From Marx to Gramsci, from Gramsci to Marx: Historical Materialism and the Philosophy of Praxis

• Published in: Rethinking Marxism Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 69 - 82
• Main Author: Haug, Wolfgang Fritz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis Group 01.04.2001; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Consciousness; Dialectics; Gramsci, Antonio; Historical Materialism; Ideology; Marx, Karl (1818-1883); Marxism; Marxist Analysis; Materialism; Philosophy; Praxis; Social sciences; Theory; New York; Chicago Illinois; United States > US; China
• ISSN: 0893-5696; 1475-8059
• DOI: 10.1080/089356901101241604

With the term "philosophy of praxis" Gramsci not only expressed exactly what he actually did as a theorist, but also brought back into Marxism what Labriola had grasped as the "nucleus of Historical Materialism." [...]through using this term he began to reclaim the field that Croce had occupied with his Filosofia della pratica and Gentile with his Filosofia del alto as original Marxist territory.6 While with some recipients of Gramsci the philosophy of praxis evaporates into post-Marxism (one has only to think of Ernesto Laclau) for Gramsci himself this line of thinking did not lead away from Marx but, on the contrary, led him to start anew from Marx's own point of departure. 1 And yet, at least in terminology, Gramsci's move was also a move away from Marx: in Marx and Engels's own terms, a "philosophy" was precisely what their theory had ceased to be (see Haug 1999b). According to official ideology, its application to history and society would give rise to historical materialism. [...]the assembly line demanded Stalin's "patriotic"-political counterrevolution which, at the same time, revolutionized the material forms of production and life in the Soviet Union. Ernst Nolte (1988), from his own rightist perspective, has discussed such Marxist inoculation of fascist philosophy. 5. Since the great American edition of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks by Joseph A. Buttigieg (Columbia University Press, 1996) was still at a beginning, in this essay we mostly quote from Gramsci (1971).