Some Notes on the Notes of Regis Debray on the Notes of Antonio Gramsci

For readers who are unfamiliar with the life and work of Regis Debray, he was a prodigious student of Louis Althusser at the École normale supérieure in Paris in the late 1950s who went on to teach philosophy at the Universidad de Havana in the mid-1960s, where, in close association with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, he became a prominent theorist of and participant in Latin American revolutionary movements.

In 1967, he published Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, which outlined a theory of guerrilla warfare specifically tailored to the social and historical realities of Latin America. The asymmetry between local elites, on one hand, and the peasant masses of the region, on the other, was exacerbated by the fact that the former had the economic and indeed military support of the empire to the north, with whose interests they were unequivocally aligned. Given this asymmetry, and given the degree of counterviolence of local oligarchies and the repressiveness of the State apparatuses in their control, political vanguards, in themselves, were insufficient. Strategically speaking, what was needed to defend the population from the twin evils of imperialism and its local collaborators, instead, were concentrated groups of guerrilla fighters, or focos, dispersed throughout the countryside. In one of many programmatic statements that justify reading Debray’s book as a manifesto of foquismo, the author asserts that “revolutionary politics must be diverted from politics as such” and take a backseat to the exigencies of armed struggle. The political organizations capable of leading the people of Latin America to socialism in the long run must emerge from effective responses to the social-historical predicament of Latin America, necessarily anterior, necessarily military, according to Debray.

Artwork for the Tricontinental Magazine, the official publication of Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL)

In 1967, Debray set down his pen and went from Cuba to Bolivia to fight alongside Che Guevara. He was instructed by the guerrilla leader, however, that his contributions to the revolution lie elsewhere, namely the type of political struggles that Debray had disparaged in Revolution in the Revolution.

Before having a chance to leave Bolivia, Debray was captured, in 1967, and charged to thirty years in prison for his collaborations with Guevara’s military foco. After an international campaign for his release, in which high level intellectual and politicians throughout Latin America and Europe intervened on his behalf, Debray was released in 1970.

The next stop on his Latin American itinerary was Chile, where he wrote and published until Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet with help from the US on the September 11, 1973.

It was during his time in Chile that his Prison Writings (1972) were published. The work is divided into three parts, titled Political Writings, Theoretical Writings, and Literary Writings, respectively. There is one text, however, that does not fit in well with this scheme. It is a short compilation of notations on Antonio Gramsci, fragmentary and inconclusive. It was included as a coda to the Theoretical Writing section but is hard to reconcile both thematically and structurally the rest of the section. It is so short, in fact, that, as a separate chapter, it constitutes less than 3% of the total text of a section composed of only two chapters. Yet there is another reason, more substantial, why the text is anomalous, conspicuous even. Allow me to explain.

Regis Debray, to be sure, is a long-winded fellow. Definitely not one to mince words, he does not hold back when he takes to the page. His prose races from one line to the next at breakneck pace, pulling the reader along for the ride. You would have to tie his hands, it seems, to keep him from writing, as an equally prolific writer, Terry Eagleton, once said about himself.

So, why all of a sudden did Debray decide to bite his lip? In a book with a carefully argued section of political analyses, a carefully constructed section on Marxist theory, and a carefully crafted literary section, why include, in the first place, a piece with unfinished sentences, unconventional orthography, observations that don’t congeal into an argument, and lines of inquiry that are spuriously opened and then fizzle out unresolved? Debray is far too talented and skillful of a writer for any of this to be a coincidence.

If we suspend the semantic dimension of the text for a moment and consider it pragmatically, we might ask what Debray is doing with his notations on Gramsci? What is his use of Gramsci?  From this point of view, the inclusion of the text in the edition becomes readily intelligible.

The “notes” in the title of Debray’s text is an intertextual reference to Gramsci’s prison notebooks. One political prisoner, a writer and activist, writing in a fragmentary style, writes about another political prisoner, also a writer and activist, adopting that same style. Loosely sketched, this is the pragmatic structure of Debray’s gesture. It is, at bottom, an inscription, an attempt to establish continuity and construct legitimacy.

If this sounds like a reproach, it isn’t. Regis Debray’s inscription is a part of a revindication, within his generation, of the figure of Gramsci. At the time, the name was starting to mean something. An image was coming into focus. A set of associations and significations was starting to crystallize around the life and work of Gramsci. This was especially the case for Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. And this was especially the case for Regis Debray, who found in Gramsci a model of the committed intellectual, capable of integrating theory and practice, hostile to academia, committed to popular struggles, willing to stand up to fascism and, when necessary, pay the price of doing so. This reading of Gramsci is reflected in the content of the notations themselves, where Debray places special emphasis on the unity of theory and practice.

What is more surprising perhaps, from our specific context of reception, is that Debray upbraids Gramsci for his hopefulness in the wake the Russian Revolution. This is surprising for several reasons, not least because it is the same thing that our generation would tend to upbraid Debray for, that is, his hopefulness over the Cuban Revolution and the possibility, almost lived as a certainty, of generalizing the experiment throughout Latin America. In this sense, he repeated the mistake, albeit unwittingly, that his attributed to his antecessor.

Yet, there is another reason, more substantial, why it is surprising that Debray would characterize Gramsci as a theorist of “historical hope whose texts announce the passage in both theory and practice to a new civilization, a new culture, a new form of life, a set of values radically at ends with those of Western capitalism.” This naive triumphalism, attributed to Gramsci by Debray, is in stark opposition to the dire circumstances in which Gramsci wrote his prison notebooks, which, in themselves, attest to a historical defeat of the Biennio Rosso and the triumph of fascism in Italy.

In his notebooks, in fact, Gramsci turns to face defeat head on. Why had the revolutionary movements of Western Europe failed in the twenties? How are Marxists to respond to the defeat of revolution and the triumph of counterrevolution and, in many places, fascism? What are the most effective strategies for revolutionary change in this new context? These are the questions he returned to time and again in his notebook entries.

It isn’t hard to draw parallels between the European revolutionary movements of the twenties and those of Latin America in the sixties and seventies. Over the past decades, my generation of activists and thinkers has struggled to understand the defeat of revolutionary movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the subsequent triumph of neoliberalism and, more recently, neo-fascisms. We are haunted by the same type of questions that haunted Gramsci throughout his imprisonment, which precisely why he has such an important place in the Marxism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Gramsci’s political and cultural theories open a number of possible avenues for envisaging political agency in times of the triumph of counterrevolution.

Strategically speaking, Debray’s theory of revolution corresponds to Gramsci’s concept of a war of maneuver, which is to say a frontal attack that is capable of directly taking control of the state through revolutionary (counter)violence. This was possible, according to Gramsci, in the East, which is to say Russia, where “the state was everything and civil society was primordial and gelatinous.” In Western Europe, however, “there was a proper balance between the state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” In the context of Western Europe, with its robust civil society (which functions as an extended state), what is needed to achieve revolutionary change is not a war of maneuver but a war of position, which is to say a prolonged struggle within the terrain of civil society with the objective of achieving hegemony, as a necessary precondition for taking control of the apparatuses of the state.

Poster for the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS)

At the time of Debray’s prison writings, revolution, which is to say a war of maneuver, was still very much on the agenda in Latin America. There had been setbacks, it’s true, such as the recent defeat of Guevara’s guerrilla group in Ñancahuazú, Bolivia, but there was still considerable room for hope. The Tupamaros (formally known as the MLN-T or the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Tupamaros) were ramping up their activities in Uruguay, to considerable success. Both the activities of both the PRT-ERP (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores – Ejército Revolutcionario del Pueblo) and the Montoneros were reaching a high point in Argentina. In Chile, the guerrilla group, MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario), was collaborating with the left coalition, Unidad Popular, after the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. These developments seemed to indicate that the wildfire of armed had not been extinguished but was simply spreading from the north of Latin America to the southern cone. This, at least, was Debray’s interpretation: “The center of gravity of revolutionary struggle is shifting from north to south, from the Caribbean region (Guatemala, Venezuela, Santo Domingo, Colombia) to the ‘Southern Cone’ (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay). Geographically and historically, Bolivia served as a nexus between the two eras and the two regions, a thoroughfare of revolutionary influx.”

Throughout this period, through an impressive barrage of publications and public interventions, Debray was theorizing Latin American armed struggle in real time, in the heat of the moment. As a strategist and as a theorist of war of maneuver, he was much closer, in this sense, to Castro than to Gramsci. In a widely publicized speech in the wake of the first Tricontinental Conference in 1966, Castro articulated the rationale behind his program for coordinated continental armed struggle. “It is a mistake to believe,” he asserted, “that conscience comes first and only then the struggle. The armed struggle has to come first, and once the struggle begins, a growing surge of revolutionary conscience will follow.” This, like Debray’s own programmatic statements, is a direct inversion of the terms of Gramsci’s formulation of a prolonged war of position to conquer hearts and minds in an extensive public sphere, understood as a necessary step prior to taking over the state. While Debray, dynamite in hand, is making a run for the seat of power, Gramsci is busily burrowing a complex system of tunnels in the earthworks and fortresses of civil society.

The question arises then. Why invoke Gramsci in the first place? What exactly did Gramsci mean to Debray and his generation? The enigma of the reception of Gramsci in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s is that his ideas, in particular those of his prison notebooks, are used to elucidate the theory and practice of a coordinated continental war of maneuver. This reading would be more consistent, perhaps, with the Leninism of Gramsci’s pre-prison journalism, which, oddly, is cited much less frequently than his notebooks by the mouthpieces of Latin American armed struggle.

This is not the place, of course, to attempt to unravel such a tangled spool of ideas. (If anyone is willing to fund my work, I would be more than happy to have a crack at it.) We can, however, venture a few tentative observations.

The Gramsci of Debray (and many of his comrades) does not align very neatly with our own interpretations. Furthermore, this discrepancy seems to indicate a rift, deeper down, between two radically different political sensibilities, two radically different frameworks of intelligibility, that of the revolutionary generation of the 60s and 70s and that of the subsequent generations. In the middle of these two structures of feeling (to resurrect the long defunct expression of Raymond Williams) stands the dramatic defeat of revolutionary movements, the repressive capitalist dictatorships of the southern cone, and the neoliberal economic policies that they were instrumental in introducing throughout the region. If, on the one hand, Debray was less sensitive to the theme of defeat in the notebooks, less inclined to approach Gramsci as the theorist of failed revolutions, more recent generations, on the other hand, are perhaps overly inclined to fixate on defeat, influenced, as we have been, by the necessities of transitional justice and by the rise (and current decline) of trauma theories. Have we foregrounded defeat so much that we lost sight of the objective on the horizon, that is, achieving hegemony and breaching spaces of power? Have we focused so much on culture that we forgot about the battle for hegemony being waged on its terrain? Have we gotten so lost in the system of tunnels throughout the earthworks that we forgot the reason why we were digging those tunnels in the first place? Have we gotten so used to academic squabbling that we forgot about organization, about agitation, about praxis? Have we suppressed the difficult discussions about how best to respond to counterrevolutionary violence? Have we overlooked Gramsci, the organizer, the strategist, the Leninist?

These are some of the questions that arise when we negotiate the distance between radically different readings of the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. By revisiting Debray, forgotten for so long, precisely on account of the discrepancies in question, unjustly so, we might add, we allow our interpretations to be destabilized in a way that could potentially help us to break out of our current impasses and broach new territory, in theory as well as practice.

The question, then, is not only what Gramsci meant to Debray but also what Gramsci’s Debray means for us and our interpretations of Gramsci. This will inevitably lead us to another set of questions. What does Debray mean to us? Why have recent generations been so silent about him for such a long time? Perhaps it is time to break that silence and address some of these questions, so long unattended.