Report by Giacomo Bergamaschi
[ 21 February 2019 ]

Days ago, in the short essay ETHICS AND AUTONOMY OF POLITICS, Eos had already highlighted the fundamental bond between Antonio Gramsci and Benedetto Croce. He returns to the issue, contesting the point of view of those who instead, like Del Noce (e Diego Fusaro) underlines the common thread between Gramsci and Giovanni Gentile
GRAMSCI SECOND OF NOCE Del Noci's reading of Gramscism is a fundamental hermeneutic passage. The maximum historical realization of Gramscian philosophy occurred in the period of the Italian protest, which represents on the one hand the definitive decline of the Soviet way and Maoism, on the other, the epistemological decline of the path of the Frankfurt School, in Luccacs, Althusser, to the advantage of Gramscian neo-idealistic voluntarism. The historical and existential process of the Italian protest highlights that the Gramscian path is the only one through which communism can assert itself in the West; the anti-Platonic historicism of this path embodies the tension of political and tactical maturity, compared to pure vitalism, to the irrational and utopian Dionysism typical of youth revolts. Gramscian communism is the most avant-garde front of world socialism, not only because Italy is a more "advanced" country than China or Russia and therefore the revolutionary step is, in the philosophy of praxis, of superior value and substance, but also because Gramscian philosophy faces both classical liberalism and historical fascism, which concretizes traditionalist absolutism, mythical and metahistorical.
Consequently, the Gramscian hegemonic conception of the world replaces the economistic abstraction of the "class enemy" and the capitalism-proletarian antithesis, the much more important one between fascism and anti-fascism. But what would fascism be?, in Gramscian philosophy? Gramscian fascism means, according to Del Noce, false immanentism, substantial anti-Enlightenment, false philosophy of praxis, false modernization. The result is therefore, that in Gramsci "the Italian re-understanding of Marxism through the revolutionary version of historicism results in its Enlightenment re-understanding". Gramsci is thus the theorist of compromise with the bourgeoisie, with an anti-traditionalist and anti-fascist function and here lies the quintessence of the Gramscian project of hegemony. For Gramsci the historical and social bloc of modernity must include both the bourgeois and communist worlds, the communists are the Jacobin intellectual elite of the new times who have the mission of splitting, ideologically and definitively, the bourgeoisie with a traditionalist dimension, sweeping away any resistance to the advance of modernization understood as secularization, transformation of metahistorical transcendence into historicist immanentism. The Gramscian "intellectual and moral reform" is read by Del Noce as the complete dissociation of the progressive bourgeois spirit from historical Christianity. In Hegelian terms, Gramscian communism could be interpreted as the absolute mediation towards the bourgeois as the original historical type, which denying himself, realizes its antithesis in a process of becoming self-overcoming. “Revolution without revolution”, says Del Noce, sensing already since the early 1970s that, as mentioned, the most advanced front of twentieth-century historical communism was the Italian one thanks to the philosophy of praxis: “Italian communism is the most adequate force to maintain order in a world in which any religion has disappeared; not just the Catholic religion, but every form of it is also immanent and secular; even faith in communism". The radical Marxist left protested, epistemologically, Gramscism as he saw both in the "philosophy of praxis", whether in radical immanentism an idealistic screen or in any case a form of heterodox historical materialism: philosophy of praxis and immanentism did not belong to the Marxist philosophical tradition. Del Noce radicalizes the issue and gets to the root: he reflects on the connection between the philosophy of praxis and nihilism. Gramsci brings, in the reading of Nociana, to the extreme consequences the Gentile philosophy of the Act as the ontological primacy of becoming. It is the failure of twentieth-century Italian philosophical thought, the complete realization of nihilism, hence the full modernity of Gentile's vision.
Gentile actualism is the radical denial of every archetypal Platonic essence, of every metaphysical value. The inevitable result is desecration, ethical-religious dissolution, the neo-positivist irreligion of the West. Gentile and Heidegger, apparently so distant, they are actually two sides of the same coin seen only from opposite sides. “Gentile's philosophy is the ante litteram confirmation of Heidegger's diagnosis” says Del Noce. Gramsci, believing he was meeting Marx, in reality he encountered Gentile actualism. The Gramscian transition from Marxist historical materialism to the philosophy of praxis is the true philosophical subject in question. And here comes the absolute Italian world-historical novelty, “the revolution further to the Marxleninian one which has its paradigm in Italy, and its main absolutely opposite political figures are Mussolini and Gramsci”. Opposites but for Del Noce epiphenomena of the same original subversive and nihilistic tension. Italy of the 20th century, much more than France in the 18th and 19th centuries, it overthrows metaphysical Platonism and in doing so becomes the chosen land of nihilism. The great historical anti-fascist bloc of the 1970s is therefore absolutely revolutionary and profoundly Gramscian, from the progressive bourgeoisie to the proletariat, as the post-fascism of the Italian Republic following the Second World War would prevent full historicist modernism, enlightened and cosmopolitan, than a socialist Italy, Gramscian, hegemonic center on the global ideological level, invereribbe.
This is the Nocian vision, which I have tried to summarize in a nutshell. If on a philosophical level this conception presents characteristics of strong theoretical appeal, on a historical-political level it presents a decisive gap. According to Del Noce, both actualism and communist Gramscism would ultimately be mere historical-formal mediations towards the triumph of the technocratic "open society", scientist and neo-positivist, “irreligiosa”, than for ours (who was a solitary man, of courageous thought and intellectually honest like few others) it is authentic contemporary totalitarianism, much more than National Socialism and the USSR, which are instead secularized “gnoses”..
GRAMSCI'S JACOBINISM
This reading, justifiable in the Professor's Catholic-traditional horizon, in my humble opinion highlights a very strong weak point. The weak point is precisely represented by the human and historical story of both Gramsci and Gentile. Del Noce fails on the level of Croce's practical philosophy. What two philosophers, who choose consciously, voluntarily, to become martyrs of an Idea and of one's own conception of the world, truly rare case in the history of humanity, but coincidentally less rare in the so demonized 20th century, that therefore two philosophers of such moral stature can be considered agents of contemporary nihilism and bourgeois materialism, this Delnocian hypothesis, if thought through thoroughly, not only would it lead to hopeless pessimism but it would then have to decree the end of any possibility of human redemption.
Implementing the Catholic thought of Nocian, it should be said that nihilism is the metaphysical substance of Western Catholicism which, throughout the 20th century, unlike Russian Orthodoxy and Shiite Islam, he did not intend to base his historical and political line on the ethics of martyrdom and sacrifice, but exclusively on that of bourgeois accommodation (even with the "nihilistic" fascist and communist regimes), when this was tactically useful to him and thereby believing that he was right, once again, of history. But the facts show today that Russian Orthodoxy is much more morally alive and politically much more solid than Western Catholicism.. And the same could be said of Shiite Islam. And if Del Noce, let it be said passing by, And, along the lines of Fabro — a severe critic, and very sharp, of progressive Catholicism - it is much less so than conservative Catholicism. Also Del Noce, as seen, calibrates Gramsci in light of the primacy of Gentile's anti-metaphysical becoming, but from the reading of the two fundamental essays that ours dedicates to the Sardinian philosopher, the whole effort of Gramscism shines through between the lines, as the political philosophy of a new Communism, is to translate Benedetto Croce's lesson on the level of the "red" political elite.

Gramscism therefore encounters the historical and political objectivity of Croce's immanentistic historicism much more than Promethean-subjectivist actualism: Gramsci's fundamental philosophical-political concepts, from that of ideology to that of elite, arise from profound meditation on the fundamental motifs of Croce's historicism. Gramsci's political philosophy is Croceanism completely freed from the influence of Sorel and Clausewitz, which, as appropriately highlighted by G. Calabrò, disciple and most acute interpreter of Croce, they are objectively central in Croce's political thought. Croce's anti-Enlightenment, like his anti-Jacobinism, in fact, according to Calabrò, they owe a great deal to Sorel.
Gramsci is instead the theorist of a historical and philosophical experiment in which political Jacobinism becomes a central dimension. Jacobinism means in this Gramscian logic a political elite of militant and progressive intellectuals who guide the process of technical-scientific and industrial modernization, it also and above all means Party as a subjectivist and Machiavellian requirement for the autonomy of politics, He left as a great pedagogue of a new mass civil religion. Right, Del Noce is right here, it is an "enlightenment" vision, progressive and bourgeois (and on the other hand Jacobinism, like the “puritan party” of Cromwell in England, so appreciated by Gramsci, they are the revolutionary faction of the bourgeoisie), that is, of a conception based on a new ethical-rational communist "religion" to be reaffirmed in the secularized world, of an immanentistic conception that absolutely wants to expel from itself the "religion" of the Sorelian myth. This conception of the Myth is considered by Gramsci to be Platonic and Pascalian, radically anti-Cartesian. E’ This is the pseudo-immanentism that Gramsci wants to hit deeply both philosophically, both politically, as the cultural influence exerted by Sorel is clear, via Cross. Progressive and rational immanent historicism, that of Gramsci, very different from the immanentized Platonism of Sorel and the fascists. And here we are.
But it is an obvious historical and political stretch to identify Gramscian heretical Communism, very heterodox compared to Marxist eschatologism, against which it opposes a continuity based on a clear paradigm break, with that establishment of a new Power diagnosed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Corsair writings and in his Lutheran Letters. Based on Delnocian hermeneutics, Gramsci would be the theorist before the letter of the “historical compromise” and the Neo-Actionist or Social Democratic apogee. If the communist ruling elite made the historic compromise with the Catholic Christian Democrat elite in the name of a new secularist Actionism, liberalsocialist, ultramodernist and ultraprogressive, the philosophical cause, for Del Noce, it would be placed in the common implicitly nihilistic secularism.
Vice versa, Gramsci, lover of Machiavellian power, which defines proto-Jacobin and of the supremacy of the political intellect both over scientific and technological reason and over Sorelian myth and insurrectionism, he is the theorist of mature and evolved Robespierrism after Marx and Croce. He reads all contemporary history in the light of the awareness that the theoretical and political weapons of the proletariat, however powerful and well nourished, they are empty weapons if the bourgeois elite does not split itself ontologically, placing itself at the service of the rational-communist historical becoming and of world spirit collectivist. It's a tactical necessity, in which the strategy must disappear and become extinct, an entirely Italian tactical necessity, and therefore cosmopolitan and universalistic, of the historical anti-fascist bloc, where precisely fascism indicates metaphysics for ours “platonic” and traditionalistic, the pure original Tradition (the Sorelian myth) which still remains to be destroyed.
In this perspective, the history of Italian Communism following the Second World War is, far more than Social Democratic or Hegelian-Marxist, neo-Jacobin and therefore profoundly Gramscian. E, Perhaps, particular and heretical phenomena such as Lin Biao in China, Ali Shariati in the Middle East, the same Guevarist Fochism as Latin American Castroism, they could well fall within the keystone of "red Jacobinism", which without Gramscian philosophy would have no political or historical sense. It is the political elite that unites with the social bloc, this historical force alone, which can give a historical and universalistic depth to the strategic concept of "hegemony". Here is all the Gramscian immanentism. Here the political legitimacy of positional war. Gramsci speaks, as known, of the robust structure of civil society and behind the State, in the West, unlike Russia, the authentic Power stands with its robust chain of fortresses and casemates, much more difficult to conquer than the mere political state. And we see today how powerful and impregnable it is, in the deep West, this iron and imprisoning chain of fortresses and casemates. If you exclude that, Gramsci's system collapses. But not excluding this, which cannot be evaded unless it makes Gramsci a Marxist positivist, the entire Nocian forced reading of a presumed Gramscian actualism collapses.
And digging into the Gramscian theory of the Jacobin elite a lot, if not all, re-emerges of the conception of the elite of Illuminati of Croce's memory. So it's about, for Gramsci, to purify revolutionary historicism from every trace of neo-religious sisterism, from every trace of “Pascalian and Jansenistic fury”. The leap forward, or in any case the authentic attempt at epistemological-activist overcoming is, by Gramscian philosophy, compared to the Sorelian immanentism that seduced Croce, not with respect to currentism. Guido Liguori, acute interpreter of the Sardinian philosopher, he does not seem to understand this decisive step. Gramsci is keen to underline in various parts of the “Notebooks” that Sorel is not a simple conservative, he would therefore be a revolutionary, or a particular type of “revolutionary” conservative. When he writes this, Gramsci is well aware that what is for him a “false immanentism”, that is, traditionalistic sisterism, However, he has trapped the revolutionary trade unionist elite in his network, which would then be the main vehicle for the fascistization of Italy, and also, albeit to a lesser extent, the most serious and determined armed anti-fascism of the time, which is neo-Pisacanian, secularist, socialist but certainly not communist. This makes the operation of liberation and purification of historicist-political immanentism from sorelism strategic.
The victory of the new social-liberal and technocratic-scientist Actionism, definitive with the “historical compromise”, as Professor Del Noce explained to us in unsurpassed pages, And, in conclusion, resulting from the inability and political short-sightedness of the neo-Gramscian Jacobin elite of the PCI, which turned tactics into strategy, instead of resolving strategy into tactics and which was not up to its mission of valorising, for qualitative intensification, the economic moment of political profit and compromise in a strategic logic of "absolute war" (Clausewitz). Looking at the USSR as the global center of communism on which to depend strategically meant applying Gramsci only half-way, doubting, in conclusion, of its political quality and its civilizational strategy. There's no point in beating around the bush too much. In how much, for Gramsci, only in Italy could true communism be achieved, which did not correspond in its conception to a broad-sided social democracy, neither to an experiment in Hegelo-Marxism nor even to a metamorphosis of "socialism in one country". It was instead, as I have attempted to show, a strategic Robespierrism absolute, revisited and updated in light of the great philosophical teaching of historical materialism, but in which the realistic objectivity of Croce's historicism ended up weighing more concretely than Marxism itself. And that the war of movement corresponded to the most acute phase of “greet Jacobin Terror” is clear about it, despite the less than serious denials of many Gramscian scholars of the new left.
Gramsci was a concrete politician, as well as a philosopher, just think of how he took over the secretariat of the Party against Bordiga. The positional war, supported by the constant, methodical tactical advancement of the new intellectual elite and the cultural compromise with the bourgeoisie, it is not social democracy, it's exactly the opposite, or a new one Red Jacobinism, an authentically Communist neo-Robespierrism adapted however to the new modern or postmodern phase of Western and universal scientific and rationalistic civilization.
 
source – https://sollevazione.blogspot.com/2019/02/antonio-gramsci-e-il-giacobinismo-di-eos.html