The article presents a Gramscian reading of organisational interventions within the framework of developmental work research. Developmental work research is based on Engeström’s concepts of activity system and expansive learning cycle. It utilizes the theoretical vocabulary provided by Marx and Ilyenkov and is situated in the traditions of cultural-historical and critical research. In recent years, critical commentaries have pointed to a need to reconsider questions related to transformation, contradictions and power within the approach. The Gramscian reading here suggests that the (...) concepts of transformism, hegemony and dialectic pedagogy could open potential ways to reformulate certain elements of both the practice of organisational intervention and the theoretical principles of developmental work research. (shrink)

Henryk Grossman's discussion of economic crises was designed to complement his Leninist understanding of politics. For Grossman, as for Marx, the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production is between the unlimited scope for expanding the output of use-values and restrictions imposed by the framework of producing profits. The increasing weight of capitalists' outlays on dead compared to living labour, which is the only source of new value, gives rise to the system's tendency to break down and, hence, to economic crises. Deep (...) financial crises can only be understood in the context of developments in production and particularly movements in the rate of profit. The initial widespread hostility to Grossman's development of Marxist economics can mainly be explained in terms of the logics of Social-Democratic and Stalinist politics. In contrast to dominant views on the Left today, the Marxist tradition in which Grossman stood places the construction of organisations capable of assisting the working class' conquest of political power at the heart of the responsibility of socialists. Grossman's political practice expressed his understanding of the close relationship between capitalism's breakdown tendency and the importance of building a revolutionary party. (shrink)

The article deals with three patterns for interpretation of language in its relation to the cultural hegemony, i.e. Gramscian, Voloshinian, and Pasolinian. As was shown, the analysis of the language problem is the necessary precondition for justifying the unity of theoretical and practical elements within Marxist philosophy. A common feature for the aforementioned patterns was an attempt to answer a fundamental question: how it is possible to make explicit the relationship between ideology and relations of production by means of the (...) materialist dialectics. A refusal to fetishize language as a particular essence, a revealing that any sign systems are mediated by ideologies, and elaboration of a nonSaussurian structure of language are the core results of the proposed analysis. The starting point for the reflections of the mentioned thinkers was a tenet that communication in the state is determined by how much the institutions of power are able to bring the interests of society under control without disturbing the balance between the political body and the existing social forces. Thus, an ideology plays in two guises: as a symbolic order of legitimation on the society’s part and as a framing the growth of cultural forms. A distinction between the written and the spoken language becomes a politically significant tool to undermine the hegemony, for a balance between the political and the social, between the coercion and the approval, is widely open to fluctuations. Hence is the problem Marxist theorists have tried to solve: how can it be found out, with an examination of statements in non-political contexts, what someone talks of is a part of her political interest. The Marxist thinkers solved it in various ways. For instance, Gramsci focused himself on the reasons of making of the Italian literary canon; Voloshinov considered the proposition that in linguistics a formalism, as well as psychologism, following from a claim that semantics and means of expression are politically independent; and Pasolini sketched the difference between the spoken language, the spoken-written language, and the purely oral language, with unequal subjects of them. (shrink)

(CONTENIDO: LA FILOSOFÍA DE ALTHUSSER A 50 AÑOS DE LIRE LE CAPITAL Pedro Karczmarczyk, 3; DISCURSO Y DECRETO: SPINOZA ALTHUSSER Y PÊCHEUX Warren Montag 11; ALTHUSSER LECTOR DE GRAMSCI Vittorio Morfino 43 LAS ABSTRACCIONES, ENTRE LA IDEOLOGÍA Y LA CIENCIA João Quartim de Moraes 67 ELOGIO DEL TEORICISMO. PRÁCTICA TEÓRICA E INCONSCIENTE FILOSÓFICO EN LA PROBLEMÁTICA ALTHUSSERIANA, Natalia Romé 85 MARXISMO Y FEMINISMO: EL RECOMIENZO DE UNA PROBLEMÁTICA1 115 Luisina Bolla* / Pedro Karczmarczyk* 115 RRESEÑAS El materialismo de Althusser. Más (...) allá del telos y del Eschaton de Vittorio Morfino, por Valentín Huarte 153; El sujeto en cuestión, Pedro Karczmarczyk (ed.) por Constanza Storani; 159 La posición materialista. El pensamiento de L. Althusser entre la práctica teórica y la práctica política, de Natalia Romé, por Ingrid Sarchman y Carolina Collazo 164. (shrink)

This article analyses the intellectual and political trajectory of the Pasado y Presente group in Argentina, focusing on its main representative, José María Aricó (1931–91). Although usually described as ‘the Argentine Gramscians’, the ‘Gramscianism’ of the Pasado y Presente group was actually little more than a theoretical cover for its erratic political behaviour, which led them from Stalinism to Guevarism, from Guevarism to Maoism, from Maoism to Montoneros’s branch of Peronism, and from Peronism to Alfonsín’s Radicalism. Politically, their weakest point (...) was that they distanced themselves from Stalinism empirically, because of the popularity of foquism, without undertaking a thorough critique of Stalinism. This made them vulnerable to the ubsequent crisis of Stalinism, which they identified with a ‘crisis of Marxism’ sans phrase. What made them historically significant was that they articulated the radicalisation of a whole social layer in Latin America under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, as well as its subsequent deradicalisation and adaptation to bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The article closes with an analysis of Aricó’s intellectual legacy, particularly his well-known book Marx y América Latina (1980). (shrink)

Peter D. Thomas’s book The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism draws us to reflect on a point that Gramsci’s interpreters have often neglected: the particular structure of the Prison Notebooks, i.e., the ways in which the text was constituted and, dependent on that, the fundamental methodological criteria for its interpretation. Thomas’s book is a consummate synthesis between the deep and detailed study of the Notebooks text and the need to reconstruct some order within; between close historicalphilosophical assessment and theoretical (...) proposal within contemporary Marxist (and para-Marxist) debate. Consequently, this book confronts us – as Gramsci’s present-day readers – with a task that no-one can face alone, but that is nonetheless extraordinarily urgent: the task of intervening in the debate within the post-modern and post-Marxist Left so that the link between Marxism and philosophy is resumed, starting out from Gramsci himself. In short: a revival of Marx through Gramsci, through – in turn – a return of the philosophy of praxis as Marxism for our own day. (shrink)

This article evaluates the political effectiveness of the Gramscian-style counterhegemonic strategy employed by the leading Islamist movement in Egypt. The article analyzes, historically and comparatively, the unfolding of this strategy during the period from 1982 to 2007, emphasizing how its success triggered heightened state repression, which ultimately prevented Islamists from capitalizing politically on their growing cultural power. The coercive capacity of modern states, as this article demonstrates, can preserve a regime’s political domination long after it has lost its cultural hegemony. (...) The empirical evidence derived from the Islamist experience in Egypt supports theoretical claims that go beyond the Egyptian case: namely, it exposes the limits of the narrow cultural reading of Gramsci that has become commonplace over the years. (shrink)

Gramsci's concept of hegemony is often believed to be a political account of legitimation. His Marxist critics go on to accuse him of failing to offer a properly structural account of bourgeois legitimation. I argue that Gramsci's theory attempted to straddle both economic and political accounts. In so doing, he presupposed the absence of effective authority in the Italian state. In such conditions, his project was to the orize the way in which economic classes became agents that would institute political (...) order. The difficulties in applying Gramsci's formu lation today lie in this combined economic and political account and the assumption of 'organic crisis' that supported it. (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, Antonio Gramsci is a political philosopher lacking in, and who avoids, a serious interest in political economy. That is a serious misrepresentation of Gramsci’s works and thought. Equally wrong is the widespread view that anything Gramsci had to say about political economy is to be found in his scattered notes on ‘Americanism and Fordism’. On the contrary, a careful rereading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks shows that Marx’s great and unfinished project of the critique of political economy (...) plays a crucial rôle for Gramsci’s efforts to come to grips with the basics of a critical social science that could live up to the aspirations of a ‘scientific socialism’. As Gramsci was fully aware of the everyday battles of ideas in capitalist societies to be fought about the notions and tenets of popular or vulgar political economy, he did the best he could in order to understand and clarify the bases of a ‘critical’ and ‘scientific’ political economy. A political economy that was and still is urgently needed in order to fight the strongest of the strongholds of bourgeois hegemony - the ideas of vulgar economics in everybody’s heads. (shrink)

In recent years there have been several calls in professional and academic journals for healthcare personnel in Canada to raise the profile of postcolonial theory as a theoretical and explanatory framework for their practice with Indigenous people. In this paper I explore some of the challenges that are likely to confront those healthcare personnel in engaging with postcolonial theory in a training context. I consider these challenges in relation to three areas of conflict. First I consider conflicts around paradigms of (...) knowledge, wherein postcolonial theory operates from a different base from most professional knowledge in health care. Second I consider conflicts of ideology, wherein postcolonial theory is largely at odds with Canada’s political and popular cultures. And finally I consider issues around the question of Canada’s legitimacy, which postcolonial theory puts in doubt. I suggest ways in which these conflicts might be addressed and managed in the training context, and also identify potential positive outcomes that would be enabling for healthcare personnel, and might also contribute to an improvement in Canada’s relationship with its indigenous peoples. (shrink)

This article is a response to some of the criticisms made of How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Gerstenberger, Post and Riley. In particular, it focuses on two issues of definition – that of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – which arise from the book’s ‘consequentialist’ claim that bourgeois revolutions are defined by a particular outcome: the establishment of nation-states dedicated to the accumulation of capital.

This book examines the artistic policies of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the early post-war years (1944-1951), after the defeat of Fascism in Europe and the outbreak of the Cold War. It brings together theoretical debates on artists’ political engagement and an extensive critical apparatus, providing the reader with an historical framework for wider reflections on the relationship between art and politics.

The following text is a translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s ‘Strategy and Politics’, which covers debates within the workers’ movement from the time of Marx and Engels, through the Second and Third Internationals, up to the more immediate revolutionary experiences in Nicaragua and Latin America. An Introduction to this has been published simultaneously.

RESUMEN Se exploran las relaciones entre hegemonía y filosofía de la praxis en A. Gramsci. Se examina la influencia de la filosofía hegeliana sobre estas nociones en los Cuadernos de la cárcel. Asimismo, se estudia la crítica a estas nociones a la luz del feminismo de la diferencia y del debate sobre hegemonía, universalidad y contingencia iniciado por E. Laclau, J. Butler y S. Žižek. Se concluye que concebir la hegemonía desde la perspectiva de la filosofía de la praxis significa (...) que la acción político-intelectual, según Gramsci, no solo implica la formación de una hegemonía alternativa, sino una crítica políticamente operante a la pretensión de universalidad del discurso hegemónico a partir de la exposición de su contingencia histórica. ABSTRACT The paper explores the relations between hegemony and the philosophy of praxis in A. Gramsci, and examines the influence of Hegelian philosophy on these notions as set forth in the Prison Notebooks. Likewise, it studies the critique of these notions from the perspective of difference feminism and of the debate over hegemony, universality, and contingency initiated by E. Laclau, J. Butler, and S. Žižek. The conclusion is that conceiving hegemony from the perspective of the philosophy of praxis means that, according to Gramsci, political-intellectual action implies not only the formation of an alternative hegemony, but also a politically operative critique of the claim to universality of hegemonic discourse, on the basis of the unveiling of its historical contingency. (shrink)

InThe Gramscian MomentPeter Thomas fundamentally revises the ‘textbook’ Gramsci – a theorist whose work centred on a primordial East/West distinction, focused on the superstructure, and upon the ways a ruling class secured subaltern consent to its rule. Placing special emphasis on the Notebooks from 1932, Thomas critiques readings of Gramsci by Perry Anderson and Louis Althusser, and finds that Gramsci articulated the ‘philosophy of praxis’ not so much as a synonym for, or declaration of independence from, Marxism, but rather as (...) a tendency within Marx’s legacy that Gramsci hoped to make hegemonic within the working-class movement. Two friendly amendments emerge with respect to this persuasive account. First, the emphasis on Gramsci’sphilosophyleads the author to an over-simplified account of the role of evolutionary theory within Gramsci’s own perspective and privileges ‘philosophy’ over other fields to which Gramsci’s vision was even more decisive. Is the ‘Gramscian moment’ really best analysed by looking at those intellectuals commonly deemed philosophers? And second, does not this moment also entail a more fundamental rethinking of the orthodox concepts and methods of revolutionary-left historiography than the author sometimes implies? (shrink)

Like the public political sphere, the world of the workplace contains literary works offering analysis, advice and philosophy to those in positions of command. In this article, I read business management advice manuals as works of political theory, focusing on their treatment of the problem of legitimacy in the relationship between employer and employee. I highlight and analyze key strategies of legitimation, draw their connections to discussions of legitimacy in the history of political thought and examine changes in workplace legitimation (...) in the context of macroeconomic transformation. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

Recent theories of the state often draw attention to states’ autonomy from social preferences. This paper suggests that the phenomenon of public ignorance is the primary mechanism responsible for state autonomy in democratic polities. Such theorists as Skocpol and Poulantzus, who do not take account of public ignorance, either underestimate the state's autonomy or stress causal mechanisms that are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its autonomy. Gram‐sci's concept of ideological hegemony is promising, even though it is far too insistent (...) on the penetration of ideology of any kind beyond relatively small numbers of political sophisticates. (shrink)

The following text is a translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s ‘Strategy and Politics’, which covers debates within the workers’ movement from the time of Marx and Engels, through the Second and Third Internationals, up to the more immediate revolutionary experiences in Nicaragua and Latin America. An Introduction to this has been published simultaneously.

This dissertation seeks to reactivate the Marxist transition debate, by conceptualising transition as a problem in its own right, moving away from a stagist vision of the development of modes of production. Part I outlines the historical materialist parameters of the ontology of transition, and traces the concept across classical and western Marxism. This section draws from Althusserian theory to sketch out a conception of historical time as a multiplicity of dislocated trajectories. This is followed by a critique of post-Marxism, (...) based on the disappearance of the concept of transition in the discursive turn. It is argued that transition should be retained as a sociologically rigorous concept, and that among various strands of Marxist theory there is evidence of its efficacy. Part II analyses contemporary left theory and politics through the dichotomy of melancholy and utopia, and argues that they exemplify temporal complexity and illuminate current impasses on the left. Part III applies the findings of the preceding parts to strategic questions of demands, agency and strategy. This is achieved through a substantive discussion of postwork theory as a new postcapitalist vision, embodying issues of temporality, transition and utopia. The thesis concludes that the neglected problem of transition and the notion of multiple temporalities are important theoretical tools for addressing questions of historical epistemology and left strategy. Understanding transition as an embedded societal tendency is valuable to critical social theory, and provides the means to theorise postcapitalist futures. (shrink)

The work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci continue to attract serious and sustained scholarly attention. This review essay, which might be viewed as an appendage to the earlier, 2016 Thesis Eleven essay ‘From Marx to Gramsci’, develops some of the lines of curiosity indicated there. Does the globalization of Gramsci occur at the expense of the recognition of the particularity of his thought, its specific time and place, and its clearly revolutionary intention? What do these phenomena signify, almost a century (...) after? (shrink)

This review examines a collection of essays that engage with the thought of Antonio Gramsci in relation to the postcolonial. I argue that some of the chapters display a symptomatic tendency to read into Gramsci’s concepts a moral charge that detracts from their theoretical value, and that on the whole here Gramsci is either read in a post-Marxist key or dismissed as inoperable for the globalised postcolony of the present.