“Gramsci’s Plan” will be understood as the philosophical effort that Gramsci undertook in prison. This comprises four parts:
- The Reconstruction of Marx’s Philosophy,
- the critique of Soviet philosophy and its precursors,
- the conceptual version of the hegemony of the bourgeois class as well as
- of the emancipation process of the subaltern classes within this hegemony.
The presentation of Gramsci’s thought along these four themes contains at the same time the core of his “philosophy of praxis”, which sees itself as a continuation of Marx’s philosophy in the 20th century and is opposed to the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism – more precisely: Stalinism – in every respect.
The reading of the relevant passages in Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks” revealed that Gramsci himself chose a classical order in the thematic arrangement of his philosophical thoughts. Gramsci took this order from the work of Immanuel Kant; it is formed by four questions. These questions are:
1. What can I know?
2. What should I do?
3. What can I hope for?
4. What is man?
Gramsci’s reflections in prison were ordered by his “plan” and these 4 questions. This creates a thread in the narrative that makes the unmanageably jagged philosophy, emptied of meaningful practice, accessible to lay people.