True Faith
The Modern Prince, and other writings. BY Antonio Gramsci, translated by Dr. Louis Marks. (Lawrence and Wishart, 21s.) ANTONIO GRAMSCI was secretary of the exiguous. Italian Communist Party in its early days, per' haps the, first genuine Italian Marxist, and by almost any standards a remarkable and adniirable man. Although errors of judgment on hiS part helped the rise of Fascism, and though some of his Left-wing colleagues soon became enthusiastic supporters of the victorioUs MusSolini, Gramsci remained adamant in opposition, and through suffering and 'adversity changed from a single' minded party boss into one of the truly creative thinkers of our time. Luckily Mussolini did not execute his opponents, and allowed political prisoners much more freedom of reading and writing than have subsequent anti-liberal govern' ments on both sides of the fence. The result in this / . case is that we possess many volumes of Gramsci's disorganised but deeply felt comments on historY, literature and politics. Some of his political pease es have now been translated into English. These hastily written jottings are fragmentarY and inconclusive, often, tantalisingly so. Usua 11Y they seem little more than a personal agenda of points for study, with casual hints for future amplification. Many. of them reveal an obsession about the class-conscious intellectual and hov, he could break down the barrier between himself and the proletariat. Gramsci was greatly con- cerned over how a Communist intellectual, knot'' ing that his dogma would be too difficult for the common people whom he wanted to convert, wan obliged to use political clichés and over-simplified fort-nuke which might hide the real truth. Thus the mechanist idea of historical causation, al- though not strictly true, had been useful at an early stage in order to raise morale in the party, as it were an opiate for the people; whereas true Marxism could now afford to be much more subtle, less dogmatic, less certain of itself, more humane and even more humble than some of the comrades would like. Individual scholars should be given their freedom to call in question even the most fundamental principles—but of course not in public. Gramsci, it is clear, was also obsessed with the Roman Church, an institution for which he apparently had a concealed envy and admiration. Marxism, like Catholicism, was in his eyes a matter of faith rather than of reason. But, above all, Marxism had to be translated into an Italian idiom in order to capture a religious- minded and land-hungry peasantry. For Gramsci, as for his master Croce, the one true philosophy was history; metaphysics and absolutes should be discarded, and dogma adjusted to meet local historical traditions.
The translator has had a difficult time with this Crocean and often 'highly obscure writing, and he has chosen to play safe with an almost word- for-word translation which sometimes leaves the • text even more obscure. There are far too many careless incidental errors, and the notes are quite insufficient and often very inaccurate. Gramsci deserves better treatment, and he also deserves a more representative selection of his writings.
DENIS MACK SMITH
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