By Marcelo ValkoLatin American Summary, May 1, 2024.
A fundamental text has just been presented at the Buenos Aires Book Fair: “Antonio Gramsci: thinker, politician, educator” whose author is the sociologist and specialist in critical theories of popular education Luis Rigal. For those who do not know Gramsci, I quickly get into the topic, pointing out the following. When Mussolini’s fascist Italy sentences him to prison, the prosecutor who accuses him says: “we must prevent this brain from working for 20 years”, such was the “dangerous importance” of this brilliant thinker who reformulated Marxism. But do you know one thing? To the disappointment of a corrupt and dictatorial justice system, his brain continued to function. Precisely there, in his long confinement of years that will consume him physically, was where he wrote his famous “Prison Notebooks”. At that time, while they were looking for him to rot in prison, Bertolt Brecht wrote this verse: “In my time all roads led to mud.” It was certainly a more than gloomy time.
Today, more than one who fights fruitless battles in the academic world or “who confuses class struggle with banditry” would do well to return to Gramsci who, despite so many sufferings, maintained a quote from Romain Rolland as a maxim “the pessimism of reason and optimism.” of will”. This distinguished thinker who proposed a decolonized humanism anticipated the fascist reactionary wave and dared with enormous lucidity and great courage to propose “that revolution is a revolution against Marx’s Capital or to question “the universal validity” of certain immovable postulates, keeping in mind that the present contains all of the past. In more than one question he refers me to the 7 Essays of José Carlos Mariátegui who proposed adapting Marxism to the Latin American reality, including the original reality. By strange paradox, Mariátegui’s text was published in Lima in 1928, coinciding with the beginning of Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks.”
With a prologue by Atilio Borón and published by Continente, it is a fundamental text, even more so in this time of defensive reflux and defeatism and of so many lukewarm and indifferent people. It is worth remembering that to this end Antonio Gramsci pointed out that “indifference acts powerfully in history. Act passively, but act.” It’s slow, but it comes…
