Perspectives on Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci is widely known today for his profound impact on social and
political thought, critical theory and literary methodology. This volume brings
together 12 eminent scholars from humanities and social sciences to demonstrate
the importance and relevance of Gramsci to their respective fields of inquiry.
They bring into focus a number of central issues raised in Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks and in other writings such as his Prison Letters including: hegemony,
common sense, civil society, subaltern studies, cultural analysis, media and
film studies, postcolonial studies, international relations, linguistics, cultural
anthropology, and historiography.
The book makes an important, and up-to-date, contribution to the many academic debates and disciplines which utilize Gramsci’s writings for theoretical
support; the chapters are highly representative of the most advanced contemporary work on Gramsci. Contributors include: Michael Denning – highly respected
in the field of cultural studies; Stephen Gill – an eminent figure in international
relations; Epifanio San Juan Jr. – a major writer in post-colonial theory; Joseph
Buttigieg – translator of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; Stanley Aronowitz – a
distinguished sociologist; Marcia Landy – an important scholar of film studies;
and Frank Rosengarten – editor of Gramsci’s Prison Letters.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political philosophy,
economics, film and media studies, sociology, education, literature, post-colonial
studies, anthropology, subaltern studies, cultural studies, linguistics and
international relations.
Joseph Francese is Professor at Michigan State University. He is Senior Editor
of Italian Culture, and is the author of numerous articles on topics in Renaissance
and contemporary literature. He has written monographs on Pasolini, postmodern
narrative, and Italian cultural politics in the 1950s. His most recent book is
Socially Symbolic Acts: The Historicizing Fictions of Umberto Eco, Vincenzo
Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi.
Routledge studies in social and political thought
1 Hayek and After
Hayekian liberalism as a research
programme
Jeremy Shearmur
2 Conflicts in Social Science
Edited by Anton van Harskamp
3 Political Thought of André Gorz
Adrian Little
4 Corruption, Capitalism and
Democracy
John Girling
5 Freedom and Culture in Western
Society
Hans Blokland
6 Freedom in Economics
New perspectives in normative
analysis
Edited by Jean-Francois Laslier,
Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel
and Alain Trannoy
7 Against Politics
On government, anarchy and order
Anthony de Jasay
8 Max Weber and Michel Foucault
Parallel life works
Arpad Szakolczai
9 The Political Economy of Civil
Society and Human Rights
G.B. Madison
10 On Durkheim’s Elementary
Forms of Religious Life
Edited by W.S.F. Pickering,
W. Watts Miller and N.J. Allen
11 Classical Individualism
The supreme importance of each
human being
Tibor R. Machan
12 The Age of Reasons
Quixotism, sentimentalism and
political economy in eighteenthcentury Britain
Wendy Motooka
13 Individualism in Modern
Thought
From Adam Smith to Hayek
Lorenzo Infantino
14 Property and Power in Social
Theory
A study in intellectual rivalry
Dick Pels
15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of a
Critical Social Theory
A critique of Giddens, Habermas
and Bhaskar
Nigel Pleasants
16 Marxism and Human Nature
Sean Sayers
17 Goffman and Social Organization
Studies in a sociological legacy
Edited by Greg Smith
18 Situating Hayek
Phenomenology and the neo-liberal
project
Mark J. Smith
19 The Reading of Theoretical Texts
Peter Ekegren
28 Durkheim’s Suicide
A century of research and debate
Edited by W.S.F. Pickering and
Geoffrey Walford
29 Post-Marxism
An intellectual history
Stuart Sim
30 The Intellectual as Stranger
Studies in spokespersonship
Dick Pels
20 The Nature of Capital
Marx after Foucault
Richard Marsden
31 Hermeneutic Dialogue and
Social Science
A critique of Gadamer and
Habermas
Austin Harrington
21 The Age of Chance
Gambling in western culture
Gerda Reith
32 Methodological Individualism
Background, history and meaning
Lars Udehn
22 Reflexive Historical Sociology
Arpad Szakolczai
23 Durkheim and Representations
Edited by W.S.F. Pickering
24 The Social and Political
Thought of Noam Chomsky
Alison Edgley
25 Hayek’s Liberalism and its
Origins
His idea of spontaneous order and
the Scottish Enlightenment
Christina Petsoulas
33 John Stuart Mill and Freedom
of Expression
The genesis of a theory
K.C. O’Rourke
34 The Politics of Atrocity and
Reconciliation
From terror to trauma
Michael Humphrey
35 Marx and Wittgenstein
Knowledge, morality, politics
Edited by Gavin Kitching and
Nigel Pleasants
36 The Genesis of Modernity
Arpad Szakolczai
26 Metaphor and the Dynamics of
Knowledge
Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart
37 Ignorance and Liberty
Lorenzo Infantino
27 Living with Markets
Jeremy Shearmur
38 Deleuze, Marx and Politics
Nicholas Thoburn
39 The Structure of Social Theory
Anthony King
50 The Sociology of Elites
Michael Hartmann
40 Adorno, Habermas and the
Search for a Rational Society
Deborah Cook
51 Deconstructing Habermas
Lasse Thomassen
41 Tocqueville’s Moral and
Political Thought
New liberalism
M.R.R. Ossewaarde
52 Young Citizens and New
Media
Learning for democratic
participation
Edited by Peter Dahlgren
42 Adam Smith’s Political
Philosophy
The invisible hand and
spontaneous order
Craig Smith
43 Social and Political Ideas of
Mahatma Gandi
Bidyut Chakrabarty
44 Counter-enlightenments
From the eighteenth century
to the present
Graeme Garrard
45 The Social and Political
Thought of George Orwell
A reassessment
Stephen Ingle
46 Habermas
Rescuing the public sphere
Pauline Johnson
47 The Politics and Philosophy of
Michael Oakeshott
Stuart Isaacs
53 Gambling, Freedom and
Democracy
Peter J. Adams
54 The Quest for Jewish
Assimilation in Modern Social
Science
Amos Morris-Reich
55 Frankfurt School Perspectives
on Globalization, Democracy,
and the Law
William E. Scheuerman
56 Hegemony
Studies in consensus and
coercion
Edited by Richard Howson and
Kylie Smith
57 Governmentality, Biopower,
and Everyday Life
Majia Holmer Nadesan
48 Pareto and Political Theory
Joseph Femia
58 Sustainability and Security
within Liberal Societies
Learning to live with the future
Edited by Stephen Gough and
Andrew Stables
49 German Political Philosophy
The metaphysics of law
Chris Thornhill
59 The Mythological State and its
Empire
David Grant
60 Globalizing Dissent
Essays on Arundhati Roy
Edited by Ranjan Ghosh and
Antonia Navarro-Tejero
61 The Political Philosophy of
Michel Foucault
Mark G.E. Kelly
62 Democratic Legitimacy
Fabienne Peter
63 Edward Said and the Literary,
Social, and Political World
Edited by Ranjan Ghosh
64 Perspectives on Gramsci
Politics, culture and social theory
Edited by Joseph Francese
Perspectives on Gramsci
Politics, culture and social theory
Edited by Joseph Francese
First published 2009
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
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© 2009 Joseph Francese for selection and editorial matter; individual
contributors their contribution
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perspectives on Gramsci: politics, culture and social theory/edited by
Joseph Francese.
p. cm. – (Routledge studies in social and political thought; 64)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937. 2. Communism–Italy–History.
3. Political science–Italy–History. I. Francese, Joseph.
HX289.7.G73P47 2009
335.4092–dc22
2008044850
ISBN 0-203-87907-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-48527-4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-87907-4 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-48527-2 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-87907-8 (ebk)
Contents
Notes on contributors
Notes on the text
Introduction: “Gramsci now”
xi
xiv
1
JOSEPH FRANCESE
1 Gramsci’s concept of political organization
7
STANLEY ARONOWITZ
2 Reading Gramsci now
20
JOSEPH A. BUTTIGIEG
3 Sinking roots: using Gramsci in contemporary Britain
33
KATE CREHAN
4 Gramsci and Labriola: philology, philosophy of praxis
50
ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO
5 “Once again on the organic capacities of the
working class”: Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
69
MICHAEL DENNING
6 Power and democracy: Gramsci and hegemony in America
80
BENEDETTO FONTANA
7 Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will:
reflections on political agency in the age of “empire”
97
STEPHEN GILL
8 Gramsci, in and on media
MARCIA LANDY
110
x
Contents
9 Common sense in Gramsci
122
GUIDO LIGUORI
10 The contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s views on Italy’s
“Southern question”
134
FRANK ROSENGARTEN
11 Rethinking Gramsci: class, globalization, and
historical bloc
145
DAVID F. RUCCIO
12 Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” and
socialist revolution in the Philippines
163
EPIFANIO SAN JUAN JR.
Works cited
Index
186
199
Contributors
Stanley Aronowitz has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York since 1983, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology. He is
director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the
Graduate Center. He is author or editor of 23 books including: Just around the
Corner: the Paradox of the Jobless Recovery; How Class Works; and False
Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. He is founding editor of the journal Social Text and is currently a member of its advisory
board, and sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Critique and Ethnography. He
is also co-editor of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination.
He has published extensively in publications such as Harvard Educational
Review; Social Policy; The Nation; and the American Journal of Sociology.
Joseph A. Buttigieg, the William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English, has been a
member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1980 and a Fellow of the Nanovic
Institute for European Studies since its inception. A specialist in modern literature and critical theory, his more recent work has focused on the relationship
between culture and politics in twentieth-century Europe. In addition to
numerous articles, Professor Buttigieg has authored a book on James Joyce’s
aesthetics, A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective. He is also the
editor and translator of the multi-volume complete critical edition of Antonio
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Several of his articles on Gramsci have been
translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. A founding member of the International Gramsci Society, he now serves as its president. The Italian Minister of Culture appointed him to a commission of experts
to oversee the preparation of the edizione nazionale of Gramsci’s writings.
He is also a member of the editorial collective of boundary 2.
Kate Crehan is Professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center,
CUNY. She is an anthropologist who has carried out fieldwork in Zambia and
Britain. Her publications include: The Fractured Community: Landscapes of
Power and Gender in Rural Zambia and Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology.
Roberto M. Dainotto is Professor of Romance Studies and of Literature at Duke
University. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures,
xii
Contributors
Communities and Europe (in Theory). He has edited Racconti americani del
’900, and his new research project is a book on the debate on the “philosophy
of praxis” from Labriola to Gramsci.
Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at
Yale University. He is the author of Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and
Working Class Culture in America; Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in
the British Spy Thriller; The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century; and Culture in the Age of Three Worlds.
He is currently leading a working group on globalization and culture.
Benedetto Fontana teaches political philosophy and American political thought
at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author of
Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli,
and the coeditor of Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric
and Democracy. He has published in various journals, such as boundary 2;
History of Political Thought; Journal of Classical Sociology; Journal of the
History of Ideas; Italian Culture; and The Philosophical Forum. Currently he
is working on Antonio Gramsci and his notions of politics and the state, on
Machiavelli and his Romans, and on politics and rhetoric.
Joseph Francese is Professor at Michigan State University. He is Senior Editor
of Italian Culture, and is the author of numerous articles on topics in Renaissance and contemporary literature. He has written monographs on Pasolini,
postmodern narrative, and Italian cultural politics in the 1950s. His most
recent book is Socially Symbolic Acts: The Historicizing Fictions of Umberto
Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi.
Stephen Gill is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York
University, Toronto, Canada and Senior Associate Member, St Antony’s
College, Oxford specializing in International Relations and Political
Economy. His publications include The Global Political Economy (with
David Law); American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission; Gramsci,
Historical Materialism and International Relations; and Power, Production
and Social Reproduction (with Isabella Bakker). His Power and Resistance in
the New World Order was the winner of Choice, Outstanding Academic
Award.
Marcia Landy is Distinguished Service Professor of English/Film Studies with
a secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian Languages
and Literatures Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include
Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1929–1943; Imitations of
Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama; British Genres: Cinema
and Society, 1930–1960; Film, Politics, and Gramsci; Cinematic Uses of the
Past; The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality and Spectacle in Italian
Cinema 1929–1943; Italian Film; The Historical Film: History and Memory
in Cinema; Stars: The Film Reader (co-edited with Lucy Fischer); Monty
Contributors
xiii
Python’s Flying Circus; Stardom Italian Style: Screen performance and
Personality in Italian Cinema.
Guido Liguori is Professor of History of Modern Political Thought at the
University of Calabria and vice-president of the International Gramsci
Society-Italia. The editor of Critica Marxista, Liguori has published numerous essays on twentieth-century political philosophy and on the Marxist
tradition in Italy. He also enjoys an international reputation as one of the
most widely-cited Gramscian scholars. In addition to his seminal work
Gramsci Conteso, Liguori is the author of Sentieri Gramsciani and, with
Chiara Meta, Gramsci: Guida alla Lettura. Liguori has also co-edited (with
Fabio Frosini) Le Parole di Gramsci.
Frank Rosengarten is Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative Literature
at the City University of New York. Among his publications are Vasco
Pratolini: The Development of a Social Novelist; The Italian Anti-Fascist
Press; Silvio Trentin: From Interventionism to the Resistance; The Writings
of the Young Marcel Proust; and Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and
the Struggle for a New Society. He is editor of the English language translation of Letters from Prison of Antonio Gramsci, and is a co-founder, with
Michael Brown, of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy.
David F. Ruccio is Professor of Economics and Policy Studies, University of
Notre Dame, and Editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics,
Culture, and Society. His most recent book is Economic Representations:
Academic and Everyday. He is currently working on three new books:
Planning, Development, and Globalization: Essays in Marxian Class
Analysis; What’s Wrong with Exploitation?, and Economics, the University,
and the World.
Epifanio San Juan Jr is Director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center and
Co-director of the board of Philippine Forum, New York City. He was
visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
the Philippines, Quezon City, and will be a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois
Institute, Harvard University, in 2009. He has received awards from the
Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Society and Culture (Ohio), MELUS
(Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), the Gustav Myers Human
Rights Center, the Association for Asian American Studies, and a Centennial
Award for Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. San Juan is
author of US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. He is a member
of the advisory boards of Atlantic Studies; Nature Society and Thought;
Amerasia Journal; Cultural Logic; and other international journals.
Notes on the text
Gramsci employs the phrase “moderno Principe” (with lower case for
“moderno” and upper case for “Principe”) in two ways: (a) as the title of a book
that he is thinking of writing and that he conceives as the modern analogue of
Machiavelli’s Prince; (b) as the political party (specifically, the communist
party) that he conceives as the collective modern analogue of Machiavelli’s
figure of the Prince. In such instances, it is here rendered as “modern
Prince.” Similarly, “Southern question” is rendered in upper case when it
refers to a lengthy essay written by Gramsci, Alcuni temi sulla quistione
meridionale [Some Aspects of the Southern Question], in 1926; when it refers to
the global “South,” the impoverished, underdeveloped areas of our planet, it is
rendered as “Southern question.”
Introduction
“Gramsci now”
Joseph Francese
The chapters collected in this volume were presented at a conference hosted by the
College of Arts and Letters of Michigan State University in early November 2007.
The college, as part of its research, teaching, and land-grant missions, wished to
offer lectures with broad appeal among college and university faculty and graduate
students, undergraduates, and the community. To that end, 12 internationally
recognized scholars, from diverse fields throughout the humanities and social
sciences, were invited to campus for a weekend of intense discussions centering
on the results of research projects that utilized the thought and writings of Antonio
Gramsci (1891–1937). The conference attracted an exceptionally broad audience;
the high level of success was due in part to the support offered by Karin Wurst,
Dean of Arts and Letters, the efforts of members of the College’s dedicated staff,
especially Betsy Caldwell, and to the intellectual reputations of the participants.
However, it was also due in large measure to the ongoing interest in Gramsci in a
multitude of scholarly fields.
The work of Gramsci was chosen as the topic for the symposium because the
encyclopedic breadth and uncommon depth of his thought are more unique than
rare. His impact on social and political thought, critical theory and literary
methodology is profound. Gramsci was an Italian journalist, activist, and social
and political theorist whose writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of
popular and elite culture and political theory. He is notable as a highly original
thinker within the Marxist tradition, especially for his ideas concerning the role
of civil society as lynchpin between the economic base and the ideological
superstructure of societies. He is also renowned for his theorization of the
importance of cultural hegemony as a non-coercive means of maintaining
bourgeois dominance in capitalist societies.
The title of the symposium, Gramsci Now, reflected the relevance and usefulness of Gramsci to the understanding of our contemporary world. Indeed, all papers
presented at the conference discussed the applicability of Gramsci’s thought to
crucial questions at the crux of contemporary US and world civilization.
In his introduction to Raymond Rosenthal’s translation of Gramsci’s Letters
from Prison, Frank Rosengarten, one of the participants in our symposium, tells of
the “immediate and prolonged” impact in Italy of those letters after their
publication in the early 1950s. This effect, Rosengarten writes, was partially
2
J. Francese
attributable to their artistic value. Indeed, the letters cast into high relief the
profound humanity that animated Gramsci’s activism and all of his writings, an
attribute that comes forth with special clarity thanks to the exceptional beauty of his
epistolary style. But this effect was also due to the high ethical standards to which
Gramsci held himself, a trait that emanates with great clarity from his epistolary. In
one of the more poignant prison letters Gramsci describes himself as “simply an
ordinary man, who has deep convictions, which [he] would not barter for anything
in the world.” In point of fact, Gramsci could have quickly and easily avoided
prison and lived a life of comfort and influence had he come to some compromise
with his jailers. His ethical coherence precluded such compromise. In fact,
Gramsci’s moral fiber and his courage – along with his remarkable erudition, great
intellect, and extraordinary insight into an exceptionally wide range of issues, in
addition to his courage and physical resilience – makes him an uncommon man.
The conditions of Gramsci’s incarceration are proof that the fascist regime
not only intended to silence him, but to stop his mind from functioning. Yet
Gramsci succeeded in transforming the discomforts and forced idleness of
prison into a monumentous contribution to twentieth-century thought. Even
though prison killed Gramsci before the ideas collected in the Prison Notebooks
could be transformed into studies of the history of Italian intellectuals in the
nineteenth century, the theory of history and historiography, and popular culture,
as he had planned, Gramsci’s legacy lives on in the many concepts we cull from
his writings such as hegemony, modern Prince, subalternity, organic intellectual
and national-popular literature, to name a few.
In referencing a national-popular literature, I would like to quickly point out
that in post-World War II Italy Gramsci’s readers attempted to breathe life into
his thoughts with new art forms that could be considered both national and
popular because they spoke to and reflected the lives of the masses. In the arts
this idea occasioned the rise of neorealism, a trend whose proponents believed
that they were not practitioners of merely another esthetic; for them neorealism
was both an ethic and a banner to be defended. And, I would submit, it could not
have been otherwise, because what unites and defines the Prison Notebooks, the
exploration of what Gramsci calls the philosophy of praxis, was anything but
another bookish concept. It was of a piece with the political and cultural struggle
to which Gramsci dedicated his life. It was both a means for understanding the
real living conditions of the working classes and for putting an end to centuries
of ignorance and to social, economic, and political oppression.
Through the priceless legacy of the Prison Notebooks Gramsci the thinker
succeeded where Gramsci the politician failed: the fragmented thoughts collected therein are a tribute to what a human mind can accomplish even under the
most adverse conditions. They continue to spark what Thomas Kuhn calls an
intellectual revolution, a change in paradigm: we think, and perceive and act
differently because of Gramsci. Indeed, one cannot help but be struck by the
enduring value of Gramsci’s writings in Italy and far outside their country of
origin while the chapters collected in this volume allow us to hear Gramsci’s
writings resonate through a broad array of fields of intellectual inquiry.
Introduction
3
For example, in the present volume Marcia Landy focuses on the uses and
abuses of media (which dwarf those analyzed in the Prison Notebooks) from the
post-World War II era to the final decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first in a Gramscian context. In “Gramsci, in and on media” she
traces the impact of Gramsci’s rich observations on history, culture, folklore,
language on films and on critical writings about media from the 1960s to the
present, so as to identify elements of continuity and difference relevant for a
rethinking of the present and future fate of cultural politics. Another important
example of the value of Gramsci’s thought to contemporary cultural studies is Kate
Crehan’s “Sinking roots: using Gramsci in contemporary Britain.” Crehan maintains that Gramsci’s writings on intellectuals and the production of knowledge
provide a useful starting-point for analysis of the role of experts and the nature of
expertise in present-day societies. The specific area of expertise on which her
chapter focuses is that of the visual arts, drawing on data from a study of a
contemporary British arts organization, Free Form Arts Trust. Free Form has a long
history of working in impoverished neighborhoods and central to this history has
been the attempt to find ways in which those living in such neighborhoods might
play a more significant role in shaping their built environment. Understanding the
nature of the relationship between Free Form artists as experts, and the residents of
the neighborhoods in which they work requires, however, going beyond conventional definitions of ‘art.’ Crehan’s chapter explores how Gramsci’s insights might
help us understand the particular nature of this relationship.
The utility of Gramscian thought to contemporary post-colonial studies is the
subject of chapters by Epifanio San Juan Jr. and Frank Rosengarten. Rosengarten argues that Gramsci’s evolving perspectives on Italy’s “Southern question,” while circumscribed within the relations of force in the Italy of Gramsci’s
time, are also relevant to a larger set of issues having to do with the history of
colonialism from the late nineteenth century to the anti-colonial struggles that
took place in the wake of World War II. An important and controversial aspect
of Rosengarten’s chapter is the claim that Gramsci followed lines of inquiry into
Italian and European politics that, in some respects, anticipated trends of thought
among various theorists of postcolonialism. In “Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the
‘national-popular’ as a strategy for socialist revolution,” San Juan argues how,
within the overarching framework of historical materialism, Gramsci’s concept
of the national-popular is a most innovative tool in postcolonial studies and
international relations. San Juan’s contention is that Gramsci’s “open Marxism”
is founded on the primacy of human agency in the shaping of history. This
agency takes the form of the “nation-people” in a society characterized by class
inequality, particularly in peripheral or ‘Third World’ formations where the
peasantry predominates. As a theorist of historical blocs, Gramsci’s principle of
analyzing the changing relations of forces in any specific conjuncture may
correct the stereotyped notion of a mechanical class analysis often ascribed to
orthodox Marxism. At the same time, Gramsci, unlike postmarxists, never
abandons the primacy of the social relations of production (which are not
reducible to market economics) as the key to the mix of coercion and consent in
4
J. Francese
any strategy for socialist revolution. Thus, San Juan’s chapter is exploratory and
experimental in its attempt to apply the heuristic theory of the national-popular
to an existing neocolonial dependent formation, the Philippines.
For his part, David F. Ruccio, in “Rethinking Gramsci: class, globalization, and
historical bloc,” explains how the project of Rethinking Marxism, the journal he
edits, overlaps with Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxian theory in four key areas
(epistemology, methodology, the focus on class analysis, and ethics) and how the
differences between the two projects make them complementary (to explain:
Rethinking Marxism’s development of Marxian class analysis provides what is
missing in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony). Thus, Ruccio argues that the two
approaches can be usefully combined to rethink globalization and to carry out an
analysis of movements and changes in the current dominant historical bloc.
Stephen Gill contends that Gramsci’s writings are of continuing relevance to
a theory of global political agency in the emerging world order of the early
twenty-first century. In “Political agency and world order in an age of ‘empire’ ”
he utilizes Gramsci’s conception of a critical historical materialist method and
Gramsci’s reflections on the relations between rulers and ruled in the global
relations of force to identify some of the key conditions of existence that now
shape the political limits of the possible for progressive social forces.
Benedetto Fontana explores the ways in which Gramsci and his thought have
been used in American politics. In “The uses and abuses of Gramsci” he asserts
that both the left and the right in the United States meet on common ground –
that of pluralism. Conservatives exploit Gramsci’s thought to mask the inherently subordinate and reactive character of their politics in their critique of
the progressive left, while the identity and diversity politics of the left is but the
re-translation of Madison’s multiplicity of factions in contemporary language,
modified to include groups whose existence Madison could hardly dream of.
Indeed, the linking together of class, race, gender, and gay politics by the left
reproduces Madison’s conception of factional politics. When all is said and
done, in reproducing the pluralism of Madison and Hamilton, the left reinforces
the prevailing hegemonic conception of politics.
In “Gramsci’s concept of political organization” Stanley Aronowitz argues
that Gramsci’s writings on education and intellectuals must be seen in the context
of the distinction Gramsci draws between the “war of maneuver” – that is the
moment of direct assault on the power of the capitalist state – and the “war of
position” – what the party does in a period of relative political and economic
stability. This leads Aronowitz to conclude that, in addition to direct practical
interventions in current reform struggles, the main work of the Gramscian party is
in the fields of education and culture – particularly the creation and maintenance
of institutions (such as autonomous media, political schools, books and pamphlets) that contest the prevailing bourgeois common sense and pose the alternative of “good sense.” Such a ‘party’ cannot be conceived as chiefly an electoral
vehicle for achieving reforms. Rather, it is, at best, a powerful intellectual force,
throughout society, that succeeds in posing the burning questions facing the
people and, finally, organizing for the solution of those problems.
Introduction
5
Roberto M. Dainotto’s chapter, “Gramsci and Labriola: philology, philosophy of
praxis,” is a philological examination of the locution “philosophy of praxis” which
first appears in Antonio Labriola’s third essay on historical materialism, Discorrendo di Socialismo e di Filosofia (1897). Dainotto’s thesis is that the link Labriola–
Gramsci may be more relevant than the canonical Croce–Gramsci in fully understanding the sense of Gramscianism. In “Common sense in Gramsci” Guido Liguori
analyzes how Gramsci utilizes the term “common sense.” Liguori argues that in the
Notebooks Gramsci does not proffer an unequivocal or ambiguous evaluation of
“common sense,” but instead uses it as is a popularized form of “ideology.” In
Gramsci’s parlance, “common sense” is a sort of “people’s philosophy” bereft of
class consciousness, inevitably subjected to the hegemony of the thought of the
dominant classes, which, because it is more highly articulated and elaborated, never
fails to carry the day. Gramsci argues that society’s subaltern strata, with the help of
the revolutionary party and its intellectuals, must leave “common sense” behind and
acquire an autonomous “conception of the world” capable of competing with the
ideologies of the dominant classes and challenging those ideologies for hegemony.
Joseph A. Buttigieg, in “Reading Gramsci now,” considers how Gramsci’s
analyses of how power operates and is sustained in the modern state continue to
shed light on the interactions of culture, politics, and power in a world that has
become much more complex than his. Gramsci’s enduring value, Buttigieg
contends, comes to the fore when we unmoor Gramsci from the circumstances
that generated his work through a complex task of translation – the kind of
translation that Gramsci performed in his interpretation and use of Machiavelli.1
For Michael Denning – “‘once again on the organic capacities of the working
class’: Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor” – Gramsci’s writings begin from his
engagement with working-class movements and subaltern life. Thus, he contests
the position of commentators who have assumed that work – the centerpiece of
Gramsci’s early factory council writings – recedes in importance in his later writings, particularly the Prison Notebooks wherein the council gives way to the party
and the factory to the ethical state. While Gramsci is most often seen as a theorist of
the state and civil society, a theorist of the “superstructures” – religion, culture, education, intellectuals, Denning proposes that the centrality of work to Gramsci’s
thinking is the source of the continuing power of Gramsci’s intellectual legacy.
It may be difficult to glean from the brief allusions just made to the contents of this
volume that it is not the intent of the authors or of the editor to come forth with a
coherent theory. In fact, the proposed volume is neither a meta-commentary on
Gramsci, nor a critical piece with a specific target it intends to critique. Rather, the
collection underscores both the way Gramscian categories are being used, or could
be used, in different fields. The result, hopefully, is a much richer, more articulated
use of Gramsci’s many broad and multifaceted interests than would be reached
had the intention been that of attempting to form a Gramscian school.
Indeed, the basic purpose of Gramsci Now is to provide readers who are interested in the Sardinian revolutionary (whose name and concepts recur with great
frequency in the work of humanists and social scientists) with an immediate
6
J. Francese
sense of how (and why) leading scholars from a wide range of fields find
Gramsci useful in their scholarship. The point, then, is not so much to explain
how Gramscian research relates to current trends such as postmodernism,
subaltern studies, etc., but rather to communicate how scholars – working in the
humanities, social sciences, and other areas of scholarly inquiry – read Gramsci
and are now employing his concepts in their work.
Thus, the intention of the volume is not to provide a survey or a retrospective
of the state of Gramscian scholarship. Moreover, given the volume’s attempt to
reflect the interaction of Gramsci’s own interests, the chapters are more likely to
provide readers with fresh points of departure. The chapters, individually and
collectively, implicitly cast into high relief the fact that Gramsci is not being used
in a common way throughout the academy, and reflect how different Gramscian
categories and theories are being used in diverse ways in different fields.
At the same time, it must be underscored how the internal coherence of the
volume comes fully into view when one looks at all the chapters as an ensemble,
for only then will it be possible to appreciate how various threads of Gramsci’s
thought intertwine in the Prison Notebooks and how his various concepts enrich
and reinforce one another. In other words, there is an attempt to reflect through
this volume Gramsci’s own thought processes. The chapters are ordered alphabetically by author, rather than being grouped by topical subdivisions (a way of
organizing that would be to some extent artificial and imposed from on high) to
allow readers the creative freedom to pursue the volume in their own individual
way. There is no need to peruse the collection in a traditional, passive, page-bypage fashion. Instead, a more active, readerly path – one that reflects the manner
in which Gramscian concepts overlap and interact in the Notebooks, and that
sees Gramscian concepts and categories interacting at a cognitive level – is
implicitly encouraged.
In sum, the proposed volume is a set of chapters from diverse individuals
from a broad array of intellectual fields who have looked closely at Gramsci’s
work. The direct access of many of the scholars represented here to the body of
his writings differentiates their research from that of the overwhelming majority
of critics in the English-speaking world – who have utilized Gramscian concepts
in their scholarship and have successfully adopted and adapted Gramscian
categories by taking them out of a very complicated network of relationships
within the Notebooks. Because of this direct access to the Notebooks, the
concepts for which the Sardinian revolutionary is best known are restored in this
volume to their very rich, original network of cognitive connections.
Note
1 I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to heartily thank Joe Buttigieg for his
help throughout this endeavor, from the early planning stages of the above-referenced
conference through the editing of this volume. I would also like to thank David F. Ruccio
and Frank Rosengarten for their assistance at various critical junctures in this process.
1
Gramsci’s concept of political
organization
Stanley Aronowitz
Introduction
Since the publication of his Prison Notebooks1 after World War II, the figure of
Antonio Gramsci has loomed large in the radical imagination. Gramsci has been
received, along with Georg Lukács and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt
School, Karl Korsch, and especially Rosa Luxemburg – who might be understood as the mother of this tendency – as part of a broader effort to generate
what has been termed an “open Marxism” against the doctrinaire theorists of the
Second and Third Internationals who ossified historical materialism in deterministic formulae. Like Luxemburg and Korsch, Gramsci, a radicalized “traditional
intellectual,” was an active participant both in the Socialist Party and in
the formation of the Communist International and its Italian section. Like
Luxemburg, Lukács and Korsch among many others of his pedigree, as Socialist
Party militant he joined Lenin in the call for revolutionary opposition to World
War II, and eventually for the organization of a party of a “new type,” and
finally for a break with the parties of the Second International. That is, in
opposition to the growing reformist and electoralist trend of twentieth-century
social democracy, Gramsci argued for a conception of political organization
whose central precepts are to upend capitalism root and branch by any means
necessary, including revolutionary action. Like Lenin he not only asserted, but
developed a method for implementing the key role of professional intellectuals
recruited, largely, from the ranks of the traditional intellectuals and the most
advanced industrial workers. Yet, despite the fact that he, along with many
others, were constrained to forge an anti-reformist alliance with Lenin, Trotsky,
Bukharin and other leaders of the Bolsheviks, his approach to questions of
political strategy reflected an acute appreciation of what Korsch was later to call
the “principle of historical specification” in forging a theory of social change,
where specification refers to conditions of social time and social space, the
particular aspects of national history, its economic aspects, but also the cultural,
philosophical and political features that constitute the make-up of the nation.2 At
the same time, Gramsci was an internationalist and never held to the Stalinist
slogan of building “socialism in one country.” But he remained acutely attuned
to the specificity of Italian history, its uneven economic and social development,
8
S. Aronowitz
and the forms of cultural production that corresponded to the struggle for Italian
nationality, as opposed to its centuries of chronic regionalism.
English and French speaking readers relied until very recently on several
different versions of excerpts from the Notebooks, his prison writings, and the
political writings published before his incarceration in 1926, his influence has
been felt in far-flung fields of intellectual discourse. At this writing three
volumes of the projected five-volume complete Prison Notebooks have appeared
in English translation, but they have not yet amplified or altered our collective
understanding of the significance of his contributions. And, as is well known,
they span many different fields of the human sciences: literature, political philosophy, Italian history, social and cultural theory and, of course, politics. As the
secondary literature on Gramsci has expanded into a relatively large cottage
industry, we can discern several trends. Among them is the reading that places
Gramsci in the tradition of Italian history and philosophy. Gramsci’s contribution to our understanding of what he calls the “Southern question” informs much
of the current work on globality, particularly the concept of uneven development, but also inflects recent discoveries in the postcolonial literature that political independence does not necessarily lead to political autonomy, or to greater
social equality. And he has earned a huge reputation in the corridors of Machiavelli scholarship, a unique place in educational theory and, especially, in the
still nascent study of the role of intellectuals in modern societies. Harvard University Press has issued a volume of Gramsci’s cultural writings, where culture
refers almost exclusively to literature and other aesthetic topics. The range of
Gramsci’s interests surely confirms his status as a “traditional” intellectual
although even here I want to insist that these studies can only be fully understood as moments in his theory of politics and political organization, and his
elaboration of the many dimensions of the struggle for communism.
Consistent with the predispositions of academic disciplines, indeed in the
more general division of labor that elevates segmentation and repetition to a
principle of production, Gramsci’s work is often abstracted from its specific
context in early twentieth-century Italian politics, and even more his positions in
the turbulent post-Bolshevik history of the interwar Communist movement.
Above all, these singularities obscure the fundamental perspective from which
all of his interventions spring: that he was a leader, and for a time just before his
imprisonment, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Italy.
In this chapter I will argue that one of the more neglected aspects of his
theoretical writing is precisely what he regarded as a basic component of any
possible struggle for a communist future: the question of political organization,
that is, an examination of the concrete processes of social transformation and
particularly how revolutionary forces ought to proceed from the present conditions of capitalist economic, political and ideological hegemony to a moment
when the “historical bloc” of excluded classes and other social formations, may
contest and win power. By historical bloc Gramsci should not be read to downgrade the crucial role of the working class, since he views the Communist Party
as, putatively, the expression of that class, but in concert with Lenin’s trademark
Gramsci’s concept of political organization
9
insistence, from the French Revolution to our times, that revolutions are never
made by isolated social classes, but instead are the result of the struggle over
radical formation among different, allied classes and social formations. Against
the tendency of some commentators to situate Gramsci’s work exclusively
within the framework of Italy, its history, intellectual currents and political contemporaneity confining the significance of much of his thought to a national
context, or to the situation of underdevelopment, I will argue that the issues
raised in his writings are relevant to our times and our problems in the most
developed industrialized societies as well as those in which uneven economic
and cultural development prevails. As with any question within historical materialism, doctrinal aspects are often hobbled by their historicity; what commends
the best that has been “thought and said” (Arnold 1971) are not the predictions
and other prognostications of events but the concepts that inform inquiry. In this
sense Gramsci’s Marxism consists as much in his method as it does in its results,
where method is not equated with “methodology” of empirical investigation, but
with a taxonomy of relevant domains that bear on the historical process and the
social totality.
Many of Gramsci’s concepts have provoked widespread discussion: the
aforementioned “uneven development” that bids us to recognize regional differences at both the national and transnational levels; the distinction in the class
war between “position” and “maneuver” where the former connotes the period
of indirect combat where the cultural struggles play, perhaps, the dominant role.
Among them the term “hegemony,” and the social formation “intellectuals” as
the bearers of both the prevailing common sense and the counter-hegemonic
battle to impose a new good sense occupy a central space; the notion of “passive
revolution” about which more below; and the invocation of the revolutionary
party as the “modern Prince,” an explicit reference to Machiavelli’s classic
exposition (in this regard Gramsci’s refusal to separate consent and coercion as
modes of political rule; and his invocation of political “will” as a decisive
component of the theory of political organization). All of these are integrated by
questions of politics and especially political organization. To abstract them from
these questions is to neutralize and de-politicize their significations.
One of the earlier entries (1931) of The Prison Notebooks concerns the
question of political organization. The central figure of the “prince” is carried to
the present in the form of the “modern Prince.” The modern Prince is invoked
here as an extension of Gramsci’s critique of Georges Sorel whose concept of the
myth of the general strike was, and remains, a key component of the anarchosyndicalist theory of revolution (see Sorel 1915). Gramsci describes the theory as
a “passive” activity because it contains only a program of a “negative and preliminary kind . . . it does not envisage an ‘active and constructive phase of its own’ ”
(SPN: 197) – no plans, no platform only the promise that the confluence of wills
might create a new society on the basis of spontaneity. Gramsci argues that the
Sorelian myth, indeed the philosophy of pure refusal and resistance will “cease to
exist scattering into an infinity of individual wills that “in the positive phase then
follow separate and conflicting paths” (SPN: 128–129).
10
S. Aronowitz
To this dead end of pure voluntarism Gramsci counterposes the modern
Prince:
The modern prince, the myth prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete
individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in
which a collective will, which has already been recognized and to some
extent has asserted itself in action, begins to take different form. History has
already provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell in
which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become
universal and total.
(SPN: 129)
While “every party is the expression of a social group,” one of its main functions,
under certain conditions is to “cement” relations between the group it represents
and other “allied” groups to form, eventually at least, a new historical bloc. But in
relation to the distinction between the war of position and the war of maneuver,
Gramsci says that for all political parties, at some moments – when the war of
position predominates – the cultural function takes precedence. The “cultural
function” refers, in the case of the leading forces, the task of preserving the old
morality and common sense or, for the insurgent and otherwise “marginal” forces
to create a new morality and “good” sense. In this respect Gramsci’s ideas about
the role of intellectuals in society cannot be separated from his conception of political organization. The party as a complex organism recruits, trains and deploys
(Gramsci is forever evoking military metaphors) traditional intellectuals as well as
“advanced” workers to wage the war for hegemony. The war is waged on many
fronts: politics; the analysis of the economy; labor struggles; literature and art;
education; the reading of historical experience and by extension the task of transforming bourgeois into radical and revolutionary consciousness. In short, in this
moment, the party, and particularly its leading intellectuals, are engaged in the
struggle for ideological hegemony against the dominant influence of the bourgeois
media, their control over the most powerful institutions of civil society – schools,
religion, cinema and other artistic organizations, most voluntary associations such
as sports organizations and social clubs – to which Louis Althusser, in “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses” is later to add the trade unions (Althusser
1970). This list expands the purview of the counterhegemonic forces.
The counterhegemony has two distinct “audiences.” The members of the
social group of which the party is putatively the expression, many of whom are
in the ideological thrall of the dominant class(es), major expressions of which
are religion, various mythologies, nationalism, militarism and those of other
allied social groups and classes who are equally the field upon which the
struggle for hegemony is fought. Under the best of circumstances where the
party has sufficient resources, especially cadres, it contests bourgeois hegemony
on all fronts, not merely in the sphere of electoral politics.
In this regard Gramsci’s theory of the party was honed in the struggle to create
the Communist Party after 1919 which, as expected, was itself rife with factions.
Gramsci’s concept of political organization
11
For while the factions were united in opposition to the bourgeois parties and to
the socialists who had forsaken revolutionary will for a policy of permanent compromise with the existing regime and envisioned social reform as the farthest
horizon of politics, (a strategy that remains, against all reason, within all socialist
and labor parties and the liberal wing of the US Democratic Party), the main issue
among the Communists was the International’s post-revolutionary strategy of the
united front. Gramsci’s reading of the united front was significantly different
from many interpretations, notably that of the German KPD and perhaps the most
important leader of the PCd’I (Partito Comunista d’Italia) in the years of the
factory occupations of 1919–1920 and their aftermath, Amadeo Bordiga. Lenin’s
famous pamphlet Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder had excoriated the
left-communists for failing to come to terms with collapse of the revolutionary
upsurge of the immediate post-war period in Western and Central Europe and to
recognize that the capitalist world had entered a prolonged stabilization that militated against the possibility of the revolution. He addressed the position of the
councilists, Korsch and the Dutch communists, Anton Pannekoek, Herman
Gorter and Henrietta Roland-Holtz, perspectives that could be described as
intransigent with respect to social democracy and, more generally, to the peasant
and middle class social formations. This intransigence was expressed, in the first
place, in their sharp critique of the tendency among the Bolsheviks and the Soviet
state to abandon workers’ councils, both in theory and in practice and to substitute the concept of the state as an organ of revolutionary transition. While
Gramsci was by no means an orthodox Leninist, he was not prepared to forsake
the Communist International even as it became increasingly subservient to the
Soviet state and the Bolshevik party. Bordiga refused to acknowledge Lenin’s
evaluation of the defeats of the German and Hungarian revolutions, the Turin
factory occupations of 1919–1920, and the uprisings in Steel and Rail in the
United States as occasions for entering a period of relative “capitalist stabilization” where Lenin argued, against the council communists that the strategy of the
party had to shift from the revolutionary war to consolidation of the party’s
position within civil society by forming alliances with the social-democratic led
unions and other organizations.
The logic of the councilist position is to thrust the struggle “from below” in the
factories and other sites of capitalist domination to a privileged position and to
assign the party chiefly to an educational and ideological role. For the councilists,
the seed of the revolution was direct action, the highest form of which is the mass
strike. They envisioned not the capture of “state power” but the smashing of the
state and its replacement by a network of councils that perform both the legislative
and administrative functions of society. From a “government over men” they
foresaw the administration of “things” and the transfer of all power to the councils,
an echo of the slogan of the 1905 Russian Revolution. A decade later Korsch and
Paul Mattick, a councilist, renounced the concept of the party itself as a hierarchical and bureaucratic form that impeded rather than advanced the workers’ cause.
At this juncture we encounter two important paths in which Gramsci’s ideas
converge with those of Lenin: Gramsci foresees the party’s ultimate task as the
12
S. Aronowitz
achievement of “state power,” a task that, at the moment of the “final conflict”
entails iron discipline analogous to that of an army. But the war of maneuver can
only succeed to the extent that the party literally “merges” with the masses and
in this sense risks and, hopefully, welcomes its self-destruction, its redundancy.
Thus as the expression of a social group, the distinction between leaders and led,
the historic gulf that separates elite from mass is entirely unacceptable, but only
in the long run. To abolish inequality, the real hierarchies of economic and political power, requires leadership, a general staff, a tacit recognition that the party,
for the time being is not yet a “conspiracy of equals” (the term conspiracy is that
of the extreme left-wing of the French Revolution. Its key figure was Gracchus
Babeuf who was killed by the Thermidor). Gramsci writes:
When does a party become historically necessary? When the conditions for
its “triumph,” for its inevitable progress to state power, are at least in the
process of formation and allow their future evolution . . . to be foreseen. . . .
For a party to exist, three fundamental elements (three elements) have to
converge:
1 A mass element composed of ordinary, average men, whose participation
takes the form of discipline and loyalty, rather than any creative spirit or
organizational ability. Although without them “the party would not exist”
they are the necessary but not the sufficient force for success. Two other
elements are necessary.
2 The principal cohesive element, which centralized nationally and renders
effective and powerful a complex of forces which left to themselves
would count for little or nothing. This element is endowed with “great
cohesive, centralizing and disciplining powers”; and here is a key distinction “one speaks of generals without an army, but in reality it is easier to
form an army than to form generals” hence the crucial task of the party to
educate and train leaders.
3 “An intermediate element” really a mediating force between the first and
the third, not only physically but also morally and intellectually.
(SPN: 152–153)
Clearly the second element is fundamental for performing the tasks of welding
the mass into a fighting force but also to make sure the party survives the inevitable
attacks from within and from without that accompany its relative strength. The
attacks from the state are well known, both from the fascist rise to power and subsequent suppression of the opposition by coercion as well as propaganda and the
frequent assaults by liberal democracies on the left in the name of the fight against
terrorism and subversion of “free institutions” such as was in evidence during the
1920s and again in the 1950s against the Left in the United States.
The education and training of leadership is a major function of the party.
Numerous socialist and communist parties and organizations since the beginning
of the twentieth century have organized political schools, study groups on the
Gramsci’s concept of political organization
13
“classics” of Marxism and anarchism and, for the so-called stratum of
“advanced workers” recruited from the party’s own ranks and, especially, its
trade union cadres, some have gone as far as to sponsor “general education”
schools where students are exposed to philosophy, literature and general history
as well as the important ideological texts. Gramsci himself acknowledges that
the party must recruit from the ranks if only because there are simply not enough
intellectuals who have affiliated with it. In this context Gramsci’s famous term
“organic” intellectuals refers primarily to those who have sprung from the ranks
of the workers and other subaltern social formations.
The organic intellectual is one whose work is that of expression of the world
view of the proletariat or of any other class that aspires to power. All classes that
aspire to attain or retain economic, political and ideological power recruit and, if
necessary, train a social category of organic intellectuals. State colleges and
universities are more or less adequate institutions for the education of the
organic intellectuals of capital and of the state. Their curriculum, networks,
administration are dedicated, more consciously than not, to the tasks of producing and reproducing the moral and intellectual capital of the prevailing system
and of training a large corps of technical intellectuals for the professions –
principally medicine, law, teaching, social services – and for the occupations
associated with the development of the productive forces and the administration
of the state: science and technology on the one hand, and the various bureaucratic skills such as accounting, economics, especially finance, management,
public administration occupations such as planning and budget management.
Of course party intellectuals and other cadres must possess many of the same
skills since many are trained in the same institutions as the organic and technical
intellectuals of capital and the state. The problems for the party are twofold: on
the one hand, it needs to incorporate many of the elements of bourgeois education into its work. After all, running an organization entails many of the same
skills: membership lists must be maintained, fund-raising is a constant, bills
must be paid, and, of course the party leader must be a good public speaker, a
coherent writer and a thinker whose scope presupposes wide learning, most of
which may be obtained in elite schools; on the other hand, while the actual functions of social-democratic and left-liberal politicians are often identical or close
to those of the hegemonic intellectuals, a radical or revolutionary political
formation must have leaders with different capacities: they are building an
opposition that, one day, will take power and administer many of the functions
of the state and civil society. They need a profound understanding of political
economy, an acute appreciation of cultural forms, principally those that Gramsci
terms the “national-popular” which in his time was contained in literature,
but now is chiefly, especially for youth, in popular music, sports video games
and cinema; and they must know the history of their own country as well as the
politics of many others. The party leader is a “new” intellectual insofar as she
combines wide learning – greater than that available in most contemporary
mainstream institutions – and the capacities and methods of the organizer, educator and public tribune. Such is the task of the party to provide the means by
14
S. Aronowitz
which cadres become organic intellectuals, not only expressing the economic
demands of the “class,” but embodying their collective capacity to take power in
a complex society.
Before passing on to a discussion of the significance of Gramsci’s conception
of political organization today, I want to conclude this consideration with some
remarks on what may be one of his more astute observations that bear on our
own time, the relation of spontaneity and organization. Recall, Lenin’s searing
indictment of the “economists” within the early twentieth-century Russian
Social-Democratic Party. He pointed to their advocacy of the pure economic
struggle and, equally, their celebration of spontaneity as serious theoretical
errors that, if adopted, could thwart the party and the working class advances. To
these precepts he offers a theory of the party as a revolutionary vanguard consisting, in the first place, of professional revolutionaries whose task was, primarily, to transcend the limits of the trade union struggle – always confined to
winning concessions within the framework of capitalist relations – to the fight
for state power. In the process, Lenin advances the need for national coherence
in a manner reminiscent of Gramsci’s second element. For Lenin the “All
Russian newspaper was a major vehicle for achieving this goal.” In subsequent
years, especially after the Bolshevik seizure of state power in 1917, What is to
Be Done became a virtual bible of political organization within the communist
movement.
It provoked, among other responses, that of Rosa Luxemburg who, while
acknowledging the need for leadership, reasserted the centrality of the selforganization of the working class, and rejected the vanguardist formulation. That
Lenin misrepresented the position of those he called “economists” matters less
than his clear difference with what might be described as the position of those
like Luxemburg, Aximov (the object of Lenin’s polemic) and Marx himself that
saw the party as not only for the class, but of the class. Recall that in the Communist Manifesto he and Engels explicitly deny that the communists sought aims
and organizational forms that were separate from the workers’ movement. It was
only in the 1870s, nearly 30 years after the appearance of the Manifesto that
European Marxists organized mass electoral parties that were separate from the
trade unions, even as they saw themselves as the expression of class interests.
Gramsci straddles this debate. While his concept of the party is close if not
identical to Lenin’s, his argument that the party will eventually dissolve in favor
of a class movement appears closer to Luxemburg. Closer still is his concrete
analysis of spontaneity itself. He begins his remarks with a provocative statement: “Meanwhile it must be stressed that ‘pure’ spontaneity does not exist in
history” (SPN). What we take for the spontaneous action of the subaltern classes
is really due to a lack of documentation of what elements of conscious leadership were present in, say, the peasant revolts of fourteenth-century England, the
rebellion against the introduction of machinery into eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury artisan workshops, bread riots in almost every major city, the New York
draft riots of 1861, the virtually unled 1934 American textile strike (where,
despite an incompetent union leadership, much to theirs and the Roosevelt
Gramsci’s concept of political organization
15
administration’s surprise, tens of thousands of mostly women and southern
workers heeded the union’s call). Since the subaltern classes do not, typically,
have a stratum of organic intellectuals to record their activity, these are coded as
spontaneous. Yet when, retrospectively, historians and sociologists investigate
the apparently spontaneous actions of workers, they often discover indigenous
leaders who were, at once, agitators, organizers and tribunes of the revolt. As
any experienced organizer knows, they are never really the leaders of the movement. The leaders most often spring from the “average” members of the group
and the task of the organizer is to find them and provide guidance through the
thicket of organizational lore.
So it is not a question of leadership per se. Gramsci, in effect, is arguing that
the spatial position of “outsider” obscures the intellectual’s comprehension.
What some, particularly anarchists and romantics, take as spontaneity merely
describes a kind of leadership, usually that confines itself to the specific issues at
hand. In effect Gramsci is describing the limitations of social movements. These
movements have conscious leadership but, in our current terminology, it is
usually postmodern. That is, it is local and often parochial, confining itself to the
specific issues and grievances of a social group at a particular time and place. It
may have national presence, but its aims, like those of the trade unions, are constrained by ideologies of reform and revindication of grievances in terms of
capitalist social relations. The notion of the possibility of forming a historical
bloc with other social formations is far from its imagination.
Left political organization today
The significance of great events and their consequences can only be fully grasped
retrospectively. For example, the debate about the French Revolution is still
largely unresolved; the question of the United States Civil War has always stimulated controversy. Historians still ask whether the war was necessary, or whether
slavery would have collapsed of its own weight, whether the resolve of the
Federal Government to protect black civil rights so deteriorated that it could be
held responsible for the defeat of Reconstruction and the resurgency of the
planter class to economic and political power. Similarly, the collapse of the
Soviet Union recalls the fateful government and party policies after the victory of
the Bolshevik Revolution. There are those, following Bukharin, who insist that
the “new economic policy” of limited capitalist enterprises should not have been
abandoned after Lenin’s death in 1924. One of the central issues remains whether
the policies of forced collectivization of agriculture and accelerated the extent to
which economic development came at the expense of the working class, particularly the party’s abandonment of the Soviets (workers and soldiers councils),
except as a fig-leaf for an authoritarian system of production. Certainly the
decision to organize the army and police along conventional repressive lines is
contested, as is its concomitant consolidation of a powerful central state that
proved intractable for more than 70 years. And, equally damaging was the failure
of the revolution to transform the fundamental institutions of everyday life –
16
S. Aronowitz
family, the relation between men and women, including sexuality, the demand
for shared child-rearing and household tasks.
The collapse of the Soviet Union proved near fatal for the overwhelming
majority of Communist parties, even those who, like the Italian party had partially severed their ties with Moscow in the 1980s. For the PCI and the French
Communist Party (PCF) both of whom had since the end of World War II
achieved solid electoral successes, particularly at the local and regional levels,
and were sometimes included in national government coalitions, the end of the
Soviet Union constituted the tipping point to their ideological and political
coherence. The US party was all but destroyed, first by their decisions in the
wake of Cold War repression, then by the Khrushchev revelations at the 1956
Soviet Party Congress. To be sure, when the CPUSA responded to McCarthyism
by declaring that we were in a pre-fascist moment that required extraordinary
measures, the degree of persecution of thousands of CP members and many who
were on the party’s periphery was dire. But the CP took this occasion to send
some of its primary and secondary leaders underground, to suspend almost all
public activity except in defense of its civil liberties and, with important exceptions, reconfigured its trade union work from being part of the opposition to
conservative leaders, to a caution that drove it to pander to union leaders who
were willing to defend the right of the party to retain legality against
liberal–democratic efforts to outlaw it. But its remnant was seriously reduced by
the events of 1991 and it has never recovered.
Within the decade, the PCI voted to liquidate and reform as the Democratic
Party of the Left and to actively participate in a series of center-left coalitions
whose reason for existence was their mutual determination to thwart a resurgent
Right. While the new party retained most of its vote, it ceased to pay even lipservice to revolutionary goals. Similarly the PCF, with some 15 percent of
the vote in national elections – somewhat reduced from its highpoint of about
20 percent – a dominant role in the labor movement and leading numerous
town and city administrations was, for similar reasons, seduced by Francois
Mitterand’s Socialist Party to form first, an electoral alliance, and then to enter
as a junior partner the victorious coalition that took office in 1981. Some
15 years later the PCF had become a minor party with barely 5 percent of the
vote that was reduced with each national election, its local base seriously eroded
by socialist and conservative gains, and its commanding position in the main
trade union federation, the CGT, all but ended. Clearly, in all cases the demise
of European Communist influence had roots in the contradictory policies of
adopting the reformist program of modern social democracy which demanded
that it transform itself into a parliamentary institution of government and the
persistence of its revolutionary legacy, at least in theory and rhetoric. This
contradiction was resolved by the end of “really existing” socialism in the
European East.
Now, there is virtually no rationale for the existence of the remaining
Communist parties. They have, in the main, ceased to advance an anti-capitalist
program, and in the wake of the electoral defeats of the center-left in all
Gramsci’s concept of political organization
17
European countries except Spain are, at best, reduced to supporting the sporadic
movements of resistance and protest on issues of war, empire and against
neoliberal assaults on the welfare state. Perhaps the two exceptions are the
Rifondazione communista in Italy, seeming to have suffered the fate of other
parties in the Center-Left that went down to defeat because it agreed to join the
government coalition; and the recently formed German Left (Links) Party, an
alliance between discontented Left Social-Democrats and the former Communist
Party which, however, has demonstrated no genuine radicality, except on questions of foreign policy. And, of course, the high hopes of left-communists that
China and Vietnam might provide an alternative to the Soviet disaster have been
frustrated by their turn toward market capitalism in their quest for modernity.
Cuba seems to have weathered the disastrous results of the Soviet collapse better
than most of the client states, perhaps due to its relative isolation for 50 years, a
painful period that forced the state and the party to develop autonomous institutions and avoid large debt accumulation. To be sure it has been obliged to
accommodate to the global capitalist market, nurturing a tourist industry and
seeking foreign investment in its economy. But it seems that, short of the democratic transformation that can complete the revolution, its economy and political
system seem fairly stable, especially since it has forged ties with the newly
formed democratic governments of Latin America.
We are still in an era of the war of position. The integration of the anti-colonial
revolutions of the post-World War II years by global capitalism thwarted their
emancipatory aspirations in the face of the Soviet demise and the weakening
of world radicalism. Instead, postcolonialism is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts,
corruption, civil wars and the brazen return of economic, military and even political domination by Western powers. The main problem remains the struggle for
hegemony; the main need is for radical and revolutionary political formations that
declare openly that the economic and political crises that afflict both the global
North and the global South are placed squarely on the doorstep of a ruthless and
often rapacious capitalism, that markets are the problem, not the solution, and that
the task remains to imagine a radically different future in which the key functions
of society are controlled by the producers of things, services and of ideas.
What we learn from Gramsci is that the cultural struggle takes pride of place
alongside protest and resistance against the capitalist offensive against living
standards, collective and individual autonomy, and the hope of a more egalitarian community. The “cultural struggle” embraces some of the same fronts that
he named 75 years ago, principally what Althusser described as state ideological
apparatuses. We must still combat the pernicious effects of hierarchy and of
domination, namely alienation in all forms of social relations – everyday life,
education, the family and, of course labor. At the same time the party cannot
shrink from the critique of religion while, at the same time, extending its hand to
those within the religious community who remain committed to a liberatory
theology and program of resistance. The party would not disdain alliances with
Left Social-Democrats and anarchists who possess the political will to fight
Empire and the forces of finance capital. In this respect it looks forward to
18
S. Aronowitz
formations of a new internationalism as well as a national-popular historical
bloc that unites workers, intellectuals, small farmers and elements of the “old
middle class” of craftspersons and small business owners.
However, the experience of the last century has taught many of us that some of
the old Leninist strategies have been overcome by the course of history. For
example, the concept of “seizure of state power” needs serious re-examination.
While the question of what the process of the actual war of maneuver will look
like remains open, we must spurn statism. Surely we will not reproduce the
European experience of socialist, labor and communist parties becoming parties of
(capitalist-) government in order to wring out some welfare reforms. The recent
history of such attempts demonstrates convincingly that the Left in power takes on
characteristics of the capitalist states they once disavowed. It is not merely that
they fail to make significant dents in the private ownership of the decisive means
of production. Beginning with the Bolsheviks they lose sight of a future in which
the needs of the “whole person” are addressed, particularly the transformation of
everyday life. As a result, when the left governs under conditions of bourgeois
hegemony the inevitable counterattack by a capital intent on reversing decades of
hard-won gains at the workplace as well as within public institutions, is likely to
succeed because common sense has not been challenged except marginally.
During the war of position we must continue to test the proposition that
reforms are still possible, even under conditions of the permanent war economy
and globality. This is not identical with Left “reformism” which signifies that
the welfare state and “more equality” are the farthest horizon of politics. We will
remain skeptical that, unless the imperatives of war and privatization are largely
dismantled, basic social needs can still be fulfilled under capitalism. Indeed,
if war no longer propels the US empire, reducing or eliminating corporations
that rely on government contracts for survival, and public services such as
transportation, health care and environmental protections are socialized so that
insurance companies and private contractors are deprived of their profits, the
whole financial structure of the system may crumble. In short the fight for
structural rather than cosmetic reforms may be understood as “non-reform
reforms” because they put capitalism itself in jeopardy.3
The struggle for a new good sense entails challenges to such ideas as that
education must be subordinated to economic requirements, that the workplace
must revert to what André Gorz termed the “prison factory” and that the
feminist revolution remain in the shadows. It also must involve a determined
struggle against racism and a renunciation of the myth that we have entered a
“postracial” society, among other issues. Perhaps more profoundly it must
engage in discussions of sociobiology and other doctrines that tend to attribute
the persistence of inequality and exploitation to “natural causes” based on
pseudo-genetic considerations. As Ashley Montagu once argued, man’s most
dangerous myth is the fallacy of race, a fallacy that is implicated in all forms of
innate difference between humans (1997).
The most delicate question is whether the party must inevitably recognize the
hierarchy of leaders and led, as Gramsci argued. Here we note that Gramsci
Gramsci’s concept of political organization
19
adhered to democratic centralism, where discussion and debate was limited to
specific periods in the formation of policy, but was not a style of work. The
question is the degree of centralism. In her debate over Lenin’s theory of political organization, Luxemburg acknowledged that the preferred horizontal
organization of the party in which the distinction between elite and mass was
always under scrutiny, did not obviate the need for a degree of central
coordination. The question is not coordination of information and action, but
command. How to combat what Robert Michels noted were the wages of the
monopoly over information and communication in the turn of the century socialist parties, indeed of trade unions and many social movement organizations?
Will the party tolerate, nay, encourage the existence of caucuses and factions
who enjoy the right to publish their positions, openly campaign for office and
recruit adherents? Will the party publish and disseminate dissident views in its
press and other publications? If so, what are the limits of dissent, the qualifications of freedom to oppose the democratically determined strategies and tactics
of its political organization? These are issues that face all political formations –
liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, and anarchist alike.
This raises the final question. Is the state, which embodies principles of
hierarchy in its very constitution, to be the model for all social relations, including the party form itself? Gramsci foresaw the formation of workers’ councils to
be an outcome of the final conflict that displaces capitalism. He did not have
prefigurative conception that encouraged new forms during the war of position.
Recent experiences of the landless peasant movement in Brazil and the workers’
cooperatives in Argentina as well as occasional publishing and political collectives in industrial advanced Western societies suggest that the party must begin
to development ideas of the “not yet” of future forms of social life, not just in
theory and program, but as materializations of labor and institution in the
present. And it needs to undertake a serious evaluation of the state as a viable
political form. What are the alternatives to the dream of taking state power? Can
a more horizontal form of organization be envisaged that would circumvent a
more or less protracted period of coercion against the forces of counterinsurgency or can a federated, rather than hierarchical, institution that preserves
a high degree of local autonomy coordinate its necessary administrative and
coercive functions? It would entail new forms of police and military formation
as well as a redefinition of “leadership” that, as Marx argued, would be confined
to the administration of things rather than persons.
None of these matters can be definitively settled before the founding of a
genuine radical political formation. Gramsci today would disavow any attempt
to address the crucial struggles without such a formation.
Notes
1 All citations are from SPN.
2 “Notes on Italian History,” SPN.
3 The term was coined in Gorz (1967). In the wake of the May, 1968 events in Paris
Gorz himself renounced the strategy, prematurely I believe.
2
Reading Gramsci now
Joseph A. Buttigieg
The seventieth anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death has been marked by
numerous conferences and symposia all across the world. Invariably, at such
gatherings, attention is drawn to the enormous body of scholarly and critical
work that he has inspired and to the continued widespread use of his concepts in
multiple fields of inquiry. The Bibliografia Gramsciana, regularly updated and
made available on-line by the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, now lists over
15,000 titles in numerous languages.1 No Gramsci specialist, however assiduous
and tireless, can possibly hope to master such a massive volume of writing. The
statistic is impressive, as is the observation made by Eric Hobsbawm some years
ago that Gramsci is among the most frequently cited Italian authors of the
modern era (Hobsbawm 1987: 23);2 but all it tells us is that, in some sense or
another, Gramsci is important. Paris Hilton, too, is important, in the sense that
she is famous. In her case, she is important or famous for being famous; she is a
celebrity simply because she is a celebrity. In other words, she is an instance of
importance without content – a phenomenon probably unimaginable a century
ago. When it comes to Gramsci, though, one would still want to know why he is
important and to whom. Obviously, there are no succinct, straightforward
answers. Guido Liguori’s study of the debates surrounding the significance
of Gramsci’s legacy, Gramsci Conteso (Liguori 1996), is 300 pages long – and
it concerns itself solely with the Italian cultural–political scene between 1922
and 1996.
Perhaps one can venture a generalization: the frequency with which Gramsci
is cited suggests that he has attained the status of a classic. Even so, one would
want to know what that means and what to make of it. Hobsbawm has some
pertinent reflections that are worth recalling here. In his brief introduction to
the second edition of The Gramsci Reader, Hobsbawm notes that Gramsci’s
“international influence has penetrated beyond the left, and indeed beyond the
sphere of instrumental politics.” Among historians, for example, even nonMarxists find him rewarding, in large measure because of “his refusal to leave
the terrain of concrete historical, social, and cultural realities for abstraction and
reductionist theoretical models.” Gramsci’s importance, Hobsbawm adds, “is
now recognized in most parts of the globe,” his “influence is still expanding,”
and one may reasonably expect it to last. After all, Gramsci
Reading Gramsci now
21
has survived the political conjunctures which first gave him international
prominence. He has survived the European communist movement itself. He
has demonstrated his independence of the fluctuations of ideological
fashion. . . . He has survived the enclosure in academic ghettos which looks
like being the fate of so many other thinkers of “western Marxism.” He has
even avoided becoming an “ism.”
(Hobsbawm 2000: 12, 13)
A right-wing alarmist might read this as a confirmation of the ominous
warning issued by Michael Novak in 1989 on the pages of a business magazine:
“The Gramscists are Coming”; or of Rush Limbaugh’s fear-mongering depiction
of leftists who “worship at Gramsci’s altar” adopting their master’s strategy for
cultural warfare and plotting the downfall of the West (Limbaugh 1993: 87); or
Patrick Buchanan’s assertion that “the Gramscian revolution rolls on, and, to
this day, it continues to make converts” (Buchanan 2002: 78).
Hobsbawm also points out, however, that while the frequent recurrence of
Gramsci’s name and the increasingly widespread allusions to the concepts he
elaborated may be a measure of his lofty status in the cultural pantheon, they are
by no means an index of general familiarity with, or understanding of, his
thought – quite the opposite. He writes:
It may seem trivial that an Anglo-Saxon reference work can – I quote the
entry in its entirety – reduce him to a single word: “Antonio Gramsci
(Italian political thinker, 1891–1937) see under HEGEMONY” (Bullock
and Stallybrass 1977). It may be absurd that an American journalist quoted
by Buttigieg believes that the concept “civil society” was introduced into
modern political discourse by Gramsci alone. Yet the acceptance of a
thinker as a permanent classic is often indicated by such superficial reference to him by people who patently know little more about him than that he
is “important.”
(Hobsbawm 2000: 13)3
This is not to say that Gramsci’s is an importance without content, like Paris
Hilton’s. Nevertheless, Michel Foucault’s succinct observation, made over
20 years ago, remains true today: namely, that Gramsci is “un auteur plus souvant
cité que réellement connu.”4 Much more recently, Timothy Brennan lamented that:
Almost every postcolonial text in the last two decades has deferred to
Gramsci’s authority, but few went back to immerse themselves in his
writing with the view of mastering it or learning from it in a novel way. . . .
Gramsci’s own theses, styles of thinking, or points of departure are in these
circles still received at second hand. It is difficult to find work in postcolonial studies that does not cite Gramsci, but there is usually little claim to
provide an exposition of his work as such.
(Brennan 2006: 234)
22
J.A. Buttigieg
In other words, much too often, Gramsci is cited because he is important and he
is important because he is often cited.
There are, of course, several scholars and critics who have studied Gramsci’s
writings carefully. Inevitably, especially given the textual complexities as well
as the almost encyclopedic range of the Prison Notebooks, they have produced
significantly different interpretations and assessments of Gramsci’s thought.
There is no consensus as to what in Gramsci is most important, or on why and
how to read him. According to one view, Gramsci is of little relevance today;
the value of his work resides, rather, in the light it sheds on the political situation
of his own pre-World War II epoch. Richard Bellamy, for example, criticizes
those who “have applied his ideas to events and movements that he neither knew
nor could have anticipated.” Recalling Gramsci’s deep involvement in the political and cultural debates of his time, Bellamy insists that “anyone interested in
Gramsci, therefore, must be interested in these discussions as well, for it is in
them that his lasting relevance, if any, is to be found” (Bellamy 1992: 5). The
same line of argument runs through James Martin’s book, Gramsci’s Political
Analysis, which opens with the caution that “we should be careful not to overestimate [Gramsci’s] contemporaneity” and concludes with the assertion that “to
analyse hegemony today requires us to be critically aware of the distance that
separates us from Gramsci” (Martin 1998: 6, 171).
In the view of these two critics, the canonical status accorded to Gramsci’s
work diminishes its value and distorts its significance; its canonicity encourages
the application of its insights and concepts to situations and issues that Gramsci
did not, could not, and never intended to address. Gramsci, they remind us, “was
no system-builder” (Bellamy 1992: 5). What makes him admirable is the acuity
with which he analyzed the specific circumstances of his particular time.
Two corollary assumptions underlie this argument, namely: (a) for a work to
be relevant to a time and place different from those of its composition it has to
contain a system or grand theory; and (b) a mode of inquiry based on concentrated attention to the specificities and particularities of its object of analysis and
critique cannot yield insights that are transportable or transferable across time and
space. Oddly, such an approach to Gramsci overlooks one of the most salient features of the Prison Notebooks in which the extensive, thorough analyses of earlier
writers and past events, while unwavering in their rigorous attention to historical
specificity and particularity, nonetheless yield valuable insights into the present.
One need only look at the very large block of notes on Machiavelli to see how
deeply Gramsci involves himself in the interpretation of the Florentine’s works;
how Gramsci’s reading, while always attentive to the historical specificity of the
original texts, leads him to an illuminating examination of the relations of power
in the modern epoch (which, in turn, enables him to further develop and deepen
his concept of hegemony) and to a series of reflections on the requirements of a
political strategy adequate to his own times. Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli’s
Prince is an exemplary hermeneutical operation that cautiously avoids instrumentalizing the text even while “translating” it into a modern idiom. In his treatment
of the Prince (as well as other works), Gramsci illustrates, without betraying his
Reading Gramsci now
23
historicism, how a text firmly rooted in its time and place can be relevant to the
study of a much later epoch.
Gramsci’s present relevance or importance cannot be assessed through experiments of direct application of his concepts to contemporary phenomena. As
Stuart Hall colorfully put it,
We can’t pluck up this “Sardinian” from his specific and unique political
formation, beam him down at the end of the twentieth century, and ask
him to solve our problems for us: especially since the whole thrust of
his thinking was to refuse this easy transfer of generalizations from one
conjuncture, nation or epoch to another.
(Hall 1988a: 161)
Gramsci’s concepts and insights cannot be readily transferred; what they call
for, rather, is careful translation – in the broader sense of the term. Herein lies
the value of the work being carried out by Derek Boothman and younger scholars such as Peter Ives and Rocco Lacorte on Gramsci’s views on translation (see,
inter alia, Boothman 2004, and Ives 2004a and 2004b). Further exploration of
this aspect of Gramsci is more likely to occur now, thanks to the recent publication in Italy of Gramsci’s previously unavailable translation notebooks (Gramsci
2007). Exemplary instances of translating Gramsci in this sense – that is, of
bringing his views to bear on the present conjuncture without unmooring him
from the circumstances that generated his work – can be found in the writings
of, among others, Stuart Hall, Edward W. Said, Michael Denning, and Marcia
Landy (see, especially, Hall 1988a: 161–174, and 1988b; Said 1983: 158–177,
and 2000: 453–73; Denning 2004: 147–66; and Landy 1994).
I am not suggesting that Gramsci’s text contains some hitherto unnoticed
formula of interpretation that would make every classic relevant to one’s own
historical conjuncture. Indeed, such a way of reading is sometimes neither possible
nor desirable. This does not mean that a classic should be consigned to oblivion
simply because it embodies values and expresses a Weltanschauung that is incompatible with the present reader’s conception of the world. Rather, a classic that is
not or cannot be made relevant to the present time could – indeed, should – still be
admired for its intrinsic qualities, even if only dispassionately. Gramsci makes
some interesting remarks about this in his letter of 1 June 1931 to his wife Giulia:
Who reads Dante with love? Doddering professors who make a religion of
some poet or writer and perform strange philological rituals in his honor. I
think that a modern and intelligent person ought to read the classics in
general with a certain “detachment,” that is, only for their aesthetic values,
while “love” implies agreement with the ideological content of the poem;
one loves one’s “own” poet, one “admires” the artist “in general.” Aesthetic
admiration can be accompanied by a certain “civic” contempt as in the case
of Marx’s attitude toward Goethe.
(LP, vol. 2, 38)5
24
J.A. Buttigieg
It is, of course, much easier to retain an attitude of detached admiration vis-à-vis
a work of art than when dealing with a work of political philosophy. Thus, for
example, a politically conservative American who “loves” Tocqueville would find
it almost impossible to resist consigning Marx to eternal oblivion, even though Das
Kapital is as much a classic as Democracy in America; and, needless to say, it is no
accident that in the current conservative cultural–political atmosphere Tocqueville’s
best known work is regarded as a paradigmatic example of a classic text that is
unquestionably relevant to the present time. More often than not, though, the perception that Tocqueville’s classic text has remained relevant stems from simplistic,
a-historical readings of Democracy in America that totally ignore the specific
historical situation and political orientation of its author – to say nothing about the
naivety of treating the twenty-first century’s only super-power as if its economic,
social, and political structures are the same, in essence, as those observed by
Tocqueville in the early 1830s. This manner of reading a classic uncritically from
the perspective of the present has nothing in common with the procedures of interpretation and “translation” that characterize Gramsci’s approach to Machiavelli.
What it calls to mind, instead, are the crude efforts that have been made time and
again to appropriate classic texts and instrumentalize them for crude and immediate
political purposes. Mussolini’s edition of Il Principe is one of the most notorious
examples of this practice.
Gramsci’s work has proven to be especially susceptible to instrumental
(mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations, despite the fact that the Quaderni
del Carcere contain several explicit warnings against textual manipulation and
hermeneutical dishonesty. One of the most poignant is the following that
appears under the heading “Past and Present”:
“Importuning the texts.” In other words, when out of zealous attachment to
a thesis, one makes texts say more than they really do. This error of philological method occurs also outside of philology, in studies and analyses of
all aspects of life. In terms of criminal law, it is analogous to selling goods
at lesser weight and of different quality than had been agreed upon, but it is
not considered a crime unless the will to deceive is glaringly obvious. But
don’t negligence and incompetence deserve to be sanctioned – if not a
judicial sanction, at least an intellectual and moral sanction?
(Q6 §198: 838)6
Gramsci’s own philological rigor has not safeguarded his text from distortions
by careless and incompetent readers; worse still, some of the abuses of
Gramsci’s work can also be attributed to “the will to deceive.” In many cases,
unscrupulous, instrumental, or merely selective readings of Gramsci have been
animated by the impulse to make him appear relevant to the present time,
particularly when he has been used to lend authority to or legitimize a specific
political stance, ideological tendency, or theoretical position (see, inter alia, the
critique of the misuse of Gramsci’s concept of subalternity in Brennan 2006,
especially 2006: 256–64). From the other end of spectrum, some prominent
Reading Gramsci now
25
conservatives in the US, such as the ones I have already mentioned, have
been propagating the notion that “Gramscism” is very much alive today. In
their eyes, Gramsci is the master theoretician and strategist of a resilient anticapitalist, anti-democratic political current that has survived the communist
debacle of 1989 and represents, even now, an imminent threat to the political,
social, and cultural foundations of the prevailing order. In other words, Gramsci
has often been made to look relevant and important on false grounds and
for the wrong reasons by putative admirers as well as by those who seek to
demonize him.
Paradoxically, however, the significance of Gramsci’s ideas for the present
time is sometimes made manifest by the selective use – and misuse – of his
ideas for politically instrumental purposes. An interesting instance of this
occurred in the summer of 2007 when Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela,
delivered a speech7 at a mass rally supporting his refusal to renew the broadcasting license of the RCTV television station. Here are some extracts from his
speech (my translation):
For a hundred years or more in practically every part of America, the
Church, the media, and the educational system – the three huge organic
entities that Gramsci identifies as the fundamental institutions of civil
society – have been used to disseminate their own dominant ideology
among the social classes, including the popular ranks. Gramsci classifies the
different levels of ideology. The most developed form of ideology is philosophy. The dominant classes . . . have their own philosophers, their schools,
and their philosophical books through which they impregnate society with
the dominant ideology. There is a second level below that of philosophy.
Neoliberalism, for example, has its own philosophy but it is much too
elaborate for the subaltern social strata to digest. The dominant class therefore develops the theses of the free market, of the freedom of expression. . . .
It elaborates a body of ideas related to bourgeois democracy with the separation of powers, rotation [alternanza], and representation . . . great lies that
constitute the ideological corpus of the hegemonic philosophy that has
reigned in Venezuela and in a large part of the West for over 100 years. A
third level of ideology is what Gramsci calls common sense which is the
result of the diverse forms of immersion in the dominant philosophy and
ideology through TV soap operas, film, popular music, propaganda, etc. . . .
We are liberating the state, because bourgeois civil society controlled the
Venezuelan state as it wished; it manipulated the government, legislative
power, the judiciary, state enterprises, the central bank, and the nation’s
budget. They are losing all of this, if not completely at least in substance.
And now they resort once again to the core elements of bourgeois civil
society, using – sometimes in a desperate manner – the spaces still available
to them in those institutions identified by Gramsci: the Church, the media,
and the educational system. That is why it is important to understand the
background of this battle.
26
J.A. Buttigieg
Chávez then went on to talk about Gramsci’s concept of historical bloc, urging
his supporters to continue “constructing from below, from the base, the new
state, the new political society. . . . A socialist society, a socialist state, a socialist
republic, a socialist structure, a socialist superstructure! That is what the bourgeoisie of Venezuela fears.”
It would take too long to disentangle the various threads of Gramscian thought
that Chávez plucked out of context and wove into his speech. Neither is this the
right occasion to dwell on other actions and policies of Chávez that are profoundly
un-Gramscian, such as, his embrace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who presides
over a theocracy – the very type of regime that Gramsci detested most. What is
interesting, in this context, is the manner in which Chávez’s speech brings into
relief, albeit idiosyncratically and in garbled fashion, the central feature of
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, at the heart of which resides his analysis of the
rapport between political society and civil society. It is worth recalling here the
famous passage in which Gramsci makes a distinction between, on the one hand,
the kind of state that was exemplified by Czarist Russia where toppling
the monarch ensured the seizure of power, and, on the other hand, “modern”
bourgeois liberal states where the conquest of power is much more convoluted:
In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil
society, and when the state tottered a sturdy structure of civil society was
immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood
a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements – needless to say, the
configuration varied from state to state, which is precisely why an accurate
reconnaissance on a national scale was needed.
(Q7 §16: 866)
Interpreting this passage one has to bear in mind that Gramsci is here using the
term “state” in its liberal, conventional sense to mean government. If he were
using his own vocabulary, Gramsci would have written: “a proper relation
between political society and civil society”; for, according to Gramsci, “state
does not mean only the apparatus of government but also the ‘private’ apparatus
of hegemony or civil society” (Q6 §137: 801).8 In Gramsci’s theory, then, the
state is not counter-posed to civil society as it is in classical liberal theory and in
the theory of global civil society elaborated by Mary Kaldor and her colleagues
in the Global Civil Society program at the London School of Economics.9 The
“succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements” Gramsci refers to in this
passage is the ensemble of elements that constitute civil society. In order to
attain power in the modern state, according to Gramsci, one would have to
prevail in civil society. This is a point he makes in that note in the Prison Notebooks where we first encounter the term hegemony. The note is headed “Political class leadership before and after assuming government power,” the main
topic is the Risorgimento, and the question Gramsci is considering is how the
Moderates prevailed politically over the Action party even though the latter
Reading Gramsci now
27
spearheaded the struggle for unification. Early in the note, he enunciates a
“political-historical criterion” which, he says, constitutes the ground of his
research. The criterion is this:
A class is dominant in two ways, namely it is “leading” and “dominant.” It
leads the allied classes, it dominates the opposing classes. Therefore, a class
can (and must) “lead” before assuming power; when it is in power it
becomes dominant, but it continues to lead. . . . There can and there must be
“political hegemony” even before assuming government power, and in
order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely
on the power and material force that is given by government.
(Q1 §44: 41)
In one respect, at least, Chávez’s speech seems to be contradicting Gramsci
even though it purports to be deriving its inspiration from him. For if, as
Gramsci says, the governing party should not have to rely on power and material
force, then why did Chávez use the coercive power of the state to shut down the
TV station that opposed him? On the other hand, one could argue that Chávez
won the national election in December 1998 because he successfully exercised
the kind of “leadership” that enabled him to achieve “political hegemony”
before assuming government power. Chávez’s electoral success was the culmination of a struggle that took place in civil society – a struggle to obtain the
consent of the majority of Venezuelans through persuasion. At the same time,
though, a good part of his speech of 2 June 2007 consists of an attack on civil
society. He seems to be saying: now that “we” are in power we need to disempower the key institutions of civil society that oppose us. Of course, there are
many other factors involved, not the least of which is the possibility that elements of civil society opposed to Chávez could have been using the spaces of
operation available to them and the institutions they controlled (including the
controversial TV station) in order to subvert the government and bring about
its downfall by means other than the electoral consent of the majority of the
population. Also, in order to analyze the Venezuelan situation with the aid of
Gramscian concepts one would have to take account of Gramsci’s reflections on
Caesarism and Bonapartism.10 Doing so would greatly complicate the issue, for
one would have to ascertain whether there is a “progressive” element in Chávez
if he were to be seen as a Bonapartist; and even if Chávez were deemed to be a
Bonapartist with progressive tendencies, one would still have to determine
whether those tendencies are not accompanied by a mode of politics that is
much too dangerous to embrace. A central claim in Chávez’s speech is that the
government (in liberal terminology, the state) is more progressive than the most
influential elements of civil society. The question, then, becomes whether the
government can be trusted to decide which segments of the opposition it can
justifiably threaten to disempower by silencing them.
In any case, the intent here is not to adjudicate Chávez’s politics. What I want
to suggest, in this most minimal of sketches, is that Gramsci’s reflections on
28
J.A. Buttigieg
hegemony and especially on the relations between political society and civil
society remain a valuable critical tool for examining the political phenomena of
our time. The concept of hegemony as elaborated by Gramsci, furthermore, has
a strategic dimension – it describes a political strategy that is not, per se,
Marxist, or socialist, or even leftist. In developing his ideas on hegemony,
Gramsci was seeking to arrive at a better understanding of the configurations,
processes, and relations of power in modern liberal societies. So, it should come
as no surprise that conservatives, too, sometimes employ his concepts. That is,
in fact, what happened when, in the run-up to the 2007 French presidential
election, Nicolas Sarkozy declared (in an interview published in Le Figaro on
17 April 2007): “I have made Gramsci’s analysis mine: power is won by ideas.
It is the first time a rightwing politician has fought on that ground.” The boast is
invalid. Conservatives in the US have been fighting on that ground for quite a
long time. The so-called “culture wars” provide abundant evidence of this. By
way of illustration, here is Rush Limbaugh’s variation on the theme:
Gramsci succeeded in defining a strategy for waging cultural warfare . . .
But the Culture War is a bilateral conflict, my friends. There’s no reason
on earth we should be content to sit back and watch our values and our cultural heritage slip away. Why don’t we simply get in the game and start
competing for control of [the] key cultural institutions? . . . Don’t be
daunted and intimidated by the thought police. . . . Stick to your principles;
don’t be afraid to unapologetically admit your belief in those corny old
traditional values. Ultimately, this will get you respect. Once you have
respect, then you will have the ability to persuade. That’s the way to reclaim
our culture.
(Limbaugh 1993: 87–8)
Limbaugh wrote this at a time when the right imagined itself as the saving
remnant and was using every means at its disposal to depict the Clinton presidency apocalyptically as both the expression and the agent of social disintegration and national collapse. Since then, we have become accustomed to
conservatives in the US portraying themselves as embattled even as they have
come to dominate some of the most powerful institutions of civil society – the
churches, the most lavishly endowed think tanks, the broadcasters with the
biggest audiences, etc. – in addition to acquiring executive power in political
society. They achieved their ascendancy in ways that are loosely analogous to
those that enabled the Moderates to prevail in nineteenth-century Italy.
In what forms – Gramsci asks – did the Moderates succeed in establishing
the apparatus of their political leadership? In forms that can be called
“liberal,” that is, through individual, “private” initiative (not through an
“official” party program, according to a plan worked out and established
prior to practical and organizational action).
(Q1 §44: 41)
Reading Gramsci now
29
The radically conservative movement in the US (including the especially
influential neoconservative faction within it) did not come to power suddenly
with the victory of the junior George Bush in the 2000 presidential election. It
needed first to acquire a leading role within the Republican Party, and it did
not – nor could it – do so through an internal putsch; rather, it prepared the
ground for the march to power over a very long period of time. The earliest
stirrings of the radical strain of conservatism prevalent today can be traced as far
back as the mid-1950s, when intellectuals like Russell Kirk and William F.
Buckley Jr. embarked on an “intellectual and moral reform” of conservatism.
“Intellectual and moral reform” is a phrase that Gramsci used to describe an
aspect of Benedetto Croce’s activity that he admired, but he also pointed out that
Croce failed because
He has not gone “to the people,” he has not become a “national” element . . .
because he has not been able to create a group of disciples who could have
made his philosophy “popular,” so that it could become an educational
factor even in the elementary schools (and thus an educational factor for the
ordinary worker and peasant, in other words, for the common man).
(Q7 §1: 852)
Unlike Croce, however, Kirk, Buckley, and their circle conceived of their task as
educational. With his book, The Conservative Mind, Kirk sought to provide conservatism with a coherent philosophy produced by and based on a distinctive
tradition; then, abandoning academia, he went on to disseminate his views
through the publication of numerous books (including novels and short stories),
essays, lectures, newspaper columns and articles in conservative journals. In
1955, with Kirk’s help and encouragement, Buckley launched The National
Review; through it he assembled an impressive group of young intellectuals,
cultivated serious thinking about conservative principles, and belied the widespread notion that conservatism was bereft of ideas or, as Lionel Trilling memorably put it, incapable of expressing itself other than “in irritable mental gestures
which seek to resemble ideas” (Trilling 1979: vii). Those were the rather modest
beginnings of a very long march characterized by perseverance in the face of
many setbacks and dispiriting defeats – none more severe, perhaps, than Barry
Goldwater’s humiliation in the 1964 presidential election.11
For decades the conservative intellectuals and publicists operated most
effectively in the sphere of civil society “through individual, ‘private’ initiative”
(Q1 §44: 41). They established think tanks, cultivated relations with a broad
range of institutions and organizations, set in motion a home schooling movement, and took over a number of school boards.12 Through persistence and hard
work – but also deviousness – they were able to get their voices heard: they prepared detailed strategic studies that enabled them to influence and eventually
even guide government policy; they launched new journals and placed their
articles and columns in already existing newspapers and periodicals; and they
learned to make effective use of radio and television. Above all, they figured out
30
J.A. Buttigieg
how to appeal to a mass public, forging strong alliances with popular religious
preachers and media personalities. In short, they attained political hegemony
through their work and strategic alliances on the terrain of civil society. They
penetrated society at the capillary level, transforming the way people look at the
world and instilling a new common sense, in the Gramscian meaning of the term.
If the coming to power of radical conservatives – associated, as they understandably are, by many progressive intellectuals with extreme or reactionary currents –
came as a surprise or shock, it is because many self-proclaimed cultural experts
failed to acknowledge the degree to which the conservative agenda has been
articulated in a manner that appeals to huge masses of people.
The conservative movement was able to forge a set of alliances that became
hegemonic insofar as it exercised leadership by gathering a huge following
through what Gramsci terms “persuasion”13 and Noam Chomsky calls the “manufacturing of consent” (Herman and Chomsky 1988). The conservatives translated
their success in the cultural sphere into political victory; they came to power
because the ensemble of social groups they brought together into a more or less
cohesive movement had become hegemonic. Conservatism did not become hegemonic because it came to occupy the seat of government power – quite the
reverse. In many important respects, the trajectory of the conservative movement
exemplifies Gramsci’s contention that, in modern societies, civil society is the
site where the contestation for power takes place and from where a hegemonic
group or stratum derives its resilience. Martin and Bellamy correctly pointed out
that there are enormous differences between Gramsci’s world and ours: for one
thing, the hegemonic apparatuses of today are incalculably more complex than
anything Gramsci was familiar with. Yet, reading Gramsci’s analyses of how
power operates and is sustained in the modern state can hardly be said to shed
light on nothing more than the events and movements of his time.
There is, of course, one more turn in the story of the conservative march to
hegemony that I have not mentioned in my brief sketch. Once they attained
government power, conservatives (and, particularly, the most militant neoconservatives among them) were not content to use their considerable advantages –
particularly, the advantage that government has in fashioning public opinion
and broadening its base of popular support – to consolidate their hegemonic position. Instead, once in power, conservatives sought to reinforce their position
through the employment of a variety of coercive tools available to the state. Hegemony, Gramsci maintained, is sustained by the consent of the governed and the
surest sign of its success is that it does not need to resort to the use of force but
holds it in reserve. During the administration of George W. Bush, however, the
tactics of persuasion and the generating of consent often took second place to the
raw exercise of executive, legislative, and judicial power aimed at marginalizing,
intimidating, or silencing dissentient voices: the punitive de-funding of such
entities as public radio and television; measures to ban certain practices and activities (e.g. stem-cell research, same-sex marriage) through legislation or the appointment of right-wing ideologues as judges; persecution of individuals declared
“enemies”; assaults on academic freedom in the universities; surveillance of
Reading Gramsci now
31
private communications; abolition of environmental controls by government agencies; and so on. The same conservatives who over the years displayed their mastery
of the strategies and processes that lead to the attainment of hegemony in modern
society, embarked on an illiberal course of action that, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has
forcefully argued, endangers democracy itself (see Brzezinski 2004).
Conservatism has used its conquest of state power to stimulate a strong
current in US political culture and cultural politics that is anti-modern and antiliberal; a current so strong that even certain intellectuals who do not associate
themselves with neo-conservatism are writing books about the limitations of
democracy (see, for example, Zakaria 2003). The shift away from a foreign
policy of leadership (and the derision of “soft power”) to a policy of domination
is coterminous with and enabled by a similar shift on the domestic front. It is a
shift that can be described, in Gramscian shorthand, as an abandonment of the
politics of hegemony in favor of the politics of coercion and domination. And,
most disturbing of all, this has been done with the consent of the majority of the
citizenry. Examining this apparent paradox would entail the kind of concrete,
painstaking study that Gramsci conducted in the Prison Notebooks of the
cultural and political practices that contribute to the corruption of civil society.
Critics and theorists of various stripes have long been interested in the
intersections of culture and politics, none more so than the practitioners of cultural studies. Nowhere does Gramsci’s name appear more frequently nor are his
concepts – hegemony, common sense, passive revolution, subalternity, etc. –
employed more extensively than in the academic books and articles produced by
cultural studies scholars. All too often, though, cultural studies has focused its
attention on the potential or latent elements of subversion and resistance in
popular practices and culture. In the US, especially, cultural theory and criticism
has evinced less interest in hegemony than in counter-hegemony – a term, incidentally, that Gramsci did not use. In their eagerness to extol the subordinate
and marginalized strata of society, cultural critics find evidence of resistance and
subversion in the most unlikely sites, including the supermarket and Hustler
magazine (see in this regard, Fiske 1992, and Kipnis 1992). With evidence of
subversion and resistance so abundant, with counter-hegemonic tendencies so
widespread, how does one begin to explain the triumph of the forces of conservatism and reaction? Maybe, this is the time to start re-reading Gramsci.
Notes
1 The first comprehensive Gramsci bibliography was compiled by John Cammett
(Cammett 1991). It has been updated regularly by John Cammett, Maria Luisa Righi,
and Francesco Giasi and is now accessible in electronic form (with a very useful search
engine) at the website of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci. Online, available at:
www.fondazionegramsci.org.
2 Hobsbawm’s observation is based on the data provided in Garfield 1986.
3 The American journalist to whom Hobsbawm alludes is Flora Lewis; her article, “The
rise of ‘civil society,’ ” appeared in her regular column in the op-ed page of New York
Times in 1989. See also Joseph A. Buttigieg 1995.
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J.A. Buttigieg
4 Letter to the author, 20 April 1984.
5 While in prison, Gramsci translated excerpts from an anthology of Marx’s writings
from German into Italian. One excerpt that discusses Goethe was, in fact, written by
Engels (“German socialism in prose and verse”) that the editor of the anthology
erroneously attributed to Marx (see PN vol. 3: 460–1).
6 All translations from the Quaderni del carcere are mine.
7 A complete transcript of the speech Hugo Chávez delivered in Caracas on 2 June
2007 can be downloaded from the official Venezuelan government website. Online,
available at: www.minci.gob.ve/alocuciones/4/14173/discurso_del_presidente.html.
8 Much of the confusion surrounding Gramsci’s concept of civil society and many
simplistic accounts of his theory of hegemony are attributable to the failure to appreciate the crucial importance of his expansion of the concept of the state (i.e. what he
calls the “integral state”). For the best elucidation, see Buci-Glucksmann 1980.
9 See, for example, Kaldor 2003, and for a critique, see Buttigieg 2005.
10 For an explanation of the terms Caesarism and Bonapartism see the note on
“Caesarism” in Forgacs 2000: 420.
11 For an account of the emergence of the new conservatism, see Brennan, M.C. 1995.
12 The degree to which the successes of the conservative movement are due to the
prominent role they have played in education is brought into sharp relief in Goldberg
2006.
13 Gramsci’s comments on the mechanisms that generate consent through persuasion are
scattered through the Prison Notebooks. One of his most interesting observations on
the topic is this: “In order to achieve a new adaptation to the new mode of work,
pressure is exerted over the whole social sphere, a puritan ideology develops which
gives to the intrinsic brutal coercion the external form of persuasion and consent”
(Q1 §158: 138).
3
Sinking roots
Using Gramsci in contemporary Britain
Kate Crehan
Every individual, including the artist and all his activities, cannot be thought of
apart from society, a specific society.
(SCW: 112)
The prison notebooks Antonio Gramsci wrote during his long incarceration are
rooted in very different political realities to those of the early twenty-first
century. Nonetheless, the writings of this early twentieth century Italian revolutionary can still help us untangle the complex workings of power in contemporary societies. It is important, however, to begin with a caution. As a number of
those who have engaged in depth with Gramsci’s work, such as Joseph Buttigieg
(1992) and Stuart Hall (1988), stress it is above all from Gramsci’s approach to
the workings of power that we can learn; Gramsci never provides us with readymade theoretical templates which we can apply in any simple way to our times
and our questions. Gramsci himself, I like to think, would have agreed
with Wittgenstein, who writes in the Preface to Philosophical Investigations,
“I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But,
if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own” (Wittgenstein 1968:
viii). It is, above all, the roads down which Gramsci sends us, not necessarily the
particular destinations at which he arrives, that are so useful. Here the road
down which I want to travel is one that begins with the concept of “expertise”
and the role played by experts and expertise in the modern world, a topic to
which Gramsci repeatedly returns in the Prison Notebooks.
An ever increasing division of labor and proliferation of specializations is for
Gramsci a central reality of the modern world (see, for example, SPN: 10). And as
intellectuals become increasingly specialized and their knowledge more and more
rarified it becomes ever harder for those not recognized as having the requisite
skills to play any genuine role in the myriad decision-making processes shaping
the world in which they live. It is easy enough to make rhetorical demands for the
inclusion and empowerment of the “poor,” but how in our technologically
complex societies could any of the ordinary, non-expert inhabitants of contemporary cities in the global North in a meaningful sense determine, for instance,
their built environment? The “public,” particularly its more prominent and
34
K. Crehan
well-organized elements, may be able to put pressure on the politicians, but almost
always those given the responsibility of coming up with appropriate and feasible
solutions will be those recognized as having the appropriate expertise, whether in
urban planning, design, financial matters or any of the other ever proliferating
forms of required contemporary competence.
For several years now I have been studying a small, London-based arts
organization, Free Form Arts Trust, with a long history of working in poor and
deprived neighborhoods. A product of the late 1960s counter-cultural moment,
Free Form was founded in 19691 by three painters, Martin Goodrich, Jim Ives
and Barbara Wheeler-Early. All three were trained at leading British art schools2
but were strongly critical of the elitism they felt had informed their training
and were in search of a way of working that would allow them to make their
art school expertise available to those beyond the established art world.
They were not alone, of course, in their aspirations for a different kind of art.
They were part of a widespread movement of artists in the 1960s and 1970s who
wanted to take art out of the gallery, get away from the static art object and
make socially relevant art. Much of Free Form’s early work involved eventbased art; they were very much part of the festivals and happenings that were
such a central feature of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. Over time, however,
their work began to shift toward more permanent forms, as they sought to find
ways, based on collaborative relationships between experts and non-experts,
through which those living in poorer neighborhoods, those whose voices are
rarely heard, might play some role, albeit small, in the design of their built
environment. And by the mid-1980s this had become the central focus of the
organization. Currently Free Form describes itself on its website as “making
artwork for the environment.”3 One of the reasons I am interested in this group
of artists is precisely because they provide an interesting context in which to
think about what modest and realistic form of participation in the design of the
built environment might look like.
The interventions I am talking about here are certainly very modest ones:
attempts to give those who normally have no voice, such as social housing
tenants, some small say in how their everyday living environment might be
made a little better. We are talking reform here, not revolution, whereas
Gramsci’s aim, as a committed political activist and one of the founders of the
Communist Party of Italy, was, of course, the radical transformation of society.
Nonetheless Gramsci’s writings can help us identify some key threads that
weave through the production of experts and expertise. And these threads can
help us imagine how the relationship between experts and non-experts might be
made more collaborative, and what the implications of this might be.
Particularly relevant here are Gramsci’s writing on intellectuals. The nature
and role of intellectuals in different societies, and how this has changed over
time, is one of the central themes in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci’s understanding of who intellectuals are and what they do, however, runs counter to
most conventional definitions of intellectuals. It is important, therefore, to begin
with some clarifications.
Sinking roots
35
The production of knowledge
Central to Gramsci’s writings on intellectuals is a fundamental shift from the
conventional focus on the characteristics of intellectuals as individuals to a focus
on the social relations within which knowledge is produced. For Gramsci what
makes someone an intellectual is not that they, as the OED definition has it,
“possess superior powers of intellect,” but that they occupy a position in society
that gives them a responsibility to produce knowledge and/or to instill that
knowledge into others. Intellectuals are society’s acknowledged experts. The
problem with conventional understandings of intellectuals, as Gramsci sees it, is
that people have looked for what defines an intellectual,
In the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities, rather than in the ensemble of
the system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectual
groups who personify them) have their place within the general complex of
social relations. Indeed the worker or proletarian, for example, is not specifically characterized by his manual or instrumental work, but by performing
this work in specific conditions and in specific social relations.
(SPN: 8)
Intellectuals are not merely those who think, however “superior” their thoughts,
but those whose thoughts – at least within the context within which they are seen
as having “expertise” – are considered to have authority. And consequently our
primary focus should be on the social relations within which intellectual activity
takes place rather than on “the intellectual groups who personify them.”
Gramsci’s definition of intellectuals is in addition very broad, encompassing
not merely “great thinkers” but all those who play a part, however minor, in the
reproduction of a given way of seeing the world. Crucial here, for instance, are
that multitude who perform organizational tasks, “the entire social stratum
which exercises an organizational function in the wide sense – whether in the
field of production, or in that of culture, or in that of political administration”
(SPN: 97). In a certain sense, that is, all those who are granted the status of
“expert” – however circumscribed their sphere of expertise may be – can be
considered intellectuals in that they have been given by society the responsibility of producing and/or reproducing authoritative knowledge. Gramsci’s
ultimate concern is always with the structures and processes by which power is
produced and reproduced, or possibly transformed, and how intellectuals are
located within these, rather than with individual intellectuals themselves. To
reiterate, intellectuals for Gramsci are defined not by their superior ability
to “think” but by the fact that their thinking is done “in specific conditions
and in specific social relations”; this is what legitimates them as expert in a
given field.
Another key point to note is the distinction Gramsci makes between “the
‘organic’ intellectuals which every new class creates alongside itself and elaborates in the course of its development” (SPN: 6), and traditional intellectuals.
36
K. Crehan
Traditional intellectuals, who were themselves originally organically linked to
particular classes have over time become
A crystallised social group . . . which sees itself as continuing uninterruptedly through history and thus independent of the struggle of groups4 rather
than as the expression of a dialectical process through which every dominant social group elaborates its own category of intellectuals.
(SPN: 452)
And in line with intellectuals’ vision of themselves as an entity that continues, as
Gramsci puts it here, “uninterruptedly through history,” traditional intellectuals
continually reproduce themselves (ibid.). This reproduction is achieved through
a complex institutional apparatus that includes both formal elements, such as
schools, colleges, and professional associations, but also a whole series of more
informal networks.
Ultimately any new social group that is genuinely rising to dominance will
create its own organic intellectuals. In a note entitled “The Formation of the
Intellectuals” Gramsci writes:
Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an
essential function in the world of economic production, creates together
with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it
homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic
but also in the social and political fields.
(SPN: 5)
These new organic intellectuals, however, do not emerge fully formed, like
Athena from the brow of Zeus; the new intellectual visions and ways of being
necessarily begin with what already exists. Some of these new intellectuals –
and Gramsci himself is a good example here – will have been formed initially in
traditional intellectual institutions but in response to the new realities in which
they live, who they are and what they do as intellectuals undergoes a process of
transformation. The very demands of the new economic and political world
bring into being new kinds of intellectuals: “The capitalist entrepreneur creates
alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy,
the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.” (SPN: 5). And, just
as it would have been impossible to predict in pre-industrial times the emergence of the industrial technician, so to it is impossible to know precisely what
shape the organic intellectuals of future societies will assume.
Traditional intellectuals may like to see themselves as “independent of the
struggle of groups” but this independence is illusory; intellectuals are always
embedded in the power structures of their societies (SPN: 7–8). And one dimension of this is that the narratives that intellectuals produce explaining how the
world is – and producing such narratives is an important part of what intellectuals do – are ultimately rooted in specific class5 experiences. What intellectuals
Sinking roots
37
do, among other things, is precisely to provide coherent narratives which capture
how the world appears from a particular social vantage point, and how it feels to
live in that social location. One way in which artists can be seen as part of the
intellectual infrastructure is in that part of what they do, at least when they are
successful, is to produce in whatever medium they work in, consciously or
unconsciously, images which resonate in emotionally convincing ways with how
the world appears to a particular group. Another passage from the Prison Notebooks where Gramsci is discussing the relationship between literature and
politics, and what a new progressive literature would look like is particularly
relevant in this context:
The premise of the new literature cannot but be historical, political and
popular. It must aim at elaborating that which already is, whether polemically or in some other way does not matter. What does matter, though, is
that it sink its roots into the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes
and tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is
backward and conventional.
(SCW: 102)
However, sinking roots into the humus of popular culture is not something that
an artist can simply choose to do; organic intellectuals in the field of art, like
other organic intellectuals emerge, although never automatically, as part of
larger social and economic processes. One of the reasons for my interest in Free
Form is that their rejection of the traditional gallery world of fine art became a
struggle to find new ways of being artists that spoke to the working-class
communities in which they wanted to use their expertise. And speaking to those
communities demanded that they “sink roots into the humus of popular culture.”
This was a project that would call into question some of the fundamental
assumptions underlying the training they had received at their elite art schools.
Indeed finding new ways of being artists that break free of traditional models
can be especially challenging for artists trained in elite art schools precisely
because of how art as a category is generally understood (at least in the global
North), and how this category is entangled with power. To explain what I mean
by this it is necessary to look at this apparently straightforward category “art” in
a little more detail.
“Art with a capital A”
Both scholarly and popular writings on the arts have a tendency treat the arts as
if they existed in their own distinct domain; “art” is seen as some universal,
timeless category, located in a realm beyond the ordinary, workaday, money
grubbing world. In 1951 the art historian Paul Kristeller published an essay,
“The Modern System of the Arts,” subsequently widely reprinted, in which he
argues that far from being a timeless, universal category, “the term ‘Art,’ with a
capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term ‘Fine Arts’ (Beaux Arts)
38
K. Crehan
originated in all probability in the eighteenth century” (Kristeller 1990a: 164).
The rise to dominance of this understanding of “Art” can be seen as closely
linked to the rise of Romanticism and the Romantic notion of the artist:
The Romantic movement exalted the artist above all other human beings.
For the first time “creative” was applied not only to God but also to the
human artist, and a whole new vocabulary was developed to characterize
the artist and his activity . . . The artist was guided no longer by reason or by
rules but by feeling and sentiment, intuition and imagination; he produced
what was novel and original, and at the point of his highest achievement he
was a genius.
(Kristeller 1990b: 250)
Interestingly, however, while Kristeller’s thesis has apparently been
widely accepted, this seems scarcely to have disturbed the basic assumption that
“art” is universal. As the aesthetic historian Martha Woodmansee puts it in her
study of the links between the emergence of a market for literary works in
Germany and the modern notion of art, philosophers of art “are given to citing
or alluding to Kristeller’s article approvingly and then proceeding to operate as
if ‘art’ were timeless and universal” (Woodmansee 1994: 3–4). “Art with a
capital A” has, it seems, become the implicit, common sense understanding of
art, an understanding which – in part because it is implicit – is extraordinarily
hard to dislodge.
Kristeller sums up the key characteristics of this common sense notion as
follows:
The basic notion that the five “major arts” [painting, sculpture, architecture,
music and poetry] constitute an area all by themselves, clearly separated
by common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences and other human
activities, has been taken for granted by most writers on aesthetics from
Kant to the present day . . . and it is accepted as a matter of course by the
general public of amateurs who assign to “Art” with a capital A that ever
narrowing area of modern life which is not occupied by science, religion, or
practical pursuits.
(Kristeller 1990a: 165)
It is significant that this essentially Romantic notion of “Art with a capital
A,” “that ever narrowing area of modern life which is not occupied by science,
religion, or practical pursuits,” (ibid.) emerges in Europe around the same time
as the first stirrings of industrial capitalism. The emergence of “Art with a
capital A” is intimately connected with the development of economic systems
organized around the production of commodities. Kristeller describes the
changes in the social location of the artist that lie behind the elevation of art
to Art, as he, and occasionally she, increasingly came to depend not on an
individual patron, but on an art market:
Sinking roots
39
The social position of the artist underwent a profound change after the
middle of the eighteenth century. He gradually lost the patronage of the
Church and the state, of the aristocracy and patriciate that had sustained him
for centuries, and found himself confronted with an anonymous, amorphous, and frequently uneducated public which he often despised and which
he would either flatter with a bad conscience or openly defy, claiming that
it was the public’s duty to approve and support the artist even when it
could not understand or appreciate the products of the artist’s unbridled
self-expression.
(Kristeller 1990b: 250–251)
In the same passage Kristeller notes how examples of “geniuses unrecognized in
their time,” so much a part of contemporary notions of the Artist, were “something rarely heard of before the nineteenth century.”6
It is in the context of the rise of capitalism that “Art” comes to be defined, we
might say, as the negative of the commodity. That is, we have, on the one hand,
the commodity, the defining characteristic of which, as classically described by
Marx in volume I of Capital (Marx 1976: 125–177), is precisely that it is produced to be sold, its value expressed in its price in the market place; while, on
the other hand, we have “Art” which, like the affections of the human heart, is
seen as inhabiting its own non-commodifed realm, a realm that must be kept
remote from the crass marketplace where money rules. According to this understanding “Art” represents transcendent goods sullied by any too obvious contact
with commerce.
In reality, however, all human activities require material resources in some
form or another. The production and consumption of art, with or without a
capital A, simply cannot be isolated from the rest of the economic system. In the
first place, its producers need to make a living or be supported in some form or
other, which requires them having access to some part of the social product, and
that locates these activities squarely within the economy of their society. Artists
get to be accredited as genuine artists, and their works imbued with value,
through their association with the established institutions of the art world.
However seemingly revolutionary the content of their works, in Gramscian
terms such artists remain traditional intellectuals, firmly embedded in the social
hierarchies of their society. Second, the consumption of art, whatever its form,
demands resources. There need to be, for example, museums, galleries, cinemas
and theaters for the consumers and audiences of art objects, films and plays.
Even the contemporary world’s increasingly privatized consumption in the
home means televisions, sound systems, home theaters and so on, and the appropriate conditions, including the necessary time, to take advantage of them. If we
ignore the reality that people’s encounters with art are always deeply embedded
in the specificities of particular forms of consumption in given times and places,
we are left with what Pierre Bourdieu described as “the miracle of unequal class
distribution of the capacity for inspired encounters with works of art and
high culture in general” (Bourdieu 1984: 29). Understanding this “miracle,” as
40
K. Crehan
Bourdieu’s own tour de force, Distinction, maps out, demands that we pay
careful attention to the material realities of consumption, and the particular
social nexus in which it takes place. Bourdieu’s point here echoes Gramsci’s
rejection of the idea of a separate cultural domain beyond the economy.
It should be noted that neither Gramsci nor Bourdieu’s insistence on the
material realities of the production and consumption of the arts should be
taken as implying that high art is irredeemably alien to non-elite audiences;
numerous successful experiences of putting on, for example, Shakespeare’s
plays in workshop settings with audiences quite unfamiliar with his plays, both
in Britain and the United States, demonstrate that, given the opportunity to
engage with a piece of unfamiliar high art over time and in a supportive environment, it is possible for all kinds of people to discover that this apparently alien,
high culture can indeed speak to them in very powerful ways.7 My point is rather
that “inspired encounters with art and high culture” necessarily depend on a
certain familiarity with the art in question, and a knowledge of its conventions –
a knowledge that the more privileged are likely to have internalized, just as they
have the basic grammatical rules of their mother tongue, so that they are no
longer even conscious of the rules they are applying. Those denied the opportunity of acquiring literacy in high culture at an early age – when learning any
language is so much easier – are certainly able to acquire it later but it is likely
to be more of a struggle and to require more conscious effort. Gramsci’s
comment on the advantages that certain children have when they enter school is
relevant here.
In a whole series of families, especially in the intellectual strata, the
children find in their family life a preparation, a prolongation and a completion of school life; they “breathe in,” as the expression goes, a whole
quantity of notions and attitudes which facilitate the educational process
properly speaking. They already know and develop their knowledge of the
literary language,8 i.e. the means of expression and of knowledge, which is
technically superior to the means possessed by the average member of the
school population between the ages of six and twelve.
(SPN: 31)
And this is equally true when the language to be mastered is that of “Art
with a capital A”: neither the making of Art nor its consumption can ever
be completely divorced from the various power relations that inevitably, in
some form or another, thread through that making and that consumption. An
important dimension of knowledge of Art that has been “breathed in” and
internalized, for instance, is that those who have it simply take it for granted
that this Art is theirs by right. The British artist and former winner of the
prestigious Turner prize, Grayson Perry, commenting on what many in
Britain see as a growing “apartheid” in the arts, captures the sense of
exclusion often felt, especially perhaps in Britain, by those not brought up with
high-culture:
Sinking roots
41
Students from working-class backgrounds are also often saddled with what
is known as “imposter syndrome”. This is a deep-seated sense that the
world of culture, particularly so-called “high-culture”, is not for the likes of
them, a feeling that at any moment they will be tapped on the shoulder and
asked to leave.
(Asthana and Thorpe 2007)
Let me also make it clear here, that just as I would not want to argue that high
art is inherently alien to non-elite audiences, neither would I want to question or
deny the importance and value of “Art with a capital A.” What seems to me the
problem is that all too often other forms of human creativity and expressiveness
are dismissed as bad or failed art because while not conforming to the model of
“Art with a capital A,” they still get caught in the broad net of common sense
understandings of what constitutes “genuine art” – a net woven out of the
associations conjured up by the category “Art with a capital A.” There is, for
instance, the attitude required of the spectator. When in the presence of an Art
object a spectator is expected to adopt a particular stance: focused, earnest, and
quasi-religious. Indeed, it could be argued, as does the anthropologist Alfred
Gell, that:
[i]n so far as modern souls possess a religion, that religion is the religion of
art, the religion whose shrines consist of theatres, libraries, and art galleries,
whose priests and bishops are painters and poets, whose theologians are
critics, and whose dogma is the dogma of universal aestheticism.
(Gell 1992: 41–42)
Above all, in line with this essentially Romantic notion of art, the spectator is
required to give full concentration to these sacred objects; any object that fails to
demand such focused attention cannot, it seems, qualify as genuine Art. And to
facilitate the proper reverential concentration, modern galleries tend to take the
form of the familiar white-cube, from which all potentially distracting clutter has
been removed, and within which a hushed silence is expected.
Defining art as that which demands focused attention, however, rules out a
wide range of work. There is, for example, the long tradition of signs painted for
inns and shops; the gardens created for the wealthy and the more modest horticultural endeavors of those lower in the social scale; typography in all its forms;
and in the modern era, the public lettering and other signage that has played
such an important role in defining the distinct physical character of the London
Underground and other Metro systems. To quote Gell again,
Western categories of (generic) “art works” are inadequate to the task of
identifying aesthetic practices even in western societies – including, as they
do, the products of every obsolete Sunday painter, but excluding those of
the imaginative gardener, home decorator, or budgerigar-breeder.
(1995: 21)
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K. Crehan
The rise of “Art with a capital A” in the later eighteenth century led to
everything – particularly in the case of the visual arts – that was seen as serving
some utilitarian purpose being relegated to what was now thought of as the far
less prestigious realm of craft. In Britain a key moment is the establishment of
the Royal Academy in 1769 under the presidency of Joshua Reynolds, a painter
to the aristocracy bent on raising his own social status and that of his fellow
“fine artists.” The official title of this institution was the Royal Academy in
London for the Purpose of Cultivating and Improving the Arts of Painting,
Sculpture, and Architecture; and Reynolds, much to the fury of William Blake,
ensured that no engravers, coach painters, metalworkers or other craftsmen
could be elected to it. Part of Free Form’s struggle to escape their formation
as traditional intellectuals involved going back to older, more inclusive
definitions of art.
At the heart of Gramsci’s understanding of intellectuals (who for him would
include visual artists) is his assumption that the coherent knowledge produced
by intellectuals emerges out of an ever-continuing dialogue between the realities
lived, and the systematizing structures that intellectuals bring to bear on these
realities. One of the ways in which Gramsci’s approach is relevant to a study of
an organization like that of Free Form is because it directs our attention to the
character of the relationship between intellectuals (especially organic intellectuals attempting to render coherent working-class experience) and those who live
a given reality. Ultimately, as I have argued, for Gramsci it is a particular class
experience itself that creates intellectuals; this experience bringing into being
new kinds of intellectuals with different forms of expertise. Part of what defines
the degree to which given intellectuals are indeed organic intellectuals is precisely the degree and quality of linkage between a specific lived reality and the
intellectuals’ rendering of it as coherent narrative. It is important to stress that in
Gramsci’s writings, in contrast to those of some other Marxist theorists, intellectuals are never seen as having some mysterious power that allows them to intuit
the “truth” of a particular class experience, which they then have the responsibility to instill in the inert mass of non-intellectuals. Rather it is that class
experience itself, albeit in complex and mediated ways, that brings into being its
own organic intellectuals. For Gramsci the creation of intellectuals is always a
process, often a long and difficult one (see, for example, SPN: 334, 418). The
longer study of Free Form I am currently completing explores how the
experience of working in working-class neighborhoods over a number of years
helped to shape the organization, and in many ways transform the nature of the
Free Form artists as artists, as they tried to find ways of translating the aspirations of working-class residents into coherent and feasible improvements of the
built environment. Their aim was essentially to use their expertise as visual
artists to find solutions to problems presented to them by the residents –
solutions the residents would see as being their own. A 1974 Free Form project
in Liverpool, and what developed out of it, shows something of how this process
worked, and how a Gramscian approach can help us better understand the nature
of these artists and of their project.
Sinking roots
43
Dead fish and totem poles9
By the early 1970s the organization’s founders, Goodrich, Ives and WheelerEarly, had attracted a shifting group of like-minded visual artists and performers,
all interested in finding new ways of working with new kinds of audiences, and
new aesthetic languages. In 1973 this group had found a base for itself in a
former butcher’s shop in the Borough of Hackney in London’s East End. To
celebrate their new building and announce their arrival in the area, Free Form
mounted an exhibition, entitled “The Growth of Public Art” that showcased the
work they had done up to that point. One of the visitors to the exhibition was a
social worker from Liverpool, Chris Elphick. Impressed with how the group
seemed to have found ways of using their artistic expertise that spoke to workingclass people, Elphick asked if Free Form might be interested in coming to
the particularly bleak Liverpool neighborhood, Granby, where he worked. Free
Form was interested and together with Elphick they successfully applied for some
very modest funding for a Free Form team, led by Goodrich, to go to Liverpool
for six weeks to run a series of arts workshops with local children, culminating in
a festival. It was this work that would lead to Free Form’s first environmental
project.
Granby, where they were to work, was a harsh and violent place in the 1970s,
rife with racial tensions; one of the most impoverished areas of an impoverished
city. Even this team of artists used to harsh conditions in the far from genteel
East End were shocked by the violence and wildness of the children with whom
they now had to work. Nonetheless, their workshops were successful and by
devising various very physical activities they managed to channel the violence
in more productive ways. The festival, which featured a range of performances
and a spectacular fire show, drew a big crowd, and the whole event was judged
to have been a great success – sufficiently so for it to be repeated for the next
three years. It is worth noting that the audiences, like the workshop participants,
were not the normal art world ones and primarily local.
In 1974, by which time there had been two Granby Festivals and Free Form
was both liked and trusted by local residents, Elphick and some of these residents again turned to Free Form for help in a struggle they were waging with the
city authorities, Liverpool City Corporation. The residents were attempting to
get the corporation to do something about four ugly, derelict sites on local
council estates.10 The corporation’s offer was to tarmac them. Enthused by the
success of the Granby Festival, the residents demanded more; they wanted them
turned into community gardens, allotments or play areas. “Too expensive,” the
corporation responded. The residents persisted, demanding that the corporation
give them the £2,000 tarmacking would cost and let them organize the work
themselves. This did not appeal to the entrenched and traditional City Corporation and things began to get increasingly tense. In a pattern that would be
repeated a number of times over the years, an awkward situation for which there
seemed no easy solution became an opportunity for Free Form. It was agreed
that Free Form, working with local residents, would be given a budget of £500
44
K. Crehan
to transform one of the sites as a demonstration project to show what could be
done on a very modest budget. The Corporation could after all recognize Free
Form and its accredited artists as having genuine expertise. A Free Form team,
this time directed by Wheeler-Early and Ives, together with a group of local
people, whose labor was paid for through a government job creation scheme, set
about the transformation. First the artists talked with local residents to find out
what they wanted. Taking the suggestions they were given, they then constructed a series of scale-models to show how these might be realized. More
meetings with residents were then organized, at which, using an approach now
called “planning for real,” people were given the scale-models and a site plan.
By moving the models around the plan various options could be explored and
people could decide what they liked best. Detailed notes of their responses were
taken and on the basis of these the artists came up with a final design.
Led by the artists, local residents, who included a number of skilled carpenters and other craftsmen, then carried out the landscaping. Workshops were
organized to teach specific skills. These included the making of mosaics, the
construction of concrete paving slabs for pathways and sculptural wooden
seating (see Figure 3.1).11
Running through the whole design was a surreal playfulness. Ives describes
them building a pond out of fiberglass, encased in which were real dead fish, and
creating totem poles from old telegraph poles. Wheeler-Early gave this account:
We did the first mosaic mural on the wall with people, with broken tiles
and china and stuff. And it was fantastic. It was very raw. Again because
in Liverpool 8 the streets were like everyone’s front room we had this
communal seating on the corner where they could all sit and talk and there
was a little stage where the kids could do their performances. And all
their mosaic work was embedded in the pathways and so on, and there was
planting.
The finished work was certainly not polished, given the minuscule budget it is
difficult to see how it could have been, but the response from the residents of this
neglected, bleak area was enthusiastic. And out of this work a new organization
emerged, the Diggers, created by one of the locals who worked with them, which
took on the task of carrying out the work on the remaining three sites. The
Diggers continued to exist and to work locally, long after these three sites were
completed. The work itself, never intended to be permanent, lasted for a
surprising number of years and was in general well looked after by local
residents. While acknowledging the rawness of the work, Wheeler-Early noted:
Now the Arts establishment would look at what we did and say in design
terms we could have done more than that. But no designer was taking on
those issues and if they’d have done it without involving [local people] it
would have been smashed to pieces. But that project was not ruined. So
quality, you have to see quality in context.
Sinking roots
45
Figure 3.1 The Granby Project, Liverpool 1974 (source: Free Form Arts Trust).
The environmental work in Granby was followed by other environmental
projects particularly as government money for urban regeneration became
increasingly available in the later 1970s. The earliest projects usually involved
similar transformations of small, derelict corners of the urban landscape, or
public spaces on council estates, with mosaics, seating, planting and so on. But
whatever the project it would always be based on collaboration between Free
Form and local residents, with the residents providing the essentials of the brief
to which Free Form worked. A central concern was to find artistic forms and
imagery that would resonate with those who would be living with the results; the
aim was, to use Gramsci’s formulation quoted above, to sink “roots into the
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K. Crehan
humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with its
moral and intellectual world” (SCW: 102). At the same time, the Free Form
artists did not want simply to reproduce what they saw as the often sentimental
and banal, visual languages characteristic of commoditized, mass-produced
visual culture. One of the ways this was achieved was through workshops in
which people could develop ideas about imagery as well as various practical
skills. In the longer study I am working on I explore the various negotiations
over aesthetics involved.
Over time the scope of the projects became more ambitious and the work of
the organization broadened to include larger issues of planning, and a search for
how the arts might be incorporated into working-class social and built environments in an organic and more permanent way. By the early 1980s the raw beginnings at Granby had developed into far more polished work,12 helped by a
ten-year core funding grant from Hackney Council, which enabled Free Form to
employ an architect and a landscape architect. A natural development seemed to
be the creation of a more structured mechanism to make Free Form’s professional expertise available to local people – a move very much in tune with the
thinking of a number of progressive architects in the 1970s. These architects,
who had begun calling themselves community architects, were also searching
for more collaborative ways of working. And in 1983 this movement led to
the creation of the Association of Community Technical Aid Centres, a nationwide body (of which Free Form was a founding member) intended to promote
the provision of various forms of technical aid to those who would otherwise not
have access to such professional expertise.
Free Form’s Design and Technical Aid Service offered free consultations
to those wanting to improve their often dilapidated and depressing estates, or
to do something about local eyesores like the derelict sites Free Form had
worked on in Liverpool. As Free Form saw it, what they were offering were
solutions grounded in art, but art here was defined extremely broadly. The
service was very popular, receiving hundreds of inquiries each year; Free Form
was by now well known in the area and their shop front provided a walk-in
center where information and explanatory leaflets (with translations into over ten
of the languages spoken locally, including Turkish, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujerati,
Swahili, Hausa, Somali, and Amharic) were available. An individual, a tenants
group, or some other organization would hear about the service and approach
Free Form for advice about how they might improve their estate or tackle a
problem area. One or two of the Free Form professionals would then visit the
site, and meet with local people, listening to their concerns and getting an initial
idea of the place. There would then be subsequent meetings and Free Form
would help people develop ideas for feasible projects and write up funding
proposals to be submitted to one of the various government or other regeneration
funding schemes. If successful the funding proposal would provide the money to
pay Free Form, together with the residents, to carry out the work. All the preliminary work done by Free Form was provided free, their core funding allowing
them to devote many hours to visiting with different groups, listening to them,
Sinking roots
47
and working on possible solutions. Once funding had been secured, work
might well extend over a number of years and involve a whole series of different
projects. Throughout Free Form’s history a key means of enabling local
people to participate and genuinely shape projects has been workshops. The
workshops both help to generate the imagery that will be used and teach
people the practical skills they need if they are to play an active role in projects.
These labor-intensive workshops are perhaps the central mechanism that
enable people to develop their skills and come up with their own solutions to
the problems they confront in their built environment. The basic idea, as
Wheeler-Early explained, was to make their particular expertise available:
“it wasn’t that we were de-professionalizing anything but we wanted to make
the professions available to people; to work for them and not work against
people.”
In the 30 years since the Granby project the world in which Free Form has
had to survive has become an ever more hard-nosed, profit-driven one. There is
also the growing obsession in the funding world with accountability and the rise
of what has been called the audit culture. Nonetheless Free Form has not only
survived, it has grown. In 2004 it had an annual turnover of around £1,000,000,
with approximately half of the organization’s income coming from grants and
half directly earned from projects. A crucial expertise this group of fine artists
has had to develop is skills in navigating the continually shifting demands of
funding agencies. Indeed, knowledge of how the funding world works and how
tenants groups and others could tap into regeneration funds was an important
part of the expertise that the Design and Technical Aid Service could offer. Free
Form’s survival has depended to a significant degree on always keeping a sharp
eye out for ways to exploit the latest funding fashions in ways that might open
up new possibilities. As various opportunities have presented themselves the
organization has expanded into a number of different areas of work, such as projects with the private sector, and running courses for artists interested in working
in the public realm. We could see Free Form’s continual reimagining of their
expertise, initially formed in traditional art schools, as representing a search for
innovative and collaborative ways in which art (if not “Art with a capital A”)
rooted in working-class experience can be made an organic part of the fabric
of the built environment in which everyday life is lived. In the course of this
search the very nature of their expertise has changed. A key point here is that the
skills they have developed, for instance, in navigating the world of funding are
not simply additional expertise to be added on to existing artistic skills; they are
organic to the process of becoming the kind of artists they aspire to be, which
brings us back to the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci stresses that newly emerging
organic intellectuals necessarily have to begin with the language that already
exists but that nonetheless, “the content of language must be changed, even if it
is difficult to have an exact consciousness of the change in immediate terms”
(SPN: 453). Here we can think of the Free Form artists as necessarily beginning
with the expertise (which can be thought of metaphorically as a language) of the
visual artist they had acquired at art school, then through their experience of
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K. Crehan
working with those living lives remote from the elite, established art world,
transforming the content of that expertise.
At the same time, chasing down grants and fulfilling the ever mushrooming
demands for accountability in the form of the documented meeting of predetermined “targets” are enormously time-consuming. The work with social
housing tenants and others has continued. It has become much more difficult,
however, for the organization to provide the all important hours of free advice,
help with devising proposals and writing grants to fund them, and the timeconsuming workshops. This is particularly ironic given that it is precisely, I
would argue, this labor-intensive process – a process which is by its very nature
open-ended and unpredictable as to what it produces and consequently tends to
be viewed with suspicion by the practitioners of the audit culture – that explains
Free Form’s reputation among a number of funders and regeneration bodies as,
in their language, being able “to deliver participation.” Gramsci’s notion of
organic intellectual can help us think through just what the participation central
to Free Form’s practice involves. One thing is clear; this participation is far
more complex than that implied by breezy populist language simply demanding
that it be “delivered.”
I discussed above Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals. The Free Form artists may not be Gramscian organic intellectuals in the
strong sense of giving a newly emergent class that represents “an essential function in the world of economic production . . . homogeneity, and an awareness of
its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political
fields” (SPN: 5). Nonetheless, I would argue, the particular kind of collaborative
relationship Free Form has sought to create between experts and non-experts can
be seen as representing an attempt to create a more organic relationship between
artists and working-class experience. These artists trained in art schools
designed to produce traditional (in the Gramsci sense) intellectuals have sought
to find ways of putting this expertise at the service of working-class people
struggling to improve their built environment. And, in line with Gramsci’s
characterization of organic intellectuals, this attempt has resulted in the Free
Form artists becoming rather different kind of artists from those of the traditional gallery world of “Art with a capital A”; artists who have perhaps managed
to sink a few roots into the humus of popular culture.
Notes
1 Originally the artists called themselves Visual Systems. The name Free Form Arts
Trust was adopted formally in 1974 when, at the suggestion of the Arts Council the
organization became a registered charity. For the sake of simplicity I refer to the
organization as Free Form throughout.
2 Goodrich and Ives’ initial training was at Walthamstow Art College, Wheeler-Early’s
at Manchester College of Art, with Goodrich going on to Royal College of Art, Ives
to the Royal Academy Schools, and Wheeler-Early to Goldsmith’s College of Art.
3 freeform.org.uk, accessed 15 August 07.
4 By “the struggle of groups” Gramsci means class struggle. This is one of the
euphemisms he sometimes used to avoid arousing the suspicions of the prison censors.
Sinking roots
49
5 Class for Gramsci is never narrowly economic. Essentially it names a location of
structural inequality which, while rooted in fundamental economic relations, also
always has political, cultural, and other dimensions (see Crehan 2002 for an extended
discussion of the concept of class in Gramsci’s writings).
6 See also Woodmansee (1994) for a persuasive elaboration of this argument.
7 For instance, the American Shakespeare Behind Bars theater troupe and The London
Shakespeare Workout Prison Project are two very successful groups that both work
with prison inmates using Shakespeare’s plays.
8 Most Italians at this time used regional dialects in their daily lives.
9 My account of Free Form and the Granby project is based on tape-recorded interviews with the artists I carried out from 2001 to 2005, and Free Form’s own archives.
All quotations of the artists come from transcripts of these interviews.
10 Housing built and managed by local councils. Until the Thatcher “revolution” this
was the standard form of social housing in Britain.
11 The illustrations of the Granby project are reproduced by permission of Free Form
Arts Trust.
12 Crehan 2006 describes one of the projects in some detail.
4
Gramsci and Labriola
Philology, philosophy of praxis
Roberto M. Dainotto
Theory is a plagiarism of things.
(Antonio Labriola)
“Nowadays” – Maria Rosa Cardia wrote (perhaps too much in earnest) at the
turn of the millennium – “Gramsci’s writings can finally be taken away from the
concrete political history in which they were born, away from the sphere of
contingency, and can enter into the history of ideas, into the sphere of the
permanent” (Cardia 1999: 89).1 The idea of Gramsci’s work leaving the “contingency” to reach permanence, universality, and, in short, the status of a canonized
classic, was certainly surprising for those who had taken the immanence of
Gramsci’s thought for granted (see for instance Frosini 2004a; Golding 1988:
545, 553–554). As Joseph Buttigieg remarked, the problem was not whether
Gramsci’s legacy could amount
[t]o a monument für ewig, whether it deserves the status of a classic as, say,
Goethe’s work does – but rather how it could be read today in order that it
may inspire, reinforce and help direct current struggles against the forces of
domination, the concealed nexuses of power and privilege, and the unequal
distribution of spiritual and material wealth.
(Buttigieg 1986: 15)
But so things go: Gramsci did become a monument, a classic – and, of all
things, a classic of “ideas” rather than of praxis. Like all classics, Gramsci
started telling us so many new things at every reading, that in the end his very
name became a formula, an empty signifier, good to decorate arguments on
virtually anything, from hegemony and subalternity, to the most reactionary
of right-wing causes (on this, see Kranenburg 1999; Zipin 2003; Diggins
1988).
In such a context, one wonders if, instead of providing new readings of
Gramsci, it may not be worth returning instead – in order to start re-imagining
what the role of Gramsci can be today – to a note penned by Gramsci in 1933
regarding some “Methodological Questions”:
Gramsci and Labriola
51
If one wants to study the conception of a world view whose author has not
developed it systematically (and whose essential coherence is to be found not
in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of all
his intellectual work, in which the elements of such view of the world are
implicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work, carried out
with the greatest scruples of exactness, of scientific honesty, of intellectual
loyalty, and without preconceptions or prejudice.
(Q16 §2: 1840)2
This note was the re-elaboration of an early entry, specifically Q4 §1. The
novelty of this rewriting consisted in the introduction of the word “philology,” a
word that Gramsci, in the earlier draft of 1930, had probably resisted for its pejorative connotations. To explain, in 1930 Gramsci was reading Benedetto Croce’s
Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, a work from which he gleaned a fundamental
antithesis between the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe, and the almost
coeval Renaissance that occurred in Italy: whereas the Reformation was a progressive “popular movement,” the Renaissance was instead a “high,” “aristocratic”
culture of the intellectual elites, incapable of speaking to the popular masses (Q4
§3: 425), that soon turned into the regressive mythologizing and erudite humanism
of the Baroque and of Mannerism. Thus, for Gramsci “classical philology” was the
characteristic methodology of the “aristocratic” High Renaissance (Q7 §60: 900),
and “old philology” was, at best, an “ingenuous form of dogmatism” (Q4 §5: 425).
By 1933, however, Gramsci had abandoned Croce’s antithesis Reformation–
Renaissance (Frosini 2004b: 184–187) – and, in fact, Croce himself: in the attempt
to go beyond Croce’s opposition of popular and high, and in order to make of
communism not only a popular (like the Reformation), but also a culturally hegemonic movement (like the Renaissance), Gramsci was now re-reading the works of
Antonio Labriola. As early as March 25, 1929, Gramsci had asked his sister-in-law,
Tania Schucht, to send to him in prison the collected works of Labriola (LC 247).
As Gramsci had annotated already in Q3 (written in 1930), such works were of
particular importance to him, since Labriola had convincingly argued that “the
philosophy of Marxism is contained within Marxism itself” (PN vol. II: 30). How
to make of Marxism a hegemonic philosophy? By reading and amending it through
Croce’s exogenous idealism? Or by interpreting it through Labriola’s endogenous
Marxism? If the latter was indeed the choice, the entries of Q16 from 1933–1934
clearly indicate that Gramsci was, at that point of his intellectual development,
starting to abandon Croce and was returning to Labriola in order to re-construct the
philosophical basis for a hegemonic Marxism – an original basis that had been
“subjected to a double revision” on the part, on the one hand, of “idealistic trends
(for example Croce),” and, on the other, of “so-called orthodox” vulgar materialists,
who “believe they are orthodox insofar as they identify the philosophy of praxis
with traditional materialism” (Q16 §9: 1854–55).
As an antidote to such “double revision,” Antonio Labriola was the key for
returning Marxism to its own internal and original logic – to its true orthodoxy.
Along with a recuperation of Labriola, a parallel appropriation of the “critical
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method” (Q7 §43: 892) of philology became then essential in order to return to
the original and internal coherence of Marxism. Pronounced dead by its opponents, and debased by its proponents’ trivial materialism, Marxism had to
be reconstructed from its very foundation: only such philological restoration
could now prepare it for a rebirth, a “Rinascimento.” And if using philology
meant appropriating a method proper of “aristocratic” Renaissance humanism,
Gramsci was quick to add that “in the Holy Family, in fact, the expression
‘humanism’ is used to mean non-transcendence. Marx, moreover, wanted to
call his philosophy ‘neohumanism’ ” (Q17 §18: 1922); this was, in short, a
“neohumanism” (Q5 §127: 657), an “absolute humanism” (Q11 §42: 1437),
different from the old one to the extent that neohumanism meant an immanent
science of humanity and of historical institutions stripped of any remainder of
metaphysical transcendence. What for a hegemonic conception of the world
was transcendental truth, philology made contingent, relative, immanent and
historical.
As a method of immanence, Gramsci’s philology begins with the assumption
that there are no immutable, transcendent meanings. For example:
There is no such thing as an abstract “human nature” fixed and immutable
(such concepts derive from religious thoughts about transcendence); . . .
rather, human nature is the totality of historical determined social relations.
In other words, it is a historical fact that can be ascertained, within limits,
with the methods of philology and criticism.
(Q13 §20: 1599)
Meanings are determined by the complexity of social and historical relations.
Philology, in this sense, is not merely a method to apply to the study of Marxism,
but is the methodological marrow of historical materialism itself, a conception of
the world, that is to say, which “asserts theoretically that every ‘truth’ thought to
be eternal and absolute has practical origins and has represented or represents a
provisional value” (PN vol. II: 188).
Yet, Gramsci’s philology is not only deployed to reconstruct an original
meaning. Philology is also productive of new ones, it is “reconstruction” and
“renaissance”: while it ascertains textual facts in order to determine their conditions
of meaning in the past historical moment of their production, it also hypothesizes
“trends” for future possibilities of meaning:
[Ascertaining facts] does not mean that one cannot also construct an empirical compilation of practical observations that widen the sphere of philology
as it is understood traditionally. If philology is the methodological expression of the importance that particular facts must be ascertained and defined
in their unique “individuality,” the practical utility of identifying a number
of its more general “laws” and “trends” of philological development cannot
be excluded.
(Q11 §25: 1429)
Gramsci and Labriola
53
If we were to apply Gramsci’s own philological and critical method to his
writings today, we would then be confronted with a double task: first, we would
need to ascertain the textual facts of what Gramsci wrote, keeping in mind that
what Gramsci meant cannot be anchored simply to a single piece of writing (or,
worse, to a simple word), but should rather be seen within the entire development
of his intellectual work, situated in the cultural, social, and political context in
which it matured. Second – while keeping aware of the immanence of his writings
and of the fact that those writings do not aim to any eternal truth, but are cognizant
of their own provisional value – we would try to individuate some “trends” that can
be useful still in thinking Gramsci now. This second side of the work that Gramsci
calls “philology” is essential if we want to avoid the danger of reifying, freezing,
and/or monumentalizing Gramsci as a given, a catechism, or a dogma. After all,
“The theory and practice of philological criticism found in the notebooks constitute
in themselves a most important contribution to the elaboration of an anti-dogmatic
philosophy of praxis” (Buttigieg 1990: 81).
Given these general premises, we could indeed begin our philological work
by locating the origin of Gramsci’s method in the proper context of Gramsci’s
re-reading and re-evaluation of Antonio Labriola. Gramsci, in all likelihood,
took the expression “neohumanism” from Antonio Labriola’s attempt at founding a “new science” of “critical communism” based on Giambattista Vico’s
humanist historicism (Dainotto forthcoming). The sort of humanistic or philological method Gramsci outlines in Notebook 16, “derived not from the natural
sciences but from the field of criticism and interpretation” (Buttigieg 1990: 76),
was par of Gramsci’s long-standing organic intention to “re-circulate Labriola’s
philosophical positions” (Q3 §31: 309).
A re-evaluation of philology had already been proposed by Labriola in his 1896
essay on historical materialism: “Where would our historic science be without the
one-sidedness [unilateralità] of philology, which is the fundamental theoretical
support [sussidio] of all research [. . .]?” (Labriola 2000: 129).3 Moreover, what
Gramsci’s note on “Methodological Questions” calls “philology” (ascertaining
facts, but also determining trends of possible development) is in fact more than a
re-phrasing of the very method that Labriola, in 1899, had called “genetics” while
commenting on a critical edition of Marx and Engels’ writings:
These writings are in reality monographs, and in most cases they come
in response to special occasions. In other words, they are fragments of a
science and of a politics in a process of continuous becoming. In order to
understand them fully . . . we must read them in the manner of, so to speak,
traces and imprints, and, sometimes, as the marks and reflections, of the
genesis of modern socialism.
(Labriola 2000: 210)
In the absence of an organic exposition of a theory (that is, historical materialism), what remains, writes Labriola, are occasional works, “fragments” – or, in
Gramsci’s parlance, “single works.” Such “units” need now to be understood as
54
R.M. Dainotto
parts of a whole, as the organic development of a single intellectual work that is
in a process of continuous becoming. The fundamental unity and coherence of
Marxism, despite the somewhat fragmentary nature of its exposition, can thus be
preserved by a method, which Labriola called “genetic” and Gramsci “philological,” and which could see in the different epiphanies of its utterances one single
science and one single politics developing through various philological/genetical
stages as the historical unfolding of modern socialism. Here lies the fundamental
premise of what Gramsci calls “orthodoxy”:
The concept of “orthodoxy” must be renewed and brought back to its
authentic origin, orthodoxy should not be sought after in this or that disciple
of Marx, in this or that tendency connected to movements that are extraneous to Marxism, but, rather, in the notion that Marxism is self-sufficient,
contains within itself all the fundamental elements for building not only a
total and unified view of the world, a complete philosophy, but also to
renew a complete practical organization of society – to become, that is to
say, an integral, complete civilization.
(Q4 §14: 435)
“Orthodoxy,” as Gramsci understood the term philologically (“brought back to its
authentic origin” and “renewed” at the same time), does not involve monumentalizing and reifying the writings of either Marx or Engels. Rather, it indicates their
revitalization, which is not synonymous with revisionism, but necessitates a
return to the fundamental elements of a doctrine which is re-adapted to new needs
and circumstances.
Why this return to philology and to Labriola on Gramsci’s part? Labriola’s
“genetic” method had been conceived as an answer to a perceived crisis of
Marxism. Attacked from the positivist front for its failure to predict a proletarian
revolution, Marxism had been dismissed by the likes of Enrico Ferri as an
“imperfect philosophy” (see Barbano 1985: 203). “Orthodox” voices against
Ferri, like Filippo Turati’s, turned Das Kapital from a living text into a sort of a
bible written in stone.
Confronted with these two possibilities, Labriola had proposed a “genetic
method” that would re-conceptualize Marxism as a living philosophy “in continuous becoming” (Labriola 2000: 129). Always cautious with analogies, Gramsci
must have seen the situation of Marxism in the 1930s as similar indeed to that of
Marxism in Labriola’s time. In addition to the continuing positivist attacks from
the likes of Achille Loria, Gramsci had singled out, as an emblem of the “so-called
orthodox” vulgarization of Marxism, the publication, in 1921, of Nicholaj
Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism: Manual of Popular Sociology, a
book “which betrays all the shortcomings of conversation” (Q1 §153: 136). The
editorial success of the Manual, and, even worse, its growing influence in the
Second and Third International, presented the danger of reducing Marxism to a
mere sociology fashioned upon the models of natural sciences and vulgar materialism. As programmatically announced by the very title of the book, Bukharin’s
Gramsci and Labriola
55
Manual aimed at being “popular”; however, for this very reason, its vulgarization
of Marxism ended up offering a theory which was anything but “superior,” and
which remained incapable of raising the popular masses from a state of ideological
subalternity.
Bukharin had translated Marxism into a series of philosophical paradigms
which were not only theoretically weak, but also extraneous to Marxism itself:
A theory of history and of politics conceived as sociology, to be constructed
according to the methods of natural sciences (above all experimental and
trivially positivistic sciences), and a philosophy coinciding with philosophical materialism, or metaphysical and mechanical (vulgar) materialism.
(Q11 §22: 1425)
For Gramsci, instead, “positivism and mechanicism are the vulgarization of the
philosophy of praxis” (Q8 §235: 1088); and the latter cannot be confused “with
vulgar materialism, or with a metaphysics of ‘matter’ ” (Q11 §62: 1489). “For
this reason,” Gramsci insisted, “Antonio Labriola’s position should be reevaluated . . . Labriola is differentiated from [vulgar materialism, but also idealism] by
his affirmation that Marxism is itself an independent and original philosophy”
(PN vol. II: 140).
To single out in Labriola’s work the recovery of Marxism understood as a novel
philosophy, original and independent from the others, meant therefore to begin,
through Labriola, a philological study of the origin and genesis of Marxism – a
philology that, alone, could prevent a misreading of the latter as a mere repetition of
positivism, materialism, or idealism. Such philology, in addition, could find in
Marxism ideas that could still be useful in a different context, in Gramsci’s “now” –
a “now” often radically different than the one in which Marx’s and Engels’s concepts were first formulated. Finally, Gramsci’s use of Labriola’s “genetic” method,
now turned into a new philology, entailed a general recuperation of the philosophical
“superior culture” of Labriola’s Marxism, which Gramsci had started to propose by
the end of 1930 as an answer to vulgarizations. Such vulgarizing tendencies had
begun “in the Romantic period of ... popular Sturm und Drang,” when, around
1848, the seeming imminence of a revolution had led Marxists to focus their
interests “on the most immediate weapons or on problems of political tactics” (PN
vol. II: 31). However, even in the 1930s, when a revolution was hardly imaginable in
the heyday of triumphant fascism, Gramsci saw Italian and international Marxism
still blinded by a search for immediacy, still preoccupied with short-term tactics, and
still uninterested in developing a more long-lasting philosophical basis for Marxism
from where to begin a long-term war of position. In the name of a misunderstood
idea of praxis, Marxism was too quick in concocting next-day tactics, and too uninterested in developing a hegemonic philosophy. If a philosophy had to be given to
the masses, vulgar materialism was enough – possibly a materialism rinsed in the
waters of the dominant philosophical paradigms of positivism and idealism.
A philological return to the original foundations of Marxism through Labriola
meant then to restitute to praxis the dignity of a philosophy, and to make the first
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R.M. Dainotto
moves in a war of position whose eventual goal was cultural hegemony – the
transformation of Marxism into a “superior culture” that could create consensus
among the masses. What the latter needed was a new view of the world, not
simply tactics: and such view of the world had to be restored from Marxism’s
own texts; not on the basis of exogenous idealist and positivist philosophies, but
through a scrupulous work of philology on the footsteps of Labriola.
Contrary to Luporini’s assumption that the relation between Labriola and
Gramsci can at best be characterized as one of discontinuity and interruption
(Luporini 1973: 1587), it seems that through both a methodology, and a series of
linguistic echoes, Gramsci institutes a precise and solid genetic link between
himself, Labriola, and the Marxism of Marx and Engels. More precisely, rather
than a discontinuity, Labriola represents the indispensable philological link
connecting Gramsci to the “marrow” of theoretical Marxism. “The philosophy
of praxis . . . is the marrow of historical materialism,” had written Labriola; and
Gramsci explicitly echoed him by asserting that the philosophy of praxis was
“the marrow-substance” of Marxism (Q11 §22: 1425). Philology was becoming
a search for a historical continuity within theoretical Marxism.
Insisting on the link between Labriola and Gramsci helps to reframe the old
question of whether there is a persistence of idealist thought in Gramsci’s work.
Already in 1970, Christian Riechers, in Antonio Gramsci: Marxismus in Italien, had
seen Gramsci as imprisoned within the schemes of idealism, led by a “voluntaristic”
and “subjectivistic” view of historical processes indebted both to Croce and to
Gentile’s actualism. Traces of this idealistic reading of Gramsci are still pervasive
(see for instance Natoli 1989; Schechter 1990; Mancina 1999; Racinaro 1999).
However, if a leading influence exists on Gramsci’s thought, it is that of Labriola
– the same Labriola who, as a teacher of Croce, posed some fundamental questions
that idealism on the one hand, and Gramsci on the other, answered in radically
different ways. Through Labriola, Gramsci prepares a re-conceptualization of
historical materialism understood as nothing less than a refutation of idealism (see
Fergnani 1976: 68–70). Central to such a refutation is the conception of historical
materialism as a “philosophy of praxis,” a philosophy, that is to say, fundamentally
different from idealist philosophy, and more specifically from Gentile’s “philosophy
of pure act”:
Neither idealistic nor materialistic “monism,” neither “Matter” nor “Spirit,”
evidently, but rather “historical materialism,” that is to say, concrete human
activity [history]: namely, activity concerning a certain organized “matter”
[material forces of production] and the transformed “nature” of man. Philosophy of the act [praxis], not of the “pure act” but rather of the “impure” – that
is, the real – act, in the most secular sense of the word.
(PN vol. II: 176–177)
“Matter” and “Idea,” within such philosophy, are nothing else than “relation” –
in this sense, they are impure “in the most secular sense of the word.” They are not
given per se, but they are the by-product of “labor” (PN vol. II: 197). Labor, in
Gramsci and Labriola
57
turn, is not relation between substances (such as “reality” and “thought,” or world
and man) that exist for themselves; even less it is activity of a “pure” Spirit or
Thought that posits reality, solipsistically, as its creation. Rather, labor is a relation
that, only as relation, can posit reality and will, matter and thought, world and man:
For the philosophy of praxis, “matter” should not be understood neither in
the sense given to this word by natural science [i.e. positivism], nor according to the meaning given to it by sundry materialist metaphysics. . . . Matter
should not be considered as such, but only insofar as it is socially and
historically organized for production, and therefore . . . as an essentially
historical category, as human relation.
(Q11 §30: 1442)
At the same time, and in opposition to any form of idealism, such a relation,
which is a historical category, institutes not only matter or man, but also thought,
which is not the “abstract thought” of idealism, but always the correlative,
thought of some thing (Q7 §1: 853):
Only the philosophy of praxis has managed to make forward progress in the
history of thinking . . . avoiding any tendency to solipsism [i.e. idealism],
historicizing thought in so far as it assumes it as view of the world. It
teaches there is no “reality” per se, in and of itself, but only in historical
relation with men who modify it.
(Q11 §59: 1486)
As we start noticing from all these brief citations, a central concept in
Gramsci’s differentiation of historical materialism both from vulgar materialism
and from idealism is that of the “philosophy of praxis,” a concept that first
appears in the Notebooks in 1932. What did Gramsci mean by that? Where did
the locution come from? Omnipresent in the Notebooks, the expression is one of
those that, to quote from the note on method again, “the author has not exposed
systematically.” For an adequate understanding of what Gramsci means here, we
need “a careful philological work, carried out with the greatest scruples of exactness, of scientific honesty, of intellectual loyalty, and without preconceptions or
prejudice.”
Despite attempts at explaining away the notion of “philosophy of praxis” as
a mere prison expedient that Gramsci would have used to escape the censor
instead of the synonymous “Marxism,”4 we know that the term has in fact a
precise and polemical intent in Gramsci, “as part of a long-standing tradition
opposed to positivist, naturalist and scientific deformations of Marxism”
(Piccone 1977: 35). However, Gramsci’s opposition to positivism is not, contrary to what has been suggested (Piccone 1977: 36; Finocchiaro 1988: 91), an
attempt to retrieve and valorize elements of idealist thought. Instead, it constitutes a defense of Marxist “orthodoxy” (i.e. originality) against both positivism
and idealism.
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The first time the locution “philosophy of praxis” appears in the Notebooks,
in a long note on Machiavelli, it is enclosed within quotation marks that indicate
it is a borrowed term:
In his treatment, in his critique of the present, [Machiavelli] articulated
some general concepts . . . He also articulated a conception of the world that
could also be called “philosophy of praxis” or “neohumanism,” in that it
does not recognize transcendental or immanent (in the metaphysical sense)
elements, but is based entirely on the concrete action of man, who out of
historical necessity works and transforms reality.
(PN vol. II: 378)
Gramsci most certainly does not borrow the term “philosophy of praxis” from
Giovanni Gentile’s “La filosofia della prassi” of 1899, nor from Benedetto
Croce’s “Recenti interpretazioni della teoria marxistica” of the same year.
Certainly, Gentile and Croce had put the term into circulation and had engendered a fiery philosophical debate over it. They had, in a sense, appropriated the
term in order to articulate a theory of the idealist overcoming (superamento,
Aufhebung) of Marxism. Gramsci, however, with philological scruple indeed,
wants to bring the philosophy of praxis to its original meaning – the one
conceived by Antonio Labriola in his Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia of
1897.
Discorrendo was the last of a series of three essays that Labriola had devoted
to establishing the philosophical foundations of historical materialism. His first,
“In Memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti” of 1895, had laid the basis for what
Gramsci would later call “neohumanism” by translating Marxism in terms of
Vico’s Scienza Nuova (New Science), which “had reduced history to a process
which man himself makes through successive experimentation consisting in the
invention of language, religion, customs and laws” (Labriola 2000: 78).
Going back to Vico’s Scienza Nuova and to its philosophy of history, Labriola had stressed exactly the historicist dimension of historical materialism: “the
distinctive character of this work [Manifesto],” had argued Labriola, was not to
be found in its materialistic conception, but, rather, is “all contained in the new
conception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explained
and developed” (Labriola 2000: 37). The importance of such claim had not been
lost on Gramsci: “As for this expression ‘historical materialism,’ greater stress is
placed on the second word, whereas it should be placed on the first: Marx is
fundamentally ‘historicist’ ” (PN vol. II: 153).
In the second essay, “Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare” of
1896, Labriola had clarified, anticipating Gramsci once again, the confusion of the
term “materialism” in the context of Marx’s philosophy (see Dal Pane 1968: 328).
Against an idealist conception that opposes matter “to another higher or nobler
thing which is called spirit,” but also against a vulgar materialist conception of the
same which attempts to explain the whole of man “by the mere calculation of his
material interests” (Labriola 2000: 94), Labriola had proposed that matter was
Gramsci and Labriola
59
the by-product of human labor, and that the latter produced, as terms of a single
relation, both the real (material circumstances) and the ideal (will).
If Labriola’s two essays had already given material for thought to Gramsci, it
was especially the third one, written in 1899, that must have caught his attention
in a passage in which historical materialism was defined not merely as a tactic or
praxis, but, rather, as a “philosophy of praxis”:
The philosophy of [praxis] . . . is the [marrow] of historical materialism. It is
the immanent philosophy of things about which people philosophize. The
realistic process leads first from life to thought, not from thought to life. It
leads from work, from the labor of cognition, to understanding as an abstract
theory, not from theory to cognition. It leads from wants, and therefore from
various feelings of well-being or illness resulting from the satisfaction or
neglect of these wants, to the creation of the poetical myth of supernatural
forces, not vice-versa.
(Labriola 2000: 238)
Certainly “philosophy of praxis” was not a new term in philosophy (see
Lobkowicz 1967). However, when Labriola adopts the terminology, “philosophy
of praxis” is no longer the Aristotelic notion of life as incessant activity, unity
of energeia and entelechy (Mora 2002: 171), but, rather, an investigation of the
relation between philosophy and socialism that Marx’s last thesis on Feuerbach
had posited in the notorious slogan: “Philosophers have only interpreted the
world; the point is to change it.”
If the meaning of Marx’s thesis, for both philosophy and socialism, is that
philosophy needs now to be transcended and transformed into action, then
Labriola’s shift from praxis to a philosophy of praxis is of polemical importance: the genitive “of ” is not to be understood as a disjunction between the two
terms as in “philosophy about praxis,” but rather as a qualifying attribute of a
special kind of philosophy that is praxis in itself. To assume that philosophy
should be transformed into something else (i.e. praxis) means, to use Gramsci’s
words, to reduce Marxism to “popular Sturm und Drang,” into a populistic
search for “immediate weapons” of political struggle. It is to oppose dialectically philosophy and praxis, as if these were things in themselves, while
privileging the second term of antithesis over the first. Hence, Labriola’s apprehension in using the very word “philosophy,” which he would rather replace
with “Lebens-und-Welt-Anschauung, a conception of life and the universe”
(Labriola 2000: 204).
It is the fundamental limit of dialectical procedure, after all, to assume that
there is such a thing as philosophy, understood as a superstructure. Because for
Labriola, philosophy is nothing per se, it is neither structure nor superstructure.
Philosophy, rather, is a continuous process, labor, relation – between reality and
the human understanding of reality; and between such human understanding and
the reality accordingly modified by it. In fact, in the way of Vico, even reality and
humankind per se are merely irrelevant and “unknowable” (Labriola 2000: 257).
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They exist only as “mutual relations of movements” that philosophy catches in
their becoming (Labriola 2000: 253).
The very dialogical structure of Labriola’s third essay seems then much more
than a mere formal expediency. “Discorrendo,” whose dramatic structure is that
of a series of letters sent by Labriola in response to questions posed by Georges
Sorel, was published in Italy on December 6, 1897, by Benedetto Croce, an exstudent of Labriola; and then in 1899 in a French edition. This “sin of minor
literature” (Labriola 2000: 300) dramatizes already in the formal choice of the
epistolary genre a firm refusal of the book, product of:
This closing century, which is all business, all money, [which] does not
freely circulate thought unless it is likewise expressed in the revered business
form and endorsed by it, so that it may have for fit companions the bill of
the publisher and the literary advertisements from frothy puffs to sincerest
praise.
(Labriola 2000: 198)
The “discussion” immediately opposes to the fixity and immobility of the
book a Socratic idea of philosophy as relation, discourse. The stylistic frame of
the exchange well fits Labriola’s preference for spontaneity and flexibility. Here,
philosophy is not a monologue that exists prior to a relation, to a discourse, but,
rather, a game of continuous adaptability. It changes and becomes according to
the colloquial intercourse between interlocutors, it becomes “spontaneous, alive
and flexible speech, as fitted the occasion” (Labriola 2000: 300).
Programmatically, the function of Discorrendo is that of “clarifying” some of
the points already raised in Labriola’s previous two essays. Between the publication of the first in 1895 and the composition of the letters to Sorel, the discussion
opened by Labriola around theoretical Marxism and the philosophical legitimacy of historical materialism had continued with a number of authoritative and
polemical interventions in the debate: in June 1896 Croce himself had published
“Sulla concezione materialistica della storia”; in October 1897, Giovanni
Gentile positioned himself in the debate with “Una critica del materialismo
storico”, and in November 1897, having read already the manuscript of
Labriola’s Discorrendo, Croce had published “Per l’interpretazione e la critica
di alcuni concetti del marxismo.”
Aware of such contributions to the debate, Labriola refuses to confront those
texts in any explicit way, to the point that Gentile, in a letter to Croce, complains
about Labriola’s disregard of his Critica (Vigna 1977: 69). Implicitly and
between the lines, however, Discorrendo can certainly be seen as an answer to
both Croce and Gentile’s misreading of Marxism from an idealist position – a
position that only in the Postscript to the French edition of 1898, Labriola will
angrily label, this time in explicit response to Croce, as a form of “hedonism”
(Labriola 2000: 318) – Gramsci will later talk of “solipsism” regarding idealist
philosophy. At any rate, it seems exactly the intention to answer Croce’s and
Gentile’s idealism in an implicit way that leads Labriola to his first formulation
Gramsci and Labriola
61
of “philosophy of praxis” in Discorrendo. If such philosophy marks the end of
vulgar materialism, it also does so of idealism:
Historical materialism, then, or the philosophy of practice, takes account of
man as a social and historical being. It gives the last blow to all forms of
idealism which regard actually existing things as mere reflexes, reproductions, imitations, illustrations, results, of so-called a priori thought, thought
before the fact. It marks also the end of naturalistic materialism, using this
term in the sense which it had up to a few years ago.
(Labriola 2000: 238)
More than a confrontation with Croce and Gentile, however, “Discorrendo”
opens an interrogation, all internal to a theory of historical materialism, regarding the validity of dialectics, which Marx and Engels had inherited from the
idealist philosophy of Hegel. Already in a letter to Engels of June 13, 1894,
Labriola had raised his objections concerning dialectics:
You use as antithetical terms dialectic and metaphysical method. In order
to say the same, in Italy, instead of dialectic, one should say genetic
method. The word “dialectics” is degraded in common usage, understood
as the art pettifogging rhetoricians, and, in sum to sophistic Scheinbeweiskunst. Nothing is known here in Italy of the Hegelian tradition. But
in the present state of the philosophical culture in Germany, do you think
it is clear, obvious, fitting and exhausting the designation of “dialectic
method” in order to say what you want to say? You think it is clear that
you mean that such method is the shape of the thought that conceives of
things not as they are in themselves (factum, fixed species, category etc.)
but as they become? Is it clear that through such method also thought
should be understood as act in motion? I would believe that the designation of “genetic” conception would make things clearer; and for sure it
would make things more comprehensible, since the concept comprehends
both the real content of the things that become, and the logical–formal
virtuosism of thought that understands them as they become. With the
word “dialectics,” only the formal aspect is represented (a form that for
Hegel, as for all idealists, was everything). And as we say “genetic,” both
Darwinism and all materialistic conceptions of history can take their
proper place. I want to say that the expression “genetic method” leaves
uncontaminated the empirical nature of each individual formation: this is
what the vulgarizers of Darwinism, and the great admirers of the eunuch
Spencer, don’t seem to understand.
(Labriola 1949: 146–147)
What is presented at the beginning as a mere nominalistic qualm – should the
word “dialectics” be used in Italy? – soon unfolds in a precise denunciation of the
limits of dialectics: dialectics formalizes thought, loses its movement. The issue
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R.M. Dainotto
is handled again in “Discorrendo,” where dialectics is presented again as the
“obstacle” of historical materialism (Labriola 2000: 302). As a general distrust
for dialectics is often remarked upon by Labriola, its fundamental and most
serious problem remains that of generating misunderstanding. Dialectics, says
Labriola “throws into the saddest of confusions all those readers of Capital who
carry into its perusal the intellectual habits of the empiricists, metaphysicians, and
authors of definitions of entities conceived for all eternity” (Labriola 2000:
212–213). Dialectics make readers perceive antitheses as mere contradictions
(Labriola 2000: 213); but more importantly, dialectics runs the perpetual risk of
mistaking the terms of antithesis as if they were things in themselves, “entities
conceived in aeternum.” In other words, to say, as the dialectician does, that
knowledge proceeds from the confrontation and antithesis of Spirit (or thought)
and Nature (or matter), risks to mistake Spirit or Matter as things in themselves,
whereas for Labriola Spirit and Matter, man and nature, thought and material
reality exist only in their relationship: they are not, but rather become in their
relation to each other; they are made the one by the other, in the same way in
which there is not Thought but only thought of something, while there is humanly
no thing but what we think, make, and know. Here lies the mechanism of the
philosophy of praxis – a philosophy, that is to say, pitted against both idealists
and materialists, “people who mistake links and relations for beings and substances” (Labriola 2000: 238).
[. . .] In these statements lies the secret of a phrase used by Marx, which has
been the cause of much racking for some brains. He said that he had turned
the dialectics of Hegel right side up. This means in plain words that the
rhythmic movement of the idea itself (the spontaneous generation of
thought!) was set aside and the rhythmic movements of real things adopted, a
movement which ultimately produces thought. . . . The intellectual revolution, which has come to regard the processes of human history as absolutely
objective ones, is simultaneously accompanied by that intellectual revolution
which regards the philosophical mind itself as a product of history. This
mind is no longer for any thinking man a fact which was never in the
making, an event which had no causes, an eternal entity which does not
change, and still less the creature of one sole act. It is rather a process of
creation in perpetuity.
(Labriola 2000: 238–239)
The stake of the philosophy of praxis is exactly that of preserving a continuous
“flux of thought” (Labriola 2000: 253), always “in the making,” perpetually changing and “in process,” from the danger of reducing it into formal abstractions –
thesis and antithesis, things as fetishes which “had no causes,” and which “do not
change”:
There is always the temptation (or at least the danger) of personifying
[sostantivare] a process, or its terminal points [i suoi termini dialettici]. By
Gramsci and Labriola
63
means of an illusory projection, relations become things, and by cogitating
farther upon them these things become operative subjects.
(Labriola 2000: 245)
Indebted to Herbart (Poggi 1978), this science of becoming that is the philosophy
of praxis, truly clarifies then what Labriola’s first essay had meant by saying that
historical materialism was a new humanism. As Gramsci’s Notebooks would
notice, the central question is always one:
What is man? This is the first and fundamental question of philosophy.
How to answer? The definition can be found in man itself; that is, in
every single man. But is this correct? In each single man we can find
only what is in each “single man.” But what interests us here is not what
a single man is, which would mean, anyway, what a single man is in each
single moment. If we think of it, we see that what we mean by posing
such question is: what can man become; if, in other words, man can
determine his destiny, can “make himself,” can create a life for himself.
Let us say, then, that man is a process, and, precisely, the process of his
actions.
(Q10/II §54: 1343–1346)
The human in its historicity, in its becoming: this was the new science that,
through Vico as much as through Marx, Labriola had proposed as a philosophy of
praxis. In such becoming, the human is never Thought, as it is never Matter – it
becomes as the relation of a thought that makes and is made by a reality that is
the human world. Being a science of relationships, and since relationships are
endless – between man and nature, between man and labor, between labor and
social labor, between society and individual . . . – Marxism’s goal has to be “to
take society as a whole” as a totality of discreet relationships, avoiding “to
represent fixed things,” pre-existing, or independent from, the relationship itself
(Labriola 2000: 253).
One should never forget that any object of knowledge is not per se, but it is
only “il divenuto del divenire,” what becomes under the influence of other
forces. In itself and for itself, outside of the web of relations, that object is
unknowable, remains metaphysical illusion:
A queer thing (that so-called thing in itself), which we do not know, neither
today, nor tomorrow, which we shall never know, and of which we nevertheless know that we cannot know it. This thing cannot belong to the field
of knowledge, [for there can be no knowledge of the unknowable].
(Labriola 2000: 258)
Labriola does not spare Marxism itself from the criticism implied in the
philosophy of praxis. Positing a thing in itself, such as “economy,” as a given
structure from which all superstructures arise, is after all yet another schematic
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R.M. Dainotto
abstraction that misses how “the form of thought reveals itself alive and becoming” (Labriola 2000: 302). It is not that – Labriola insists – Marx or Engels fall
into such schematic abstractions. Instead, the vulgarizers are to be blamed. Yet,
despite the effort to rescue both Marx and Engels, the perilousness of dialectics,
its tendential formalization of “becoming,” of the “living,” is too present to
Labriola not to add a few words of warning:
I became firmly convinced of the great injury done to young minds by
steeping them without warning in formulae, diagrams, and definitions as
though these were the forerunners of real things, instead of leading them by
gradual and well weighed steps through a chosen department of reality and
first observing, comparing, and experimenting with actual objects before
formulating theories. In short, a definition placed at the beginning of a study
is meaningless. Definitions take on a meaning only when genetically
developed.
(Labriola 2000: 303)
What could this mean if not that dialectics, as a formal method, is empty? Marx
and Engels – Labriola insists – do know that, and dialectics is only a methodological tool in their philosophy of praxis, a reduction of the complexity of
the web of total relationships to conceptual “facts.” Yet, even as a tool, as a
transient moment in the unfolding of the philosophy of praxis, dialectic is, even
in the pedagogical praxis, a “great injury”: it begins from abstractions – thesis
and antithesis – as if the formula was the prototype of something really existent.
The “marrow” of historical materialism, in other words, must be recovered,
philologically or genetically indeed, not simply in the text, but in the intention of
Marx and Engels. This is an intention, to spell it clearly, that Marx and Engels
themselves may have confused and betrayed because of the influence on them of
the hegemonic philosophies of their time – positivism, and more specifically in the
case of dialectics, Hegelian idealism. Little matters what Marx and Engels wrote,
suggests Labriola’s “discussion”: scripta manent – unfortunately! More than their
writing, it is their thought that matters, a thought that philology needs to reconstruct, sometimes going against the grain of canonizations, monumentalizations,
reifications, and traditions: “Tradition must not weigh upon us like a nightmare. It
must not be an impediment, an obstacle, an object of a cult or of stupid reverence”
(Labriola 2000: 240). And later, in the “Postscript” to the French edition:
Here you have it: I am not the knight in white armor defending Marx. I
acknowledge all possible criticisms, I am myself a critic in what I say. I do
not deny the validity of the sentence: to know is to overcome.
(Labriola 2000: 327)
All of this Labriola is willing to accept – if, and only if, “overcoming” is
accompanied by philological scruples, or, as Labriola puts it, if one is aware that
“overcoming means to have well understood” (Labriola 2000: 327). As if to say
Gramsci and Labriola
65
that to go beyond has nothing to do with the revisionism of “that cretin Bernstein” (letter to Croce of January 8, 1900, cited in Gerratana 1974: 578), but
means, rather, philologically to understand a meaning correctly, behind the veil
of a lectio facilior that translated historical materialism into a form subservient
to dialectical idealism. Philosophy of praxis for Labriola is then not a form of
revisionism, but scrupulous philological, genetic work: the same founders of
historical materialism, after all, were theorizing not an “absolute eternal Truth,”
but rather a truth immanent to the very historical context of their own theorizing.
In other words, Marx and Engels themselves had written and produced theory in
a specific historical context, determined not only by certain contextual needs,
but also by the epochal hegemony of positivist and idealist philosophies. Labriola’s philological work is therefore that of cleansing the very words of Marx and
Engels from what was merely accidental, determined by the historical context in
which some words were produced; such work meant to recover, behind what
was accidental, the essential “marrow,” which a strenuous philological work had
to bring back to light.
If not revisionism, what is ultimately at stake in Labriola’s philosophy of
praxis is the possibility to understand philosophy and praxis, not in a dialectical,
but in a relational way – as interdependence. Can it be said that philosophy is
one thing and praxis another? For Labriola:
To think is to produce. To learn means to produce by reproduction. We
do not really and truly know a thing, until we are capable of producing it
ourselves by thought, work, proof, and renewed proof. We do this only by
virtue of our own powers, in our social group and from the point of view
which we occupy in it.
(Labriola 2000: 228)
To think and to act are not two separate activities that dialectics can put in a
relation; they are, rather, the very same process of becoming. Is not a philosophy
that mentions a proletarian revolution an act, something that “produces,” prepares and moves minds and spirit of an imagined community called “proletariat”
to see itself as one and reshape the world around? The problem, for Labriola, is
not that of an Aufhebung of one thing – philosophy – into another – praxis; but
rather Vico’s interdependence of scienza e vita.
Labriola, in other words, tries, through the locution “philosophy of praxis,” to
go around one of the most problematic aporias of Marxism. Roberto Finelli
summarizes well:
For Labriola it is essential that the refusal of philosophy recommended by
Engels and Marx in the German Ideology and in the Holy Family, and by
Marx in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the Antidühring, is somewhat
attenuated and marginalized. Their demand for a “totally practical praxis,”
and the consequent abandonment of any political praxis identified with
theory, had imposed on Marx and Engels the necessity to conceive of
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R.M. Dainotto
thought, and of philosophy more specifically, as the most abstract by-product
of the social division of labor. If labor is the most real and most true locus of
reality, since it is rooted in the materiality of life, all that is distinct and separated from that primary locus must accordingly become secondary at the
level of ontology and fallacious at the level of knowledge. Particularly fallacious and mystifying must be philosophy, which represents the most abstract
and speculative extreme of that derived and secondary sphere of life. The
consequence is an aporia, a contradiction inherent in historical materialism:
because the exclusion of philosophy from the sphere of truth disallows the
philosophy of historical materialism itself the possibility of claiming any
scientific validity. In other words, Marxism, at the same moment in which it
claims that the knowledge is an abstraction from praxis and labor, constitutes
itself, paradoxically, as an exception to its own claim.
(Finelli 2006: 78–80 my translation)
It is in fact from the very first appearance of the term “philosophy of praxis” that
Labriola starts insisting not on the idea of a philosophy that ought to become
praxis, nor on any idea of praxis as “immediacy,” as the fatalistic product of
material circumstances, but rather on the precise notion of a philosophy and a
praxis that are always inseparable one from the other, thus forming a relation, a
totality:
Historical materialism will be enlarged, diffused, specialized, and will have
its own history. It may vary in coloring and outline from country to country.
But this will do no great harm, so long as it preserves that kernel which is,
so to say, its whole philosophy. One of its fundamental theses is this: The
nature of man, his historical making, is a practical process. And when I say
practical, it implies the elimination of the vulgar distinction between theory
and practice.
(Labriola 2000: 225)
Historical materialism becomes, has a history; it is a process. In itself, it is nothing,
but what becomes “from country to country.” Its inner logic, its “marrow,” is “the
perfect coincidence of philosophy, that is to say of a thought critically aware of
itself, with the material that is known. In other words, it is the complete liquidation
of the traditional separations between science and philosophy” (Labriola 2000:
249). In this “perfect coincidence,” therefore, the separation of the two terms,
“philosophy” and “praxis,” is not an ontological one. It is, rather, a methodological
abstraction, separating, for simplifying things, what in fact should be thought of as
a totality:
This is historical materialism, taken as a threefold theory, namely as a philosophical method for the general understanding of life and the universe, as
a critique of political economy reducible to certain laws only because it
represents a certain historical phase, and as an interpretation of politics. . . .
Gramsci and Labriola
67
These three aspects, which I enumerate abstractly, as is always the custom
for purposes of analysis, form one single unity in the minds of the two
authors [Marx and Engels]. For this reason, their writings . . . never appear
to literary men of classic traditions to have been written according to the
canons of the art of book writing. These writings are in reality . . . fragments
of a science and politics in a process of continuous growth [divenire].
(Labriola 2000: 210)
So, if a philosophy of praxis is an immanent philosophy, it is also something
more than that: it is the re-interpretation of Marxism as a neohumanism, as a
philology; and the parallel cleansing of historical materialism from both natural,
empirical sciences, and from idealism itself.
In this rich and polemical sense Gramsci understands the philosophy of
praxis as the marrow of historical materialism: through it, Gramsci begins a reevaluation of so-called superstructural elements in his conception of Marxism.
Philosophy of praxis is also a vitalist conception of history that has little to do
with Gentile’s attualismo, and has more in common with Vico’s humanistic
understanding of history as a relation between Man and Reality. It seems as if,
along with the locution “philosophy of praxis,” Gramsci also inherits from
Labriola a distrust for the formal logic, and for the systemic fixity of dialectics
itself. If Labriola had abandoned dialectics altogether, Gramsci would be more
concerned with establishing a “real” dialectic (Golding 1988: 553–558); and if
the former had addressed his distrust directly to Engels, the latter contents
himself with addressing Bukharin. Yet, the address does touch the very marrow
of historical materialism:
One no longer understands the importance and meaning of dialectics
which, from doctrine of knowledge and marrow of historiography and
political science becomes degraded to a subgenre of formal logic and to a
form of elementary scholasticism. The meaning of dialectics can only be
understood in all its importance only if the philosophy of praxis can be
conceived as an integral and original philosophy that goes beyond (and
doing so includes comprehends all vital elements of) both idealism and
traditional materialism. If the philosophy of praxis is thought of as something subordinated to another philosophy, we will not have any new dialectics, which alone can determine and express the overcoming of all other
philosophies.
(Q11 § 22: 1425)
To what extent can a new dialectic be different than the old one? Which
dialectics, if not Labriola’s Viconian science of relationships, can adequately
determine and express Marxism’s overcoming of Hegelian idealism? And will
such Viconian new science be a science of dialectics after all, or even what
Marx understood as “dialectics”? As Labriola had warned his reader through the
Faustian epigraph to Discorrendo, his dialogue, apparently civilized and polite
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R.M. Dainotto
in its tone, was to pose a set of diabolical questions concerning the relation of
Marxism and dialectics – questions that still concern Gramsci now:
I’ve had enough of a sober tone,
it’s time to play the real devil again.
(Goethe, Faust)
Notes
1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
2 Translations of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, through Notebook X, are from the
Columbia University Press edition. All other translations from the Notebooks are my
own.
3 Translations from Labriola’s Saggi are from www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/
index.htm.
4 For instance, in the “Glossary” prepared for the 1966 Einaudi edition of Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, the term “philosophy of praxis” is understood as a prudent substitute for the proper “Marxism” in order to escape jail
censorship.
5
“Once again on the organic
capacities of the working class”
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
Michael Denning
“Once again on the organic capacities of the working class”: that was the title of
an article Antonio Gramsci published in Unità in October 1926, one of his final
publications before his arrest a month later. It was a reflection on the factory
occupations six years earlier, provoked by questions at a meeting of Communist
Party sympathizers: “Explain to us,” a blacksmith asks, “why we workers . . .
abandoned the factories which we had occupied in September 1920” (SPW2:
418). Gramsci’s reply points to the working-class capacities the factory occupations demonstrated – the capacity for self-government, the capacity to maintain
production, the capacity for defense, even the capacity for Sunday “theatrical . . .
performances, in which mise-en-scène, production, everything was devised by
the workers.”
It was really necessary to see with one’s own eyes old workers, who seemed
broken down by decades upon decades of oppression and exploitation, stand
upright even in the physical sense during the period of the occupation – see
them develop fantastic activities.
(SPW2: 419–20)
He also notes the failures: the inability to solve problems of communication,
transportation, and financing, the national and international problems that only a
challenge to state power could address.
Two and a half years later, after Gramsci finally received permission to write in
his prison cell, he opened his prison notebooks in June 1929 with two notes that
begin from the words of workers: “remember the answer,” he writes in the first
note, “given by a French Catholic worker” to the objection that Christ has affirmed
that there would always be rich and poor: “we will then leave at least two poor
persons, so that Jesus Christ will not be proved wrong” (Q1 §1; PN vol. 1: 100).
For Gramsci, this exchange opens an examination of the social doctrines of the
Catholic Church. In the second note, Gramsci turns to courtroom speeches of
working-class anarchists, and suggests that their rhetoric – their malapropisms,
their moral justifications (their assertion of a “right to well-being”), and their
“mixture of Prince Charming and materialistic rationalism” – “may be used to
show how these men acquired their culture” (Q1 §2; PN vol. 1: 100–1).
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M. Denning
Both of these passages remind us that Gramsci’s writings begin from his
engagement with working-class movements and subaltern life. However, they
might also be seen as emblems of contrary Gramscis: the first, a “workerist”
celebration of the revolutionary potential of proletarian direct action, characteristic of the “young” Gramsci of the Turin factory occupations; the second, a
“subalternist” reflection on the symbolic forms of resistance and accommodation
in the popular rhetoric of everyday life, characteristic of the incarcerated
Gramsci of the Notebooks. I would like to argue that these apparently dissimilar
passages on the “organic capacities of the working class” are linked by a theory
of work that is fundamental to Gramsci’s thought. Though Gramsci has most
often been seen as a theorist of the state and civil society, of the “superstructures” (religion, culture, education, intellectuals), he begins with and always
returns to – “once again,” as he puts in the title of the 1926 article – the capacity
for work and the capacities of workers.
It has been common to see a dramatic break in Gramsci’s writings between
the prophetic tone of his theorizations of the factory council movement in
Ordine Nuovo and the continually deferred formulations of the “modern Prince”
in the Prison Notebooks. There have been partisans of both Gramscis, but
all have generally assumed that work – the centerpiece of the factory council
writings – recedes in importance in the later Gramsci. There are only a handful
of references to the councils or to the Turin movement in the Notebooks. The
council gives way to the party, the factory to the ethical state. The voice of
the Communist worker – why did we abandon the factories? – recedes, and the
voices of the Catholic worker reflecting on Jesus and of the anarchist worker
mixing Prince Charming with materialist rationalism resonate.
In this chapter I will challenge this view and suggest that work remains central
to Gramsci’s thinking; moreover, far from being a weakness – a workerism, a productionism, a labor metaphysic – this focus on work is the source of his continuing
power. First, I will argue that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is a philosophy of
labor and depends on the central concept of the “forms of organization” of work
and workers. Second, I will show how his key concept of the “collective worker”
emerges from his reflections on the factory council movement and on Fordism.
Finally, I will argue that Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern can only be understood
as the dialectical counterpart of the “collective worker.” Through these concepts,
we might grasp what he means by the “organic capacities of the working class.”
What does it mean to say that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is a theory of
labor? Is it an ontology of labor? Critics of labor theories have insisted that they
depend on a notion of homo faber, a founding assumption that work is constitutive of humanity. For religious or romantic labor theories – work as the “curse of
Adam” or work as the form of human fulfillment, linked to art and play – this
may not be a telling rebuke; they are intended as ontological theories. But is
Marxism such an ontology of labor (as sometimes appears in the young Marx):
is it our nature to work? Not for Gramsci, I would argue. In fact, for Gramsci,
the organic ideology that links art and labor is a product of a certain form of
labor organization, the world of artisans and craft-workers.
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
71
Gramsci’s discussions of work are scattered throughout the Prison Notebooks,
but the key formulations really emerge in a series of notes in the middle of Notebook 4 (from Q4 §47 to Q4 §55), which was written in the summer of 1930. It was
during that summer that Gramsci’s miscellaneous reflections begin to coalesce in
essayistic notes that formulate the core concerns of his years in prison.1 In these
notes, Gramsci begins not from an ontology of labor – we work, therefore we are –
but from a historical account of the ever-transforming relations between work and
daily life. “New methods of work are inseparable from a specific mode of living
and of thinking and feeling life” (Q22 §11; SPN: 302), he writes, and he gives a
powerful account of the “brute coercion” that accompanied the transformation in
modes of production.
Who could describe the “cost” in human lives and in the grievous subjection of instinct involved in the passage from nomadism to a settled agricultural existence. The process includes the first forms of rural serfdom and
trade bondage, etc. Up to now all changes in modes of existence and modes
of life have taken place through brute coercion, that is to say through the
domination of one social group over all the productive forces of society.
The selection or “education” of men adapted to the new forms of civilisation and to the new forms of production and work has taken place by means
of incredible acts of brutality which have cast the weak and the nonconforming into the limbo of the lumpen-classes or have eliminated them
entirely.
(Q22 §10; SPN: 298)
New methods of work are not simply technical matters for Gramsci; they
involve the re-making of the body – “life in industry demands a general apprenticeship, a process of psycho-physical adaptation to the specific conditions of work,
nutrition, housing, customs, etc. This is not something ‘natural’ or innate, but has to
be acquired” (Q22 §3; SPN: 296). For Gramsci, this process reaches to sexuality
itself; the “sexual question” is “a fundamental and autonomous aspect of the
economic” (Q22 §3; SPN: 295). Furthermore, Gramsci understands schooling as a
process that conforms a society’s working bodies and working minds. Elementary
education, he writes, “hinges on the concept and the reality of work, because it is
work that grafts the social order (the ensemble of rights and duties) onto the natural
order” (Q4 §55; PN vol. 2: 226). And it is in this context that Gramsci insists on the
inseparability of mental and manual labor: “no occupation is ever totally devoid of
some kind of intellectual activity” (Q4 §51; PN vol. 2: 214); inversely
[s]tudying, too, is a job and a very tiring one, with its own special apprenticeship, not only of the intellect but of the muscular-nervous system as
well. . . . Would a thirty- or forty-year-old scholar be able to sit at a desk for
sixteen hours on end if, as a child, he had not acquired “compulsorily,”
through “mechanical coercion,” the appropriate psycho-physical habits.
(Q4 §55; PN vol. 2: 230, 227)
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M. Denning
In a sense, these psycho-physical habits – manual dexterities, sexual practices,
proverbial wisdoms – become the “organic capacities” of workers.
Thus the key concept in Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is less “work” or
“labor” than the “organization of work.” It is “the most widespread methodological error,” he writes, to look at the “intrinsic nature” of an activity rather than
at the “system of relations wherein this activity is located”: therefore “the worker
is not specifically characterized by his manual or instrumental work but by his
working in specific conditions and within specific social relations” (Q4 §49; PN
vol. 2: 200). The notion of the “organization of work” unites his early account of
the Turin factory councils with his prison reflections on the “American” methods
of Ford and Taylor.
The two sets of writings are in one sense quite different. Gramsci’s writings
about the factory councils emerged directly out of his experience as a participant
and organizer in the movement. Turin, one of the key metal-working cities of modernism, had a huge concentration of machinists and engineering workers (SPW1:
151, 312): a third of its population was involved in industry (Clark 1977: 27) and
Gramsci spent much of 1919 and 1920 among them, organizing and speaking in
Socialist Circle rooms, at party branch meetings, and in the occupied factories. His
knowledge of the new US production methods came in part from the same moment
– FIAT’s Agnelli had visited Ford in 1912 and had installed Italy’s first assembly
line – and in part from his reading of the Tocqueville of Taylorism, the French
Socialist André Philip, who had spent two years in the United States visiting factories before publishing a massive study of Fordism, Taylorism and the American
labor movement, Le problème ouvrier aux Etats-Unis in 1927.2
For Gramsci, the Turin factory councils and the “American system of production” were – despite their differences – revolutionary attempts to re-organize
work. “The Factory Council is the model of the proletarian State,” Gramsci
writes in October 1919, in the midst of a month when metal workers in “nearly
all the main factories in Turin” elected delegates (Clark 1977: 82).
All sectors of the labor process are represented in the Council, in proportion
to the contribution each craft and each labor sector makes to the manufacture of the object the factory is producing for the collectivity. . . . The
Council is the most effective organ for mutual education and for developing
the new social spirit that the proletariat has successfully engendered from
the rich and living experience of the community of labour.
(SPW1: 100)
A year later, in September 1920, when Turin workers occupied between 100 and
200 factories and continued to work, re-organizing production under their own
control, Gramsci wrote that “every factory has become an illegal State, a proletarian
republic living from day to day, awaiting the outcome of events” (SPW1: 341). For
Gramsci, the factory council was a new “organization of work” in several senses: it
was a new organization of workers, a new way of organizing production, and a
demonstration of the organic capacities of working-class life.
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
73
If the factory councils represented the revolutionary re-organization of work,
the American system represented by Ford and Taylor might be seen as the “passive
revolution,” the “revolution from above,” in the organization of work. “The
American phenomenon ... is,” he writes in Q4 §52, the note that summarized his
thoughts on “Americanism and Fordism,” “the biggest collective effort [ever made]
to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose unique in
history, a new type of worker and of man” (Q4 §52; PN vol. 2: 215). This is a
remarkable assertion; one might think that Gramsci would write this of the Soviet
Union rather than of the United States. After all, Gramsci’s note begins from a
reflection on the re-organization of labor in the Soviet Union, specifically on
Trotsky’s militarization of labor. Gramsci says Trotsky’s “practical solutions” – the
“labor armies” – “were wrong,” but that “his concerns” – “the principle of coercion
in the sphere of work” – “were correct” (Q4 §52; PN vol. 2: 215).3
Gramsci’s reflections on Fordism culminate with the key question:
The problem arises: whether the type of industry and organisation of work
and production typical of Ford is rational; whether, that is, it can and should
be generalised or whether, on the other hand, we are not dealing with a
malignant phenomenon which must be fought against through trade-union
action and through legislation?
(Q22 §13; SPN: 312)
As usual in the Prison Notebooks, the question is more developed than the
answer, though Gramsci does write: “it seems possible to reply that the Ford
method is rational” (Q22 §13; SPN: 312). Moreover, he had argued earlier that,
in contrast to the United States, in Italy, skilled workers had not only not
opposed the innovations in the labor process, but had themselves “brought into
being newer and more modern industrial requirements” (Q22 §6; SPN: 292).
Thus Gramsci recognized the affinities between Fordism and the factory councils; his first note on “Americanism” mentions that Ordine Nuovo “supported an
‘Americanism’ of its own” (Q1 §61; PN vol. 1: 169, later revised as “its own type
of ‘Americanism’ in a form acceptable to the workers,” Q22 §2; SPN: 286). One
incident stands as an emblem of this affinity: the attempt by FIAT founder Giovanni Agnelli – the Italian Henry Ford – to, in Gramsci’s words, “absorb the
Ordine Nuovo and its school into the FIAT complex and thus to institute a school
of workers and technicians qualified for industrial change and for work with
‘rationalized’ systems” (Q22 §6; SPN: 292).4 Though Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo
rejected Agnelli’s overture, critics of Gramsci have often suggested that his “productionism” is a mirror image of Taylorism. For example, in his fine study of
Gramsci’s theory of the councils, Darrow Schecter rightly notes the connections
between the early writings and the notes on Americanism and Fordism, and concludes that “Gramsci makes the same mistake that he made in 1919–1920 by
failing to clearly distinguish what is brutal and exploitative in the Taylor system
from what he thinks is progressive and indispensable in it for socialism”
(Schecter 1991: 170).5
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M. Denning
Is Gramsci a left-wing Taylorist? Is he too narrowly focused on the point of
production? Though the powerful shorthand of the famous line about the United
States – “Hegemony here is born in the factory” (Q22 §2; SPN: 285) – has inspired
a fundamental re-understanding of the politics of the labor process, it can seem
more limited than his other definitions of hegemony, encompassing state and civil
society, structure and superstructure. When linked to his early claims that “the new
society will be based on work” and that “tomorrow the work-places where the
producers live and function together will be the centers of the social organism”
(SPW1: 95), one might think that revolution must be born in the factory as well.
However, this is to misread the thrust of Gramsci’s work; he is neither a
Fordist/Taylorist nor a council communist. The key theoretical point in both the
factory council writings and the Americanism and Fordism notes is that the forms of
organization of labor must be understood historically, and that there is a continuing
dialectic between the way work is organized and the way workers organize themselves. Thus, it is a profound mistake to take the forms of workers’ organization as
permanent or natural (SPW1: 74–6). That, Gramsci argues, was the error of syndicalists and parliamentary socialists alike (SPW1: 74,76): the syndicalists fetishized the
union, the parliamentary socialists fetishized the party. But the union – as important
as it was and continues to be – is a form of worker’s organization built on “the need
to organize competition in the sale of the labour-commodity” (SPW1: 90), and thus
mirrors the logic of the labor market. The party, on the other hand, is a form rooted
in “the electoral markets with their empty and inconclusive speech-mongering”
(SPW1: 92), and the young Gramsci explicitly rejected the notion that the form of
the party would model a future socialist society:
To imagine the whole of human society as one huge Socialist Party, with its
applications for admission and its resignations, inevitably excites the fondness
for social contracts of many subversive spirits who were brought up more on
J.J. Rousseau and anarchist pamphlets, than on the historical and economic
doctrines of Marxism.
(SPW1: 142)
The historical breakthrough of the factory councils in the uprisings of 1917 to
1920 lay in part in the way they developed from the organization of the factory:
its labor processes and its work units. A new form based not on the sale of labor
power (SPW1: 90, 110, 114) but on what Gramsci called the “shopfloor way of
life” (SPW1: 96), the councils modeled new forms of “sovereignty” of the work
unit (SPW1: 91) which were rooted not in the “tumult and carnival atmosphere
of Parliament” (SPW1: 92), but which would “replace the person of the capitalist
in his administrative functions and his industrial power, and so achieve the
autonomy of the producer in the factory” (SPW1: 77). The factory council broke
from both of the imposed roles of parliamentary capitalism: neither wage earner
nor citizen, Gramsci argued, but rather producer and comrade (see, for example,
SPW1: 100). But the councils also demanded – like work itself – more than
passive solidarity on the part of workers. Gramsci wrote, six years later:
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
75
In normal mass activity, the working class generally appears as a passive
element awaiting orders. During struggles, strikes, etc., the masses are
required to show the following qualities: solidarity, obedience to the mass
organization, faith in their leaders, a spirit of resistance and sacrifice. . . .
The occupation of the factories required an unprecedented multiplicity of
active, leading elements.
(SPW2: 418–9)
Gramsci’s historicist analysis of the factory councils would warn against
fetishizing the council form, and I think this explains his recognition of the
limits of the council form, the limits of a workplace-centered view of society.
The factory council depends on the “concentration” of workers, not only in
specific factories but in specific cities. In the earliest essays on the councils, he is
already trying to figure the complex relation of factory to neighborhood (through
the question of the relation of factory councils to ward councils (SPW1: 67), as
well as the relation to “non-concentrated workers,” including domestics, waiters
and other service workers, and of course to rural workers outside Turin (here he
tries to link the factory occupations to land seizures, see SPW1 141). Inside and
outside the factory becomes a leitmotif of Gramsci’s writings of the mid-1920s.
By the time of his incarceration, Gramsci’s conception of the “organization of
work” has extended to a new reflection on the international division of labor. The
Southern question is not simply the question of Italy’s regional inequalities and the
need for an alliance between northern workers and southern peasants; it is also the
question of Italian emigration as a fundamental part of world capitalism, the “role
of Italy as a producer of labor reserves for the entire world” (Q1 §149; PN vol. 1:
228–9). Here we might rethink his curious insistence on the importance of Corradini’s conceptualization of Italy as a “proletarian nation.”
One can see this trajectory of thought in Gramsci’s use of the relatively rare but
nonetheless central concept of the “collective worker.” It first emerges in Q9 §67,
written in 1932, a note that was part of the “Past and Present” rubric (Q9 §67;
SPN: 201–2), a group of reflections on the failures of the Italian left, which were
interwoven with the notes on the history of the subaltern classes. In Q9 §67,
Gramsci writes,
In a critical account of the post-war events, . . . show how the movement to
valorise the factory by contrast with (or rather independently of) craft
organisation corresponded perfectly to the analysis of how the factory
system developed given in the first volume of the Critique of Political
Economy.
In other words, he suggests that the factory council movement rather than the
craft union corresponds to the modern factory system analyzed in Marx’s
Capital. The reason, Gramsci goes on to argue, is that, as a result of the workshop division of labor in detail, “the complexity of the collective work passes
the comprehension of the individual worker”; but at the same time, “work that is
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M. Denning
concerted and well organised gives a better ‘social’ productivity, so that the
entire work-force of a factory should see itself as a ‘collective worker.’ ”
“These were the premises,” Gramsci argues, “of the factory movement,
which aimed to render ‘subjective’ that which was given ‘objectively.’ ” He
insists that the “junction” between “the requirements of technical development”
and the interests of the ruling class are merely “transitory”; the new technical
requirements can be “conceived in concrete terms . . . in relation to the interests
of the class which is as yet still subaltern.” Indeed, “the very fact that such a
process is understood by the subaltern class” is a sign that the class is “no longer
subaltern, or at least is demonstrably on the way to emerging from its subordinate position.” “The ‘collective worker,’ ” Gramsci concludes, “understands that
this is what he is, not merely in the individual factory but in the broader spheres
of the national and international division of labour” (Q9 §67; SPN: 202).
This notion of the collective worker will turn up in Gramsci’s later revisions
of notes on Bukharin’s Popular Manual and on Americanism and Fordism, but I
want to note three particular aspects of this important note.6 First, Gramsci’s 1932
reconsideration of the council movement does not reject the politics of the movement, but neither does it simply reiterate them. Rather he recasts the council
movement historically and theoretically as a moment in the dialectic between the
changing organization of work and the forms of self-organization of workers, a
dialectic he finds in Capital. Second, it is in this reconsideration of the council
movement that he sees the “collective worker” not only through the lens of the
factory, but through the figure of the “international division of labor,” a concept
which, as I have argued elsewhere, is central to any contemporary re-imagination
of the working class (Denning 2007: 143–4). Third, in this passage, the notion of
a collective worker is articulated with Gramsci’s other key concept in theorizing
the working or “instrumental” classes, the subaltern.
For Gramsci was not just the theorist of the emerging “collective worker.” His
notes on the new modes of work that Fordism dictated are interwoven with “Notes
on the History of the Italian Workers’ Movement,” and the “History of Subaltern
Classes.” In his accounts of the “new methods” of work, he always noted the resistance of workers to that reshaping, and argued that “every trace of independent
initiative on the part of subaltern groups” was “of incalculable value for the integral
historian” (Q25 §2; SPN: 54–5). Curiously, the handful of celebrated short notes
collected in Notebook 25 – “On the Margins of History: History of Subaltern Social
Groups” – are rarely linked with either the factory council writings or the notes on
Americanism and Fordism; their sober realism seems far from the productivist
utopias of socialist Taylorism. Yet they were, for the most part, first drafted in the
summer of 1930 at the same time as the “Past and Present” reflections on the Italian
left and the key note (Q4 §52) that summed up his reflections on Americanism and
Fordism. To separate Gramsci’s reflections on the subaltern groups from his
account of the re-organization of work falls into the precise failing that he identifies
in the work of the Belgian socialist and labor educator, Henrik de Man.
De Man is one of the four great contemporary socialist interlocutors of the
Prison Notebooks: the others are the Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin, the
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
77
French anarcho-syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, and the Italian “post-Marxist”
philosopher Benedetto Croce.7 De Man’s The Psychology of Socialism (1926)
(which Gramsci knew from the 1929 Italian translation of the German original)
was, and remains, one of the major socialist theoretical works of the 1920s, though
it has been eclipsed by the New Left revival of the works of Lukács and Korsch.
De Man’s powerful socialist critique of Marxism is based not only on a profound
understanding of the actualities of working-class life but on a full-fledged labor
metaphysic: “all the social problems of history are no more than variants of the
eternal, the supreme, the unique social problem – how can man find happiness, not
only through work, but in work.” For de Man, factory councils and soviets,
worker’s control and industrial democracy were attempts to solve this problem,
essential preliminaries “to the revival of delight in labor.” And de Man is highly
critical of Marxist admirers of Taylor: sounding much like New Left critics of
Gramsci, de Man argues that “In Marxist doctrine, the ‘ideal workman’ is, at any
rate in respect of his position in the industrial enterprise, remarkably and suspiciously like the ‘ideal workman’ of the ultra-capitalist Taylor system” (de Man
1928: 65, 79, 69).
Given that prescient critique, what does Gramsci say of de Man’s sense of
the capacities of workers? In Q3 §48, one of the “Past and Present” notes that discusses the “history of subaltern classes,” Gramsci asks “a fundamental theoretical
question”: “can modern theory be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ sentiments of
the masses?” (Q3 §48; PN vol. 2: 51). For de Man the answer is yes, and Gramsci
recognizes that de Man opposes “modern theory” – that is, Marxism – by appealing to the empirical reality of subaltern sentiments: the fact that popular common
sense rarely transcends traditional conceptions of life and that popular leaders
often embody this taken-for-granted folklore. Gramsci does not disagree with de
Man’s account of subaltern sentiments. “De Man,” Gramsci writes, “demonstrates
the need to study and work out the elements of popular psychology,” though
Gramsci adds that it should be done “historically and not sociologically, actively
(that is, in order to transform them by means of education into a modern mentality) and not descriptively, as he [de Man] does” (Q3 §48; PN vol. 2: 49). It is this
spirit that places the voices of the French Catholic worker and the Italian anarchist
workers at the very beginning of the Prison Notebooks. However, de Man’s
“stance,” Gramsci writes in a subsequent note, “is that of the folklore scholar who
is always afraid that modernity will destroy the object of his study” (Q4 §33; PN
vol. 2: 174) One is tempted to remark that some contemporary subalternists are
more de Manians than Gramscians. De Man’s defense of “joyful work” is, for
Gramsci, nostalgia for a craft era that is already past. Gramsci rarely romanticized
work: he stressed its coercive, wearing and brutal character. He also rarely
imagined a world without work; he lived in the realm of necessity, not the realm
of freedom, though he was fascinated by popular utopias of abundance without
work, sorting those notes under his “history of subaltern social groups.” Gramsci
seems closer to the famous slogan of his contemporary, the Swedish migrant
worker and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) songwriter, Joe Hill: Don’t
mourn, organize.
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Gramsci’s lasting theoretical accomplishment lies in the unraveling of the
dialectic between the way work is organized and the way workers organize: “the
modern state abolishes many autonomies of the subaltern classes,” he writes, “but
certain forms of the internal life of the subaltern classes are reborn as parties,
trade unions, cultural associations” (Q3 §18; PN vol. 2: 25). If hegemony is born
as much in the school, the office, and the mall as in the factory, Gramsci’s theory
of the forms of organization of work should lead us to attend to new labor
processes, new workplaces, and new forms of worker’s self-organization, which
mark the refusal of subalternity.
For Gramsci reminds us that the organization of work – even joyless, alienated
work – and the organization of workers produces capacities that transcend that
work. “The active man of the masses” has two contradictory consciousnesses, he
writes in the essay-long note, “Some preliminary points of reference” (Q11 §12):
“one, superficially explicit and verbal, which he has inherited from the past and
uncritically absorbed,” fossilized fragments of obsolete conceptions of the world,
and “one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all
his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world” (Q11 §12;
SPN: 333). Across an international division of labor that continually re-organizes
work and brutalizes workers, the subaltern is usually more visible than the
“collective worker.” But that was also true of the moment in 1926, when under
intensified fascist repression, Gramsci recalled the occupation of the factories as a
reminder, “once again,” of the organic capacities of the working class.
Notes
1 Gramsci later re-copied and recast these notes on work in two main places. The ones on
education are re-copied and recast in the famous short Notebook 12 on intellectuals and
schooling; the ones on Fordism end up in the thematic Notebook 22 on Americanism and
Fordism. Throughout these notes, there is a rhetorical hesitation between psychological,
educational and management vocabularies: at times, Gramsci speaks of the repression
of instincts and animality, echoing a popular Freudianism; at other times, he speaks of
regulation, manipulation and management, echoing popular Taylorism.
2 Gramsci’s other sources on Taylorism and the US labor movement seem to be Henry
Ford’s own writings. Gramsci had French translations of My Life and Work and Today
and Tomorrow (see PN vol. 1: 468), as well as European works on the US by André
Siegfried and Lucien Romier (see LP vol. 1: 257). By the summer of 1929, Gramsci
had obtained Philip’s book, and somewhat later the 1931 Italian translation of
H. Dubrueil’s Robots or Men? A French Workman’s Experience in American Industry
(PN vol. 3: 464).
3 Moreover, Gramsci explicitly shared Trotsky’s interest in Americanism and in the need
for a cultural revolution in the habits and customs of “everyday life.” Gramsci strenuously rejected a cultural critique of Americanism: it is wrong, he argued, to read Ford’s
moralizing or the US’s prohibition and sexual morality as versions of “puritanism.”
4 This was apparently connected to Agnelli’s offer in the fall of 1920 to turn FIAT into a
cooperative, an offer provoked by the factory occupations and rejected by the FIAT
workers (Gramsci argued against the plan). There is a second incident that serves a similar
function in Gramsci’s writings about this a decade later: the overture to Ordine Nuovo by
the young radical, Massimo Fovel, who later comes to see Italian fascism as the vehicle
for Americanism. See Gramsci’s note on Fovel (Q1 §135, later revised as Q22 §6).
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
79
5 Schecter also cites the Italian labor historian Stefano Musso, arguing that there is a
small difference between Taylor’s “trained gorilla” and Gramsci’s new type of worker
(Schecter 1991: 177 n. 79). Carl Levy also suggests that “Gramsci uncritically transferred the factory system of capitalism into his own future socialist commonwealth,”
citing Gramsci’s enthusiasm for the 1919 essays on Taylorism and the councils by the
anarchist Pietro Mosso. According to Levy, Mosso saw the councils as an opportunity
to separate the scientific kernel of Taylorism from its capitalist content. However, Levy
is not really able to show that Gramsci shared Mosso’s views; it is worth noting that
Gramsci does not mention Mosso’s essays in his prison notebooks (Levy 1999: 179).
6 Gramsci returns to this notion of the “collective worker” in two subsequent notes that
revise earlier formulations. The first is the note titled “Quantity and Quality,” part of
his critique of Bukharin’s Popular Manual, the leading introduction to Marxism of the
time. In Q11 §32, Gramsci rewrites an earlier note (Q4 §32) dealing with the claim by
Engels and Bukharin that a social aggregate is greater than the sum of its parts. Rejecting the mechanism of Bukharin’s account, Gramsci turns to the factory in Capital as a
means of thinking the quality of the collective, and imagines society on the model of
the factory:
In the factory system there exists a quota of production which cannot be attributed
to any individual worker but to the ensemble of the labour force, to collective
man. A similar process takes place for the whole of society, which is based on the
division of labor and of functions and for this reason is worth more than the sum
of its parts.
(SPN: 469)
The second is in Q22 §11, the thematic notebook on Americanism and Fordism, where
he recopies and slightly revises the key note I have already discussed: Q4 §52, the first
to be titled “Americanism and Fordism.” Here it appears from the point of view of the
industrialist:
It is in the industrialist’s interest to put together a stable, skilled work force, a
permanently attuned industrial ensemble, because the human ensemble is also a
machine that cannot be dismantled too often and renewed cog by cog without
serious losses.
(PN vol. 2: 216)
When Gramsci recopies the passage in Q22 §11, he inserts a parenthetical “(the
collective worker)” to specify “the human ensemble.”
7 One might add Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, but their works are directly engaged
only rarely.
6
Power and democracy
Gramsci and hegemony in America
Benedetto Fontana
I
Antonio Gramsci is the theorist of the failure in Italy of two revolutions: the first
is that of the Risorgimento and the liberal state it produced, and the second is
that of socialism. In Gramsci’s mind both revolutions, and both failures, are
related (see Clark 1977 and Miller 1990). Italian liberalism created a weak
Italian state, as well as a weak and desiccated political culture. State and society
were backward and underdeveloped because, to Gramsci’s mind, they lacked the
major defining element of modernity, a politically aware and active populace.
The absence of a popular mass base produced a wide gulf between the state and
its institutions and the life and everyday activity of large strata of society. It is
this weakness that made possible both the rise of fascism and the defeat of
socialism and democracy.
Hegemony, civil society and the war of position – and its related notions of
direzione/dominio (force and consent) – are concepts that deal with the strength and
resilience of a political order. Gramsci developed them by means of a theoretical,
political, cultural and historical investigation into the causes and sources of Italian
political failure and weakness.
This point is significant in weighing the status of Gramsci in the contemporary US. For state and society in the US have been and remain strong and powerful. The divorce between the state and its social bases, and between the elites
and their followers, that Gramsci saw as the major flaw in the formation of the
state in Italy does not exist in the United States. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s critique
of state and civil society in Italy provides a fruitful explanation and analysis for
the strength of their counterparts in the United States. Gramsci’s analysis of the
absence of a hegemonic civil society in Italy in the late nineteenth century and in
the early decades of the twentieth century functions as a mirror image of the
strength and endurance of American political and social order.
From the nation’s inception in its war of independence to its two most significant and destabilizing crises, the Civil War of 1861–1865 and the Depression
years of the 1930s, its political and economic elites have managed to establish
and to maintain a close and intimate relation with the lower strata of society.
Social and class conflict in the United States does not undermine or delegitimate
Power and democracy
81
the state; rather, such contests, by widening and expanding the electoral and
political bases of the various elites, place the system on an increasingly solid
foundation of mass support. And even though American history is permeated
with class, ethnic and racial violence, the political has not only remained stable
but its legitimating myths and ideologies of democratic inclusion, progressive
individualism, and economic opportunity have successfully repelled and outlasted competing systems of belief. In Gramsci’s terms, both state and society
have managed to maintain a “proper” balance or equilibrium (Q2 §7: 8661), such
that opposition groups could not manage to pose a dangerous threat to the sociopolitical order in the United States.
Since the publication in 1967 of John Cammett’s ground-breaking work,
Antonio Gramsci and the Orgins of Italian Communism, interest in Gramsci in the
US has increased exponentially. Scholars in many fields of research have produced
works on Gramsci’s major political and theoretical concepts, while others have
introduced these ideas into their fields of inquiry. Thus, we find Gramsci acting as
an important and even a central intellectual figure in areas ranging from literary
studies to history to international politics. Joseph Buttigieg’s translation into
English of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, an endeavor of great learning as well as
deep passion, is the crowning proof of the continuing significance of Gramsci in
cultural, intellectual and academic circles in the United States.
Antonio Gramsci is the only major Marxist of the twentieth century whose
works and ideas have survived the fall of Marxism and socialism. There are
many reasons for this, some political, others intellectual. The political reason is
that in the United States, where Marxism and socialism have always been
viewed as marginal to mainstream politics, Gramsci is a figure whose life and
work are not tainted with Stalinist totalitarianism. Even Gramsci’s support of the
Bolshevik Revolution and of Lenin is seen in terms of the context of his era.
Similarly, his communism is seen as peculiarly Italian or Western, and quite
unlike that expounded by Lenin in the “East” (Q2 §7: 866). And the second
reason, this one intellectual, is that his major ideas and concepts have assumed
a role and significance independent of the time and place in which they were
formulated. As a revolutionary and then as an inmate in Mussolini’s prison
system Gramsci developed ideas to be used as weapons and as instruments in
the on-going struggle for power. Yet the intellectual force and the originality
of his writings, which exhibit both a profound depth and a sweeping breadth,
propelled Gramsci to a status as a thinker whose work has become central to
contemporary cultural and intellectual life in the United States. That Gramsci
has achieved such a position is testimony to the intellectual resilience of his
thought, and it is also an irony that Gramsci himself would have found amusing,
as he saw his intellectual effort as an element of his revolutionary activity, not as
a form of mere literary or academic work.
In effect, Gramsci is not only indelibly embedded in American scholarly
discourse; he is also a major presence in contemporary polemical and political
conflicts between conservatives, rightists and republicans on the one hand, and
left liberals, progressives and the left, on the other.
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B. Fontana
II
When we think about the reception of Gramsci in the United States, two paradoxes,
one political, the other conceptual and intellectual, immediately come to mind.
Gramsci has become quite famous among right-wing thinkers, and religious and
conservative ideologies. In the conservatives’ polemics Gramsci’s ideas, especially
those regarding hegemony and attendant ideas such as the organic intellectual, are
used to attack liberals and the left generally and at the same are seen as a model to
be emulated. Thus, former Republican presidential candidate and commentator
Patrick Buchanan, and conservative ideologues such as John Fonte, James Cooper
and Samuel Francis warn of the danger of Gramsci’s ideas to US society by attacking its cultural and moral/intellectual structure. They select from the Selections
from the Prison Notebooks to show how Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, organic
intellectuals and civil society are disseminated by the left to undermine and to infiltrate cultural, academic and political institutions. Electronic mass media polemicists
of the right such as Rush Limbaugh take this vulgarization even further. Gramsci is
used to attack their left/liberal opponents as anti-American and anti-Christian, as
(Marxist) wolves in (democratic) sheep’s clothing.
Representative of this conservative understanding of Gramsci is James
Cooper, who writes:
Seventy years ago, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) wrote
the most important mission for Socialism was to “capture the culture.”
By the end of World War II, the liberal Left had managed to capture not
only the arts, theater, literature, music, and ballet, but also motion pictures,
photography, education and the media.
Through its control of the culture, the Left dictates not only the answers,
but the questions asked. In short, it controls the cosmological apparatus by
which most American[s] comprehend the meaning of events.
This cosmology is based on two great axioms: the first is there are no
absolute values in the universe, no standards of beauty and ugliness, good
and evil, The second axiom is – in a Godless universe – the Left holds
moral superiority as the final arbiter of man’s activities.
(1990: 3)
In a similar vein, John Fonte of the Hudson Institute writes that Gramsci’s
thought is radically subversive of the moral and intellectual foundations of the
socio-political order in the US as well as antithetical to its history and to its
future trajectory. He notes that Gramsci’s thought is based on
“Absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truth, standards and
human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no
absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside
of a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”
(2000: 17)
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Fonte sees Gramsci’s historicism as acting as an acid on the cultural, moral,
political and educational institutions of US society. The view that human nature
acquires its specificity, particularity and subjectivity (its consciousness as a
concrete and embodied self) within a social and historical context, and that this
context is in constant movement as the product of various subjective and objective forces, is a deadly assault on the stability and continuity of Western history
and culture which is provided by Christian and classically liberal values.
Finally, Patrick Buchanan sees Gramsci as a disciple of Marx “who has lately
begun to receive deserved recognition as the greatest Marxist strategist of the
twentieth century” (2002: 76). Buchanan sees in the Prison Notebooks “blueprints
for a successful Marxist revolution in the West” (ibid.). He equates what he calls
“our cultural revolution” with Gramsci’s notion of the war of position. Buchanan
believes that American leftists have learned Gramsci’s lesson, with its emphasis
on culture, intellectuals and civil society, and paraphrasing Bill Clinton’s 1992
presidential campaign slogan – “It’s the economy, stupid!” – Buchanan says that
this lesson is summarized in the slogan “It’s the culture, stupid!” (ibid.: 77).
Buchanan concludes his discussion of Gramsci by noting that “the Gramscian
revolution rolls on, and to this day, it continues to make converts” (ibid.: 78). This
revolution is what Buchanan and Fonte call the “long march through the institutions,” a phrase, as Joseph Buttigieg has pointed out, that does not occur in
Gramsci (2005: 50). These institutions are located precisely within the sphere of
civil society: arts and letters, schools, universities, religious groups, cinema,
theater, electronic and print media. Buchanan and Fonte are concerned by
Gramsci’s emphasis on the centrality of religion in civil society, its resilience and
moral/cultural force because of its ability to connect with the common sense of
ordinary people.
To these authors it is the university and academia that are the major instruments of the Gramscians’ attempt to undermine the culture in order to introduce
a new conception of the world supported by new hegemonic institutions. The
academy has imposed an “inclusive” curriculum and politically “correct” discourse. And it has generated such new ideological trends as multi-culturalism,
ethnic studies, diversity, postmodernism, relativism, and feminism. The avantgarde of this Gramscian revolutionary transformation is the university, which
has replaced the political party as the modern Prince (Fonte 2000: 50; see also
Buttigieg 2005: 49). The demise of a viable revolutionary left and the supersession of Marxist and socialist ideology have shifted the locus of radical action
from the specifically and overtly political institutions to the educational and
cultural structures of society (see Donadio 2007). These latter perform basic
socialization and legitimating functions without which the existing systems of
power could not exist and without which their power could not be reproduced
and transmitted. Thus the university is the new “collective intellectual” (see
Q13 §1: 1555–1561) and as such it generates the organic intellectual the left
requires to generate the new hegemonic conception of the world, one that is
replacing the conventional narrative of liberal democracy (Donadio 2007:
50–53).
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In this regard, it is obvious that the right sees Gramsci as a bête noire. It is
also obvious that this depiction of Gramsci as an ogre is a useful sword to wield
within the American cultural and political context. Whether the struggle takes
place in the political, social or educational field, linking one’s opponent to
Gramsci, the only Marxist whose ideas and life continue to resonate throughout
the globe, is a common practice, one that predated the arrival of Gramsci to the
US. But what is more important, and certainly ironic, is that the view of Gramsci
and the left as waging a war of position against US society and culture is a
portrayal that more appropriately fits the tactics and strategy of the conservative
right rather than the liberal left. For beginning with the founding of the journal
National Review by William F. Buckley Jr., to Nixon’s calling forth of the
“silent majority” in the early 1970s, to the Reagan presidential years, to the rise
of fundamentalist and Christian Right, to the “culture wars” of the past 20
years,2 the right in the US has generated a plethora of intellectuals and opinion
makers organized in think tanks, newspapers and various media outlets, research
institutes, prestigious universities such as Stanford and Chicago, religious
denominations and sects,3 government agencies from the cultural (NEH and
NEA) to the economic (taxing power and tax subsidies) all of which represent
the classic application of the strategy of the war of position. In other words,
notwithstanding their protestations, Buchanan, Fonte et al. recognize the utility
and efficacy of Gramsci in the right’s pursuit of political and cultural hegemony.
III
A second, and more telling, point is that both the left and the right misunderstand
Gramsci. In the United States the progressive left is associated with such issues
as radical feminism, identity politics, multi-culturalism, diversity, pro-immigrant
policies (see Hollinger 1995, and Rorty 1998). In American politics the left often
invokes the formula of “race, gender and class.” The formula means that
ethnic/racial minorities, women and gays, and the poor are subordinate groups
that the system oppresses and relegates to the margins. The category of class,
however, for all practical purposes has dropped out of the radical left’s language
and is no longer seen as a central element in political conflict. It is also suggested
by some on the left – Terry Eagleton, for example – that the political program for
equality and for justice has changed into a post-Marxist, post-colonial struggle
that encompasses issues and ideas unknown to Marx and his successors (Eagleton
2007; see also Hardt and Negri 2004: 219–227). Yet to see Gramsci as the grandfather of such a politics is to misread the most important concept for which he
is noted. These issues, and the social movements that they promote, may be
progressive, and they certainly stand in opposition to the conservative and rightist
agenda;4 yet the ideas they represent have little or no connection to Gramsci’s
thought. Indeed, quite the contrary.
Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony operates on two separate but closely
related levels. It describes the process by which alliances and coalitions are
made and remade: a process that presupposes not merely the articulation but,
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crucially, the aggregation of interests. Such a process involves moving from
particular to general or universal interests. The movement from the particular to
the universal, from what Gramsci calls the “economic–corporative” to the hegemonic, is precisely a movement from a pre-political stage to the political. It also
involves, at the second level, the generation of a given conception of the world
and its consequent proliferation and dissemination throughout society. Alliance
formation demands the recognition of common interests, common values, as
well as the generation of an encompassing discourse and narrative. Thus the
hegemonic is the political, and to become hegemonic is to become political, that
is, a conscious, disciplined actor or subject capable of ruling and being ruled (to
use an Aristotelian formulation).
Diametrically opposed to the practice and consciousness of a hegemonic group
is what Gramsci calls the subaltern, or a subordinate group (Q3 §25: 2283–2289).
The subaltern is characterized by fragmentation, disaggregation, incoherence, and
disorganization. Gramsci attempted to discover within Italian history and society
instances of subordinate group activity that might reveal incoherent or instinctive
forms of rebellion, discontent and revolt. Such instances, Gramsci shows, are
reflected or refracted through the prisms of the prevailing hegemonic group, which
perceives them in negative terms, thus the language used to characterize the group
or its activity will reinforce the distinction between hegemonic and subordinate.
Gramsci writes:
The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily disaggregated and
episodic. Undoubtedly these groups have historically shown a tendency
toward unification if only provisionally. Yet this tendency is continually
undermined by the dominant groups. . . . The subaltern groups are always
subject to the initiatives of the dominant groups even when they rebel or
revolt.
(Q25 §2: 2283)
In any case, the subaltern represents the inner core of Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony: he wants to discover within existing society, and within the prevailing hegemonic system, the germs that might offer opposition to the prevailing
hegemony, and that might eventually develop the capacity to pose the question
of power to the ruling groups. Fragmentation is the condition of those without
power and without property, and so the problem is how to overcome the
fragmentation and disorganization that forestall the principled and coherent
opposition necessary to establish a new order.
Throughout his writings, including his pre-prison work, Gramsci focuses on
the incoherence and disorganization of subordinate groups. He begins with subalternity and moves to hegemony. That is to say that he begins with fragmentation and tries to discover ways in which a conscious and coherent subject can be
identified and cultivated such that it is capable of rule (see Fontana 2002:
25–40). This movement from subaltern status to self-rule and eventually to
hegemonic rule becomes possible once the subordinate groups develop from
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within their own stratum of intellectuals. These organic intellectuals will transform the fragmented subaltern groups into a disciplined and critical actor. In
Gramsci’s words, they act
To raise the intellectual level of ever growing strata of the populace, to give a
personality to the amorphous mass element. This means working to produce
elites of intellectuals of a new type, which arise directly out of the masses, but
remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the
corset.
(PN: 340)
The production of organic intellectuals gives a “personality” to subaltern groups,
one that will enable them to acquire “critical self-consciousness” (PN: 334) and
consequently to become both self-ruling and ruling. To acquire such a personality means to move from fragmentation and disaggregation to integration and
coherence. As Gramsci writes in a pre-prison essay,
Consciousness of self which is opposed to others, which is differentiated
and, once having set itself a goal, can judge facts and events other than
in themselves but also in so far as they tend to drive history forward or
backward. To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself,
to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist as
an element of order – but of one’s own order and one’s own discipline in
striving for an ideal.
(SPW1: 10–13)
The question of personality defines Gramsci’s project. The dynamic interaction
between subaltern action and hegemonic, the conflict between the subordinate
group trying to define itself and to overcome itself simultaneously as it encounters
resistance from the hegemonic group as it tries to maintain its integrity, constitute
a process by which the various and differing subaltern groups slowly and painfully
become aware of themselves and the world, and overcome their incoherence
and isolation to form a personality capable of self-rule and thereby capable of
hegemonic rule.
IV
The politics of the left, characterized by identity issues, diversity and multiculturalism, rather than offering an alternative to the prevailing order, is the
purest reflection of that order. The social and political system in the United States
is best understood in terms of the analysis provided by Alexander Hamilton and
James Madison in The Federalist Papers. This is a series of essays written in
1787–1788 whose purpose was to mobilize public opinion to support and to ratify
the newly written US Constitution. In Federalist no. 10, Madison notes that
factional conflict is endemic to society, and thus cannot be eliminated without
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also eliminating liberty (see Dahl 1956). As he says, “The latent causes of faction
are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into
different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil
society” (Hamilton et al. 1999: 47). The factional struggle for power and advantage is contingent upon the concrete political, economic and material configuration of society, such that the greater the economic and material complexity
of “civil society” the greater the number of factions and the more prevalent the
factional conflict. Madison recognizes two fundamental types of faction: one is
based on interest (material/economic), and the second on “opinion” (ideologies
and belief systems). He also recognizes the intimate relation between economic
interest and opinion/belief.
Yet what seems a striking parallel between postmodernist ideology and
Madisonian thought is the latter’s position regarding the nature of reason and its
relation to thought and to the generation of opinion. Madison notes that
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise
it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists
between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a
reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the
latter will attach themselves.
(Hamilton et al. 1999: 46)
The thesis regarding the “fallibility” of reason is crucial, and it may be
viewed as both the product and herald of the modern world. In the first place,
since reason is “fallible,” it does not have the capacity to judge and to determine
the authenticity nor the truth content of any socio-political, moral/ethical or
philosophical proposition. What is determining, as a consequence, is what
Madison calls “self-love” or “passion,” which in Federalist no. 51 is transformed into “ambition” or “power” (Hamilton et al. 1999: 290–291). Thus we
are back to Hume and especially to Hobbes, for whom a system is established
where appetite, passion, desire and interest are the underlying characteristics of a
socio-political order, and thereby determine the direction and purpose of the
system. In such a conception the demand for equality is merely the rationalization for an underlying “jealousy of power” and the struggle for justice is a mere
cover for the ambition to dominate.5
In the second place, the displacement of reason as the arbiter or standard of
social and political life leaves a vacuum into which flow various other forms of
judgment and value, based on non-rational or extra-rational factors. Hobbes and
Hume have shown how reason can act as an acid not just on traditional values, but
on itself – that is, various uses of reason may undermine reason. There is a long
tradition in the West in which reason is used to attack reason. Beginning with the
pre-Socratics through Nietzsche to contemporary post-modern ideologies the
status of reason has been constantly put to the test and been found wanting. These
latter attack the very notion of the utility and stability of reason in order to criticize
the established order, which, in the process, questions the value of thought itself.
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At the same time, the fallibility of reason leads to the surmise that human activity is inherently valueless and meaningless, that no stable and just human order
may be attained in the here and now. This tradition goes back to Augustine and his
concept of original sin and the consequent necessity of God’s grace. Since human
nature is irremediably corrupt and intrinsically degenerate, any human action is
useless because it carries with it the taint of sinful nature. Only the grace of God
can give value to human action, and without it it is powerless. Thus the importance
of extra-rational faith in God and of the Christian religion especially. The attempt
to use reason to construct a new order of things is counterproductive, and it leads
ultimately to consequences originally unintended and unforeseen by the actor.
The postmodern critique of reason paradoxically parallels the Christian
emphasis on faith and on God’s grace, and both join together in the de-valuation
of political action and in the retreat into the private sphere. In effect, in both
instances, the attack on reason by secular critics, and the attack on reason by
religion and faith, lead to a conception of society and to a conception of politics
where the established order and the established values are taken as a given.
What is more important, the attempt to reform or to transform the established
order is not only seen as impossible, but also as reproducing in different forms
the existing structures of power. What remains is power, presented and asserted
in various disguises (that is, in various ideologies, theories and belief systems or
faiths). One center of power counteracts and checks an opposing structure of
power. In this sense, “passion” and “fallible reason” may and do lead to a plurality of factions based on opinion (political ideologies, ethical systems, sects and
churches, economic and social theories, etc.).6
Yet Madison believes that the factions based on, and organized by, economic
self-interest are the major determinants of social strife. He writes that “the most
common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever
formed distinct interests in society” (Hamilton et al. 1999: 47). Madison joins a
long line of thinkers, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, through Machiavelli and
Tocqueville, and up to Mosca, Gramsci, Schumpeter and Dahl, who see social
and political questions through the prism of the conflict between the few and the
many, the minority and the majority.
In a modern liberal system the problem for thinkers such as Madison,
Tocqueville, Mosca and Schumpeter is the advent and the rise of the people to
power such that their desires, needs and opinions must be considered. The
English Revolution of the 1640s and early 1650s, the American Revolution and
the French Revolution introduced into history and into politics the people (that is,
the majority who do not hold property) as a force, and their opinions have
become a factor in the power equation. The generation and deployment of mass
opinion is the central issue in modern politics. More specifically, according to
Madison, the question is the development of mechanisms by which to control the
majority without property in such a manner that the minority who hold property
is not threatened. Madison’s solution is the multiplication of groups and factions
such that the fundamental class cleavage is obscured and attenuated. He calls for
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a “multiplicity of interests” and a “multiplicity of sects” such that the majority
faction is fragmented and disaggregated.
Thus, the left and the right in the United States meet on common ground:
namely, pluralism. The identity and diversity politics of the left is but the
re-translation of Madison’s multiplicity of factions in modern (or postmodern)
language, whose content now includes groups whose existence would have been
inconceivable for Madison. Indeed, the linking together of class, race, gender and
gay politics by the left reproduces Madison’s conception of factional politics. At
the same time, the conservative critique of the progressive left, in basing it on
Gramsci’s thought, masks the inherently subordinate and reactive character of the
latter’s politics. For in reproducing the pluralism of Madison and Hamilton the
left reinforces the prevailing hegemonic conception of politics.7
The left is accused of undermining core values and core institutions by
waging a Gramscian war of position. Rather, what undermines the conservative’s value system is the preeminence of the market and the relentless drive of
capital to penetrate the entire globe and to refashion it. Marx’s assertions in the
Manifesto have never had greater meaning than today: capital is making and
remaking the world in its own image. As Marx notes, the bourgeoisie
Compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their
midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world
after its own image.
(Marx and Engels 1978: 477)
The spread of capital from Europe and the Unites States to the rest of the world
means that economic modernization, technological innovation and socio-cultural
transformations that together undermined the traditional and customary usages of
the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are today reproduced on a
far vaster scale throughout the world. During these centuries many observers
from Marx to Nietzsche recognized the revolutionary and radical character of
capital as it undermined all forms of pre-modern cultures and societies. As Marx
comments in the Manifesto,
All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
(Marx and Engels 1978: 476)
The conservative desire and need to protect traditional American values and to
preserve religious and especially Christian faith clashes with the technological and
economic innovations unleashed by capitalist hegemony. To speak of traditional
American values is to speak of contradictory and antagonistic ideas. Since the
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founding of the American republic (and extending back to its Calvinist and Protestant origins) economic utility and capital accumulation have been inextricably
wedded to religious enthusiasm and to Christian faith. This means that the free
market is the not-so-hidden god of the conservative critique of Gramsci in the
United States. At the same time, the supremacy of the market and the hegemony of
capital clash with the rhetoric of democratic rule and the belief in equality. Market
competition necessitates strict authoritarian control of capitalist enterprises.
Conservative ideologues fail to recognize that their critique of Gramsci in
America presupposes a defense of classical liberal thought and of the classical
liberal state (see Hartz 1955, Auerbach, M. 1959, Guttmann 1967, Cook 1973,
and Crick 1955). The first reduces politics to economic utility, where individuals
are seen as rationally maximizing their appetites and desires, and the second
sees politics and the state as spheres of coercion and force, in which the role of
the state is to protect property and to rationalize economic activity.
V
The Madisonian conception of politics leads directly to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. They mutually imply one another precisely because they are antithetically
opposed to each other. One desires to preserve a newly established order, the
other desires to overthrow a misbegotten pre-existing order in order to establish a
new one.
The relation between Madisonian politics and Gramscian politics operates at
various levels. It is encapsulated in Gramsci’s distinction between two overarching types of politics, which encompass all the different forms and permutations of political activity: grand politics and petty politics (Q2 §48: 970; Q3 §5:
1563–1564; Q3 §72: 1832–1833), as well as the parallel distinction between
politics (politica) and diplomacy (diplomazia) (Q1 §38: 457–458; Q2 §86:
760–762, Q2 §87: 764–767; Q2 §10: 943–944; Q2 §41: 1309–1310; Q3 §16:
1577; Q3 §16: 1583–1585). Grand politics focuses on “the founding of new
States, the struggle for the destruction, the defense, and the preservation of
determinate organic socio-economic structures” (Q3 §5: 1563–1564). Petty
politics is characterized by conflicts and struggles defined by the established
ideological consensus and conducted within a pre-existing structure of power.
The first attempts to generate a new consensus and to create a new order: it
presents a countervailing conception of the world in opposition to the prevailing
one, and in so doing it seeks to transform the subaltern into a hegemonic
“personality” capable of establishing this new order. The second acts within the
moral/intellectual and political/ideological categories of the established given; it
cannot, or refuses to, see beyond them, and thus it is concerned with issues,
policies, programs and conflicts that arise out of normal everyday political
competition. Grand politics establishes or founds entirely new structures,
whereas petty politics takes place within an already constituted socio-political
order. An analogous distinction between politics and diplomacy parallels that
between grand and petty politics. Here too the defining principle is a politics
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conceived as foundational and innovating and distinguished from a politics seen
as restorative and preservative.
In Gramsci, stages of political action parallel stages of political consciousness,
and both reflect the movement from narrow self-interest to common interest, from
the particular to the general, from fragmentation to coherence, from subordination
to self-government, from incoherence to self-discipline.
In Q13 §3 Gramsci formulates a politics directed to the launching of fundamental historical and social movements that go beyond the merely personal struggles
for leadership or the day-to-day policies of the government. The latter deals with
immediate “quasi” incidental or accidental incidents (Q13 §3: 1579–1580). The
problem is to identify the proper relation between these two moments. Gramsci
asks of the level of organization and consciousness that may enable a subaltern
group to transcend its immediate objective environment and its particular narrow
interests and develop a consciousness and a politics sufficiently universal and
general to attract and to lead other groups. He then identifies various stages in
the process by which a subaltern group attains political leadership, stages which
parallel levels of political consciousness. The first is the most elemental: the
economic–corporative. At this level a baker identifies and unites with baker,
plumber with plumber, laborer with laborer, and so on. Yet at this state the baker
and plumber do not achieve a common basis of action or of solidarity. Identity qua
identity acts to inhibit the formation of a more inclusive and more encompassing
political “personality.” The organization is narrow, not yet capable of overcoming
its immediate interests. The second is the attainment of a consciousness of common
interests among all the members of a social group, but still remains within the realm
of the purely economic. At this stage the political question of state power is
revealed, but only to achieve equal rights with the dominant groups, to demand the
right to participate in the making of laws and their administration in order to change
them or to reform them. And the third stage is the realization that the corporate
interests of a given group can transcend the merely economic, and can become or
be transformed into the interests of other subordinate groups (Q13 §3: 1583–1584).
It is at this final stage that the question of power is posed, and that the contours of a
new structure are revealed.
For Gramsci this last is the purely and properly political stage. It is more
“straightforwardly political,” and it signals the “decisive” passage from the level
of the purely corporate and economic to the level of complex political formations (Q13 §3: 1584). This is the phase where the ideologies that were germinating in the earlier stages transform into a political party – they become organized,
self-aware and disciplined. The “battle” (Q1 §44: 54; Q2 §10: 1229–1231; Q2
§65: 1493) of ideologies takes place here, a battle in which one or a combination
will prevail, proliferating and disseminating throughout the society, uniting and
aggregating both economic and political, as well as moral and intellectual ends,
such that the struggle is raised from the merely corporative to the “universal”
level (Q3 §17: 1584), and finally, creating the hegemony of a “fundamental
social group” over a series of subordinate groups. Such a process describes the
coming to consciousness of a social group, its passage from a subordinate or
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subaltern status to a hegemonic status. It is also an analysis describing the
process by which a state or a new order is founded.
VI
The transition to the modern world, the breakdown of traditional communal
ties, the rise of the bourgeois and mercantile classes, were accompanied by the rise
of the “people” or the “masses” as a force in politics and in history. The movement
from the pre-modern to the modern initiated a new form of politics, mass politics,
in which the organization and deployment of the people became crucial. The
problem now became: how to control and to check the power of democracy, that is,
the power of the many (see Burnham 1943). In Europe, there were three possible
responses: the classical liberalism of Mill, Croce, and Mosca; the reactionary
conservatism of Maistre and Bonald, and the revolutionary politics of assorted left
wing social movements. In the United States the emergence of the people as a
political force was recognized and addressed by the very leadership that won
independence and that established and set the contours and boundaries within
which politics and power struggles were to be conducted.
It is noteworthy that the debate over power acquired particular force during
the second half of the last century in the controversy in the US between pluralists like Dahl and elitists like C. Wright Mills. This controversy, ostensibly over
the methodological problem concerning the conceptualization and measurement
of power, was central to democracy, both as an empirical and a normative idea.
It was widely recognized that democracy in both senses depended upon a
particular form of organized power and a particular manner of its deployment.
This pluralist/elitist debate regarding democracy in America was also a controversy regarding the nature of power, its distribution and stratification, which in
turn was also a debate over the nature of social science and the methodology
appropriate to the study of these issues. Dahl’s emphasis on power as a relation
between two observable actors issuing in an observable decision, Bachrach and
Baratz’s analysis of power in terms of non-decision-making, Schattschneider’s
notion of the mobilization of bias, and Mills’s idea of an interlocking directorate,
are simultaneously discussions regarding power, its method of analysis, as well as
the democratic or oligarchic character of society.
Thus the debates over power are also debates over democracy, or rather over
the relationship between democracy and oligarchy. This debate, beginning in the
late nineteenth century with the works of social theorists like Weber, Pareto,
Mosca and Michels, transformed radically the traditional and classical conception
of democracy – that is, democracy as rule of and by the people (see Sartori 1987).
Mosca posits a permanent and unbridgeable cleavage in all societies (past,
present and future) between the minority and the majority, a condition in which
rule is always by a minority, and in which such rule is legitimated by a “political
formula” whose form is determined by the character of society and government. In
the modern world democracy is the formula that legitimates rule by the few. He
also talks about the circulation of elites, either by revolution or by co-optation,
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where the latter occurs in an open society and the former in a closed society.
Michels, too, talks about the rule of the few. The iron law of oligarchy is the
formula he uses to describe the determining character of organization: that is,
organization and minority rule presuppose each other. Under these conditions
modern society can look forward to at best the free (“open”) percolation of
individuals from the bottom to the top, that is, the open and free formation of
oligarchies. In a similar vein, Schumpeter builds on these ideas and uses them to
define democracy as an “institutional arrangement” established to insure free and
open competition among various elites and different oligarchies.
Dahl “democratizes,” so to speak, the formulations of Schumpeter, Mosca, and
Michels. While the latter three look at democracy in a typical European liberal
manner, that is, narrowly, with politics occurring within a delimited and circumscribed social base, Dahl enlarges the social foundations to make it as inclusive as
possible. To use Dahl’s term, “polyarchy” is democracy understood as the rule of
many oligarchies or plural elites, in competition with each other, and in alliances
constantly forming and reforming; it is a competition for power that occurs on a
wide social base in which the people legitimate the struggle by their consent. This
consent is gained in various ways, the primary political way being electoral
competition. In effect, since the nineteenth century, what has occurred is a radical
re-definition of democracy. Classical, that is pre-nineteenth century, notions of
democracy understood democracy in terms of class, or factional, rule: the rule of
the many. This many was mostly and always understood to be poor, or at least less
wealthy than the few.
What elitists such as Mosca and Michels accomplished was to compel theorists and thinkers such as Dahl and other pluralists who valued democratic ideals
to redefine the concept of democracy and to modernize it. The empirical work of
the former, in addition to that of Schumpeter, Lasswell, Kaplan and others,
showed that democracy seen as rule by the many was no longer tenable (see
Lasswell and Kaplan). Thus the meaning of democracy was changed, from a
form of rule where the many dominated, to a form of rule where no one dominated: that is, democracy was now no longer a type of rule, but a method of
ruling.
Gramsci directly addresses the problem regarding the disparity between
empirical theories of power and the ideal notion of democracy. It is important
to avoid an overly idealized version of democracy and to ground it in a
version of power suitable to a just society and yet remains empirically
grounded.
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci notes that
The supremacy of a social group is manifested in two ways: as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership.” A social group is dominant
over those antagonistic groups it wants to “liquidate” or to subdue even
with armed force, and it is leading with respect to those groups that are
associated and allied with it.
(Q3 §19: 2010)
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For Gramsci modern Western societies – liberal and democratic political
regimes – are systems of hegemonic equilibrium characterized by a “combination
of force and consent which are balanced in varying proportions, without force
prevailing too greatly over consent” (Q3 §13: 1638). Violence and persuasion,
force and consent, domination and leadership together form the defining and
essential character of the political. This means that Gramsci understands the state
as characterized by two analytically separate, but historically and mutually penetrating, spheres: “dictatorship + hegemony,” and “political society + civil society,”
where the symbiotic unity of the two spheres represents what Gramsci calls the
“integral State” (Q2 §6: 763–764). Hegemony never replaces, though it may veil,
dictatorship, in the same way that consent never replaces force. Both moments of
the dyad are necessary. In modern mass democracy the issue is never the elimination of the moment of force, dictatorship and domination: rather, the point is the
identification of the “proper” (Q2 §7: 866) balance or proportion between the two
moments of force and consent, dominio and direzione. What Gramsci shows
is that the generation of consent is necessary for force and for its successful use.
As already stated, hegemony is a conceptual bundle in which are woven several
highly complex and interrelated notions, and one of these is the generation of
consent by means of organic intellectuals acting within the sphere of civil society.
Yet consent in its political context of modern democracy is nothing more than
the formation and deployment of mass opinion in order to capture the state
(“political society”). Thus the generation of consent is the precondition for the
capture of state power and consequently for the deployment and use of force (see
Fontana 2005).
Discussions of Gramsci in the United States tend to accentuate the elements of
consent, persuasion, and opinion formation while de-emphasizing elements such
as force, coercion, violence and domination. Because the former are located
within civil society much time and space are devoted to expounding the various
groups, institutions and organizations that together constitute this type of society.
It is said therefore that Gramsci, in his analysis of civil society, points to a new
type of politics, a “cultural” or “ideological” struggle that excludes the elements
of domination and force. Gramsci is reduced to a liberal (in the American sense)
or a social democratic (in the European sense) thinker whose work and writings
are concerned with the ameliorative, social welfare and inclusionary tendencies
of modern democracy.
The element of force and coercion, which is crucial to politics and to power, and
which thinkers, in addition to Marx and Gramsci, as varied as Plato, Machiavelli,
Hamilton, and Croce recognize, has disappeared into the Parnassian realms of
“deliberation,” “discourse,” “pure speech,” and the catch-all category of democratic
and liberal “culture.” Domination and force are de-politicized, and transformed into
cultural forms of power, in the same way that the state itself is de-politicized (that
is, shorn of its coercive and repressive element), and reduced to civil society, which
is seen as the sphere and locus of consensual action (and thus of liberty).
Crucial is the emphasis on democracy and its equation with civil society. If
politics is now a question of persuasion and consent, and conflict solely cultural,
Power and democracy
95
then the element of domination central to Gramsci’s concept of politics is eliminated, and “antagonism” (Q3 §19: 2010) is replaced by conversation and discussion. It should not be forgotten that hegemony, arguably the central focus of
Gramsci’s thought, cannot be understood in isolation, without linking it to its
opposite polarity, dictatorship, in the same way that “allied” (Q3 §19: 2010)
cannot be understood without “antagonistic.” Gramsci’s polarities are analytical,
but they are not mechanical. They presuppose each other, and acquire meaning
and direction in close relation to each other.
It is precisely such a conception of politics and society that led Madison to
develop his notion of a Realpolitik founded upon a multiplicity of interests and
a multiplicity of opinions. Since Plato’s discussion of justice in the Republic
(31 E-336 A, 336 B-347 E), in which Polemarchus defines justice as helping
one’s friends and injuring one’s foes and Thrasymachus sees justice as the interest of the stronger faction or group, politics and the state have been seen as both
cause and consequence of the conflict between two encompassing factions, the
few and the many. Both Madison and Gramsci recognize the centrality of this
idea. One tries to diminish and to reduce its consequences such that the few may
maintain their political and cultural supremacy, the other tries to develop ways
in which the many may attain hegemonic rule.
From this perspective, Madisonian politics is a politics designed to channel
mass and popular activity within the confines of the pre-existing order; and it
acts to insure that political activity can never transcend or escape the established
boundaries of the system. Madison helped to found a new order that guaranteed
that only petty politics could thereafter be practiced; it provided the scaffolding
for a structure that inhibits the birth and the growth of a new order. As such, it is
a politics of a very high order – what Gramsci calls “grand politics.”8
Notes
1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are mine.
2 See in this regard Hunter (1991), who sees Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and
organic intellectual useful in explaining the “battle” over ideas and culture in the US.
3 Gramsci’s distinction between popular culture and high culture is useful in understanding
the dynamics of religion (especially Protestant) in the US. The character of American
culture and society is a blend of high and low, in which the “high” and the “low” mirror
each other, in the sense that the former is a more “rigorous” or “disciplined” version of
the latter. This is especially evident in American religion, particularly fundamentalist and
evangelical Christianity, in which certain groups evince what on the surface appears to be
a bifurcated conception of the world, at once a belief in the literal inerrancy or truth
of the Bible and a sophisticated, rigorous knowledge of the mechanisms of modern
economic business practices as well as an intimate familiarity with modern technology
and modern capitalist markets.
4 See Alexander 2007 and see its review by Wolfe.
5 In Federalist no. 6, Hamilton writes:
The causes of hostility among nations [and, by implication, among factions and
other social groups] are innumerable. There are some which have a general and
almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description
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are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion–-the jealousy of
power, or the desire of equality and safety.
(Hamilton et al. 1999: 22)
6 I omit discussion of thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and their
followers, who have developed a theory of democracy based on deliberation, conversation and discourse. These deliberative democrats posit a realm of “pure speech” and
“public reason” from which are excluded all forms of emotion, sentiment, interest and
power. This realm is basically an idealized and romanticized version of civil society,
within which rational discussion and deliberation define democratic practice. Shorn of
the struggle for power and conflict for competitive advantage democratic politics is
reduced to a philosophical contest over ideas. Madisonian liberals emphasize the fallibility of reason and the preeminence of passion, and deliberative democrats posit the
autonomy of reason. See Fontana, Nederman, and Remer, especially the introductory
essay by the editors.
7 For a different perspective see Hardt and Negri 2004: 348–358.
8 I thank the Eugene M. Lang Foundation and the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation
for their generous support and help. Special thanks are due to Doris L. Suarez for her
incisive critique and insightful comments.
7
Pessimism of the intelligence,
optimism of the will
Reflections on political agency in the
age of “empire”
Stephen Gill
My starting point for this chapter is the early 1990s, when Fukuyama argued
that alternatives to liberal capitalism seemed to have been defeated, not only
in the postcolonial Third World, but more acutely in the former eastern bloc
(Fukuyama 1992).1 A key illustration was how at US insistence the reconstruction of communism in Europe took the form of shock therapy. Indeed it became
a commonplace of political discourse to argue that the global strategic situation
of the post-Cold War world was unprecedented: for the first time since the
Roman Empire a majority of the world’s military power was concentrated in
the hands of a single state and its institutions of national security.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century it even became fashionable
among both conservatives and liberals, in a manner reminiscent of nineteenthcentury discourses of the civilizing mission of the Western powers, to ascribe
benevolence to the new forms of supremacy and to hail the revival of American
imperialism and empire as a universal force for progress.
However, as I shall argue, rather than the end of history, a new phase of historical struggle began in the 1990s. Counterhegemonic and alternative movements
emerged precisely as the contradictions of the reassertion of US dominance and
the US-led “war on terror” intensified after 2001. Despite the US reassertion of the
prerogatives of empire in ways that had institutionalized a type of global state of
emergency and, despite the attempts to intensify what I call disciplinary neoliberal
patterns of globalization, social forces from across the political spectrum throughout the world began to reassert political alternatives. Challenges to the dominant
globalization projects of the powerful became more widespread, in ways that
reconfigured the political limits of the possible in the new world order.
So, in what follows we explore some of the implications of this conjuncture
and by focusing on the question of global leadership we will seek to highlight
how progressive social forces are responding to new conditions of existence
and in some ways beginning to form a collective political will on a global scale.
We can view this as similar in some respects to a novel form of transnational
political party or peoples’ International. At this stage it is a network of movements and social forces, but in important ways it is coming to assert itself as a
key collective force in the making of our contemporary history. I call this new
and emerging political form “The postmodern Prince” (Gill 2000, Gill 2003a).
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The methodological perspective that frames my analysis is drawn from
Gramsci’s favorite political maxim, which he derived from Romain Rolland:
“pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will”:2
On daydreams and fantasies. They show lack of character and passivity.
One imagines that something has happened to upset the mechanism of
necessity. One’s own initiative has become free. Everything is easy. One
can do whatever one wants, and one wants a whole series of things which at
present one lacks. It is basically the present turned on its head which is projected into the future. Everything repressed is unleashed. On the contrary, it
is necessary to direct one’s attention violently towards the present as it is,
if one wishes to transform it. Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of
the will.
(SPN: 175 n. 75)
Gramsci meant that we should look at contemporary political challenges with a
sober realism in order to be able to transcend the political limits of the possible that
were posed by national and international conditions. Note that Gramsci’s maxim
was linked to the injunction that we should examine contemporary conditions with
an analysis that directs attention “violently towards the present as it is, if one wishes
to transform it” (my emphasis).
Thus Gramsci’s historical materialism was also a form of political realism that
was historically grounded in the appraisal of a violent world order. It was focused
on how power and its potentials serve to define constraints and opportunities for
resistance and progressive change – at any specific moment. Indeed, the dialectic
of power and resistance is therefore linked in this type of historical materialism to
fundamental ethical questions, such as the relationship between rulers and ruled
and indeed the question of whether political leaders seek to either sustain or
transcend existing social relations and world order structures.
Thus a neogramscian perspective addresses two basic questions concerning
leaders and led in a very clear way:
In the formation of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention
that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the
conditions in which this division is no longer necessary? In other words, is
the initial premise the perpetual division of the human race, or the belief that
this division is only an historical fact corresponding to certain conditions?
(SPN: 144)
Theorizing world order
I have already noted that the terms imperialism and empire are now embraced by
liberals and conservatives to capture key aspects of the power relations of the
contemporary world order. Writers on the left have also focused on what they call
the “new imperialism” (Panitch 2000; Harvey 2005) of the US. It is a moot point
Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will
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as to whether the forms of imperialism are indeed all that new, although in some
respects the combined forces at work have novel elements. Perhaps it is better to
suggest that they are being practiced in a conjuncture that combines elements of
both the old (the use of organized violence to intensify the extraction of surplus
and tribute from subordinated peoples and classes) and the radically new (e.g. the
acceleration of the global tendency to turn increasing aspects of life and nature
into exploitable commodities). Perhaps the term “imperialism of our time” is
more appropriate since for many nations and subordinated peoples, the struggles
against imperialism have continued for centuries (Ahmad 2003).
Nonetheless, many writers on the question concerning the imperialism of our
time – from across the political spectrum – have focused much of their attention
on rather immediate questions, notably the degree to which American unilateralism and its massive military footprint are placing severe strains on the unity and
legitimacy of its primary alliance structures associated with its allies, e.g. in
the G-7 and NATO. Others have emphasized not only concerns and diverging
interests of allies but also forms of resistance that have crystallized, such as a
resurgent left in Latin America as well as Islamic resistance movements, antiwar
movements, and efforts by other states such as Russia and China to countervail
US power and authority in global politics.
Nevertheless, while liberal, neorealist and neomarxist approaches to international relations have focused on the question of the US as a superpower or as
an imperialist force, relatively few have done so from the perspective of the
analysis of the complex of social forces and historical blocs that constitute these
forms of dominant political agency.
Here it is worth pointing out that much of the mainstream analysis of hegemony, supremacy and imperialism – including that of a number of Marxists – is
often based on simplified Realist geopolitical perspective. It therefore tends to
present a reified view of power in world order as defined narrowly by the interactions among territorial states, often ignoring more fundamental social forces
(Gowan 1999; Ferguson 2001; Foster 2003; Ikenberry 2004). This error is not
found in the strategic forums of business (e.g. the World Business Council on
Sustainable Development) or in the scenario planning used by corporations and
government agencies (e.g. by Shell Oil, whose methods have been used by the
CIA) to not only influence policy but also to anticipate and to curtail political challenges, e.g. to the continuation of neoliberal economic and cultural globalization
(United States National Intelligence Council 2004).
I would argue that a weakness of most approaches to world order is that they
avoid basic questions of and links between political economy, political theory and
political sociology – e.g. the relations between rulers and ruled, in this case, on a
world scale. They thus obscure power relations and transnational links between
key social and political forces – forces that are often highlighted in more “critical”
geopolitical perspectives. By shifting to a more complex analysis of social forces
we can bring into relief various social struggles (e.g. workers’ struggles and their
links to processes of primitive accumulation, such as in China where a new proletariat is being created; struggles over social reproduction and the question of the
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biosphere). A more critical geopolitical approach also allows for relatively more
nuanced and open visions of world order prospects.
On the other hand some of the critical literature is both too structuralist and
insufficiently dialectical, thus evacuating agency from the making of world
order, in ways which may be disempowering to progressive forces. An example
is the very influential “empire hypothesis,” namely that a decentered network
structure is the emerging form of global order, a structure with no leadership
per se (Hardt and Negri 2000).
By contrast other writers go too far in the opposite direction, and ascribe too
much to the agency and instrumentality of a hegemonic “transnational capitalist
class” said to rule the globe (Sklair 2001). This tends to obscure how a complex of
transnational social and political forces, combining elements of capital and labor,
struggles to come to agreement or to negotiate a range of local/national/regional
questions, and how it must seek to co-opt and outflank forces opposed to its
projects of global leadership. It should be noted here that the Gramscian concept
of a transnational historical bloc as I have used it differs from other concepts used
in the radical literature: e.g. a “transnational capitalist class alliance,” a “superimperialism” or indeed what the neokautskians would call an “ultraimperialism”
of “core capital.” This is because elements of more than one class (i.e. both capital
and incorporated elements of labor) are necessarily involved, under the leadership
of an internationally oriented class fraction with its own organic intellectuals who
seek to articulate its ideas and ideology in political and civil society. A dominant
historical bloc is one that is anchored in the ruling elements of one or more of the
most powerful states that seek to defend, strengthen and extend the leading mode
of production, relative to rivals and challengers (Gill 1986; Gill 1990).
Global relations of force and changing conditions of existence
Thus, my approach draws upon a detailed analysis of social forces and historical
blocs that operate both within and across what Gramsci called complexes of civilizations. It then advances a concept of global leadership connected to patterns of
power and resistance on the terrain of an effective reality configured by what
Gramsci called the “relations of force.” For Gramsci, these are threefold, as
follows:
•
•
•
Those connected to the fundamental economic and social structure of
society (and we would add its ecological constraints).
Those connected to the “strategic” aspect, namely military–strategic relations,
or the capacities for use of organized violence.
Those connected to the “political” moment – which for Gramsci was the
most important – since it involved forms of state, political association and
political organizations. The political moment was associated with different
levels of consciousness, e.g. the relatively narrow corporate consciousness
of business associations, unions etc. or the more universal or hegemonic
consciousness of actual or potentially ruling classes.
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At the apex of world order hierarchies – and straddling the global relations of
force – is an interstate political formation that my earlier work identified in rather
precise terms as the “G-7 nexus” that embodies and seeks to direct some of the
prevailing relations of force (Gill 1998b). It involves social forces led principally
but not exclusively by the ruling classes of the US. The nexus includes not only
governments but also networks of transnational corporations and other social
forces active and influential in political and civil society across borders. This
nexus is now expanding to incorporate some of the ruling forces of other states
(e.g. the G8+5 initiative launched in 2007, to add not only Russia but also five
influential Third World states to some – but not all – of the summit discussions at
the “top table”).
Underpinning this nexus – which is currently leading the forces of disciplinary neoliberalism – is a historical bloc of social, economic, cultural and political forces, a bloc that is transnational in its structures and scope. Its material
and political base rests on the power of giant oligopolistic firms and market
forces that operate politically both “outside” and “inside” the state and that form
part of the “local” and “global” political structures, which includes some parts of
organized labor, as a kind of new labor aristocracy, as it were. Its social nucleus
is the relatively small percentage of affluent people who are the primary beneficiaries of neoliberal political economy (Gill 2003b). This includes not only big
business and the people who make huge fortunes from financial services and
hedge funds, but also smaller and midsized businesses, such as contractors or
suppliers, import–export businesses, stockbrokers, accountants, consultancies,
lobbyists, educational entrepreneurs, architects, and designers, as well as sports
and other stars of entertainment and the celebrity culture.
A central political purpose of this bloc is to enlarge the power of capital
within state and civil society. Indeed, during the 1990s over 80 jurisdictions formally adopted new liberal constitutions, and most countries joined the World
Trade Organization, accepting its conditions of entry which formally committed
them to the “progressive liberalization” of their economies – all moves that
enhance the power of capital on a world scale. For example, many multilateral
and bilateral investment treaties make nationalization of and control over private
property illegal (Schneiderman 2000). I call this the new constitutionalism. It
is legal and political process to lock in the power gains of capital by means of
disciplinary neoliberal frameworks of law, regulation and indeed constitutional
reforms, such as the replacement of the former communist constitutions with
neoliberal ones in the 1990s (Gill 1998a).
In sum, the supremacy of the G-7 nexus is connected to disciplinary neoliberalism and the relatively arbitrary use of military power by the US and its allies.
This involves several moments or characteristics of our time that configure the
global relations of force:
•
The effective restoration of the political power of the propertied, reflected,
perhaps in an unprecedented way in the rapid growth of a global plutocracy
(Gill 2004).
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•
•
•
•
•
•
S. Gill
The increasing subordination of state forms to capital (following some
socialization and nationalization of the means of production between 1917
and 1991).
The reconfiguration of state forms so they act as if they are market place actors
who regulate the political economy to permit the accelerated commodification
of social life. The restructuring of the state’s obligations for social reproduction, e.g. rolling back welfare, public education and healthcare, leading to
greater privatization of services and increased social atomization (Gill 2002b;
Bakker 2008; Bakker and Gill 2003; Bakker 2007; Bakker 2003).
The associated trend toward intensified exploitation of human beings and
nature allied to tendencies toward extreme inequality of income, wealth and
life chances – the obverse of rising stock prices and the growing fortunes of
the plutocracy.
The apparent acceleration in the ongoing process of primitive accumulation,
involving expropriation or dispossession of producers of their means to
subsistence – with parallels to early forms of dispossession, enclosure and
colonization (Wherlof 2000; Shilliam 2004; Federici 2003; Di Muzio 2007;
Harvey 2005).
The US-led war on terror, interventions and wars have prompted concerns
not only over “humanitarian intervention” and aggressive wars, but also over
coercive, arbitrary use of military force and the means to make political
leaders legally and morally accountable to law and humanity (Falk 2007;
Falk 2003).
The contradictions between legality and legitimacy in world order and
global governance, e.g. whether global justice is understood in liberal, procedural terms or as substantive in nature. A procedural conception – as in
new constitutionalism – sees the World Trade Organization as legal and
legitimate (since it was freely made by governments). Others interpret the
main organs of the WTO as a product of relatively closed-door procedures
dominated by illegitimate and unaccountable corporate interests, in ways
that are intensifying maldevelopment (Gill 2002a).
Social forces in an emerging global political and civil society
These moments – and others – have prompted diverse political responses to
imagine and seek to create political alternatives. Here we can identify at least four
sets of political and civil society forces – some progressive, some conservative,
some reactionary – associated with struggles over world leadership and the future
world order:
•
Dominant forces such as the G-7 nexus that encompasses not only mainstream
political forces in the metropolitan states, but also elites and ruling classes in
the Third World, with its leading personnel often drawn from Ivy League and
Oxbridge universities and other agencies of elite socialization. The unity and
coherence of these forces should not, however be overstated.
Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will
•
•
•
103
Counterhegemonic forces associated with rival groupings of states, some
which are state-driven, left-wing models based on social needs, e.g. Hugo
Chávez’s regional plans for Latin America. Others are regional powers such
as India and China that are undergoing rapid integration into the capitalist
world market and that seek greater global influence.
Alternative forces that are forging regional or global initiatives involving
progressive, grass roots and citizens organizations, e.g. parts of the World
Social Forum and Via Campesina (small farmers and peasants).
Reactionary forces, e.g. conservative forces, those on the far right (e.g. the
pan-European Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty) and other forces associated
with religious fundamentalism in North and South in rejection of liberal and
modernist projects. Again the unity of these forces is often more apparent
than real.
These very diverse forces reflect a new phase of historical struggle akin to what
Polanyi called the “double movement”: i.e. the changes of 1918–1939, in reaction
to attempts principally on the part of financial interests to restore key institutions
of the liberal world economic order of the nineteenth century such as the Gold
Standard (Polanyi 1957). The economic chaos associated with international
market forces in the 1930s prompted massive and relatively spontaneous challenges from agriculture and industry, the ranks of peasants, workers and owners.
Some rallied behind reactionary concepts of global leadership, e.g. Nazism and
Fascism.
Of course the UK–USA–USSR alliance defeated the Axis Powers. The
market-based liberalism of the 1930s was redefined in the post-1945 war settlements in the West as a system of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982). The
postwar settlement involved the transnational leadership of a coalition of corporate, labor and civil society forces in the US and its allied partners. A general,
and in some limited senses, progressive social purpose governed the regulation
of market forces. However, in the post-Cold War order, disciplinary neoliberalism reverses this progressive and redistributive regulatory principle. It promotes
the world market as the principal form of governance. One effect of this shift is
to marginalize most organized labor from its previous positions of influence
over some of the key national and international leadership institutions, forums
and initiatives in the post-1945 capitalist world order. Disciplinary neoliberalism
is a form of governance and a pattern of accumulation that is dominated by
capital, particularly big capital, and its influence has become increasingly global
since the early 1980s, although its scope and depth varies across jurisdictions
and localities.
More recently, and partly because of significant resistance and pressure from
social forces, some of the more farsighted global business interests have sought
to mobilize civil society support for a new development paradigm: sustainable
development. In a search for greater consent and legitimacy, there have also
been shifts in some flanks of global business (particularly mining corporations)
away from market based shareholder capitalism toward stakeholder models
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more attuned to the needs of communities. Such initiatives also involve governments and international organizations, e.g. the Commonwealth Business Council
seeks to mobilize “good corporate citizenship.”
However in much of Latin America and in parts of Eastern Europe – after
more than a decade of disciplinary neoliberalism and “shock therapy,” some
governments and elements of society increasingly seem to reject the neoliberal
vision of a “market democracy” and stakeholder capitalism and are looking to the
state to shape economic, social and environmental policies. In Latin America, it
seems, this part of the new double movement has privileged more progressive
politicians. On the other hand, in Europe there has been a rise of more authoritarian nationalist politics – chiefly but not exclusively in Russia. There is also a
more reactionary and conservative critique of disciplinary neoliberalism and
market civilization, sometimes linked to theocratic and fundamentalist movements. For example, longstanding efforts to constitute a pan-European “nationalist” force culminated in January 2007 with the formation of a new extreme
right-wing political grouping in the European parliament: Identity, Tradition,
Sovereignty. Its founding statement espouses concepts of national interest and
Christian heritage that other far-right parties such as the Nationaldemokratische
Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany) have articulated
into a rival conception of a European League of Nations.3
At the same time in North and South, workers, feminists, environmentalists,
scientists and technical experts are combining to produce a shared analysis and
common critique of market civilization and “sustainable development,” e.g. in the
World Social Forum, which was created in 1999 as a strategic response to the
World Economic Forum. It seeks an alternative world order premised on socialism and earlier demands for a New International Economic Order. ATTAC
originated in France is active in many countries on various issues: the World
Trade Organization, international financial institutions, debt, taxation of financial
transactions, tax havens, public services, water rights and free-trade zones. It
seeks to propose concrete alternatives to neoliberalism based on solidarity.
While detractors use the terms “antiglobalists” or “antiglobalization” to
describe such social forces, their opposition to neoliberal policies rather than
globalization per se is perhaps better encapsulated by the label “ethical globalists” (Podobnik and Reifer 2005; Clark 2003). Such initiatives may well presage
a new form of progressive internationalism.
Thus despite the reassertion of US supremacy and disciplinary neoliberalism,
new forms of political agency have arisen. In the global South and in Latin
America, new political forces are, to paraphrase Marx, concerned with imagining new possibilities and the making of history, although not necessarily under
conditions of their own choosing. Indeed history is being made in far from
propitious, in key ways deteriorating, world order conditions for the majority of
people.
This may seem to be all the more surprising given the way that the economic
and social crises that characterized the 1980s and 1990s for example in Latin
America – crises that created economic stagnation and social atomization and that
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were governed under the policy regime of disciplinary neoliberalism associated
with the so-called Washington Consensus and its successors.
In Latin America for example, the authoritarian regimes that held power in
the 1970s were replaced by transitions to limited electoral democracy in the
1980s, overseen by the military and economic power of the United States
(Robinson 1996).
Nevertheless, particularly following the debt crises of the early 1980s, local
ruling classes and their overseas allies managed to channel and constrain more
radical democratization movements during the 1980s and much of the 1990s via
mechanisms that separated economic power from popular control – in effect a
new constitutionalist strategy that in Latin America dates back to the period
between the two world wars (Teivainen 2002). Indeed, for much of the last ten
years much of the left in Brazil moved toward the political center while engaging
in some redistributive programs to contain popular challenges from below.
President Lula – despite his radical background and years of engagement in class
struggle associated with the new proletariat of industrial workers in Brazil – has
maintained Brazil’s incorporation into disciplinary neoliberalism.
At the same time throughout Latin America in the 1990s there were many other
spontaneous uprisings and organizations of urban, peasants and indigenous movements which occurred outside of the formal political institutions (Petras 1997). It
had been anticipated by many on the left that the US would confront and repress
such popular mobilization and intervene militarily or use covert action and “low
intensity warfare” – perhaps under the guise of the “wars” on drugs and on terror,
for example the US’s massive investment in Plan Colombia. And of course, some
of the region’s governments tried to brand the new social movements as terrorists
and indeed confronted them with coercion and intimidation.
However, despite being confronted with other Pentagon threats designed to
produce “shock” and “awe” in the minds of its adversaries, there is clearly a
resurgence of defiant left-wing populism and state capitalism in Latin America,
e.g. Chávez has openly repudiated new constitutionalism and the US Republican
leadership to advance his so-called Bolivarian Revolution, paradoxically
financed by a windfall in oil revenues as oil prices rose dramatically during
the early twenty-first century – in no small part due to the US-led war in the
Middle East.
More broadly throughout the world – in Asia, Africa, Latin America – various
workers’ and peasant movements, feminists, and environmentalists and others
have combined to construct a relatively common framework of analysis of the
problems associated with neoliberal globalization. Some, like the Landless
Workers Movement in Brazil (MST) are forging real and practical alternatives to
the rule of capital. However, more to the point is that many of these new forces
are much more radical than those of orthodox leftist parties, and they have
engaged in new practices and discourses of politics. Indeed, in many respects the
most radical stronghold for left-wing resurgence is found among the landless
peasantry – which has formed a large, strong, dynamic, innovative and effective
social movement in Brazil. In Bolivia and Paraguay, as well as in Mexico,
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peasant movements have been prominent in reshaping and redefining the terrain
of politics, often in combination with traditional civic and union movements.
What often unites these diverse movements is the way that global accumulation along disciplinary neoliberal lines has entailed the mass dispossession of the
basic means of livelihood for growing numbers of people. People are being
deprived of their customary rights to clean water, to use of the land for fuel and
for grazing, and not least, they are losing control over their food supplies and the
use of other natural resources. A small number of giant corporations increasingly
dominate global agriculture and they promote export-oriented energy-intensive
production for the world market, in ways that often undercut the local productive,
social and ecological base. It follows, therefore that the resistance of peasants to
disenfranchisement and dispossession is also a resistance to capital, even if some
of the terms of resistance reaffirm premodern social and political forms. An
example is Rigoberta Menchú Tum, whose narrative defends communal forms of
land tenure that are threatened with violent expropriation when governments seek
to impose “modern” (her term) private property forms to commodify the land
(Menchú Tum 1984). This position is not blanket opposition by indigenous
peoples to modernity as such (i.e. it recognizes some of the benefits of science
and technology). Rather it is an insistence that certain institutions of modernity
such as capital and private property need to be rejected since they represent an
expropriation of the right to livelihood (Beverley 2004: 271).
The contrast between such new organic intellectuals and the older more
incorporated intellectuals of the traditional left is striking indeed.
Rulers and ruled: methodological propositions on the
new progressive movements
As Gramsci noted in the 1930s, often neglected in discussions of leadership are
the “first elements” of political science. These elements concern the “primordial”
and to an extent the “irreducible fact” that there do exist rulers and ruled, leaders
and led, in this case on a world scale (SPN: 144). The vision and goals of the
progressive, subaltern movements I have just described are ultimately designed to
abolish this primordial distinction. They are concerned to imagine and create
forms of political economy that allow for these divisions to be eliminated and
indeed for a diversity of civilizations to flourish – both within and across countries and regions. The forces of globalization from below ask whether a purely
materialist and singular monoculture of the market, dominated by corporations on
behalf of their shareholders, can be a mark of civilized life.
Beyond this ethical question, of course, the new movements and groups share
concerns at the social dislocations and wider ecological consequences of intensified
globalization for present and future generations. As the new millennium beckoned,
they became more self-conscious and sought to challenge the constraints and
disciplines that had sought to redefine the parameters of the political.
Nonetheless, a number of commentators have pointed out that the alternative
forces from the global North, e.g. in the US, have weakened in the face of the
Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will
107
neoconservative politico-military offensive since 2001. It is claimed that we
have reached a juncture where many are questioning the political potential of
the new movements. As a contribution to addressing these questions I would
highlight a number of methodological propositions we might consider as we
look to the future.
•
•
•
•
We need to take a longer-term view, linking past, present and future in our
political assessments. Contemporary progressive movements need to be
understood in terms of the successes and failures associated with the longue
durée of progressive politics with a lineage that goes back to the very earliest
democratic struggles for political representation, for rights, equality and
recognition, including the struggles of generations against colonization and
imperialism. These struggles for basic rights and representation still continue
and must continue in their most basic sense.
The most fundamental thing about the new forces of global politics is that
they go well beyond earlier forms of progressivism. While many gains were
produced by the Socialist and Communist movements of the past two
centuries and indeed many are still being produced by traditional forms of
left-wing populism, one of their weaknesses was linked to relatively restricted
definitions of politics – primacy was given to the politics of production and
the struggles between industrial labor and capital. Many fundamental issues –
associated with livelihood, racism and the relations between men and women,
and more broadly what feminists call social reproduction and the relations
between human beings and nature – were relegated to secondary importance.
Today’s global progressive movements may therefore be grounded in a much
broader grasp of conditions of existence.
We should avoid the fallacy of assuming that all forces of opposition are or
should be unified in a specific response to all problems, or that they need to
be unified organizationally in the form of a traditional political party with a
singularity of purpose, aims and, not least restrictive membership requirements. The counter forces are much better understood as a movement of
movements (Patomäki and Teivainen 2004). While this can suggest lack of
organization, the leadership is largely the membership, which is diverse and
potentially unlimited, and difficult to co-opt, intimidate or decapitate.
We should reimagine political agency as involving forces in movement as well
as forces that are expressed in specific forms of political organization. The new
progressive forces are characterized by great diversity; their unity comes from
recognition of common problems, empathy with the suffering of others and
shared principles of collective action. These are North–South movements that
do not simply focus on the primacy of industrial workers as the “vanguard” of
the proletariat. They also encompass peasants, other urban workers, feminists,
ecologists, anarchists, indigenous peoples and a wide range of forces, including churches and experts who possess high levels of scientific and technological expertise. These movements are globally interlinked through powerful
means and modes of global communication such as the Internet; their message
108
•
•
S. Gill
is propagated by cultural and communications innovations and popularized by
radical media outlets. Such outlets – in conjunction with many institutions and
forces associated with an emerging global political and civil society – can
potentially place practices of dominant power under surveillance and scrutiny,
with critiques that can be instantaneously communicated worldwide.
It is therefore difficult, if not impossible for established power to fully
contain these movements, and to constrain the growth of their knowledge
and capabilities. This point is underlined by the fact that despite the intensification of police powers associated with the global state of emergency
declared following 9/11, and in face of threats of “shock and awe” the
movements continue to be radical and far-reaching in their potential to
incorporate relatively unlimited numbers of people – perhaps more so than
could their Socialist or Communist predecessors in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
Finally, to fully understand the future potentials of these new movements
and forces we need not only to examine the credibility of their political
proposals and policy frameworks but more fundamentally – as we have just
shown – to go beyond narrow assumptions of how political agency is to
be conceived, and to connect to the feasible utopias or myths that these
movements actually do or may embrace, that is why I call their alternatives,
both real and imagined.
The postmodern Prince: progressive strategy and a new
form of political party
Any effective political force needs a credible strategy and set of policy proposals
that can have practical impact, e.g. the proposals of ATTAC on global investment
by workers’ funds, equitable taxation and the regulation of financial markets; the
reorganization of agriculture on locally-based organic principles as promoted by the
MST.4 Since the movements seek to protect hard earned social gains and to protect
the means of livelihood of different communities, their political strategy will be
necessarily defensive – in view of the tendency of capital to pursue privatization
and the commodification of key aspects of everyday life and nature.
However, an effective long-term political strategy can never be purely defensive. It must reshape the political terrain by delivering victories or gains that signal
its political strength, growing potential and appeal. This is why the agenda and
debate of the counter movements has concentrated on specific issues such as debt,
food sovereignty, rights to livelihood, and struggles against privatization of public
services and the means of life such as water supplies.
Perhaps, therefore, the concept of a progressive party needs to be rethought.
It needs to relate to the contemporary global political, social and ecological
situation, which involves a combination of premodern, modern and postmodern
social forces and historical conditions. Thus the political forms of the new
movements are more flexible and diverse than the political parties of the
modernist era, e.g. as reflected in Gramsci’s modern Prince:
Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will
109
The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete
individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in
which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some
extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.
(SPN: 129)
Any new myth-prince needs to relate to the contemporary global political, social
and ecological situation, which involves a combination of pre-modern, modern
and post-modern social forces in movement, i.e. a postmodern Prince in which
diverse movements are combining the pessimism of the intelligence with an
optimism of the will.
Thus our basic hypothesis is that there is a new fluid form of a transnational
political party in formation. It is not institutionalized nor under centralized
control. It should be understood as something plural. This new “party” is both a
movement and a process, one that is social, economic, ecological and political. It
simultaneously involves an ethical and pedagogical moment that is associated
with feasible utopias. It has a novel, multiple, flexible and capillary form. In sum
this postmodern Prince embodies a moment of hope to progressive forces;
indeed it is central to the way that they not only imagine but also make another
world possible.
Notes
1 This chapter draws on some parts of the second (2008) edition of my book Power and
Resistance in the New World Order (Palgrave), particularly pp. 255–260 and 264–269.
I thank Isabella Bakker, Tim Di Muzio and Adrienne Roberts for their helpful comments and suggestions, and Julian Germann for his invaluable research assistance.
2 The citation that follows was written in 1932 although Gramsci used this slogan as
early as 1919, in the radical newspaper, Ordine Nuovo.
3 See www.its-pe.eu/pages/groupe.php?TYPE=G2&LANG=EN
4 An example is the MST’s agroecological alternative (with its own organic seed
producer, Bionatur), an alternative to the corporate takeover of global agriculture and
the reframing of food security as a market commodity (see McMichael 2003).
8
Gramsci, in and on media
Marcia Landy
Antonio Gramsci has been the subject of a substantial number of biopics, docudramas, non-fiction films, and interviews with still living comrades, descendants,
and scholars from the late 1950s to the present, listed in the closing credits of
Gramsci: La forma della memoria (Isaja and Melandri 1997). The distinctiveness
of this film resides in what the Audio-Visual Archive in Rome describes as being
“a study of the diverse forms of memory, transmitted in the idiom of audio visuality.” The film’s focus on Gramsci includes extracts from classic political documentaries on film and television, feature films, animated cartoons and drawings,
interspersed with commentaries by individuals who knew him and by family
members, and a montage of images of his works in Italian, European, Latin
American and Asian languages. Judging by the books, articles, and even films
that continue to appear on the life and writings of Antonio Gramsci, his work
continues to be germane to cultural and political analysts. Thus, the film offers an
initial testimony to Gramsci’s influence in and on media.
Moreover, media technology was relevant to Gramsci’s considerations of
connections between culture and politics explicit in his references to cinema and
implicit in his mode of analysis of cultural politics as evident in the work of internationally prominent Italian filmmakers, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Bernardo Bertolucci, the Taviani brothers and Gianni Amelio. Gramsci’s writings
on culture with their political emphasis also influenced the writings of British
thinkers identified in the 1960s and 1970s with the Birmingham Centre for the
Study of Culture and particularly with the writings of Stuart Hall. The center’s
studies were to animate international media critics in their attempts to find a
language to account for the production of consent and coercion in the social and
political arenas. Furthermore, the writings of Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, and
Gayatri Spivak in a postcolonial context have demonstrated how Gramsci’s work
on culture and politics continues to resonate.
This chapter is a modest attempt to focus on the vicissitudes of media from
the postwar era to the final decade of the twentieth century and the beginning
of the twenty-first. Through Gramsci and his analysts, I will address the
specter of fascism that has been summoned and enhanced by the practices
of contemporary media in collusion with the avatars of neoliberalism and
neoconservatism.
Gramsci, in and on media
111
My comments are animated by a question raised by Tony Judt in an essay in
The London Review of Books, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” in which Judt asked,
“Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic
foreign policy?” (Judt 2006: 3). A similar concern about consensus subtends
Gramsci’s analysis of the Risorgimento and the rise of fascism. Gramsci’s
writings are vital for the present defeat of democracy and socialism, since they
examine the structures of consent and coercion that made this failure possible.
He wrote:
The course of events in the Risorgimento revealed the tremendous importance
of the demagogic mass movement, with its leaders thrown up by chance,
improvised, etc., nevertheless in actual fact taken over by the traditional
organic forces – in other words, by the parties of long standing.
(SPN: 112)
Since the “power and reach of the state and the achievement of capitalism’s
global ambition” today (Harootunian 2007: 1–15) have also resulted in a
re-structuring of capital and social relations as witnessed by a redistribution of
wealth to the top of the economic pyramid on an international scale, Gramsci’s
concept of “passive revolution” remains cogent as a concept that can account
for continuities and changes within the order of capital that have resonance in
contemporary terms (Morton 2007b: 68). The “passive revolution” begun in
the 1970s has been greatly aided by academic and public intellectuals via
media, film, television and journalism. Gramsci’s concept is an antidote to the
deleterious effects of disregarding past history that occludes understanding of
the processes that subtend the dictum that “everything must change so that
everything can remain the same.”
In his writings on Italian history, Gramsci characterized the Risorgimento and
its political, cultural, and economic reforms (as he did the emergence of fascism)
as serving the interests of the traditional ruling classes with the incorporation of
new friends and allies at the expense of the population at large. To account for
this “revolution from above” he marshaled evidence and produced analyses from
a number of sources: historical texts, classical and popular literature, theater,
philosophy, an examination of folklore and common sense and a number of
reflections on language and literature. Moreover, Gramsci was aware of the then
“new media” and recognized them as a “source of linguistic innovation” inherent
to forms of cultural hegemony. In seeking the sources of this innovation, he lists:
1) the school; 2) newspapers; 3) popular and artistic writers; 4) theater and
sound cinema; 5) radio; 6) public and religious congregations of every type;
7) connections in “conversation” among the most and least cultivated of the
population (a question which perhaps is not accorded the importance it
deserves in relation to the “word” as verse that is learned through memory
in the form of songs, fragments of lyric opera, etc.).
(Q29 §3: 2345)
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M. Landy
His sustained stress on language “is crucial because it cannot be separated from
all aspects of social life” (Ives 2005a: 33).
For Gramsci, “the history of language is the history of linguistic innovation,
but these innovations are not individual (as happens in art) but are of an entire
social community that has innovated its culture” (Q6 §71: 738). These innovations in language are connected to folklore and common sense insofar as they
are conceptions of a world and of life. According to Peter Ives,
Linguistic values and meanings are human creations that always exist within
history . . . subject to human collective and individual manipulation within the
parameters set by past human action. Thus language is not a non-productive
realm of communication or merely the transmission of information. . . . Language products – whether Hollywood movies or computer programs – are
constituted by language, and this requires that Marxism and all progressive
social movements comprehend the importance of language to politics.
(Ives 2005a: 174)
For filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti the question of the forms of language
(including the arts and media), their innovativeness, and their importance in the
formation of hegemony became a critical feature of his films.
Following Gramsci’s thought, Visconti, in his film adaptation of Giuseppe di
Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo, portrays the Risorgimento as a “revolution
from above” in which “Restoration becomes the first policy whereby social
struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain
power without dramatic upheavals” (SPN: 115). This policy “resulted in both
colonial exploitation at home (in the form of exploiting the southern masses of
the Mezzogiorno with the support of Catholic Action and the monarchy as the
‘state form’ of the fascist regime” (Morton 2007b: 71). Furthermore, the vital
economic base generates its masked and/or obfuscating reflective superstructure,
by changing the nature of the relationship from one of reflection to one of
reciprocity” (Lucente 1997: 94–95).
The film is a reflection on this masking by means of visual and auditory
spectacle, gesture and music. Melodrama and opera are instrumental in the film’s
dramatization of this critical historical moment and also as a meditation on
literary, operatic, and cinematic language. Of the operatic, Gramsci wrote
“Verdian music, or better the libretto and the plots of Verdi’s musical dramas are
responsible for an array of ‘artificial’ expressions, of forms of thinking, of a
style” (Q8 §46: 969). Visconti’s film incarnates and undermines this conception
of the operatic. The film’s spectacular style is testimony to the power of
cinematic language to visually and aurally create a “realization of the theory of
trasformismo, the absorption of members from other social classes into the ruling
class” (Said 2006: 108). But if in other popular historical films, the language of
melodrama and opera is used to enhance the spectacle of a visually and aurally
dazzling world, in Visconti’s film – through the costumes, the frescoes, and the
music from Verdi’s La Traviata and Vincenzo Bellini’s (a Sicilian composer) La
Gramsci, in and on media
113
Sonnambula – the spectator is treated to the decomposition of spectacular and
melodramatic images of aristocratic splendor and power.
Visconti spared no cost in creating a sense of actual paintings, garments worn
by the actors, and decor. The emphasis on the “authenticity” of this past world
might seem to belong to the familiar conventions of the epic film with its
penchant for monumental spectacle. Here, however, the appeal of “authenticity”
is unmasked whenever possible. For example, the princely Salina family’s
arrival at the church of Donnafugata – set, ironically, to the strains of a Verdian
opera, links monumental architecture and sculpture to aristocratic patronage. But
then the scene produces a curious reversal of expectations. At first, the spectator
is provided with breathtaking images of the edifice, bas-reliefs, religious icons,
and rituals, only to be wrenched from this exalted moment. As the members of
the Salina family sit immobile in their appointed carved seats, covered with the
dust from the journey to Donnafugata, the camera films them as immobile. They
appear like the statuary in the church, identified with historical stasis.
The transition of The Leopard from novel to film dramatizes a fusion of the
aristocratic and imminent bourgeois family as an event that allegorizes the union
of the family and the state, and of new landowners in collusion with the aristocracy. The realization of the Prince of Salina’s motto, “All must change, so that all
can remain the same,” depends on his bringing the struggle for national unity into
line with his own, his social class, and his family’s self-interest. The Risorgimento
as “a revolution from above” excludes the peasants (presented by Visconti as
silent subalterns). Of this type of “revolution” Gramsci wrote:
Restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently
elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic
upheavals. . . . The old feudal classes . . . are not eliminated, nor is there any
attempt to eliminate them as an organic whole; instead of a ‘class’ they
become a ‘caste’ with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but
no longer with predominant economic functions.
(SPN: 115)
A critical scene for understanding the film’s Gramscian perspective on the
Risorgimento occurs between Don Fabrizio and a representative of the new
government, Chevalley, who has come to Donnafugata from the North to invite
the prince to participate in the new Italian parliament. The encounter between
the two men highlights the language of unity, progress, and the blessings of
modernity identified with Risorgimento mythology, something the wary spectator might perceive as irony. Like the structure of the film itself, this episode
conveys repetition not forward movement. Chevalley’s invocation of progress
invokes instead the Gramscian motif of political betrayal that haunts the film.
Ironies that link the historical past to the future (which is for the spectator
already the past) are evident in Chevalley’s assumption that Sicily’s incorporation into the nation is indeed a “happy annexation” and in the prince’s declining
to participate in this “progress” (though he has helped to engineer it).
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This “annexation” will bring bourgeois opportunist Don Calogero Sedara, his
daughter, Angela, and Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, into the new nation-state
but “what was involved,” in Gramscian terms,
[w]as not a social group which “led” other groups, but a State which, even
though it had limitations on as a power, “led” the group which should have
been “leading,” and was able to put at the latter’s disposal an army and a
politico-diplomatic strength.
(SPN: 105).
“Law and order” and its forms of coercion and consent are now the domain of
this new “family.” Thus the film’s ending, with its echoes of the shooting of the
Garibaldians in the name of law and order, and the ominous statement of Don
Calogero concerning its restoration, evokes Gramsci’s observation, “perhaps it
is not without significance that fascism in the first years of its development
affirmed its ties to the Old Right” (Q10 §9: 1228).
In a similar Gramscian vein, Bernardo Bertolucci in 1900 (1976) presents
portraits of a “liberation manqué” through telescoping the pre-fascist years, the
rise and impact of fascism, and the Resistance and Liberation (Bondanella 2001:
312). What the spectator views is, as was the case in Visconti, an exploration of
the hegemonic formation of fascism through a focus on families as an allegory
of the history of the politics of passive revolution and its relations to fascism.
The films of the Taviani brothers, particularly Allonsanfan (1974), return to the
Risorgimento as a failed revolution, and explores the role of intellectuals in that
failure. The Tavianis’s Padre Padrone (1977) in a particularly Gramscian vein,
is invested in the Southern question, subaltern life, and the importance of education and of verbal, technological, and artistic language as a means of identifying
new types of intellectuals. Lamerica (1994), directed by Gianni Amelio, also
bears a Gramscian legacy as it conjoins past and present in its flashbacks to the
fascist era to develop a series of contemporary political concerns: the historical
role of the Mezzogiorno, the role of emigration, the frangibility of national
citizenship, and the role of media, television in particular, as producer of false
promises of economic and social “opportunities” in neocolonial Albania.
Pasolini too was influenced by Gramsci’s work, though he sought to bring it
into alignment with the changing cultural realities he perceived wrought by
Italy’s “Economic Miracle.” In Heretical Empiricism, he wrote: “Gramsci’s
influence is palpable . . . not only in its frequent references to hegemony but in
Pasolini’s concern with linguistics and the development of an Italian language”
(1988: xv). Moreover, Pasolini felt “authorized to announce that Italian has been
born as a national language” (ibid.: 17). He prophesied, “The guiding spirit of
language will no longer be literature but technology (ibid.: 19). Invoking
Gramsci, Pasolini wrote that,
[f]or a man of letters who is not ideologically bourgeois it’s a question
of remembering once again, with Gramsci, that if the new Italian reality is
Gramsci, in and on media
115
producing a new language, a national Italian, the only way to take possession of it and make it one’s own is to know with absolute clarity and
courage what is the national reality that produces it is.
(Ibid.: 20)
Language for Pasolini was not merely confined to the written word but
extended to include spoken language and cinematic images. Of language, Pasolini
wrote, “For some time now I have been speaking of a code of cinematographic
decoding as analogous to that of the decoding of reality. This implies the definition
of Reality as Language” (ibid.: 262). This assertion would seem to place him at
odds with Gramsci; however, it is neither a-historical nor metaphysical. For
Pasolini “the language of reality [is] in its physicality” (ibid.: 261).
Pasolini’s films are theoretical and practical explorations of the vicissitudes
of the language of folklore and common sense. In Accattone (1961), Pasolini
portrayed the culture of the Roman subproletarian world dominated by a ruling
class that makes little attempt to assimilate it, but peripheralized it. He returned
to this world in Mamma Roma (1962) where he probed the catastrophic effects
of a prostitute’s attempts to integrate herself and her son into the petit bourgeoisie. Thereafter, Pasolini in the style of his films articulated a profound
concern over the social and political character of what he observed was a change
“from humanistic to technocratic dominance in both superstructure and infrastructure, from a heterogeneous to a homogeneous bourgeois culture” (Pasolini
2008: xxiv) that he termed “technocratic communicativeness.” He claimed that
between 1961 and 1975, something essential to the culture changed and became
a linguistic genocide responsible for the destruction of a total population.
Pasolini’s animadversions on television and his attempts to create an “unpopular
cinema” were a response to what ultimately became for him a new form of
fascism dramatically and terrifyingly unleashed in his Salò (1975).
Pasolini’s (and Gramsci’s) theoretical and practical concern with passive
revolution, its connections to forms of fascism, and the power of language to
enhance or challenge this political possibility migrated to the UK. The purely
economistic and bureaucratic tendencies of the revolution from above could be
seen to reign in the triumph of the British Conservatives from the late 1960s to the
1990s. For intellectuals of the left, it became imperative to understand the genealogy and character of changing economic, political, and cultural formations, and
Gramsci’s writings played a significant role in analyzing these formations. His
writings were disseminated throughout Europe and the United Kingdom in the
1960s and 1970s, giving rise to forms of cultural analysis directed to rethinking
prevailing forms of Marxist analysis. Stuart Hall drew on the Prison Notebooks to
develop the thesis that Thatcherism was understandable through Gramsci’s conception of “passive revolution.” He saw that moment as a “defeat” for the forces
of the left and for the rise of a “new political project of the right” and “regressive
modernization” (Hall 1988: 164).
Following Hall, among others, “British Gramscianism” involved the production
of cultural critiques focused on questions of education, ethnography, language,
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community and social institutions in mass media, particularly film and TV. The
burgeoning of cultural studies, for better or worse, has left its marks in the ongoing
studies of popular and mass culture that desperately seek “sites” of “resistance”
and “subversion.” For John Fiske culture is always at its heart, political. “Fiske
finds semiotic struggle everywhere: in wearing jeans, in shopping malls, on the
beach, in the video games arcade, among Madonna fans, in rock videos. . . .
“(Harris 1992: 166–167). However, according to Joel Pfister, cultural analysis
began lose to track of the theories and the history that had animated its initial work
(Pfister 2006: 152–153). Gradually “politics” came to mean any form of cultural
struggle (Baker Jr et al. 1996: 60). Identity politics shorn of its historical specificity and contradictions took center stage in much cultural analysis. While there is
no shortage of historical, religious, feminist, racial, postcolonial, global, and antiimperialist productions, there is a lack of theoretical and self-critical examination
in the works and in the commentaries on it by intellectuals. Many writings seems
geared to reanimating the past, the traumas wrought by earlier atrocities, exclusions, and failure or to celebrating the “end of history,” of traditional “culture,”
often placing hope in the “New Media” as a profound futurist rupture in subject
positions via digital modes of interactivity and the emergence of a “differential
digital transculture” (Poster 2007: 391).
Media critics fervent about the emergence of new virtual realities, now on a
global scale, dismiss the importance of historicizing and hence neglect to focus
on what is continuous in the “new” forms of power and social subjection wrought
by advances in technology. Their fascination with global utopianism is apocalyptic: it smacks of chiliasm, and, even worse, it blindly places its faith in machinery
and not human intelligence. In fact, professionalism reigns among intellectual
workers in the realm of what Gramsci described as “traditional intellectuals.”
Since issues of subalternity, technology, media, the reorganization of social
formations as a consequence of changing dimensions of capital, and the character of intellectual life is under siege, the writings of Gramsci remain important
for assessing the cultural and political landscape. While they may not offer a
panacea, they do offer an opportunity to engage with necessary forms for
rethinking the relation between inherited forms and their “new” incarnations.
As Stuart Hall once cautioned, “I do not claim that, in any simple way,
Gramsci ‘has the answers’ or ‘holds the key’ to our present troubles. I do believe
that we must ‘think’ our problems in a Gramscian way – which is different” (Hall
1988a: 161). This difference is urgently bound to human intelligence and the
contemporary role of intellectuals. Gramsci’s insights on intellectuals, subalternity, passive revolution, relations between civil society and the state, nation
formation, and historicity remain essential to the writings of Edward Said, Partha
Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakravarty, and Gayatri Spivak (and to the
related works of scholars on Indian media such as Ravi S. Vasudevan and
Madhava Prasad). These thinkers can be described, in Tariq Ali’s words about
Said’s work, as being distinguished from those critics “who feel that the twentieth
century erred in attaching too much importance to intellect and reason, conviction
and character” (Ali 2007).
Gramsci, in and on media
117
In “The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society,” Joseph A. Buttigieg
reminds his reader that rather than thinking “of intellectuals as either out of
touch with political reality or as inveterate leftists,” intellectuals of various
political persuasions have played an important role in the creation of the present
political moment, “in the policies that are now being enacted by the Bush
administration.” Buttigieg adds: “This work of preparation was carried out
by groups or clusters of extremely well-educated, technically sophisticated
individuals hosted and funded by various think tanks and research institutes”
(Buttigieg 2005: 47).
The intellectual in the modern democratic state is increasingly dependent on
specialized expertise tied to cultural and political functions that Gramsci saw
developing (e.g. “Americanism and Fordism”), including the noteworthy expansion of media technology. These intellectual functions range from direct domination to indirect involvement in and direction of political parties, business and
allied civil institutions. This distinction is fundamental to any understanding of
how consent and coercion operate not only from the state but also in diffused
fashion from other economic, educational, philanthropic, medical and juridical
institutions. The difficulty posed by the concepts of coercion and consent entails
a more historically inflected definition of their meaning in the age of media
dominance to identify when consent becomes coercion.
Invoking Gramsci on the meaning of consent, Buttigieg writes,
[w]hat makes the modern democratic state robust and resilient in Gramsci’s
view, is not the power of coercion that it can exercise through political
society (the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the police, etc.), but,
rather the myriad ways in which the core elements of self-definition and
self-representation are internalized, or, to some degree or another, endorsed
by most of its citizens – including those who belong to social strata other
than the ruling or privileged groups.
(2005: 43)
Therefore, in order to understand if, or when, consent becomes coercion, it is
necessary to think about the “triadic elements (economic, political, and civil
society) that compose the modern State.”
The Gramscian text provides a nuanced means to understand the character of
coercion and consent, but, given the prominent role played by media in our
times, greater elaboration, beyond description and decoding of texts, is required
to determine the character and social role of media and the relations of the media
to the three component elements of the modern state. What role, Buttigieg asks,
have the mass media (newspapers, radio and television) played in the context
of economic, political and civil society and what role do they now play “to
bring the overwhelming majority of citizenry into line and to marginalize the
dissenters through a campaign of vilification?” (Buttigieg 2005: 46). And, I
would add, how have media played an active role in creating the illusion of
choice, if not of bewilderment? The misinformation and contradictory reporting
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M. Landy
on national and international politics since 9/11, the Iraqi war, and the selective,
melodramatic, and celebrity-oriented treatment of the 2008 presidential election
are exemplary of the strategies and sway of the conservative media moguls and
their employees. As Christopher Wagstaff finds in relation to advertising – but
also to information – “it is not the program that is being sold to the viewer. It is
the viewer who is being sold to the advertiser” (Wagstaff 2001: 295).
One of the major commodities that television has to offer is the packaging and
selling of time. Time in non-commercial television is dependent on licensing (as
in the UK and Ireland) or on subscription drives in US public television. Television can do many of the things that cinema and other media do. It can create
feature-length films; it can document events (biographies, catastrophes, scientific
and medical documentaries); it is a news medium; it can produce short and long
programs including cartoons; and it can serve as an educational medium. Television “offers a continuous flowing river of experience from which we have come
to draw the substance of our identities” (Smith 1998: 2). This “flowing river” of
time is characterized by interruption; major events are broadcast that constitute
“rare realizations of the technological dream of the electronic media – to reach
everybody, directly and simultaneously” (Smith 1998: 97). Now, with recent
electronic advances, these parallel programs can be viewed on one screen at the
same time and at the time they are happening. The televisual potentially has no
beginning or endings: it is a medium that is always on even when the individual
set is turned to off: television never sleeps, though the spectator does. In this
respect, the medium is identified with an annihilation of memory and specialization in catastrophic events. “The televisual construction of catastrophe seeks
both to preserve and to annihilate indeterminacy” (Doane 2005: 257).
These characteristics are endemic to the late capitalist society of the United
States “where crisis is produced and assimilated directly to the circulation of
commodities” (Doane 2005: 261) and multiplied through repetition, selection, and
censorship. The control of the medium is evident in the reportage surrounding
9/11 and then the Iraqi war buttressed by the government restructuring of social
and political life via the Patriot Act. A return to the Gramscian concern with
democratic consensus suggests that coercion in the guise of consent seems to have
triumphed. The spectator is barraged by images of events ranging from domestic
crises, criminality, subversion of institutions, extended and repetitive displays of
all forms of violence identified under the rubric of the threat of “terrorism.” The
viewer is enlisted through the mobilization of anxiety, the menace of annihilation,
governmental corruption, the threat of natural disasters, prophecy, and of domestic
outbreaks of “lawlessness.”
Further, the reign of the celebrity not only continues unabated, but has metastasized. The “stars” of the present, along with political figures, men and women
of wealth, media magnates, demagogues and dopesters, have gained near total
control of media. The example of the political figure of Silvio Berlusconi is
instructive about the intertwinings of politics, stardom, and media in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Paul Ginsborg, in accounting for the
Berlusconi phenomenon, writes that he is
Gramsci, in and on media
119
[n]ot just the President of the Council of Ministers, he also presides over the
imagination of a consistent segment of the nation; not just those who
already enjoy considerable wealth, but also those who would like to. . . .
Perhaps it is his charisma that is forged, in the sense of being constructed
within the confines, practices and symbols of modern communication and
consumption, carefully manufactured.
(Ginsborg 2004: 110–111, emphasis original)
Berlusconi’s putative “charisma” has relied on his being a “master of evasion,”
an “unrivalled salesman of escapist dreams,” a “self-made tycoon,” and a
personification of a “part-Dallas, part Mediterranean chic” (Ginsborg 2004: 111).
Berlusconi is a mirror for Italians to regard themselves as “opulent and powerful” (Ginsborg 2004: 111). He embodies the social, economic, and cultural transformations from the 1970 to the present. In keeping with the rhetoric and politics
of neo-liberalism, Berlusconi is associated with anti-communism, the Roman
Catholic Church, privatization, the free market, and individual initiative. Such
positions that unite him in the popular imaginary to other European and American
leaders from Thatcher to George W. Bush as well as to other powerful media
magnates. Berlusconi and Murdoch have played a critical role in establishing new
and homogenizing trends in journalism and TV that have altered the transmission
of information and entertainment in relation to both quantity and quality.
The efforts on the part of right-wing politicians to “radically transform
American society from within by “stealthily corrupting or taking over the major
institutions of civil society” (Buttigieg 2005: 50) have also been expressed
through government policy and the White House collusion with media.
Buttigieg’s injunction not to underestimate the nature and effects of this dire
turn of events is an appeal to intellectuals to summon the strength to recognize
and assess “the adversary’s strengths” (Buttigieg 2005: 52). This position is
instructive for concluding my own brief journey through the various expressions
of Gramsci’s insights on media and politics and their role in generating the illusion of “consent.” However, it is inadequate to focus on media alone. Media
must be considered in relation to the nature and operations of the state in collusion with civil institutions so as to engage analytically and critically with the
changes wrought by “technocratic liberalism” and its effects in transforming the
public space into a “market place” (Judt 2005: 543).
In the last years of his life and work, Pasolini agonized over the televisual
world we now inhabit. He wrote
Audiovisual techniques are in large measure already a part of our world,
that is the world of technical neocapitalism, which moves ahead, and whose
tendency is to deprive its techniques of ideology or to make them ontological; to make them silent and unrelated; to make them habits; to make them
religious forms. . . . we must therefore fight to demystify the “innocence of
technique” to the last drop of blood.
(Pasolini 1988: 221–222)
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M. Landy
Buttigieg’s examination of the conservative movement’s attempts to “move beyond
hegemony ... to acquire a ‘monopoly of the organs of public opinion” (Buttigieg
2005: 51) is an equally stringent assessment of “technical neocapitalism.”
But how can Gramsci’s ideas on media from an earlier moment in twentieth
century culture and politics contribute to an understanding of these techniques
and thus fuel efforts to combat them? Gramsci did not set himself up as an
arbiter of “correct” cultural artifacts, nor did he promote a taste for tendency
literature on behalf of proletarian concerns. Instead, he was concerned to
examine how cultural artifacts are deeply imbued with the process of intellectual
civilizing. Our challenge is to identify and evaluate the multiple determinants
and changes in cultural and political forms and their effects. To use Gramsci’s
own phrasing: “implicit in this research [is] that of the quantitative as well as
qualitative modifications (mass extension) brought about in ways of thinking by
the technical and mechanical development of cultural organization.” And
“spoken communication,” he wrote, “is a means of ideological diffusion which
has a rapidity, a field of action, and an emotional simultaneity far greater than
written communication (theatre, cinema and radio, with its loudspeakers in
public squares, beat all forms of written communication” (SPN: 377).
These remarks are echoed in the concerns articulated above concerning the nature
of mass media and further reinforce the importance of identifying their effects.
Instead of regarding the media as evacuating meaning, Gramsci offers insights into
strategies whereby the media and, more broadly, culture still draw on common sense
as folklore (nowadays as religiosity). Folklore as common sense functions as “a
subtle system involving survival, exchange of services, and uncritical [affective]
adherence to tradition” (Landy 1994: 80). Folklore as common sense, is a residual
aspect of these earlier cultures, involving the anastomosis of elements from the past
to new forms of communication, particularly radio, cinema, and TV. Standing
midway between folklore (religion, superstition, ritual, cliché), science, and philosophy, common sense is not static but renewed and altered to accommodate
to contemporary exigencies, requiring study and critical elaboration in its present
incarnations (Landy 1994: 382–383). As a fusion of archaic and modern beliefs
and practices, folklore migrates between high and popular forms of expression, and,
therefore, deserves careful attention so as to identify its character, circulation, and
impact on social and political life.
For Morton, this invocation – through contemporary media – of common
sense as folklore is characterized by promises of freedom and democracy effected
through “the new constitutionalism of disciplinary neo-liberalism and the concomitant spread of market civilisation” (Morton 2007b: 126). David Harvey
attributes this diffusion to:
[p]owerful ideological influences circulated through the corporations, the
media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society – such as
the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations. . . . the
origination of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the capture
of certain segments of the media, and the conversion of many intellectuals
Gramsci, in and on media
121
to neoliberal ways of thinking, created a climate of opinion in support of
neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom.
(Harvey 2005b: 40)
Media, bolstered by the common sense of triumphant global capitalism, has
played a critical role in reinforcing belief in the inevitability of war, corporate
greed, and natural disasters. Television outlets such as CNN and Fox News have
become state channels to articulate these views. Sectors of the film industry
have largely succumbed as well in their offering a spate of war films, portraits
of dysfunctional social life, and dramas of social uplift and personal fulfillment.
At the same time, for discerning viewers, the media makes visible the persistence of the long march of capitalism and its updated and diverse mechanisms of
consent and coercion that involve state and civil institutions. Disaffection with
the new order is apparent along the political spectrum expressed in antagonism
to “mismanaged” wars, fiscal irresponsibility, lack of economic and social benefits promised by the old/new order of capital, the proliferating expansion of the
underclass, and abuses of state power.
The reign of information and expertise needs to be understood as a variant on
the folklore of common sense that must be understood as a mode whereby the
effects of contemporary culture serve to maintain a familiar tendency of disorganizing the masses, thus rendering them vulnerable to coercion cloaked as consent.
Thinking with and beyond Gramsci on media requires an orchestrated address of
the multivariate strategies – production, financing, distribution, and intellectual
labor – whereby institutions and individuals passively and actively endorse forms
of common sense as folklore that blend religion, patriotism, passion, and economic
gain to create the illusion of choice and of private gain as public good.
9
Common sense in Gramsci
Guido Liguori
Two meanings
“Common sense” appears for the first time in the Prison Notebooks in the list of
“main topics” that Gramsci drew up on 8 February 1929 at the beginning of his
first notebook. The entry, unlike any other in the same list, is accompanied by a
parenthetical reference to another one of the “main topics”, namely “the concept
of folklore” (Q1: 5). A later listing of “principal essays” on the opening page of
Notebook 8 contains the item: “Folklore and common sense” (Q8: 935) – here,
Gramsci joins the two topics that in the initial list were connected only
indirectly. Gramsci’s interest in the concept of “common sense,” then, manifests
itself at the earliest stage of his work in prison and the phrase recurs frequently
in the first as well as most of the subsequent notebooks.
Following its inclusion in the list of “main topics”, the term “common sense”
reappears for the first time in Notebook 1 §16. Commenting on a column,
“Readers’ Postcards,” published in the popular weekly Domenica del Corriere,
Gramsci writes: “the ‘readers’ postcards’ are one of the most typical documents of
Italian popular common sense. Barilli belongs to an even lower level than this
common sense: philistine for the classical philistines of the Domenica del
Corriere” (Q1 §16: 14). It is noteworthy that in this passage: (a) “common sense”
is qualified by “Italian popular” which suggests that Gramsci believes that there
exist multiple “common senses” that are distinguishable by social connotation and
geographical region; and (b) common sense is considered as something negative
since the music critic Barilli is scorned for belonging to a level that is “even lower”
than the very low bar set by common sense. Does (a) conflict with (b)? If there are
different forms or types of common sense, depending on geographical region and
above all on social group, how can one place them all at the lowliest level? What
this passage contains, in nuce, are two partially different ways (that can sometimes
converge) of understanding common sense: (a) as the prevailing and often implicit
“conception of the world” of a social or regional group; and (b) as something that
is the opposite of a developed and coherent world view. I will argue that in keeping
with meaning (a) Gramsci maintains, among other things, that intellectuals, too,
have their common sense, whereas in keeping with (b) he uses the term “common
sense” in a patently negative, when not derogatory, sense.
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123
The next appearance of “common sense” in Notebook 1 occurs in a note entitled “Types of periodicals” where it carries the pejorative connotation indicated in
(b) above. Gramsci’s study of “types of periodicals” in the notebooks is important
because, among other things, it explores the terrain of the organization of hegemony and thus examines the conscious efforts to disseminate an ideology, that
is “the educational–formative work that a homogenous cultural center performs”
(Q1 §43: 34). It seems that in writing this, Gramsci was also thinking, albeit
in coded terms, about the efforts that a communist party should undertake. He
cautions against the “ ‘enlightenment’ error” of thinking that “a well propagated,
‘clear idea’ enters diverse center consciousnesses with the same ‘organizing’
effects of widespread clarity.” He then adds:
The ability of the professional intellectual skillfully to combine induction
and deduction, to generalize, to infer, to transport from one sphere to
another a criterion of discrimination, adapting it to new conditions etc., is a
“specialty”; it is not endowed by “common sense.” Therefore, the premise
of an “organic diffusion from a homogeneous center of a homogeneous way
of thinking and acting” is not sufficient.
(Q1 §43: 33)
The “enlightenment” error, then, consists in believing that all human beings
are the same. If the goal is to enable all humans to become equal, it is necessary
to start from the realistic assumption of existing disparities – including cultural
and intellectual disparities. There is a clear difference between someone who
can be said to be an intellectual by profession and someone whose cultural
development is arrested at the level of common sense. While all men and
women are intellectuals, as Gramsci states elsewhere, it does not follow that
they are all intellectuals in the same sense. Obviously, there are people who
have had the privilege of developing their intellectual capacity; common sense
(in its predominantly negative sense) lies outside and beyond this citadel of the
privileged.
“Common sense” appears for the third time in a note – Notebook 1 §65 – that
is, once again, entitled “Types of periodicals.” Here common sense receives
somewhat more ample treatment as Gramsci provides some clarification of what
he means by the term. He begins the note by referring to a number of periodicals
that, in his view, “belong to the sphere of ‘good sense’ or ‘common sense.’ ”
They fall into this category because they try “to modify the average opinion of a
particular society, criticizing, suggesting, admonishing, modernizing, introducing new clichés.” To succeed, these periodicals must be seen to occupy the
middle of the road. They “must not appear to be fanatical or exceedingly partisan: they must position themselves within the field of ‘common sense,’ distancing themselves from it just enough to permit a mocking smile, but not contempt
or arrogant superiority” (Q1 §65: 75–76). Setting aside the remark that makes it
seem there is no difference between common sense and good sense, this note
contains some tactical cautions (apparently directed at the “homogenous center”
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G. Liguori
carrying out the “educational–formative work” discussed above). Therein one
can already locate a conception of common sense: in order to have an impact on
common sense it is necessary to occupy a position “within the field of ‘common
sense.’ ” Common sense, then, is not simply an enemy to be defeated. Rather, a
dialectical and maieutic relationship has to be established with common sense in
order to transform it (and enable it to transform itself) so that a “new common
sense” will prevail – a crucial achievement in the struggle for hegemony.
Even richer and more complex is the following passage in which Gramsci
proceeds with his reflection, making a logical-argumentative leap that reveals to
the reader how far he has arrived in his elaboration of the concept:
Every social stratum has its own “common sense” which is ultimately the
most widespread conception of life and morals. Every philosophical current
leaves a sedimentation of “common sense”: this is the document of its
historical reality. Common sense is not something rigid and static; rather,
it changes continuously, enriched by scientific notions and philosophical
opinions which have entered into common usage. “Common sense” is the
folklore of “philosophy” and stands midway between real “folklore” (that
is, as it is understood) and the philosophy, the science, the economics of the
scholars. “Common sense” creates the folklore of the future, that is, a more
or less rigidified phase of a certain time and place.
(Q1 §65: 76)
This passage provides a number of significant insights. The most relevant are:
(a) “every social stratum has its own common sense”; (b) common sense is
defined as “the most widespread conception of life and morality” (in a given
social stratum); (c) common sense is the “folklore of philosophy”; (d) common
sense changes constantly, always incorporating new philosophical and scientific
fragments and evolving with the evolution of society. What we have here seems
to be a variant of the concept of ideology – what Gramsci calls a conception of
the world or world view. Common sense, in light of this passage, is the world
view that a social stratum receives, for the most part passively. This passive
receptivity stands in contrast to the active manner in which the intellectuals and
the ruling group of that same society elaborate their world views. Insofar as it is
passive, common sense is marked by belatedness and minimal development.
However, the emphasis placed on the fact that “every social stratum has its own
‘common sense,’ ” excludes any definition that would designate “common
sense” solely as a world view of the lowest level. In general terms, common
sense is the most widespread and often implicit ideology within a social group at
the most basic level – even in the sense of being the basic common denominator.
Hence, it has a dialectical relation with philosophy, that is, with that advanced
level of ideology typical of the upper echelons of the various social groups.
Broadly speaking, Gramsci’s concern here is with the terrain of the “preintentional” wherein the great majority of subjects are not only “acted upon” but
also “defined” (in their subjectivity and their mode of individual and collective
Common sense in Gramsci
125
existence) by ideology and, therefore, also by common sense. This gives rise to
the problem – that will not be confronted here – of how to connect the broadly
pre-intentional character of common sense with the activity of the “homogenous
center” engaged in “educational–formative work” in such a way as to change it
and create a new common sense. Obviously, the “homogenous center” must
resist the delusion that it can create a whole new common sense. The formation
of common sense is influenced by many factors that one cannot control; this has
to do with the open character of the historical process that cannot be defined in
advance. It is hard to determine to what extent Gramsci was aware of this
problem, but in discussing of the “pre-intentional” one must not forget that the
concepts of “will” and “collective will” have an important role in Gramsci’s
thought and are indicative of the complexity of the conception of anthropology
found in the Notebooks.
Spontaneity and backwardness
How does Gramsci describe common sense in the earliest notebooks? He defines
it as “the traditional world view” (Q3 §48: 328) of a given social stratum, with an
apparent emphasis on “traditional,” an adjective that Gramsci inserted between
the lines in the manuscript. This note is devoted to an analysis of the nexus
“spontaneity and conscious leadership” with explicit reference to the weekly
newspaper he edited, Ordine Nuovo. Here Gramsci, to some extent, rehabilitates
the importance of spontaneity at the popular level, albeit as an element that needs
to be educated. In Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci writes,
This element of “spontaneity” was not neglected, much less disdained: it
was educated, it was given a direction, it was cleansed of everything extraneous that could contaminate it, in order to unify it by means of modern
theory but in a living, historically effective manner.
(Q3 §48: 330)
This is an example of an approach that is not marred by the “enlightenment error”
he decried in earlier notes (i.e. Q1 §43 and Q1 §65, discussed above). This
undoubtedly constitutes a re-evaluation of common sense. In the first place, it is
treated in connection with the “the ‘spontaneous’ sentiments of the masses”
which are formed “through everyday experience in the light of ‘common sense’ ”
(Q3 §48: 330–31). More importantly, Gramsci affirms that there is a quantitative
rather than a qualitative difference – i.e. a difference “of degree not of quality” –
between philosophy and common sense: “Kant considered it important for his
philosophical theories to be in agreement with common sense; the same is true of
Croce” (Q3 §48: 331).
The fascinating discussion in Notebook 3 §48 is not taken up again, either in
Notebook 3 or in later notebooks. The positive evaluation of common sense that
appears in this very early notebook remains an almost totally isolated case. If we
wish to observe Gramsci’s well known injunction to avoid clinging to isolated
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G. Liguori
assertions and seek, instead, to grasp “the rhythm of thought in development”
(Q16 §2: 1841), we would have to start from the fact that, in the Prison Notebooks, the explicitly and implicitly negative evaluations of common sense are
far more numerous and significant. For example, in Notebook 4, in a note
entitled “The technique of thinking,” Gramsci writes:
The technique of thought will certainly not produce a great philosophy, but
it will provide criteria for judgment and it will correct the deformities of the
modes of thinking of common sense. It would be interesting to compare
the technique of common sense – i.e. of the philosophy of the man in the
street – with the technique of the most advanced modern thought. In this
respect, it is also worth taking into account Macaulay’s observation on the
logical weaknesses of a culture formed by oratory and declamation.
(Q4 §18: 439)
In other words, common sense has clearly identifiable weaknesses of a logical
nature and its deformations need correction.
Even more severe is the critique of common sense in its relation to an issue on
which Gramsci dwells at length, namely “the objective existence of reality” which
he regards as the “most important question concerning science” but “as far as
common sense is concerned the question does not even exist” (Q4 §41: 466). Belief
in the objective existence of reality comes to common sense from “religion (at least
Western religions, above all Christianity)” that makes it “the most widespread and
deeply rooted ideology.” Common sense, in Gramsci’s view, is a retrograde world
view both because it is conditioned by religious ideology, which is inescapable and
because it does not accept scientific innovations:
Common sense affirms the objectivity of the real in that this objectivity was
created by God; it is, therefore, an expression of the religious conception of
the world. Moreover, in its account of this objectivity, common sense
commits the grossest errors; for the most part it is at the stage of Ptolemaic
astronomy, it is unable to establish the real connections between cause and
effects, etc. – in other words it is not, in fact, really “objective” because it
cannot conceive of objective “truth.” For common sense, it is “true” that the
world stands still while the sun and the whole firmament turn around it, etc.
Yet, it makes the philosophical affirmation of the objectivity of the real.
(Q4 §78: 745)
Gramsci thus equates common sense with a pre-modern world view. Further
along, in Notebook 6, in the course of some reflections on Pirandello, he
describes common sense as stuck in “the Aristotelian–Catholic way of conceiving
the ‘objectivity of the real’ ” (Q6 §26: 705). Several pages later, still in the same
notebook, Gramsci characterizes common sense as conservative and traditionalist: “common sense is led to believe that what exists today has always existed”
(Q6 §78: 745).
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127
In the course of the composition of the Prison Notebooks, the negative
evaluations of common sense – often described as “vulgar” – continue to greatly
outnumber the positive ones. It is superfluous to insist on this, but I wish to draw
attention specifically to a passage in Notebook 7 in which Gramsci characterizes
common sense as backward in both content (it stops at “formal logic”) and form
(it is “dogmatic”). The note is one of many devoted to a critique of Nikolai
Bukharin’s Historical Materialism. In this instance, Gramsci accuses Bukharin
of having “capitulated before common sense and vulgar thought” (Q7 §29: 877).
Taking his cue from the “Theses on Feuerbach” – and specifically from the third
thesis with its assertions on the reciprocal relations between humans and their
circumstances and on how the educator must be educated – Gramsci links
“vulgar common sense” with an “uneducated and crude environment” to arrive
at the conclusion that “the uneducated and crude environment has exercised
control over the educator; vulgar common sense has imposed itself on science
instead of the other way round. If the environment is the educator, it must in turn
be educated” (Q7 §29: 877). Here, Gramsci unmistakably contrasts common
sense with science (and Marxism, understood as a materialist science of history
and society) and consciousness. Why?
Why is it that confronting the Janus-face of common sense (and folklore) –
which is reactionary but also necessary, conservative but also potentially a
component of a new hegemonic project – Gramsci insistently stresses the negative face of this rudimentary level of the ideological continuum? The answer
resides in the simultaneously practical and theoretical character of the Prison
Notebooks: in addition to an inquiry into the cognition of the real, Gramsci takes
on the task of developing a line of political action that displaces power relations
and reopens the struggle for hegemony – and that, therefore, transforms common
sense. In order to achieve this, one must not only start with the criticism of what
exists but also repudiate all populist temptations.
Common sense, neoidealism, and misoneism
Discussing Croce’s philosophy in the opening pages of Notebook 7, Gramsci
asserts that “Croce is continuously flirting with the ‘common sense’ and the
‘good sense’ of the people” (Q7 §1: 853). The theme of Croce and common
sense is important because it enables us to place Gramsci’s reflections on
common sense within the context of philosophical discussion (in Italy and
elsewhere) in the 1920s and 1930s; it also foregrounds Croce as a fundamental
point of reference of Gramscian discourse in a complex relationship of filiation
and repudiation.
In “Filosofia come vita morale e vita morale come filosofia,” Croce maintains
the need to “abandon the traditional distinction between ordinary and
extraordinary thought,” that is, between philosophy and common sense, since
“every thought is always ordinary and is always tied to experience.” The distinction between philosophical and non-philosophical thinking is, for the neoidealist
philosopher, “not a logical distinction, but merely a psychological one.” The task
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G. Liguori
of the professional philosopher is to overcome incoherence and incompleteness,
whereas the non-philosopher is content to live them. Croce also points out,
however, that “no man is entirely a non-philosopher and no philosopher is perfectly and completely such.” Furthermore, he adds, someone can be a philosopher
even though “he does not write on philosophy nor so much as know the name of
the discipline” (Croce 1928: 77). While it hard to miss the paternalistic tone of
Croce’s discourse, his assertions are rather close to Gramsci’s even though the
latter’s views are animated by a quite different spirit.
Gramsci’s thinking on common sense is developed most extensively in Notebook 8 where he confronts the views of Bukharin, Croce, and Giovanni Gentile.
In an extremely important note that is also concerned with the shortcomings of
Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, Gramsci returns to and intensifies his
critique of neoidealism on the question of the philosophy of philosophers and
the philosophy of common sense. He writes:
Croce often seems to take pleasure in the fact that certain philosophical
propositions are shared by common sense. But what can this mean, concretely? In order to prove that “all men are philosophers,” there is no need
to resort to common sense in this way. Common sense is a disorderly
aggregate of philosophical conceptions in which one can find whatever one
likes. Furthermore, Croce’s attitude towards common sense has not led to a
cultural attitude that is fruitful from a “popular–national” point of view. In
other words, Croce’s attitude has not led to a more concretely historicist
conception of philosophy – but that, in any case, can only be found in
historical materialism.
(Q8 §173: 1045–1046)
Despite its obvious indebtedness to some of Croce’s views on this topic,
Gramsci’s critique of common sense goes well beyond Croce’s. Since the purpose
of Gramsci’s work is to bring people out of their condition of subalternity, he
emphatically underscores the inadequacy of existing common sense. As long as
they remain attached to common sense the subaltern classes cannot launch a real
challenge for hegemony; they will be condemned to remain subaltern – an
outcome that, on the political level, Croce would favor.
A couple of pages later, in another note, Gramsci examines Gentile’s position
on the same question: “Gentile talks of an ahistorical ‘human nature,’ and of the
‘truth of common sense,’ as if one could not find whatever one wanted in
‘common sense,’ and as if there were just one, immutable, eternal ‘common
sense’ ” (Q8 §175: 1047). In a subsequent revision of this note, Gramsci adds
some very important observations:
What has been stated to this point does not mean that there is no truth in
common sense. It means that common sense is an equivocal, contradictory,
and multiform concept and that to refer to common sense as proof of a truth
makes no sense. We can say with precision that something true has become
Common sense in Gramsci
129
common sense to show that it has spread beyond the circle of intellectual
groups, but in that case we are doing no more than noting a historical fact
and asserting historical rationality; in this sense, provided that it used
soberly, the argument has some value, precisely because common sense is
crudely misoneist and conservative so that to have succeeded in forcing the
introduction of a new truth is a proof that the truth in question has powerful
evidence and capacity for expansiveness.
(Q11 §13: 1399)
This is not a positive appraisal of common sense; Gramsci is simply pointing
out that even in common sense, which contains a bit of everything, there are
elements of truth. It is certainly important, especially for those who want to
create a new common sense, to take note of a thesis that has become common
sense. The fact remains that, in this passage, common sense is associated with a
misoneist ideology that is conservative and averse to innovation. Most important
of all, then, in a given historical situation, common sense is a huge obstacle to
revolutionary strategy. It is an unavoidable case of hic Rhodus, hic salta!; it
must be engaged in the present, not set aside until some utopian future.
Marxism and common sense
Gramsci’s harsh criticism of Bukharin in Notebook 8 also targets the Russian’s
evaluation of common sense. In the most pertinent note “common sense” appears
18 times as Gramsci reasserts and extends his definition of the term. Gramsci
explains that common sense is: (a) a “philosophy,” albeit the “philosophy of nonphilosophers”; (b) a “conception of the world”; and (c) the “folklore of philosophy.” It is a part of what one might call the conceptual kinship structure of
ideology in the Gramscian sense. Gramsci writes: “The fundamental characteristic of common sense consists in its being a disjointed, incoherent, and inconsequential conception of the world that matches the character of the multitudes
whose philosophy it is” (Q8 §173: 1045). Here, too, he criticizes common sense
very severely; it is a conception of the world “absorbed a-critically”; it is
syncretic (“it appears in countless forms”), “incoherent,” and “incongruent”; it is
the philosophy of the “multitude” where “multitude” refers to a social subject of
indeterminate class or social group and has a negative connotation. The note continues: “Historically, the formation of a homogeneous social group is accompanied by the development of a homogeneous – that is, systematic – philosophy, in
opposition to common sense” (Q8 §173: 1045). The significance of this passage
can hardly be overemphasized. Revolutionary theory is born in opposition to
existing common sense. What is at stake is the conception of the world of the
subalterns, a world view that needs to be transformed or replaced. In Gramsci’s
view, Bukharin’s Historical Materialism is fatally flawed not because it is based
on common sense, but because it is not based on a critique of common sense.
In the same note Gramsci moves on to a discussion of the spread of common
sense in French culture. He writes:
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G. Liguori
“Common sense” has been treated more extensively in French philosophical
culture than in other cultures. This is due to the “popular–national” character of French culture. In France, more than elsewhere and because of
specific historical conditions, the intellectuals tend to approach the people in
order to guide it ideologically and keep it linked with the leading group.
One should therefore be able to find in French literature a lot of useful
material on common sense. The attitude of French philosophical culture
toward “common sense” might even provide a model of hegemonic cultural
construction.
(Q8 §173: 1045)
For Gramsci, France represented a model of bourgeois hegemony, but the point
he is seeking to establish here is of a broader, more general nature. Common
sense, Gramsci observes, has been treated in two ways: “(1) it has been placed at
the base of philosophy; (2) it has been criticized from the point of view of
another philosophy.” Nevertheless, he argues, both approaches have the same
outcome: “In reality, however, the result in each case has been to surmount one
particular ‘common sense’ in order to create another that is more compliant with
the conception of the world of the leading group” (Q8 §173: 1045). In other
words, common sense cannot be eliminated; it is part of what is at stake in the
struggle for hegemony. It is a widespread, basic “conception of the world” that
can be replaced or transformed but not eliminated. Gramsci leaves open the
question of whether one day, as humanity moves toward self-emancipation
from its own economic, social, political and cultural limitations, it will be possible to eliminate common sense in its pejorative sense – that is, as the passive
adaptation by the led to the world view developed by those who lead.
In a note on Gentile, a couple of pages later, Gramsci cites Marx:
When Marx alludes to “fixed popular opinion,” he is making a historicalcultural reference in order to point out the “solidity of beliefs” and their
effectiveness in regulating human behavior; implicitly, however, he is
affirming the need for “new popular beliefs,” that is, for a new “common
sense” and thus for a new culture, a new philosophy.
(Q8 §175: 1047)
The invocation of Marx in this passage allows Gramsci to reaffirm and lend
greater weight to his dynamic conception of common sense as something that
must be superseded. Ideology is a material force in particular situations. What
interests Gramsci is the production of a “new philosophy” that overcomes existing common sense and becomes a mass ideology – that is, a new common sense.
Common sense and philosophy
Gramsci also discusses common sense in a series of notes gathered under the
title “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy.” In one of them he sketches a
Common sense in Gramsci
131
number of “preliminary points” for the kind of “Introduction” he had in mind.
Here, common sense is characterized as “everyman’s” philosophy whereas
philosophy is described as “the critique of religion and of common sense” (Q8
§204: 1063). It is clear that Gramsci appreciates two qualities of philosophy in
particular: coherence and self-awareness. As he sees it, philosophy constitutes a
world view that is potentially hegemonic – which common sense can never be.
It is noteworthy that Gramsci insists on talking of “philosophies” in the
plural, that is, as multiple world views in conflict with one another, the most
significant conflict being progressive philosophy versus “existing” or “vulgar”
common sense. The different forms of philosophy and common sense are
divided up on a vertical axis that might be called “political” (Right/Left) and on
a horizontal axis according to their characteristics of coherence, awareness, and
originality. Thus, there will be both philosophies and types of common sense (in
short, ideologies) that are more or less progressive and more or less developed.
It should be added that in a subsequent elaboration of the same note (Q11 §12:
1375) he lists three ways in which the world view of the common man manifests
itself: (a) in language; (b) in “common sense and good sense”; (c) in popular
religion.
In the first draft of “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,” Gramsci
writes:
Religion, common sense, philosophy. Find out how these three intellectual
orders are connected. Note that religion and common sense do not coincide,
but religion is a component of disjointed common sense. There is not just
one “common sense” but it, too, is a product of history and a historical
process. Philosophy is the critique of religion and of common sense, and it
supersedes them. In this respect, philosophy coincides with “good sense.”
(Q8 §204: 1063)
In the later version of this passage the “connection” is expressed in negative
terms: philosophy is an “intellectual order” whereas religion and common sense
are not “because they cannot be reduced to a unity or made coherent even in an
individual mind, let alone a collective one” (Q11 §12: 1375). In first draft of
another note entitled “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy” Gramsci
further explains his view on the relationship between philosophy and common
sense:
Perhaps it is useful to make a “practical” distinction between philosophy and
common sense in order to be better able to show what one is trying to arrive
at. Philosophy means, rather specifically, a conception of the world with
salient individual traits. Common sense is the conception of the world that is
most widespread among the popular masses in a historical period. One wants
to change common sense and create a “new common sense” – hence the
need to take the “simple” into account.
(Q8 §213: 1071)
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G. Liguori
Gramsci’s goal is clear: to create a new common sense. In this passage, the
characterization of common sense as “the conception of the world that is most
widespread among the popular masses in a historical period” cannot be said to
be negative. Indeed, in the later version of this passage, he points out that “every
philosophy has the tendency to become the common sense of a particular milieu,
even a circumscribed one” (Q11 §12: 11382) before reasserting the need to
remain culturally in touch with the people – which is, in fact, what Gramsci
always sought to do in all his work, from his Ordine Nuovo days through his
years of study and writing in prison.
In Notebook 11, the description of common sense as the most widespread
world view within a certain sphere or milieu does not have the same negative connotations as the characterization of common sense as “spontaneous philosophy.”
Elsewhere, Gramsci also attributes to common sense the merit of functioning as a
counterweight to “abstruse metaphysics” (Q10 II §48: 1334), thus assigning it a
positive trait at the technical-philosophical level. At the same time, though,
Gramsci never loses sight of the fact that
A philosophy of praxis must initially adopt a polemical stance, as superseding the existing mode of thinking. It must, therefore, present itself as a
critique of “common sense”. . . . The relation between “high” philosophy
and common sense is assured by “politics” in the same way that politics
assures the relationship between the Catholicism of the intellectuals and of
the “simple.”
(Q8 §220: 1080–1081)
When he rewrites this passage, Gramsci adds an important clarification: “the position of the philosophy of praxis is antithetical to that of Catholicism” since the
goal of Marxism is “not to keep the simple people within their primitive philosophy of common sense but rather to lead them to a superior conception of life.”
Marxism seeks “to build an intellectual and moral bloc that enables the intellectual
progress of the masses and not just of restricted intellectual groups” (Q11 §12:
1384–1385). Another noteworthy element of this note that is absent in its first draft
is Gramsci’s reiteration that common sense is just a primitive philosophy that has
to be superseded. Superseding common sense opens the way for “the political
development of the concept of hegemony” (Q11 §12: 1385). Hegemony does not
base itself on common sense; rather, hegemony is only possible if existing
common sense is superseded.
Conclusion: a double return to Marx
It is clear that, in the Notebooks, common sense has mostly negative connotations. Does this mean that Gramsci’s thinking had changed since his Ordine
Nuovo years, or since his reference to “the creative spirit of the people” in the
19 March 1927 (LC 57) letter to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht? Yes,
Gramsci’s view did change. There are several reasons: not only does Gramsci
Common sense in Gramsci
133
learn the Leninist lesson of the 1920s regarding the NEP and the defeat of the
revolution in the West, but also his prison reflections – crucially spurred by the
“defeat” of his movement – on the relation between politics and economics lead
him to understand the full complexity of the ideological and social structure of
the West. Through his examination of the forms of hegemony which he links to
the state – and, here, one must bear in mind Gramsci’s “integral” concept of the
state – Gramsci arrives at a new theory of collective subjectivity that is based
largely on “pre-intentionality.” Perhaps, in returning specifically to the Theses
on Feuerbach, Gramsci took special note of the “ontological” lesson of the
more mature, anti-subjective phase of Marx. To be sure, Gramsci retains his
convictions about the role of the (collective) subject and (collective) will but
he also comes to understand, more than ever before, the inertia, passivity, and
subalternity that imbue common sense.
For Gramsci, common sense is something to supersede rather than conserve.
The choice is always from among different world views in conflict with one
another, and the choice is not “merely intellectual” (Q11 §12: 1378) – it is the
struggle for hegemony. The alternative to hegemonic bourgeois culture, however, is
not to be found in a philosophy based on common sense. The historical-materialist
world view, in Gramsci’s view, is established by superseding existing common
sense in order to create another common sense. Furthermore: to avoid being
perverted and defeated, the new conception of the world must remain in touch with
the “simple” and “connected to and implicit in practical life” (Q11 §12: 1382). For
the new philosophy – i.e. the new conception of the world – to become widespread,
it is necessary, in dialectical fashion, to take into account common sense (the needs
it expresses, the level of consciousness of the masses that it reflects, etc.) while at
the same time enabling the subaltern classes to acquire a new awareness and, thus,
a new “spirit of cleavage (cf. Q3 §49: 333).”
10 The contemporary relevance of
Gramsci’s views on Italy’s
“Southern question”
Frank Rosengarten
Preface
Antonio Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” are relevant today in
several ways. Not only do his writings shed light on regional and interclass tensions in contemporary Italy, they provide a critical entry point through which to
look at the dynamics of colonial and neocolonial power relations elsewhere in
the world. After reviewing the salient themes of these writings, I will conclude
the chapter with a few remarks about Gramsci and postcolonialism.
Gramsci’s writings on the “Southern question” (1910–1924)
Gramsci’s early perspective on Italy’s Southern question appears in a school
essay he wrote in 1910 or 1911, entitled “Oppressed and Oppressors” (SPW1:
3–5). This youthful work attests to his awareness of the new wave of imperialist
depredations that, in the 1890s, had swept over almost all of Asia and Africa and
that by the outbreak of World War I resulted in the colonization or control by
Western powers of nine-tenths of the globe (Young 2001: 2). In a number of
passages he refers sardonically to French and British imperialist claims that
the new colonialist ventures were really attempts to “civilize” the still primitive
barbarian peoples. In addition to exposing the hypocrisy that lay behind such
claims, young Gramsci pointed out the “colonial” or “semicolonial” nature of
the relationship not only between conquering and conquered nations, but
between dominant and dominated classes and groups within a single country.
Indeed, Sardinia, like its sister island Sicily, had long suffered from a mixture of
neglect and exploitation by its own ruling classes, which were linked to powerful economic interest groups on the Italian mainland.1 By his mid-teen years,
Gramsci had become an ardent Sardinian “patriot.” In this early essay Gramsci
also insisted on the idea that both national and class oppression were rooted in
particular historical conditions, and as such were capable of being remedied.
“Social privileges and differences,” he said, “being products of society and not
of nature, can be overcome.”
The last decades of the nineteenth century were rife with theories of inherited
and unchangeable racial and ethnic traits that still have many adepts today. Young
Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question”
135
Gramsci was familiar with the work of Italian social scientists such as Cesare
Lombroso and Alfredo Niceforo, whose theories had many adherents at precisely
the moment when his political consciousness was undergoing rapid development.
Of paramount importance to us in this discussion is that, by the 1890s, as Mary
Gibson points out, racist theory had ceased being based exclusively on biology
and skin color and had begun to insinuate itself into debates about social class,
with especially dire implications for how the Italian peasantry was perceived in
polite society and by many members of the Italian intelligentsia.2 “Race,” Gibson
explains, “was used in Italy . . . to explain persistent differences within the nation,
especially divergences between North and South” (Gibson 1998: 100). This
admixture of racial and class-based prejudices underlies the politics of Umberto
Bossi’s Northern League today, with its regionally based network of groups claiming identification with the exalted civilization of “Padania,” which obviously
draws a prejudicial dividing line between North and South.
In his writings from 1916 to 1924 on the North–South relationship, Gramsci
gradually freed himself from the effects of a childhood and early manhood
haunted by poverty, by periods of physical and mental labor that stretched his
capacities to the utmost, and by the strains of coping with a misshapen and
diminutive body that often gave him the feeling of being isolated and cut off
from his fellow human beings.3 Despite these handicaps, his point of view
became more objective and analytical, closer in spirit to the Gramsci we come to
know in the Prison Notebooks: methodologically rigorous, psychologically
acute, philosophically mature in his effort to reconcile the idealist concepts he
had absorbed from Benedetto Croce with the critical realism he had taken from
his readings of Marx, Antonio Labriola, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and
others of the classical Marxist tradition.
It was during these same years that Gramsci became a full-fledged political
activist, first as a member of the Italian Socialist Party, and then, beginning in
1921, as a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, which owed its
allegiance to the international communist movement. On the one hand, his new
political commitments enabled him to link the struggles of the working class in
his own country to the vicissitudes of this class worldwide; on the other hand, it
made him more aware of the particularities of these struggles in different places
and circumstances.
The success of the Russian Revolution had a transfiguring effect on Gramsci.
In their excellent edition of Gramsci’s writings on the Southern question, Franco
De Felice and Valentino Parlato are right in saying that under the influence of the
Russian Revolution, Gramsci began to see new possibilities for raising the Italian
peasantry from its subordinate role vis-à-vis the industrial working class to one of
equal responsibility as a protagonist of the Italian revolution (QM: 12–14). One
of the key aspects of his writings as a revolutionary was the parallels he began to
see between Russia and Italy as countries with a limited industrial base combined
with a backward and oppressed peasantry. But Russia offered Gramsci something
more: the life and writings of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who in Gramsci’s view
provided an incomparable example of political realism mixed with an unflagging
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F. Rosengarten
commitment to a revolutionary transformation of Russian society as part of an
international workers’ movement.
Gramsci’s article of 1 April 1916, entitled “The South and the War”
(QM: 55–58), brings to the foreground the historical perspective I mentioned above
in my comments on the essay “Oppressed and Oppressors.” Specifically, he
pointed up what he regarded as the fatal tendency of Italy’s conservative politicians
in the 1860s and 1870s to conceive of national unification as possible only under “a
single centralized regime,” which for the South had had disastrous consequences.
Instead of recognizing and validating the particular needs and problems of the
South, the new Italian ruling class, in slavish imitation of the French model of state
formation, had moved immediately to centralize all major state functions, and in
doing so, ironically, had created a new united Italy that was in reality more divided
than ever into two trunks, southern and northern, “in absolutely antithetical conditions.” Working within this historical framework, Gramsci reiterated a judgment
often expressed before him by the historian Gaetano Salvemini and the economist
Giustino Fortunato: what he called the “bestial” centralization practiced by the
Italian governments of the 1860s and 1870s had only aggravated the de facto existence of “two Italies,” a center-north with a burgeoning industrial sector and a rich
tradition of communal self-government, and a South burdened by centuries of
feudal monarchical rule that had virtually paralyzed the forces of progressive
change. Added to this burden was the alliance between northern industrialists and
large southern landowners that had nullified every effort in the South to alleviate
the miseries of peasants and itinerant farm-workers.
Gramsci did not confine himself to political history. He extended his discussion
to economic conditions that had deteriorated dramatically at the turn of the twentieth century. On this subject, he spoke of the constant flow of liquid capital from
the South to the North, as a result of government policy that encouraged wealthy
landowning southerners to invest their capital in northern industries rather than in
initiatives designed to improve southern agriculture and give a boost to nascent
industries in the South. The imbalances produced by these investment practices
were further aggravated, Gramsci argued, by a recalcitrant industrial protectionism, which was not compensated for by an agricultural protectionism that would
have benefited the producing class in the South. Furthermore, such policies had
negated the otherwise beneficial effects of emigration. It made no sense, Gramsci
continued, to blame southern miseries on a southern lack of initiative. The fact
was that capital would always seek its most profitable outlets and means of
employment, unless those responsible for guiding social and economic policy
made a concerted effort to bring the inherent profiteering of private capitalist interests under democratic control. But attempts to do this had been blocked, Gramsci
said, by the ever-expanding accumulation of profits accruing to industrialists
whose productive resources were indispensable to the prosecution of the war,
which Italy had entered on 24 May 1915. While the regions of Piedmont,
Lombardy, and Liguria had begun to reap colossal profits from their war industries, the South had continued to languish, while providing the bulk of the manpower needed to fight the war.4
Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question”
137
Three years later, in a seminal essay entitled “Workers and Peasants” that
appeared in Ordine Nuovo on 2 August 1919 (SPW1: 83–87), Gramsci confronted the Southern question in its connections with the war and with the
new opportunities opened up to the proletariat and to the peasantry by the
Russian Revolution. Here we witness the strides in confidence and conviction
that he had made since his first tentative exploration of economic and social
injustices in the school essay “Oppressed and Oppressors.” No longer was
he tempted even fleetingly to see suffering and inequality as ineluctable
facts of the human condition. Now, with the support of his fellow editors
of Ordine Nuovo he denounced the war as a carnage that had “equalized”
only one thing, the deprivations and death experienced by the proletarian
masses. However, he also glimpsed some positive outgrowths of the war:
mainly that four years of trench warfare had strengthened ties of solidarity
among men who had shed their blood together, a majority of whom were of
peasant origin. This sense of solidarity, he observed, was one of the essential
conditions of revolution.
At the same time, Gramsci was also able to step back from this hopeful vision
to take stock of a discouraging aspect of life in countries where modern capitalist
industry was still in a relatively undeveloped stage – Russia, Italy, Spain – namely
that in these countries there was still a sharp separation between city and country,
which discouraged constructive collaboration between workers and peasants. As a
result of its long isolation from the advances of modern civilization, the peasantry
in these countries had remained mired in prevalently feudal social relations, which
had engendered a mentality where
Economic and political institutions . . . are conceived as natural, perpetual,
irreducible. . . . The mentality of the peasant has therefore remained that of a
serf, who revolts violently against “the lords” in particular instances, but is
incapable of thinking of himself as a member of a collectivity (the nation
for the landowners and the class for the proletarians) and of carrying on
a systematic and permanent revolt aimed at changing the economic and
political relationships of social coexistence.
(QM: 64)
Gramsci then boldly announced his view that “the historical conditions of
Italy were not and are not very different from those in Russia.” Suddenly, he
threw all reservations and qualifications to the wind and, perhaps for the first
time with such vehemence, made the following assertion:
Factory workers and poor peasants are the two founts of energy of the proletarian revolution. . . . They are the backbone of the revolution, the robust
battalions of the proletarian army that is advancing, impetuously overturning obstacles or besieging them with its human waves that wear them down,
that corrode them with patient labor, with relentless sacrifice. Communism
is their civilization, it is the system of historical conditions in which they
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F. Rosengarten
will acquire a personality, a dignity, a culture, for which they will become
the creative spirit of progress and beauty.
(QM: 67)
Those who know Gramsci only through the Prison Notebooks might have some
difficulty in recognizing him as the author of such incandescent prose and the
bearer of such impassioned political enthusiasm. It is important to remember that
the Gramsci who penned this essay in 1919 was in a different state of mind than
that of the man who ten years later toiled away in prison on notes written für ewig
[for posterity]. Yet this difference is something that needs to be carefully pondered
because the difference is more one of tone than of substance. Although muted in
the notebooks, Gramsci’s overall ideological position in prison was anchored to
his youthful idealism. In any event, the essay of 2 August 1919 and two others
with the same title published in Ordine Nuovo on 3 January and 20 February 1920,
mark a turning point in Gramsci’s conceptualization of the Southern question that
he now viewed on a far larger canvas than he had in 1910 and 1916. It was not
simply a matter of numbers and raw power that informed Gramsci’s thinking in
1919 and 1920. It was a matter of enriching the cultural patrimony of people previously stunted and disempowered by a system that rewarded capital investments
far more generously than it did labor in the factories and fields of Italy, Russia, and
other nations.
Two of Gramsci’s writings of 1923 and 1924 on the Southern question call
for comment. They are a letter he sent from Vienna to his comrades in Rome
dated 12 September 1923 (QM: 79–81), explaining why he had chosen the name
Unità for the new party newspaper, and an article of 15 March 1924, in Ordine
Nuovo entitled “The South and Fascism” (QM: 83–88). Again, we need to take
into account the different moments and contexts in which these two writings
were conceived.
The political orientation underlying the letter on Unità was somewhat different from the one that he had expounded from 1919 to 1922, inasmuch as the
Italian Communists, after a period of alienation from the “united front” policy
pursued since 1921 by the Soviet Communist Party, had in 1923 come around to
accepting the broader definition of unity given by the Comintern, which now
favored parliamentary and extra-parliamentary collaboration with non-communist
labor and social-democratic groups, especially with the “Third-Internationalist”
Socialists. There was concern in the Comintern about the failure of revolutionary
movements in Europe, especially in Germany, and the advent to power of fascism
in Italy. Gramsci saw himself at this point in his political life as much more
directly joined to the world center of communist activity in Moscow, where he
had served on several important committees from June 1922 to the fall of 1923,
when he left Russia for Vienna for the purpose of coordinating contacts between
the Italian and other European communist parties.
In his appeal for unity, Gramsci made two proposals. One was to endorse the
decision made by the Enlarged Executive of the Comintern, on which he had
served while in the Soviet Union, to move resolutely toward “a worker and
Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question”
139
peasant government, and to give a special importance to the Southern question.”
This involved seeing the relations between workers and peasants in Italy not
only as “a problem of class relations, but also and especially as a territorial
problem, that is, as one of the aspects of the national question.”
His other proposal was equally far-reaching and portentous in its aims, in
calling for a worker and peasant government that in Italy would embrace the
slogan “Federal Republic of Workers and Peasants.” By using the term “Republic,” Gramsci and his party were signaling their repudiation of the Italian Monarchy, which had acquiesced to the dictates of the fascist regime, in power since
October 1922. What we see happening here is a threefold evolution in Gramsci’s
political thought toward a broadened alliance with other left parties, adaptation
of Soviet strategy on a workers and peasants government to Italian conditions,
and forthright opposition to fascist policies, including an implicit return to and
valorization of the republican theory of popular government championed in the
Risorgimento by Italian federalists and by Giuseppe Mazzini and his disciples.
The word “federal” in the Italian context meant looking at the relations between
various regions and territories in terms of their relative autonomy within a
unitary but decentralized state. This is why Gramsci spoke of the Southern question here as a “territorial” problem forming part of the Italian “national question.” This historical framework is what gives Gramsci’s proposals at this point
their relevance not only to the immediate outcome of events in the 1920s and
1930s but also to the form and substance of the Italian Republic that was to
emerge from World War II and the anti-fascist Resistance. In effect Gramsci
was talking implicitly about the need for a fundamental constitutional reform in
Italy as part of a revolutionary collective struggle for socialism and democracy.
The article of 15 March 1924 on “The South and Fascism” is important for
three reasons. First, Gramsci resolutely confronted fascist policy in the area of
relations between the national fascist party, as the ruling party of both the
government and the state, and the South. This policy had, in Gramsci’s view,
reached an extreme calcification and arbitrariness entirely contrary to the real
interests of the southern regions. Second, referring mainly to the National Union
of Liberal and Democratic Forces led by Giovanni Amendola from 1923 to
1926, Gramsci emphasized that the South, where Amendola had his primary
base of operations, had become the special reserve of the anti-fascist constitutional opposition. Third, he concluded his article by alluding to the inextricable
connections between the South and the watchword of a worker and peasant
government. There was thus an obvious continuity of theme between the letter
of 23 January 1923 and the article of 15 March 1924.
Gramsci on the “Southern question” from 1926 to the
prison years
Gramsci’s speech at the third congress of the Communist Party of Italy – held in
Lyons, France, in January 1926 (SPW2: 340–375) – which he wrote jointly with
Palmiro Togliatti, was in many respects a summary of Gramsci’s own and his
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F. Rosengarten
party’s positions since its founding in 1921, and an attempt to track certain currents in Italian political history that had favored or in some way foreshadowed a
radicalizing turn in Italian politics after World War I. Speaking now as general
secretary of the Communist Party of Italy, and operating in an increasingly
repressive and threatening climate, he also tried to take the measure of other
leftwing and anti-fascist parties, especially the Italian Socialist Party, whose
deficiencies he subjected to an acute analysis. A noteworthy feature of the
speech was the assessment by Gramsci and Togliatti of the “Italian social structure,” in the course of which they carried out a provocative class analysis
designed to show how politics and class were enmeshed with each other in a
now fascist-dominated country.
In several sections of his speech, Gramsci returned to the “territorial” as well
as class character of relations between industry and agriculture in Italy. It was in
this context that he gave voice to a theme I mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter, in which his penchant for seeing a close analogy between the way imperialist countries dominated their colonies and the kind of relationship that existed
within certain nation-states, notably Italy, between ruling and subordinate classes
and social groups. As previously noted, this is a contemporary theme at the center
of passionate controversies where the conventional categories of relations
between states have been applied to oppression based on racial, class, and gender
differences.
This theme comes up three times in the 1926 address. In the eighth section, for
example, Gramsci highlighted what he called “the semi-colonial relationship
between northern and southern Italy.” In economic terms, he said, the South was a
captive market and a source of cheap labor for the North. Lenin’s considerations in
his Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, of 5 June 1920, and other
writings on the same subject formed the theoretical substratum of some of what
Gramsci had to say in his speech. Lenin had described oppressed groups within
countries, such as African Americans in the United States, as “colonialized”
peoples. The Russian leader had urged his fellow communists to reject “bourgeois
abstract and formal principles” and to make “a precise appraisal of the specific
historical situation, and primarily of economic conditions” (Lenin 2005: 620).
Lenin had also stressed the special importance of “backward states and nations
characterized by feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal–peasant relations,” of which
Italy and Russia were prime examples. Lenin’s analysis was in all likelihood
present in Gramsci’s mind when he, Gramsci, made the following observations
about the Italian situation:
The relations between industry and agriculture, which are essential for the
economic life of a country and for the determination of its political superstructures, have a territorial basis in Italy. In the North, agricultural production and the rural population are concentrated in a few big centers. As a
result of this, all the conflicts inherent in the country’s social structure
contain within them an element that affects the unity of the State and puts it
in danger. The solution of the problem is sought by the bourgeois and
Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question”
141
agrarian ruling groups through a compromise. None of these groups naturally possesses a unitary character or a unitary function. The compromise
whereby unity is preserved is, moreover, such as to make the situation more
serious. It gives the toiling masses of the South a position analogous to that
of a colonial population. The big industry of the North fulfills the function
vis-à-vis them of the capitalist metropoles. The big landowners and even the
middle bourgeoisie of the South, for their part, take on the role of those categories in the colonies which ally themselves to the metropoles in order to
keep the mass of working people subjugated. Economic exploitation and
political oppression thus unite to make of the working people of the South a
force continuously mobilized against the State.
(SPW2: 344–345)
This passage makes it clear that Gramsci wanted his readers to grasp the
potential for anti-fascist resistance that existed within the economically as well
as politically subjugated sectors of Italian society. At the same time, he was
anxious to point out a distinctive aspect of fascism that needed to be taken into
account by the Communist Party, namely that
Fascism reacts to the dangerous shifts and new recruitment of forces provoked by its policies, by subjecting the whole of society to the weight of a
military force and repressive system which hold the population riveted to
the mechanical fact of production – without any possibility of having a life
of its own, expressing a will of its own, or organizing to defend its own
interests.
(SPW2: 353)
We come now to a work that is generally regarded as Gramsci’s most important analysis of the Italian Southern question, an essay he wrote in October 1926,
only a few weeks or possibly even a few days before his arrest and imprisonment
on 8 November of that year. Entitled Some Aspects of the Southern question
(SPW2: 441–462), it was published in 1930 in the Paris-based Italian Communist
Party journal Lo Stato Operaio, so that its impact was much more direct on
Italian anti-fascist organizations abroad than on the scattered anti-fascist forces in
Italy. The language Gramsci employed in this essay, in recalling the work of the
Ordine Nuovo group in 1919 and 1920, was more nuanced than that of the speech
he delivered at the Party Congress in Lyons eight months earlier:
[In 1919 and 1920] the Turin communists posed concretely the question of
the “hegemony of the proletariat”: i.e. of the social basis of the proletarian
dictatorship and of the workers’ State. The proletariat can become the
leading and the ruling class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a
system of class alliances which allow it to mobilize the majority of the
working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy,
in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it
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F. Rosengarten
succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. But the
peasant question is historically determined in Italy; it is not the “peasant and
agrarian question in general.” In Italy the peasant question, through the specific Italian tradition, and the specific development of Italian history, has
taken two typical and particular forms – the Southern question and that of
the Vatican. Winning the majority of the peasant masses thus means, for the
Italian proletariat, making these questions its own from the social point of
view; understanding the class demands which they represent; incorporating
these demands into its revolutionary transitional program; placing these
demands among the objectives for which it struggles.
(SPW2: 443)
This passage is closer in spirit to the mode of analysis typical of the Prison
Notebooks than to the passages cited above from the January 1926 Party
speech. In one of the few such instances in Gramsci’s pre-prison writings,
Gramsci used the word “hegemony” not only to designate rule based on superior material and armed power but also in the sense of rule that wins over the
ideological consent of the ruled. Gramsci speaks here of the possibility that the
proletariat can become “the leading and ruling class” whose aim is to “mobilize
the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois
state.” The distinctions made in this sentence are the ones often associated with
Gramsci’s whole approach to politics in countries where groups struggling to
change society in fundamental ways must win a leadership role before they can
begin to envision themselves as potentially “ruling.” This dyadic conception
rests on sociologically complex concepts that are largely absent elsewhere from
Gramsci’s writings of these years. Also significant is his use of the phrase “the
majority of the working population,” a much more comprehensive formulation
than “the majority of the working class.” It embraces virtually all people who
work for a living, not just industrial and agricultural workers. Beyond that, the
class alliance of which Gramsci speaks would have to “gain the consent of the
broad peasant masses.” The ordinarily conventional term “consent” acquires a
denser specific gravity here within the context of Gramscian social theory. We
also see in the above-quoted passage the kind of historical consciousness that
prefigures the many brilliant pages on Italian history in the Prison Notebooks.
In sum, we begin to see in this passage the emergence of a strain of thought that
will constitute the core of Gramsci’s writing on cultural politics in prison.
I can only touch fleetingly on how Gramsci treats the Southern question in
the Prison Notebooks. In general, the distinguishing trait of passages on this
question in the Notebooks is that whatever Gramsci had to say about southern
politics and society was placed firmly in a historical framework, in a much more
definitive manner than in his pre-prison writings.
Gramsci made a giant leap in complexity in the Notebooks, even in comparison with the essay “Some Aspects of the Southern question.” The difference lies
in the fact that in these notes, far from the din of daily political strife, and determined to expound ideas and insights that might stand the test of time in a way
Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question”
143
that his journalistic pieces and official writings could not, Gramsci was not
aiming so much to clarify as to complicate the problems of interest to him. His
writing in the Notebooks – in a special way when dealing with Italian history –
has something of the “thickness” of which Clifford Geertz speaks in his discussion of the methods available to cultural anthropologists (see Geertz 1973:
3–30). Several of the rubrics under which Gramsci gathered his thoughts on
themes of interest to him in prison (two of which deal precisely with “The
Southern Question” and “North and South,” but also others scattered in a wide
variety of thematic sub-categories, such as “Regionalism,” “The Concept of
National-popular,” and “Town and Country”) shed further light on how he structured his understanding of the North–South relationship against the wider background of Italian history from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Gramsci and postcolonialism
Postcolonialism, as one offshoot of postmodernism, is a body of thought and
practice that in the domains of social, cultural and literary theory has placed concepts such as hybridity, indeterminateness, and unpredictability at the center of
its investigations. Underlying this turn away from traditional norms and certainties is a deep-seated skepticism about the ability of language and other means of
expression to represent reality in any secure or reliable way.
Most postcolonial theorists would agree that, after World War II, formerly colonialized and underdeveloped countries had a natural tendency to work out theories
and systems of government that were radically different from the ones they had
learned from their former colonial masters. Yet at the same time, generally speaking, postcolonial theory also recognizes that, as Anurada Dingwaney Needham has
cogently argued in Using the Master’s Tools, these “masters” had also left an intellectual heritage behind that could not simply be rejected out of hand, but demanded
to be integrated into a reconstructed political project.
The main direction of thought and the methodological innovations associated
with postcolonial theory have been critically examined in brilliant fashion by
E. San Juan Jr. One of his arguments is that
the anti-Marxism of postcolonial theory may be attributed partly to Edward
Said’s eclecticism, his belief that American left criticism is marginal, and
his distorted if not wholly false understanding of Marxism based on doctrinaire anticommunism and the model of “actually existing socialism” during
the Cold War.
(San Juan Jr. 1998a: 29)
It seems to me that this argument errs on the side of a too doctrinaire version
of Marxism. What Said has to say in Culture and Imperialism about Gramsci’s
essay Some Aspects of the Southern question (1993: 49) does not really diverge
from a fundamentally historical-materialist reading of that work, provided that we
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F. Rosengarten
understand materialism in the way the mature Gramsci understood it, as referring
not only to the processes of material production underlying the economic system
of any society, but also to ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and in general the domains of
discourse and subjectivity, which he regarded as constitutive facets of social life
(Crehan 2002: 34).
At issue here is Gramsci’s whole approach to the study of history, philosophy,
culture, and society, which precluded a version of Marxism that one can somehow
pry loose from its Hegelian idealist origins, as received and elaborated in Italy
primarily by Benedetto Croce. No doubt Said did not adhere to a strict Marxist
conceptual paradigm. San Juan is right when he states that Said favored a theory
of liberation that goes well beyond what most Marxists understand to be the aim
of revolution. There is ample textual evidence of Said’s non-Marxist conception of
life. But I do not believe that Said’s work negates the premises of a Marxist world
view. As I see it, Gramsci is in fact a mediating link between Marx’s synthesis of
idealist and materialist thought and Said’s attempt to open up new possibilities for
a multi-faceted exploration of our era that avoids all ideological abstractions and
orthodoxies. If my point of view is a defensible one, and if Said’s Orientalism
is one of the foundational texts of postcolonialism, then it is not unreasonable to
conclude that Gramsci helped establish the premises of certain currents of thought
and practice of basic importance to postcolonial theory.
Notes
1 In an autobiographical note of 1933, Gramsci spoke of his “continuous attempt to go
beyond a backward way of living and thinking typical of a Sardinian at the beginning
of the century who wanted to appropriate a way of living and thinking no longer
regional and village-like but national,” to which he added that
If it is true that one of the most prominent needs of Italian culture was to
deprovincialize itself even in the most advanced and modern urban centers, this
process should appear all the more evident as experienced by a “triple or quadruple provincial” such as a young Sardinian certainly was at the beginning of the
century.
(PN: 1776)
2 For an exhaustive study of this aspect of Italian social history see Moe (2002).
3 See Germino (1990) for a study that emphasizes this aspect of Gramsci’s life.
4 Among military detachments from the South and the Islands that were to bear an especially heavy share of military operations in World War I, the Sardinian Sassari Brigade
was of course of special interest to Gramsci. He used his command of the Sardinian
language and his familiarity with Sardinian traits of character to do some effective
proselytizing when the brigade was given police duties in Turin at the time of some
major labor-led actions against the war.
11 Rethinking Gramsci
Class, globalization, and historical bloc
David F. Ruccio
Antonio Gramsci’s work is mostly ignored in economics. This is the case both in
mainstream economic discourse and among those of us who are Marxists and
work in heterodox theoretical traditions. Indeed, attempts to interpret and use
Gramsci’s writings have been confined mostly to the humanities (particularly
literary theory and cultural studies) and politics (especially political theory and
international relations).1 In this chapter, I endeavor to cross this disciplinary
divide.
I venture into this relatively uncharted territory because, from an intellectual
and political position, that is, from the perspective of the philosophy of praxis,
Gramsci’s contributions to the Marxian tradition are indispensable for analyzing the world today – for investigating how current hegemonies work and for
producing alternative hegemonies. In short, for analyzing the contemporary
historical bloc.
In this chapter I discuss why and how Gramsci matters, especially for
someone who comes out of the Rethinking Marxism tradition. The RM project
was initiated some 25 years ago as an attempt to identify and recover what is
distinctive about a Marxian approach to economic and social theory – to rediscover and further develop the antiessentialist moments of Marxism and the
concepts of Marxian class analysis. Here, I create a theoretical confrontation
between Gramsci’s contributions to Marxian theory and the work that some of
us do in and around RM, especially in relation to two concepts that are directly
related to Marxist attempts to understand the world today: globalization and
historical bloc.
My view, to be succinct, is the following: the scholars associated with RM have
developed and extended Marxian class analysis in ways that simply cannot be
found elsewhere in the Marxian tradition (let alone non-Marxian theoretical traditions) but have largely sidestepped or ignored the analysis of how capital rules, that
is, of how capitalist class projects are created and reproduced in the modern world.
Gramsci’s great contribution, on the other hand, is precisely the analysis of hegemony, the use of force and consent whereby capitalist class rule is secured. And, of
course, how alternative hegemonies can be created. But he has little to contribute
that is interesting or new about class structures themselves. Therefore, in my view,
the two projects need – or, at least, complement – one another, both intellectually
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D.F. Ruccio
and politically, especially in the analysis of the changing configurations of capitalist
globalization.
I understand that such a formulation leaves out many nuances and subtleties.
But in this chapter I focus on the basic concepts and methods of analysis that
guide the two traditions – a rethought Marxism and Gramsci – and where they
meet. I also point out the main tensions and open questions that remain, and
some of the theoretical and empirical work that remains to be done.
Globalization and Rethinking Marxism
Many of us associated with Rethinking Marxism have been quite critical of prevailing theories of globalization, on both the Right and the Left. That is certainly
the case with my own work on issues of international economics and political
economy, as I have struggled to make sense of existing discourses of globalization and to produce a different, particularly Marxian analysis of the institutions
and processes that fall under the rubric of globalization.2 It is also true of other
contributors to the RM tradition. Rather than attempt an exhaustive examination
I want to present three examples that pertain to this topic.
First, in a recent article, J.K. Gibson-Graham ask us to imagine a scheme in
which an “ethics of the local” is not confined and constrained by the global but,
instead, is allowed to flourish – as a new “space of freedom and capacity” (2003:
50). The path to the local traced by Gibson-Graham involves, first, the specification of a set of basic principles or guidelines and, then, the description of a set of
research projects in which local subjects are encouraged to cultivate themselves
in accordance with an ethics of the local. The principles are drawn from recent
work in postmodern or poststructuralist social theory: a recognition of particularity and contingency (which “establishes parity between global and local”
[ibid.: 52] ), a respect for difference and otherness (“between localities but also
within them” [ibid.: 53] ), and cultivating local capacities (such as the “capacity
to modify ourselves” and “to enact a new relation to the economy” [ibid.: 54] ).
The second step, the process of resubjectifying local actors, is already taking
place in research projects in Australia and the United States. There, GibsonGraham have sought to overcome the fixation on global capitalism in order to
uncover and produce a new language of diversity within the regional economy.
Such a language has made it possible for the people involved in their research
conversations to “become something other than what the global economy wants
us to be” (ibid.: 56). But they also discovered the need, beyond language, for
social practices and bodily sensations that are capable of nurturing and sustaining new, communal subjectivities. For Gibson-Graham, these capacities point
toward a new ethical stance – making it possible to move beyond the politics of
opposition within global capitalism in order for people to cultivate themselves
as “subjects rather than objects of economic development” (ibid.: 68) within
diverse, local economies.
In the same issue of Rethinking Marxism, I (Ruccio 2003) suggest a
complementary way of untangling the juggernaut of globalization: to recover and
Rethinking Gramsci
147
rethink the traditional Marxian concept of imperialism. In my view, contemporary
discourses of globalization (including those on the Left) exaggerate the novelty of
the current process of global expansion and fail to appreciate the parallels with the
expansion that took place in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Such
discourses also produce false choices – both theoretical and political – between, for
example, free trade and regulated trade that are defined by and limited to the terms
of mainstream economics. One alternative move available to radical thinkers and
activists is to retrieve the notion of imperialism in order to “characterize and
oppose at least some significant events and activities, frameworks and projects, in
the world today” (ibid.: 85). In order to place imperialism back on the agenda, I
challenge the apparent resistances to the notion (which led to its virtual disappearance from radical thinking about the first Gulf War although, fortunately, despite
the falsified information about weapons of mass destruction, not about the invasion
of Iraq) and distinguish it from globalization (such that imperialism can be seen as
a partial and incomplete project to remake the world, thereby shedding the
inevitability and uniformity often associated with globalization). I then turn my
attention to analyzing the economic dimensions of the new “imperial machine,”
focusing on the flows of value associated with the class dimensions of global
capitalism. Finally, I challenge the “disciplinary machine” of economic discourse,
which conditions the existence of imperialism, in order to open up a space for
imagining and enacting “new, noncapitalist class arrangements and forms of
globalization” (ibid.: 92).
The third example comes from Antonio Callari (2008), who challenges the
widely held view that contemporary globalization signifies the decline of US hegemony and/or undermines the possibility of any territorially centered imperialism. In
fact, Callari argues, the ability of finance capital to capture an increasing share of
surplus-value represents a new type of imperialism – different from the old imperialism, which was built around the production of surplus-value in the metropolitan
nations, but still a form of imperialism, in the sense that the dominion of finance is
based on the use of state power in international relations. Even more, Callari views
it as an Anglo imperialism, because of the ability of the United States and Great
Britain to capture distributions of surplus-value produced around the globe. The
new imperialism is also different because it seeks to manage its political and
cultural conditions of existence in a manner that gives priority to a certain concept
of democracy (rather than humanity, culture, or nationalism/independence) as a
way of articulating political agency and property relations within the domestic and
international agendas of globalization discourse. The conclusion that Callari draws
from this analysis is that the Left needs to take democracy seriously as a space for
emancipatory politics. Because the imperialist project of democracy involves an
expansion of the fantasy of property at an international level and a retreat of the
promise of democracy within the center, the Left has an opportunity both to contest
this process of rearticulating and retreating from democracy and to struggle for a
democracy in excess of property.
There’s a great deal more RM-related work on globalization I could
discuss – on sovereign right (Buck-Morss 2007), territorialization (Cocco
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2007), the anti-sweatshop movement (Erçel 2006), the politics of global
justice (DeMartino 2004), time and space (Jessop 2002), immaterial labor
(Dyer-Witheford 2001), history (Dirlik 2000), and so on. I simply want
to suggest that in the context of the rethinking of Marxism, we have been
critical not only of the more-trade-is-better fantasies of mainstream economists but also of many left-wing approaches that embrace the idea of global
capitalism as a way of mapping the world while criticizing its effects.
The rethinking of Marxism
I have observed many overlaps between such a critique of globalization and the
work that Adam David Morton and others have been carrying out in the area of
international political economy. However, while Morton’s approach (which I
discuss in detail below) is based firmly on Gramscian principles, the RM framework is not, at least in any direct fashion. Let me, then, devote a few paragraphs
to outlining the rethinking of Marxism that we have been carrying out over the
course of the past 25 years or so.3
What I am referring to as the Rethinking Marxism theoretical project began at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the Department of Economics, in
the late 1970s.4 It has had as its main goal to open up the Marxian tradition and
to elaborate an approach to Marxian theory, especially the Marxian critique of
political economy, which is quite different from existing approaches. I am referring, in particular, to the traditional Marxisms associated with the Old Left as
well as the approaches to Marxian theory produced by Monthly Review and
radical political economics as it was practiced in the United States in the
postwar period. These are Marxisms that, for all their positive contributions to
keeping the critique of bourgeois economic thought and capitalism alive under
very difficult cultural and political conditions (such as the McCarthy period and
the Cold War), we identified as essentialist and deterministic, for example, based
on traditional theories of knowledge, tracing out the laws of capital accumulation, and/or conflating Marxian class analysis with analyses of unequal power or
property. We, for our part, were influenced by the work of Louis Althusser,
starting with Reading Capital and For Marx, which served both to identify the
distinctiveness of Marxian theory vis-à-vis mainstream social science – as an
epistemological “break” – and to reread the Marxian tradition, from Marx and
Engels through Lenin, Gramsci, and Mao on up to the present day.
This project is sometimes referred to as antiessentialist or overdeterminist
Marxism (especially as it was initially formulated in the work of Stephen
Resnick and Richard Wolff [1987, 2006] ), more recently as postmodern
Marxism (in that some of us further developed the initial ideas in conjunction
with explorations into the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, JeanFrançois Lyotard, and other poststructuralist and postmodern thinkers). Given
the names we have used, or which (like postmodern Marxism) are names that
have been applied to our work by others, readers can probably discern the main
points and trajectory of this project. The affinity with Gramsci and his attempts
Rethinking Gramsci
149
to open up and rethink key concepts in the Marxian tradition should already be
apparent.
In any case, the four dimensions of the project are:
Epistemology
This involves a refusal and critique of all correspondence theories of knowledge, both rationalism and empiricism (including, e.g., critical realism), in
favor of what has come to be known as a more constructivist, poststructuralist,
or relativist epistemology. The idea is that different theories produce different
knowledges, which are incommensurable and which have different conditions
and consequences. Thus, for example, in the domain of economics, neoclassical
and Marxian economic theories produce radically different conceptions of
capitalism – how it works, how problems arise, how such problems can be
fixed, and so on – and there is no neutral arbiter or fixed point from which to
judge one a better, more accurate conception of the world than the other. But,
of course, such different knowledges or discourses have different effects in and
on the world. Thus, theoretical stances, whether those of academics or nonacademic intellectuals, cannot be neutral. So, another name for this epistemological
position is partisan relativism, in that it becomes possible to criticize some
theories but only from the perspective of another theory.
Methodology
The aim here is to distance Marxism from any and all determinisms, such as
humanism and economism, in favor of an alternative, “overdetermined” conception of society. What this means is that the project of theoretical and social
analysis – the development of concepts or the analysis of economic and social
reality – neither presumes nor looks for any kind of causal priority among
aspects or levels of social reality but, instead, is based on specifying the ways in
which economic and social processes are constituted in a contradictory fashion
by all other social and natural processes. Thus, whether an analysis of individual
agents or social subjects, events or institutions, the idea is to produce a conception that cannot be reduced to one or another or even a small subset of causal
factors. Even more: the focus of such analyses is on concreteness and contingency instead of the playing out of one or another immediately or ultimately
causal factor. Another way of referring to such a methodology is in terms of an
aleatory or postmodern materialism that eschews any and all causal hierarchies
and is characterized, instead, by the relative autonomy and mutual effectivity of
the various dimensions of social reality.
The critique of determinism clearly overlaps with key strains of the theoretical
work carried out in the Prison Notebooks.5 In contrast to what the authors of
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) concluded (that
Gramsci’s references to classes necessarily reaffirm an economic determinism),
my view is that Gramsci’s rethinking of Marxism (in his arguments against
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mechanicism and positivism, from his treatment of politics and common sense to
his critique of Bukharin) is based on a thorough-going rejection of essentialism
and the elaboration of a nondeterministic approach to both knowledge and social
reality. In this, the RM and Gramscian traditions are really quite similar.
Class
Here, the theoretical work carried out by the people associated with RM has been
both to narrow and to expand Marxian class analysis. It is a project of narrowing,
in the sense that class is defined in terms of surplus labor – and not one of the
many other conceptions of class (based on power, property, income, wealth,
lifestyle, etc.) that abound inside and outside the Marxian tradition. Class thus
refers to the manner in which surplus labor (the labor performed above and
beyond what is necessary to reproduce the social existence of the direct producers) is produced and appropriated and, then, distributed and received. And, once
class is defined in such a narrow fashion, it becomes interesting – even more,
important – to analyze the specific connections to other social phenomena, such
as patterns of ownership of property, amounts of income, forms of power exercised by one social group over another, and other senses of class that can be
found throughout academic and popular culture. The point is, these notions of
class are not the same, either theoretically or empirically, although they certainly
affect one another.
The project of rethinking Marxian class analysis also involves an expansion,
in the sense that class as surplus labor identifies a class structure that, in the case
of capitalism, goes beyond the two fundamental class positions of bourgeoisie
and proletariat (or, in the case of feudalism, lords and serfs, and similarly with
other forms of noncapitalism). One way to think about expanding class analysis
is this: it brings together or bridges the gap between the first and third volumes
of Capital, between the processes whereby surplus-value is produced by productive laborers and appropriated by industrial capitalists, and then is distributed by
those capitalists to still others (such as merchant and financial capital, the state,
supervisors, other industrial capitalists, and so on).
So, we end up producing a more complex class structure than has traditionally been the case in the Marxian tradition. As a result we refer to class
processes defined by the distribution/receipt of surplus labor in addition to its
production/appropriation. This means we can analyze the ways class stamps its
mark throughout the social formation, as surplus labor, once it has been pumped
out of the direct producers, is distributed to still others, thereby affecting a wide
variety of institutions and events. Another implication is that there can be class
struggles – struggles over the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the
appropriative and distributive class processes – across the social formation. Such
struggles may take place not just over how much surplus labor is extracted from
laborers but also over how much and in what manner that surplus labor is shared
out among occupants of distributive class positions. So, in the case of capitalism, tensions and struggles can arise not only between industrial capitalists and
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productive laborers (over the rate of exploitation) but also between industrial
capitalists and the state (over taxes), finance capitalists (over the rate of interest),
merchant capitalists (over discounts), landlords (over rents), other industrial
capitalists (over super-profits, in the context of competition) and so on.
The rethinking of Marxian class analysis suggests that, in any social formation –
whether the United States or Brazil or wherever – we can look for and expect to
find various and changing combinations of both capitalist and noncapitalist class
processes. There will likely be productions/appropriations and distributions/receipts
of surplus labor that assume both capitalist and noncapitalist forms, with no necessary movement or transition from one form to another. Thus, it is incumbent on
social analysts to examine economic and social institutions such as enterprises,
churches, schools, governing bodies, and households in terms of their particular
class processes – capitalism in some, noncapitalism in others, and combinations
of both or neither in still others. Finally, any individual person or social group
may and probably will occupy more than one class position (in addition to other,
nonclass social positions) during the course of a day, a year, or a lifetime. It is quite
possible, for example, for someone to be an exploited laborer in a capitalist enterprise and then to return home and extract feudal surplus labor from their spouse.
Similarly, members of the so-called upper class may variously appropriate, distribute, and receive surplus-value (not to mention other, noncapitalist forms of surplus
labor).
Such an approach to class analysis makes reference to “classes” as social actors
somewhat problematic. There is no one-to-one correspondence between class
(when used as an adjective for referring to a subset of social processes) and classes
(when used as a substantive attached to particular social groups). But it does put
class transformation on the agenda, beside and in addition to other progressive
social projects. It creates an imaginary in which it is possible to identify exploitative class processes and to eliminate them, in favor of nonexploitative – communal
or collective – class processes, in which the direct producers, and smaller or larger
portions of the wider community of which the direct producers form a part, are
also the first appropriators of the surplus. In other words, we have the opportunity
of developing a particularly Marxian notion of class ethics (and, of course, a
Marxian class politics).
Ethics
The fourth and final aspect of this rethinking of Marxism to which I draw attention in this brief sketch pertains to ethics. The most recent development within
the RM project, a particularly Marxian approach to ethics or justice, is characterized by both its radical historicism and its attention to class. The historicism
refers both to the way Marxian ethics arises within and is characterized by – to
the extent that it takes up and moves to the limit of – the notions of fairness and
justice that pertain to a capitalist society and to the manner in which it captures
and is acted upon by social forces. A Marxian ethics is therefore antifoundational (it does not transcend history, in the manner of absolutes) and social (it is
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not a matter of individual ethical judgment but represents a critique of the existing social order). The class dimension, for its part, refers to the way the surplus
is produced, appropriated, and distributed. Thus, a Marxian critique of exploitation means that the producers of the surplus should not be excluded from participating in the collectivity that appropriates the surplus. In addition, the traditional
maxim from the Critique of the Gotha Program – from each according to
ability, to each according to need – can be interpreted as referring not to the production and distribution of wealth (as is commonly understood) but to the
manner in which the surplus is produced (those who are able should participate
in producing the surplus) and distributed (to individuals and the community
according to their needs).6
Again, there are obvious overlaps between the RM project and Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxian theory: both approaches are defined by their focus on class
analysis and by the need for a particularly Marxian ethics (although the discussion
of Gramsci’s notion of ethics – as against his thinking about politics, etc. –
remains relatively underdeveloped). And I do not consider this observation of the
similarities between the two theoretical projects particularly controversial, as it
appears to coincide with much of the existing critical literature.
But, on the RM side, there remains the thorny problem of the critical importance of analyzing and changing the world today: how capital rules. The fact is,
the class of industrial or productive capitalists is relatively small: the members
of the boards of directors of capitalist enterprises comprise a few thousand
individuals in the United States.7 However, there are also many more who are
beholden to the capitalists, who “share in the booty,” who receive a cut of
surplus-value for providing some of the conditions of existence of the continued
extraction of surplus-value. While such numbers are not inconsequential (either
in number or in public awareness, as scandals of escalating CEO pay and the
accumulated wealth of Fortune 500 members provoke concern and sometimes
even outrage), it is still the case that the vast majority of the population do not
appropriate, distribute, or receive the surplus. Then how, given the small number
of those who control the surplus, does capitalism come into existence and get
reproduced over time? How, given the small number who benefit, do capitalist
class projects get produced historically and continue to exist within society?
And how, given the fact that the masses are excluded from appropriating and,
except in relatively small amounts, do not receive distributed shares of the
surplus, do not alternative class projects emerge? For all the richness and complexity of the RM class analysis, the framework I outline above is lacking.
Gramsci, hegemony, and historical bloc
This is precisely where Gramsci’s writings (and those who have developed and
deployed his thoughts on this topic) gain in significance. Although Gramsci is
sometimes characterized as providing merely a theory of politics or of culture or
of applying Marxian theory to Italian history, he must instead be recognized as
an important theoretician and analyst of hegemony (the way in which class
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projects – in particular, capitalist class projects – are created and reproduced,
brought into existence and change, in modern society). And, of course, the
way such projects can be challenged, through the formation of an alternative,
noncapitalist hegemony – especially in societies where civil society is well
developed, where the majority is governed by consent (with, of course, the
threat of force), where the state equals both political society and civil society
and the capitalist class project is embedded in and governed through both.
Rather than explore in detail the textual evidence of the various concepts and
conceptual strategies Gramsci uses to analyze hegemony, I want to argue that,
while Gramsci’s class analysis is rudimentary (it is not where he focuses his
efforts, although references to classes and class-like social groups can be found
throughout his writings, e.g., in his writings on Americanism and Fordism and
the Southern question) class is central to his conception of hegemony. That is,
hegemony is class hegemony; it is the hegemony of dominant classes and, with
them, the hegemony of a particular class project. Hegemony therefore refers to
the dominance within society of a particular class structure, a specific configuration of capitalist class relations and struggles. That is what makes it Marxist and
serves to distinguish a Gramscian conception of hegemony from other uses, such
as those that prevail today in debates about international political economy,
which conflate hegemony with the leadership of one nation, or a group of
nations, within the world economy or international system of nations.
One does not need Gramsci to refer to the power exercised by one nation (or
set of nations) over others – just as Gramsci is not indispensable for discussing
civil society as distinct from and in opposition to the state, to the government or
political society narrowly understood. Or, for that matter, to talk about the role
of common sense, intellectuals, passive revolution, and so on. These concepts
are emptied of their Gramscian – and, more generally, Marxian – content when
they are wrenched apart from class issues, from the various and changing forms
of capitalist and noncapitalist exploitation, when they are separated from the
conditions and effects of such exploitative class relations. The philosophy of
praxis is precisely a Marxian philosophy to the extent that it focuses on the ways
in which the hegemony of a class project is created, reproduced, and contested.
The same is true, in my view, of historical bloc. It is a particularly Gramscian
way of conceiving of a social totality – in traditional Marxian terminology (which
we do not use much these days), the relationship between structure and superstructure, between material base and ideological and political superstructure.8
The concept of totality is important because it allows us to examine the way
formations are constituted and have effects on other elements of the social
structure, freeing us from considering aspects of society or social agents or
events in isolation. Therefore, it represents a critique of and counter to a
positivism of individual aspects, agents, events, and of history itself. Such
elements cannot be taken as given. Thus, for example, against a “mainstream,”
neoclassical conception of a given human nature – of preferences, technology,
and productive abilities – Marxists see these aspects of individuals as historically and social constituted. They are created by social forces but, of course,
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not in circumstances of their own choosing. Understanding such elements as
endogenous to history and society, viewing them as constituted within rather
than as exogenous determinants of historical and social processes, undermines
all the major propositions of neoclassical theory – from individual rational
choice to international trade theory. Such a perspective:
•
•
•
methodologically, undermines any notion of stasis or equilibrium;
theoretically, necessitates an analysis of how agents and institutions are
created historically and socially, e.g., through advertising, the so-called
snob effect, struggles over the surplus, and so on;
politically, allows for the possibility that interventions in markets, or
eliminating markets altogether, can create better alternatives than allowing
markets to operate freely.
What is particularly important for the Marxian tradition is that no element –
be it human nature, ideas, or relations of production – can be taken in isolation,
or serve as the given cause of all other phenomena. More specifically, against
liberal thought inside and outside the discipline of economics, the notion of
totality serves to cross or blur received boundaries. Thus, the economy is always
understood to be political (not a technical given but constituted by political
decisions and projects) and politics is economic (constituted, at least in part, by
the ways surplus labor is performed/appropriated and distributed/received),
while culture is both an economic and political phenomenon (in the sense that it
includes the different philosophies and common senses whereby the existing
economic and political order is both constituted and challenged).
So, the Gramscian historical bloc is a totality that connotes a configuration of
forces that is moving in a particular direction, and that can be pushed further in
that direction or moved in still other directions. In other words, it is a dynamic
totality. And so, when we analyze a historical bloc, a Gramscian analysis requires
us to examine both the structure of the totality, the way economic and noneconomic elements affect one another, but also the direction in which that complex
social structure is moving. In particular, we need to determine not only what the
class project is that rules society at any point in time but the way it is moving and
changing (that is to say, whether or not it is ascendant or declining, and are there
other class projects that are in formation and capable of challenging it). This is a
very difficult kind of work, especially in the contemporary United States, where
we are currently confronted with an increasingly severe economic crisis, the
continuing war in Iraq, and the effects of a crucial presidential election.
The rest of Gramsci’s concepts give concrete content to the concept of historical bloc, suggestions of where to look, aspects in movement that the social analyst
is encouraged to investigate in some detail: hegemony (particular configurations of
force and consent, of political and civil society, that lead to the dominance of one
class project over others) and crises in hegemony (in which spaces are created
for new class projects to emerge and, perhaps, become hegemonic); the role of
intellectuals (especially organic intellectuals, who represent and articulate in the
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realm of ideas those class projects) and the formation of common sense (where
ideas become a material force, for and against the existing hegemony); the development of language (because this is how both intellectuals and subaltern classes
represent and challenge the existing hegemony), and so on.
Therefore, in my view, there are strong affinities and complementarities
between the RM theoretical project and Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxian
theory, in all four dimensions discussed above: epistemology, methodology, the
discursive centrality of class, and ethics understood as class justice. At the same
time, I must stress that I am not arguing that the two projects are exactly the
same. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were, given the different times and
contexts in which they were carried out. But, in both cases, the specificity of
Marxism is defined by its critique of traditional theories of knowledge and
methodology (all the various forms of idealism and metaphysics) and by the
focus on class, for understanding and changing the world.
Globalization
Class hegemony and capitalist globalization
If we now turn to how – from the perspective of both of these projects – we
might begin to make sense of globalization we encounter more questions than
answers. This is especially the case, given my suspicion of the term: it has
become too easy to subsume everything that is going on in the world to this one
concept. It seems that everything – forms of governmentality, subject formation,
the role of nation-states, the limits on political possibilities – can be explained
by recourse to globalization, a term I admittedly use at my own peril.
Thus, it is necessary to proceed carefully, admitting, as we go forth, what we
do not know, and perhaps cannot know at this point in time. If our point of
departure is what we know, then the basis for discussion is the fact that nationstates have not been eliminated, nor are they in the process of being eliminated;
indeed, we know that national boundaries and national characteristics continue
to matter.
Within such a context, the continuing value of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
(the creation and reproduction of a class project) is readily apparent because it is
primarily constituted at the national level, at the level of the nation-state. There are
two fundamental reasons for this: one theoretical, the other political.
The theoretical reason is that class projects (and their associated class groupings,
organic intellectuals, common senses, claims to universality, and so on) are articulated in and through the state and thus become hegemonic within nations. This is
true even when such projects have international conditions and effects, when global
factors contribute to defining the possible and when those who articulate and carry
out class projects at the national level aspire to control – through forms of consent
or domination – conditions elsewhere in the world.
The political reason is that the nation-state is the primary arena in which class
struggles, struggles over existing and possible class projects, take place. It is the
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space within which politics is practiced. Where class politics combines with,
overlaps with, dovetails with – in short, overdetermines and is overdetermined
by – the politics of race, gender, sexuality, knowledge, the environment, and
so on. Where a class project becomes hegemonic, enters into crisis, and is
challenged by an alternative class project, an alternative hegemony.
Furthermore: I contend that there is no such thing as global capitalism
(although I am willing to countenance the idea of a capitalist globalization).
Again, this idea or thesis has both an intellectual and a political dimension.
Intellectually, there is no privileged space of capitalism, at least not in the way
Marxists define it. Capitalist class exploitation, the extraction of surplus-value,
the productive consumption of the commodity labor power – whatever shorthand we want to use – is neither national nor international, neither local nor
global: not in its concept or in its historical trajectory. It is not the case that
at one time it could be defined nationally (for example, in the eighteenth or
nineteenth centuries) and then must be redefined internationally (say, in the last
20 years). Nor is it the case that capitalism (whether defined in terms of its class
processes or their conditions of existence) was at one time an exclusively
national phenomenon and is now international. This is not to say nothing has
changed, but I return to that important issue below.
Politically, those who seek to challenge capitalism and create other, nonexploitative class projects cannot be either nationalist (supporting the regulation of
capitalism in one nation, in a battle against the success of capitalism or of some
particular class grouping – such as workers – in other nations) or internationalist
(in the sense of worrying about conditions in far-off lands and denying the
importance of intervening to shape national realities or attempting to configure
more stable systems of international relations). To do so would be to privilege
one space of capitalism over another. The goal for Marxists is to place class
transformation on the agenda at whatever level political issues are being posed –
whether in terms of the closing of a local factory or raising the national
minimum wage or the formation of the European Union or the negotiation of the
provisions of a new binational or international trade agreement.
In my view, both these themes – the existence of hegemony at the national
level and the critique of the notion of global capitalism – challenge the “common
sense,” a sort of conceptual laziness, inherent in contemporary intellectual debates
and encourage us to do some serious rethinking. They prompt us to take a critical
look at the ideas we invoke and use, and reexamine where and how we engage in
our politics. They provoke us to develop a better understanding of what it means
to analyze hegemonic class projects in the context of changing historical blocs and
what our role is in challenging the existing class hegemony and participating in the
formation of an alternative hegemony.
The spaces of capitalist globalization
We reconstruct globalization from the perspective of a rethought Marxian class
analysis in the following two ways: in terms of the spatiality of the class
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processes themselves, and in terms of the space within which their conditions of
existence are secured.
Analyzing the spatial dimensions of class processes is a way of constructing
an accounting system that focuses on when and where surplus labor is performed,
appropriated, distributed, and received.9 An appropriate point of departure for
such an analysis is the appropriative class process, which necessitates distinguishing between the places where the surplus-value is performed and where it is
appropriated. While the performance and appropriation of surplus take place
simultaneously (as labor power is productively consumed in a capitalist enterprise, whether an office or a factory), they can occur in the same or different
places. So while there can be exploitation within one nation (when the national
sites of performance and appropriation coincide, such as exploitation within the
United States or Brazil), there can also be exploitation across national boundaries
(when, e.g., surplus-value is created in Brazil but appropriated by the capitalist
board of directors in the United States, or vice versa). Therefore, contemporary
capitalism involves different and changing combinations of the spaces of
exploitation.
Moreover, the national sites of performance and appropriation can be added
up. If we sum any set of national appropriations, regardless of where the
surplus-value was performed, we have an indicator of how much capitalist
surplus labor is appropriated by capitalists within one nation from workers
within that nation and from other locations around the world. Similarly, if we
sum the national performances, apart from where the surplus-value is actually
appropriated, we have an indicator of how much surplus is created in a capitalist
form within enterprises located within one nation, some of which may be appropriated by capitalists in that nation while the rest is appropriated by capitalists
located in other countries. In this way, we end up with two different indicators
of the level of capitalist development within a nation, which take into account
both national and international dimensions of the performance and appropriation
of surplus-value. Is contemporary capitalism national or global? It is, at least at
this level of definition, neither – or, if you prefer, a combination of both.
We can expand on this by conducting a similar spatial analysis of the distributions of surplus-value. Thus, surplus-value, once appropriated from the direct
producers, is distributed to still others, who provide some of the conditions of
existence of capitalist exploitation. And, again, we can expect both national and
international dimensions. For example, surplus-value produced in a Brazilian
factory can be appropriated by the board of directors of a Japanese corporation
and, in turn, interest payments be made on a commercial loan from a US bank. In
general, there are many different distributive class payments: inside a nation (to
the state as corporate taxes, to supervisors in the form of salaries, to landlords
as rental payments, and so on) and to occupants of distributive class positions
in other nations (to merchants as price discounts, financial capitalists as interest
payments, to off-shore supervisors in the form of salaries, and so on).
Thus, we have a spatialized account of capitalist appropriative and distributive class processes.10 Based on this account, there are four different ways we
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can analyze the extent to which capitalism is global, that is, we can refer to
capitalist globalization:
•
•
•
•
when the conditions of existence of extraction of surplus-value in industrial
sites located within one country are performed outside the borders of that
country, for example, when goods and services (whether as inputs or outputs)
take the form of internationally traded commodities, when money loans are
made across national boundaries, and so on;
when sites of capitalist exploitation exist within different nation-states
across the globe;
when surplus-value that is produced in one country is appropriated in other
countries; and/or
when surplus-value, wherever it is produced and appropriated, is distributed
to individuals or entities in other countries.
These different senses of the international dimensions of capitalism demonstrate both that capitalism has been global (as well as national) from the very
beginning and that the international (as well as national) dimensions of capitalism
have changed over time. This spatialized configuration of capitalist class processes
and their conditions of existence leads to new ways of analyzing the changing
forms of capitalist globalization and new ways of intervening to transform and
hopefully eliminate capitalist class exploitation wherever it occurs.
Thus, for example, we can distinguish two periods of global economic relations: when the global South was deindustrialized (and its exports, often produced
in a noncapitalist manner, were inputs into capitalist production in the North) and
when many of the countries of the global South became reindustrialized (when
domestic markets were protected and the conditions of existence of specifically
capitalist production, often under the aegis of the state, were created). And, of
course, once capitalist class processes exist – once surplus labor is appropriated in
the form of surplus-value – the conditions of existence need to be reproduced over
time. Once the capitalist class process exists, the appropriated surplus-value can be
distributed in an attempt (never guaranteed, of course) to secure those conditions
of existence. And, of course, there are struggles not only over the appropriation of
the surplus-value but also over its distribution. Thus, we need to take into account
not only struggles between industrial capitalists and productive laborers but also
between industrial capital and the state, between industrial capital and finance
capital, and so on. Each one of these struggles over the qualitative and quantitative
dimensions of the appropriative and distributive class processes is, in Marxian
terminology, a class struggle.
Historically, what we have is a process of the widening and deepening of
capital, the production of absolute and relative surplus-value, in the center as
well as in the periphery. In my opinion, one key mistake many contemporary
observers make is to conflate neoliberalism with capitalism instead of understanding that (a) capitalism existed prior to neoliberalism, in the form of what in
shorthand we refer to as import-substitution industrialization in the South and
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Fordism in the North and (b) that if neoliberalism refers to anything useful, if it
is capable of shedding light on anything instead of shortcircuiting the necessary
analytical work we need to do, it refers to the changed manner in which the
conditions of existence of capitalist exploitation are reproduced, in both the
North and the South, and thus to the changing flows of surplus-value. It involves
a movement toward more private forms of capitalism with less state ownership
and a decline in certain forms of state provisioning and regulation – although not
a decline in state regulation per se. The state, in the Gramscian sense, is not
eliminated.
Gramsci and globalization
In any case, this is how those of us involved in the RM project have begun to
analyze the class dimensions of globalization, of capitalist globalization, and of
the national and international spatial dimensions of capitalist development. Of
course, the widening and deepening of capital does not occur spontaneously or
naturally or inexorably. They are the outcomes of specific class projects, of the
hegemony of projects to transform society such that the conditions of existence
of capitalist class exploitation are secured.
And this is where the class framework elaborated above shows its shortcomings and where Gramsci’s work is invaluable. Gramsci’s theory makes no sense
without a conception of class (a nonessentialist conception of class, I would add)
but the concept of class makes no sense without an understanding of the concrete,
contingent processes in and through which the rise of capitalist class exploitation
and its social conditions of existence are articulated, naturalized, and made hegemonic. In other words, here we have a way of approaching history that focuses
on, that pays respect to, “difference, multiplicity, the specificity of the particular”
(Buttigieg 1990: 78). The method that Gramsci suggests and employs eschews all
general laws (of the sort that both Croce and Bukharin sought to privilege, and
that form the basis of positivism and metaphysics). Not metaphysical materialism
or idealism, “instantly subjecting individual actuality to the requirement of the
totality” (ibid.), as if the general laws were already known, or even knowable, but
a more concrete, contingent materialism – along the lines of what Althusser
referred to in his later writings as “aleatory materialism.”11 This is also how I
think about such concepts as overdetermination – less a general scheme for
understanding the interconnections of social reality and more a way of clearing
the ground of all metaphysical schemes in order to focus on the particularities of
history (including, of course, those of contemporary society).
Herein lies the problem with such terms as global capitalism, neoliberalism,
empire, and the like: they are too often deployed to explain all that is happening in
the world (the novelty, the “break” from the past and its governing logic) and to
subsume all particulars into a general scheme, a totalized mapping of the world.
This is not what Gramsci refers to in discussing the concept of historical bloc. He is
referring to a totality but not a totalizing logic: his focus is on a concrete ensemble
of “historically determined social relations,” a particular configuration of structure
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and superstructure. He is referring to an ensemble that is both the product of social
struggles and the context within which such struggles take place. This subtends his
attempt to “record history in its infinite variety and multiplicity” (SPN: 428). In
specifically Marxian terms, Gramsci provides an example of how to look at particular class processes, particular conditions of existence: of culture, of intellectual
activity, social groups, governing alliances, regional differences, and common
senses, what Buttigieg describes as Gramsci’s “contribution to the elaboration of an
anti-dogmatic philosophy of praxis” (1992: 64).
The project of criticism and analysis found in the Notebooks provides us with
general concepts that aid our comprehension when they help us make sense of
how historical blocs are articulated, an understanding that enables us to intervene
and change one or another aspect of the particular configuration of relations, and,
hopefully, create the conditions for a noncapitalist class hegemony.
This is exactly how those associated with RM think about the Marxian
concept of class. It does not provide a general scheme – of society or history –
into which everything else can be subsumed, nor does it aspire to do so. Rather,
our focus is on the particular: class defined in terms of surplus labor (not income
or wealth or lifestyle), which, once distinguished, can be related to other
instances or aspects of the social totality. We proceed step by step, fragment
by fragment, conceptually and empirically – to come to grips with hegemonic
class projects and the possibility of alternative hegemonies: through criticism
and solid class-analytic social and cultural analysis that takes into account the
precautions outlined by Gramsci: “[a] structural phase can be studied concretely
and analyzed only after it has completed its whole process of development
and not during the process itself, except hypothetically and with the explicit
admission that one is only dealing with hypotheses” (Q7 §24: 174).
The RM project parallels the work Morton (2007b) has been doing on global
political economy and Mexico, using a Gramscian framework to make sense of the
“passive revolution” that brought a neoliberal form of the capitalist class project to
power in the late 1970s. It is an approach he has elaborated (2006) and defended
(2007a) in his debate with Randall Germain (2007) about critical international
political economy in the journal Politics. Morton expresses his concern that scholars of international political economy tend mostly to efface class struggle and then
articulates what he calls an emergentist theory of class identity as the way forward.
In this way he aims to link problems of “subjectivity, identity, and difference” to
issues of “materiality, inequality, and exploitation.” He does so by “focusing on the
vertical capital–labour relation as well as the more common focus on horizontal
relations between capitals (or inter-capitalist rivalry).”
Further reflection on how we view the historical bloc of social relations, of
class processes and the state, in movement, is necessary. My own past work has
involved analyzing class structures and at least some of their conditions of existence (economic, as well as political and cultural) without a good way of making
sense of the balance of forces, forces in movement, and therefore changing the
very hegemony that exists into something else. In the case of the United States,
much of the academic work (in economics and other disciplines) that is being
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done is simply not useful for this purpose. It meets professional standards, and
garners professional accolades but fails to engage the issues (whether in analyzing economic conditions, political forces, or intellectual culture) necessary for
criticizing present conditions and analyzing class processes and their conditions
of existence, what they look like and the direction in which they are moving.
Much more important is the work being done by certain nonacademics, such
as Thomas Frank (2005), Kevin Phillips (2003), and Naomi Klein (2007), who
demonstrate, in a way that many of our academic colleagues do not, what it
means to assume the role of a critical intellectual. Nonacademic intellectuals like
Frank, Phillips, and Klein – in contrast to many academics who, as Gramsci
phrased it, “give the impression of someone who is bored, who is kept from
sleeping by the moonlight, and who busies himself slaying fireflies in the belief
that the brightness will dim or go away” (2007: 177; Q7 §26) – are carrying out
the work that Gramsci initiated. This is the work and the responsibility critical
intellectuals – inside and outside the academy – must take up today.12
Notes
1 Although, as Boothman (1995) reminds us (and as we might expect given Gramsci’s
relationship with Piero Sraffa), Gramsci did think and write about economic issues,
from the history of economic thought to statistics regarding tax revenues and landholdings. But Gramscian scholarship, in the United States and elsewhere, has tended
to focus mostly on questions of culture and politics, almost to the exclusion of political economy.
2 Ruccio (forthcoming) contains many of my essays on the topics of planning, development, and globalization.
3 One caveat: I refer to Rethinking Marxism, but not everything that is published in the
journal itself is what I would identify as RM work. In fact, only a small portion is. The
journal project (and, with it, the national and international conferences Rethinking
Marxism has sponsored) encompasses a wider orbit of ideas, including over 30 essays
on Gramsci and his work. Looking at the journal, one might even call it a Gramscian
journal, certainly in comparison to the relative paucity of writing inspired by or related
to Gramsci in other left-wing and Marxist journals around the world today. (See the
Appendix to Ruccio [2006] for a list of essays related to Gramsci’s life and writings
that, to that point, had been published in RM. Since that time, RM has published more
than a dozen others.) The reason for this is that, relatively early on, scholars discovered
a range of affinities between the work that was being carried out under the rubric of
Rethinking Marxism and the contributions Gramsci himself and later Gramscians have
made to the rethinking of Marxism.
4 During 2008, RM celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Much of the history of the
journal is covered in an interview with the editors (Erçel et al. 2008) published in the
special anniversary issue.
5 See Wolff (1989) for a more detailed discussion of the parallels between Gramsci’s
writings and RM’s approach in the areas of epistemology and methodology.
6 For further discussion of Marxian ethics in the RM tradition, see DeMartino (2003)
and Amariglio and Madra (forthcoming).
7 I am referring here to boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies, in and through
which most of the corporate activity in the United States is conducted. In order to estimate
the total number of capitalists, one would have to add all those who appropriate surplusvalue within smaller, both publicly traded and privately owned, capitalist enterprises.
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D.F. Ruccio
8 See Boothman (2000) for a subtle and sophisticated interpretation of Gramsci’s use of
the concepts historical bloc and totality.
9 Other analyses of the spatial configuration of class processes in the RM tradition
include Ruccio et al. (1990) and Resnick and Wolff (2001).
10 To which we could add, of course, the spatial configurations of noncapitalist – feudal,
slavery, communal, etc. – performances, appropriations, and distributions of surplusvalue.
11 See, e.g., the discussion of aleatory materialism in Ruccio and Callari (1996).
12 I want to thank Joseph Francese for his gracious invitation to participate in the
symposium on “Gramsci Now: Cultural and Political Theory” at Michigan State
University and for his extensive changes to the first draft of my chapter, and colleagues at the University of Wollongong – especially Charles Hawksley, Richard
Howson, and Kylie Smith – who, along with Adam David Morton, gave generously
of their time, ideas, and hospitality during a workshop on “Globalisation and the
Historical Bloc.”
12 Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the
“national-popular” and socialist
revolution in the Philippines
Epifanio San Juan Jr.
Though in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of
course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. . . . The workingmen
have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the
proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the
leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is so far itself
national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Gramsci has been pronounced “dead” so many times that one suspects the
announcement to be unwittingly premature and question-begging (Day 2005).
Of all the Western Marxists, Gramsci is exceptional in being the subject of an
immensely burgeoning archive of scholarly studies and the object of furious
worldwide political debates (Rosengarten 1994). Except for the somewhat
opportunist inflection of “subaltern” by Derrideans/Foucaultians and the trendy
fashion of reinterpreting “hegemony” as pluralist consensus, Gramsci’s thought
seems useless for postmodernists, including establishment postcolonialists.
Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School successfully popularized Gramsci as an
innovative cultural theorist and founded the academic discipline of mainstream
Cultural Studies. It was Gramsci’s resurrection in advanced capitalist formations, the birth of what David Harris (1992) calls “gramscianism.” This followed
the Eurocommunist view of Gramsci’s “revolution against Capital” – to quote
his famous article of 1917 – in which the Italian road to socialism (classless
society, socialization of crucial productive means) would be won not through
revolutionary violence but through cultural reform – through education and
moral/ethical persuasion. Communist parties will thus gain hegemony, that is,
domination by consent, peacefully or legally.
Communism will win without replacing the prevailing “common sense.” Presented as ideals to be aspired for, and naturalized as “common sense,” the belief
system of bourgeois society does not require armies or police; only a finely
tuned art, schools and mass media, ideological apparatuses that would do the job
(Finocchiaro 1995). From this prophylactic stance of postcolonial scholastics,
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Gramsci is seen as a precocious neoliberal avant la lettre, committed to “rational
persuasion,” political realism, methodological fallibilism, liberal democracy,
and pluralism. Something is surely wrong with this picture.
Clearly, history – or, better yet, neoliberal metaphysics exacted a vengeance
on Gramsci’s historicist “good sense.” While reborn as a theoretician of the
superstructures, civil society, rule by consent, and non-economistic “open
Marxism,” Gramsci became irrelevant to socialist revolutions as they were
occurring in the “Third World.” He had nothing to say to peoples struggling
against finance–capital imperialism, old-style colonialism that ruled by brute
force, or neocolonial rule masquerading as latter-day “civilizing mission,”
humanitarian intervention. For postcolonial studies, in particular, the obsession
with Eurocentrism (the fallacious subsumption of capitalism into an abstract
Western modernity) in the case of Edward Said, as Neil Lazarus (2002; see also
San Juan Jr. 2007a) has shown, led soon to the speechless subalterns of Gayatri
Spivak and the sly mimics of Homi Bhabha. Meanwhile, the logocentric
discourse of poststructuralism wrought its dire effects on the critique of the
nation/nationalism launched by Bhabha and the Australian “high priests” of the
discipline after the collapse of “actually existing socialism.” With nations and
nation-states abolished or rendered defunct by the “New World Order” and later
by triumphalist globalization, we are on the way to the heady disjunctures of
Arjun Appadurai and the nomadic multitudes of Hardt and Negri’s Empire.
Until September 11, 2001 exploded over this academic scenario and overtook
our missionary enlighteners who had attended Gramsci’s redundant burials.
We owe it to Benita Parry’s appraisal of the historical-political contexts
surrounding the disciplinary formation of postcolonial studies that we can now
begin to appreciate Gramsci’s relevance to “Third World” social transformations.
Parry’s argument on the centrality of Marxist principles (internationalism, permanent revolution) in liberation theory actualized in anticolonial revolutions, is salutary.
The erasure of socialism and an anticapitalist modernity in postcolonial discourse
coincides with the refusal of a national-democratic stage in anticolonial revolutions
led by a historical bloc of anticapitalist forces. What kind of nation-state do postcolonialists have in mind? Certainly not the Italian nation of 1861 that witnessed
the colonization/annexation of the South through the subjugation of the insurgent
peasant masses, and produced the “Southern question” that Gramsci considered
decisive in carrying out a socialist revolution in the twentieth century (Verdicchio
1997). Postcolonialists erase the ugly fact of neocolonized nation-states (the
Philippines, Haiti, Colombia, etc.) resistant to their fantasy of a world-system of
hybrid social formations equal in power and wealth, all inhabited by transnational
consumer-citizens.
Postcolonial obfuscations
The asymmetry of uneven and combined development distinguishes the structure of
nation-states born in the shadow of finance–capital imperialism. Archaic, feudal,
and modern sectors coexist in these societies. The Althusserian idiom of Bhabha
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
165
is revealing when he problematizes the “ambivalent temporalities of the nation
space.” For Bhabha, nationalism is fascism tout court. Ultimately, the culprit is
“that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one –” and so,
Marxist theories of culture and community defined as holistic, expressive social
totalities should be repudiated. Unity, solidarity, the multitude envisaged by
Gramsci as “national-popular” collective will (Jessop 1982) are all anathema,
contaminated by bourgeois universalism and other archaic irrationalities.
For her part, Spivak rejects anticolonial revolutions as hopelessly controlled
and manipulated by a native bourgeoisie. The colonized subaltern is made not
only speechless but immune to experience. Parry’s comment applies a Gramscian
optic to this fantasized self-erasure:
It dismisses the experiential transformation of the “subalterns” through their
participation, and disregards situations where an organic relationship was
forged between masses and leaders sharing the same class interests and
revolutionary goals – there is after all no essential and invariable correlation
between objective class position and ideological belief or political stance.
(2002: 144)
In short, history as a dialectic of subject–object is denied by postcolonialists for
whom pacified subalterns are speechless or tricky ventriloquists (for Gramsci’s
concept of subaltern, see Green 2002).
With the formalization of canonical postcolonial studies as an academic
discipline, a reconciliatory attitude seems to have emerged. Stuart Hall’s inflection
of this fetishism of ambivalence or difference is only symptomatic: anti-imperialist
opposition, for Hall, must be conceived in terms of “transculturation” or cultural
translation “destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever” (1996:
247). This postcolonialist bias against binarism, telos and hierarchy, as we have
seen, returns us to the question of agency and the role of the subaltern in a
revolutionary disruption of the colonial predicament. But, as Parry notes, this
impulse to find a middle ground between domination and oppression, to describe
colonialism as “generically ambivalent,” the site of dialogue and cultural assimilation, is both historically mendacious and “morally vacant” (2002: 144). This applies
to the tendentious genealogy of nation/nationalism offered by Ashcroft et al. (1998;
see my critique in San Juan 2001). In effect, the nation (and its attendant set of
beliefs called “nationalism”) is a foul ideological invention, a dangerous myth of
exclusivism, homogeneity, and naturalness. It refuses internal heterogeneities and
differences. It informs the violence of the nation-state (such as the Stalinist Soviet
Union, as well as European imperialism as “an extension of the ideology of a
‘national’ formation”) against those who are different, thus making the cause of
national liberation for oppressed colonies suspect if not hopelessly tainted.
Postcolonialists cannot face the truth of sustained colonial legacies and their
insidious resonance in everyday lives. As to the notion of the “subaltern,”
Ashcroft et al. (1998) cannot but invoke Gramsci’s terminology but not the political project that motivates it. They elide the whole issue of hegemony (consent
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armored by coercion) and replace Gramsci’s framework with the entirely disparate paradigm of the Indian historians’ Subaltern Studies Group (with which
Spivak is affiliated). This group’s primary preoccupation is the criticism of elites
and elite culture in India whose anti-British nationalism worsened the oppression
of the landless peasantry. Consequently, they criticize Marxist class analysis
which to them ignores the “politics of the people,” and by implication Gramsci’s
notion of the popular as a transcendence of economic–corporatist position, and a
national-popular culture as a crystallization of the diverse interests/sectors constituting the nation (SCW: 203–212). Their concern with power and authority, with
governability (a variant of Foucault’s governmentality), displaces the question of
sovereignty vis-à-vis the occupying colonial power. While Gramsci envisioned
the “national-popular” as a process of lay intellectuals expanding and elaborating
a secular “humanism” attuned to the grassroots, for the Subaltern Studies Group,
an implacable fissure exists between the nation represented by the native elite and
the people, specifically the peasantry. Gramsci is accused of essentialism, though
it is unclear how the Indian historians can be credible when they themselves postulate a rigid distinction between the elite and the subaltern, subject-positions
which are constituted by converging and diverging lines of differences. Again,
difference becomes fetishized or reified when Spivak claims to establish a
fixed incommensurability between elite and subaltern, even canceling the at least
relational category of dominant/subordinate groups in structural-functionalist
sociology. Since the categories of nation and class are rejected, subalternity
becomes mystified or trivialized as all or any kind of subordination removed from
any revolutionary socialist telos.
The habitual imposition of a monolithic grid of difference in postcolonial
methodology sets it apart from a historical-materialist analysis such as that
subtending Gramsci’s “Notes on Italian History” (1934–1935) in the Prison
Notebooks. It accords with a nihilistic and even cynical skepticism toward any
emancipatory project of overthrowing capitalist social relations of production.
For those desiring to change the impoverished and exploited condition of what is
now called the global “South,” it is better to forego Establishment postcolonial
studies and go straight to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (see the lucid exposition
of Bellamy and Schechter in Gramsci and the Italian State). The twin issues of
the peasantry and national sovereignty constitute the blind spot that defines the
limit of postcolonial critique.
In quest of Gramsci
“A new way of being Gramscian” – to quote Pasolini’s (1982) slogan – is to
apply Gramsci’s dialectical–materialist (not homological) approach to the task
of popular democratic mobilization against finance capital in specific national
settings. I am not interested in deriving axiomatic truths or formulas from
Gramsci’s texts. Nor am I interested in ascertaining which text represents the
“real” Gramsci among the multiple Gramscis now available (Holub 1992),
including the “rightist” Gramsci quoted by neoconservatives. My task here is
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
167
circumscribed: to see how we can deploy or adapt certain modes of analysis
initiated first in Gramsci’s historical studies. I would locate Gramsci’s usefulness today in the application of precisely the speculative tools he devised earlier
in his vocation as a radical activist. One key concept is the “national-popular”
and its resonance with the conceptual archive of alliances, anti-corporativism,
blocs, ensembles, etc. Following the nuanced approach of Nicola Short (2007)
and Stephen Gill (1993) to the historical-materially structured nature of international production in the context of antagonistic core-periphery relations, I
would argue that Gramsci’s dialectical analysis of class realignments, especially
the stratified divisions of epochal and conjunctural sequences, would prove most
useful in elucidating what is involved in the theory of combined and uneven
development first formulated by Lenin and Trotsky and explored by activists
in the Marxist tradition. Gramsci is, as Boothman (1995: liii) aptly puts it,
“the theorist of the historical bloc” engaged in a concrete analysis of relations/
articulations of social forces in a given country at specific conjunctures or
periods for the purpose of calibrating at which exact point human agency can
produce the most decisive transformative effects.
The “Southern question” epitomized for Gramsci the problem of uneven,
disarticulated, non-synchronous development carried out by the bourgeois liberal
state. Before Gramsci became a socialist, around 1913, he was a Sardinian
nationalist, alienated as he was by the industrial North’s subjugation of the
predominantly rural South. Even when Gramsci became an active socialist intent
on constructing a proletarian-led state within the fabric of civil society, he never
stopped insisting on the need to concentrate on the specificity of the Italian situation, its “particular, national characteristics,” compelling the party to assume “a
specific function, a particular responsibility in Italian life” (LP: 4). The premise
here is the forced unification of Italy by the northern bourgeoisie’s subjugation of
the southern peasantry and the unresolved issue of landed property. What this
implies is an active program to counter the transformist politics of the liberal state
which maintained the fragmented social reality of Italy characterized by divergent regional traditions, polarized classes and economic disparities. The material
inequalities were reflected, and in turn sustained by, the ideological/cultural
incompatibilities between a popular culture of the quasi-feudal, rural areas and
the elite culture of the caste of cosmopolitan intellectuals. To mobilize the
masses, a whole program of education and organization of the entire populace
was needed, a pedagogical mobilization led by a political party of the proletariat
and its organic intellectuals. New values and ideals were needed to generate a
critical consciousness – “unitary” and “coherent” thinking, as he put it – of
the social situation, together with the ethico-moral imperative for organized
collective action.
Gramsci had in mind a national-democratic liberation project based on the
protagonism or participatory mobilization of the people that would constitute the
emergent nation. What was needed is a mass movement to emancipate the proletariat, together with the peasantry, and the establishment of a communist society,
the precondition for the full liberation of the individual. This fundamental
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Marxist belief Gramsci enunciated in his articles of 1914 and 1916, “An Active
and Functional Neutrality,” and “Socialism and Culture.” It was specifically in
the 1917 article “The Revolution against Capital” that Gramsci expressed for the
first time his distinctive Marxist conviction that without organized political will
and social consciousness of the people, even the most favorable objective conditions of crisis will not lead to revolutionary change. Economic statistics do not
mechanically determine politics; it was necessary for people “to understand . . .
and to assess them, and to control them with their will, until this collective will
becomes the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality itself ”
(LP: 40). In colonial and peripheral societies, historically sedimented divisions of
class, race, religion, nationality, and so on present more formidable obstacles to
mass mobilization. The appeal of national self-determination in such colonial
formations as India in the 1920s and 1930s led Gramsci to conceptualize the
“national-popular” movement as a powerful agent of revolutionary change
(Bocock 1986). The centrality of organic intellectuals and the pedagogical strategy of mobilizing the masses is immediately relevant to peripheral societies (such
as the Philippines) where bureaucratic and authoritarian institutions support and
are reproduced by patronage, clientelist politics, reinforced by police–military
coercion and para-military gangsterism and warlordism, all beholden to the
dictates of US finance capital.
We owe it to Forgacs’ review of its historical context that Gramsci’s concept
of the “national-popular” has been foregrounded into a site of controversy and
revaluation. While textually faithful in his reconstruction of its genealogy,
Forgacs’ renovation is qualified by the British/European political and ideological
milieu of the 1980s – the rise of neoconservatism in the UK, North America and
the industrialized nation-states. Like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (against
the background of the Althusser/Poulantzas/Foucault orbit of dissonance),
Forgacs’ chief concern lies in using Gramsci’s idea to transcend economistic
Marxism and assert that there is no necessary correlation or link between class
and ideology. Forgacs is correct in appraising Gramsci’s concept as integral,
fusing the political and cultural, but at the expense of the economic – a term
misconstrued as a separate, independent sphere usually isolated to the “base” in
the misleading couplet “base–superstructure.”
Removing “national- popular” from the underlying historically specific relations
of production in any given society, Forgacs concludes that the notion “recognizes
the specificity of national conditions and traditions” in which multi-sectoral and
cross-cultural struggles are strategically linked together to promote common
interests (1993: 219; compare Hall 1981).
In effect, Forgacs has re-inscribed Gramsci’s idea in the process of “passive
revolution,” or transformism, at the same time as he marginalizes the role of the
state. By detaching the “national-popular” from its Gramscian framework of
socialist transformation, its link with the abolition of private property and class
inequality, in short, an expansive proletarian hegemony, Forgacs confuses
himself and others in wondering how a class alliance can contain a collective
will, and how such an alliance can become reorganized by bourgeois hegemony.
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
169
This is due to the mistake of using the term “alliance” for a populist, spontaneous trend that has no will, no purposive direction. Once a collective will is
defined as non-class (in the functionalist sense) since it has transcended narrow
corporatist class interests, then it is impossible to fashion a collective will
lacking goals that are defined as simultaneously national and popular. Nation
and people (both the discourses and institutional practices associated with these
terms) are class-stratified and acquire coherence by articulation into a hegemonized nation-people. Hegemony is not only ethico-political but also economic,
given “its basis in the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the
decisive core of economic activity” (Boothman 1995: li). Why this is so from
Gramsci’s perspective, can be explained by his own singular understanding of
“collective will.”
Beyond idealist hermeneutics
Two earlier texts may illuminate the political condition of possibility for the
theory of the “national-popular” will. The first is the 1916 article “Socialism and
Culture.” Here Gramsci defines culture as a creation of humans as products of
history, not natural evolution. Culture is:
The organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’s
personality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we can
come to understand our value and place within history, our proper function
in life, our rights and duties.
(Gramsci [1916])
This inventory and ordering of the layers/aspects of one’s self becomes the
staging-ground of class consciousness. Change occurs gradually, through “intelligent reflection” of a few, then of a whole class. Revolutionary change comes about
through critical reflection and enlargement of one’s awareness via solidarity or
collective mobilization of the people constituted as nationwide directing agency
(Jones 2006).
The formation of a socialist collective will thus results from “a critique of
capitalist civilization.” Gramsci emphasizes the growth of a collective will
through critique, through the discovery of the self (ultimately social) as an
inventory of traces inscribed by history. Gramsci focuses on the objective or
goal pursued through discipline and order:
Discovery of the self as it measures itself against others, as it differentiates
itself from others and, having once created an objective for itself, comes to
judge facts and events not only for what they signify in themselves, but
also according to whether or not they bring that objective nearer. To know
oneself means to be master of oneself, . . . to emerge from chaos and
become an agent of order. . . . And one cannot achieve this without
knowing others, . . . the succession of efforts they have made to be what
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they are, to create the civilization they have created, and which we are
seeking to replace with our own.
(Buci-Glucksmann 1980: 348–349)
The labor of acquiring self-knowledge is key to grasping the nation/people as a
site of constituting oneself as an agent of change. The dialectical interface of
nation/people found in self-understanding – a form of cognitive appropriation of
the world – leads to the integral state, thus abolishing the liberal distinction
between civil society and state: “State = political society + civil society, in other
words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (SPN: 263; Williams
1980). Learning has an ultimate emancipatory drive (LP: 11–12). It epitomizes
the “catharsis” bridging economics and politics (ideology). Space limitations
prevent my elaborating on this “catharsis,” the cognitive praxis enacted by
the national-popular subject; as a corrective to the sanitized interpretation of
Gramsci (e.g. Germino 1990; see Gedo 1993; Haug 2000; Thomas 2007).
The second text for elucidation is the 1917 article, “The Revolution against
Capital.” Here Gramsci spells out the versatile diagnostic power of historical
materialism, “the real, undying Marxist thought” purged of positivist, naturalist
incrustations. This Marxism upholds, as the most important factor in history “not
crude, economic facts but rather men themselves, and the societies they create, as
they learn to live with one another and understand one another; as, out of these
contacts (civilization), they forge a social, collective will.” This collective will
understands and controls facts, becoming “the driving force of the economy, the
force which shapes reality itself, so that objective reality becomes a living,
breathing force, like a current of molten lava, which can be channeled wherever
and however the will directs” (LP: 40). Knowledge, will, and practice/action all
coalesce in the collective transformation of social life in a determinate historical
milieu.
Beyond being a united front tactic, the project of a national-popular ensemble
is the project of a mass-based proletarian party constructing hegemony – moralintellectual leadership – as it confronts “the problems of national life.”
Gramsci’s collective will arising from historically determined “popular forces”
is premised on “the great mass of peasant farmers” bursting “into political life”
(SPN: 132). This event will materialize through a Jacobinist strategy: when the
working class overcomes its “narrow economic–corporative” outlook and
incorporates the interests of the peasantry and urban artisans into its own
program and praxis. In the “Notes on the Southern Problem,” Gramsci predicates the capacity of the proletariat to govern as a class on its success in shedding “every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice or incrustation”
(1995: 27). While this may be described as an educative, universalizing and
expansive alliance, the strategy does not abandon class – does not break the
connection between ideology and class, as Forgacs et al. (1985) insist. Rather,
the class ideology used to dominate the peasantry and other intermediate strata is
thoroughly analyzed (as witness Gramsci’s meticulous anatomy of traditional,
petty-bourgeois intellectuals, their ethos and worldviews). Gramsci thus asserts
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
171
that aside from getting rid of inherited prejudices and sectarian egoism, they
have to take one more step forward: they have to think like workers who are
members of a class that aims to lead peasants and middle classes into a collective project of releasing human potential for the benefit of all; “members of a
class which can win and build socialism only if it is helped and followed by the
large majority of these social strata” (LP: 28) – the majority – whose subsumption by bourgeois leadership serves as the chief obstacle to socialist reconstruction. This process of a generating directed consensus through organic
intellectuals who will synthesize the cultural traditions of the whole people is a
process not only of education but of organization for class war. Proletarian
agency is thus universalizing and sublating at the same time. This entails the
imperative of further elucidating the purpose of a national-popular alliance and
the goal of constructing a national-popular will.
Again, Gramsci directs our attention to the shifting balance (equilibrium/
disequilibrium) of political forces. Given the situation of the South as “a social
disintegration,” and the peasants’ inability “to give a centralized expression to
their aspirations and needs,” Gramsci notes, the landlords and their intellectuals (Croce, for example) dominate the political and ideological field. Likewise,
the proletariat as a class “lacks in organizing elements,” just as it lacks its own
stratum of intellectuals with a left tendency “oriented toward the revolutionary
proletariat.” With the mediation of intellectuals as organizers, the proletarian
party will facilitate the alliance between peasant masses and the workers
prepared to “destroy the Southern agrarian bloc.” The party needs to organize
the masses of poor peasants “into autonomous and independent formations”
free from the stranglehold of the “intellectual bloc that is the flexible but very
resistant armature of the agrarian bloc” (1995: 47). Thus the people, not the
bourgeoisie nor the Church and its cosmopolitan intelligentsia, will proceed to
constitute the nation by releasing the productive forces needed for a more
humane civilizational project, a new social order.
While the educational–pedagogical task seems a prerequisite, Gramsci does
not envision an ideological-moral reform as an end in itself, a continuous “war
of position” regardless of changed circumstances. Nor does it have anything to
do with the numerical weaknesses of the proletariat nor of the fascist monopoly
of military reserves and logistics. Rather, the problem Gramsci faced then was
historically dictated by the deleterious moral-intellectual leadership of the fascist
bloc enabled by the continuing political and economic subordination of the
peasantry and the failure of the workers and their party in mobilizing them. For
Gramsci, one of the ways (specific to Italy but not to all social formations) in
building a counter-hegemonic bloc is the cultivation of organic intellectuals that
can help shape a genuinely democratic national unity (the Italian nation as a
legal, formal entity had no real cultural unity rooted in the people’s lives) on the
basis of a unified struggle with the popular forces (peasantry, middle elements).
Before applying Gramsci’s theory of the national-popular strategy to the Philippines as a model neocolonial formation, I want to summarize its fundamental
elements:
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A national life and field of action is needed for the proletariat to settle first
with its bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels stipulated in the Manifesto, and a
synthesizing historical program based on commonality of experiences will
be used to unify, activate and lead the majority of the population.
For socialist revolutionaries to defeat the capitalist bloc and its feudal or semifeudal supports, the party of the proletariat needs to move beyond sectarianism, that is, beyond corporatist/syndicalist tendencies and win the consent of
the peasantry and middle elements by including their interests/demands in a
common program/platform of action through concessions/compromises
without abandoning their humanist, secular principles and the goal of a
classless society.
To build such an alliance or historical bloc of subaltern masses under the
leadership of the party of the working class, organic intellectuals are needed
for organizing the nation-people, and to supervise the inculcation of discipline in thinking and action; these tasks aim to generate a collective will
informed by a knowledge of the totality of social relations that is its
condition of effectivity.
The field of political mobilization involves civil society and the state institutions, without any predetermined approach (as always, an orchestration of
frontal assault in a war of maneuver needs to be synchronized with politicallegal actions in a war of position); the tactics of mass actions will depend on
the concrete situation and the alignment and balance of political forces in
any specific conjuncture. Consent is always armatured with the legitimacy
of coercion.
The national-popular has a socialist orientation based on internationalist
solidarity, geared to utilizing the scientific and progressive achievements of
all of humanity to improve the material and spiritual well-being of all
communities and national formations.
Historical triangulation
I will now summarize briefly the political history of the Philippines and sketch the
most crucial problems of neocolonial development in the epoch of globalized
capitalism and the US-led “war on terror” gripping the whole planet. This exercise
is intended simply to illustrate the usefulness of Gramsci’s thesis on the imperative
of a “national-popular” will applied to a colonial/neocolonial formation. While Italy
and the Philippines belong to sharply disparate temporal and spatial regions and
scales, with incommensurable singularities, one can discern rough similarities. The
principal difference, of course, is that the Philippines was colonized by theocratic
feudal Spain for 300 years and by the industrialized capitalist United States for
nearly a century. US colonial rule preserved the feudal infrastructure, heightened
ethnic divisions (principally between Christian and Muslim), and deepened class
inequality by supporting a comprador-merchant class and an army of bureaucratic
intelligentsia. After forcibly subjugating the revolutionary forces of the first Philippine Republic, it used a transformist “passive revolution” to win the subaltern
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
173
intelligentsia and thus incorporate the peasantry into a colonial order and eventually
a neocolonial setup. It suppressed the birth of a Filipino national-popular will.
The parameters of revolutionary socialist change in the Philippines are
clearly drawn by the legacy of its colonial history, first by Spain and then by the
United States. This resulted in the continuing fragmentation of the country in
terms of class, language, and religion with deadly consequences (instanced by
the undefeatable Moro separatist struggle). Spain used the Philippines primarily
as a trading post for the galleon trade with China, using natural and human
resources it found, until primitive mercantilism took over in the nineteenth
century. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philippines as a result of tribal conflicts which the Spanish civil authority resolved
mainly by force and partly by concessions to the local chieftains. Unable to
occupy the Muslim territories with its limited resources and personnel, the
Spanish colonial administration used this conflict to heighten insecurity and
legitimize their authority. They relied mainly on the friars of the religious orders
to extract tribute from the Christianized inhabitants who were reduced to
serfhood or abject slavery.
In time the encomienda system generated a stratum of Spanish landlords who,
together with the Catholic Church, maintained a tributary system in which only a
few selected natives functioned as petty administrators and bureaucrats. So
Spanish hegemony was tenuous, obtained mainly through the disciplinary regime
of religious practices and institutions. When the children of Chinese and Filipino
creoles or mestizos succeeded in acquiring formal education in schools administered by the religious orders, and also in Europe, they absorbed liberal ideas that
formed the basis for the nationalist movement which began in the 1870s and
ripened in the 1898 revolution. But this consciousness of Filipino nationality was
confined mainly to the artisans and professions led by the ilustrado gentry class.
It was not shared by the peasantry who were mobilized in terms of kinship or
traditional loyalty to their village elders; or in terms of affiliation with millenary,
chiliastic sects. In time, because of the organizing efforts of the Propagandists
(reformist intellectuals, ilustrados, from the classes of rich farmers, artisans and
petty traders) with their ideals of enlightenment rationalism and autonomy, and
the recruitment of the petty landlords–merchants, a hegemonic social bloc of
anticolonialists emerged: the Malolos Republic led by General Emilio Aguinaldo.
This signaled the emergence of a Filipino national-popular intelligence and
communal-oriented sensibility.
A sense of Filipino nationhood founded by the cosmopolitanized petty bourgeoisie with allies in the merchant and small landlord class was aborted when the
United States suppressed the young Republic in the 1899–1903 Filipino–American
War. The formal republican institutions built on the ruins of Spanish theocracy
collapsed when the ilustrado leadership surrendered to the US colonial authority.
While the Spaniards used violence armored by Christian evangelization, the United
States occupied the islands with brutal force armored by diplomatic propaganda,
the promise of “Benevolent Assimilation” and eventual independence. Using
scorched earth tactics, torture and mass imprisonment, the US killed 1.4 million
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Filipinos, 10 percent of the population. Unable to defeat the Moros (Filipino
Muslims) despite a series of massacres, the US deployed a combination of diplomatic chicanery, subterfuge and “bribery” to pacify them. Up to the present, US
Special Forces are still battling the Moros (Muslims living in the Philippines) in the
form of the “Abu Sayyaf” terrorist bandit group, a proxy for the massive and more
formidable Moro insurgency forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
and disaffected sections of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (San Juan
2007a) who refused to cooperate with the current US-subservient administration.
One can summarize the 50 years of direct US colonial rule as an illustration of
hegemony won initially through military power and stabilized through the twin
methods of bureaucratic coercion and cooptation. When the Philippines was
granted formal-nominal independence in 1946, the US had set in place an
Americanized privileged minority, an oligarchy of landlords, bureaucrat-capitalists,
and compradors that would fulfill US economic needs and global foreign policy.
Consensus on elite democracy and the formal trappings of representative government was obtained through decades of violence, cooptation, moral persuasion, and
a whole range of pedagogical–disciplinary methods, with the active collaboration of
the religious institutions (both Catholic and Protestant). Hence the Philippines
today is a nation of impoverished peasants and workers, with less than 1 percent of
90 million people comprising the middle class and landlord-comprador elite
(Lichauco 2005). It is basically agricultural and dependent on foreign investments
(lately, on remittance of Overseas Filipino Workers [OFW]), devoid of the full
exercise of its sovereignty (the US has veto power over its military and foreign
policy). Its political system is characterized by the presence of formalistic liberaldemocratic institutions administered by a tiny group of oligarchic families,
reinforced by the Church, and a vast military–police apparatus chiefly dependent on
US aid (economic, military, political) rationalized by the US-led “war on terror”
(on US support of “low-intensity conflict” [see Agee 2003]). There is as yet no
national-popular will exercising genuine independence, only a subalternized elite
whose ascendancy and survival depend on direct or mediated (via World
Bank–IMF–WTO) US military and political patronage.
The Southern question in the Philippines
Gramsci of course did not directly engage with the process of Western
colonization of a “Third World” country. However, even though there are
considerable differences, one can consider the Philippines as analogous to the
Italian “southern region” vis-à-vis the US industrial metropolis. The current
metaphorical use of “North” (industrialized nations; center) and “South”
(underdeveloped regions; periphery) in international relations is clearly
indebted to Gramsci’s geographical–economic polarity. To be sure, Gramsci’s
categorization of the North–South binary is less economic than sociopolitical
and cultural, in contrast to the orthodox Marxist definition of a nation historically predicated on the existence of a market and a commodity exchange
system.
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
175
Contrary to orthodox Marxism (Rosenthal and Yudin 1967: 304), which
considered the capitalist national market as the basis for nationhood, the sense of
a Filipino nation was born in armed struggle against Spanish theocratic rule and
later against US military aggression. No full-blown commodity market existed in
a feudal-theocratic mercantilist order. However, the emergent national identity
was cancelled outright when Filipinos were excluded in the 1898 Treaty of Paris
(Spain, militarily defeated, was forced to cede the islands to the US for 20 million
dollars). Laws were immediately promulgated to criminalize anticolonial dissent:
the 1901 Sedition Law and 1902 Brigandage Act punished anyone advocating
separation from the US. The 1903 Reconcentration Act relocated entire rural
communities into towns to deny refuge to rebels; the Flag Law, which prohibited
displays of the revolutionary flag of the Filipino Republic, was enacted in 1907,
the same year when the last revolutionary Filipino general, Macario Sakay, was
hanged in public. Nationalist discourse and symbols were proscribed, thus
destroying the material practices sustaining the collective spirit of resistance and
will to independence. This period of pacification (1898–1935) involved a variable
if shrewd application of force and consent, violence and persuasion, guided overall by a transformist, “passive revolution” strategy administered by the local
oligarchy and its bureaucrats tutored by American overseers.
US colonialism thus applied “transformism” by supplementing coercive tactics
with a long-range strategy of ethnocentric, opportunistic extraction of consent from
the new subjects (Pomeroy 1970). After Filipino guerilla resistance waned in the
first decade of the twentieth century, the US established the Philippine Assembly as
an auxiliary law-making body under the US-dominated Philippine Commission
appointed by the US President to manage the colony. It was one way of implementing the slogan of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the natives proclaimed by President
William McKinley in the midst of the violent pacification of the islands under the
aegis of the white-supremacist slogan of “Manifest Destiny.” This Assembly served
to co-opt the native elite (elected by at most 3 percent of the population) and defuse
the popular agitation for “immediate independence,” a submerged, repressed
tendency in the majority of colonial subjects.
A neocolony was born from the destruction of the insurgent nation and the
systematic deepening of divisions among the people (Schirmer 1987). The
principal instruments for winning consent were the school system of universal
public education and the enforcement of English as the official medium of
instruction, government communication, and mass media. Among progressive
intellectuals, Renato Constantino (1978; see also Martin 2001) was the first to
stress the crucial role of the pedagogical apparatus and the modes of the
production and transmission of knowledge, specifically through the English
language, in enforcing the allegiance/conformity of the majority of citizens
whose national imaginary has thus been captured and detained. Americanization of the Filipino through education and cultural domination may be viewed
as a kind of “passive revolution” aimed chiefly to defuse nationalist impulses
in the peasantry and working class, and re-channel the energies of the middle
strata of intellectuals–professionals to serve the interests of US policy in Asia
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especially in a time when Japan was rising as an imperial power and revolutionary ferment in China and other countries was dangerously looming in the
horizon. Future independence was promised to pacify the nationalist intellectuals while recruitment to the Hawaii plantations gave temporary relief to
unmitigated misery in the countryside.
In the process of revolutionizing the political and cultural institutions “from
above,” the US colonial regime also cultivated its own intelligentsia. Politics
imitated the prevailing patronage system binding landlord and tenant. Filipino
ilustrados serving the defeated Republic – the educated gentry – were enticed to
join the colonial administration as teachers, policemen, clerks, and technical
help in the bureaucracy; as judges and municipal legislators. One example of a
traditional intellectual who participated in this negotiated compromise was
Trinidad Pardo de Tavera. In 1901, Tavera wrote to General Arthur MacArthur,
the chief administrator of the military occupation:
After peace is established, all our efforts will be directed to Americanizing
ourselves, to cause a knowledge of the English language to be extended and
generalized in the Philippines, in order that through its agency the American
spirit may take possession of us, and that we may so adopt its principles, its
political customs, and its peculiar civilization that our redemption may be
complete and radical.
(Quoted in Constantino 1978: 67)
This stratum of neocolonized intellectuals cemented the tie between the
oligarchic elite and the colonial rulers, performing a necessary role in disintegrating the popular memory of past revolutionary struggle and alienating this
elite from the everyday lives of the masses.
When the Philippine Commonwealth was established in 1935, the Filipino
intellectuals who came from the peasantry and working class gathered around
the US-sponsored President Manuel Quezon and his program of “social
justice.” This populist rhetoric re-channeled nationalist impulses toward legal
ameliorative schemes won as concessions from Washington. The social bloc of
landlords–bureaucrats–compradors funded cultural programs with a sentimental
patronizing attitude toward the native or aboriginal populace. While writers in
the vernacular gravitated toward more activist left-leaning circles on the fringes
of the Communist Party of the Philippines (formed in August 1930), the writers
using English remained “cosmopolitan,” as can be gleaned from this reflection
of a progressive-minded critic, Salvador P. Lopez (written during the Japanese
occupation circa 1942–1944):
For culture is fluid, volatile, impossible to confine in an air-tight compartment; and nothing is truer than that real culture is universal, the exclusive
property of no particular nation but of all nations that have intelligence to
harness it to their own uses.
(1945: 61)
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
177
Cosmopolitanism Filipino-style lurked astutely behind this left-wing nationalist
figure who eloquently voiced proletarian sentiments in the 1930s and 1940s
against European fascism and Japanese militarism.
Uneven and combined development
Unlike Italy, then, the Philippines was distinguished as an undeveloped ruralagricultural economy without any heavy industry, under US ideological-moral
control and political “tutelage.” Utilitarian and pragmatic norms permeated
the social habitus of the middle strata. This hegemony flourished due to the
acquiescence of the oligarchic bloc of landlords, comprador merchants, and
bureaucratic intelligentsia, complemented by overt and covert tactics of violence
and bribery unleashed on the unruly sections of landless peasants, workers, and
artisans. Challenged by numerous peasant insurrections and workers’ strikes, US
hegemony continues as a compromise setup enforced by juridical-police means
of untenable legitimacy.
Filipino cacique/elite democracy is built on the parasitic dependency of the
local clients on US military, economic and political assistance. The Philippines
is a polity formally identified as “national” (since the Philippines is recognized
by the United Nations as a “nation-state”) without genuine sovereignty, but
only “popular” on the basis of periodic elections. This is concealed by John
Gershman who, in a historical survey of the country, describes the Marcos dictatorship as a hybrid of personalistic caudillo rule, aided by technocrats and
regional alliances of governors, without any mention of US dependency of the
whole structure validated by bilateral treaties and secret stipulations (1993: 162).
From 1899 up to 1946, the US utilized the Philippines as a source of cheap raw
materials and labor (the colony began earlier to supply the Hawaii plantations with
contract workers), as well as a military-naval outpost. The semi-feudal system of
land tenure, especially in the sugar plantations, maintained landlord/rentier power
that shared governance with the comprador merchants in the cities. Clientelism
and patronage regulated class friction. More impoverished than before, the peasant
masses staged regular revolts culminating in the numerous peasant uprisings in the
1920s, the Sakdal uprising of the 1930s and the Communist-led Hukbahalap rebellion of the 1940s. The Moros for the most part followed their tribal chieftains who
were allowed limited local power by the central government. After World War II,
the neocolonial government re-located landless peasants, former Huk partisans, to
the southern island of Mindanao, temporarily relieving population pressure and
unemployment in the North. The question of land and the demands of the peasantry eluded the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines because, in a
one-sided manner, they gave priority to the issue of formal independence, thus
subordinating them to elite politicians like Quezon and abandoning the peasantry
to the military, church and landlord private armies. Based on the small urban
industries (printing, cigar-making, etc.), Crisanto Evangelista and other trade
unionists set up the party with 6,000 members, a few from the peasant sector.
Impatient, they tried to skip the necessary stage of winning hegemony in civil
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society, opting mainly for confrontational tactics within a narrow geopolitical
arena. Within less than one year, however, the leaders were in jail and the party
criminalized and substantially dismantled.
James Allen, a leading Communist Party USA functionary, visited the
Philippines in 1936–1938 and helped amalgamate the urban-based Communist
Party with the peasant-based Socialist Party led by Pedro Abad Santos. In his
memoirs, Allen criticizes the limitations of the Filipino Marxists, influenced by
anarchist and syndicalist notions absorbed from Spanish progressive intellectuals rather than from “liberal and radical ideas emanating from the United States”
(1993: 27) – for example, the Popular Front perspective. Allen describes the
peasant leaders Juan Feleo, Mateo del Castillo, and Pedro Abad Santos who, in
contrast to the Communist Party leaders, emphasized the need for unifying the
peasant and proletarian movements. Even though they were not familiar with the
debates among Western Marxists, at least they paid attention to the “Southern
[peasant] question.” With the merger in 1938 of the communists and socialists
into one Communist Party, the theme of national independence was eclipsed by
a “democratic front policy” to oppose the victory of fascism in Europe and
Japan. The mediation of Allen and other patronizing mentors displaced the
“national-popular” agenda with an internationalist one, thus legitimizing the
continuing authority of the US-patronized cacique, Quezon, who had terrorized
the party and persecuted its officials, and only grudgingly tolerated their 1938
convention. Proletarian and socialist principles were displaced by the virtues of
entrepreneurial individualism and US-style pluralism, ironically conveyed by a
trusted “tutor”/adviser from the US Communist Party.
From a Gramscian point of view, a shift of party policy from the national to the
international (in Gramsci’s specific case, this was brought about by the need to
confront the rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s) sacrifices the interests of the party’s
mass base. It subordinates the party to the oligarchy whose defense of elite/cacique
democracy would conceal their subservience to US authority. The outcome in the
Philippines was disastrous. When the US forces returned in 1945, the axiomatics of
US imperialism, which disappeared in the struggle against Japanese occupation, had
to be re-learned after the arrest and killing of anti-Japanese Huk (Filipino communist-led) guerillas. A similar situation occurred 30 or so years later when former
leftists made a fetish of “civil society” as an entity separate from the state, following
US Cold War strategy against the Soviet state. Filipino postmarxists (now flunkeys
of the Establishment or ideologues of globalization) glamorized a hypothetical
“democratic space” and electoral democracy without any substantive land reform
or even token social-democratic improvements during Corazon Aquino’s presidency. Meanwhile, Aquino and her successors welcomed US advisers to supervise
terrorist and fascist measures against the left, up to inviting US Special Forces to
help wipe out Moro dissidents. This policy of systematic terror against leftists,
nationalists, and indigenous advocates continues under de facto president Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo, with over 1,000 extra-judicial killings (also designated by
human rights monitors as “summary executions”) and enforced disappearances
since 2001.
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
179
Again, Gramsci’s lesson here is clear: replacing the need for an anti-imperialist
“national-popular” bloc fighting for genuine national sovereignty, and the
democratization of social property to abolish class privileges, means abandoning
the entire socialist project. It is a formula for defeat.
During the Marcos dictatorship (1972–1986), the revolutionary project of
building socialism through a worker–peasant alliance took the form of a united
front – the National Democratic Front (NDF) agenda initiated by a party established under “Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tsetung Thought.” Established in April
1973, the NDF sought to fight Marcos’s authoritarian-martial rule through the
transitory alliance of the proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and the
national bourgeoisie in a national-democratic revolution – a people’s war geared
to forming a democratic coalition government (on the postwar elite, see Agoncillo
and Guerrero 1970: 670–671). According to the 1985 draft program, the NDF
Provides a framework and channel for the unity and coordination of all
groups and individuals adhering to, and advancing, the general line of fighting for national liberation and genuine democracy. It wages armed struggle –
specifically a people’s war – as the principal form of struggle at this stage of
the Philippine revolution; but it also recognizes the importance of other
forms of struggle, and in fact combines and coordinates the armed struggle
with all types of clandestine and open, non-legal and legal struggles.
(National Democratic Front Secretariat 1985: 5)
In later elaborations of this program, one finds the “armed struggle” accentuated
as the primary form of struggle nationwide, taking pride of place over all the
other forms. The first item in the 12-point general program reads: “Unite the
Filipino people to overthrow the tyrannical rule of US imperialism and the local
reactionaries.”
Clearly, the NDF may have sidetracked, at certain conjunctures, the primacy
of the armed struggle in favor of peace negotiations with the government beginning with the Hague Joint Declaration of 1992 (NDFP 2006). Combined with
armed political mobilization, I see these negotiations as an astute move of the
NDFP to build public consensus on the most crucial issues of land reform, social
justice, and sovereignty. This is an opportunity denied to it except in the
liberated zones where the New People’s Army (NPA) exercises precarious
ascendancy. However, the NPA cannot win consent in the domain of civil
society (including the economic sphere) unless its program is translated into
community-wide practicable agendas. But the drive for winning consent
(through a wise strategic balancing of frontal assault and positional warfare)
seems premised on a mechanical reading of the prevailing social production
relations (not just the economic base, in the conventional sense). For example,
there is a recurrent stress on the developing crisis as engendering the imminent
collapse of the regime. Conversely, there is a belief that a spontaneous outburst
of mass action may precipitate revolutionary victory, ahead of any nationwide
acceptance of the legitimacy of the NPA as the liberating people’s army.
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Whereas Gramsci proposed that what is decisive is moral-intellectual leadership
of the historical bloc of social forces subtending the people’s army, a leadership
which does not passively anticipate crisis breakthroughs but in fact prepares the
ground for such direct confrontations. In addition, the forces of the ruling bloc
need to be sufficiently demoralized, disaggregated, and decapitated of its
intellectual-moral leadership before proletarian hegemony can be assured.
Toward clarifying the problem of transition
The problem of the national-democratic transition to socialism in the Philippines
has been surrounded with the endless and often futile debate on the mode of
production, in particular, whether feudalism or capitalist social relations obtain.
Numerous volumes have appeared contradicting Sison and De Lima’s (1998)
thesis of the Philippines as a semi-colonial and semi-feudal formation. For
example, Ben Reid (2000) argues that the Philippines is now overdetermined by
rent capitalism which is more vulnerable to urban insurrections, therefore a
peasant-based insurgency is no longer valid or tenable as a revolutionary strategy. This kind of empiricist-positivist thinking is what Gramsci warns us to
reject when he states: “it is not the economic structure which directly determines
the political action, but it is the interpretation of it and of the so-called laws
which rule its development” (quoted in Bobbio 1979: 33). And for Gramsci,
such laws in Marxism are tendential laws that are historical, not methodological,
because they always beget unpredictable countervailing forces. “Economic
contradiction becomes a political contradiction” and economic law passes into
political strategy (Bensaid 2002, 283).
Statistics proving uneven and combined development in neocolonial formations
like the Philippines can be interpreted to serve either progressive or reactionary
purposes; they cannot by themselves propose a revolutionary strategy. A leadership formation is needed. Gramsci writes that the mythical “modern Prince” (vanguard political party) is a creator or initiator, basing itself “on effective reality”
which is not something static or immobile, but rather “a relation of forces in
continuous motion and shift of equilibrium.” Hence, normative ethical judgment
and realistic critical analysis fuse in political action: “What ‘ought to be’ is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality,
it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics”
(SPN: 171). The ascendancy of the national-popular will as the sign of accomplished hegemony does not hinge on the resolution of the feudal-or-capitalist
debate but on the meticulous analysis of the balance of political forces, that is, on
theorizing the alignment and conflict of social blocs on the terrain of a specific
historical formation.
The Philippines is indeed a complex test case for any revolutionary socialist
politics removed from its European provenance. In such a highly differentiated
political economy with divisions and fragmentation on every level, what is
imperative is precisely an inventory of social-political forces. For there to be a
revolutionary change there has to be a national-popular movement in which
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
181
masses will be “led to think coherently and in a unitary manner an existing
reality” (Fontana 1993: 45). This critical and coherent practice of understanding
is expansive, moving beyond sectarian, corporatist or parochial views.
Gramsci’s strategy of striving for a national-popular bloc is premised on the
notion of catharsis, the dialectic of the war of position and the war of maneuver,
neither one nor the other but always contingent on the highly mutable balance of
political forces:
The term “catharsis” can be employed to indicate the passage from the
purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, that
is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds
of men. This also means the passage from “objective” to “subjective” and
from “necessity” to “freedom.”
(SPN: 366)
In short, proletarian class ideology becomes universalized; it becomes the
nation-people’s “common sense,” pervading everyday life. All these have been
prefigured in the emphasis Gramsci laid on the need for self-inventory, order
gained from self-discipline, knowledge of social relations, and collective will in
the essays I have cited earlier.
Failure to heed this dialectical analysis of the ever-shifting equilibrium of
political forces, which is essentially a symptom of positivistic or dogmatic thinking, has led to catastrophes in the past. Most notable is the prediction by the
leadership of the Huks in the 1950s that the neocolonial regime would collapse
because of the sharpened crisis of international capitalism (Dalisay 1999: 116).
This error stems from ignoring the form of the state being challenged and the
existing balance of political forces, allowing the supposed transnationalization of
production and finance to dictate the terms of the national-democratic struggle. It
is the current malady afflicting anti-globalization “leftists” who consider the
battle against the IMF/World Bank/WTO as more important than fighting the
ruthless fascist acts of the US–Arroyo regime. The other lesson in ignoring
the problematic of achieving hegemony via a national-popular bloc may be found
in the CPP/NDF’s boycott of the “snap elections” of February 1986, a mistake
due (to quote the official explanation) to the mechanical analysis in terms of class
standpoint and subjective intentions, without taking into account “the objective
positioning of each of the political forces in motion and in interaction with
others” (Schirmer and Shalom 1987: 384). But that self-criticism does not
mention at all where and how the protagonism of the masses will intervene in the
conjuncture.
With the demise of the Soviet system and the proliferation of Western-funded
NGOs (Non-governmental organizations) in the civil society of “Third World”
countries, Gramsci was discovered as a quotable sage. In the Philippines, the
“new social movements” opted for US-promoted electoral democracy instead of
socialism or national independence. In this milieu, Gramsci’s notion of engaging
the state from bases within civil society was refunctioned to resolve the crisis of
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left-oriented political forces. It was purged of its historically realist theorems
(see Jaluague 1993). The Filipino “civil-society” advocates were dutifully silent
about US imperial plunder of the Philippines and the utter subservience of its
rapacious local agents to the Washington Consensus. Thus Gramsci is instrumentalized to deflect attention away from the lack of national sovereignty, the
fragmentation and anomic decay of society, and the unprecedented impoverishment of the masses – a majority of Filipinos subsist on $2 a day – and the
endemic unemployment, which explains why eight out of ten households are
stricken with hunger (Lichauco 2005; Oliveros 2008), and why between nine
and ten million Filipinos are exploited migrant workers in over 200 countries
around the world. This use of Gramsci was surely an exercise in tendentious
extrapolation at the tail of the Cold War when neoliberal themes/slogans
purveyed via privately funded NGOs led by managerial technocrats flourished.
Gramsci’s hegemony was equated with radical democracy, all struggle being
reduced to the ideological realm (Wood 1986). In fact, the call for hegemony
(construed as electoral supremacy) eclipsed and erased the call for revolution,
for people’s war. This is of course a prelude to the trendy, chic sectors of the
anti-globalization movement embodied in the World Social Forum and its
eclectic, opportunist accommodationism.
Imperial terror contra revolution
Immediately after September 11, 2001, the Philippines was declared the “second
battlefront” after Afghanistan in the “war on terror” (Tuazon 2002). In October,
Secretary of State Colin Powell classified the CPP and the New People’s Army
as “terrorist” organizations, clearly revealing the normative unilateral criterion
of “terrorist” as any group or individual that opposes US imperial policies and
its effects. President Bush dispatched thousands of US Special Forces and
Marines to pursue members of the Moro guerilla contingent called “Abu
Sayyaf,” actually a kidnap-for-ransom gang, alleged to be Al Qaeda followers.
The informed public in the Philippines already knows that this group was set up
by government military/police, local politicians and businessmen to split up the
Moro revolutionary camp and also channel ransom money into their private
bank-accounts (Vitug and Gloria 2000; International Peace Mission 2002).
Notwithstanding this truth, the Bush regime utilized the brutal 1899–1903 colonial pacification of the islands to justify sending US troops to the Philippines as
an example of the US spreading democracy and freedom to benighted lands at
horrendous costs for both Americans and Filipinos (Katz 2004; Kolko 1976).
There is no doubt that US policies of hegemony succeeded in making the
Philippines one of the first genuine neocolonies on the planet. Concluding his
history of Philippines in the twentieth century, Renato Constantino states that
after the 1946 grant of formal independence, “the culture, the institutions, the
sciences and the arts that evolved only served to confirm in the minds of orthodox
Filipinos the need for some form of dependence on the United States” (1975:
393–394). Lichauco contends that “the contradiction between colonialism and
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
183
nationalism remains the principal contradiction of Philippine society” (2004; see
also CENPEG 2005; Bauzon 1991).
Consequently, parasitic on US support, the Filipino ruling bloc has never
really won hegemony over the nation-people. Like the previous administrations
from day one of the Republic up to the present, the Filipino elite has never
enjoyed the full and total consent of the governed, as witness the uninterrupted
peasant rebellions in the first 50 years of the last century, as well as the periodic
eruptions of Moro antigovernment resistance. Even after the end of Marcos’s
“constitutional dictatorship,” the military and police apparatus of the neocolonial
state continues to be fully deployed both against the communist guerillas and
the Moro insurgents – the Moros in fact receiving worldwide recognition of its
legitimacy by the Organization of Islamic Conference. Class war persists in both
its positional and confrontational dimensions, across ethnic, sexual, and regional
heterogeneities (Eadie 2005).
Despite their unflagging struggle against fascist violence in defense of
people’s rights and welfare, the NDF, CPP and NPA are branded as terrorists by
all those who succeeded Marcos. At present, the Arroyo regime has been
accused of unprecedented and massive extra-judicial killings and abductions of
over 1,000 citizens, priests, lawyers, journalists, human-rights advocates, labor
union leaders, women, and activists from “civil society.” Amnesty International,
the UN Special Rapporteurs, World Council of Churches, Human Rights Watch,
and others have all agreed that Arroyo’s government, in particular the USfunded and supervised Armed Forces of the Philippines and the National Police,
are all guilty or complicit with those crimes. In March 2007 at The Hague,
Netherlands, the Permanent People’s Tribunal held a trial of the US–Arroyo
regime and found it guilty of “crimes against humanity,” a judgment conveyed
to the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the International Court of
Justice (San Juan 2007b). It would be logical to conclude then that following
Gramsci, the war of maneuver, frontal assault, may be considered appropriate
(as it was in Russia in 1917), especially if the state (military-police power) was
everything and civil society “primordial and gelatinous” (SPN: 238). But is that
the case in the Philippines today where, behind the army and bureaucracy, the
trenches and fortifications of civil society – church, media, schools, etc. – have
already been taken over by the national-popular bloc, the alliance of workers
and peasants? If so, then the revolution has won. If not, we need to go back to
the mass grass-roots organizations and reassess our frameworks, paradigms,
conceptual tools, and experiences.
We may sharpen our inquiry further. While the situation may be crisis-ridden
and Arroyo deprived of majority support in “civil society,” has the working class
party achieved hegemony in that realm? Apart from the current logistical weakness and decreased size of the NPA (the Moro insurgents, though massive and
well-equipped, appear to be plagued with leadership problems), the CPP and
other left-leaning or socialist-oriented groups have not yet fully attained
“national-popular” stature. That is, their leaders and intellectuals have not yet
achieved that “organic cohesion in which feeling–passion becomes understanding
184
E. San Juan Jr.
and thence knowledge,” precisely that moment when they can be said to be
representative insofar as a “shared life” exists “which alone is a social force . . .
the ‘historical bloc’ ” (SPN: 418). We do not yet have proletarian-oriented
“common sense” operating in everyday social life. In other words, the historical
bloc of national-popular forces has not been realized as yet, despite the utterly
corrupt, mendacious and criminal actions of the illegitimate president. The neocolonial state survives by virtue of superior military-police organization (though
rent by factional in-fighting, as attested to by several mutinies in the last decade,
which persist up to now), the inadequacy of its challengers, and sheer psychocultural inertia. Above all, the neocolonial state is able to function with a
semblance of normality (though quotidian life is replete with emergency episodes
and punctual ruptures) because of unremitting US support. Aside from US
military-political aid, the elite is able to survive because of the $12–14 billion
annual remittance of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers), enough to pay the
growing foreign debt and fund the irredeemably corrupt bureaucracy and
military-police apparatus.
Globalizing the nation?
Viewed from the neo-Gramscian perspective of international political economists
(Gill 1993; Bieler and Morton 2003), we need to take account of the current world
order, the appearance of trends such as “the new constitutionalism” and “disciplinary neoliberalism.” Future research should take into account the “recomposition of
state-civil society relations” that generate new structures of exploitation, forms of
class-consciousness, modes of resistance and class struggle (Bieler and Morton
2003). World-systems analysis has to be supplemented by a historical-materialist
critique of mutable forms of political subjectivities generated by new innovative
forms of commodification and marketization of both private and public spheres, as
well as the corresponding changes in the planet’s bio-eco system (Gill 1993).
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony operating through the historic bloc of the
national/popular conceptualizes the idea of socialist revolution as a transformation
in the relation of political forces. Protracted people’s war, if it is not just a carryover slogan from the Chinese experience, needs to be judged as a tactic, not a
long-range strategy of political struggle where the land problem coexists within
the question of neocolonial dependency. “People’s war” also needs to concede if
not incorporate the more urgent demand for Moro self-determination within its
parameters. Within the dual perspective that Gramsci applies to the revolutionary
process, the military moment of a relation of forces – the moment of maneuver or
frontal assault – must be located within the unity of the whole formation and the
complex relation of the elements within it. Gramsci warns us that it is foolish to be
fixated by a military model since politics must have priority over its military
aspect: “only politics creates the possibility for maneuver and movement” (SPN:
232; Sassoon 1980).
Notwithstanding the primacy of class struggle in historical materialism, the
people-nation (mainly in the “Third World”/global South) remains the pivotal
Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular”
185
agency for a strategy against finance–capital imperialism. The people (prefigured
by the revolutionary worker–peasant alliance) and the emergent nation endowed
with critical universality (Lowy 1998) remains the dual thematic and narrative
vectors of any socialist praxis in neocolonized formations. In the case of the
Philippines, as long as the peasantry, rural middle stratum, and indigenous
communities remain the base of landlord–comprador power, and therefore of
bourgeois (US and local capitalist–bureaucrats) control, the insurgency in the
countryside will always be an irrepressible part of the “civil society + politicalideological domain” (the integral state) which is the paramount terrain of the
national-democratic struggle (Q2 §6: 763–764). Again, we need to be reminded
that civil society includes the economic sphere lest everything be reduced to the
cultural or ideological realm. The immiserated countryside and its urban extensions continue to serve as the reservoir for the millions of migrant contract
workers who now remit billions of their earnings, enough to pay the country’s
huge foreign debt to the World Bank and financial consortiums. And as long as
the Philippines is a deformed or inchoate “nation-state,” without real sovereignty,
the nationalist project-global decolonization as “the most significant correlate of
US hegemony” (Arrighi 1993) remains pivotal and decisive in socialist transformation. Without the Filipino nation-people, there is no agency to carry out the
socialist revolution in a neocolonial location. Without the national-popular, there
can be no historical specificity to analyze, no particularity to authenticate the
universal drive of global socialist transformation of the global capitalist system.
By grasping the full implications of Gramsci’s “national-popular” as applied to
the historicized formation of a neocolony like the Philippines, by exploring its
heuristic and explanatory value for socialist goals, we may be able to find the
most fruitful way of being Gramscian in this new millennium of imperial terror
and impending planetary ecological disasters.
Works cited
A note on the Italian and English editions of Gramsci’s
writings quoted in this volume
There exist a number of editions of Gramsci’s writings; those directly cited in
this volume are referenced in the following manner:
LC – the critical edition of Gramsci’s Lettere dal carcere edited in 1996 by Antonio
Santucci (Palermo: Sellerio Editore).
LP – Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, edited by Frank Rosengarten and translated by
Raymond Rosenthal in 1994 (New York: Columbia University Press).
PN – the first three volumes of the critical English edition of the Prison Notebooks (or
Notebooks), edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, vol. 1, 1992; vol. 2, 1996;
vol. 3, 2007 (New York: Columbia University Press).
Q – the first complete and critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, edited by
Valentino Gerratana in 1975 (Torino: Einaudi). This edition is at the basis of most
Gramsci scholarship today. All references to this edition will include indication of
the notebook (Q), followed by the paragraph quoted (designated by §, following
Gramsci’s original annotations) and a specific page indication. This allows the
reader to consult any of the existing critical editions in different languages (French,
German, Portuguese, Spanish, and English), all of which follow the numeration of
the notebooks and individual notes established by Gerratana. It also makes it possible for the reader to locate the cited notes in the different volumes of “selections”
from the Prison Notebooks published in English by using the concordance prepared
by Marcus Green for the International Gramsci Society – online, available at:
www.internationalgramscisociety.org/ resources/concordance_table/index.html.
QM – La questione meridionale, edited by Franco De Felice and Valentino Parlato in
1996 (Roma: Editori Riuniti).
SCW – Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith in 1985 (London: Lawrence and Wishart).
SPN – Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by
Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith in 1971 (New York: International Publishers).
SPW1 – Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920), edited by Quintin Hoare, and
translated by Joseph Mathews in 1977 (New York: International Publishers).
SPW2 – Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926), edited and translated by Quintin
Hoare in 1978 (New York: International Publishers).
Works cited 187
The website of the International Gramsci Society (www.internationalgramsci
society.org) also hosts an index compiled by John Holst and Marcus E. Green
where it is possible to locate citations from the different volumes of “selections”
from Gramsci’s pre-prison writings in Italian and in English translation.
This may be found online, available at: www.internationalgramscisociety.org/
resources/pre-prison-index/index.html
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Index
Abad Santos, P. 178
Abu Sayyaf 174, 182
Agee, P. 174
Agnelli, G. 72, 73, 78n4
Agoncillo, T. 179
Aguinaldo, E. 173
Ahmad, A. 99
Ahmadinejad, M. 26
Al Qaeda 182
Alexander, J.C. 95n4, 95n5
Ali, T. 116
Alighieri, D. 23
Allen, J. 178
Althusser, L. 10, 17, 148, 159, 164, 168
Amariglio, J. 161n6
Amelio, G. 110, 114
Amendola, G. 139
American Revolution 88
Americanism 73–4, 76, 78n1, 78n3, 78n4,
79n6
Amnesty International 183
antiessentialism 150
Appadurai, A. 164
Aquino, C. 178
Aristotle 59, 88
Arnold, M. 9
Aronowitz, S. 4
Arrighi, G. 185
Arroyo, G.M. 178, 181, 183
Ashcroft, B. 165
Association of Community Technical Aid
Centres 46
Association for the Taxation of Financial
Transactions to Aid Citizens (ATTAC)
104, 108
Asthana, A. 41
Auerbach, M. 90
Aufhebung 58, 65
Augustine, St. 88
Aximov, V. 14
Axis Powers 103
Bachrach, P. 92
Baker Jr., H.A. 116
Bakker, I. 102
Baratz, M.S. 92
Barbano, F. 54
Barilli, B. 122
Bauzon, K.E. 183
Bellamy, R. 22, 30, 166
Bellini, V. 112–13
Bensaid, D. 180
Berlusconi, S. 118–19
Bernstein, E. 65
Bertolucci, B. 110, 114
Beverley, J. 106
Bhabha, H. 164–5
Bieler, A. 184
Bionatur 109n4
Birmingham Centre for the Study of
Culture (Birmingham School) 110, 163
Blake, W. 42
Bobbio, N. 180
Bocock, R. 168
Bolshevik: Party 7, 8, 11, 14, 18;
Revolution 15, 81
Bonapartism 27, 32n10
Bondanella, P. 114
Boothman, D. 23, 161n1, 162n8, 167, 169
Bordiga, A. 11
Bossi, U. 135
Bourdieu, P. 39–40
Brennan, M.C. 32n11
Brennan, T. 21, 24
Brzezinski, Z. 31
Buchanan, P.J. 21, 82, 83–4
Buci-Glucksmann, C. 32n8, 169–70
Buck-Morss, S. 147
200
Index
Buckley Jr., W.F. 29, 84
Bukharin, N.I. 7, 15, 54–5, 67, 76, 79n6,
127–9, 150, 159
Bush, G.W. 11, 29, 30, 117, 119, 182
Buttigieg, J.A. 5, 21, 31n3, 32n9, 33, 50,
53, 81, 83, 117, 119–20, 159, 160
Cable News Network (CNN) 121
Caesarism 27, 32n10
Caldwell, B. 1
Callari, A. 147, 162n11
Cammett, J. 31n1, 81
Cardia, M.R. 50
catharsis 170, 181
Center for People’s Empowerment in
Governance (CENPEG) 183
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 99
Chakravarty, D. 116
Chatterjee, P. 110, 116
Chávez, H. 25–7, 32n7, 103, 105
Chomsky, N. 30
Christianity 82–3, 88–90, 95n3, 126
civil society 1, 5, 10, 11, 13, 21, 25,
26–30, 31n3, 32n8, 70, 74, 80, 82–3, 87,
94, 96n6, 164, 167, 170, 172, 178, 179,
181–5
Civil War (US) 80
Clark, J. 104
Clark, M. 72, 80
class 4, 35–7, 40–3, 46–8, 145–62,
163–85; analysis 4, 140, 148, 152, 166;
consciousness 5; dominant 5, 25, 27,
134; dominated 134; economic 149;
inequality 3; leading 27; processes 151;
structures 145, 147, 152; working 2
Clinton, W.J. 28, 83
Cocco, G. 147
Cold War 16, 148, 178, 182
collective worker 70, 75–7, 78, 79n6
colonialism 3, 164–5, 175, 182–3
Comintern (Communist International) 7,
11, 138
common sense 4, 5, 9, 10, 18, 25, 30, 31,
111–12, 115, 120–1, 122–33, 150, 153,
154–6, 160, 163, 181, 184
Commonwealth Business Council 104
Communism 8
Communist movement 8, 14
Communist Party of France (PCF) 16
Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 11
Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) 8, 10,
34, 69, 135, 139–49
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)
181, 182–3
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
138
Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA)
16, 178
Confédération générale du travail (CGT)
16
Conservatism 31, 32n11
Constantino, R. 175, 176, 182
Constitution (US) 86
Cook, S.D. 90
Cooper, J.F. 82
Crehan, K. 3, 49n5, 49n12, 144
Crick, B. 90
Croce, B. 5, 29, 51, 52, 58, 60–1, 65, 68n4,
77, 125, 127–8, 135, 144, 171
Cultural Studies 31, 163
Dahl, R.A. 87–8, 92–3
Dainotto, R.M. 5, 53
Dal Pane, L. 58
Dalisay, J.Y. 181
Day, R.J.F. 163
de Bonald, L.G.A. 92
De Felice, F. 135
De Lima, J. 180
de Maistre, J. 92
de Man, H. 76–7
de Tocqueville, A. 24, 72, 88
del Castillo, M. 178
DeMartino, G. 148, 161n6
democracy 80, 83, 92–4, 96n6
Democratic centralism 19
Democratic Party (US) 11
Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) 16
Denning, M. 5, 23
Derrida, J. 148, 163
Di Muzio, T. 102
Diggins, J.P. 50
direction (direzione/dominio) 9, 84, 87, 94,
95
Dirlik, A. 148
diversity 83, 84, 86, 89
Doane, M.A. 118
Donadio, R. 83
Dubrueil, H. 78n2
Dyer-Witheford, N. 148
Eadie, P. 183
Eagleton, T. 84
education 4, 5, 8, 10–13, 17, 18, 70, 71,
72, 77, 78n1, 163, 167, 171, 173, 175
Elphick, C. 43
Empire 159
Index 201
Engels, F. 14, 32n5, 53–6, 61, 64–5, 67,
79n6, 89, 148, 163, 172
English Revolution 88
Erçel, K. 148, 161n4
essentialism 166
ethical state 70
Eurocommunism 163
European Parliament 183
Evangelista, C. 177
factions 87–90, 95, 95n5
factory councils 5, 70, 72–7
factory occupations 11, 69, 70, 75, 78n4
Falk, R.A. 102
fascism 78n4, 80, 103, 138, 141, 165, 177,
178
fascist regime 2
feasible utopias 108–9
Federici, S. 102
Feleo, J. 178
feminism, radical 84
Fergnani, F. 56
Ferguson, N. 99
Ferri, E. 54
FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili
Torino) 72, 73, 78n4
Filipino–American War 173
Fine Arts (Beaux Arts) 37
Finelli, R. 65–6
Finocchiaro, M.A. 57, 163
Fiske, J. 31, 116
folklore 111–12, 115, 120–1, 122, 124,
127, 129
Fondazione Istituto Gramsci 20, 31n1
Fontana, B. 4, 85, 94, 96n6, 181
Fonte, J. 82–4
force (coercion, violence) 80, 90, 93–4
Ford, H. 72, 73, 78n2, 78n3
Fordism 70, 72–4, 76, 78n1, 79n6
Forgacs, D. 32n10, 168, 170
Fortunato, G. 136
Fortune 500 152, 161n7
Foster, J.B. 99
Foucault, M. 21, 148, 163, 166, 168
Fovel, M. 78n4
Fox News 121
Frank, T. 161
Frankfurt School 7
Free Form Arts Trust 34, 37, 42–8, 48n1,
49n9, 49n11
free trade 147
French Communist Party (PCF) 16
French Revolution 9, 12, 15
French Socialist Party (PSF) 16
Freudianism 78n1
Frosini, F. 50, 51
Fukuyama, F. 97
G-7 99, 101, 102
G8+5 101
Garfield, E. 31n1
Gedo, A. 170
Geertz, C. 143
Gell, A. 41
Gentile, G. 56, 58, 60–1, 67, 128, 130
Germain, R. 160
German Left (Links) Party 17
Germino, D.L. 144n3, 170
Gerratana, V. 65
Gershman, J. 177
Giasi, F. 31n1
Gibson, M. 135
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 146
Gill, S. 4, 97, 100, 101, 102, 109n1, 167,
184
Ginsborg, P. 118–19
globalization 4, 97, 99, 104–6, 145–8,
155–61, 161n2
Gloria, G. 182
Goldberg, M. 32n12
Golding, S. 50, 67
Goldsmith’s College of Art 48n2
Goldwater, B. 29
good sense 4, 9, 10, 18, 122–33, 164
Goodrich, M. 34, 43, 48n2
Gorter, H. 11
Gorz, A. 18, 19n3
Gowan, P. 99
Gramsci, Julca Schucht (Giulia) 23;
Gramscianism 163
grand politics 90, 95
Great Depression 80
Green, M. 165
Guerrero, M. 179
Guha, R. 116
Gulf War 147
Guttmann, A. 90
Habermas, J. 96n6
Hall, S. 23, 33, 110, 115–16, 163, 165,
168
Hamilton, A. 4, 86–9, 94, 95n4, 95–6n5
Hardt, M. 84, 96n7, 100, 164
Harootunian, H. 111
Harris, D. 163
Hartz, L. 90
Harvard University Press 8
Harvey, D. 98, 102, 120–1
202
Index
Haug, W.F. 170
hegemony 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 21–2,
26–8, 30–1, 32n8, 74, 78, 80, 82, 84–5,
89–91, 94–5, 95n2, 123, 124, 127, 128,
130–2, 133, 141, 142, 145, 147, 152–6,
159–60, 163, 165, 168–70, 173–4, 177,
180–5
Herbart, J.F. 63
Herman, E.S. 30
high culture 95n3
Hill, J. 77
Hilton, P. 210, 21
historical bloc 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 18, 26,
99–101, 132, 145, 152–5, 156, 159–60,
162n8, 163–85
historical materialism 3, 5, 7, 9, 52–4,
56–67, 98, 128, 143–4
historical materialist method 4
Hobbes, T. 87
Hobsbawm, E. 20–1, 31n2, 31n3
Hollinger, D. 84
Holub, R. 166
homo faber 70
Human Rights Watch 183
Hume, D. 87
Hunter, J.D. 95n2
idealism 51, 55–7, 60–1, 64–5, 67;
Hegelian 144; idealist philosophy 56,
60–1
Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty 103, 104
identity politics 84, 86, 89, 91
ideological superstructure 1, 5, 70, 74,
164, 168, 181
ideology 5, 25, 32n13, 122–33, 165, 168,
170, 181
Ikenberry, G.J. 99
imperialism 147, 164–5, 178–9, 182–5
Industrial Workers of the World 77
intellectuals 2, 3, 4, 5, 8–9, 18, 33–7, 111,
114–20, 122–4, 130–3, 149, 153, 160,
161, 166–8, 170–3, 175–6, 178, 180,
183; hegemonic 13; new 13; organic 2,
13–14, 35–7, 42, 47–8, 82–3, 86, 94,
95n2, 154–5; professional 7; traditional
7–10, 35–6, 39, 42, 48, 116
International Court of Justice 183
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 174,
181
International Peace Mission 182
Iraq 147, 154
Isaja, P. 110
Italian antifascist resistance 139
Italian Communist Party (PCI) 16
Italian national unification 136
Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 7, 135, 140
Ives, J. 34, 43–4, 48n2
Ives, P. 23, 112
Jaluague, E. 182
Jessop, B. 148, 165
Jones, S. 169
Judt, T. 111, 119
Kant, I. 38, 125
Katz, W.L. 182
Khrushchev, N.S. 16
Kipnis, L. 31
Kirk, R. 29
Klein, N. 161
Kolko, G. 182
Korsch, K. 7, 11, 77
Kranenburg, R. van 50
Kristeller, P.O. 37–9
Kuhn, T. 2
Labriola, A. 5, 50–68, 135
Laclau, E. 168
Lacorte, R. 23
Landless Workers Movement (MST) 105,
108, 109n4
Landy, M. 3, 23, 120
Lasswell, H.D. 93
Lazarus, N. 164
Lenin, V.I. 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 79n7,
81, 135, 140, 148, 167, 179
Levy, C. 79n5
Lewis, F. 31n3
Liberation theory 164
Lichauco, S. 174, 182
Liguori, G. 5, 20
Limbaugh, R. 21, 28, 82
Lobkowicz, N. 59
Lombroso, C. 135
Lopez, S.P. 176
Loria, A. 54
Lowy, M. 185
Lucente, G.A. 112
Lukács, G. 7, 77
Lula da Silva, L.I. 105
Luporini, C. 56
Luxemburg, R. 7, 14, 19, 79n7, 135
Lyotard, J.-F. 148
MacArthur, A. 176
McCarthyism 16, 148
Macaulay, T.B. 126
Machiavelli, N. 5, 8, 9, 22, 24, 58
Index 203
McKinley, W. 175
McMichael, P. 109n4
Madison, J. 4, 86–90, 95, 96n6
Madra, Y. 161n6
Magellan, F. 173
Manchester College of Art 48n2
Mancina, C. 56
Mao Tse-tung 148
Marcos, F.E. 179, 183; Marcos
dictatorship 177, 179
Martin, I.P. 175
Martin, J. 22, 30
Marx, K. 14, 19, 23–4, 28, 32n5, 39, 52,
53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63–5, 67, 70,
75, 83, 89, 94, 104, 129–30, 132–3, 135,
163, 172, 179
Marxian: class analysis 3, 4, 145–6, 148,
150–3, 156–8, 160; epistemology 4;
ethics 4, 146, 151–2, 15, 161n6;
methodology 4, 149–50, 155, 161n5;
theory 4
Marxism 68n4, 74, 79n6, 81, 127, 132,
146, 148–52, 155, 155n; economistic
164, 168; as ontology of labor 70–1;
open 3, 7, 164; orthodox 3; and
postcolonial theory 143–4; postmarxism
3, 77; theoretical 56, 60
Marxist: epistemology 149, 155, 161n5;
revolution 83; tradition 1, 145, 167;
world view 144
Mattick, P. 11
Mazzini, G. 139
Melandri, M.P. 110
Menchú Tum, R. 106
Mezzogiorno 112, 114
Michels, R. 19, 92–3
Mills, C.W. 92
Mitterand, F. 16
modern Prince 2, 9–10, 70, 108, 180
Modernity 80
Moe, N. 144n2
Montagu, A. 18
Mora, F. 59
Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
174
Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)
174
Moros (Filipino Muslims) 173–4, 177–8,
182–4
Morton, A.D. 111, 112, 120, 148, 160, 184
Mosca, G. 88, 92–3
Mosso, P. 79n5
Mouffe, C. 168
multi-culturalism 83, 84
multiplicity; of interests 89, 95; of
opinions 95; of sects 89
Murdoch, R. 119
Musso, S. 79n5
Mussolini, B. 24, 81
nation-people 3
National Democratic Front Philippines
(NDFP) 179, 181, 183
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
84
National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH) 84
national-popular 2, 3, 4, 13, 18, 128, 130,
163–85
national sovereignty 166, 174, 177, 179,
182, 185
Nationaldemokratische Partei
Deutschlands (National Democratic
Party of Germany) 104
nationalism 164–6, 182–3
Natoli, S. 56
Nazism 103
Nederman, C.J. 96n6
Needham, A.D. 143
Negri, A. 84, 96n7, 100, 164
neohumanism 52, 53, 58, 63, 67
neoliberalism 25, 158–9, 184
neorealism 2
new constitutionalism 101–2, 105, 184
New Economic Policy (NEP) 15
New Left 77
New People’s Army (NPA) 179, 183
Niceforo, A. 135
Nietzsche, F. 87–9
Nixon, R.M. 84
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) 99
Northern League 135
Novak, M. 21
oligarchy 92–3
Oliveros, B. 182
oppression: class 134, 140; gender 140;
national 134; political 141; racial 140
Ordine Nuovo 70, 73, 78n4, 109n2, 125,
132, 137, 138, 141
Organization of Islamic Conference 183
overdetermination 159
Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) 174,
184
Padania 135
Panitch, L. 98
204
Index
Pannekoek, A. 11
Pardo de Tavera, T. 176
Pareto, V. 92
Parlato, V. 135
Parry, B. 164–5
Pasolini, P.P. 110, 114–15, 119, 166
passive revolution (revolution from above)
9, 31, 73, 111–16, 168, 172, 175
Patomäki, H. 107
Patriot Act 118
peasantry 3, 135, 137, 166–7, 170–7, 185
people-nation 184–5
people’s war 179, 182, 184
Permanent People’s Tribunal 183
Perry, G. 40
Petras, J. 105
petty politics 90, 95
Pfister, J. 116
Philip, A. 72, 78n2
Philippine Commonwealth 176
Phillips, K. 161
philosophy of praxis 2, 5, 50–68, 70, 72,
145, 153, 160
Piccone, P. 57
Pirandello, L. 126
Plan Colombia 105
Plato 88, 94, 95
pluralism 4, 89
pluralist/elitist debate 92–3
Podobnik, B. 104
Poggi, S. 63
Polanyi, K. 103
political economy 146, 148, 153, 160,
161n1
political society 26, 28
politics of coercion 31, 32n13
polyarchy 93
Pomeroy, W.J. 175
popular culture 37, 45–6, 48, 95n3
Popular Front 178
positivism 55, 57, 64
postcolonial studies 164–6
postcolonialism 17, 134, 143–4, 163–6
Poster, M. 116
postmarxism 178
postmodern Prince 97, 108–9
postmodernism 6, 15, 83, 87, 88, 89, 143,
146, 148, 149, 163
postracial society 18
poststructuralism 146, 148, 149, 164
Poulantzas, N. 168
Powell, C. 182
power relations, colonial and neocolonial
134
Prasad, M. 116
professional revolutionary 7
progressive party 108–9
pro-immigrant policies 84
proletarian agency 179
proletariat 13
puritanism 78n3
Quezon, M. 176–8
Racinaro, R. 56
racist theory 135
Rawls, J. 96n6
Reagan, R. 84
Reconstruction 15
Reid, B. 180
Reifer, T.E. 104
relations of force 100–2
religion 126, 131
Remer, G. 96n6
Republic of Italy 139
Republican Party 29
Resnick, S. 148, 162n9
Rethinking Marxism (RM) 4, 145–8, 150,
151–2, 155, 159–61, 161n3, 161n4,
161n5, 161n6, 162n9
Reynolds, J. 42
Riechers, C. 56
Rifondazione communista (PRF) 17
Righi, M.L. 31n1
Risorgimento 26, 80, 111–14, 139
Robinson, W.I. 105
Roland-Holtz, H. 11
Rolland, R. 98
Roman Catholic Church 25
Romanticism 38, 41
Romier, L. 78n2
Rorty, R. 84
Rosengarten, F. 1, 3, 163
Rosenthal, M. 175
Rosenthal, R. 1
Rousseau, J.J. 74
Royal Academy 42, 48n2
Royal College of Art 48n2
Ruccio, D.F. 4, 146, 161n2, 161n3, 162n9,
162n11
Ruggie, J.G. 103
Russia, czarist 26
Russian revolution 135, 137
Russian Social-Democratic Party 14
Said, E.W. 23, 110, 112, 116, 143–4, 164
Sakay, M. 175
Salvemini, G. 136
Index 205
San Juan Jr., E. 3–4, 143–4, 164, 165, 174,
183
Sarkozy, N. 28
Sartori, G. 92
Sassari Brigade 144n4
Sassoon, A.S. 184
Schattschneider, E.E. 92
Schechter, D. 56, 73, 79n5, 166
Schirmer, D.B. 175, 181
Schneiderman, D. 101
Schucht, T. 51
Schumpeter, J.A. 88, 93
Second International 7
sexuality 71
Shakespeare, W. 40, 49n7
Shalom, S. 181
Shell Oil Company 99
Short, N. 167
Siegfried, A. 78n2
Sison, J.M. 180
Sklair, L. 100
Smith, A. 118
social relations 35
socialism 80, 81, 82
Sorel, G. 9, 60, 77
Southern question 3, 8, 134–44, 164, 167,
174–7
Spencer, H. 61
Spivak, G.C. 110, 116, 164–6
spontaneity 9, 14, 15
Sraffa, P. 161n1
Stalin, J. 165
state ideological apparatuses 17
Stato Operaio 141
Sturm und Drang 55, 59
subaltern classes 14–15, 70, 75–8, 85–6,
90–2, 113–14, 174
Subaltern Studies Group 166
subalternists 70, 77; studies 6
subalternity 2, 24, 31, 114, 116, 163–6,
172
surplus labor 150, 154, 157–8, 160
surplus-value 147, 150–2, 156–9, 161n7,
162n10
Taviani, P. and Taviani, V. 110, 114
Taylor, F. 72, 73, 77, 79n5
Taylorism 72–3, 76, 78n1, 78n2, 79n5
Teivainen, T. 105, 107
Thatcher, M. 49n10
Thatcherism 115
Third International 7
Thomas, P. 170
Thorpe, V. 41
Togliatti, P. 139–40
Tomasi di Lampedusa, G. 112
totality 153–4, 159–60, 162n8
trade union movement 10, 13–16, 19
transformism 168, 175
Treaty of Paris 175
Trilling, L. 29
Trotsky, L. 7, 73, 78n3, 79n7, 135, 167
Tuazon, B. 182
Turati, F. 54
UK–USA–USSR alliance 103
Unità 138
united front 11, 170, 179
United Nations 177, 183
United Nations Special Rapporteurs 183
United States Civil War 15
University of Massachusetts-Amherst 148
USSR 11, 15–17, 165, 178, 181
Vasudevan, R.S. 116
Verdi, G. 112–13
Verdicchio, P. 164
Via Campesina 103
Vico, G. 53, 58, 59, 63, 65, 67
Vigna, C. 60
Visconti, L. 110, 112–14
Vitug, M.D. 182
von Goethe, J.W. 23, 32n5, 50, 68
vulgar materialism 51, 54–5, 57, 58, 61, 64
Wagstaff, C. 118
Walthamstow Art College 48n2
war: of manuever 4, 9, 12, 18, 172, 181,
183; of position 4, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19,
55–6, 80, 83–3, 89, 171–2, 181; on
terror 97, 102, 172, 174, 182
Washington Consensus 105, 182
Weber, M.C.E. 92
Wheeler-Early, B. 33, 43–5, 47, 48n2
Williams, R. 170
Wittgenstein, L. 33
Wolfe, A. 95n4
Wolff, R.D. 148, 161n5, 162n9
Wood, E.M. 182
Woodmansee, M. 38, 49n6
work, organization of 70, 72–8
workers’ councils (Soviets) 11, 15, 19
working class 8, 14, 15
World Bank 174, 181, 185
World Business Council on Sustainable
Development 99
World Council of Churches 183
World Economic Forum 104
206
Index
World Social Forum 103, 104, 182
World Trade Organization (WTO) 101,
102, 104, 174, 181
World War I 140, 144n4
World War II 7, 16, 17, 139, 143
Wurst, K. 1
Young, R.J.C. 134
Yudin, P. 175
Zipin, L. 50