, in praxis one confirms the
existence of both limits, and in it, therefore, thought and reality coincide. Praxis is the
process of understanding that Marx, along with Hegel, considers the overcoming of the
antithesis between the one-sidedness of subjectivity and the one-sidedness of
objectivity.2 The concept of praxis for Marx turns out to be very close to the principle
of experience for Hegel. The principle of experience contains the infinitely important
determination that, for a content to be accepted and held to be true, man must himself be
actively involved with it, more precisely, that he must find any such content to be at one
and in unity with the certainty of his own self. He must himself be involved with
itwith his essential consciousness of self as well. And that is to say what ought to
count in our human knowing, we ought to see for ourselves, and to know ourselves
as present in it.3 But since the concept of praxis is the sensory human activity that
establishes or creates the object, and with which one is forming oneself, Marx attaches
to this principle the exclusion of any reality extraneous to praxis, considering the
object and the subject not independently, but as the formation of praxis.4

Now for praxis the will is needed; for the will consciousness is needed; all of this,
according to Hegel, was a means for the cunning of reason and substance of history.
Here precisely is the fundamental contrast with materialism. For Marx the atomistic
conception, being necessarily mechanistic, could not be applied to human society. The
atom is in itself inert, it is not a principle of force and of development, it is not able to
be conceived dynamically: and atomism comes precisely from mechanistic materialism.
Instead man is essentially activity and vital impulse, whence arises ones needs and,
therefore, action tending toward a goal: the concept that can be applied to man, as
principally dynamic and teleological, turns out to be repulsing from materialism.
Therefore the philosophy of praxis, that is the voluntarism derived from Feuerbach, is
presented as antithesis to materialism.5 The philosophical conception most appropriate
appears as that of a voluntaristic idealism. The definition historical materialism is
infelicitous with respect to the object that one wants to define. And the object is a
philosophy of praxis, which one might be able to say otherwise as voluntaristic
telism. Philosophy of action, which in some respects one can refer to, for reasons of
similarity, as todays pragmatism.6 By this fact alone: because of the value criterion of
truth that Marx confers on praxis, it is the subjective activity that establishes the object.
With this one difference: that praxis, of which he speaks, is of the individuals own
social nature.7
One can therefore conclude here. The definition of Marxism that one must give is:
philosophy of praxis. The content: a voluntaristic telism. The meaning: a pragmatism
of social nature; philosophy of action, seen no longer from the point of view of the
individual, but from the point of view of society, which is in the individual himself.

2.

For Gentile, historical materialism can be considered in two ways: as philosophy of

history and as metaphysics and intuition of the world. In time the first comes to take
precedent over the second; and the second turns out to be an artificial construction,
designed by Marx, in order to take a position in philosophy. We limit ourselves to
observing this artificial construction.

The keystone rests, without doubt, in the concept of praxis. This concept, new to
materialism, is, on the other hand, within idealism, as old as idealism itself, born with
it actually, already with Socrates and his subjectivism.8 And it is easy to find in Plato
and in Hegel and in Vico, in their key ideas [idee-forza], in the pedagogy of Froebel.
Marx first wants to carry this concept that knowledge goes hand in hand with activity,
with praxis from abstract idealism into concrete materialism. From this a
materialistic monism is born, which is distinguished from every other comparable
system, precisely because the concept of praxis is applied to matter. Pure object and
intuition are characters of objectivism, whether idealistic or materialistic. But praxis
means the relation between subject and object. Therefore neither individual-subject,
nor individual-object, as such; but man in necessary relation with the other, and vice
versa; therefore identity/unity of opposites.9 What Marx blames on materialism, with
respect to the theory of knowledge, is this: to believe the object, sensible intuition,
external reality is a given, instead of a product.10 Marx, the born idealist, who in the
formative period of his intellect had such a familiarity first with the philosophy of
Fichte, then with Hegel, approaches the materialism of Feuerbach, not forgetting all that
he learned and which is by now ingrained in his thought. He cannot forget that one does
not give an object without a subject that constructs it; nor is he able to forget that
everything is in perpetual movement, everything is history. Though this subject is not
spirit, but sensation; not ideal activity, but material activity. And all this, which is
always in a state of becoming, is not the spirit or the idea, but matter. Therefore matter
indeed: but matter and praxis (in other words subjective object); matter indeed, but
matter in continuous becoming Materialism indeed, but historical. Here is the root of
the contradiction that crops up, through every line, in the materialism of Marx. The
concept of praxis cannot be applied to perceptible reality, or to matter. There is an
absolute incompatibility in the two above-mentioned principles, of that form (=praxis)
with that content (=matter).11 The general character of this philosophy turns out to be
an eclecticism of contradictory elements. And this seems to be a conclusion that does
not leave space for a resumption of the problem. Instead, on closer inspection, in this
rests the implicit suggestion of a different solution, the possibility of an overcoming of
contradiction, in the Hegelian sense of the limit.12

Thought is real because it establishes, and in so far as it establishes, the object. Or

thought is, and thinks; or it does not think, and it is not thought. If thinking, doing.
Therefore reality, the objectivity of thought, is a consequence of its very nature. This is
one of the first consequences of Marxist realism.13
In this framework, the question of whether the circumstances form the man, or the man
forms the circumstances, is resolved thus: society, which is an organic totality, is
together cause and effect of its conditions; and it needs to investigate in the very breast
of society the reason for its every mutation. There are not educators on one side and
educated on the other; but educators who are educated and the educated who educate. It
is society itself, which has already been educated, returning to educate. All education is
therefore a praxis of society.

The subject, Marxs practical activity, is the thesis; the circumstances and the education
are the antithesis; the subject, modified by circumstances and by education, the
synthesis. And since the subject is the originary activity that establishes the object, this
is also the being, which negates itself, establishing the object, in so far as this position is
a singular determination of its activity The object therefore (the circumstances, the
education) is equivalent to the Hegelian non-being, which is the intrinsic contradiction
to being, and produces the becoming of being itself, that is to say of the subject that is,
as has been said, modified by the object (circumstances, education).14

Here is the meaning of the return to Hegel. The contradiction is overcome, negating one
of the limits of the contradiction. It is overcome but not resolved. It is taken up
as content of the dialectical procedure and suffers its fate: a false mobility, alongside a
nefarious overturning [rovesciamento vizioso] of its own reality. Reality, the objectivity
of thought, is in thought itself, as a consequence of its nature. But in addition there is
the pragmatic realism that comes with the very act of thinking. If thinking, doing. In
praxis there is already a certain germ of the pure act.15

3.

The second of the essays that Croce dedicates to Marxism is from 1896, and it concerns
the scientific form of historical materialism. All of his ideas on the subject are already
in this essay. Historical materialism is not, and cannot be, a new philosophy of history
or a new method; but it is only this: a summary of new information, of new experiences,
which enters into the consciousness of history. With respect to historiography it resolves
in rebuke to hold onto its own observations, as a new aid for understanding history. This
is all. Apart from that, metaphysical materialism which Marx and Engels had reached
easily, starting out from the extreme Hegelian left gave its name and some
metaphysical ingredients to their conception of history. But the one and the other are
entirely foreign to the proper character of their conception. A conception of history can
be neither materialistic nor spiritualistic, neither dualistic nor monistic. In this case
speaking of monism and materialism is to say something deprived of meaning.
Historical materialism is a simple figure of speech.16 Croces preferred definition is
that of a realistic conception of history.

And this is the important passage, within the scope of this interpretation. Speaking
about the transformation that the Hegelian Idea suffers in the conception of Marx, Croce
expresses himself thus:

In reality the Idea of Hegel and Marx knew it very well is not the ideas of men, and
the overturning of the Hegelian philosophy of history; it cannot be the affirmation that
ideas are born as a reflection of their material conditions. The inverse would be,
logically, this: history is not a process of the Idea, that is of a rational reality, but rather
a system of force: to the rational conception one opposes the dynamic conception.17

The Marxist conception according to which ideas are determined by facts and not facts
by ideas, more than an inversion of the view of Hegel, turns out to be rather like the
inversion of the views of the ideologues and of the doctrinarians. This is Marx as the
most renowned follower of Niccol Machiavelli, the Italian.18

This sequence of considerations includes the reason which pushes Croce to reject
Marxism as an a priori construction of a philosophy of history, and to accept it instead
as a simple canon for the interpretation of history. A simple canon, mind you, and not
a method of thought. Because the historians of the materialistic school apply the same
intellectual instruments and follow the same roads of the historians, thus I will say
philologians, and they only bring with their work some new pieces of information, some
new experiences.19 The method on the other hand was that of the idealistic
philosophers who deduced historical facts. A canon, therefore, from an altogether
empirical origin, which merely suggests a turning of attention to the so-called economic
substratum of society, in order to better understand the configuration and sequences of
this society.

He does not deny that historical materialism has manifested in two currents, intimately
if not practically distinct: as a historiographic movement and as science and philosophy
of society. But rather he says that in this second point a metaphysical, eternal danger is
suggested.

Also in the writings of Labriola one finds some propositions, which on recent occasion
have been brought to a rigorous and exact critique (by Gentile), which concludes that
Labriola understands historical materialism in its genuine and original meaning as a
metaphysics, and one of the worst kinds: a metaphysics of contingency.20

No philosophy therefore in historical materialism, no metaphysics. Marxs Hegelian

orthodoxy21 does not appear here. The reduction of Marxism to a canon for historical
research has overcome the problem implicitly. And the speculative reasons advanced by
Gentile seem very far away. Yet Croce does not speak of the philosophy of Marx,
because he declares himself in agreement with Gentiles interpretation. Limiting the
assertion to the doctrine of knowledge, one could speak of a historical materialism as
a philosophy of praxis, that is as of a particular mode of conception and of resolution, in
fact of overcoming, the problem of thought and of being.22The practical canon to
suggest to the work of thought agrees, in this case, with the reduction of all reality
to praxis of thought. In addition, in his adherence to the economic construction of the
hedonistic principle, to the concept of marginal utility, to final utility, and finally to the
economic explanation of the profit on capital as arising from different degrees of utility
of the present and future goods, there is already, in nuce, the practical category of
profit, on which the entirely spiritual essence of Economics hinges and is shaken.

4.

Both Croce and Gentile, when they should summarize the thought of Marx, summarize
the thought of Labriola. His Essays on the materialist conception of history are held as a
finally systematic [organica] exposition of Marxs disorganized thought. These essays
truly introduce Marxism into Italy. From this moment, the object of everyones
discussion will be Marx, and thus he has been studied, by everyone, from Labriolas
perspective alone.

And we must say that, as the presenter of Marx, in the Italian language, Labriola had the
same fate as Marx: rarely was he read, for that which he said. He begins from the
Hegelian environment of Naples, he lives for years with a spirit divided between Hegel
and Spinoza, with youthful enthusiasm he defends the dialectic against Zellers neo-
Kantianism, passes through Herbart and through the Vlkerpsychologie of Steinthal, and
arrives at Marxism. And perhaps all these tendencies within his Marxism are still being
felt, battling and canceling each other out. What emerges is a balanced and somewhat
eclectic thought, modern for its time and charged with vivid suggestions.

The secret of history is simplified. We are within the prosaic And even communism
becomes something prosaic: or rather it is science.23 In this there is none other than the
first central thread of a science and a practice, which experience and time alone can and
should develop. Everything that he considers is the unique method and rhythm of the
proletarian movement; rational not because it is founded on arguments drawn from
reasoning reason, but because it is deduced from the objective consideration of
things.24 The relativity of economic laws is discovered and at the same time their
relative necessity is confirmed. In this is the entire method and justification for the new
materialistic conception of history. Mistaken are those who, calling it economic
interpretation, believe that they understand and make understood everything We,
however, are in the organic conception of history. Here we have before our minds the
totality and the unity of social life.25 The revolutionary hypothesis coincides with the
scientific goal of the new doctrine. Since this objectifies, and I would say
almost naturalizes the explanation of the historic processes.26 To naturalize history,
without falling into a new type of political and social Darwinism, nor into any
mythical, mystical, or metaphorical form of fatalism. It is a matter of understanding in
a single expression the critique of all ideological viewpoints, which in the
interpretation of history originate from the presumption that work and human activity
are the same thing as liberty, choice, and planning.27

Labriola is not on the terrain of positivism, but neither is he on the terrain directly
opposite to positivism, as it will be, from the beginning, for Croce and for Gentile. For
him there is no arch nemesis to strike, no single polemic to carry out. There is no old
way of thinking to renounce; there is a new way of thinking to put into circulation. In
his essays one glimpses, at times, the enthusiasm of a neophyte. It is not a matter
of interpreting Marx, but of explaining him; not to make him current once again, but to
introduce him for the first time; not to select among diverse positions within Marxism,
but to present him wholesale. In its philosophical perspective, Marxism is still a
unique whole. It was not hitherto criticized; it was only ignored. Marx represents a force
of practical action, not a philosophical position; he is a political agitator, not un classico
del pensiero. He has no rights of citizenship within high culture. No one would have
thought to open the doors of the university classrooms to him. No one, except Labriola.

These ages, which mark a slow, gradual, and serene development of things, become
increasingly, on the level of thought, the ages of the returns. And at that moment,
there were those who turned to Kant and those who turned to Hegel, those to Jacobi and
those to Darwin. Labriola proposes to return to Marx. And while the other socialists
pose the question of whether Mr. Marx can go hand in hand with this or that
philosopher, Labriola tries to grasp and to isolate that philosophy which is necessarily
and objectively implicit in this doctrine.28 In fact, if one wants to go looking for the
premises of Marxs and Engels doctrinal creation, it will not suffice to limit oneself to
those who are called the precursors of socialism up to Saint-Simon, nor to the
philosophers up to Hegel, nor to the economists who declare the anatomy of civil
society: one needs to go back directly to the entire formation of modern society, and
then at last triumphantly to declare that the theory is a plagiarism of the things which it
explains.29 The new doctrines effective precursors are the facts of modern history.
Scientific socialism is no longer subjective critique applied to things, but it is the
discovery of the self-critique that is in the things themselves. The true critique of
society is society itself. In this consists the dialectic of history: a rhythm of thought
that reproduces the more general rhythm of reality in its becoming.30 In this case it
would be better to say a genetic method rather than a dialectical one, since the word
dialectics is degraded in common usage to the rhetorical and lawyerly art,
to Scheinbeweiskunst.31 But it is a simple question of nomenclature. One finds Labriola
in complete agreement with Engels chapter on the negation of the negation. And in
general all of Engels work excites him. Clearly he needed to find a spirit very near to
himself. Not only because of Engels work to systematize and popularize Marxism,
which was for Labriola the fundamental objective to be achieved; but above all because
of a motive of greater substance: because of a certain affinity with the form of his
thought, because of a certain similarity in their cultural formation, because of the
common thread of their philosophical interests, more wide than deep, more popular than
rigorous, more suggestive than convincing.

Labriola also has the merit of making more explicit the misunderstanding of the
dialectic in Engels. And not to be confused with pure empiricists, with the antiquated
metaphysicians, with popular evolutionists, Labriola returns to Engels treatise,
expressing, in private, some doubts on the terminology of the problem. But he barely
attacks that eclectic pasticcio, that strange hodgepodge between Hegel and Spencer,
which has so little in common with Marxs scientific method: formally the law of
evolution is required to assume a dialectical rhythm, after the reciprocal obligation on
the part of the dialectic to assume the real content of things which are in a state of
becoming; and in this way the empirical nature of each particular formation remains
not pre-judged, but at the same time little known.

Here is precisely the point at which diverse suggestions co-exist once again. But this is
not the fundamental point. It is not the fundamental moment in which Labriola speaks
of the philosophy of praxis as the marrow of historical materialism. Because he is
quick to define it as the philosophy immanent to the things about which it
philosophizes. From life to thought, and not from thought to life; this is the realistic
process. From labor, which is an operative knowledge, to knowledge as abstract theory:
and not from this to that.32 This is just another way of saying basically the same thing:
that the overturning of the Hegelian dialectic consists in this: for the rhythmic self-
propulsion of thought in its own right, gets substituted the self-propulsion of things, of
which the thought is ultimately a product. Marxism as philosophy of praxis does not
go back to Labriola; it turns out to be profoundly alien to his thinking. The fundamental
point to be researched in the philosophy of Marx is what Labriola calls a tendency
toward monism. A critical-formal tendency that must escape both vague transcendental
insights, which have the pretension of representing the totality of the universe, as well
as the simple empiricism of non-philosophy.

A tendency toward monism, but at the same time precise conscience of the special
nature of research. A tendency to blend science and philosophy, but, simultaneously,
continued reflection on the range and on the value of those forms of thought which we
use concretely, and which at the same time we can detach from the concrete To think
concretely, and to even be able to reflect in the abstract on information and on the
conditions of thinkability. Philosophy is and is not. For those who have not already
arrived there, it is something beyond science. And for those who have arrived there, it is
science conducted to perfection.33

This is truly the formula that we find concretely applied in the course of his essays. This
is the philosophy of Labriola. The language is that of the time; the individual concepts
are all already in the thought of his era. Yet the result is an original tendency, loaded
with unpredictable developments. And in fact this point will be ignored and bypassed by
Labriolas idealist interpreters: their consideration of Marxism will not pass through
here. There were other weaker, more contradictory aspects, which were, at the same
time, more obvious and noisy. There was, for example, the philosophy of history. More
than once Labriola claims that the doctrine of Marx cannot be made to represent the
entire history of the human race in a panorama, however perspectival or unitary, the
kind which repeats in design the historic philosophy, from St. Augustine to Hegel, or
better, from the prophet Daniel to M. De Rougemont; and he recognizes in it not
the intellectual vision of a grand plan or design, but only a method of research and of
conception, a simple guiding thread.34 So if Labriola theoretically negates the concept
of an ultimate and definitive philosophy of history, he then ends up practically applying
it himself. He fails to pivot upon a particular point in history, upon a specific and
determinate type of economic-social formation. He recognizes that Marx started from
this point, but he fails to follow suit. He stretches, with intelligence and knowledge,
across many centuries of great human events, but he fails to fix his expert gaze on the
depths of his own time, even on that limited environment that surrounds him. This is
sometimes an end-point but never a point of departure. Hence that isolated detachment
of his person, the accusation that in his abstract nature he was confined to his own
thought, the weak practical grasp that characterized all his attempts at political action.

And all of this is no accident. Mere historical-psychological reasons are not enough to
explain it. A thinkers fundamental defects must always be found in their thought.
Which means that we must know how to find the historical motives of a thought by
means of an analysis internal to the thought itself.

So, within Labriolas thought there is a fundamental point of weakness, which after all
he has in common with an entire traditional line of interpretation of Marxism. A point
which on the one hand makes his contribution to the development of a renewed Marxist
problematic somewhat modern, somewhat current today, and which on the other hand
made possible then the attempt to close down once and for all the discourse on
Marxism. We are speaking of that radical caesura, that split, made between two sides
of Marxism, which is like an open breach, through which pass all those who want to
liquidate Marxism. It is the distinction between an interpretation of history and
a general conception of the world and of life, as if they were two separate and
overlapping things, the one a function of the other, the one subordinated to the other.
That which will become, in the Marxist orthodoxy and Vulgate, the distinction between
historical materialism and dialectical materialism.

And mind you: this is not to deny, in Marx, the possibility of a scientific methodology
next to an interpretation of history; the possibility of a theory of consciousness next to a
science of society. It is not to deny Marx his philosophical horizon. It is simply to
state this: that the Marxian conception of history is conducted precisely with a scientific
method; that his philosophy becomes one with that scientific consideration of history;
that his logic is already all in his sociology, and his sociology is already his logic. There
is a profound unity (which is unity and not identity) of logic and sociology,
of philosophy and science, of science and history.

But in Labriola there is, additionally, the tendency to monism, which leads him
concretely to resolve the science of nature into the science of man; to dissolve the
dialectic into the idea of progress; to submerge all the world in history; and to consider
all history as the development of human praxis. Precisely for this reason, we find him at
the origin of both Italian Marxism and Italian idealism.

5.

Here proceeds the crisis of Marxism. Sorel in France, Bernstein in Germany, Croce in
Italy, Masaryk in Prague, Struve and Bulgakov in Russia, the Fabians in England, and
the little sharp debate within the Zusammenbruchstheorie: everyone agrees,
everything corresponds.35 And Labriola gets angry and yells: it is a sketch [pochade], a
demimonde crisis from the Latin Quarter; it is one of so many pretexts which serve an
international conspiracy, the scientific investigator [mouchard]. And then he falls
silent, all of a sudden, disappointed and perhaps disgusted.

He was wrong: not in his defense of Marx to the bitter end, but in the response that he
reserved for his own critics. Because there was the crisis of Marxism: there was and
there is, every time that the crisis of capitalism weakens, diminishes, fades, and seems
to be resolved; there is an inversely proportional relationship. He needed to endure the
polemic, climb onto the terrain of his adversaries, reclaim Marx and rediscover, with
Marx, the reality of the present; he needed to inaugurate a new comparison of thought
with things. But Labriola was not Lenin, and he was not able to do it.

And yet if for forty years in Italy it was believed that theoretical Marxism, born in 1895,
had died in 1900, this is not to be attributed to Labriolas particular type of Marxism. It
is to be attributed to the particular type of Marxism seen and understood by Italian
idealism, in the person of its own two most authoritative representatives. You compete
with yourself to know what use you should make of Marxism, but not to know the thing
itself: we could extend these, Labriolas words for Croce, to all Italian thought. Marx
was always used as a means for reaching ends, which were not so much those of Marx
as of those who studied and interpreted him: for the vital suggestions that he offered to
the historian; for the vast field of investigation that he opened in front of the economist;
for the secret stashes that he revealed to the legal scholar; for the scientific guise that he
gave to the discourse of the politician; and for so many other things. He was not reduced
to a canon but to many different canons, to many little techniques, as many as there are
various disciplines. The historian and the economist, the jurist and the sociologist, the
politician and the art critic all speak in a Marxist language, demonstrating however, on
every occasion, a supreme contempt for Marx. And the philosopher, aware of his
mission, uniting in himself the substance of all these disciplines, and making of so many
techniques one alone, carries out the same service, in its classic and definitive form.

And so, for Italian philosophy, Marx was the toehold for arriving at Hegel; he
functioned as a hyphen, a link, historically determined and
concrete. Marx introduced Hegel into Italy: he fulfilled the function that the good
Neapolitan philosophers, who had ended up taking their books of Hegel to antique
auctions, had failed to achieve.

This concept is expressed clearly by Croce in 1917:

If now I look for the objective causes of the interest I had in Marxism and in historical
materialism, I see that this happened because, through that system, I experienced once
again the charm of the great historical philosophy of the romantic period, and it was like
discovering a Hegelianism far more concrete and alive that that which I was accustomed
to finding among scholars and commentators, who reduced Hegel to a sort of theologian
or metaphysical Platonic.36

Confirming this is the fact that now, after more than twenty years, Marx has largely
lost the teachers office that he had held then; because in this midst, philosophy and the
dialectic climb back up to their own sources and there they are renewed in order to draw
vigor and stamina for a more daring journey.37

And we find the same autobiographical accent in a note that Gentile writes in 1937,
when he picks up the old pages of his studies on Marx.

I reread these with the touched curiosity with which we sometimes rummage through
our old, forgotten papers in order to rekindle ancient experiences and faded images of
long-ago youth. And I heard, once again, here and there, voices which have never been
extinguished in me, and something fundamental in which I recognize myself once again,
and in which others, perhaps better than I, can recognize the first seeds of thoughts
which matured later. And therefore I saw in my book, even if so aged, a documentary
and also a present value, which made me rediscover life where I feared death had passed
forever a document of bright ideas from before the end of the last century, when in
Italy by myself and with others I began to feel the need for a philosophy that was a
philosophy.38

And likewise, the same Croce who had felt his whole mind ignite again from
Labriolas letters, no longer able to turn away from those thoughts and problems which
were taking root and enlarging in his mind, thus concludes: From the tumult of those
years, the expanded knowledge of human problems and the reinvigorated philosophical
spirit were like good fruit. Philosophy since then was an increasingly large part of my
studies39
And finally again Gentile, after he excavated the origins of contemporary philosophy, in
a forest of Kantians and Hegelians, of Platonic spiritualists and of positivist amateurs,
arrives at an epilogue in which the presence of Marx is at least implied, and which, at
the end of the century in Italy, closes the old discourse in order to open a completely
new one:

The conclusion is that, after positivism, we will never go back; that the Platonic
metaphysics of the old spiritualists is by now a dead philosophy, even in Italy; that
rather there is established the immanent concept of the truth which is generated through
experience and which is not therefore presupposed, but the product, or rather the very
act of knowing; but it is also clear that this concept would be absurd, if experience was
conceived in that way in which positivism conceived it, that is naturalistically, as a
passivity of the spirit destined as a result to close itself in an agnostic sphere of
subjective appearance, without logic and without freedom: in short, that
spiritualism is only a half-truth and a half-truth is also naturalism; and all truth cannot
be found if not in idealism, which is the unity and the resolution of those two contrary
needs.40

The idealist, he will say in another work, who believes that he has the universe in his
hand, and that he builds the universe with categories, can believe experience to be
almost if not completely useless; and from here follows his dogmatism. But the true
idealism is that other one which, in this field, has known how to fairly deal with
positivism. To this rightfully belongs, for example, Bertrando Spaventa, who,
maturing a concept outlined in the Phenomenology, discovers in consciousness a
knowledge that is not easy to know, but inasmuch as we know, it is to act, to work. So:

this concept, lucidly explained by Spaventa, is, in our opinion, the golden key of the
new gnoseology after Kant; and it is the great merit of our philosopher to have detected
it in Hegels Phenomenology and to highlight it. It was also one of the most profound
ideas of one of Germanys most celebrated followers of the philosopher of Stuttgart,
unknown certainly in this respect to Spaventa, Karl Marx.41

All truth therefore is in idealism. And also the truth of Marx for Gentile is in
idealism. Marx alongside Bertrando Spaventa. And from this we can extract these
considerations: that Marx, in Italy, was not confused with positivism; indeed, he served
to combat positivism, after subsuming into himself the higher need. He was a means and
an instrument, temporary and contingent, for that definitive synthesis which was to mark
the overcoming of the antithesis between spiritualism and naturalism, in the new and
modern idealism.

Marx served to clear the field of all amateurishness, all improvisations, the superficiality
of a cultural world, then dominant; and to revive the seriousness, commitment, and
profundity of all research in the field of thought. He served to discover under the
scientific guise of new thought the heavy body of old metaphysics; and he served to
pick up the discourse at the point at which the great tradition of classical German
philosophy had left it.

Marx is therefore at the origins of Italian idealism. And if on the one hand he leaves a
visible stamp on the development of this thought, on the other hand he is radically
marked by it. In Italy Marx was not only to flirt with Hegel; but also Hegel was
to flirt with Marx. Conclusion: we have had a tendentially Marxian Hegel and a
decisively Hegelian Marx.

Even today, here, those who approach Marx rediscover him through the filterof the
idealist culture; a filter clearly tendentious and deforming. In it the decisive factor was
not the liquidation of Marxism: this basically no one has ever believed; even when we
gave it up for dead, we spoke as if it were alive and well. The decisive factor was
instead a certain interpretation of Marxism: because if Marx serves only to resume
the discourse on Hegel, once returned to Hegel, Marx is already liquidated. Or rather: if
Marxism was only a partially successful attempt to review and revise, to complete and
to realize Hegels philosophy, then, once a new and different attempt has been tested
and fully completed, Marxism has fulfilled its historic function and it may well be
considered a thing of the past. First one has all of Marx revolve around Hegel, then one
removes Hegel from the center and says: see, Marx fails to rotate on his own.

This is precisely the case in which the interpretation of a theory coincides with its
liquidation. In fact precisely this misunderstanding has driven the thought of Marx to
the margins of contemporary philosophical thought.

After Marxs thought has passed through the stitches of idealistic culture, what is left of
it? Croce has denied that there might exist a philosopher Marx; Gentile has conceded
this to him, but he has deemed him contradictory and therefore unworkable; Mondolfo
has defined him as a philosopher of praxis. So, this final point is to be considered the
logical conclusion that springs from those premises. Marxism as philosophy of praxis
is what is left of Marxism after it has been liquidated by the idealistic interpretation.

What is left then is a theory of action, a philosophy of will, a guide for social
comportment, a technique for the revolutionary process, the identity of knowing and
doing, of thought and praxis; a Vichianism corrected by modern pragmatism.

6.

Gramsci has behind him all of this past. And without understanding all of this past, we
cannot understand Gramsci; much less the Marxism of Gramsci. There is
an original line of development that Marxism assumes in Italy: for the way in which it
is introduced; for the way in which it is interpreted. It passes through, now in the
background, now in the foreground, the whole movement of contemporary thought; it
arrives at the work of the Prison Notebooks, and it goes even further still.

In this sense, Gramsci is a typically and, I would say, fundamentally Italian thinker.
Italy is his natural environment; he sinks his roots into the deepest national fabric. We
would end up restricting and not expanding, diluting and not deepening, the theoretical
figure of Gramsci if we wanted to give him a European range [respiro]. His problems
and the way that he negotiates them, his culture and the form of his cultural research, his
interests, his language, his education, his very human sensitivity all of it resides in
Italy. That is why, in my opinion, the fundamental though not exclusive point of
research around the thought of Gramsci must pivot around the environment of Italian
thought.
One can easily isolate, even materially, a philosophical part of Gramscis thought;
that is an attempt at a general theoretical elaboration of the fundamental problems of
Marxism. The primary need is the research of that philosophy which would have
Marx standing on his own legs, without need for other philosophies; the recovery of
Labriolas cause. But what for the latter was already accomplished and fully expressed
in the work of Marx and of Engels, becomes in Gramsci a result that is still to be
reached, a position that is still to be conquered, an objective toward which one must
stretch.

We have a theory that is still at the stage of discussion, of debate, of elaboration;

which still has not reached the classical phase of its development. Any attempt to
manualize it must necessarily fail, as its logical systematization is only apparent and
illusory. But one believes vulgarly that science absolutely means system and therefore
building any systems whatsoever, systems that do not have the intimate and necessary
coherence but only the mechanical outward appearance.42

Instead one should lend a hand to the discussion, to the debate, to the elaboration, in
order to succeed at clarifying the core of the new philosophy; in order to put it into
circulation with a function no longer subaltern, but hegemonic in contests with other
philosophies.

The point of departure is a great opening, which puts before itself an exceptionally
demanding commitment. Between one and the other there is an attempt at a solution. A
solution that, precisely for this reason, appears open to different interpretations: because
it renounces, concretely, the systematic presentation, the precise formulation, the
definitive definition. It lies, and lives, and moves, always, on the plane of the problem.
For this reason Gramscis Notebooks are a great school against dogmatism,
against catechism, against the dead quiet of thought in the arms of an absolute
doctrine, against the simple vulgarization of a simple knowledge, conquered once
and for all.

That is why we say: the attempt at a solution. And we could say: the suggestion, the
hint, the proposal, the uncertainty that is the road to follow in order to arrive at a
solution. These are all typically Gramscian words and expressions.

Marxism wants to be a coherently historicist conception of all reality: this is

absolute historicism. It wants to be a critico-practical methodology of knowledge and of
human action: this is philosophy of praxis. As a whole it is the neue Weltanschauung
of the modern proletariat.

Its origin is in idealism, actually in historicism, which is the truth of idealism. Truth
which was foreseen by it, but not included within it; implied but not fulfilled;
discovered and then immediately distorted. It means taking up once again the same
concept, rendering it totally inclusive, coherently complete, correct in form, real in
content. The task of the new philosophy is to render actually true the unaware truth of
idealism. In this sense, one finds it at the end of a long labor of thought. The
philosophy of praxis is the result and crowning achievement of all preceding history.
From the critique of Hegelianism were born modern idealism and the philosophy of
praxis. Hegelian immanentism becomes historicism, but it is absolute historicism or
absolute humanism.43

It even needs to be verified whether the movement that leads from Hegel to Croce-
Gentile was not a step backwards, a reactionary reform.

Have they not made Hegel more abstract? Have they not cut off the most realistic, the
most historicist part? And is it not, instead, exactly of this part that only the philosophy
of praxis, within certain limits, is a reform and an overcoming? And is it not precisely
the entirety of the philosophy of praxis that has misdirected Croce and Gentile in this
way?44

Gramsci realizes that, in Italy, the problem of Marxism is strictly tied to the problem of
idealism. He realizes that, between them, there were deep, intertwined links, and
important issues were confused: there were mutual concessions made. He finds himself
in the situation of having to rediscover Marxism through the lens of idealism. The road
which from Croce-Gentile should connect to Labriola, is for him the same road that
led from Hegel to Marx. As Marx is the reform and the overcoming [superamento] of
Hegel, in this way the modern philosophy of praxis is the reform and the overcoming of
modern idealism. The Anti-Croce can be defined therefore as the Anti-Hegel of our
time. For we Italians to be heirs of classical German philosophy means that we are the
heirs to Crocean philosophy, which today represents the world-wide moment of
classical German philosophy.45 The Anti-Croce represents therefore todays global
moment of Marxist philosophy.

And it is easy to note here two things: that on the one hand, this antitheticalposition
preserves in the depths of its nature a hidden Hegelian sense an antithesis that stands
as a formal negation, for the purpose of provoking the full development of the positive-
affirmative side and therefore of the originary thesis; on the other hand the
same recovery of the Labriola-Marx nexus through the Croce-Gentile nexus, takes for
granted, in its premise, precisely the interpretation that Croce and Gentile have given of
both Labriola and Marx. I mean that, in either case, there is a vision of Marxism that
contains in itself, uncritically, the manner in which idealism has wanted to see Marxism.

Yet for Gramsci precisely here appears the theoretical nexus by which the philosophy
of praxis, while continuing Hegelianism, turns it on its head; or rather and this is not
the same thing while turning it on its head, it continues it. Which is not to say as
Croce thought and stated it wants to supersede every kind of philosophy. It means
identifying, concretely, philosophy with the history of philosophy, and philosophy with
the whole of history.

One can see with greater exactitude and precision the significance that the philosophy of
praxis has given to the Hegelian thesis that philosophy transforms itself into the history
of philosophy, that is to say of the historicity of philosophy. This leads to the
consequence that one must negate abstract and speculative or absolute philosophy, that
is to say philosophy that was born from the preceding philosophy and inherits from it
so-called supreme problems, or even only the philosophical problem, that becomes
therefore a problem of history, of how the determinate problems of philosophy are born
and are developed. The priority goes to practice, to the real history of the changes of
social relations, from which therefore (and therefore, in the last analysis, from the
economy) there arise (or are presented) the problems that the philosopher proposes and
develops.46

The Crocean thesis of the identity of philosophy and history is the the Crocean way of
presenting the the same problem posed by the Thesis on Feuerbach. With this
difference: that for Croce, history is still a speculative concept, whereas for the
philosophy of praxis according to Engels expression history is practice, that is to
say, experiments and industry. The sense therefore of that overturning which is a
continuation of the Hegel-Croce-Gentile line by the philosophy of praxis is precisely
this: that to the idealistic and therefore speculative identification, one substitutes
a historicist and therefore completely real identification between history and
philosophy, between doing and thinking, until reaching the German proletariat as the
sole heir of classical German philosophy.

And this, in my opinion, is the central point of Gramscian thought. It is the point that
introduces and justifies, in substance, his own determinate philosophical problem, the
choice of his principal polemical target, the particular use of a particular terminology.
We can find, in his work on this problem, less certain and apparently contradictory
expressions. But it is certainly not this that matters. With the works of Gramsci we can
organize battles of citations, in which each can find written confirmation of ones own
current position; precisely through the character of those works, made up of notes, of
recollections, through research left open and always problematic. It is then a matter, in
any case and for any question, of finding the core of his position, discerning it not only
from his abstract formulation, but also from the way in which it spills out and is found
again in concrete practical research.

Now, regarding our problem, the position of Gramsci is this: the philosophy of praxis
has endured a double revision, that is it has been subsumed in a double philosophical
combination. On one hand, some of its elements, in an explicit or implicit manner, have
been absorbed and incorporated by certain idealistic currents (Croce, Gentile, Sorel,
Bergson, pragmatism); on the other hand the so-called orthodox, worried about finding
a philosophy that was more comprehensive than a simple interpretation of history,
believed to be orthodox, identifying it fundamentally with traditional materialism. The
philosophy of praxis thus is needed to form eclectic combinations, both with idealism
and with philosophical materialism. We must find again the original core at an
intermediate point between these two positions of traditional philosophy.

And so Marxism as philosophy of praxis becomes, in Gramsci, the discovery and the
return to this original core; it becomes the resolving sense that one must give to the first
theoretical contradictions of Marxism; the concept that makes possible the originality
and the autonomy of Marxism; the decisive point that distinguishes it both from
idealism and from positivism. It becomes, finally, the philosophy of Marxism.

In such a case, what will be the meaning of the term monism? It will certainly not be
materialist nor idealist, but the identity of opposites in the concrete historical act, that is
to say concrete human activity (history-spirit), indissolubly connected to a certain
organized (historicized) matter, to nature transformed by man. Philosophy of the act
(praxis, implementation) but not of the pure act, but rather precisely of the impure, real
act, in the most profane and earthly sense of the word.47

Here is the Gramscian sense of a philosophy of praxis.

But we have seen what has been, right here in Italy, the theoretical and historical origin
of this interpretation. We have seen it born within idealism, or rather we have seen it
preside over the earlier birth of the same idealism. In this we have been able to find not
only as Gramsci maintains the concepts that Marxism has ceded to traditional
philosophies; but we can and we must also find the reverse: and that is to say the
concepts that traditional philosophies have ceded to Marxism. In these latter concepts
the height of confusion resides; not when they are critically reflected on and re-
elaborated, but when they are immediately and unwittingly accepted.

It is not enough to overthrow the praxis of the idealists in order to make history proceed
correctly; just as it is not enough to overthrow the dialectic of Hegel in order to find the
correct path in the movement of reality. It is not enough to complete praxis in order to
make history real; just as it is not enough to make the dialectic concrete in order to
make reality historic. It is a matter of understanding that the pure act does not exist; the
act is always impure. At stake is our ability to envision, within the content of our
thoughts, a specific and always determinate impurity, a concrete entity; a fullness of the
other thinking process, within the framework of a particular and determinate objective
reality.

Gramscis objective, to find an original philosophy of Marxism which was equally far
from idealism and traditional positivism, was legitimate. But this has not been achieved.
The solution proceeds from within the context of its prior orientation. Today we find
ourselves formulating the same problem: the need for a Marxism that is as far from
the philosophy of praxis as from dialectical materialism; not reduced to a purely
technical methodology of knowledge and of human action, and which does not claim to
close within itself a total and definitive metaphysic; a Marxism that poses itself as a
science.