>Praxis is practice with a Ph.D.
That will go into my book of cyber-aphorisms.
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith wrote in their "Introduction" to _Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci_ (NY: International Publishers, 1971):
***** The term "philosophy of praxis," best known today in connection with Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, in which it is used partly for its own sake and partly as a euphemism to deceive the censor, was introduced into Italy by Antonio Labriola, the only Italian theoretical Marxist of any consequence before the first world war. Labriola, who died in 1994, was a philosopher and historian who had come round to Marxism and to participation in the socialist movement fairly late in life, bringing with him distinct traces of a Hegelian intellectual formation. He saw the essence of Marxism in the unique nexus it established between theoretical and practical activity, and maintained the unity of philosophy and history; he distinguished himself from the Hegelian school mainly by his insistence on the primacy of concrete relations over consciousness. Labriola's ideas, particularly on the interpretation of history, were extremely influential, but mainly in intellectual circles and often in a distorted form which accentuated their latent idealism at the expense of their materialist base. The phrase "philosophy of praxis" in particular entered into the parlance of a specifically anti-materialist tendency of which the major exponents were Rodolfo Mondolfo and, in a marginal way, Giovanni Gentile.
Gentile's role in the development of Italian Marxism was limited to one thing: his translation, the first into Italian, of Marx's _Theses on Feuerbach_, which he interpreted idealistically as referring to the process of cognition rather than to the real world and man's relation to it. Gentile's flirtation with Marxism was brief and superficial. His theory of praxis soon degenerated into a philosophy of the "pure act", of voluntarist and proto-fascist inspiration. He later became a major ideologue of fascism and was executed by the partisans during the resistance.
Mondolfo was a far more serious figure, and after Labriola's death the leading philosopher of Italian socialism. His main contribution to Marxism lay in his attempt to drive a wedge between the "philosophical" Marx and the more empirical Engels. Mondolfo and his school were also responsible to a large extent for the idealistic interpretation of Labriola. The use, common to Labriola, Mondolfo and Gramsci of the same phrase "philosophy of praxis" has led some commentators to posit a common idealist matrix for the three thinkers. This is a view that must be treated with caution. In one feature Gramsci's mature thought is in accord with Mondolfo's ideas and that is in its constant underplaying of the materialist element in Marx's work, which, in Gramsci at least, is replaced with a stress on "immanentism" and the elimination of metaphysics. On the whole, however, Gramsci shows himself critical of Mondolfo and concerned to reassert the substantial Marxism of Labriola against both those Marxists who had criticized him for idealism and the idealists who had tried to claim him for their own. (xxi-xxii) *****
What happened to Labriola also has happened to Gramsci: the accentuation of idealist elements, at the expense of materialist frameworks, by intellectuals who have taken up his writings. Sebastiano Timpanaro argues in "Praxis and Materialism," _On Materialism_ (London: NLB, 1975):
***** I know very well that the word 'praxis' exerts a strong power of suggestion today, due in part to its very vagueness and multiplicity of meanings. In it can be found echoes of the _Theses on Feuerbach_, American pragmatism, Gramscism, and even of the philosophical consequences which some people have believed could be drawn from Heisenberg's principle. More particularly, the appeal to praxis often represents, within the Marxist camp, a way of not talking about or of talking very little about materialism. Those very people who today are busy burying Gramsci take over from Gramsci precisely that characteristic most closely linked to the cultural contingencies of the milieu in which he lived: his attenuation of materialism, which found expression, among other things, in his definition of Marxism as the philosophy of praxis' (a definition which, as is generally recognized now, was not due only to the prison censor, and which moreover antedated Gramsci himself).
Thus, it is necessary first of all to show that a reference to praxis can have quite different meanings, according to whether one is declaring the inability of pure thought to make man happy and free ("The philosophers have only _interpreted_ the world differently, the point is, to _change_ it'), or declaring that knowledge itself is praxis _tout court_. In the latter case, since _to know reality is already to transform it_, one retrogresses from Marxism to idealism -- i.e., to a philosophy of _thought as praxis_, which makes action seem superfluous. In the first case, however, although one may not have abandoned the idea of enlarging the dimensions of knowledge's 'active side', and although one may not make any absolute distinction between knowing and doing, it is acknowledged that...[t]rue liberation can be attained only through the practical transformation of reality....An unmediated identification of knowing with acting is not Marxism; in its most coherent form, it is Gentile-ism, i.e. a philosophy equally open to an irrational activism and to a mysticism of pure thought (56-7) *****
I basically agree with Timpanaro here. As for Gramsci, however, I would like to add that his emphasis on "praxis" -- which is to say politics, especially, the political Marxism of Lenin -- came from his realization that Italian Marxists missed the chance to organize on the national scale and move to the next level the militant strikes of Italian workers during the immediate post-WWI period: Italian workers in major industrial cities such as Turin were spontaneously militant, but their spontaneous militancy remained local and fragmented, without coordinated support from workers and peasants of other parts of Italy, especially those in the South. As Hoare and Smith note in "Introduction" to _Prison Notebooks_: "It was only after the defeat of the factory occupation in September, i.e. after the effective end of the period of postwar revolutionary upsurge, that the [Communist] Party was in fact formed" (xl). Also, even after the Party was formed, it lacked the correct analysis of fascism, trapped between the abstentionism of Bordiga (who refused to see any distinction between fascism and general capitalist counter-offensive) and the liquidationism of Tasca (who argued for the united front with the Socialist Party to the extent of making "passive revolution/war of positions" into a political program and of abandoning a revolutionary perspective). Gramsci came to form his own distinctive political perspective, rejecting both (perhaps too late in his life -- he couldn't elaborate his position clearly until he ended up in prison).
After the end of WWII, the Italian Communist Party eventually came to turn "passive revolution/war of positions" into a permanent program; in the process, Gramsci's thought was turned against itself, his *analysis* of "passive revolution/war of positions" misappropriated as his *advocacy* for it.
Yoshie