Why Gramsci?

To construct a new cultural order, you need not to reflect an already-formed collective will, but to fashion a new one, to inaugurate a new historical project.

(Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’)

Antonio Gramsci died in April 1937 at the Quisisana clinic in Rome, his always precarious health destroyed by more than 10 years of incarceration in Mussolini’s fascist prisons, his primary legacy 33 notebooks written during his imprisonment. He did not live to see World War II, the Independence of almost all of the former European colonies, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. And yet, more than 80 years after his death, people still turn to his notebooks for insights into contemporary landscapes of power. What is it that this theorist shaped by Marx and the Marxist tradition (a tradition many now see as past its sell-by date) has to offer those looking to make sense of our twenty-first century world?

Gramsci’s approach to history, like that of Marx, is rooted in a notion of progress, as when he writes:

The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over.

(Gramsci, 1971: 324)

At the same he was scornful of those who saw progress as inevitable, those who believed ‘that there exist objective laws of historical development similar in kind to natural laws, together with a belief in a predetermined teleology like that of a religion’ (Gramsci, 1971: 168). It is also clear that for this Sardinian Marxist, again like Marx, the fundamental motive power for progressive social transformation lay with industrial workers concentrated in massive factories. If capitalism was to be challenged effectively, he believed, it was the lived experience of these masses of workers that would provide the foundation for necessary political narratives. It is this assumption that lies behind his assertion, which makes some anthropologists uncomfortable, that ‘the mass of the peasantry, although it performs an essential function in the world of production, does not elaborate its own “organic” intellectuals.’ (Gramsci, 1971: 6) Given all this, why might this twentieth-century thinker nonetheless, ‘offer us a possible point of orientation for the twenty-first [century]’ (Thomas, 2010: 442), as Peter Thomas puts it in his masterly The Gramscian Moment?

Against abstraction

A key reason the writings of this Sardinian Marxist can speak to our historical moment is the resolutely undogmatic nature of his thinking. Some later theorists, notably Perry Anderson in his influential ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ (1976-77), have seen Gramsci’s refusal to define his concepts clearly and unambiguously as a problem, an untidiness that needs sorting out. What we need to do, such commentators argue, is to search for the clear, coherent system buried beneath the surface flux. But in reality, I would argue, it is precisely Gramsci’s lack of precision, the flexibility and openness of his Marxism that gives it its life and its continued relevance. In making sense of the world around us, he stressed, we cannot simply force the world in all its unpredictability into our ready-prepared, theoretical boxes, and a fortiori is this true when our goal is social transformation. He is quite clear on this point:

The scholastic and academic historico-political conception: the only authentic and worthy movement is one that is one hundred percent conscious and that, furthermore, is governed by a preestablished, minutely detailed plan or (and this amounts to the same thing) corresponds to abstract theory. But reality is teeming with the most bizarre coincidences, and it is the theoretician’s task to “translate” the elements of historical life into theoretical language, but not vice versa, making reality conform to an abstract scheme. Reality will never conform to an abstract scheme ...

(Gramsci, 1996: 52, my emphasis)

Gramsci certainly uses broad theoretical concepts, such as ‘the state’, ‘civil society’, ‘common sense’, but his concern is with their existence as concrete realities in particular times and places. He seeks always to ‘translate the elements of historical life into theoretical language’. This insistence that such terms may identify a particular terrain, but cannot give us the details of its topography, is why the definitions he does give in the notebooks continually shift depending on the specific context. In a note critiquing the positivist sociology of his day and the resulting ‘[i]mpoverishment of the concept of the State’, for instance, Gramsci argues for an expansive definition:

the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules ...

(Gramsci, 1971: 244)

A note that begins with the many different kinds of organised collectivities (both formal and informal) that exist within societies, defines the ‘State’ quite differently however. Here, this scholar, always so attentive to ethnographic reality,1 distinguishes between ‘civil society’ and ‘the State in the narrow sense of the governmental-coercive apparatus’. (Gramsci, 1971: 265). Such shifting definitions should not be seen as Gramsci contradicting himself, but rather the result of his insistence that we should use theory to help us make sense of ever-shifting empirical realities, not as a rigid template to which those realities are expected to conform. That abstract theoretical schema do not provide such templates is, for me, one of the most valuable lessons we can learn from the prison notebooks: it is up to us as analysts to do the work of mapping those details as they exist in a given historical moment.

Judith Beyer’s account of expert activists working in behalf of stateless people, for instance, demonstrates the real world messiness of ‘statelessness’, and the importance of tracing out exactly what ‘the State’ is in a given context. The UN’s definition of statelessness, quoted by Beyer, sounds straightforward enough: ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’. These are those who, as Hannah Arendt put it, lack ‘the right to have rights’ (quoted in Beyer). Those who are formally recognised as ‘stateless’ do, however, have at least some of the rights accorded to refugees. Alongside the de jure stateless, there are also the far more numerous de facto stateless. The Palestinians caught in a stateless limbo, denied statehood in Israel, with no state of their own, the always marginalised Roma in the former Soviet Union, and many others who may, as Beyer writes, ‘be denied housing, medical care, school attendance, marriage, and even the freedom to move from one place to another’. If we are to understand the reality of ‘statelessness’, we cannot treat ‘the state’ as some monolithic entity to which the stateless are related in a single, uniform way. Different states practise different forms of denial and exclusion, and enforce their boundaries with different degrees of harshness, all of which can change over time. Activists working on behalf of the stateless need to pay attention to the specificities of their particular context.

Gramsci’s insistence that we pay attention to all ‘the elements of historical life’, however ‘bizarre’ these may be, and however much they may challenge our pre-existing theoretical schema, can also help us think through the recurrent tension between ‘theorists’ and ‘activists’, termed by Beyer ‘the practitioner-scholar dilemma’. All academics who like to think of themselves as ‘progressive’ have probably encountered this tension in workshops and conferences, where self-proclaimed activists accuse academics of not engaging with the ‘real’ problems in the ‘real’ world. Beyer writes of one conference she attended that brought together theorists and participants, quoting the rather defensive way one participant opened her presentation: ‘Although I have ‘Doctor’ in front of my name, I am actually a curious person’. The implication being that academics think they already have all the answers and don’t listen to those outside their ivory towers. So how did Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party as well as author of the prison notebooks, see the relationship between theory and activism2?

It is helpful her to remember that for Gramsci, Marxism or, as he refers to it in the notebooks, the philosophy of praxis, is an inherently unfinished theoretical project. It is unfinished because it is ‘the conception of a subaltern social group, deprived of historical initiative, in continuous but disorganic expansion, unable to go beyond a certain qualitative level’. (Gramsci, 1971: 396). In other words, this theoretical project could only achieve coherence once that subaltern group achieved hegemony. And crucially, for this founder of the Italian Communist Party, developing the philosophy of praxis requires the input of both intellectuals and subalterns, whose ‘conception’ those intellectuals render coherent. It is essential that political narratives that have the power to challenge capitalist regimes are firmly rooted in the lived experience of subalternity. Effective political theory can never be a pure ‘head-birth’ springing directly from the brains of intellectuals.

Two letters Gramsci wrote to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht (his main correspondent while imprisoned) throw light on how he viewed the theory/activism divide. The first was written in September, 1931, after almost 5 years of incarceration. He is reflecting on the many articles he wrote as a journalist before his imprisonment, which he always refused to have collected in book form: ‘In ten years of journalism I wrote enough lines to fill fifteen or twenty volumes of 400 pages each, but they were written for the day and, in my opinion, were supposed to die with the day’. (Gramsci, 1994b: 66). This is not to say, of course, that he thought the many articles he wrote for newspapers, such as the socialist Avanti!, were worthless. They were important interventions into what we might call ‘real time’ — a real time, prior to his imprisonment, during which he was a tireless political activist. But, for him, this journalism ‘written for the day’, focussing on the specific issues of that moment, needed to be distinguished from more substantial intellectual analysis that sought to trace out the structural forces that lay beneath the ever-shifting surface of day-to-day reality. It was this kind of serious intellectual work he planned to pursue in his cell, determined to prove that while the fascists might have imprisoned his body, they could not imprison his mind.

The second letter that helps us understand Gramsci’s view of the theory/activism divide is one he wrote to Tatiana a few months after his arrest while still awaiting trial. In it he writes of his plans for study, of how he ‘would like to concentrate intensely and systematically on some subject’. He mentions the essay he had been working on at the time of his imprisonment, ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (Gramsci 1978: 441–462):

Do you remember my very hasty and quite superficial essay on southern Italy and on the importance of B. Croce? Well, I would like to fully develop in depth the thesis that I sketched out then, from a “disinterested”, “ für ewig” point of view.

(Gramsci, 1994a: 83)

The ‘für ewig’ here is Gramsci ironically quoting Goethe, a quintessentially idealist thinker. As I read this passage, in using the terms ‘disinterested’ and ‘für ewig’ he is not suggesting that he is aiming for a God-like view, remote from the messy world of political reality in which he had been immersed as a political activist, but rather that he will be seeking to go beyond the surface flux.

The point is that while the serious intellectual work Gramsci is proposing may not be of immediate use to activists, such in-depth analysis is essential as the basis of any effective challenge to the existing hegemony. A successful political movement needs both theoreticians and activists. And, as in the case of the author of the notebooks, it is not that theoreticians and activists are necessarily different people, but rather that the same individuals are positioned differently in different contexts. Sometimes they may need to draw more on their analytical expertise and knowledge of the larger picture, and sometimes more on the practical knowledge that comes from their work as activists. The point is that both forms of expertise (to use Beyer’s term) are necessary and need to be in continual dialogue with one another. Gramsci can help us think through how political movements transform the raw, fragmented knowledge that emerges from lived experience into narratives with the power to overcome the entrenched, and seemingly immoveable, assumptions undergirding the existing hegemony.

State, family, and church

Antonio Maria Pusceddu and Patricia Alves de Matos’s fieldwork provides another example of the usefulness of Gramsci’s insistence that we always need to examine the concrete ways actual States in actual places manifest themselves. In their article, they compare Church-run charity organisations in two impoverished regions, one in Setúbal, Portugal and one in Brindisi Italy.

Once we go beyond a monolithic notion of the State and focus on the particular ways in which particular States interact with their populations, two inescapable institutions are the family and the Church. The boundaries between State, family and Church are entrenched and long-standing, but also shifting and fuzzy. When and how does the State have the right to intervene in what goes on within families? What limits are there, for instance, to parents’ power to discipline their children? If members of a family — and who counts as ‘family’ is not always a simple question — fall into poverty or hardship, what are the respective obligations of the State and the family? And what are the rights and obligations of the Church vis-à-vis the State and the family? In a very general and rather vague way, States are expected to ‘care’ for their citizens, but what this care involves is much argued over. There is a long history of the Church being seen as a major provider of care for the poor and others of the State’s less fortunate citizens, particularly perhaps in predominantly Catholic countries. In the first note in the first notebook, entitled ‘On poverty, Catholicism and the papacy’, Gramsci lists the ‘principal assertions made in the encyclicals of the more recent popes’:

1) private property, especially “landed property” is a “natural right”, which may not be violated, not even through high taxes ... 2) the poor must accept their lot, since class distinctions and the distribution of wealth are ordained by God and it would be impious to try and eliminate them; 3) alms giving is a Christian duty and implies the existence of poverty; 4) the social question is primarily moral and religious, not economic, and it must be resolved through Christian charity, the dictates of morality, and the decree of religion.

(Gramsci, 1992: 100)

The Catholic Church, we might say, sees itself here as buttressing the State; its role, the alleviation of the poverty and suffering of individuals, not social transformation. While insisting on the importance of Christian charity, this charity should be directed at individuals and families. Antonio Maria Pusceddu and Patricia Alves de Matos’s case studies explore how in each country the obligation of ‘Christian charity’ can be seen as applying band-aids to some of the gaping wounds produced by the austerity policies imposed by the EU.

In Portugal, Alves de Matos followed a programme that delivered monthly food baskets, and a ‘social refectory’, seen by the priest in charge as a ‘socially progressive form of providing for material needs and social inclusion’. Her fieldwork was carried out in the aftermath of the acceleration of a longer term ‘welfare neoliberalism’ following the 2008 global financial meltdown, and after Portugal had agreed to a EU structural adjustment programme in 2011. Part of this programme involved, as Alves de Matos and Pusceddu observe, ‘the state delegating its responsibilities to the third sector while reinforcing a broader philosophy of charity and poor relief in welfare provisioning’. This brings to mind Gramsci’s expansive definition of the State, quoted above, where the State is ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’ (Gramsci, 1971: 244). We find a similar definition in a long note entitled ‘The State’: ‘by “State” should be understood not only the apparatus of government, but also the “private” apparatus of “hegemony” or civil society’ (Gramsci, 1971: 261). If we think about ‘the State’ is this way, the distinction between ‘the State’ and the ‘third sector’ begins to look more like a conjuror’s slight of hand than an objective reality.

The majority of the volunteers carrying out the actual work of delivering the ‘charity’ studied by Alves de Matos were women. Those performing such ‘charity’ work, especially when it is unpaid, tend to be women. And not only in Portugal does such caring work tend to be seen as a ‘natural’ extension of women’s ‘natural’ care-giving role within the family. Shifting what might be seen as the obligations of the State to provide for the ‘needy’ to church-organised charity is facilitated by such deep-rooted, ‘common sense’ assumptions about the ‘natural’ proclivities of women.

Pusceddu also carried out his Brindisi fieldwork (2015–2016) in the context of savage austerity policies that, as in Portugal, had led to increasing demand for the services of ‘charity’ organisations. During his fieldwork he volunteered in a Caritas soup kitchen and followed the organisation of ‘delivery and food distribution in the parish church of peripheral neighbourhoods’. A port city, located on the southern Adriatic coast, Brindisi already had a history of refugees landing on their shore. In March 1991, the city had received twenty thousand Albanian refugees, and had developed a narrative of itself as a ‘welcoming’ city. However, as the economic crisis worsened, as the ranks of the needy expanded, resources shrank. This led to increased tension reflecting a widespread common sense narrative that Caritas was ‘taking care of “the migrants” instead of relieving the suffering of the local poor’, a narrative, as Pusceddu and Alves de Matos note, that resonated with ‘a nationwide myth about migrants and refugees receiving privileged treatment while “Italians are starving”.’ Such tensions around who has the ‘right’ to help, and what kind of ‘right’, are growing across the globe, and are likely to become more extreme as climate change produces, directly or indirectly, ever greater flows of climate refugees. Writing more than 80 years ago, Gramsci did not specifically address this issue, nonetheless, his open flexible Marxism has much to offer twentieth-first century analysts as they attempt to ‘“translate” the elements of historical life into theoretical language’ (Gramsci, 1996: 52). Following the approach we find in the notebooks makes it less likely that we will continue forcing new realities into old theoretical boxes.

‘Healthy Human Wit’

Danielle Karasz and Angelica Lems’ articles illustrate the usefulness of Gramsci’s concept of common sense for those attempting to map the fractious politics of immigration (Karasz), and their intertwining with conspiracy theories around Covid-19 (Lems) in the case of Austria. In the notebooks, ‘common sense’ (senso comune) gathers together all those received opinions that people see as ‘obvious’, beyond question to any ‘sensible’ person. Importantly, common sense for Gramsci is never outside history. We should remember that while the Sardinian Marxist was very much a historical materialist, the emphasis for him was always on the ‘historical’: ‘It has been forgotten that in the case of a very common expression [historical materialism] one should put the accent on the first term—“historical”—and not on the second, which is of metaphysical origin’. (Gramsci, 1971: 465) One implication of this stress on history is that common sense in the notebooks is always a heterogeneous, often contradictory, mass of received opinions, the elements of which are continually being added to, modified, falling away, as they move through history. It is never, as it was for Hannah Arendt, ‘that portion of inherited wisdom which all men have in common in any given civilization’ (Arendt, 1994: 317).

Karasz explores how rapidly common sense understandings of who ‘belongs’ in a given neighbourhood, and who is an alien outsider, can shift. Karasz carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Monte Laa neighbourhood of Vienna in 2011 and 2018. Between the two stints of fieldwork, the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan led to a sharply increased flow of migrants into Europe. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees, predominantly Muslim, travelled through Austria, with nearly 90,000 that year applying for asylum in the country, and more than 42,000 the next. Not surprisingly, xenophobic narratives pitting the migrants against native-born Austrians — often whipped up by right-wing parties — became ever more powerful. In 2015, the xenophobic FPÖ party triumphed in the municipal elections. When Karasz returned to Monte Laa in 2018, she found the shared understanding of who ‘belonged’ and who did not, had shifted from ‘one between “Austrians” and “non-Austrians” to one between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim”’. Through her in-depth ethnography, Karasz was able to trace how the shift in people’s deep, common sense notions of belonging had shifted their daily experience of the places they called ‘home’.

Lems’ study of responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in a very different region of Austria, throws light on the way longer histories can shape local common sense. Her article also demonstrates the different connotations ‘common sense’ has in different language traditions.

Lems returned to her home village in the Austrian Alps in the summer of 2020, when the first Covid wave seemed to have passed, although it would pick up again in the Autumn of 2020. Conducting fieldwork in the midst of a pandemic was made particularly difficult by what seemed to be the local population’s refusal to take the pandemic seriously, a scepticism that was not confined to the less educated. In spite of (perhaps in part because of?) the Austrian government mandates on mask wearing, Lems recounts,

Even the local acupuncturist [Jürgen], a highly educated man in his fifties with a great sensitivity for health-related issues, encouraged me to take off my facemask when I went to see him — in spite of the poster pinned to the door reminding patients to abide by the government regulations. In Jürgen’s opinion, the Austrian government was intentionally fabricating panic by locking everybody inside and forcing people to wear masks.

Displaying the often contradictory nature of common sense, Jürgen also told Lems, that even if.

the mainstream media refused to write about it, ... he knew that the hundreds of Corona patients treated in hospitals across the country were predominantly migrants. He said that because Muslim migrants had failed to “integrate” properly, they did not follow the rules the government had introduced to reduce the spread of the virus.

Anton, the owner of the village pub, ‘was convinced that the politicians and global elites had fabricated the narrative of the pandemic to ruin local small businesses and replace Austrian workers with cheap foreign labour’, a theory Lems heard repeatedly during her fieldwork. Asked how he knew this, were there websites or books to which he could refer her, Anton responded that ‘if you were walking through life with a clear and critical mind this knowledge was not difficult to obtain.’ All that was needed was ‘healthy human wit (gesunder Menschenverstand)’, a kind of human knowledge that falls squarely within Gramsci’s broad concept of common sense. Lems glosses ‘healthy human wit’ as ‘a sober, practical and realistic kind of knowledge that has grown out of life experience’, a definition that aligns more closely with the English ‘common sense’ (the normal English translation of Gramsci’s senso comune) with its strong positive connotations, than with the more neutral Italian term.

Those of us who like to think of ourselves as ‘progressive’ sometimes tend to romanticise the oppressed. And here Gramsci can serve as a useful corrective. Lems’ article provides an instructive example. She describes how her experiences in her home village challenged some of her preconceptions (surely one of the great benefits of traditional, Malinowskian ethnographic research?). Influenced by phenomenology, her approach has been to seek out ‘people’s everyday meaning-making processes’. But in her home village this was at times profoundly disturbing:

the healthy human wit I was faced with (ironically!) on my own home turf, left me feeling utterly puzzled and estranged. If I had so far unwittingly conceptualised the realm of vernacular knowledge production in positive terms — as a means for the marginalised, less powerful to voice their critique and generate “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 1985) — the research in my home village confronted me with the irrefutable fact that everyday conceptions of the world are far more complex.

The neutrality of Gramsci’s concept of ‘common sense’, I would argue, is precisely what makes it such a useful concept. As he writes, ‘Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one likes.’ (Gramsci, 1971: 422). At the same time, he is far from dismissive of common sense. Common sense, we might say, contains multitudes. Within this confusion progressives should seek out, ‘the beginnings of a new world, rough and jagged though they always are’ (Gramsci, 1971: 343). These beginnings, he argued, emerged from the realities of the lives of the oppressed, and represented the seeds from which new and powerful oppositional narratives develop. He termed such jagged beginnings ‘the healthy nucleus’ within common sense, the element that ‘can be called “good sense [buon senso]” and which deserves to be made more unitary and coherent’. (Gramsci, 1971: 328).

There is a lot of dross, however, surrounding this ‘healthy nucleus’, which is just as much the product of experience and history as is ‘good sense’. To understand the Austrian villagers’ ‘healthy human wit’ — so much of it distinctly unhealthy in the context of a pandemic — Lems realised she needed to ‘look at the historical embeddedness of the common sense ideas’ confronting her. In this region of Carinthia, opposition to the dictates of the urban centres has deep historical roots, explored by John Cole and Eric Wolf in their 1999 monograph, The Hidden Frontier. Drawing on Cole and Wolf, Lems notes that.

this culture of opposition can be traced back to the sixteenth century, when a rift started to appear between the flourishing upper-class cosmopolitan lifestyles of the Habsburg court of Vienna and the reality of peasants in the Austrian hinterlands whose struggles for self-determination had been brutally crushed.

And this tension would reoccur, ‘leading to self-depictions of the mountain villagers as proud and independent bearers of healthy human wit and fierce opponents to the changes imposed upon them by liberal city elites.’ This self-perception was a deeply rooted strand of the villagers’ common sense. In the 1930s, Carinthia was one of the most important Nazi strongholds. In more recent times, it was the ‘ideological bastion’ of the fiercely right-wing politician Jörg Haider, and the state has continued to support right-wing candidates.

This history resonates with Anton’s insistence that the Austrian government and global elites had fabricated their Covid narrative to ruin small businesses and replace Austrian workers with cheap foreign labour. At the same time, these conspiracy theories provided him with a simple, straightforward explanation as to why, through no fault of his own, he and other small business owners were suffering.

The concept of common sense in the notebooks names a crucial, but protean terrain that exists in all societies. Continually shape shifting, it cannot be defined in the abstract beyond its shared acceptance among a given collectivity and its apparent obviousness; if it needs to be substantiated with evidence, it is not common sense. It is also never a coherent whole, always a conglomeration of different, often disparate elements, a conglomeration that represents ‘a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at a given time and place’, as Gramsci puts it in one note (Gramsci. 1971: 326).

Mapping the precise contours of this ‘popular knowledge’ requires the careful empirical investigation of daily life. The ‘truths’ of common sense are embedded in that daily life — because common sense is so taken-for-granted, it lurks in the form of assumptions that do not need to be put into words. For instance, except when questioned by a naive anthropologist, who despite growing up in Carinthia inexplicably failed to recognise ‘truths’ that were so obvious to them, Anton and Jürgen probably rarely needed to explain their unshakeable belief that their community was under attack by the Austrian government and global elites.

Through their ethnographic fieldwork, as Lems and other authors in this collection demonstrate, anthropologists are well placed to trace out the ways in which the ‘truths’ of common sense are rooted in both history and the realities of contemporary life. One of the great virtues of the anthropological method at its best, I would argue, is its insistence that we remain open to whatever we may encounter. Gramsci’s notion of common sense fits very well with this radical openness, giving anthropologists a way of thinking about this ever-shifting terrain that refuses to define common sense in the abstract except in the loosest terms, while providing enough structure so that we can make sense of it.

Appropriating Gramsci

Gramsci continues to be a presence in political debates across the world. References to his concepts crop up in popular media as well as scholarly publications. Rather surprisingly, and worryingly for some on the left, he is also invoked by those on the right. In France, for instance, there is Alain de Benoist, founder of GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne [Research and Study Group for European Civilization]), whom Agnieszka Pasieka describes as ‘the key far-right “importer” of Gramsci’. In her contribution to this special issue, Pasieka explores both what she calls ‘far-right Gramscianism’, that is, Gramsci’s impact on far-right milieus, and how Gramsci’s thought might help us understand this phenomenon. She draws on her fieldwork with two far-right organisations: Lealtà Azione (Loyalty Action, LA) in Italy, and the much smaller Praca Polska (Polish Labour, PP) in Poland.

In Italy, one of her key interlocutors was Reno, one of the founders of LA, who defined the movement’s key aim as achieving ‘national rebirth’ before Italy ‘gets totally destroyed by immigration’. Reno insisted that the movement is against immigration policies, not immigrants: ‘It’s not that we don’t want them, they simply can’t be happy in Italy … their roots are elsewhere.’ The PP also sees immigration as a major problem, identifying migration to Poland as a ‘driving force behind their activism.’ The nation, in their view, is defined by ethnicity: ‘migration to Poland and Europe ought to be stopped’. This strong ethnic nationalism, the belief in an unbreakable link between a ‘people’ and its homeland runs through European, right-wing, nationalist discourse. In the USA, a country built on settler colonialism, and the displacement, or outright genocide of the indigenous population, the narratives of who is ‘really’ American with authentic claims to the rights of ‘an American’, are founded on somewhat different, if equally emotionally based claims of ‘belonging’. But American far-right pundits, too, sometimes claim Gramsci. Rush Limbaugh in his 1994 See, I told You So, explicitly draws on Gramsci, although in a way that would seem to have little to do with what we find in the notebooks.

What explains the far right’s attraction to this long dead Marxist? Should this worry those of us who find in the notebooks an approach to the analysis of power that can illuminate our historical moment, even though it differs in so many ways from that of Gramsci? Personally, while I find it deeply ironic that this thinker has been taken up by right wingers, a thinker whom Mussolini’s fascists thought so dangerous that they locked him away in prison in the hopes that they could, as the prosecutor at his trial famously said, ‘prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years’, I do not see this as a threat. No theorist can control the meanings others attribute to their writings. Take Machiavelli, whom Gramsci wrote about at length in the notebooks. As Benedetto Fontana writes in his study of these two major Italian thinkers, ‘Machiavelli’s thought has been appropriated throughout the course of Italian history precisely by those elements and groups that have been the strongest and most consistent opponents of the Machiavellian political project.’ (Fontana, 1993: 70). Once out in the world, ideas take on a life of their own. Gramsci’s intellectual project in the notebook, like that of Machiavelli, can be seen as a mass of interwoven threads. Depending on their understanding of the ‘realities’ they confront, different political actors will draw out different strands, weaving them together in a way that reflects their view of the world. This ability to shape shift is in fact one of the defining characteristics of ‘great’ thinkers, those whose theories remain living bodies of thought even when the historical moment that produced them has long passed.

Engaging with Gramsci

For good or ill, precisely because Gramsci’s Marxism is so open, the different strands that make up the notebooks can be rewoven in a multitude of ways. The notebooks are not an easy read, possessing, as Joseph Buttigieg puts it, ‘all the intricacies and perplexities of a textual labyrinth.’ (Gramsci, 1992: ix). Recognising the connections between what can appear a rather random collection of reflections on very disparate subjects requires careful, and patient readers, willing to follow Gramsci down far from obvious paths, readers who are not looking for quick soundbites. This kind of engagement with the notebooks is time-consuming, and outside the world of Gramsci scholars, even among academics there are not so many willing to take it on. An added difficulty is that Gramsci is a profoundly dialogic thinker. As he explained to his sister-in-law:

My entire intellectual formation has been of a polemical order; even thinking “disinterestedly” is difficult for me, that is studying for study’s sake. ... I need to set out from a dialogical or dialectical standpoint, otherwise I don’t experience any intellectual stimulation. As I once told you, I don’t like to cast stones into the darkness; I want to feel a concrete interlocutor or adversary ...

(Gramsci, 1994a: 369)

Hovering over the notebooks is a chattering, albeit unseen, crowd of disputing interlocutors, with whom contemporary readers are unlikely to be familiar. Finally, Gramsci’s thought is underpinned by basic Marxist assumptions that he does not think it necessary to state explicitly. His starting point is similar to that of Marx in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ultimately, ‘it is not the consciousness of [people] that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ (Marx, 1970: 21). But this is a starting, not an endpoint. Running through the notebooks are the questions: how exactly has the particular ‘social existence’ of any given time and place ‘determined’ consciousness? What does ‘determine’ mean in practice? The questions their author explores concern the nature of those shaping forces in a given context, and how exactly they operated. The Gramsci of those who know Marx only as a bogey man whose theories led directly to Stalin and the gulag, and whose knowledge of the notebooks comes from predigested soundbites, has little to do with the thinker we encounter when we engage with the notebooks in a serious and focussed way. Personally, I am not too worried that the far right sometimes uses his name, and claims concepts like hegemony for their political project, any more than when other ‘Marxist’ notions get co-opted. Once ideas are out in the world, how they are understood depends on where, and when, and by whom, they are picked up.

What might Gramsci himself have thought of his appropriation by the right? It is instructive here to compare him with Foucault, who towards the end of his life, his biographer tells us, worried that his books were travelling too far beyond the scholarly ghetto: ‘[T]oo wide a circulation for scholarly books was disastrous for their reception’, Foucault insisted, ‘because it bought with it a multitude of misunderstandings.’ (Eribon 1991, 292). Gramsci by contrast, questions whether ‘a philosophical movement [is] properly so called when it is devoted to creating a specialized culture among restricted intellectual groups.’ (Gramsci, 1971: 330). For him, the ideas that are important are those that act in the world: ‘What matters is not the opinion of Tom, Dick, and Harry but the ensemble of opinions that have become collective and a powerful factor in society.’ (Gramsci, 2007: 347). Would-be progressive intellectuals, who seek an audience beyond their ivory towers, have an obligation to express themselves as clearly as possible. At the same time, as I read the notebooks, their author accepts implicitly that no theorist can control how s/he is interpreted.

Progressives also have an obligation to engage in what Gramsci termed ‘cultural’ struggle. We need, as he wrote, to give ‘“full weight” to the cultural factor, to cultural activity, to the necessity for a cultural front alongside the merely economic and merely political ones.’ (Gramsci, 1995: 345). One of the reasons the notebooks retain their relevance is the help they can give us in understanding the nature of the ‘cultural front’ on which we must struggle. Running through the notebooks, there is (as Gramsci argued there is in Marx’s writings),

an assertion of the necessity for new popular beliefs, that is to say a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs.

(Gramsci, 1971: 424)

The notebooks do not furnish us with any magic formula that tells us how to create this ‘new common sense’ with its accompanying ‘new culture’ and ‘new philosophy’, what Stuart Hall called ‘a new cultural order’. Rather, in the notebooks, Gramsci lays out an approach to the mapping the complex and contradictory terrain of common sense, and how to think about the ‘good sense’ entangled with the dross. The actual mapping of specific empirical terrains is up to us as analysts. The tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, so central to anthropology as a discipline, helps to equip anthropologists for this task. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, the discipline’s stress on attentive listening, and a readiness to have preconceptions challenged, makes anthropologists particularly well suited to tracing out the empirical realities into which large abstractions, such as ‘the State’ or ‘common sense’ manifest themselves in a given context. For those of us who like to think of ourselves as part of a larger, progressive project, Gramsci seems to me an exemplary guide. He identifies terrains we need to explore, while leaving those terrains undefined enough so they can encompass new twenty-first century realities the Sardinian Marxist did not live to see.