[1]

Volontarismo e masse sociali. In a whole series of questions, whether of the reconstruction of past history or of the historical-political analysis of the present, no account is taken of this element: that it is necessary to distinguish and to assess differently the undertakings and the organizations of volunteers from the undertakings and the organizations of homogeneous social blocs (it is evident that by volunteers one should not mean the élite when it is the organic expression of the social mass, but the volunteer detached from the mass by an arbitrary individual impulse and often in opposition to the mass or indifferent to it). This element is especially important for Italy: 1) because of the traditional apoliticism and passivity of the great popular masses, which have as their natural reaction a relative readiness for the «recruitment of volunteers»; 2) because of the Italian social constitution, one of whose elements is the unhealthy quantity of rural or rural-type bourgeois, middling and small, from whom many restless intellectuals are formed and hence easy «volunteers» for every initiative, even the most bizarre, provided it be vaguely subversive (on the right or on the left); 3) the mass of rural wage-earners and of lumpenproletariat, which is picturesquely called in Italy the class of «those dying of hunger». In the analysis of the Italian political parties one can see that they have always been parties of «volunteers», in a certain sense of the displaced, and never or almost never of homogeneous social blocs. An exception was the historic Cavourian Right, and hence its organic and permanent superiority over the so-called Mazzinian and Garibaldian Partito d’Azione, which was the prototype of all the later Italian «mass» parties, which were not in fact such (that is, they did not marshal homogeneous social groups) but were gypsy-like and nomadic encampments of politics. One can find only a single analysis of this kind (though imprecise and gelatinous, from a merely «statistical-sociological» point of view) in Roberto Michels’s volume on Borghesia e proletariato. The position of Gottlieb [Amadeo Bordiga] was precisely similar to that of the Partito d’Azione, that is, gypsy-like and nomadic: its trade-union interest was very superficial and of polemical origin, not systematic, not organic and consistent, not a search for social homogeneity, but paternalistic and formalistic (Q 1623-1624).

The passage quoted above is drawn from the Quaderni del carcere of Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1977: 1623-1624) [2], Quaderno 13 (1932-1933), § 29. The passage is a second draft of what was written in Quaderno 9, § 142 (1932, Q 1202-1203). Gramsci uses the metaphor «gypsy-like and nomadic encampments of politics» to criticize the fragmentary, fluctuating and non-homogeneous positions of the traditional parties, within the framework of a critical analysis of voluntarism contained in his Noterelle sul Machiavelli, with references to the Italian Risorgimento. The importance of the organization of the political movement is underlined, and a radical critique of voluntarism is expressed. This is a considered rewriting. We do not have space here to examine the differences between the various versions of the text cited above, but we note how, in Quaderno 3, § 46 (1930), Gramsci had already used the gypsy metaphor, speaking of «gypsy bands and political nomadism» in this key:

The concepts of revolutionary and of internationalist, in the modern sense of the word, are correlative to the precise concept of State and of class: a poor understanding of the State means a poor class consciousness (an understanding of the State exists not only when one defends it, but also when one attacks it in order to overthrow it), hence a poor efficiency of the parties, etc. Gypsy bands, political nomadism are not dangerous facts, and thus Italian subversivism and internationalism were not dangerous (Q 326).[3]

The passage quoted from the Quaderni is among the most relevant in the overall assessment of Gramsci’s use of the gypsy metaphor. The noun «gypsy», and the adjective «gypsy-like», appear sporadically in the different periods of the complex Gramscian prose [4], and take on a different meaning according to the contexts. It emerges that Gramsci at times takes up the gypsy metaphor for the popularity of its ancient figural connection with nomadism, and in order to connote, while rejecting them, sociopolitical propositions far removed from a necessary and rigorous organizational discipline. Also to be assessed in this framework is the critique of the French artistic, literary and political movement of the bohème, which in Gramsci, analogously to his deconstruction of Neapolitan «lazzaronismo», takes on more articulated and less generalizing accents than the Marxian-Engelsian concept of lumpenproletariat [5]. In this reading, Gramsci’s metaphor implies a pioneering distancing from a «nomadic thought» (Deleuze-Guattari 1980) [6], still to come, but already present then in the «voluntaristic» forms of anarchist political insurgency, taken up rhetorically also by early fascism (Gentile 2012). Among the various places in which the nomad metaphor appears in the pre-prison writings, we intend to choose here a “service communication” of September 1926 (a little less than two months before he was unlawfully arrested by the fascist police), sent to the clandestine Milanese editorial office of the daily he had founded two years earlier, “l’Unità”, in which, accompanying the dispatch of an errata corrige, he expresses a harsh reproach for the grave misprints in the publication of an article he had dictated by telephone from Rome;
Let us dwell, as a brief example of contextualization, on the metaphor «gypsies of politics» used by Gramsci on 18 September 1926 in the “service communication”, much aggrieved and marked by a tone of harsh reproach toward the Milanese editorial office of “l’Unità”, guilty of publishing an article of his on the front page unrevised and with too many grave misprints:

This is not revolutionary journalism: it is irresponsibility, adventurism worthy of gypsies of politics (Gramsci 1992: 448; cf. Detti 1975).

Examining the phrase in question in a recent essay of his on Gramsci’s use of language in the pre-prison letters, the scholar of Italian linguistics Luigi Matt observed:

The last example brings out the distance that separates Gramsci’s times from our own days, with regard to certain linguistic usages: it would be unthinkable today, for a politician of the left, to use the term zingari with a negative value, in violation of the norms of the “politically correct” (Matt 2008: 809).

Sharing Matt’s observation, one may perhaps add that this distance between past and present in the usages of language was often bridged, crossed, overcome by Gramsci himself: his capacity for linguistic experimentation is well known (d’Orsi 2006; Durante – Voza 2006), and on more than one occasion it steps out of its own time and lives in the contemporary, with the same power with which his writing managed to pass beyond the walls of the cell at Turi (Selenu 2008). We are speaking, in fact, of a most lucid experimenter with words, an academically “failed” “glottologist”, but for that very reason all the more attentive to the political-pragmatic function of utterances, to doing things with words as well, producing, in the public space of his own day, a «proliferation of estranging metaphors of strong critical impact» (Paladini Musitelli 2006: 140; Carlucci 2013: 72-78). In order to situate the Gramscian metaphor, then, one must explore more fully the historical context contemporary with Gramsci, so as to identify elements that favor an analysis of that expression more attentive to its contextualization in the communicative field of the time. It was the historian Tommaso Detti who reconstructed, in definitively documented fashion, the controversy set off by Gramsci’s letter, placing it alongside the theme addressed in his article (Detti 1975). With Detti’s study one understands well that Gramsci’s aim in his article for “l’Unità” was to advance and spread the elements of an analysis of the foreign policy of fascism, which also influenced the press organic to the dictatorship, in particular when it came to reporting news concerning the Soviet Union. This close thematic connection between Gramsci’s 1926 letter containing the metaphor «gypsies of politics» and fascism appears relevant, for a reason that cannot escape an anthropological-historical gaze: six years earlier, in 1920, the same expression «gypsies of Italian politics» had been used, as a prejudicially positive and idealized rhetorical figure, by an impassioned former socialist: Benito Mussolini. As is well known, Mussolini had been director of “Avanti!” from 1912, for two years. Expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for having abruptly changed his position in favor of Italian intervention in the First World War, he had founded in 1914, in the city of Milan, first a personal daily of his own: “Il Popolo d’Italia”, and then, five years later, on 23 March 1919, the movement of the “fasci italiani di combattimento”. Contemporary with Gramsci and older than him by eight years, on 5 September 1920 the thirty-seven-year-old Mussolini was delivering a speech at Cremona, at the “Verdi” theater, at an important gathering of the fasci italiani di combattimento a year and a half after their founding. His address concluded the series opened with the speeches of Roberto Farinacci and other comrades. Thus in that address Mussolini rhetorically represented the identity of the fascist movement:

Our program? We are a minority and we do not care to be many. To brute quantity we prefer excellent quantity. A million sheep – let our adversaries, who understand such things, remember it – will always be scattered by the roar of a lion. (Applause). We do not compete with them in the sale of stamps and membership cards. We are a combat formation and we are also the gypsies of Italian politics. Gypsies, because we have a long road to travel, and, though we have a goal, it is not dogmatic; gypsies, because in our encampment there is room for all faiths, because we have a common fund of love for the nation. (Mussolini 1954: 153).

To summarize: in the early 1920s, a year after the founding of the fasci and two years before the seizure of power in Italy, fascism was adopting a «gypsy-like» rhetoric in order to assert itself in a decidedly incisive manner on the communicative plane and to give value, in the national and international public space, to a characteristic of its own that was “fluctuating” and “nomadic”, the characteristic of a movement and not of a party. Gramsci’s letter containing the metaphor «gypsies of politics» dates from 18 September 1926. A month and a half later, on 8 November 1926, Gramsci’s arrest takes place, carried out by the fascist police in defiance of his parliamentary immunity, as leader of the communist camp and the only parliamentary opposition group-leader still holding out in the post-Aventine Italian parliament, by then fascistized, totalitarianized and terrorized after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, the year of the founding of the clandestine daily “l’Unità”. Even stopping here with the reconstruction of the context, within such a framework it is difficult to imagine that Gramsci was not exposed to the “positive” use that the fascists were making of the “gypsy” stereotype through the mouth of Mussolini. If this conjecture is not unfounded, then we are faced with a parler tsigane that, beyond the effect of re-proposing an ancient and long-lasting stereotype, finds effectiveness on the public communicative plane and in the construction of the common sense of a very complex political moment in the history of Italy, certainly open to a more rigorous anthropological-historical inquiry. Subjecting the historical context to such an attempt at a situated reading, it is conceivable that in Gramsci’s use of the metaphor «gypsies of politics» there could figure the allusion to the forms of the political identity flaunted, at least in its early phase, in the public rhetoric of the fascist adversaries [7]. In sum, around the Gramscian rejection or the Mussolinian idealization of the gypsy metaphor there were played out, so to speak, two opposed perspectives: the first, revolutionary, democratic and communist; the second, terroristic and totalitarian, that is, fascist.
The object of very numerous and well-established multidisciplinary exegeses, both historical and contemporaneist, in the case of the ziganological metaphor as well, Gramsci offers himself to a reading that imposes a critical methodology of contextualization between past and present. By reason of the various chrono-logical and chrono-topical slippages, a warning to the reader is necessary: one should not consider the sequence of Gramscian references as a dismemberment of isolated phrases withdrawn from the «search for the leit-motiv, for the rhythm of thought, more important than the single detached quotations» (Q 419) [8], but rather as a renewed occasion for approaching or returning to the direct reading of the Gramscian work, fragmentary and for that very reason dialogical (Gerratana 1997: XIV-XV), for the purposes of an immediate and broader contextualization of its lexicon (Frosini-Liguori 2004; Liguori-Voza 2009). It remains evident that the ziganological metaphors, examined briefly here, take on a powerful political intentionality, both negative and positive. Once again it happens, in European history, that gypsies reveal themselves «good to think with symbolically» for non-gypsies (Piasere 1999, 2006, 2016; Trumpener 1992). In Gramsci’s use of the «gypsy-like» metaphors there emerges the stereotypical nexus with «political nomadism» [9]: an expression to be examined in the historical environment of the time, but also in the one contemporary to us, which today sees the recovery of the category, both in the negative sense of “political transhumance”, produced by the institutional and bureaucratic-administrative reformism, European and extra-European, aimed at legislatively countering the national transformisms (Poirer-Kyelem 2012; Ikechukwu 2015), and as an overturning of the stereotype in a nomadological and rhizomatic philosophical-political perspective (Deleuze – Guattari 1980), inspired by a specific strand of anthropological literature (Ciavolella 2015). In this present-day light, one could say, albeit anachronistically, that in his critique of capitalism Gramsci intended to reject clearly, even then, the value-laden adoption of the «political potential of nomadism», held capable of producing the «neo-barbaric» subversion of the «empire» (Hardt – Negri 2000: 448, 214). To be considered, therefore, is the Gramscian rejection of that «political fascination of the gypsy» (Todesco 2004: 117) understood as a positive prejudice (Piasere 2015), inherent in the figurations that exalt «nomadism» in the current “alter-political” thought, of anarchist ancestry (Lenco 2012).

Bibliographical references

Carlucci, Alessandro, 2013, Gramsci and Languages. Unification, Diversity, Hegemony, Brill, Leiden-Boston.

Cavalluzzi, Raffaele, 2009, entry trasformismo, in Liguori – Voza, eds., 2009: 860-862

Ciavolella, Riccardo, 2015, Alterpolitics or alterotopies. A critique of nomadology with reference to West African Fulbe, “Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology”, 72(23), pp. 23-36.

Deleuze, Gilles – Guattari, Félix, 1980, Mille plateaux, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Detti, Tommaso, 1975, Gramsci e la politica estera del fascismo. Una polemica del 1926 con “l’Unità”, “Studi Storici”, 1, pp. 155-181.

de Vaux de Foletier, François, 1981, Les Bohémiens en France au 19° siècle, Lattes, Paris.

d’Orsi, Angelo, 2006, Una strategia per la verità. Appunti sul «giornalismo» del Gramsci torinese, in Durante – Voza, (eds.) 2006: 207-248.

Durante, Lea – Voza, Pasquale (eds.), 2006, La prosa del comunismo critico. Labriola e Gramsci, Palomar, Bari, 2006.

Frosini, Fabio – Liguori (eds.), 2004, Le parole di Gramsci. Per un lessico dei Quaderni del carcere, Carocci, Roma.

Gentile, Emilio, 2012, E fu subito regime. Il fascismo e la marcia su Roma, Laterza, Roma-Bari.

Gerratana, Valentino, 1997, Gramsci. Problemi di metodo, Editori Riuniti, Roma.

Gramsci, Antonio, 1975, Quaderni del carcere, critical edition edited by Valentino Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino.

Gramsci, Antonio, 1992, Lettere 1908-1926, edited by Antonio A. Santucci, Einaudi, Torino.

Hardt, Michael – Negri, Antonio, 2000, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts – London, England [Italian edition: Impero: il nuovo ordine della globalizzazione, translated and edited by Alessandro Pandolfi, translation of the notes and bibliographical research by Daniele Didero, Rizzoli, Milano, 2002].

Ikechukwu, Udeuhele Godwin, 2015, Political Nomadism and Its Implications on Political Development in Nigeria: A Critical Analysis, “International Journal of African and Asian Studies”, 9, pp. 75-86

Lenco, Peter, 2012, Deleuze and World Politics: Alter-Globalizations and Nomad Science, Routledge, New York.

Liguori, Guido – Voza, Pasquale (eds.), 2009, Dizionario gramsciano. 1926-1937, Carocci, Roma.

Matt, Luigi, 2008, Aspetti linguistici delle lettere pre-carcerarie, in Gramsci nel suo tempo, edited by Francesco Giasi, Carocci, Roma, pp. 793-811.

Mussolini, Benito, 1954, Opera Omnia, vol. 15, edited by Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, La Fenice, Firenze.

Paggi, Leonardo, 1970, Antonio Gramsci e il moderno principe, Editori Riuniti, Roma.

Paladini Musitelli, Marina, 2006, Stile e pensiero nella prosa giornalistica di Gramsci, in Durante – Voza, (eds.), 2006: 131-152.

Piasere, Leonardo, 1999, Un mondo di mondi. Antropologia delle culture rom, L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, Napoli.

Piasere, Leonardo, 2006, Buoni da ridere, gli zingari. Saggi di antropologia storico-letteraria, Cisu, Roma.

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Notes

[1] The present contribution constitutes the abridged version of a broader work now in press. Though solely responsible for it, I thank Leonardo Piasere, for having invited me to write on this subject and provided me with some valuable indications, and Guido Liguori, for having read the text and commented on it with useful advice.

[2] From now on, the letter Q in italics followed by the page number refers to this edition of the Quaderni del carcere.

[3] In § 18 of Quaderno 14 (1932-1935), entitled Machiavelli. Volontarismo e garibaldinismo, Gramsci, within the framework of a critique of voluntarism, develops a reflection on the Risorgimento, speaking of a «gypsy-like dominion» of the social blocs involved as vanguard. It is interesting that in this case a connection appears with «The Parisian bohème of romanticism» (Q 1675-1676). In the previous Quaderno, the 17th (1931-1935), in § 28 (entitled Risorgimento italiano), Gramsci had used the metaphor of «fluctuating and uncertain gypsy bands» with regard to the indeterminate forms of Risorgimento political action (Q 1932).

[4] We do not examine here the occurrences of the metaphor in the pre-prison writings and in the Lettere dal carcere. On the political complexity of Gramsci’s vivid metaphors, cf. Durante – Voza 2006.

[5] Gramsci’s references to the bohème in the Quaderni and in the earlier Gramscian writings are pertinent also because the term bohémiens for centuries designated gypsies in France (de Vaux de Foletier 1981). The «legend» of Neapolitan “lazzaronismo” is evoked and criticized by Gramsci in Q 47, 70, 2022, 2122, in one case also indicated as «myth» (Q 927). For a rereading of the Marxian notion of lumpenproletariat, in the sense of «ragged proletarians», as Palmiro Togliatti already rendered the German term (Togliatti 1973: 517), cf. among others Stallybrass 1990; Thoburn 2002; Piasere 2016. On the question of marginalities and differences in Gramsci, cf. Selenu 2008; Smith 2010.

[6] The chapter Traité de nomadologie: la machine de guerre (Deleuze – Guattari 1980: 434) opens with the drawing of an ancient “nomad cart”: «Char nomade entièrement de bois, Altaï, V^e-IV^e siècles av J.C.».

[7] As Leonardo Paggi underlined in 1970, in Gramscian prose it often happens that he «polemically takes on the language of his own adversaries, charging it with allusive meanings that can be specified only by keeping in mind the general fabric of the thought» (Paggi 1970: XIII-XIV).

[8] Here Gramsci gives indications for approaching the study of the texts of Marx and Engels. Various authors have seen in these indications elements of method to be adapted to the exegesis of Gramsci’s own writings (cf. Frosini – Liguori, 2004).

[9] A further deepening could be carried out by taking into account the “nexus” that the concept of «political nomadism» has with the complex notion of «transformism» explored several times in Gramsci’s analyses (cf. Cavalluzzi 2009).

Giovanni Pizza teaches Medical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Perugia, where he directs the School of Specialization in Demo-ethno-anthropological Heritage (Castiglione del Lago).