History and politics

The left lost the 2023 regional elections because Gramsci lost in 1949.

Gramsci wrote in his notebooks that at the beginning of the twentieth century modern civilization entered into an “organic crisis” and, as with the Renaissance, to overcome the crisis of medieval civilization, the construction of a new civilization began by creating new sciences and new arts, now it was necessary Building another human civilization.
The Italian Marxists did not want to acknowledge this historical mission in Gramsci’s Quartet. Led politically and ideologically by Togliatti, they vowed to reduce Gramsci to a “critical Marxist” and legendary founder of the Italian Communist Party. In 1949, the thematic edition of the notebooks supervised by Togliatti was published, and it was the beginning of the end.

It will be necessary to wait for 1975 and the critical edition of the notebooks before we begin to speak of Gramsci’s “epistemic break” in prison in relation to the young Gramsci, but vaguely, again in a Togliatti-like fashion. And in startlingly paradoxical form: the picture on the title page of the notebooks of 1975 was not the 1933 prison picture – of Gramsci, the scholar of history and politics – but the 1916 picture of Gramsci – Gramsci’s picture of «El Gredo del Popolo. ».

Historical forgery. In prison, Gramsci went beyond sociology (bourgeois and Marxist) and beyond Marxism (including Marxist Marx), and began to build a new science, “the science of history and politics”, which explains – among other things – the “organic crisis” of the era the talk. The civilization we are witnessing today is in the process of dying.

In 1978, Di Donato’s publisher published Sociology and Marxism in Critique of Gramsci, which I co-wrote with Luis Razeto, the Chilean sociologist known worldwide as the first and greatest author of Solidarity Economics. Since 2009, enriched and updated, we have published it on Amazon – with the title “Transit”. From the criticism of Marxism and sociology to the proposal of the science of history and politics.

Ah, I forgot: “Prison Notebooks” and “Letters from Prison” still today feature a self-portrait of Gramsci shouting at people on the title page, not Gramsci’s portrait of the world.