Last night I read the scene in Antonio Gramsci's life. On the evening of 8 November 1926, this Communist Party leader was arrested by Italian fascist government, and two years later the 20-year sentence handed down. On that day the prosecutor said, "For over 20 years we must stop this brain function.".
Many ways for stopping the mind, a lot of jail and not a prison, sometimes effective, sometimes failed. Law enforcement failed. After being held in Regina Coeli cell in Rome, Gramsci finally locked up in prison Turi, almost at the southern tip of Italy, with deteriorating health. He died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 46 years, 27 April 1937. But then known, from 11 years in solitary confinement there was born thousands of records, containing his thoughts, in addition to approximately 500 letters to his family and his friends.
The records were later collected in three volumes (in English version: Prison Notebooks) which then become a source of fresh debate about revolution and Marxism. Indeed there were prosecutors and Mussolini, but there was no confinement for Gramsci's thoughts. Although it did not mean there was a freedom, too.
His records could only be issued freely in a few years after World War II. His original capabilities seen in reviewing the points in Marxism. We can also find his musings about other things. About the language, for example. But it became known widely after Stalin died. Previously, his friends broadcast it carefully. Not only because of Mussolini's regime. Gramsci relationship with Stalin -- the controller international communist movement that reigned in the Kremlin -- not always straight. Another Italian Communist Party -- including Togliatti, his close friends since they attended the same school -- could receive the commandment from "the Center". Gramsci couldn't abide by the time he had to obey. If he was imprisoned by Mussolini, then he might be killed by Stalin as hundreds of other revolutionaries.
Perhaps because there were two figures of Gramsci, then both could be distinguished but could not be separated.
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, "Unlike Lenin, Gramsci is an intellectual from the beginning. He is"someone who is almost physically aroused just because of the attractiveness of the ideas. In stirred, no one can rule. But at the time the same, he is the leader of the Party. Party is an idea, program, work, discipline. He is a true Marxist, which is always in the middle of a confrontation, not only want to interpret the world, but also to change it. He's siding. Vivo, sono Partigiano. I'm alive, I'm a partisan. I feel the pulse of the country's future activities that was built by those who stood at my side."
A partisan often have to summarize the idea to be the doctrine and packing the doctrine to be the guidelines. Map of the future should be made clear, The steps must be contrived for sure. Gramsci of course ever for preferring effective way than continuing the deep thinking.
But apparently, it was not always so. He could change as commentary about him changed. February 1934, in a periodic party someone describing Gramsci profile with awe - but showed him as a patient who was always questioning everything, just like Socrates. "He is," said the author, "Not the kind of party leaders who are always quick to give an answer". In other words, for Gramsci, not always there was a ready-made answer.
Apparently, the article was a veiled criticism to the tendency of Italian Communist Party which more doctrinaire. Not surprisingly, the author immediately denounced. For the officials of the party, Gramsci was not a Socratic who was wondering. In the ideological turmoil at that time, when in Moscow Stalin changed the fundamentals established by Lenin, the Communist Party of Italy had to have a stable Gramsci.
But in his cell, Gramsci felt there was something could change in him. "I feel, if only I am released from prison now, I will continue to live with my brain, only to see the people, even to those who should I consider close, not as a living being, but as a puzzle to be solved."
Many years estranged from rumbling debate and excitement over a togetherness, a thinker is easily drawn into a Cartesian silence: The others will only be present as an object of analysis. Humans exist to be formulated. The doctrine will increasingly determine the views of the thinker, not an unexpected relationships between people.
For Gramsci, that's where the death of a revolutionist. "How many times I wonder to myself, how can a relationship with people when we never have a strong sympathy to anyone, even to our own parents, as if we can have together while we do not have people who loved us."
Love and loved often become commonplace and never referred to in the theory of revolution. But we remember Gramsci in cells: write, write, write. He is reaching out to those who are not objects of analysis that can be formulated. Each of words he used containing speech of another person who in somewhere ever said it and will use it. The word is the deal, clash, misunderstandings, struggle. Can not be alone. Language, though siding but it could be one-sided. It is not a product of passiveness.
"I hate indifference", he wrote. "Indifference and apathy are the same as parasite, cowardice."
***
(CZ-lacalifusa16121)
No comments:
Post a Comment