Euro-Gramscism

Letters

Vol. 2 No. 16 · 21 August 1980

From Ezekiel Emanuel

SIR: Tom Nairn’s review of works on Gramsci (LRB, Vol.2, No 13) contains a very small but disturbing confusion of terms. Early in the review he writes of the authors under consideration: all are ‘on broadly the same track. They are in search of a new revolutionary ideology for the European Left as a whole.’ In the very next column we read: accessibility ‘has become impossibly aggravated for the Left by the consolidation of academic Marxism since the later 1960s’. And concluding the same paragraph: ‘Rigour in the new tribal sense is counterposed for its justification against what one might call numbskull populism, an item never in short supply on the Left. Rigorists believe that Marxism is a science …’ The problem is that Nairn, like many others, conflates the Left with Marxism, implying, if not directly stating, that the entire Left is Marxist or that the only serious portion of the Left, the non-numbskull portion, is Marxist. Why does a new revolutionary ideology have to be Marxist? It is about time that the Left be freed from the Marxist albatross.

The Left, if the term is not so vague as to be totally meaningless, is informed by a collection of philosophies which stand for the liberation of the individual within a liberated society; it stands for liberation from economic oppression and from ideological suppression; it stands for undistorted perception. The fundamental value of the Left, in shorthand, is human emancipation in its multifarious manifestations. The philosophies of the Left vary as their understandings of emancipation differ and as their emphases on the form of emancipation differ. Marxism is only one philosophy of the Left. Marxists, as is well-known, argue for economic liberation, the destruction of the bourgeois’s class domination over the proletariat through destruction of the capitalist system, as the basis of emancipation in all other aspects of life.

This is hardly the only conception of emancipation possible, nor does it seem very accurate. Marxist theory has not made one correct prediction in the past hundred years about the prognosis of capitalism, and not for want of trying. Erroneous predictions, such as freedom under the dictatorship of the proletariat, have led to reforms, modifications and rejection of large portions of Marxism by Marxists. Even self-declared Marxists – Habermas, for instance – have gone so far as to reject fundamental Marxist concepts: that the economic base determines the character of political, cultural and intellectual superstructure, and that man creates himself through his physical labours. It is about time people accepted that Marxism has no monopoly on the truth; it is wrong, and no modification will make it true. There are many illuminating and meaningful ideas in Marxism which must be retained. But to be salvaged they must be incorporated into a new theory which avoids the mistakes of Marxism.

Ezekiel Emanuel
Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford