Gramsci Study Circle

Welcome to the third study circle on Antonio Gramsci and the prison notebooks. Everyone is welcome to join, also new participants.

The idea is inspired by Sweden’s «folkbildning» and other initiatives (such as reading circles in factories in Italy).

Each meeting is around 2 hours long and is divided into a reading session, where everyone reads some textual material individually, and a subsequent discussion that is done collectively, where the discussion is intended to start around the shared material and take a form of his own based on the participants.

The specific direction of each meeting is still to be completely decided as the participant themselves are expected to give form to it in a way that allows them enjoy the activity while learning something and practicing the discussion of political ideas.

There have previously been two meetings.

The first was to introduct the initiative to a random sample of people.

We read «Observations on Certain Aspects of the Structure of Political Parties in Periods of Organic Crisis», from Gramsci’s prison notebooks, and tried to discuss and understand it.

The material can be difficult to approach and requires a lot of context and knowledge about the period, as such the discussion was of the more general kind about trying to picture things together collectively   (for example one of the participants felt that the concept in the note that we were reading could be related to an understanding of the situation in the USA).

One particular discussion point was that of the idea of «ruling class»; which was different between participants and produced a relatively varied amount of discussion.

The second meeting was related to expanding on this last discussion point.

The material then was comprised of the note from the previous meeting, Weber’s «Class, Status, Party», two extracts from Marx-Engels «A Critique of the German Ideology» («Individuals, Class and Community» and «Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas») and a translation that I made of the entry for «ruling class» in the the «Gramsci Dictionary» (A text written by various Italian’s reasearcher of Gramsci that gives context to important terms and their usage in Gramsci’s work).

The discussion has been very general and mostly grounded in the direct experience of the participant. While initially it was related to the material it generally moved in very many directions as the participant discovered each other point of view of some of the topics that came to mind form the material and the discussion.

For the third meeting we will move away from directly reading Gramsci to a more general reading + discussion circle, as this seemed to be the natural course that discussion took in the past two sessions.

For this meeting everyone is free to bring a discussion topic and some material (20-30 min of expected reading).

The specific of what material will be used depends on who will join and what material is brought.

For example one specific topic and associated material could be chosen or all the material could be divided randomly between the participants and so on.

Various topics were briefly touched upon in the last session and most probably some of the participants will provide material related to that.

For example one of the participant might provide material about some of the current political landscape of Latin America as they understand it as this was brought up in the last meeting.

Similarly, there was a discussion about the State and its composition and role and as such it could be interesting to read parts of Kropotkin’s «The State: It’s Historic Role».

Everyone is generally welcome to join and bring their own point of view.