By EDUARDO GRANJA COUTINHO*
Foreword by the organizer of the newly released collection
1.
It is known that the expression “philosophy of praxis” was used by Antonio Gramsci in prison notebooks, instead of “historical materialism” or “Marxism”, to circumvent fascist censorship. For this purpose he referred to Karl Marx as the “leader of the philosophy of praxis”; and to Vladimir Lenin as “the greatest modern theoretician of the philosophy of praxis”.
But beyond this practical function of deceiving censors, who are not usually very well versed in philosophy, the term has a very important theoretical meaning and speaks to Gramsci's reading of Marxism. With it, Antonio Gramsci makes explicit something that vulgar Marxism had left behind: the eminently dialectical character of Marx's thought.
It is with this fundamental category that Karl Marx overcomes the speculative philosophical tradition that he called “German ideology.” When he grasps the dialectical unity between subject and object in the development of history—the relationship of reciprocal determination between man and his world, theory and practice, consciousness and social being—Marx opposes both Hegelian idealism, which assumes the existence of an absolute consciousness that governs the world and determines human reality, and the still abstract materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, so called because he abstracts material, objective reality from the historical process.
It is the notion of praxis, therefore, that allows him to criticize the “subjectivist” and “objectivist” perspectives, from which metaphysical thought understands history, culture and social relations in a mystified way.
Starting at Theses on Feuerbach, where, in the words of Friedrich Engels (1975, p. 91), “the brilliant germ of the new conception of the world” would be deposited, thought, theory, philosophy, consciousness begin to be understood as something determined by historical reality and, at the same time, as a constitutive moment of social totality. The central idea of Theses is the decisive role of knowledge as a practical reality in the life of society. This idea is unequivocally present in Thesis XI: “Philosophers have limited themselves to interpreting the world in different ways; what matters is to transform it.”
If until then, thought was considered something separate from objective reality (and therefore merely speculative and metaphysical), it is now conceived as a material force that acts to transform the world, guiding human practice. Driven by ideas, human beings make their own history, but these ideas do not spring spontaneously from their minds: they are conditioned by objective circumstances. This means that human consciousness is conditioned by the world that they themselves have created. By transforming objective reality, individuals transform themselves: this, in short, is the brilliant seed of a new conception of the world.
From the perspective of the philosophy of praxis, it is therefore a question of highlighting the connection between objective reality and the forms of subjectivity, between the mode of material production of existence and the social and political sphere or, in the form consecrated and not always understood by the Marxist tradition, between the economic structure and the ideological superstructure. In fact, there has always been in Marxism, since the time of Marx, a clear tendency to disregard the dialectical relationship between these spheres, which, as is known, led Marx himself to say, referring to the French “Marxists” of the late 1870s: “Tout ce que je sais, c'est que je ne suis pas Marxiste".[I]
Assimilated by different currents of Marxism, the thought of Marx and Engels underwent, as Antonio Gramsci observed, “a double revision, that is, it gave rise to a double combination, materialist [abstract] and idealist” (1975, v.1. p. 421-2). On the one hand, it was popularized by theorists of positivist inspiration, according to whom the economic factor mechanically and unilaterally determines the forms of subjectivity; on the other, by neo-Hegelian revisionists, who, on the contrary, overestimate the role of consciousness in historical processes, disregarding the fact that ideas – the ethical-political consciousness that acts upon the world – have a real basis and cannot be understood by themselves, nor by the so-called general evolution of the human spirit. On the contrary, they must be explained on the basis of the material conditions of existence. Regarding these “Marxists” Engels (1975, p. 194): “What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics.”
2.
Antonio Gramsci is considered one of the great renovators of Marxism, precisely because he was able to restore that dialectical unity disregarded by the positivist, objectivist current (of which Karl Kautsky was certainly the main expression) and declared impossible by subjectivist irrationalism. The author of prison notebooks recovered the notion of praxis, relying on authors who claim to be heirs of the Marxist methodological tradition: notably Vladimir Lenin, but also his fellow countryman Antonio Labriola (1843-1904), responsible for introducing the thought of Marx and Engels into the Italian socialist movement.
Antonio Labriola, despite initially having drawn close to the main heralds of the “crisis of Marxism” – Bernstein, Sorel, Croce –, remained outside of revisionism, rejecting any attempt to scientifically disqualify historical materialism. It is known that Georges Sorel asked Antonio Labriola for a metaphysical complement to Marxism. Antonio Labriola responded by proposing what he suggestively called the “philosophy of praxis”, an expression that Antonio Gramsci would later adopt. With this expression, Antonio Labriola made explicit the fundamental connection between revolutionary thought and the objective rhythm of the historical movement.
Following Antonio Labriola, Antonio Gramsci was an advocate of a non-fatalist, non-objectivist version of materialism. In contrast to the economistic determinism prevalent in Italian socialism, Antonio Gramsci was able to understand the relationship of reciprocal determination between the material life of men and the way they think, feel and represent their reality.
Without denying, therefore, the “ultimately” (Engels) determination of the ideological superstructure by the economic base, he criticized the reductionist Marxism of the Second International, notably the Popular Essay on Marxist Sociology by Nikolai Bukharin, who understood this determination as something unilateral, mechanical.
As a dialectical thinker, Antonio Gramsci distinguished the mediations between the so-called economic base and the ideological superstructure; he understood that the unity between economics and politics is mediated by civil society, the sphere of culture, where the forms of consciousness appropriate to the development of a given mode of production and, therefore, to the interests of a social class are organized. It is in this intermediate sphere, therefore, that relations of political-ideological direction, of hegemony, develop; it is in this sphere that the dominant groups forge the ideology historically necessary for a given structure.
Antonio Gramsci understood that the ideological superstructure is not monolithic: it is constituted by different spheres: a political and legal sphere (of the objectifications of the State) and another that he called “civil society”, in which subjects create and disseminate their ideologies, that is, they fight for political and cultural hegemony. Civil society, which materializes in the private apparatuses of hegemony, is, in some way, conditioned by the structure, insofar as its function is the reproduction (or transformation) of the dominant mode of production.
A union, for example, is an apparatus of hegemony, whose function is to organize the worldview of a social class. In this sense, it is determined by the material relations of production. The same can be said of the other instruments that constitute civil society: they are conditioned by the economic structure of society.
Therefore, the political and legal ideas of a class are not an immediate expression of the economy, as vulgar Marxism would have it: ideology develops in this material sphere of culture, directly linked to the economic structure. This means that “the economy determines politics not through the mechanical imposition of unequivocal, fatal results, but by conditioning the scope of alternatives that arise for the subject’s action” (Coutinho, 1992, p. 57).
Contrary to what a postmodern, culturalist reading of Antonio Gramsci suggests, the communist thinker considers that the objective reality of men determines their forms of subjectivity (for him, the ontological priority of being in relation to consciousness is undeniable), but he also understands that the subject has a certain degree of autonomy in relation to economic determinations, which limit (but do not nullify) the moment of freedom. After all, Marx would say, men make their own history.
As a mediation between the relations of production and the ideas necessary for their reproduction, culture thus appears as an instance of political struggle, of conforming consensus and hegemony; and civil society, as a place of cultural conflict – a space for the construction of identities and subjectivities. It is in civil society, understood as the set of organizations responsible for the elaboration and/or dissemination of ideologies – media, schools, Church, parties, unions, cultural institutions, etc. – that domination is legitimized (or contested).
It is there that the ruling classes create, together with the mass of the population, the cultural and moral level that corresponds to the development needs of the productive forces. And it is also there that the subordinate classes develop “their way of conceiving the world and life in contrast to official society” (Gramsci, 2002, v.6, p.181). It is therefore a question of thinking not only about the way in which the ruling groups exercise their political hegemony, but also, dialectically, about the cultural processes of contestation, pressure and resistance.
3.
For Antonio Gramsci, culture is – just as the sign is for Mikhail Bakhtin (1997, p. 46) – the “arena where the class struggle unfolds”. In this semiotic arena, different subjects rework the signs of the past, the old cultural forms that have settled down from a historical perspective that is articulated with their interests. Their political-cultural leadership, that is, their hegemony, depends on their ability to determine the meaning of reality. Here we hear echoes of Marx’s formulation, so often taken up by Antonio Gramsci (2001, v. 1, p. 237): ideologies “form the terrain on which men move, become aware of their position, and fight”.
The struggle for hegemony thus appears as a clash between different forms of consciousness. In this confrontation, the economically dominant class, which is also the ideologically ruling class, imposes its worldview, like a secular religion, on the subordinate classes. There is a fundamental difference between these classes with regard to the elaboration and systematization of knowledge.
According to Antonio Gramsci, the consciousness of the masses is fragmentary, disaggregated, contradictory, ideologically servile, permeated by superstitions and beliefs, although it may have a “healthy core” – “common sense” – popular wisdom – which provides action with a conscious direction, implicitly opposing the official or hegemonic worldview. In the words of Marilena Chaui (1986), popular culture thus appears as a mixture of “conformism and resistance”, while hegemonic culture tends towards unity and organicity: it is a “philosophy” in Antonio Gramsci’s terms. Not a philosophical system, but an elaborated and coherent worldview, that is, an organic ideology.
Thus, in opposition to the hegemonic ideology, it is up to the masses to develop their own philosophy. Their task is precisely to combat the mosaic of conservative traditions present in their worldview and to organize another culture, based on the creative, critical and progressive strata that are found in “common sense”. The organization of culture is, in this sense, a work that develops on the forms of consciousness present in the cultural life of the masses. It is a work of selecting and interpreting organic cultural forms and of demystifying and rejecting the fossilized and reactionary content of popular consciousness.
It is not, therefore, a simple denial or elimination of folklore as a form of knowledge, but a dialectical overcoming (uplift), which eliminates, preserves and raises to a higher level the ethical-political consciousness of the subaltern classes. From the perspective of the philosophy of praxis, it is a question of creating a new culture, understood as “a coherent, unitary and nationally disseminated 'conception of life and man', a 'secular religion', a philosophy that has transformed itself precisely into 'culture', that is, that has generated an ethic, a way of living, a civic and individual behavior” (Gramsci, 2002, pp. 63-4).
The struggle for hegemony thus appears as a confrontation between ideas that guide human action, ideas that become material force, theories put into practice, projects for the conscious transformation of the world. It is, therefore, a clash between philosophies that shape the interests of social groups and contribute to the moral and intellectual direction of individuals. Hegemony is, in short, philosophy in action, philosophical praxis.
4.
This collection brings together essays that develop a reflection on culture from the perspective of the philosophy of praxis, which means understanding it as a terrain of political struggle. The texts gathered here were organized according to three main thematic axes: (i) “national-popular” culture; (ii) communication and hegemony; (iii) intellectuals and political engagement.
After the introductory article by Ivete Simionato and Mirele Hashimoto Siqueira, “The philosophy of praxis as 'living philology'”, which seeks in Gramsci's prison notes a systematic exposition about historical materialism in terms of the philosophy of praxis, revealing the organic nexus existing in this conception of the world between philosophy, politics and culture, Celso Frederico, in his essay “Culture: notes on Gramsci”, begins a discussion about “the solitary place occupied by Gramsci in Marxist reflections on culture”.
Instead of fighting for a new art, like György Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Bertold Brecht, the Sardinian thinker, says Celso Frederico, proposes the formulation of a new culture capable of reconciling artists with the people. Literature and aesthetic issues are seen from the perspective of this educational concern, this desire to raise the consciousness of the masses, because what truly interests Antonio Gramsci is the cultural value and not just the aesthetic value of the literary work.
This project of cultural renewal is based on the defense of a national-popular worldview, with a view to a project of intellectual and moral reform that is indispensable for the development of new social relations. The proposal of the “national-popular,” the core of the cultural policy defended by Gramsci, means the possibility of the popular classes reinterpreting the national past from a perspective that is convenient to their class interests.
Opposing itself, on the one hand, to abstract cosmopolitanism and, on the other, to the chauvinistic nationalism – “from above” – of the ruling classes, the term national-popular refers, in Gramscian texts, sometimes to an expression of culture, sometimes to a collective will, sometimes to a counter-hegemonic political-cultural strategy.
The article “National-popular versus cosmopolitanism” by Gianni Fresu provides the conceptual historical framework for this debate. The author shows how this category, inseparable from the notions of State, hegemony, civil society, passive revolution, and transformism, emerged in the wake of Gramsci’s reflection on the contradictions intrinsic to Italy’s economic and social formation that gave rise to fascism.
In his prison notes, Antonio Gramsci observed that the process of passive modernization, which hindered the expansion of the social bases of the Italian State, deepened the fracture between intellectuals and the masses, determining the absence of an identity of worldview between intellectuals and the people, and limiting the development of a national-popular culture.
Carlos Nelson Coutinho (1943-2012), responsible for introducing Gramsci to Brazil in the 1960s, was certainly one of the first Brazilian thinkers to use the category of “national-popular” to think about the cultural issue in Brazil. In his article “In samba, the popular poison against the regime”, he starts from the recognition that Brazilian intellectual life was conditioned by a process of “passive revolution”, analogous to the Italian one, which sacrificed the national-popular element.
Here too, social transformations from above, through agreements between the old and new ruling classes, resulted in the weakening of civil society, medium of culture, restricting the scope of alternatives that were available to the intellectual. Such processes created a lack in the spiritual life of our people, notably at the beginning of the 20th century, when, disconnected from social issues, artists and intellectuals, with rare exceptions, did not propose an alternative image of Brazil, placing themselves against the dominant current.
However, Brazilian culture has made efforts to overcome this lack of intellectual, literary and artistic production identified with the popular universe. According to Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Brazilian popular music has taken on the socio-cultural function of creating and expressing a national-popular consciousness, appearing objectively as a democratic opposition, in the cultural sphere, to the various concrete configurations assumed by the hegemonic culture. Published in Italian exile in 1976, under the pseudonym Jorge Gonçalves, this text remained unpublished in Portuguese and unknown to the Brazilian public for many years, and has only now been released in our country.
Along the lines developed by Carlos Nelson Coutinho in his article and, in general, in his texts on culture and society in Brazil, my essay “Popular music and national life: the image of the people in Noel ____"aims to show that popular song, notably Noel Rosa's samba, appears as an alternative form of representation of the nation that has nothing to do with the yellow-greenness that is recurrent in our political and cultural history; a form that, as Antonio Gramsci would say, is distinguished by its way of understanding the world and life in contrast to official society. In the Brazil that emerged with the Revolution of 1930, Noel Rosa's modern samba is, as it is intended to show, a counter-hegemonic, national-popular samba.
Also a tributary of Carlos Nelson Coutinho's seminal article is Marcelo Braz's essay “The 'social question' and the cultural question in Brazil”. According to the author, the national-popular, of which samba is one of its most important cultural expressions, is unthinkable without considering the social struggles that are at the heart of the “social question” in Brazil. From this perspective, the importance of samba musicians as “organic intellectuals” of the Brazilian people, organizers of culture among the popular classes, stands out.
Cunca Bocayuva, in “Gramsci and the decline of consensus in the 1945st century,” talks about the crisis of the national-popular in the contemporary world. According to the author, the organized collective will that waged the “wars of position” that marked the progressive shifts between 1973 and XNUMX was impacted by the changes in civil society, without, however, entirely losing its importance as a political-cultural strategy. In a world marked by the return of fascism and the destabilization of social consensus, reading Antonio Gramsci invites us, he says, to reimagine the forms of resistance and the construction of a new politics capable of facing the challenges of our time.
Ronaldo do Livramento Coutinho (1937-2017), although not a Gramscian, was a Marxist and Leninist throughout his political career and had in common with the Sardinian thinker the fact that he took popular culture seriously and understood it as a form of proletarian subjectivity. In the unpublished article “Some observations on the culture of the people”, Ronaldo do Livramento Coutinho discusses, among other issues, the relationship between popular culture and the cultural industry, defending the point of view that there is no passive acceptance by the working classes of the elements that “mass culture” and the dominant ideology more broadly present, but rather a unique and quite creative manipulation of cultural elements that come to define the proletarian condition.
According to him, it is not a matter of passively consuming a culture that is foreign to one's interests and objective living conditions, but of reinterpreting and even creating (to the extent that reinterpretation itself implies the attribution of a new symbolic meaning) peculiar forms of cultural expression that involve a sense of rejection and resistance.
5.
The articles in the second thematic block, focusing on the relationship between communication and hegemony, analyze the importance of the media and cultural mediations in contemporary political processes. Leila Leal, in her beautiful article “Being noise in the silence: communication and hegemony in occupied Palestine”, talks to us about the role of the Western media in the brutal process of oppression and genocide of the Palestinian people.
According to the author, journalism, strengthened by the Israeli war machine, actively creates the conditions for genocide to happen, creating the “cultural climate” (Gramsci) that paves the way for Benjamin Netanyahu’s tanks to advance. These hegemonic processes are, however, counterposed by ongoing efforts by alternative media, the struggle for culture in the search for the production of meaning associated with a project of emancipation.
In “Disputa de ideias no neoliberalismo”, Claudia Santiago resumes the critique of the overwhelming power of media corporations that place themselves at the service of big capital, showing how, in the neoliberal period, they are responsible for the consensus necessary for absolute market dominance, sweeping away the rights conquered by the working class in the 19th and 20th centuries and erasing the remnants of the welfare state.
A historic activist in popular communication, the author reaffirms that, in today's world, the practically unlimited power of big tech on public opinion, causing waves and tsunamis of misinformation, must be confronted by media outlets linked to the social movement.
A good example of alternative, counter-hegemonic communication is that carried out by the Landless Workers' Movement. This is what Leonardo Campos Martins shows us in “From praxis to the plate: mysticism and hegemony in the MST”. In line with the ideas of Mariátegui, who understood the importance of myth as a way of highlighting the passionate dimension of revolutionary combat, the article discusses the revolutionary mysticism of the MST, a cultural and communicational strategy that drives and feeds the daily struggle of peasants, impelling them to action and guaranteeing them the extreme tension of will necessary to carry out the project of transforming the Brazilian agrarian structure. Being of the order of passion, as Antonio Gramsci would say, the mysticism can be materialized in a play, in the workers' song, in a collective meal or in a disturbing poem.
The third block of articles, which focuses on the relationship between intellectuals and politics, a theme dear to Antonio Gramsci, begins with Luciana Goiana’s essay “Juan Gelman: Poetry and Politics in Latin America”. Based on the recognition that “there is no true poetry that is not political” (Florestan Fernandes), the author understands that for the Argentine poet and guerrilla Juan Gelman, as for Antonio Gramsci, art has autonomy in relation to politics, because although it can and should be used politically, it is not limited to mere ideological propaganda: there is “an inalienable dimension” of poetry that is not subject to the immediate demands of politics: this specifically aesthetic sphere concerns the poetic form.
An icon of resistance to the Argentine civil-military dictatorship, Juan Gelman brought his activism for the right to truth, memory and social justice in his country to both poetry and journalism. His poems speak of the yearnings and pains of an Argentina oppressed and plundered by neocolonialism, while also showing solidarity with the struggle of other peoples: Algeria, Panama, Senegal, Vietnam, Cuba and Palestine.
Anita Helena Schlesener, in “Intellectuals and Education”, reaffirms the importance of organic intellectuals and collective mobilization in the fight against capitalist barbarity. “Resuming the paths of Gramsci’s thought”, the author understands that the creation of a new culture is an educational process. “Only from a common and supportive work of clarification, persuasion and reciprocal education will concrete action of construction arise” (Gramsci).
This process is not limited to formal, school education: it takes place in social and political relations; in alternative media, in popular traditions, in resistance initiatives by unions, parties, and cultural associations, instances in which the conditions are created for the development of a collective national-popular will towards a superior form of modern civilization.
In the struggle for culture, revolutionary educational processes have as a counterpart the permanent assimilation and emptying of critical thinking by hegemonic groups. This is what Pablo Nabarrete suggests in his provocative essay “Engagement in the spotlight”, showing that bourgeois hegemony promotes a certain type of engagement to the extent that it incorporates the people into its project of domination, co-opts left-wing intellectuals, and resignifies the very ideas and practices of resistance, including the very concept of engagement, originally associated with transformative thinking.
According to the author, this concept of eminently political origin has gained hegemonism in recent decades as the meaning of ideological alignment between companies, their brands and their audiences, both at the level of corporate communication and in communication mediated by social media platforms. As it does with all ideas that may threaten the dominant symbolic system, capital has appropriated engagement as an ideological link for the benefit of accumulation and its material and symbolic reproduction. Against this hegemonic perspective, it is a matter of recovering the revolutionary meaning of engagement, as a condition for a transformative praxis.
6.
The fact that, from the time of Antonio Gramsci until today, the elites have dramatically increased their capacity to organize the political will of the masses through powerful instruments of hegemony does not detract from the relevance of Gramscian theory and strategy. On the contrary: this theory remains an explanation for the extreme difficulty of creating the subjective conditions for carrying out a socialist revolution in “Western” countries.
Today, the task of popular intellectuals in the struggle for political hegemony continues to be to create and disseminate a critical worldview capable of taking hold of the masses and becoming a material force. In the Gramscian spirit, it is hoped that, at this crucial moment in which humanity lives, these theoretical essays will contribute practically to the conscious transformation of the world.
*Eduardo Granja Coutinho is a professor at the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Author of, among other books, Passion according to Antonio Gramsci (Morula).
Reference
Eduardo Granja Coutinho (org.). Culture and philosophy of praxis. Rio de Janeiro, Editorial Mórula, 202), 268 pages. [https://amzn.to/42GFjP1]
REFERENCES
BAKHTIN, Mikhail (VOLOCHINOV). Marxism and philosophy of language. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1997.
CHAUÍ, Marilena. Conformity and resistance: aspects of popular culture in Brazil. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986.
COUTINHO, Carlos Nelson. Gramsci: a study of his political thought. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1992.
GRAMSCI, Antonio. Prison notebooks. Turin: Einaudi, 1975.
________. Prison notebooks. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2002, v. 1, 6.
MARK, Karl; ENGELS, Friedrich. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and Other Philosophical Texts. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1975.
Note
[I] Marx's famous quote, “All I know is that I am not a Marxist,” is found in a letter to Conrad Smith dated August 5, 1890.
