Contenu du sommaire : Antonio Gramsci

“The Rhythm of Thought in Development” : the Renewal of Gramscian Studies in Italy
The article focuses on the renewal of Gramscian studies in Italy. It begins with a presentation of the criteria adopted for the new national edition of the complete writings of Antonio Gramsci, drawing on the significant philological progress made possible by the research of G. Francioni. It goes on to discuss recent historiography, based in particular on Soviet archives : these have enabled researchers to arrive at a better understanding of Gramsci's intellectual path during his formative years and the question of his links, when he was in prison, with the Italian party and with the International. It also draws on the studies carried out in the field of historical semantics on Gramsci's language (in particular the Dizionario gramsciano) and on some of the most important theoretical works (notably those of G. Cospito and F. Frosini) which are grounded in current philological, semantic and historical research. A diachronic reading of the Quaderni, in which the writings are linked to the concrete political situations out of which they emerged, is now possible, and it may help us to understand better how Gramsci's singular and innovative thinking can still be useful in the 21st century.

Hegemony : a Genetic Approach
Gramsci's theory of hegemony is currently understood as a theory of power in Western democratic societies, and therefore as a theory of cultural power (“cultural hegemony”). The aim of this article is to show that this interpretation is erroneous for at least three reasons. Firstly, because the notion of “democracy” itself has to be placed within its historical context : the meaning of “democracy” in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe was very different from what it would become in the post-WWII era. Secondly, because the various regimes which Gramsci might have been taking into account when he wrote the Prison Notebooks were the result of the crisis of the Liberal State and parliamentarianism. This is the case even if, in different ways, the political conflicts within each of them unfolded in ways which were quite different from what is today presupposed by the notion of cultural hegemony. And thirdly, because the genetic reconstruction of Gramsci's concept of hegemony, as developed in the Prison Notebooks, will demonstrate that the core of what is usually considered the Gramscian theory of hegemony had already been developed before 1926, in what I refer to as “standard theory”. What we thus have in the Notebooks is a substantial updating of this theory in order to think the new conditions of political struggle in Italy and Europe.

The Pedagogical Relationship and the Common School in the Gramscian Conception of Power
This article sets out to synthesize and question several passages dealing with educational issues in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, in particular the project of building a “common school” (scuola unitaria) and, more generally, what is called the “pedagogical relationship”. These occasional and apparently random remarks we find scattered throughout the Prison Notebooks are used by Gramsci to refine the concepts of power and hegemony, which they help to formalize. For Gramsci, hegemony is in fact an “educational relation”. These remarks enable us to identify certain ambiguities prefiguring those involved in the theories of symbolic domination, and which the critical sociology of education will make great use of. However the remarks also open up other potential paths leading into the heart of the philosophy of praxis, with its focus on the necessary and possible development of a “collective name”, intimately associated with the development of a “singular noun”. If we avoid the temptation to distort it by granting it a mythical status, the project of the “scuola unitaria” retains its relevance today, insofar as it makes the case for certain potentialities which, till now, have scarcely been actualised through the historical deployment of schooling.

Althusser as a Reader of Gramsci
The paper examines Althusser's readings of Gramsci, from the first critical notes and annotations to his writings on the crisis of Marxism. It highlights the profound ambivalence of Althusser's interpretations. On the one hand, Gramsci is presented as a precursor, as the only figure within the Marxist tradition deemed to have attempted to think the superstructure, and in particular the political. On the other side, the Gramscian corpus is criticized as the paradigmatic instance of a conception of temporality and politics with which Althusser is in disagreement. Regarding the Althusserian critique, we here identify two distinct phases starting out from a critique of the lack of knowledge of the specific status of science in general, especially of the science of history, characteristic of the second half of the sixties, Althusser would, in the late seventies, formulate a critique of the Gramscian concept of hegemony which, in his view, erases the question of class domination.

“Translations” and “Transfers” of Gramsci, Hegemony, Subjectivities in Anglophone Critical Social Sciences. This article examines the legacy of Gramscian thought in Anglophone social sciences. It focuses in particular on three currents or disciplines, namely Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies. All three have sought and sometimes found in Gramscian categories a number of theoretical and political instruments through which to think the structures of domination, individual or collective subjectivity, and their relation to culture, in particular through the use of the dialectical relationship of hegemony/subalternity. Demonstrating how Gramsci was received in the intellectual and political Anglophone context, the article highlights certain genealogies which have sometimes led to what amounts to a number of fully-fledged “translations” of Gramscian concepts, but also to a series of “lighter”, more distant uses. In this perspective, the article focuses on the translation of Gramsci undertaken by the New Left in the Seventies, insofar as this detour has proved of capital importance for the successive interpretations of Gramscian theories in the Anglophone social sciences.

Gramsci as an Interpreter of Brazil
This paper discusses the rare references to Brazil to be found in Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere, confronting them to the findings of the recent historiography, and the interpretations developed by Brazilian researchers on the basis of Gramsci's work. These interpretations are divided into three periods : a) 1960-1980, when the concept of passive revolution began to come into usage, albeit in a casual manner, to explain the genesis of the social and political forms in a country which had never witnessed a bourgeois revolution and which, at the time, was under a military dictatorship ; b) 1980-2000, a period marked by the publication of the first Brazilian studies devoted to Gramsci's thought, along with a stricter use and application of his concepts ; c) 2000 until today, a period when, drawing on these concepts, analysts have debated the nature of the Workers' Party (PT) government. The paper ends by suggesting new lines of research on passive revolution and the history of intellectuals.

A New Prince Beyond the Antimonies : Readings of Gramsci in Contemporary Social Movements
This article addresses the issue of the legacy of Gramsci in current debates within critical theory on questions of social transformation, political struggle and social movements. A survey of the current state of the literature reveals the existence of a number of strikingly opposed interpretations and “translations” of Gramsci. On the one hand, scholars and intellectuals in phase with the “anarchist moment” characteristic of recent upsurges and struggles tend to regard Gramsci as an old-fashioned and totalitarian Marxist, due to his insistence on the necessity of building a new hegemony. On the other hand, certain radical theorists focus on the possibility of using Gramsci's theories as a tool for devising new forms of popular resistance and subaltern politics. The article argues that both positions rely on a partial understanding of Gramsci's dialectical categories, hegemony/subaltern, political society/ civil society. More recently, the possibility of a resolution of these contradictions has become apparent thanks to the emergence of Gramscian approaches to contemporary political struggles which insist on the necessity of conceptualising a new political and cultural subject, a contemporary “modern prince”, capable of producing a new collective will.

The Burial of the Political in the Metaphysics of Karl Marx
This paper argues that in Marx's metaphysics, especially in his philosophical anthropology, a certain number of reasons can be identified which explain why he neither developed a political theory nor disposed of the conceptual space that might have enabled him to integrate a plausible system of political institutions within his social philosophy. As I argue here, this can be shown via a close analysis of the way Marx both criticised Hegel's metaphysics while at the same time integrating a number of crucial conceptions of Hegel's philosophy within a philosophical anthropology. The article therefore demonstrates that the metaphysics of species being is to be understood as a synthesis of Hegel, Feuerbach and Hess, leaving no room for a tension between individual and species.

On the Question of Dialectical Materialism in France : the Programme of the New Russian Circle in the Process Leading to the Formation of “Modern Rationalism”There is a chapter in the history of ideas which, at least since the 1960s, appeared to have been definitively resolved. French Marxism of the 1930s has thus been reduced, whether by its supporters and opponents or by historians, to the status of a mere avatar of Stalinist diamat, albeit with certain variations which can be traced back to the national heritage of materialism and rationalism. The paper presents the main results of a research project whose purpose is to reconstruct the developments which have led to the formation of such an image. The aim is to recover the possibility of apprehending afresh the various competing trends which, at the time, were engaged in a discursive struggle, the object of which was the definition of dialectical materialism. Hegel's name, invoked in the context of epistemological discourses and to oppose the dominant academic tradition, thus emerges as a major philosophical reference for those currents which, at the termination of this ideological conflict, ended up on the defeated side.

Were Some People More Equal than Others ? Forms of Domination in Primitive Communism
The article explores the main forms of domination which structure that category of classless societies in which inequalities of wealth and socioeconomic inequalities are absent, and which are often grouped together under the heading “primitive communism”. Our aim is to show that, contrary to the image conveyed by a certain Marxist tradition drawing on a rather sketchy body of ethnological information, such societies do actually present various forms of domination, which can sometimes be extremely harsh and formalized. These practices in particular involve the domination exercised by the old on the young, by the holders of the esoteric knowledge on the uninitiated or the common people and, perhaps most of all, by men over the women.

The Social and Ecologial Crisis of Capitalism : a Contradiction Between Wealth and Value
This article argues that the depreciation of labour and the degradation of nature are today the principal causes of the structural crisis, because capitalism cannot go beyond the current level of exploitation of labour and nature without a corollary decrease in the rate of profit. It draws on a distinction between use value and exchange value that proves helpful for an understanding of two facts. Firstly, that the mobilisation of labour in non-saleable services is productive of value. Secondly, that the « value » of nature does not belong to the order of economy. It belongs to a scale which cannot be evaluated : it provides wealth, but not value.

The Economy and Politics of the Theses of Thomas Piketty. II – An Alternative Reading of the History of Capitalism
The main purpose of this second article devoted to T. Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (the first was published in the previous issue of Actuel Marx) is to introduce our alternative reading of history. The tendencies manifest during the last decades of the 20th century and the early 21st century are not, it is argued, the replication of the tendencies which prevailed prior to World War I. The starting-point for our analysis is the beginning of the 20th century, a moment characterized by the dynamics of a “managerial capitalism” built around the “tripolar” class pattern of capitalists, managers, and popular classes. The main quantitative manifestation of these trends was the steady rise in the share accounted for by wages (compared to capital income) in the income of upper classes (notably the top 1 percent). In place of Piketty's impact of shocks, we focus on the chain of successive configurations of class domination and alliances, in a succession of “social orders” marking the historical advance of managerial capitalism : the first financial hegemony, in the years leading up to the Great Depression ; the postwar social-democratic compromise ; and its successor, neoliberalism, involving a new alliance to the right, between the managerial and popular classes.