Branko Milanovic — “We had everything before us, we had nothing before us”.

by
Mike Norman
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Are we in another Gramsci interregnum?

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 3

A quick search on the Internet shows that, in the past few years, a spike occurred in the frequency of references to Gramsci’s famous quote about “morbid symptoms”: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

I myself have contributed to this spike by borrowing the phrase “morbid symptoms” for the title of my 2016 book on the counterrevolutionary phase that followed the Arab Spring, and by quoting the whole sentence as epigraph to the book.

The obvious reason for this spike in uses of the quote is that it provides a clue to the emergence on the global scale, in recent years, of various phenomena that are unmistakably “morbid” from a progressive perspective: from the sad fate of the Arab Spring to the so-called Islamic State, to the reinvigoration of the European far right, to Donald Trump, and so on and so forth. However, before dwelling on the relevance of the above sentence to our present condition, it is appropriate to start by making sure that we correctly understand what Gramsci meant when he wrote it. For this, we need to reinsert the quotation in the text from which it was lifted and replace this text in its own historical context in order to grasp Gramsci’s intention, which may be different from what we instinctively attribute to him in retrospect....