Prison censorship forced Gramsci to mask Marxists and Marxist concepts in code names

Evidence

Names of well-known Marxists and Communists are almost always given in the Quaderni in the form of a substitute or a circumlocution. Thus Marx is referred to as “the founder of the philosophy of praxis”, Lenin as “Ilich” or “Vilich” [V. Ilich], Trotsky as “Leon Davidovitch” or “Bronstein” and so on. Similarly certain identifiable concepts of Marxism Leninism such as the class struggle or the dictatorship of the proletariat are usually masked under innocuous sounding titles. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 25

In translating our aim has been to combine the demands of a readable English style with a respect not only for the precise content but also for the flavour of an original which, in its fragmentary and elliptical character and its frequent recourse to tricks to deceive the prison censor, bears distinct traces of the difficult circumstances under which it was written. Names of well-known Marxists and Communists are almost always given in the Quaderni in the form of a substitute or a circumlocution. Thus Marx is referred to as “the founder of the philosophy of praxis”, Lenin as “Ilich” or “Vilich” [V. Ilich], Trotsky as “Leon Davidovitch” or “Bronstein” and so on. Similarly certain identifiable concepts of Marxism Leninism such as the class struggle or the dictatorship of the proletariat are usually masked under innocuous sounding titles. All such names or phrases have been left in the original form used by Gramsci, but explained either by square brackets in the text or by a footnote. In the case of concepts this has been done not merely in order to preserve the feel of the original text but also to avoid imposing too simplistic an interpretation on phrases which often have a conceptual value of their own. Thus “philosophy of praxis” is both a euphemism for Marxism and an autonomous term used by Gramsci to define what he saw to be a central characteristic of the philosophy of Marxism, the inseparable link it establishes between theory and practice, thought and action. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 25

Categorization

• SHARE: Specific enough that a Gramsci specialist would appreciate the exact circumlocutions (Ilich, Bronstein, ‘philosophy of praxis’).
• DEFINE: Explains ‘philosophy of praxis’ as both censor-evading euphemism and Gramsci’s own autonomous term meaning theory-practice unity.
• XREF: The idea of a text whose terms carry masked political meanings under innocuous titles prepares reading other censored/veiled bodies of writing in colonial and political contexts. — connects to: The Frankfurt School deliberately censored Marxist terminology to appease American Jewish sponsors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1551
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 25