Gramsci's Turn to the Superstructures - 1

Gramsci's Turn to the Superstructures - 1

The failure of revolution and the rise of fascism
in the West led critical theory away from Marxism,
but it had the opposite effect on the Italian
socialist Antonio Gramsci. It turned his youthful
voluntarism in a Marxist direction. Thus, in 1918
Gramsci referred to the Russian Revolution as a
"revolution against Capital," against iron laws
which state that the most advanced forms of
capitalism undergo socialist revolution fist. In
his prison writings Gramsci tried to come to terms
with the collapse of the Turin factory council
movement (19 19- 1920) and the subsequent rise
of fascism by fusing his voluntarism with the
deterministic strands of historical materialism.
In this later analysis, the subjective moment in
history became the vehicle for consolidating
capitalism as well as the only means for mounting
a revolutionary challenge.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
Gramsci drew on Marx's Theses on Feuerbach
([I8451 1978, pp.143-5) to make explicit
the indeterminism in the seven postulates of historical
materialism. Gramsci agrees that human
beings enter social relations which are indispensable
and independent of their will (PI), but these
relations are not entirely external, since knowledge
of them can change them (1971, pp. 244,
352-3). Thus, Gramsci saw the superstructure as
arising out of the economic base (P2), but it was
possible for the superstructure ("human will") to
react back on the base ("economic structure")
(1971, pp. 366,403).