Bookmark: Marxian methods

[john_b_cannon]

Haven't been on LJ much lately. If you want more Fodder, I've been writing recently for the Solidarity Webzine and our campus grad student organizing committee against budget cuts, fee hikes, declining access, and austerity in public education. Check it out!

Next quarter I'm teaching my own class for the first time. It's called "Philosophies of

Comments

[anonymous]

I'd love to see the syllabus. I just finished "Proletarian Order" by Gwyn Williams, which is about Gramsci and the factory councils during Turin's Two Red Years. For the first time I got a real sense of that circular relationship between theory and practice in his work.

There are some good nuggets in the Notebooks, but I always felt they were too bogged down in the old (1970s) debates about Eurocommunism and the popular front for me to enjoy them as much as I wanted to. Not Tony G.'s fault, of course, but there you go.

Are you using material from L'Ordine Nuovo in the class?

-- James

[john_b_cannon]

I'm not having them read stuff from the L'Ordine Nuovo years, though that would have been interesting. I'm thinking, if I teach this course again as a general, intro-level college course, I would slow down a bit, perhaps cut back on a bit of the more purely philosophical stuff, and put in some more closely related movement history - to show that circular relationship in historical contexts. I agree that the L'Ordine Nuovo era stuff is fascinating in that respect, particularly read alongside his more (necessarily) disengaged reflections on similar thematics in the notebooks

[john_b_cannon]

e.g., Just in the section we're reading for tomorrow: "Everything is political, even philosophy or philosophies and the only 'philosophy' is history in action, that is, life itself. It is in this sense that one can interpret the thesis of the German proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy - and one can affirm that the theorization and realization of hegemony carried out by Lenin was also a great 'metaphysical' event

[john_b_cannon]

Perhaps the aspect of the Eurocommunist interpretation of G. that bothers you has nothing to do with the question of his "Leninism." There's a question of whether Gramsci takes us in the direction of reformism that is a fair question, I think. I would argue that revolutionaries need to have good answers to the questions he poses - answers that don't make us sound out of touch, like we're living in the 1910s, quiescently mechanical, or naively idealistic about how people radicalize. If we can give those kinds of answers to his questions, then Gramsci doesn't take us in the direction of reformism. But there's an "easy route" one can take with Gramsci which ends up posing Realpolitik-like questions about strategy and cultural work. Abstracting his concepts from the technique of his writing tends to produce that kind of reading, I think.