In true Leninist style, there never was any serious effort at a skillful cultural penetration. The Soviet efforts, right up to the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, did foment cultural relations organizations and movements. But no one in any position of leadership was ever deceived. In propaganda, the Soviets had far greater success than the West. But, in matters of substance, they failed miserably. There was never the slightest sign of a genuine proletarian uprising in any country—only the meretricious imposition of Soviet domination by deceit, assassination, threat and military investment.
Only somebody like Karol Wojtyla, in the position he occupied as Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, in the front line of the Stalinist empire, could—among his Poles and fellow Slavs—smell the dry rot in the timber of that empire and could confidently predict back in the mid-seventies that “nothing can ensure the continuance for long of a system that is eating its own vitals.”
By the time the sinister Yuri Andropov died, in February 1984, the men huddled around the Politburo table in the Kremlin were beginning to realize that time was not on their side, that the hated capitalist world was growing stronger, that a new spirit was abroad even among their captive nations within the USSR and outside its borders, and that the colossus to the east—Communist China—was developing dangerous-looking muscles. There would be a short reign by the already ailing Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko—really an interregnum. For in their midst since 1980 there was this bustling, agile-footed Mikhail Gorbachev, already substituting for Andropov and Chernenko. His Party orthodoxy was above reproach. His administrative powers were recognized as superb. Under such headings of practical housekeeping, there were no doubts registered in his Politburo colleagues’ minds.
But what about his constant harping on a restructuring of the Marxist economy? And his proposals of a new mission, an utterly new mission for the Party-State, involving an entirely new way of penetrating the already burgeoning globalism of the capitalist nations? What did he imply by the “disaggregation of useless surrogates”? The refurbishing of the governmental structure of the USSR itself? The historic ties between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Germanic peoples and the Russian peoples? Nothing, he had stated to his colleagues, in the last seventy years of the Revolution has prepared us, in terms of how we have practiced Leninism, to deal with the new globalism.
Eventually, in their hardheaded way, those colleagues would yield to the importuning passion this comparatively young man brought to their brooding discussions. They vested him with all authority over the Party-State in March 1985. But it is most probable that none of them, or not, at least, the majority of them, had ever seriously delved into the writings and theories of Antonio Gramsci. His prison notebooks and their fateful analysis of Leninism were the textbooks of their new General Secretary.
13
Antonio Gramsci:
The Haunting of East
and West
When Pope John Paul II reckons up the major forces against him and his Church in the millennium endgame, the geopolitical strength of Soviet-led world Communism at the end of the twentieth century rests in his view on the contributions of one man, who stands second only to Marx and Lenin. The historic events that have been gathering momentum since the end of World War II, and that have reached a pitch of euphoric fever at the opening of the 1990s, have proved Antonio Gramsci the worthiest, the most farsighted and, in practical terms, the most successful of all the interpreters of Karl Marx.
Italian Communists have long recognized Gramsci as the authentic founder, theoretician and strategist of their party’s unique success in the West. But that is not the basis of John Paul’s judgment. Rather, the Pope counts Gramsci’s greatest contributions as three. His incisive critique of classical Leninism. His stunningly successful blueprint for the reform of that Leninism, which has now swept the world. And his accurate prediction of the cardinal mistake that the Western democracies would make in their confrontation with Gramscian Communism, and with their own future.
Antonio Gramsci’s contributions have outlived the man by half a century. And, though Moscow has been chary with its kudos for him, the fact remains that the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism—and certainly more than Stalinism—to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West. All that has happened both to capitalist and Communist powers since 1945—and most dramatically since 1985—has completely vindicated the judgment of this authentic Marxist genius in the Hall of Communism’s Heroes.
Personally speaking, Antonio Gramsci was not the most fortunate of men. But he was probably one of the most tenacious. He was born in the village of Ales on the island of Sardinia in 1891. As the only road upward for any Sardinian is the road out, Gramsci left for mainland Italy, where he studied philosophy and history at Turin University. By 1913, he was a member of the Italian Socialist Party. In 1919, he founded a newspaper, whose name alone—L’Ordine Nuovo, The New Order—gave clear indication of his bent of mind and of the fact that, like Lenin, he was both a visionary and a doer of deeds.
In 1921, in association with Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci founded the Italian Communist Party. The next year, however, the squat, broad-shouldered, lantern-jawed, forty-year-old Benito Mussolini came to power. Like a toad who had been masquerading as a prince, that onetime Italian Socialist turned into a Fascist dictator. Italy became a Fascist nation. And Gramsci took off for what he no doubt expected would be the safer haven of Lenin’s USSR.
Marxist though he was, and as fully convinced as Lenin that there was a force completely inner to mankind driving it on as a whole to the Marxist ideal of the “Workers’ Paradise,” Gramsci was too aware of the facts of history and of life to accept other basic and gratuitous assumptions made by Marx, and accepted unquestioningly by Lenin.
For one thing, Marx and Lenin insisted that throughout the entire world, human society was divided into just two opposing camps—the broad “structure” of the great mass of people, the workers of the world; and the unjustly created “superstructure” of oppressive capitalism.
Gramsci knew otherwise. He understood the nature of Christian culture, which he saw as still vibrant and thriving in the lives of the people all around him. Not only did Christianity point unceasingly to a divine force beyond mankind—a force outside and superior to the material cosmos. Christianity was also the spiritual and intellectual patrimony held in common by the bone-poor peasants in his native Ales, the workers in Milan’s factories, the professors who had taught him at Turin University, and the Pope in his Roman splendor.
Gramsci himself rejected Christianity and all its transcendent claims. He knew Mussolini was the latest in a long list of leaders who abused it. He knew the Sardinian peasants and Milanese laboring classes readily accused the upper classes of playing on it. He knew the university dons might have contempt for it. And he knew it was under attack from many sides.
Nevertheless, he knew Christian culture existed. It was far more real, in fact, than the still nonexistent proletarian revolution. Moreover, as a religion, the appeal and the power of Christianity could not be denied. For that was the force binding all the classes—peasants and workers and princes and priests and popes and all the rest besides—into a single, homogeneous culture. It was a specifically Christian culture, in which individual men and women understood that the most important things about human life transcended the material conditions in which they lived out their mortal lives.
True, in the Czarist Russia in which Lenin and Stalin had been reared, there had been an oppressive “superstructure”—the Czar, the aristocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church—which had stood in opposition to the mass of citizens. But even in such ripe conditions as that, there had been no such proletarian revolution as Marx and Lenin had predicted.
Perhaps Lenin and Stalin and the rest of the Bolshevik Party were prepared to pretend otherwise. And perhaps the rest of the world was prepared to accept their Big Lie. But Gramsci would not. For him, a coup d’état was not a rev
olution. And for him, the Russian masses, whom he described contemptuously as “primitive and spineless,” had no importance, in any case.
Gramsci agreed that the great mass of the world’s population was made up of workers. That much was just plain fact. What became clear to him, however, was that nowhere—and especially not in Christian Europe—did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from the ruling classes by an ideological chasm.
And if that was true, Gramsci argued, then Marx and Lenin had to be wrong in another of their fundamental assumptions: There would never be a glorious uprising of the proletariat. There would be no Marxist-inspired violent overthrow of the ruling “superstructure” by the working “underclasses.” Because no matter how oppressed they might be, the “structure” of the working classes was defined not by their misery or their oppression but by their Christian faith and their Christian culture.
Realist that he was, Gramsci understood that he was knocking his Marxist head against that strong millennial wall—the pervasive culture with which Christianity had built, housed, defended and buttressed its faith. The Marxist insistence that everything valuable in life was within mankind—was immanent in mankind and its earthly condition—was impotent against such a bulwark.
Had Gramsci needed any concrete reassurance that his analysis of the situation, and not Lenin’s, was the correct one, it came in 1923, toward the end of his exile in the Soviet Union. In that year, the proletarian revolution Lenin had expected in Germany died in the ballot box and on the streets of Berlin.
Indeed, Gramsci’s critique even held true in China, where all of Lenin’s careful networking for the proletarian revolution came to its own dismal end. Perhaps Mikhail Borodin took the official blame for that failure when, as the chief architect of the effort there, he was brought home and garroted. But Gramsci was convinced that neither Germany nor China nor any other country—especially any European country—fulfilled the simplistic Leninist-Marxist formula of a vast, featureless structure of the masses who perceived themselves as fundamentally different from a small, alien superstructure.
Gramsci still nourished the Leninist conviction that the final birth of the “Paradise of Workers” would take place. But he knew that the way to that peak of human happiness had to be completely different from the Leninist concept of armed and violent revolution. He knew there had to be another process.
As it happened, the failure of Lenin’s efforts in Germany and China not only confirmed Gramsci in his convictions; it also meant time was running out for him in the Soviet Union. His point of view was not overly popular in Moscow in any case. It had been his misfortune to have arrived in the Soviet Union in the twilight time of Communism’s “glorious genius,” Lenin. Now, with Joseph Stalin in charge of the Central Committee as General Secretary of the CPSU, and with inner-Party democracy becoming an increasingly fragile and dangerous thing at best, Gramsci would probably end up in the infamous Lubyanka Prison, where he would be tortured into a confession of his deviancy and then killed.
In the circumstances, Gramsci turned his eyes back toward home. As great a foe as Mussolini and his Fascism were to Gramsci’s ideals, Stalin’s already impressive control of the Party machinery in Moscow would leave Gramsci with no allies in the USSR. Italy would at least be the better of two bad choices.
Once he returned, things went well enough for a short time. Gramsci was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1924. As the head of a nineteen-man Communist faction in Italy’s Parliament, however, he rapidly became a danger for Mussolini’s regime. He was arrested in 1926, and in 1928 was sentenced by a Fascist court to twenty years imprisonment.
By that time, he had already converted the major Italian Communist thinkers and political leaders to his critique of classical Leninism and to his own suggested reform of that Leninism. But over and above that, in a sort of continuous paroxysm of Marxist dedication, the imprisoned Gramsci spent the next nine years of his life writing. He set down his ideas on any scraps of paper he could get his hands on. By the time he died in 1937, at the age of forty-six, and against all odds, he had produced nine volumes of material that pointed the way to achieve a Marxist world.
Gramsci did not live to witness Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and the failure of yet another plan for violent proletarian revolt. He didn’t live to see the disgrace and ignominious death of his Fascist persecutor, Mussolini, at the hands of the Italian Communist partisans. Nor did he live to see even the first traces of the vindication and victory of his ideas.
Nevertheless, when the first volume of what he had written in prison was published in 1947—a full ten years after his death—the voice of the long-dead Marxist prophet became a reality for which the world at large had no ready answer. A reality that would bedevil Joseph Stalin and each of his successors until Mikhail Gorbachev, who listened at last, would finally take the hand of Gramsci’s ghost and set off on the Leninist-Marxist road to the twenty-first century.
Gramsci’s willingness to face the fact that the idea of a violent worldwide proletarian revolution was bankrupt from the outset allowed him to rethink and reapply the most powerful of the ideas of his Marxist predecessors. For he never broke faith with the ultimate Communist and Marxist ideal of the Workers’ Paradise. He simply read without tinted glasses the basic philosophic text Marx had imbued and taken as his own. And then he put a sharp knife to what he saw as the mistakes of both Marx and Lenin.
Gramsci—intellectually a product of the Roman Catholic society of Italy—was far more advanced than either Hegel or Marx in his understanding of Christian metaphysics in general, of Thomism in particular, and of the richness of the Roman Catholic heritage. That understanding, and his own insistently practical mind, allowed him to be far more sophisticated and subtle in his interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic philosophy of history than Marx had been.
A key element of Gramsci’s blueprint for the global victory of Marxism rested on Hegel’s distinction between what was “inner” or “immanent” to man and what man held to be outside and above him and his world—a superior force transcending the limitations of individuals and of groups, both large and small.
The immanent. The transcendent. For Gramsci, the two were unavoidably paired and yoked. Marxism’s “transcendent,” said Gramsci, was the utopian ideal. But he understood that if Marxism could not touch the transcendent motivation presently accepted as real by men and women and groups in the largely Christian society that surrounded him, then Marxists could not get at what made those individuals and groups tick, what made them think and act as they did.
At the same time, however—and precisely because the immanent and the transcendent are paired—Gramsci argued that unless you can systematically touch what is immanent and immediate to individuals and groups and societies in their daily lives, you cannot convince them to struggle for any transcendent.
As far as Gramsci could see, therefore, the call of Marx and Lenin to impose their “transcendent” by violent force was a futile contradiction in human logic. It was no wonder that, even in his time, the only Marxist state that existed was imposed and maintained by force and by terrorist policies that duplicated and even exceeded the worst facets of Mussolini’s Fascism. If Marxism could not find a way to change that formula, it would have no future.
What was essential, insisted Gramsci, was to Marxize the inner man. Only when that was done could you successfully dangle the utopia of the “Workers’ Paradise” before his eyes, to be accepted in a peaceful and humanly agreeable manner, without revolution or violence or bloodshed.
Deeply critical though he was, Gramsci still did not tamper with the most fundamental and motivating of Marx’s ideas. He totally accepted the strange utopian vision that is the siren call of all true Marxists. The idea that capitalism and capitalists would be eliminated, that a classless society would come into existence, and that such a society would be the Paradise of Marx’s dreams. And he was totally convinced that the material dimension of everything
in the universe, including mankind, was the whole of it.
From Lenin, meanwhile, Gramsci absorbed two major and supremely practical contributions. The first was Lenin’s extraordinary geopolitical vision. The second was his even more extraordinary practical invention—the Party-State as the operational core of geopolitically successful Marxism. For, in Gramsci’s blueprint, Lenin’s intricate international Party machinery would remain the basis for a worldwide Communist Party under the dominant control of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
In fact, Lenin’s organizational creation was Marxism’s ideal answer to the centrally directed global structure of the Roman Catholic Church.
What Marx and Lenin had got wrong, Gramsci said, was the part about an immediate proletarian revolution. His Italian socialist brothers could see as well as he did that, in a country such as Italy—and in Spain or France or Belgium or Austria or Latin America, for that matter—the national tradition of all the classes was virtually cosubstantial with Roman Catholicism. The idea of proletarian revolution in such a climate was impractical at best, and could be counterproductive at worst.
Even Stalinist terror methods, Gramsci predicted, could not eliminate what he called “the forces of bourgeois reaction.” Instead, he warned, those reactionary forces—organized religion, the intellectual and academic establishment, capitalist and entrepreneurial circles—all would be compressed by any such repression into dense streams of tradition, resistance and resentment. They would go underground, no doubt; but they would seek converts in the Leninist structure. They would bide their time until, at the opportune moment, they would thrust to the surface, shattering Marxist unity and ripping open the seams of the Leninist structure.
Once that happened, Gramsci understood, the capitalist circles abroad would be waiting to jump into the situation and exploit it for their own gain, to the detriment of the Leninist-Marxist ideal of the ultimate Workers’ Paradise.
Keys of This Blood Page 31