When people quote Marxist Antonio Gramsci's most famous sentence — have they considered its relevance? — what sounds wise is not

25 April 2018

Befuddled people are often drawn to pretend wisdom

Here is what Marxist Antonio Gramsci once wrote.

Taken from the early 1930s, when he was in Italian prison:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

© Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers, 1971) (at pages 275-276) (for this citation — see Henry Radice, ‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ On the Virtues of Muddling Through in European Politics, Euro Crisis in the Press (London School of Economics and Political Science) (24 March 2013)

This sentence is frequently quoted during ruffled times

For instance, with regard to today's evidently rotting United States:

Trumpism is one of many manifestations of the effects of the neoliberal policies of the past generation. These have led to extreme concentration of wealth along with stagnation for the majority.

There have been repeated crashes of the deregulated financial institutions, each worse than the last. Bursting bubbles have been followed by huge public bailouts for the perpetrators while the victims have been abandoned.

Globalization has been designed to set working people throughout the world in competition with one another while private capital is lavished with benefits. Democratic institutions have eroded.

[A]ll of this has led to anger, bitterness, often desperation -- one remarkable effect is the increasing mortality among middle-age whites discovered by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, analyzed as "deaths of despair," a phenomenon unknown in functioning societies.

While there are variations from place to place, some features are common. One is the decline of the centrist parties that have long dominated political life, as we see in election after election.

Though there are also significant signs of hope, some commentators have . . . been quoting Gramsci's observation from his prison cell:

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Is what Gramsci said usefully relevant?

His words assume that there are situations in History in which:

the Old Order is croaking —

but (for some reason)

a New One has not yet poked its head from Time's birth canal.

Presumably, this is because rot-eating maggots still control the Stage, but their stranglehold on society is simultaneously breaking down.

Disordered deterioration spreads because a New Wolf is not yet here to gobble the rot and its maggots.

But isn't instability characteristic of Life and Society?

"Yup, ya got a fever. You're probably sick."

When we are sick, we know that usually temporary "morbid symptoms" are going to abound.

Big deal.

Gramsci's quote (by itself) neither identifies the illness nor suggests a way to treat it.

The moral? — the Gramsci quote just affirms a banally elementary reality

Life and History routinely go through periods of ugly change. Quoting Gramsci's observation, out of its broader philosophical context, gets us nowhere.

It is Leftists — of which I am arguably one — who drag this too-narrow quotation into the fray. Then they usually avoid making Gramsci's more insightful Marxist argument to support its concealed merit.

This is the ballpark equivalent of hypocritical Rightists pretending to venerate Martin Luther King Jr, but obliterating everything he said about militaristic capitalism's anti-human evil.

When someone avoids:

(a) facts and honesty — like the American Right

(b) generating genuinely penetrating analysis — like the conventional Left . . .

It will be self-interest or stupidity. More likely, both.

This is just another way of saying that community and commons usually lose. Which, full circle, is a Marxist point.

PeteFree.com

When people quote Marxist Antonio Gramsci's most famous sentence — have they considered its relevance? — what sounds wise is not