Gramsci and Marxism

Abstract

When Marx died in 1883 and Engels, less than twenty years before the Great War, in 1895, they left the outlines of a "Marxist" philosophy to be carried forward by disciples of their own like Kautsky, and by new men in new lands like Plekhanov and then Lenin in Russia, or Labriola in Italy. This Marxism held its ground against "revisionist" criticism in the international socialist movement before 1914. but more securely in appearance than in reality because most of its upholders were too much concerned to defend it as an established creed, too little to develop it and keep abreast of changing times. In 1914 war, in 1917 revolution, produced an immense cleavage in the socialist movement; from which time Marxism came to be identified with Lenin, Bolshevism and the U.S.S.R., while the Marxism of the non- Communist parties, with Kautsky at the outset for its exponent, faded away. It faded, or grew only very patchily, in the Communist camp too, under the weight of orthodoxy now reinforced by State power or, outside the U.S.S.R., by allegiance to Moscow leadership. Issues between the two factions were, or seemed, clear and straightforward, and were almost exclusively practical matters of strategy and tactics. Amid vituperative controversy over these, interest in refinements of Marxism as a theory of society and history at large fell very much into the background.