"The Modern Prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual; it can only be an organism; a complex element of society in which the cementing of a collective will, recognized and partially asserted in action, has already begun. This organism is already provided by historical development and it is the political party: the first cell containing the germs of collective will which are striving to become universal and total."
Welcome back readers! This week we're off to sunny Italy with a selection from Antonio Gramsci's The Modern Prince, an up-to-date homage to his pre-modern fellow-countryman Niccolò Machiavelli.
Per Wiki, Gramsci was: an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926, where he remained until shortly before his death in 1937.
The Modern Prince is a name given to a selection of writings within Gramsci's famous Prison Notebooks, written on scraps of toilet paper during the period of his imprisonment under fascism. Given the conditions of their writing, the text of the Notebooks is often fragmentary and incomplete. Nevertheless, Gramsci's Notebooks became tremendously influential across postwar Europe and particularly in Britain, where Marxian theorists of anti-racism and left populism like Stuart Hall and influential publications like the New Left Review heavily promoted his perspective, which at its most useful provides a thorough framework for analysing the relationships both friendly and foe-ly between classes and strata within classes.
In the Prince writings, Gramsci sets forward a general theory of how different classes in society express their will at the highest decision-making levels in a nation, i.e. at the level of state power, via politics and political parties. He sets out the programme of a "Modern Prince" - which must be a "collective organism" rather than an individual - as that of forming a "national-popular collective will", the creation of which requires both economic as well as "intellectual and moral" revolution, commencing not at some future date when political power is secured, but right away.
We'll discuss the material within pages 127 to 144, covering the sub-essays "Notes on Machiavelli's Politics", "The Science of Politics", "Elements of Politics", and "The Political Party".
Find it here: https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/C14-Gramsci-The-Modern-Prince-1st-Printing.pdf
Happy reading and see you there!
NOTE: This time we're gathering at our East London home of Mapps Cafe for real. Hackney Wick Overground station (Mildmay Line) or Hackney Wick Station (bus) are your closest connections. I'll be on site from 18:00, so if anyone needs any help finding us, just post a comment or message me.
