The importance of the political in Gramsci's Prision Notebokks

EMILIA CASTORINA

University of Toronto

Conferencia; Culture and Materialism in Gramsci's Thought; 2006

University of Toronto (Department of Philosophy)

The aim of this essay is twofold. First, it explores the way in which Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks provided a suggestive and original political understanding of revolutionary praxis thanks to his notion of hegemony. In so doing, not only he radically departed from orthodox Marxist epistemologies but also enforced a political reading of capitalism and historical processes, which enabled him to revitalize Marx’s original historical materialism (as it had become ossified by that time within certain streams of Marxist thought). Second, it attempts to raise some fundamental questions regarding some current historical cases: new forms of political praxis (the so-called new politics from “below”) from the standpoint of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Particularly, the political limitations of new forms struggle in Argentina will be considered