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For a Gramscian dialectic of the subaltern

Raul Mordenti, 19/4/2007

1. The question of whether the subaltern can speak is (strictly speaking) a tautology, but it hides a problem (and maybe the problem). The subaltern, subordinate, and as long as it is subordinate, clearly can not speak, because to be subordinate is defined precisely as a radical lack of autonomy, which means the lack of their own point of view, lack of speech self-centered and positioned from itself, so no first word. Where "word" obviously means that language is language which (feminist thought taught us) are soaked domain: use the word to those who use is not talking. I believe indeed that this might be the very definition of "subordinate" means a subordinate who does not have its own ability to speak (Spivak here and learn to itself when it defines "subordinate" how "to be removed / to / from each line of the social mobility ": the opposite is true, even the" social mobility ", pursued individually or corporately in the hierarchy of classes taken as unchangeable, is a factor and a sign of subordination).
2. If "subordinate" is no word, then "power" is also the power of speech, the hegemonic power of articulate speech self-legitimizing, to establish a sense, to give meaning to things (or rather to force him), making his point of view, "common sense". And Gramsci tells us that just around the "common sense" is held the hegemonic struggle between the classes: Those who encounter is dominant, controlling, managing common sense.
From this point of view not only nations but also the powers are novel or, rather, the "grand narratives" shared by the subordinates are not necessary for less than what the authorities are the police and military (if only because - as Gramsci saw clearly - even in the most exclusive, coercive and dominant dictatorships least their police and armies, and members of the repressive apparatus must, somehow, be "hegemonic" power, who are convinced, that the world must share the story Proposed imposed by that regime). That's why dictatorships need heroes.
3. It is time that the revolutionaries take on the problem of construction of meaning as the most crucial problems. If not in terms of production of a story than the mirror opposite of the power at least in terms of ability to criticize the story of power in order to escape. This gesture is the necessary condition of the struggle for independence, that is subordinate to it coming out. It is the gesture (if we think: wonderful) that give rise to any collective liberation: the labor movement that was born at the same time it refuses to believe the story of the capital (that is, that the liberation for the working distance) is the act of colonized peoples to understand how the "burden of ' white man "is just a story you need to load any burden on the shoulders of the black man and black woman, is the gesture of Lenin and Malcolm X, feminist and youth movements of revolt, etc..
When power relations are particularly bad or even desperate (as in our own time) could perhaps do the gesture of the Jews who were forced to attend the sermons of the Counter: turarsi ears with invisible plugs of wax. Perhaps this is what teens do today, perhaps it is a form of primitive, but sensible and radical rejection of their melancholy and silence anorexic, maybe it's the only form of opposition that is now possible for them.
4. Those who still refuse the urgency of the problem that we set here (perhaps because he believes, with formuletta lorianesca, "superstructure") should reflect sull'accanimento and care that uses the power of capitalism in the systematic destruction of the stories of liberation that threaten to concerned the liability of subordinates. What else are the systematic campaign of cultural page of the Corriere della sera "against the resistance or "Republic" against Cuba if the effort to convince people that nothing other than the power of its horror was never possible (and, therefore, impossible even to imagine today)? Although much of the management of neo-brescianesca Gramsci (Gramsci liberal Trotskyite Gramsci, Gramsci Social Democrat betrayed by Gramsci Togliatti, etc..) Speaks of this need the power to make impossible any alternative.
This is the age-old cultural struggle (and politics) between the classes: on one side of the subordinates always try in every way (including dreams and religion) to assert that another world is possible in spite of everything, the other side of the power instead insists that there is nothing to be done, that another world is absolutely impossible, "so, my lady, once in power are all equal." From this point of view the outcome of the experience of the PRC (symbolized by the reactions of Bertinotti students who had complained that the "Wisdom") is a great victory of culture, namely politics, the Italian capitalist power, and is a formidable factor disillusionment and resignation of subordinates (which turns into political passivity).
5. Here the thought of Gramsci helps us. Gramsci in the subject (the subject of history, and revolution) is not given, it must continually build, then self-build.
A closer look here is derived from an irrepressible democratic body found in Gramsci: the need to build the revolutionary subject (build, not only direct) through a real process historically determined, and that political conflict, which has also to its internal contradictions (between leaders and masses, between party and movement, between "conscious direction" and "spontaneity" etc...) And the theoretical foundation of the Communist democracy is the unprecedented response that Gramsci provides the most unheard-of questions that a Communist leader has ever placed a request with the limits of absurdity in the Leninist conception of the Party and who instead Gramsci defines "question fundamental theoretical ":" It presents a fundamental theoretical question (...) the modern theory [Marxism, ed] can be in opposition to the movements 'spontaneous' of the masses? "(Q 3, pp. 330-331). The answer is given that Gramsci (and no other communist after him will be given) is as resolute as serious consequences for the fundamental theory of the Party and to the very idea of \u200b\u200brevolution: "It can not be in opposition: among them there ' is a difference between 'quantitative', in degree, not quality, should always be a 'reduction', so to speak, between them, a transition from one to another and vice versa "(ibid.).
6. "We are Indians, but not only ..." say the Zapatistas. Subordinates Gramsci, the workers in the years that he has heard of the 'New Order', the popular paintings with which he sought to build his party, even the southern offenders who met in prison were never a tabula rasa, have never mere passivity and lack of subjectivity, are never just the "keystone" of the story: always something else. This is why: "The starting point must always be common sense, which naturally is the philosophy of the multitudes that they are making a consistent philosophy." (Q 11, pp. 1397-1398). There is in fact "the People's creative spirit, "which Gramsci says is the real basis of his research, the common origin of the four themes strange that he gives in his letter to Tania on March 19, 1929, announcing for the first time the notebooks. To this: "Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should (...) to be invaluable for the historian integral" (Q 25, pp.2283-2284).