PAST AND PRESENT. Philosophy, Politics, and History in the Thought of Gramsci.

International Conference. 18-19 June 2015. Kings College, London.

Time and Revolution in Gramscis Prison Notebooks
Fabio Frosini
University of Urbino
fabio.frosini@uniurb.it

1. Past and Present

One can say, as a first approximation, that for Gramsci past and present coincide
respectively with history and politics: the past is past history and the historiography that
recounts it; while the present is politics in action the real clash of organized forces and, at
the same time, is the strategic reflection that helps these forces to assume positions within this
clash, and to prevail. But historiography is also a political act, a political intervention in the
present, inasmuch as it critically interprets the present as an outcome of a determinate past; and
political practice is also a form of reflection on the struggle, inasmuch as it criticizes the projects
of other political forces and strategically elaborates its own.
In short, from a gramscian perspective it is impossible to separate the subjective aspect
from the objective of the times past and present: the objectivity of past events is reflected in
the subjectivity of historiographical intervention, and the subjectivity of strategic elaboration is
incorporated in the objectivity of the struggle unfolding. Real events and ideas of these events
are two interlinked aspects; not however in a static way, but functional: the victories (or defeats)
of the past reaffirm themselves in the present thanks to historical account, while the conflicting
critical and strategic elaborations realized by the forces in struggle help these to resolve the
conflict in one or another direction.
The reciprocal or mutual immanence of events and ideas of these events is not an
evident fact; on the contrary, it is the result of the central philosophical nucleus of Gramscis
thought. Gramsci calls this nucleus the unity of theory and of practice. To be precise: the
version of the unity of theory and practice that Gramsci places at the center of the renewal of
marxism, defined by him as the philosophy of praxis, is that which he calls translatability of
languages.

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This theory is a particular development of the gramscian theory of ideologies. To
ideologies, affirms Gramsci, should be assigned a gnoseological and not merely psychological or
moral value. Ideologies, in other words, are the terrain on which the knowledge of truth occurs.
But given that these are always both instruments of social and political organization, and
interpretations of reality, their functioning is simultaneously of a theoretical-cognitive and
practical-organizational character. Declaring ideologies as the only point of access to truth,
Gramsci also establishes that there does not exist an interpretation that is not also, in some
way, a transformation of reality.
The distinction will then be between ideologies that, organizing social forces and
interpreting the position occupied by these in the conflict with other social forces, succeed in
prevailing over the others; and ideologies that, incapable of organically connecting
interpretation (theory) and organization (practice), consign the social forces they represent to a
subaltern position. The distinction lies in short in the degree of power, which coincides with
the truth: it will not be a qualitative type (in the sense of truth/error), but quantitative (in the
sense of the different degrees of capacity to organize practical reality and, in this way, to produce
a new reality).
This equalization of truth and power and this conception of ideology as practical
power can appear heterodox from a Marxist point of view. In reality Gramsci draws it from a
contextual reading highly original, it is true of the Theses on Feuerbach with the Poverty of
Philosophy. In this way, the thesis, according to which it is in practical activity that man must
demonstrate the truth, that is the reality and power, the worldly or earthly character of his
thought (Wahrheit, i.e. Wirklichkeit und Macht, Diesseitigkeit seines Denkens) (Thesis 2) is
linked by Gramsci to the way in which, in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx considers the
practical power of the political economy of Ricardo. The latter, thanks to a precise idea of laws
as those which occur only given certain premises or conditions, expresses a precise political
project, consisting in the occurrence of conditions given by the affirmation of the bourgeoisie as
the dominant class. In other words: Ricardo shows the way in which from a political struggle
springs a terrain on which there occurs a series of scientific regularities.

2. Translatability

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But how will it be possible to understand in what specific way this intertwining of truth and
power is realized? The answer lies in the theory of translatability, which establishes that any
theoretical position cannot really be understood, if it is not considered from the point of view
of its practical implications, and vice versa, that of no practical position one understands the
true meaning, if one does not extract the theory which is present in it. Theory and practice
are united not insofar as they are parallel or identical, but insofar as they are mutually
translatable: theory is inside practice, and practice is inside theory. Or better: one sees the true
meaning of theory only if one translates theory in practice, and vice versa.
This formulation can appear abstract. In reality, nothing could be further from that. An
example taken from the Prison Notebooks will be sufficient to show it. This example is crucial,
because it is precisely on its basis that Gramsci develops the theory of translatability. It concerns
the great alternative between France and Germany in the Europe of the age of the Revolution and
the Restoration. German philosophy and French politics, notes Gramsci, are two distinct
languages respectively theoretical and practical which in appearance are wholly
opposites and not in communication with one another. But this is true, only if they come to be
considered in themselves, as if they were complete and self-sufficient phenomena, that have
within themselves the criteria to be understood. In reality, national history is incomprehensible if
it gets separated from international history, or better: the national moment acquires its true
significance (that is its meaning of truth-power in the sense of Marx) only if it comes to be
seen as a national/international nexus. The nation in relation to the international context,
exactly as the individual compared to society, are nodal points, whose identity and autonomy
(which are not denied by Gramsci) derive from a work of translation; they are in other words the
effect of a praxis and not an initial given, a contingent (historical) result and not an ontological
characteristic.
In this sense, French politics and German philosophy, as national expressions that
characterize in an original and unmistakable way France and Germany between Revolution and
Restoration, acquire their real meaning only if they are translated into its opposite. Thus, in
Jacobin politics there is implicitly contained a philosophy. Gramsci recognizes the subsequent
developments of this philosophy in the great historical experiences of 1848 and of 1917,
respectively in the slogan, launched by Marx, of revolution in permanence, and in the theory
and practice of hegemony developed by Lenin. Vice versa, in German classical philosophy

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there is contained a politics, that consists in the theoretical comprehension of the meaning of the
Revolution, a comprehension that realizes, at the same time, its speculative translation, i.e. an
absorption of the practical effects of the Revolution within the frameworks of liberal
civilization and State. This opposite translation in respect to Jacobinism, not of practice into
theory but of theory into practice, is, as will be seen later, that which Gramsci at a certain point
calls passive revolution.
3. Personality and human reality
Translatability is, as has been seen, a development of the thesis of Marx, according to which the
truth and power of thought are demonstrated in praxis. Translatability in other words renders
comprehensible how the unity of truth and power is concretely realized, without the truth getting
reduced to power nor vice versa, that power becomes a mere expression of truth. This
equilibrium, this dialectic between the two moments of universality and particularity
explains the way in which Gramsci interprets the relation, which I recalled at the beginning,
between subjective time and objective time: the relation between subjective intervention, i.e. the
element of politics in action, and that of the identification of the real conditions, i.e. the narration
of history.
Between subjective time and objective time there is not, according to Gramsci, a real
separation; they are abstractions made within a single reality. For the philosophy of praxis,
between the sphere of the individual and that of society (and of the State) there does not exist a
substantial disparity; rather: resuming a tradition of thought that goes back to Machiavelli and,
passing through Bruno and Spinoza, arrives to Hegel and to Marx, Gramsci rejects any notion of
an internal experience (only individual), that could be separated from external expression,
from the concrete practice of the individual, that are always already social practice and in some
sense political.
This concept emerges in a text of Notebook 9, belonging to the section on the
Risorgimento: The national personality (like the individual personality) is an abstraction if it is
conceived outside the international (and social) nexus. National personality expresses a
distinction of the international complex, therefore it is linked to international relations.1

A. Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, edizione critica dellIstituto Gramsci a cura di V. Gerratana, Torino,
Einaudi, 1975, p. 1161.

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We are in the presence of a very complex text, which I try to analyze by points:
a) the word personality indicates the unmistakable composition that
constitutes the person and which is much more than the mere individual: the
person is not serial, but has a structure at the single limit;
b) the term personality is used to designate the nation exactly like the
individual, in the sense that the individual with respect to society is a person exactly
like the nation with respect to international relations;
c) if one separates the nation from the international nexus, or the individual
from the social nexus, one falls into abstractions without meaning;
d) this structural connection of the person with the nexus does not nullify the
uniqueness of the person; on the contrary, it is its foundation; in fact, it is on the basis
of this connection that the distinction is produced;
e) it follows that only recognizing the primacy of the nexus and of the
complex in relation to the individual elements that constitute it, will these elements be
recognized in their originality and real, authentic uniqueness; in other words: relations
precede the distinct, they constitute it as distinct, i.e. as an autonomous element;
f) there is not a real difference between the individual moment and collective or
national moment; on the contrary, the original personality is produced at all levels,
individual and collective, but can be recognized only if one abandons the point of view
according to which the individual precedes society;
g) but Gramsci also implicitly criticizes the opposite idea, that society precedes
the individual: the term distinct is an index, written by Gramsci in quotes to signal a
specific, technical usage.2 The reference is evidently to the Crocian theory of distincts,
according to which the unity of reality does not nullify its constitutive elements, but on
the contrary it exists as a unity of this elements only thanks to the independence and
autonomy of each of these. In this way Gramsci is opposed to the holistic approach, as in
the Italy of those years it had come to be developed by the actualism of Gentile.
Against Gentile, Gramsci uses distinction; but, thinking the latter as an aspect that gets
produced by the nexus or complex, outside of which it is a mere abstraction, he redefines

Cfr. G. Guzzone, La nozione crociana di distinzione nei Quaderni del Carcere di Antonio Gramsci.
Osservazioni testuali e ipotesi interpretative, unpublished text. I thank the author for allowing me to read his article.

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in a materialistic way the Crocian concept. This double distancing leads to conceiving the
singularity of the elements of reality as, on the one hand real and effective, but on the other as
transitory products of a complex of relations, which the elements express. Individual and
collective, also like active and passive, are not opposed, but necessarily imply each other.
The idea that the philosophy of praxis is born as a complete rupture with the traditional
alternative of materialism and idealism, is enunciated by Gramsci in relation to the Theses on
Feuerbach, in which he following Engels identifies the brilliant germ3 of the new
philosophical position of Marx. Also in the passage of Notebook 9 discussed just now on
national and individual personality, the double critique of individualism and holism is justified
with an implicit reference, but very clear, to thesis 6 on Feuerbach, in which (in the Italian
translation by Gramsci) recurs not accidentally the same word abstraction also used by him
in the text of Notebook 9: But human reality is not an abstraction immanent in the single
individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations (Ma la realt umana non una
astrazione immanente nel singolo individuo. Nella sua realt linsieme dei rapporti sociali).4

4. Present time and hegemony

The past-present nexus signifies therefore, if not understood in an abstract way, that a series of
elements that compose a determinate personality whether individual, collective or national
are reorganized on the basis of a determinate project. This reorganization coincides with that
which Gramsci referring to the experience of the individual calls adherence to the present.
The present, he writes, is not only an overcoming of the past, but is, specifically, its critique.
This critique must also be a critique of that part of ourselves which corresponds to the past. It
is necessary in short to have an exact consciousness of this real critique and to give it not only a
theoretical, but political expression. In other words we must be more adherent to the present,
which we ourselves have contributed to creating, having consciousness of the past and its

Es sind Notizen fr sptere Ausarbeitung, rasch hingeschrieben, aber unschtzbar als das erste
Dokument, worin der geniale Keim der neuen Weltanschauung niedergelegt ist (K. Marx-F. Engels, Werke, Bd. 21,
Berlin, Dietz 1962, p. 264).
4
Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, cit., p. 2357. On this notion of ensemble cfr. C. Luporini, Introduzione
a K. Marx, F. Engels, Lideologia tedesca, trad. it. di F. Codino, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1967, pp. XI-LXXXVIII:
LXXXIII-LXXXIV; Id., Dialettica e materialismo, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1974, pp. 382-384; E. Balibar, La
filosofia di Marx, trad. it. di A. Catone, Roma, manifestolibri, 1994, p. 36; P. Macherey, Marx 1845. Les thses
sur Feuerbach, Paris, ditions Amsterdam, 2008, pp. 150-160.

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continuation (and reliving).5 The past-present nexus poses in short a problem of
contemporaneity (or anachronism).
However this problem of political articulation of the past/present nexus exists for
Gramsci, as has been seen, on both the individual and collective plane. The single human being,
the political party, the entire nation: the political necessity to adhere to the present makes itself
felt on all these levels. Only connecting organically actual practice to past history, and vice
versa, does it become possible to be contemporary. However, this does not mean making a
given element coincide with a presumed course of history. Just the opposite: the course of
history is none other than the effect of necessity produced on the national and international
plane by a given hegemonic articulation, and this latter, in turn, is the result of the capacity, that
a determinate national class possesses, to realize coherent translations, i.e. capable of
universalizing its own ideology, organizing to its own advantage the national/international
nexus.
Consequently, present time can be defined as the intertwining of hegemonic practices,
an intertwining that realizes itself in distinct ways at the local, national and international level.
Therefore, present time is never a unitary fact, but, structurally, it is the contingent unitary effect
on different spatial levels of a plurality of relations always in movement, and which only
temporarily acquire a certain stability. It also follows that, when Gramsci (in the just quoted
passage concerning the adherence to the present time) affirms the necessity to critique
politically the past/present nexus, he is not referring to an adjustment to a present understood
as a unitary and static space. He thinks, instead, of a hegemonic kind of intervention, thanks to
which the relation between the complex of relations and a determinate distinct, that
expresses this nexus, comes to be rearticulated in a manner to render this distinct less
dependent on the complex, and therefore much more capable of contributing to determining the
balance of the forces in the overall context.
The mere flow of time does not decide the changes that can occur in its interior.
Time, inasmuch as it is a bearer of a determinate meaning or significance, is always incorporated
in a series of spatial (geographical) determinations, that in turn result from the way in which the
various hegemonic articulations mutually and reciprocally dispose themselves. Therefore one
can really speak of past and present (i.e. of genuinely temporally distinct dimensions), only
5

Notebook 1, 156: QC, 137.

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if one is in the presence of a, real or possible, modification of the relations among the elements
that one finds in this time/space (or pluralized time).
5. The two principles of historical materialism
The modification, real or possible, of the relations between the elements of space-time is that
which Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, calls an era
of social revolution.6 It arises, Marx maintains, at the moment in which the social relations
within which the productive forces were up to that moment developed, turn (umschlagen) from
forms of development into their fetters.7
It is in this moment, and only in this, that the question is posed of a revolution of the
entire society: each stage (Stufe) of development of the nexus between productive forces and
relations of production must have reached its limit, and it is at that point that the alternative
between the past and the present is concretely posed: Mankind thus concludes Marx
inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve.8
Marx postulates therefore two distinct times: one of development and one of crisis. In
the time of development one has the quantitative expansion of a given structure constituted by a
certain relation between productive forces and relations of production; in the time of crisis one
has the qualitative reorganization of these elements in a new structure, in the sense that, new
relations of production replace the old, but these must already be formed within the old
society. The role of politics is circumscribed to periods of crisis. Also here, however, to politics
belongs a function of support to those relations that already must have been formed within the
old society, and this formation is a natural process exactly like that of the development of the
productive forces.
The property relations change, therefore, only as a consequence of the change of the
relations of production. Said otherwise: the same swerve from development to crisis is an
element internal to development. Consequently, the modification between the elements of
space-time is also an expression of the logic of continuity. On this basis, the relation between
past and present is dominated by the past. And it is this, i.e. the material base of society,
6

K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, Bd. 13, Berlin, Dietz, 1961, p. 9 (K. Marx, A contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, transl. by S. V. Ryazanskaya, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
7
Ibidem.
8
Ibidem, p. 8.

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that produces in its interior the conditions, and the tasks corresponding to these. In short, the
clear distinction between development and crisis, postulated by Marx, resolves itself in an
absorption of the crisis within development, in the sense that the crisis is explained departing
from development, but one cannot say the converse: development is not comprehensible
departing from crisis.
Now, if we return to the initial question, and namely to the past/present nexus as the key
for understanding the relation between time and revolution, we must recognize the profound
distance between the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the
approach of Gramsci. And yet this is precisely one of the texts to which he appeals with greater
conviction, to delineate the contours of his return to Marx and, through this, to define the
philosophy of praxis. This attention can be considered a strategic choice, dictated by the fact
that the Preface was commonly considered as the distillate of historical materialism, and was
therefore read in a deterministic and economistic key.
The point of attack of Gramsci is precisely the nexus between the maturation of
conditions in the womb of the old society, and the tasks that are born from and depend on
this maturation, in which we have recognized the foundation of the primacy of development
over crisis. In the Preface this nexus is presented as that between a premise (the conditions)
and a consequence (the tasks). In connecting the two moments, Marx in fact uses the adverb
daher, thats why.
It is on this point that Gramsci intervenes, transforming the gap between premise and
consequence into an organic interlacing between two principles which it is necessary to
mediate dialectically.9 Gramsci conceives the relation between conditions and consequences, or
between material premise and political initiative, as a pair of opposites that return to some form
of dialectical unity. This idea is justified by his approach to marxism: according to Gramsci
Marxism is born, as has been seen, with the Theses on Feuerbach, as a dismissal of the
speculative alternative between materialism and idealism and, therefore, of the same idea of a
speculative philosophy. The primacy of real conditions on political praxis is, from this
point of view, inadequate to express the theoretical revolution of Marx, and risks throwing
Marxism backwards, towards the old forms of reductionism. The intertwining of truth and

This difference was noted and commented upon by V. Gerratana, Sul concetto di rivoluzione(1977), in
Id., Gramsci. Problemi di metodo, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1997, pp. 83-118: 109-112.

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power, the conception of ideologies as jointly the site of knowledge and practical transformation,
in the end the theory of translatability: these elements, that constitute the marxism of Gramsci,
prevent the detachment, if not by abstraction, of the objective side from the subjective.
6. Permanent revolution and passive revolution
The truth-power of the two principles of historical materialism will only result from their
mediation. About this Gramsci makes two apparently inconsistent affirmations. The first dates to
October of 1930, and is resumed, in the second draft, in 1932. In its first version, Gramsci
affirms: Meanwhile one can say that the dialectical mediation between the two principles of
historical materialism reported at the beginning of this note is the concept of permanent
revolution.10 The second affirmation dates to April-May of 1933: The concept of passive
revolution must be rigorously deduced from the two fundamental principles of political science
[] This means that these principles must first be critically developed in their full extent and
purified of any residue of mechanicism and fatalism. They must therefore be referred back to the
description of the three fundamental moments into which a situation or an equilibrium of forces
can be distinguished, with the utmost stress on the second moment, or equilibrium of political
forces and especially on the third moment or politico-military equilibrium.11
The two texts date back to different moments of elaboration in the Prison Notebooks and
partly reflect distinct preoccupations: the first belongs to a crucial moment in the development of
the concept of hegemony, while the second is one of the points of arrival in the reflection on the
concept of passive revolution. These belong however to the same, fundamental problematic, as
is apparent not only from the common reference to the Preface of Marx, but also from the fact
that passive revolution is a type of hegemony. Finally, in the text of Notebook 4, immediately
after the passage I cited, Gramsci elaborates for the first time that notion of relations of
forces,12 which in the text of Notebook 15 is recalled as the conceptual framework that permits
a non fatalistic or mechanistic understanding of the two principles of the Preface.

10

Notebook 4, 38: QC, 456-457. The second version contains a few variations which are not secondary
and unimportant: Meanwhile one can say that the dialectical mediation between the two methodological principles
enunciated at the beginning of this note can be sought in the historical-political formula of permanent revolution
(Notebook 13, 17: QC, 1582).
11
Notebook 15, 17: QC, 1774.
12
Cfr. Notebook 4, 38: QC, 457-459.

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Hegemonic processes, relations of forces, theory of history: herein lies the common
horizon of these two notes. There exists however a trait that clearly distinguishes them, and on
this we will now concentrate attention. In one case Gramsci speaks of dialectical mediation of
the two principles, while in the second he speaks of a rigorous deduction. In essence: if the
nexus between past and present (between conditions and political action) is dialectically
mediated, one has the concept of permanent revolution, while if from this same nexus one
carries out a simple deduction, that which results is passive revolution. In fact, in the same
Notebook 15, in a text of June-July 1933, significantly entitled Past and Present. First epilogue,
Gramsci again recalls that: It seems that the theory of passive revolution is a necessary critical
corollary of the Introduction to the critique of political economy.13
What exactly does necessary critical corollary mean? A corollary is a consequence.
Therefore, we are confronted here by a clear and precise warning on the part of Gramsci: the way
in which the past/present nexus is presented in the Preface, per se, propels one to think history as
a process of molecular accumulation, that by definition always assigns a preponderant role to the
past. Historical innovation springs from an internal dynamic of the already dominant
elements. This happens because, if past and present i.e. theory and practice, history and
politics are not understood in their dialectical unity, history tends to appear as an objective
flux, in which the only political action is that of those who, wanting to revolutionize the
existing conditions, will act on the basis of these, or else be confined to an unrealistic
subjectivism.
Herein lies therefore the necessity of that corollary, and the critical character of
this consequence of the theory of Marx. That consequence must be drawn, and in other words the
theory of passive revolution must be developed, in order to demonstrate the risks of that way
of understanding history. And that is, in the terms of Gramsci, to show that, so long as the two
principles of the Preface are treated separately, the first will have the upper hand and the
present will be the continuation of the past. Passive revolution arises, in fact, when (as has
been seen above regarding Germany and France) the translation, i.e. the unity of philosophy
and politics, is realized departing from philosophy; when a class of intellectuals succeeds in
absorbing within its own discourse the political dimension of the class struggle, rendering
possible a development devoid of deep and profound trauma.
13

Notebook 15, 62: QC, 1827.

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But, in its own way, the passive revolution is also a translation, that is a form of the
unity of theory and practice, i.e. of hegemony. Herein lies the proximity between passive
revolution and revolution in permanence. The latter emerges, as Gramsci writes, when the
struggle and the practices of insubordination of the dominated classes are unified in a
hegemony, i.e. when it is understood at the price of bloody struggles and of many defeats
that the subalterns can escape from their condition, only when they will have learned to realize,
from their point of view, the translation of theory and practice. From their point of view: i.e.
departing from practice, that is as a process of real, political unification of their mentality in a
coherent praxis. This development is also present in the Preface of Marx: in the dialectical
mediation of the two principles, in other words in the capacity, which only thanks to the organic
intellectuals and to the modern prince is it possible, to rethink the past as political struggle and
the present as the site of the constitution of truth-power.
Both revolution in permanence and passive revolution are therefore forms of hegemony.
But it matters whether the translation occurs departing from theory or departing from practice.
Departing from theory leads inevitably to the production of the representation of a unitary time,
whose own unfolding brings forth the revolution. This risk is present in Marx, not incidentally,
at the moment of the defeat and diminishing of the whole proletarian front. The laws of
political economy, like the laws of history, are the crystallizations of hegemonic processes, but
they express these processes from the point of view of theory, not of practice. This is the
reason why Gramsci considers Ricardo highly precious as one of the points of departure for the
philosophical experiences of Marx and Engels that contributed to the development of historical
materialism14: his method of lets suppose that expresses this political conditionality of the
necessity of law, this hegemonic origin of truth: this method does not deny necessity but
rethinks it departing from the contingency of politics, and which therefore helps (as Gramsci
maintains) to reduce the immanentist conception of history, expressed in idealistic and

14

Notebook 8, 128: QC, 1019. And cfr. The letter to Tania of May 30 th 1932: can one say that Ricardo
has been important to the history of philosophy besides the history of economics, in which hes certainly a figure of
primary importance? And can one say that Ricardo helped to direct the early theoreticians of the philosophy of
praxis toward going beyond Hegelian philosophy and toward constructing their new historicism, purified of every
trace of speculative logic? (A. Gramsci-T. Schucht, Lettere 1926-1935, a cura di A. Natoli e C. Daniele, Torino,
Einaudi, 1997, p. 1015).

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speculative language by German classical philosophy, to an immediately historical and realistic
immanence.15

15

Ibidem.