Keys of This Blood (41 page)

Realist that he was, Gramsci understood that he was knocking his Marxist head against that strong millennial wall—the pervasive culture with which Christianity had built, housed, defended and buttressed its faith. The Marxist insistence that everything valuable in life was within mankind—was immanent in mankind and its earthly condition—was impotent against such a bulwark.

Had Gramsci needed any concrete reassurance that his analysis of the situation, and not Lenin's, was the correct one, it came in 1923, toward
the end of his exile in the Soviet Union. In that year, the proletarian revolution Lenin had expected in Germany died in the ballot box and on the streets of Berlin.

Indeed, Gramsci's critique even held true in China, where all of Lenin's careful networking for the proletarian revolution came to its own dismal end. Perhaps Mikhail Borodin took the official blame for that failure when, as the chief architect of the effort there, he was brought home and garroted. But Gramsci was convinced that neither Germany nor China nor any other country—especially any European country—fulfilled the simplistic Leninist-Marxist formula of a vast, featureless structure of the masses who perceived themselves as fundamentally different from a small, alien superstructure.

Gramsci still nourished the Leninist conviction that the final birth of the “Paradise of Workers” would take place. But he knew that the way to that peak of human happiness had to be completely different from the Leninist concept of armed and violent revolution. He knew there had to be another process.

As it happened, the failure of Lenin's efforts in Germany and China not only confirmed Gramsci in his convictions; it also meant time was running out for him in the Soviet Union. His point of view was not overly popular in Moscow in any case. It had been his misfortune to have arrived in the Soviet Union in the twilight time of Communism's “glorious genius,” Lenin. Now, with Joseph Stalin in charge of the Central Committee as General Secretary of the CPSU, and with inner-Party democracy becoming an increasingly fragile and dangerous thing at best, Gramsci would probably end up in the infamous Lubyanka Prison, where he would be tortured into a confession of his deviancy and then killed.

In the circumstances, Gramsci turned his eyes back toward home. As great a foe as Mussolini and his Fascism were to Gramsci's ideals, Stalin's already impressive control of the Party machinery in Moscow would leave Gramsci with no allies in the USSR. Italy would at least be the better of two bad choices.

Once he returned, things went well enough for a short time. Gramsci was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1924. As the head of a nineteen-man Communist faction in Italy's Parliament, however, he rapidly became a danger for Mussolini's regime. He was arrested in 1926, and in 1928 was sentenced by a Fascist court to twenty years imprisonment.

By that time, he had already converted the major Italian Communist thinkers and political leaders to his critique of classical Leninism and to
his own suggested reform of that Leninism. But over and above that, in a sort of continuous paroxysm of Marxist dedication, the imprisoned Gramsci spent the next nine years of his life writing. He set down his ideas on any scraps of paper he could get his hands on. By the time he died in 1937, at the age of forty-six, and against all odds, he had produced nine volumes of material that pointed the way to achieve a Marxist world.

Gramsci did not live to witness Hitler's betrayal of Stalin and the failure of yet another plan for violent proletarian revolt. He didn't live to see the disgrace and ignominious death of his Fascist persecutor, Mussolini, at the hands of the Italian Communist partisans. Nor did he live to see even the first traces of the vindication and victory of his ideas.

Nevertheless, when the first volume of what he had written in prison was published in 1947—a full ten years after his death—the voice of the long-dead Marxist prophet became a reality for which the world at large had no ready answer. A reality that would bedevil Joseph Stalin and each of his successors until Mikhail Gorbachev, who listened at last, would finally take the hand of Gramsci's ghost and set off on the Leninist-Marxist road to the twenty-first century.

Gramsci's willingness to face the fact that the idea of a violent worldwide proletarian revolution was bankrupt from the outset allowed him to rethink and reapply the most powerful of the ideas of his Marxist predecessors. For he never broke faith with the ultimate Communist and Marxist ideal of the Workers' Paradise. He simply read without tinted glasses the basic philosophic text Marx had imbued and taken as his own. And then he put a sharp knife to what he saw as the mistakes of both Marx and Lenin.

Gramsci—intellectually a product of the Roman Catholic society of Italy—was far more advanced than either Hegel or Marx in his understanding of Christian metaphysics in general, of Thomism in particular, and of the richness of the Roman Catholic heritage. That understanding, and his own insistently practical mind, allowed him to be far more sophisticated and subtle in his interpretation of Hegel's dialectic philosophy of history than Marx had been.

A key element of Gramsci's blueprint for the global victory of Marxism rested on Hegel's distinction between what was “inner” or “immanent” to man and what man held to be outside and above him and his world—a superior force transcending the limitations of individuals and of groups, both large and small.

The immanent. The transcendent. For Gramsci, the two were unavoidably paired and yoked. Marxism's “transcendent,” said Gramsci, was the utopian ideal. But he understood that if Marxism could not touch the transcendent motivation presently accepted as real by men and women and groups in the largely Christian society that surrounded him, then Marxists could not get at what made those individuals and groups tick, what made them think and act as they did.

At the same time, however—and precisely because the immanent and the transcendent are paired—Gramsci argued that unless you can systematically touch what is immanent and immediate to individuals and groups and societies in their daily lives, you cannot convince them to struggle for any transcendent.

As far as Gramsci could see, therefore, the call of Marx and Lenin to impose their “transcendent” by violent force was a futile contradiction in human logic. It was no wonder that, even in his time, the only Marxist state that existed was imposed and maintained by force and by terrorist policies that duplicated and even exceeded the worst facets of Mussolini's Fascism. If Marxism could not find a way to change that formula, it would have no future.

What was essential, insisted Gramsci, was to Marxize the inner man. Only when that was done could you successfully dangle the utopia of the “Workers' Paradise” before his eyes, to be accepted in a peaceful and humanly agreeable manner, without revolution or violence or bloodshed.

Deeply critical though he was, Gramsci still did not tamper with the most fundamental and motivating of Marx's ideas. He totally accepted the strange utopian vision that is the siren call of all true Marxists. The idea that capitalism and capitalists would be eliminated, that a classless society would come into existence, and that such a society would be the Paradise of Marx's dreams. And he was totally convinced that the material dimension of everything in the universe, including mankind, was the whole of it.

From Lenin, meanwhile, Gramsci absorbed two major and supremely practical contributions. The first was Lenin's extraordinary geopolitical vision. The second was his even more extraordinary practical invention—the Party-State as the operational core of geopolitically successful Marxism. For, in Gramsci's blueprint, Lenin's intricate international Party machinery would remain the basis for a worldwide Communist Party under the dominant control of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

In fact, Lenin's organizational creation was Marxism's ideal answer to the centrally directed global structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

What Marx and Lenin had got wrong, Gramsci said, was the part about an immediate proletarian revolution. His Italian socialist brothers could see as well as he did that, in a country such as Italy—and in Spain or France or Belgium or Austria or Latin America, for that matter—the national tradition of all the classes was virtually cosubstantial with Roman Catholicism. The idea of proletarian revolution in such a climate was impractical at best, and could be counterproductive at worst.

Even Stalinist terror methods, Gramsci predicted, could not eliminate what he called “the forces of bourgeois reaction.” Instead, he warned, those reactionary forces—organized religion, the intellectual and academic establishment, capitalist and entrepreneurial circles—all would be compressed by any such repression into dense streams of tradition, resistance and resentment. They would go underground, no doubt; but they would seek converts in the Leninist structure. They would bide their time until, at the opportune moment, they would thrust to the surface, shattering Marxist unity and ripping open the seams of the Leninist structure.

Once that happened, Gramsci understood, the capitalist circles abroad would be waiting to jump into the situation and exploit it for their own gain, to the detriment of the Leninist-Marxist ideal of the ultimate Workers' Paradise.

Gramsci had a better way. A subtler blueprint for Marxist victory. After all, was not Lenin's geopolitical structure already a more brilliant creation by far for fomenting a stealthy revolution in the way people think, than it would ever be for fomenting bloody uprisings that never materialized anyway?

Use Lenin's geopolitical structure not to conquer streets and cities, argued Gramsci. Use it to conquer the mind of civil society. Use it to acquire a Marxist hegemony over the minds of the populations that must be won.

Clearly, if Gramsci was to change the common cultural outlook, the first order of business had to be to change the outward face of the Communist Party.

For starters, Marxists would have to drop all Leninist shibboleths. It wouldn't do to rant about “revolution” and “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “Workers' Paradise.” Instead, according to Gramsci, Marxists would have to exalt such ideas as “national consensus” and “national unity” and “national pacification.”

Further, advised Gramsci, Marxists around the world would have to behave as the CP in Italy was already behaving. They would have to engage in the practical and normally accepted democratic processes, in
lobbying and voting and the full gamut of parliamentary participation. They would have to behave in every respect the way Western democrats behave—not only accepting the existence of many political parties but forging alliances with some and friendships with others. They would have to defend pluralism, in fact.

And—heresy of all Leninist heresies—Marxists would even have to defend different types of Communist parties in different countries. The Central Committee of the CPSU would still be the operational center of world Marxism—would still direct this new style of world revolution by penetration and corruption. But no Communist Party in any country outside the Soviet Union would be a forced clone of the CPSU.

On top of all that, Marxists must imitate, perfect and expand the roles already invented by Lenin and his “intelligence expert,” Feliks Dzerzhinsky, for the foreign arms of CHEKA and its successor organizations. In other words, they must join in whatever liberating causes might come to the fore in different countries and cultures as popular movements, however dissimilar those movements might initially be from Marxism or from one another. Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread.

Even such a pervasive blueprint as that would not work in the end, however, unless Gramsci could successfully target Marxism's greatest enemy. If there was any true superstructure that had to be eliminated, it was the Christianity that had created and still pervaded Western culture in all its forms, activities and expressions. This attack must be strong everywhere, of course, but particularly in Southern Europe and Latin America, where Roman Catholicism most deeply guided the thinking and the actions of the generality of populations.

For this purpose, Gramsci felt the timing was rather good. For though Christianity appeared on the surface to be strong, it had for some time been debilitated by unceasing attacks against its teachings and its structural unity.

True to his general blueprint for action, therefore, Gramsci's idea was that Marxist action must be unitary against what he saw to be the failing remnant of Christianity. And by a unitary attack, Gramsci meant that Marxists must change the residually Christian mind. He needed to alter that mind—to turn it into its opposite in all its details—so that it would become not merely a non-Christian mind but an anti-Christian mind.

In the most practical terms, he needed to get individuals and groups in every class and station of life to think about life's problems without reference to the Christian transcendent, without reference to God and the laws of God. He needed to get them to react with antipathy and positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals or the Christian transcendent into the treatment and solution of the problems of modern life.

That had to be accomplished; no question about it. For Gramsci was a Marxist through and through. And the bedrock essence of Marxism—the cornerstone of the Marxist ideal of a this-worldly Paradise as the summit of human existence—is that there is nothing beyond the matter of this universe. There is nothing in existence that transcends man—his material organism within his material surroundings.

It was a fact pure and simple, therefore, that the residue of Christian transcendentalism in the world had to be replaced with genuinely Marxist immanentism.