Gramsci noted how to bury religious and spiritual views of history and culture. He noted that language was key in the revolution. The more I read him, the more cynical he seems to me. He claims to have hope, but his hope is in a process. His hope is merely based on idealism. Does this sound like someone who is in power?
We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man. The question is this: of what historical type is the conformism, the mass humanity to which one belongs? When one’s conception of the world is not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass human groups.
Note 1. With regard to the historical role played by the fatalistic conception of the philosophy of praxis one might perhaps prepare its funeral oration, emphasizing its usefulness for a certain period of history, but precisely for this reason underlining the need to bury it with all due honours. Its role could really be compared with that of the theory of predestination and grace for the beginnings of the modern world, a theory which found its culmination in classical German philosophy and in its conception of freedom as the consciousness of necessity. It has been a replacement in the popular consciousness for the cry of “tis God’s will’, although even on this primitive, elementary plane it was the beginnings of a more modern and fertile conception than that contained in the expression ‘tis God’s will’ or in the theory of grace. Is it possible that ‘formally’ a new conception can present itself in a guise other than the crude, unsophisticated version of the populace? And yet the historian, with the benefit of all necessary perspective, manages to establish and to understand the fact that the beginnings of a new world, rough and jagged though they always are, are better than the passing away of the world in its death-throes and the swan-song that it produces. [...]SPN, 323-43 (Q11§12), 1932
In other words, create a completely new philosophy ignoring, indeed, burying the old ones. Creative a political philosophy based on a new concept of history, which is a mad combination of political messianism and pragmatism.
Does this sound like something you have heard in the past few days?
