Gramsci's concept of Marxist orthodoxy is "not based on this or that follower, or this or that tendency linked to currents outside the original formulation...but on the fundamental conception of Marxism as 'sufficient to itself', sufficient to create an entire civilization, total and integrated". This integral Marxism was in turn made concrete by the enormous project Gramsci set himself during his long imprisonment: to rework, to actualize theory in relation to a specific national experience and culture in order to present a global critique and challenge to existing social reality. It was his refusal to apply schematic solutions to a particular "effectual reality" that made him underline the specificity of the conjuncture of forces, national and international, which determine the form a crisis will take in any particular case and hence the strategy of the revolutionary movement. In the prison notes he attacked "closed and definitive systems" and added that "the unity and systematic quality of a theory is to be found not in its external and architectonic structure but in its intimate coherence and fertile comprehension of each particular solution". In his note 'Against Byzantinism' we read: "The correspondence of effective reality determines the identity of thought and not vice-versa. From this we deduce that every truth, while being universal and capable of being expressed in abstract form (for the tribe of theoreticians) derives its efficacy from being expressed in the language of particular concrete situations: if it is not expressible in 'particular languages', it is a byzantine and scholastic abstraction serving only as a pastime for phrasemongers". The particular requirements corresponding to each situation cannot be fixed in advance: "Reality is rich in bizarre combinations and it is the theoretician who must out of this confusion find the proof of his theory, 'translate' into theoretical language the elements of historical life; not, on the contrary, reality which must present itself according to the abstract schema. This can never happen and in consequence this conception is the expression of passivity". Each national conjuncture is "the result of an original, unique combination (in a certain sense) and it is in the context of this originality and specificity that the combination must be understood and conceived if one wishes to overcome and direct it". There is no one road to socialism applicable for all cases: "The development is in the direction of internationalism but the point of departure is 'national' and it is from here that one must start". It was this overriding concern for national conjuncture, in contrast to the formal internationalism of Trotsky and of Rosa Luxemburg, that enabled Gramsci to discern the specificity of the problematic in the case of western countries and to adapt the experience of Leninism and the Russian Revolution to the different conditions of the West . It is all the more essential to emphasise this close link between theory and actual movements within society since the tendency to interpret Gramsci's theories as an "idealist Marxism" overlooks the unity of theory and practice, linked indissolubly with the needs of concrete struggle, which underlay his work. Gramsci's weapon against both materialism and idealism was "the energetic affirmation of unity between theory and practice".'The underlying thematic of his philosophical, historical and cultural studies was a response to an essentially political problem.
Merrington, 'Theory and practice in Gramsci's Marxism', pp 148-149.