Who
Loves Communism?
By
Gaither Stewart
18 December,
2007
Countercurrents.org
“Telling
the truth is always revolutionary.”
(Rome) Recently I visited the tomb of Antonio Gramsci
in the Poets’ Cemetery in Rome. An inconspicuous urn resting in
the center of the mound contains the ashes of the philosopher, Marxist
thinker and founder of the Italian Communist Party. The tombstone bears
only his name and his dates—1891-1937. The fresh red flowers indicate
that the site is tended.
I visited
the tomb of Gramsci because I wanted to speak of one of the most representative
men of the better side of tormented Twentieth century Europe, an advocate
of a new social-political-economic structure. Less known to non-Europeans,
Gramsci was a major figure in shaping progressive thought from the early
XX century.
I wanted
to speak of Gramsci today because the Italy that many people love is
in danger, according to a recent New York Times article, in decline.
During the recent government of TV magnate Silvio Berlusconi, Italy
reached depths of reaction that would cause Gramsci’s spirit to
wing its way to other worlds. Now, Berlusconi, the man who compares
himself to Napoleon and calls to mind Gramsci’s adversary, the
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, is vying for a comeback.
The figure
of Antonio Gramsci is emblematic of the profound dichotomy between progress
and reaction marking Europe since the end of the Nineteenth century.
The Marxist Gramsci would have ambivalent feelings about his neighbors
in the Poets’ Cemetery: Lying near him are dozens of “White
Russians,” the adversaries of the Bolshevik revolution in Tsarist
Russia in 1917, which Gramsci supported. At the same time, the culture
of the Russian exiles was dedicated to maintaining the hegemony of the
Russian upper class over the masses, which Gramsci opposed.
Gramsci must
have had sympathy for the progressive English poets, John Keats and
Percy Byshe Shelley, who lie under two pines in a distant corner of
the same cemetery. Keats (“I saw pale kings, and princes too”
from his La Belle Dame san merci) wrote, as Gramsci must have at some
point, “I am ambitious to do the world some good.”
Keats arrived
in Rome a sick man—as Gramsci was all his life—and died
at age twenty-six after choosing the Poets’ Cemetery for his resting
place. Shelley, who preferred “painful pleasures to easier ones”,
also lived his last years in Italy where he died in a Mediterranean
storm near Lerici and joined his friend Keats a year later.
As much as
he appreciated their culture and admired Keats’ universal words,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ Antonio Gramsci, did not
worship all the names of the Western literary canon because, he believed,
there was usually an unacceptable ideology involved in their canonization.
In his Selections from the Prison Notebooks he writes of the difficulty
of intellectuals to be free of the dominant social group; he was mistrustful
of the compromises running through the intellectual community.
Born in Sardinia,
Gramsci moved to Turin in 1913. At the university he came into contact
with the Socialist movement then strong in that north Italian city.
He was a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became
its head the year after. He was elected to Parliament in 1923. Three
years later he was arrested by the Fascist police and spent most of
the rest of his life in prison.
Like most
great men Gramsci hoped to change the world. His point of departure
was the Marxist idea that everything in life is determined by capital.
The class that controls capital is the dominant class. The capitalist
class formulates its ideology to secure its control—or in Gramscian
language, its hegemony—over the people. Class struggle results
when the people try to change the rules and take power.
Earlier than
others of his generation, the Marxist Gramsci separated from Leninism.
He knew nothing of Lenin until 1917 and Lenin had never even heard of
Gramsci. Leninism was only one ingredient in Gramsci’s theory
for social change.
Leninism
is now largely history, while many of Gramsci’s contributions
to Socialist thought are intact. Leninism is demagogy, the opposite
of Gramscian intellectual pursuit and culture. In Gramscian thinking
revolutionary violence is not the only way to change things. He was
interested in political action. Political activity is the path to challenge
the hegemony of the capitalist class. Though a revolutionary, he did
not advocate a totalitarian world outlook.
Gramsci amended
Marx’s conviction that social development originates only from
the economic structure. Gramsci’s distinction of culture was a
major advance for radical thought, and it still holds today.
The Italian
Marxist recognized that political freedom is a requisite for culture;
if religious or political fanaticism suppresses the society, art will
not flower. To write propaganda or paint conformist art is to succumb
to the allures and/or the coercion of the reigning system. For that
reason, most artists, like Keats and Shelly, are countercurrent. That
is also why artists should stay far away from the White House or the
Elysées Palace.
WHO
LOVES COMMUNISM?
Rightwing
regimes adore Communism. Just the word “Communist” sets
their hearts a flutter. Communism in Italy is the scarecrow that terrorism
is in America. In countries with less solid democratic traditions, the
threat of Communism has been exploited by reactionary forces to establish
dictatorial regimes. Nearly every day you can see it in action. Like
terrorism, Communism was the excuse for emergency laws in the Philippines
and Peru as it was in Chile and Argentina. Emergency laws, special prisons,
torture, the sky is the limit in the war against the Communist bugaboo.
Though the
Stalinist brand of Communism in East Europe failed long ago and those
states disappeared, the European Right—in Italy, France, Spain,
Greece— continues to raise the specter of the “Communist”
threat to “family” and “our values.”
But what
is Communism today? In the minds of non-Communists, Communism is still
associated with the former USSR. Yet, Communistic ideas are as old as
man: a social system characterized by the community of goods and the
absence of private property. Such ideas marked the organization of the
first Christian communities.
Communism
first appeared in ancient Greece advocating the community of all goods.
In the Nineteenth century Communistic ideas inspired reformists all
over Europe, ideas of equality and the abolition of private property.
Marx summed things up with his motto: “From each according to
his capacity, to each according to his needs.”
Communist
parties born last century from the European Socialist movement called
themselves Marxist. The totalitarian parties of East Europe called themselves
Communist, but their states were called Socialist republics. Using the
name Communist and Socialist they blackened and spoiled the idea that
inspired earlier reformists.
Today, Communist
slogans sound more utopian than threatening. Today, Communism is nearly
a myth, abstract even in countries that call themselves Communist, like
China.
With the
broadening of the European Union toward the East the question of Communism
is recurrent today since the EU is formed by peoples with opposite perceptions
of it. For East Europeans, Communism was a nightmare. Nor was the exit
from totalitarian regimes in East Europe a happy one in that it led
some of those countries to blind faith in a savage market economy and
abandonment of the spirit of social solidarity.
However,
for many people in the world the word Communism is not a dirty word.
Though the totalitarian regimes in East Europe vanished and Communist
parties are marginalized, for the 450,000,000 people of the now twenty-seven
nations of the European Union the memory of Communism is alive, even
though controversial. Though Communism in practice is no longer a credible
alternative to free market democracy, though it no longer aims at revolution
and though it is crushed by its Soviet totalitarian past, its memory
is alive. The question of Communism has not been settled.
In West Europe,
Communists led the resistance against Nazism. In post-WWII, Communism
was at the center of the political opposition. After the fall of Communism,
the anti-Communist Pole, Pope John Paul II, wrote that Communism was
necessary to combat unbridled Capitalism. In the year before his death,
Pope Karol Wojtyla made a famous pronouncement concerning the evils
of our times: “Nazism,” he wrote, “was the absolute
evil, and Communism the necessary evil,” with the emphasis on
“necessary.”
Reformed
Communist parties abound in modern Europe. In Italy, Communist parties
are integrated into progressive forces and have well over ten per cent
of the national vote. Communist parties play political roles in France,
Spain and other countries, scandalizing only the extreme Right. The
original ideas of Communism survive chiefly as a theoretical alternative
to rampant capitalism and a brake on the dismantling of the social state.
Communism
has always had multiple faces—political, social, economic, and
cultural. In some places its roots were deep in society; in some it
still enters into traditional political parties as in Italy and France.
Perhaps its Christian ideals on one hand and its economic promises on
the other explain why the idea is still alive.
Karl Marx
wrote in 1848 that the ghost of Communism haunted Europe. Today, it
is the memory of that ghost that resists. The ghost however is so powerful
that the political Right regularly dangles its threat before the eyes
of voters each time they go to the polls.
Residues
of Communist culture, the spark of utopia that all men desire, partially
explain the spirit of anti-capitalism in the world. The memory of Communism
also explains the resistance of the social state to an unfettered market
economy. It offers an alternative view of history, another approach
to the present, and for some a vision of the future.
Antonio Gramsci
was one of the early critics of the structures of Stalinist Communism,
even though he did not live to experience the total degeneration of
Soviet Communism. He didn’t know the full extent of Stalin’s
purges, of the repressions and the deportations of entire peoples, and
of the transformation of Communism into Soviet nationalism.
After Stalin’s
death, the revelation of his crimes at the XX Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 shook the world. That same year the
arrival of Soviet tanks in Communist Budapest to crush the uprising
of Hungarian workers was the last straw for Western Communists. In those
ideological times, some Western Communists recalled Gramsci’s
reservations. Many broke with Moscow. The relationship between West
European Communism and the USSR deteriorated. As one Italian Communist
recently recalled of the year 1956, “the age of innocence was
over.”
Some of Italy’s
social system has been dismantled but the conversion to a market economy
has not worked and economic growth is low. The problem of modern market
economies is the distribution of wealth. As in the USA, the inequalities
between rich and poor in Italy, in much of Europe, have never been greater.
The richest five per cent of Italy controls a disproportionate part
of the nation’s wealth.
While the
gap between the rich and poor is widening everywhere, free market exponents
cry for more and more “freedom”, freedom for the rich to
become richer. But everywhere there is a missing factor in the equation:
equality. Equality is out. Equality! alarmed free marketers exclaim.
An infringement on my freedom! Free marketers cry and wring their hands.
An inexplicable
mystery for free marketers is that people in Social Democratic countries
in Scandinavia enjoy the world’s highest standard of living. These
mixed economies, part social, part capitalist, work. There, the rich
pay dear. They grumble and dodge taxes, but in the end a majority of
them accept higher taxes for they realize that future generations of
their society will be the better for it.
We don’t
need economists to tell us that inequality is incompatible with freedom.
Freedom, now one of the most complex words in our vocabulary, is often
an evil word. What kind of freedom? Freedom for whom? At whose expense?
The truth is that the poor and miserable are seldom represented politically.
Who represents the poor in America’s near one-party system? America’s
poor, who are poorer than the poor of much of Europe where parts of
the staggering social state still survive.
Antonio Gramsci
today would agree with political economist Ralf Dahrendorf that democracy
must guarantee both fundamental rights like ownership of property and
also a decent economic status to everyone, as exists in Scandinavia,
as still exists in some of Europe. There is little evidence of many
infringements on the rights of the rich anywhere; but as far as the
poor are concerned, the minimum wage is hardly a sign of equality.
The social
economy recognizes the existence of inequalities and places limits on
them. Market economy theoreticians, on the other hand, explain that
inequality is quite a good thing; it is a stimulus to improve one’s
position by hard work or innovation; success is a hope for all, an aspiration,
something to strive for; it makes a society more vital.
I do not
believe that social and economic inequalities are a necessary price
to pay for the economic freedom (that word again!) of a few. First,
let’s redistribute wealth dramatically. Then we can talk about
acceptance of inequalities as a boast to economic progress.
Gramsci like
other Marxists insisted on the role of intellectuals to lead the way
toward reform. Gramsci considered mass media the instrument used by
the dominant class to spread its hegemony, but he pointed out that the
media can also be used to counter that hegemony.
Throughout
the world today we see the confrontation—still unequal—between
establishment media on one side and the spread of alternative media
on the other: ezines, independent publishers and filmmakers and the
free press.
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