Régis Debray

Schema for
a study of Gramsci
I
His historicism can be turned against him, in the sense that he too can
be subjected to a historically limitative analysis. Indeed, he cannot be
understood outside his specific historical context, or divorced from the
object of his opposition.
1. Gramsci’s fundamental target was ‘social-democratic’ and ‘Bukharin-
ist’ mechanicism, which he saw as a form of fatalism, as a confusion
between the science of nature and the science of history (hence his anti-
Engelsian, anti-scientific emphasis).
(What was the principal danger? The principal confusion against which
and in relation to which Gramsci’s position was to be defined and
Marxism was to be distinguished? Defining the particularity, i.e. the
inner essence of a doctrine or theory is something which cannot be done
abstractly: it is an active and reactive operation. To define means to
distinguish, to separate from a historical environment, from a filiation,
from a threatening affinity. Gramsci sets out to establish the nature of
Marxism as compared to the mechanistic materialism of the Eighteenth
Century. He is therefore engaged in a struggle: the character of his
theoretical work is essentially polemical, just as his activity as a militant
is founded on that theoretical work. It is wrong to try and ‘excuse’
certain of Gramsci’s theoretical formulations, however surprising they
may be, as deriving from his situation as an active militant. This is what
Cogniot does in the Morceaux Choisis;1 he is continually seeking to de-
fend Gramsci from himself, to ‘moderate’ him, as if trying to calm down
a person who has become over-excited in the heat of a dispute. In
reality, all theoretical analysis is of its very essence polemical, a ‘com-
mitted’ form of critique; Marx himself constructs Capital on a critique

1 The title is in fact Antonio Gramsci, Oeuvres Choisies, published by Editions Sociales,

with an introduction by Georges Cogniot.

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of political economy, starting from—-and against—Smith, Ricardo and
Say. The interesting thing in Gramsci’s case is that he does not hide it,
he does not claim any scholarly, academic or ‘scientific’ ‘objectivity’, he
lays his cards on the table: he theoretically assumes the necessity for
explicit polemic).

2. In this struggle, Gramsci takes as his starting-point (i.e. turns for

assistance to) Croce, Sorel, De Man: authors—especially Croce—
whose importance he over-estimates. This over-estimation too (in our
eyes) is a historical feature, the mark of an epoch.

II

These limitations notwithstanding, the immense merit of Gramsci is

that he took as the central node and strategic junction of his analyses the
unity, the welding together of theory and praxis. That he radically
opposed any separation of the two. Gramsci is the man who asks him-
self how theory can make the transition into history; anybody who is a
genuine militant, seeking to act in a revolutionary manner, necessarily
comes up against this problem of how to effect a fusion of history and
philosophy.

A fusion:
1. From the revolutionary-political point of view: unity between ‘spontaneity’
and ‘conscious leadership’ (Turin council movement), relation between
party and masses, leaders and rank-and-file militants. (The passage on
p. 338 is an extraordinarily apt prescription for the May movement; i.e.
do not condemn it but raise it above itself 2 ). The party ⫽ education ⫽
collective intellectual (the party ‘as’ collective intellectual); or the con-
tradiction negated: the intellectual in fact is the individual.

2. From the theoretical point of view: ‘modern theory can be in opposition

to the spontaneous feelings of the masses’ ‘as a quantitative difference,
not one of quality’. Marxism effects a junction with common sense: it
surpasses and resumes it.

3. From the cultural point of view: ‘the intellectuals’ must be evaluated

according to whether they do or do not constitute a link with the as-
cendant masses. If they do, they are ‘organic’, if not, they are artificial.

4. From the artistic point of view: popular literature. How is the bond
achieved between literature and people? What is the form in which a
people or nation can accede to the literature of the élite? Hence
Gramsci’s meticulous attention to the historical reality of the nation,
inseparable from the theoretical moment. Marxism must be born of a
historical implantation, must continue a tradition—and this in its
incarnated form. Thus it must ‘translate’ the concreteness of life into
theoretical form (‘A scholastic, academic conception of history and of
politics is the expression of a passivity.’3 Historically correct). Translate

2 op. cit. p. 338, corresponding to A. Gramsci, Passato e Presente, Einaudi, p. 57.

3 See Cogniot p. 339, Passato e Presente, p. 58.

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common sense into philosophy and incorporate (Marxist) philosophy
into common sense: these are the two key precepts. The question of the
transition from one to the other, understood at once as translation and
transformation.

III

We have an extraordinary historical advantage over Gramsci. For

Gramsci was not destined to see the ‘transition’ of Marxism into a
concrete historical society. He could not assess the consequences—both
for Marxism and for Russian society. We, however, have watched 50
years of a fantastic historical experiment: what happens to a theory
when it has become the official ideology of a number of states? Or
again, what happens to a culture when a ‘scientific’ theory has been
incorporated into it? etc.

At this point, a note: the Marxists. Marxism has not yet reflected upon
its own incarnation in history. During the past 50 years, socialism has
become a historical, social and cultural reality for one third of the
world’s population: the ‘countries with a socialist system’, what used to
be called the ‘socialist camp’. This half century constitutes a history,
which has produced a resultant. This history is a complex one, and
consequently its resultant is complex too. It is not the superficial ex-
pression of a simple principle; there are different levels, inequalities,
contradictions between the levels, both within a single country and
between the various countries—economic, cultural, and political con-
tradictions. But the fact that the reality is a complex one means that a
complex analysis is necessary, and not that all analysis can be dispensed
with!

Now, this socialist ‘realization’ (history as resultant) has not been the
object of a Marxist analysis.

For various reasons:

1. Marxism is not the analysis of socialism, but of the capitalist system.
The hiatus is especially evident in the field of economics: despair of the
socialist economists searching laboriously for references in Marx
(Gotha Programme, Manifesto, Correspondence, etc.).

2. The historical necessities of struggle have given priority to defence

over knowledge: first of all, defend the socialist camp from its assail-
ants, in order to protect the proletariat from doubt and despair, etc.
Hence apology rather than analysis. Impossibility of taking a distance.
For it is evident that analysis would reveal the existence of contradic-
tions internal to socialism; contradictions which Communism—as a
mass ideology—claims have disappeared.

3. It would necessarily involve using ‘heterodox’ concepts: civilization,

culture, etc.

4. The way in which consciousness, and science too, lag behind the
process that is their object.
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 IV
Gramsci is simultaneously philosopher ‘and’ historian: (even from the
point of view of simple quantity, he left as many philosophical notes as
historical ones). But he is neither a historian of philosophy—which
would presuppose that philosophy can have a history of its own,
comprehensible from within itself (an anti-Gramsdan, idealist premiss).
Nor is he a philosopher of history—which would presuppose a dis-
solution of real history into some philosophical teleology (another
anti-Grams cian premiss). The problem which he confronts is contained
in that ‘and’; Gramsci stands on the watershed between relation and
distinction. Instead of seeing relation as given once and for all, he presents
it as a problem, or rather as problems in the plural—in the sense of
problems that each time are new, unique, ‘historical’. History as a
problem to solve: that is Gramsci’s strength. His weakness, or better
his historicist deviation, appears whenever he treats history as its own
solution, as a self-solving problem: ‘Humanity never poses itself prob-
lems other than those which it can solve, problems the conditions for
whose solution do not already exist . . .’; this is the motif which con-
tinually recurs. Whence certain doubts: how and why historicism is not
a simple historical relativism. Also certain lacunae: how and why science
can exist, etc. There is a further objective limit of history, which gives
certain of Gramsci’s texts their pathos (though it by no means robs
them of their value—they remain to bear witness, milestones of a
historical hope): the texts which predict, which expect from the
‘transition’ of theory into practice, a new civilization, a new culture, a
way of life, a scale of values radically different from those prevalent
under Western capitalism—which has become inorganic, decadent,
dualist. As far as Europe (USSR and People’s Democracies) is concerned,
history has frustrated these hopes. The Gramscian task for us today is
to seek out the reasons, the modalities and the consequences of that
frustration. ‘Gramscian’ because it particularly concerns Europe, the
Italian and French workers and intellectuals. Some of the political
conditions exist, especially in Italy, for beginning this work. But the
objective dynamic of the theoretical field (thrusts and counter-thrusts)
will necessarily tend to displace this criticism towards the right—
‘revisionism’—to the extent that it seeks its points of reference in
Europe alone. Or else, at the opposite extreme, the criticism will seek
its points of reference solely in the myths of the Third World or in a
non-European reality, and it will then be displaced in the direction of a
romantic, abstract leftism, without roots or points of application in the
sphere of reality. Is it possible to overcome this alternative, this mutual
incomprehension of two positions which are equally incorrect (the
right-wing position is a mass one, the left-wing position is one of
minorities trapped in a ghetto) but sufficiently displaced to justify each
other reciprocally, to feed each other’s reason for existing? Judging by
events—by what is happening in Rome or Paris—one would not say so.
(By ‘reality’ I mean phenomena seen critically, restored to their effective
conditions of possibility. The drama of ‘May 1968’ is that it is already
fulfilling the same function for left extremism as ‘June 1936’ fulfilled
for communist reformism: the function of a justificatory myth, the
residue of decades of illusions. What is new in comparison with 1936 is
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the speed with which the phenomenon made the transition from
history to myth, from the real to the symbolic. This is of course due to
the progress made by capitalism in its ability to recuperate those who
were contesting its power, by means of books, newspapers, films, plays,
etc. But above all May succeeded in satisfying a real need, an immense
frustrated need, felt by revolutionary groups (and also to a certain
degree by the entire social body, as something to be exorcized, re-
jected). This was precisely the need for Myth, for an autochthonous
Myth, internal to capitalism—without forgetting that every myth re-
flects a relative rupture as an absolute. This need was born of the hiatus
produced by the imbalance between an immediate, local, grey, reform-
ist, profane history and the breath of revolution, a disruptive yet
mediated and distant force (China, Vietnam, Cuba)—without the two
moments being able to meet on the ground of the hie et nunc. The hiatus
was filled by what took on the appearance of a reality: the myths born
of May 1968. The need is satisfied for twenty years).

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