nav-icons nav-icons
Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Progress in Political Economy (PPE)
LOGIN REGISTER
LOGIN
REGISTER
linklink
  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Making Global Society
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • PPExchanges
  • Pedagogy
    • IPEEL Of The Environmental Crisis
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
On State-Society Relations in the Study of Subaltern Politics
Previous
Book Launch: The Emotional Logic of Capitalism
Next

Travels with Gramsci

by Elizabeth Humphrys on June 17, 2015

Travels with Gramsci

Elizabeth Humphrys | June 17, 2015

Tags: Antonio Gramsci Peter Thomas
Antonio Gramsci, Peter Thomas
| 1 716

Some paths to an event seem particularly labyrinthine, which only adds to the joy once a project reaches an unexpected destination.

When Adam David Morton arrived to take up his Professorship at Sydney in 2014, it coincided with a merging and re-foundation of a number of local Capital reading groups. A group of students were about to embark on reading Peter Thomas’s prize-winning book The Gramscian Moment, and so this initiative was brought under the auspices of the Department of Political Economy and expanded to become the Past & Present Reading Group. The group has been tackling classic and contemporary heterodox books over the last 18 months, most recently Samuel Knafo’s The Making of Modern Finance.

On finishing Peter’s book, those working specifically with Gramsci’s texts began reading the Critical English Edition of the Prison Notebooks. We met weekly to discuss them, and in the process developed an event to bring together higher degree research (HDR) students working with Gramsci’s writings from around Australia. An early thought that we might discuss our experience of reading Peter’s book with him, initially proposed to be via Skype, expanded into asking him to participate in the workshop.

With the generous support of the Department of Political Economy and the School of Political and Social Sciences, the Gramsci workshop took place at the end of last month. The day involved a range of impressive PhD student papers, bookended by keynote addresses from internationally renowned Gramsci specialists Adam Morton and Peter Thomas. The keynote papers have already been made available online (here and here).

The call for papers for the event was focussed on method in Gramsci, and his urging that we study with ‘heroic fury’ any new theory. On the day, I felt two themes around method ran through the papers — the questions of the translatability of Gramsci’s conceptions and of what method to use to study the Prison Notebooks themselves.

UnravellingGramsci’s conceptions developed in a close study of various locations and historical moments — not least of all the Risorgimento in Italy — and many of the papers raised the issue of how one can ‘translate’ Gramsci to another time. They asked how Gramsci’s work might usefully aid social inquiry about other moments and geographic locations. This is a question raised by many Gramsci scholars, and as Adam argues in his book Unravelling Gramsci it is crucial to be attentive to how Gramsci’s ideas developed within his historical context before discerning any contemporary relevance. Quoting (and contesting) Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, in that book, he notes that there is ‘the need to historicise Gramsci and display “greater sensitivity to the general problems of meaning and understanding in the history of ideas” as well as pay “far greater attention to the problems of meaning and interpretation embedded in his ideas”’.

With Gramsci, perhaps more so than some other theorists, this task is complex because of the open-ended form of the Notebooks — their both circular and progressive structure, and incomplete form. This open-ended nature leads many to argue there can’t be, therefore, only one true Gramsci.

Thus in using Gramsci’s work, there is a need to be attentive to the historical specificity of Gramsci’s conceptions and an acknowledgement that the nature of the Notebooks means this is not always plain. Additionally, the history of alteration and adaptation of Gramsci’s conceptions in the secondary literature, often without making such shifts clear, further complicates this task.

ThomasPeter’s book The Gramscian Moment — which was winner of the prestigious Premio internazionale Giuseppe Sormani (2011) for the best book on Gramsci between 2007 and 2011 — urges a way through some of these difficulties. He asks us to examine Gramsci’s work in the manner Gramsci suggested we read others. To read it in a search ‘for the Leitmotiv, for the rhythm of the thought as it develops’, in Gramsci’s writings (Q16§2, quoted in Thomas 2009, p. 129). Peter argues this should be done in acknowledgement that the search for the Leitmotiv ‘should be more important than [a search] for single casual affirmations and isolated aphorisms’.

Our travels with Gramsci at the workshop, in seeking to translate Gramsci to our own research, saw presenters ask about the connections between Marxism and American Pragmatism, hegemony and the German Revolution, land struggles in Brazil, and the content and form of neoliberalism (amongst other topics).  My presentation focussed on the relationship between the state and civil society, in tracing aspects of this through Hegel, Marx and Gramsci in order to better understand corporatism in recent Australian history. The audio recording of my talk, based on my PhD research and entitled ‘Gramsci’s ‘Integral State’: Securing Neoliberalism in Australia’, is available below.

On a final note, on behalf of the organisers of the workshop (Ihab Shalbak, Philip Roberts, Richard Parkin and myself) I would like to thank Adam Morton for his help in bringing the workshop to fruition — as well as for travelling with us and Gramsci in our reading group over the last year. We were also ably assisted by administrative staff in the School, Nena Serafimovska and Grace Zhang in particular, and would like to thank them too. Thank you to Adam and Simon Tormey, our Head of School, for securing the funding to make the initiative possible.

Share this post

  • Tweet
  • Share Post:

Author: Elizabeth Humphrys

Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist of labour based at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She is a member of the UTS Climate, Society and Environment Research Centre (C-SERC), leading their work on the impacts of climate change on workers, and an Associate of the independent think tank the Centre for Future Work. Her first book, How Labour Built Neoliberalism (2019 Bill/Haymarket), has been read widely by scholars and labour activists, and was described in the Sydney Review of Books as a ‘tremendously important’ contribution to understanding economic change in Australia.

Related Posts

 

Towards a Theory of Law, State Formation and Social Movements in Modern India

In 2022, one has to be exceptionally out of touch not to have taken note of the dramatic democratic backsliding that has taken place in India under the eight-year long rule of Nare...

 

What is it about our contemporary world that still makes NGOs necessary?

My monograph with Cambridge University Press, Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management and Development, explores how the figure of the Non-Governmental Org...

 

The Political Economy of a Stateless Nation: When Polanyi Meets Gramsci at the Kurdish Mountains

These days we are witnessing a growing interest in Karl Polanyi’s framework to explain the organic crisis of neoliberalism, including the populist reaction; while Antonio Gramsci...

 

Antonio Gramsci, ‘I Hate New Year’s Day’

This text was first published in Avanti!, Turin edition, from Antonio Gramsci’s column “Sotto la Mole,” January 1, 1916.

Every morning, when I wake again unde...

Comments

  • paresh chattopadhyay | Jul 4 1515

    On an important political aspect Gramsci cannot come up to the level of his great contemporaries Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Pannekoek. This aspect concerns workers’ self emancipation. In his ‘Il materialismo storico’ Gramsci wrote “critical self consciousness signifies historically and politically creation of an intellectual elite; a human mass does not distinguish itself and does not become independent on its own without organisation in large sense (in senso lato) and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is without organisers and without leaders…without there being a stratum of persons specialised in the conceptual and philosophical elaboration’. This is, of course, Kautsky-Lenin: workers on their own are incapable of creating their own revolutionary consciousness. This is standing Marx on his head. It is not wihout reason that Marx and Engels in their famous ‘Circular Letter'(1879, September) emphasised that the intellectuals have only one one task in the revolutionary movement, to bring education. They must not be allowed to have any influence on the leadership of the movement. In 1844-45 they underlined that workers create their own consciousness in the course of their struggle. This is further discussed in Marx’s 1857-58 Grundrisse. Here Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek followed Marx.

    0

Leave a Response Cancel reply


Join our mailing list

© Progress in Political Economy (PPE)

Privacy | Designed by Nucleo | Terms and Conditions

  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Making Global Society
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • PPExchanges
  • Pedagogy
    • IPEEL Of The Environmental Crisis
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
 

Loading Comments...