ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Gramsci, Sraffa and historical causality
Author: Ginzburg Andrea
In a recent essay (Ginzburg, 2014), the author argued that the cross reading of unpublished Sraffa papers with the writings of Antonio Gramsci can help us to understand the meaning and importance of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. The key concept employed there was the concept of ‘translatability of scientific languages’. From this concept, Boothman has argued, stems the ‘open’ character of Gramsci’s Marxism. The theme of the translatability of languages is also present in Sraffa: in a Note written after the important theoretical turning point of the summer of 1927, he stated his intention to write a book that will consist in the translation of Marx into English, that is, in the translation of the 'metaphysics' of Hegel into that of Hume. It was argued that the interpretation of Marx accepted by Gramsci – the philosophy of praxis– and its project of unification of philosophy, economics and politics can help us to understand the meaning and implications of the distinction, highlighted by Garegnani, between 'internal' and 'external' relations with respect to the 'core'. Developing this line of interpretation, this contribution intends to focus on two aspects. The first concerns the placement of Gramsci’s and Sraffa’s heterodoxy with respect not only to mainstream economics but also to the interpretation of Marx provided by members of the Second International Marxists (dialectical Marxism and evolutionary Marxism à la Spencer). It will be argued that this heterodoxy must be located within the more general reaction, started at the end of nineteenth century, to the mechanistic reductionism, factual and methodological, derived from classical mechanics, i.e. the tendency to explain all phenomena only through concepts and laws concerning the individual parts that compose them, assumed to be homogeneous and existing before and independently of the whole of which they are part. On the epistemological level, such reductionism attributed the methodological primacy to classical physics: a hierarchical ordering of scientific disciplines was built on the basis of the possibility of axiomatization and forecasting. It was completely removed from the analysis the possibility that heterogeneous parts could acquire, through mutual interactions, new properties by virtue of being parts of a particular whole, and this in turn could impart to the whole new properties, which may be reflected in changes in the parts and in their relations with the whole, and so on. In the cultural battle against reductionism, modern systems and complexity theories, with their emphasis on the existence of non-linear interactions that can lead to new structures and behaviours, have inherited some of the tasks that Labriola and Gramsci attributed to dialectics in the interpretation of historical phenomena. The second aspect concerns the implications of this approach with respect to a critique of (technological, institutional, social, etc.) determinism. In addition, the return to the classical political economy perspective calls into question the disciplinary boundaries established in the period of mechanicism’s egemony: a coherent anti-reductivist position suggests the adoption of a trans-disciplinary approach in social analysis.
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