Gramsci and the Opposition between Materialism and the Philosophy of Praxis

Abstract

Gramsci did not have access to important philosophical texts by the young Marx, such as the Manuscripts of 1844 or The German Ideology. In these writings, as well as in the Introduction of 1843-44 or in The Holy Family, Marx clearly adopts Feuerbach’s materialism and at the same time transcends it by stressing the objective character of human- social practice (praxis) as a constantly transforming activity of the material world it inhabits, which also conditions consciousness. It is thus a materialism of praxis (or practical materialism) that highlights the root of the intellectual alienations denounced by Feuerbach (religion, speculative philosophy) in the material alienations of praxis: private property, the modern state, money. These elements are not merely intellectual problems, but rather material ruptures of the social body, for the solution of which mere critique is not enough, but which
require the translation of this critical theory into revolutionary practice. In this practical materialism there are no
traces of that determinism which will characterise the conception of history proposed by Marx from the German
Ideology onwards and which Gramsci, under the influence of Italian neo-idealism and a subjectivist reading of the
Feuerbach Theses, will readily identify with “materialism”. Praxis will then be conceived by Gramsci as an extension
of conscious subjective activity, leaving no room for any kind of material or objective exteriority.