Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank

Abstract

‘permanent’—in other words, those that were to be taken up as the thinker’s own thought’’ and distinguish it from what he calls ‘‘discards.’’ This is especially true, Gramsci says, ‘‘when one is dealing with a personality in whom theoretical and practical activity are indissolubly intertwined and with an intellect in a process of continual creation and perpetual movement, with a strong and mercilessly vigorous sense of self-criticism. Given these premises, the work should be conducted on the following lines: 1. Reconstruction of the author’s biography, not only as regards his practical activity, but also and above all as regards his intellectual activity. 2. A catalogue of all his works, even those most easily overlooked, in chronological order, divided according to intrinsic criteria—of intellectual formation, maturity, possession, and application of the new way of thinking and conceiving life and the world. Search for the Leitmotiv, for the rhythm of the thought as it develops, should be more important than that for single casual affirmations and isolated aphorisms’’ (1971:383–84). Frétigné’s biography generally hits the mark on both fronts, especially the first. What it does not do, what has never yet been accomplished, even for Marx, is to create the kind of myth that, for Gramsci, makes Machiavelli’s The Prince so powerful, giving ‘‘imaginative and artistic form to his conception . . . such a procedure stimulates the artistic imagination of those who have to be convinced, and gives political passions a more concrete form’’ (see Gramsci 1971:125–26). It remains to create such myths for a new party. To Live Is to Resist should be read and studied, and used in such an endeavor.