Gramsci's Plan

Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800

Robin Jacobitz

• Publisher: tredition
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783347356771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800 is an interesting read even for philosophical nonprofessionals because... - the philosophy of the Enlightenment is presented in comprehensible language and embedded in the 300-year struggle for the liberation of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, - the importance of reason in our knowledge, in the sciences, and in the democratic republic is elaborated based on Kant's writings, - in times of threat with Kant's philosophy a reassurance can be made regarding the foundations of the democratic republic and the worldwide spread of this form of government since the First French Republic, - Kant's "categorical imperative" must be reinterpreted as a fundamental political norm of the democratic republic, if his ethics is understood as a "German theory of the French Revolution" (Marx), - countering the postmodern discrediting of the philosophy of history by placing the current struggle for the democratic republic in the context of Kant's goal of history, which called for a democratically organized and federally unified humanity on the grounds of reason.

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1

Gramsci’s Plan and the Legacy of German Classical Philosophy

A book about Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy?

This book is intended for all those who wish to orient themselves in today’s world, who wish to learn from which philosophical disputes our present world emerged, and who are looking for suggestions as to how today’s world can be changed in a humanistic, progressive and socialistic sense. It was written with the intention to bring philosophy as a whole closer to our contemporary life; to reclaim it for today’s social disputes. Philosophy deals very fundamentally with human life and the world in which it takes place. With Kant, philosophy can be fundamentally divided into epistemology, ethics, philosophy of history, and the final question, “What is man?” The issues philosophers address are in some ways “beneath” current political disputes, yet all social and political actors – from a citizens’ initiative to governments – are constantly guided by philosophical considerations. In the 21st century, a new generation has set out to avert the looming ecological catastrophes and fight the misery in the world. It is about nothing less than slowing down the capitalist world economy, which is designed for profit and growth under competitive conditions and to initiate an ecological reconstruction of the world economy based on solidarity. This task permanently raises philosophical questions today and in the future, such as the question of the cognitive capacity of meteorological science, the possibilities of human action as producer and consumer in a globalized economy, or the general chances of humanity to avoid a warlike or ecological catastrophe. Because of this situation, a study of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci seems to make sense, because his work refers to the historically unique attempt to transcend the bourgeois social order as a whole and to build a new world without war, exploitation, and colonial oppression. This attempt was made in the years 1917 to 1921 by the revolutionary movements in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, because they drew consequences from the hell of World War I and wanted to put an end to the capitalist world economy.

Oppressors and Oppressed – An essay by Antonio Gramsci from 1911: Antonio Gramsci’s generation was also confronted with a very specific world political issue. In Gramsci’s case, this was European colonialism and the threat of war that it posed. In the late 19th century, the great European states had begun to divide the entire world among themselves and build colonial empires. In the process, considerable tension arose between the imperial powers. After France occupied Morocco in April 1911, the German Kaiser sent gunboats off the coast of Morocco. With this threatening military maneuver, Wilhelm II wanted to obtain quid pro quos for accepting French rule over Morocco. Following these events, which made headlines as the “Moroccan Crisis,” large demonstrations against the impending war took place throughout Europe. The largest mass rally took place in Berlin in September 1911, with about 200,000 participants. In the same month, the Italian government, emboldened by a nationalist and pro-colonialist mood, declared war on Libya. Libya was then a part of the Ottoman Empire, that is, Turkey. During the course of the Turkish-Italian war, massacres of Libyan civilians were carried out by Italian troops, who dropped bombs from the air for the first time. In October 1912, victorious Italy annexed Libya and named this colony “Italian North Africa.” Also in 1911, Antonio Gramsci, then 20 years old, wrote an essay in school entitled “Oppressors and Oppressed.” In it, he protested the colonial conquests of Europeans around the world and placed resistance to them philosophically in the tradition of the Enlightenment as established by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). “The struggle waged by humanity from time immemorial is truly amazing. It is an incessant struggle, one in which mankind strives to tear off and break the chains with which the lust for power on the part of a single man, or a single class, or even an whole people, attempt to shackle it. This struggle is an epic that has had innumerable heroes and has been written down by historians all over the world. Men, when they come to feel their strength and to be conscious of their responsibility and their value, will no longer suffer another man to impose his will on them and claim the right to control their actions and thoughts.”¹ A year later, Lenin (1870-1924) wrote an article in the Russian newspaper Pravda about the Turkish-Italian war. Lenin, the then still largely unknown leader of the Russian Social Democrats (Bolsheviks), would later become an important guiding figure for Gramsci in the years of the uprising of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919/20, as well as in his “Prison Notebooks.” In 1912, Lenin commented on the outcome of the Turkish-Italian war as follows: “Italy ‘has won.’ A year ago, it invaded the Turkish territories in Africa like a brigand, and from now on Tripoli will belong to Italy. It will not be out of place to take a closer look at this typical colonial war of a ‘civilized’ state of the 20th century. What was the cause of this war? By the greed of the Italian financial magnates and capitalists who need a new market, the successes of Italian imperialism.” Lenin continued as follows, “What kind of war was this? A perfected, civilized massacre, a slaughter of the Arabs with ‘most modern’ weapons. The Arabs were desperately fighting back. (…) Despite the ‘peace’, in reality, the war will continue, because the Arab tribes in the interior of the African continent, far from the coast, will not submit. They will be ‘civilized’ for a long time to come – by bayonet, by bullet, by rope, by fire, by the rape of their women.”² Lenin will be right in his prediction. Only towards the end of the 20th century will colonialism have been defeated everywhere on Earth. The international peace movement could not prevent the outbreak of World War I three years after the Moroccan crisis. For 4 years, the war raged over zones of influence, colonies, and national prestige, costing the lives of 17 million people. It was followed by economic crises, famine, widespread misery, and revolutions and uprisings throughout Europe, one of which took place in Italy.

Antonio Gramsci and his philosophy of praxis: Antonio Gramsci was Italian and lived from 1891 to 1937. He was born in Sardinia and grew up in modest circumstances. Because of a scholarship, he was able to begin studying literature in Turin in 1913. In the same year, he joined the Italian Socialist Party. Later he wrote articles in socialist daily newspapers. When World War I broke out in 1914, Gramsci was 23 years old. After the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918 helped end World War I, he participated in a leading position in the Italian factory councils movement in 1919/20. Gramsci was thus a contemporary of Lenin (1870-1924) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), only about 20 years younger. Like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, he was one of the leading figures of the communist parties that had just been founded. Gramsci became general secretary of the Italian Communist Party in 1924, and in 1926, the police of the fascist Prime Minister Mussolini arrested him. Gramsci spent the next 11 years in prison, where he wrote the “Prison Notebooks” on philosophy, politics and culture in Italy and Europe in 29 notebooks of over 1300 pages. In 1937, shortly after his release, Gramsci died because of his stay in prison. His “Prison Notebooks” and the philosophy of praxis they contain continue to be considered a treasure of 20th century European philosophical history. In it, Gramsci undertook a critical reappraisal of the philosophy and practice of the labor movement and its social democratic and communist parties to explain the defeats of the years 1917 to 1921 and to draw conclusions from them. In his “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci took a hard line with the entire Marxist philosophy as it had been developed after Marx’s death in 1883, from Friedrich Engels to Georgi Plekhanov, the theoretician of Russian social democracy, to Lenin and Bukharin, the leaders of the Russian Bolsheviks. His investigations culminated in the statement that this philosophy must be laid to rest.

Did Gramsci create the philosophical core of an alternative form of communism? The literature on Antonio Gramsci and his work has become unmanageably large in recent decades. His “Prison Notebooks” in particular have been the starting point for a great deal of discussion on the political left and in universities about Marxist philosophy, European history, the concept of hegemony, and his comments on language, culture, and the school system. So why yet another book on Antonio Gramsci? Everybody knows it: there are certain sentences that stay in your head. This is what happened to the author with a sentence formulated by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in his 1200-page account of the “Main Currents of Marxism” in 1976: “One may say that Gramsci created the ideological core of an alternative form of communism, which, however, never existed as a political movement and even less as a real regime.”³ Instead of “ideological core“, it should better read “philosophical core”. And the second part of the sentence also needs correction: Gramsci was part of a social movement; he processed the struggles and defeats, the goals and forms of organization of the Turin factory councils movement in his theories as an activist and later as leader of the Italian Communist Party. If his early writings from the years of the Italian factory councils movement in 1919 and 1920 are read in the context of the “Prison Notebooks,” they contain the philosophical core of an alternative to Stalin’s philosophy, which was predominant, with certain exceptions, in the Soviet Union until its demise in 1991. The philosophical alternative to Stalinism does not consist mainly in the exposition of the principles of a future society, but it formulates those principles that are to be applied in a constantly developing bourgeois society to be able to take an emancipatory path out of it. Gramsci derived these principles from an independent reconstruction of Marx’s philosophy and the struggles of the Italian workers’ movement under the conditions of a democratic constitution in the years following World War I. Based on Kolakowski’s thought that Gramsci had created the philosophical “core of an alternative form of communism,” the author resumed reading the “Prison Notebooks” after the Argument-Verlag, Hamburg, published them in German.

Gramsci’s plan and the legacy of classical German philosophy: In the course of this second reading, the philosophical leitmotif that Gramsci had pursued in his “Prison Notebooks” emerged piece by piece. According to this, his plan was to make Marxism fruitful again as a practical philosophy for the modern world, beyond the philosophical materialism developed by Lenin and codified in the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin (1878-1953). Gramsci provided his plan with the practical goal of achieving the “emancipation of the subaltern classes” in a global perspective. Accordingly, Gramsci’s philosophy, which he himself gave the name “philosophy of praxis,” is presented here as an attempt to think a way out of world capitalist society based on the practical experience of the years 1917 to 1921. What makes Gramsci unique in the tradition of Marxist philosophy is that he considered classical German philosophy, and specifically the philosophies of Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831), to be the key to understanding the philosophy of Karl Marx. He conceived of Marx’s philosophical work as a reform of Hegelianism. In this context, Gramsci also explored the question of whether Kant’s philosophy was the “first annual ring of a new philosophy that goes beyond the philosophy embodied in the French Revolution.”⁴ Gramsci thus intended to uncover the Kant-Hegel-Marx line of philosophical development, a line of philosophical thought that Stalinism and its precursors had fought against, successfully destroyed, and replaced with a different approach to Marx. This book intends to fill this gap in the literature on Gramsci by systematically tracing the breadcrumbs he scattered on the subject in the “Prison Notebooks.”

Gramsci’s Plan Part 1: Kant and the Enlightenment: The title says it all: The focus of this book, to be followed by others, is the presentation of Antonio Gramsci’s philosophical thoughts on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In “Kant and the Enlightenment,” the original works of Kant are presented, accompanied by Gramsci’s comments, and embedded in the historical drama that took place before, during, and after the French Revolution. To reconstruct the Kant-Hegel-Marx lineage, the writings of Kant and Hegel had to be reread, which meant, especially with respect to Kant, breaking through traditional Marxism’s deep-seated political defense mechanism against Kant. Kant and Marx are indisputably among the greats in the history of philosophy. They are considered to represent diametrically opposed currents: Kant is assigned to idealism, Marx to materialism. In the main part of this book, which follows immediately, it is explained in detail that Kant had determined the inner core of the Enlightenment as the self-thinking of man. Marx had written that the social being determines consciousness. Then, it could be assumed, it cannot have much to do with self-thinking. Moreover, Kant is undisputedly considered an important philosophical founder of modern bourgeois democracy, while Marx is considered a proponent of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By reconstructing the heritage of classical German philosophy in the philosophy of Marx, all of his theories, as well as those of Gramsci, are cast in a new light and can thus be made useful for an understanding of today’s world.

Gramsci proposed to write a dramatic book about philosophy. The emergence of philosophical thoughts should be embedded in a historical drama taking place at the same time: The purpose of bringing philosophy closer to contemporary life gives rise to some unusual aspects of form and content for a philosophical book. The linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of academic philosophical literature have been dispensed with. The course of the argumentation has been substantiated throughout with quotations from the originals, not only for hedging purposes, but also to encourage further reading. The presentation of Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts is always in the foreground. The incorporation of critical statements from the secondary literature on this or any problem at the edge of the path has been largely dispensed with in favor of this stringency. Only in this way, a long ascending line in the argumentation can be realized without fraying. In this way, readers are taken on a journey to ever more complex philosophical constructions. Although the ambition was to develop the concepts systematically, it was in no way intended to write a textbook. A superior position was given to Gramsci’s proposal to write about philosophy “a book that is in a sense ‘dramatic,’ a historical drama taking place at the same time …”⁵ Accordingly, the presentation of the development of the thoughts of the individual philosophers is largely chronological and embedded in the historical reality in which they arose. This also takes into account a reference by Hegel, who described philosophy as the thought of its time. At this point, it is hoped that a variety of new and perhaps surprising insights and perspectives should emerge even for readers who are familiar with the material. What is known of Marx’s philosophy corresponds to the standard Marxist interpretation of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. This everyday knowledge, which has congealed into solid form and is also highly valued by bourgeois literature, must be broken up in order to pave a way for the emancipatory content of Marx’s philosophy into the 21st century. With Kant and Hegel, the highest peaks of classical German philosophy will be climbed in the first books and the processing of this heritage by Marx will be presented, in order to then dive into a philosophical abyss with Engels, Lenin and Stalin, in which parts of the world still find themselves today. This will be followed by an exploration of Gramsci’s thoughts on the defeats of the workers’ movement in the years 1917 to 1921, bourgeois hegemony and his perspective of an emancipation of the subaltern classes.

It is confusion that philosophy has to start with in the first place: A book with philosophical content is written at a certain time. It carries the spirit of the time in which it is written, and this spirit of the time includes the position of philosophy itself. In the 21st century, philosophy has continued the decline that was already evident in the preceding decades. Philosophy today is far from shaping social debates, people’s social actions, or politics, or even from being a kind of guiding science for the natural sciences and the humanities. Doubts about its own raison d’être, about its own effectiveness, and about the tasks to be tackled plague the discipline. Thus, the question is discussed whether philosophy is on the verge of abolishing itself? A book like “Why Philosophy?” published in 2008 is a symptom of a deep-seated crisis in the self-image of this science, which was already practiced by the ancient Greeks before our era.⁶ A contributing factor was that with the Soviet Union in 1991, the most historically significant variant of Marxist philosophy perished theoretically and practically in a great implosion, without any new emancipatory approaches emerging from it. Postmodern philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard (1923-1998) began to declare all “grand narratives” about the history of humanity i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• Foreword
• Introduction Chapter 1: Gramsci’s Plan and the Legacy of German Classical Philosophy
• Kant Asked Four Questions with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
• The Philosophers Kant, Hegel, and Marx
• Gramsci – on the Person and the Work
• Gramsci’s Plan
• Gramsci’s Suggestions for a Philosophical Work
• Historiography According to Walter Benjamin: Seizing a Memory
• Chapter 2. Kant and the Enlightenment 1500 to 1800
• The Fight for the Religious Freedom and the Early Bourgeois Republics
• Kant and the Enlightenment in the 18Th Century
• Kant as a Natural Scientist
• Kant and the Epistemology
• Kant and the Critique of Feudal Religion
• Kant and the Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
• Kant and Ethics – the Reason and the Free Will of the Individual
• The American Revolution 1776-1783
• The French Revolution 1789-1799
• Kant and the Democratic Republic
• Kant and the Philosophy History
• Kant as a Philosopher of an Epoch and the Philosophy of History
• Bibliography