By LINCOLN SECCO & GIOVANNI SEWER*

Commentary on the complete online translation of Antonio Gramsci's book

In 1923, Antonio Bernardo Canellas wrote a report on his participation in the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. He probably made the first mention of the name of Antonio Gramsci, with whom he debated in Moscow. Antonio Gramsci's name has been mentioned several times in Brazil since then, but it was only in the 1960s that his Prison Notebooks were published here.

In Italy the Prison Notebooks were published between 1948 and 1951. Under the supervision of Palmiro Togliatti and Felice Platone, Antonio Gramsci's notes were regrouped by major themes. There were six books: Machiavelli, the State and Modern Politics; Literature and National Life; Past and Present; Historical Materialism and the Philosophy of Benedetto Croce; The Risorgimento. In addition, the following were also published: Prison Letters.

That edition was linked to the so-called national road to socialism (a strategy of the Italian Communist Party in the post-war period). Grouping Antonio Gramsci’s criticisms of Benedetto Croce and not his criticism of Nokolai Bukharin revealed a choice, for example. In the second case, it would show a Gramsci who questioned Soviet materialism, something uncomfortable for communists in the 1950s.

The “thematic edition” served as the basis for the first attempt to publish the notebooks in Brazil in the 1960s, as we have seen. The publication was incomplete, however. In 1975, Valentino Gerratana published the texts in Italy in their “spatial order”, that is, as they appear in the original notebooks, although the controversy over the chronological order of the texts persisted.

From 1999 onwards Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Luiz Sérgio Henriques and Marco Aurélio Nogueira published a version of the prison notebooks which combines the “thematic edition” with the “critical edition”. Although it has expanded knowledge of Gramscian texts, since the thematic edition was left unfinished, the Brazilian edition is also not complete and the ordering of the texts is arbitrary.

The full translation of the works is now available free of charge on the website of the International Gramsci Society-Brazil (igsbrasil.org/galeria). Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, carried out based on that Edizione Critica dell'Istituto Gramsci, the cure of Valentino Gerratana.

A well-established standard for references and translations in several languages, the Critical Edition offers the content of all the handwritten notes that Antonio Gramsci recorded between 1929 and 1935, filling “miscellaneous” and “special” notebooks, as he himself calls them. With the authorization of the Gramsci Institute of Rome and the Einaudi Publishing House of Turin, this translation into Portuguese, promoted by IGS-Brazil and carried out without funding, with the voluntary collaboration of a team of professors from several Brazilian universities, will have its official launch this Tuesday, November 5.

Having at your disposal the translation of the complete notes as they were written by Antonio Gramsci in the prison notebooks, readers, students, researchers and social and political activists, will be able to have a more precise understanding of the historical, political and cultural context in which these writings are situated; with access to the most diverse areas of knowledge explored by the author, the complexity of his thinking and the intense conceptual plot that permeates the elaboration of his impactful political conception and his original world view.

In addition to making visible “how Antonio Gramsci worked” in precarious prison conditions, the systematic reading of prison notebooks reveals the methodology used in his research. By going through the prison notes, woven in a reticular form and evolving in a spiral, one discovers the “rhythm of thought in movement” (Notebook 11, end of § 22), as Antonio Gramsci himself defines the dynamics of his theoretical process. Therefore, he recommends that when studying an author’s thought it is necessary to seek the authentic meaning of his writings “in the entire development of the intellectual work”, carrying out “preliminary meticulous philological work conducted with the utmost scrupulousness of accuracy” (Notebook 16, §2).

In conjunction with this recommendation, throughout the notes, Antonio Gramsci frequently points out criteria for acquiring a rigorous study method (cf., for example, Notebook 11, § 15) and means for forming a consistent personality endowed with intellectual maturity, polyhedral knowledge and action in social and political organizations.

Therefore, anyone who dedicates themselves to reading his notes in full, even if it is a time-consuming task, will come across an enormous wealth of data and theoretical perspectives. Contrary to the superficial impression of fragmentation, Antonio Gramsci outlines a research project based on the dialectic of history and developed within Marxism.

This allows us to develop a unitary vision of reality, where the parts are articulated with the whole and the “living philology” of concrete facts is linked to an organic conception of the world that intertwines the local, the regional, the national and the international, since “history is always 'world history' and particular histories live solely within the framework of world history” (Notebook 29, §2).

When navigating this fascinating universe, one notices the inseparable connection that Antonio Gramsci establishes between “research method” and “exposition method”, since the collection of the first draft material recorded in the “miscellaneous notebooks” is not a random deposit of notes, but an extensive field of research and a complex laboratory of ideas, articulated by objectives that condense a significant collection of subjects aimed at converging into the most elaborate and systematized unifying themes in the “special notebooks”.

Dedicate yourself to the study of notebooks It is like entering a large, high-level school, open to all. IGS-Brazil offers us a generous collective work that will continue with eventual adjustments, preparation of grades based on the 600 pages of Note to Text do Critical Apparatus of the Gerratana Edition and the offering of courses on the work of Antonio Gramsci.

It is hoped that, once made available to everyone, this translation will further increase the active participation of all those in Brazil who fight for the construction of the new civilization envisioned in the prison notebooks by Antonio Gramsci.

* Lincoln Secco He is a professor in the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of History of the PT (Studio). [https://amzn.to/3RTS2dB]

* Giovanni Semeraro is a professor at the Faculty of Education of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Author, among other books, of Gramsci and the new clashes of the philosophy of praxis (Publisher Ideas and Letters).

Reference

Antony Gramsci. prison notebooks. Collective translation. 2024.

Available in https://igsbrasil.org/galeria