Francesca Savoia

Gramsci "before prison" not only constitutes the content, but also the form of the Notebooks. On the one hand, if only the “late” Gramsci will provide his own solution to the quintessential philosophical dilemma (dualism) through a radical historicization of philosophy as politics (theory of hegemony), on the other, the Notebooks can be considered an autobiography, de-personalized, brought to the level of conceptual elaboration.
My work investigates the roots of Gramscian Marxism as Philosophy of Praxis, following the strict relations between the development of a methodological horizon and the historical vicissitudes in which Gramsci found himself not only submerged, but also chose to be partisan.
My general intention was to return to the “classics” so that to rescue a method. I tried to substitute an abstract and theorist approach with an historical and political horizon, so that to highlight the extreme originality of Gramsci’s theoretical proposal.
To this end, the thesis examines Gramsci's proposals in relation to the Italian and international labor movement, both considered in the long historical period and at the time when they re-defined their own political identity as part of a larger crisis, that of the liberal State and its complex cultural expressions.
Focusing upon the struggle for socialism and democracy, I read it as a contradiction between the national and the international relation of forces that, being constitutive of the State in its “integral” form, it reveals itself as such at crucial moments in the same history of Marxism, the latter understood as a political and cultural praxis contested, disputed, and in this sense, permanently in crisis.

The process of value accumulation and its specifics urban forms in the centre and the periphery.
The study, articulating Marx, Braudel, and the main contributions of the so-called "critical geography", focuses on the urban as a historical process, evidencing its articulation with the current processes of capital reproduction and from a critical approach to the hypothesis of the “world city”.

The essay focuses upon Gramsci's marxism as "philosophy of praxis", giving an account of the theory of hegemony as an historical-political concept for the interpretation of the relationship between state and capital as political and social forms

The essay explores the dynamics of the transition, in Mexico, from developmentalism to the neoliberalism by considering the relation between transnationalization, the neo-oligarchical character of the state form and the increasing fragmentation and informalization of civil society.

The essay examines the 1857 Introduction to the Foundations for the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse] as the place in which Marx exposes his theoretical method. The authors point out its foundational character for a critical approach to the processes of  counter-reform undergone by the Latin American region since the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The paper develops a conjunctural analysis of Latin America. After considering the international context, it reviews the overall characteristics of the subcontinent's political, social, and economic developments during the year of 2011. In the last section, it focuses on the analysis of Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, and Panama, all considered as representative countries, in so far as they reflect a synthesis of the dominant tendencies in the region.

The paper presents a summary of Latin America social and political conflict during the year 2010. It highlights a shift from the relative consolidation of progressive agendas ato the maintenance of conservative models on behalf of those same governments and it presents a general view of the global context in which a regional tendency is taking place.