Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian Perspectives on Migration and Civil Society Alliances

Series Preface

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) is one of the most frequently referenced political theorists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. His pre-disciplinary ideas and especially his articulation of hegemony are commonly referred to in international relations, social and political theory, political economy, historical sociology, critical geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, feminism, new social movements, critical anthropology, education studies, media studies and a host of other fields. And yet, his actual writings are steeped in the complex details of history, politics, philosophy, and culture that shaped Italy’s formation as a nation-state as well as in the wider turmoil of twentieth-century world history.

Gramsci began his practical and intellectual odyssey when he moved to Turin University (1911). This move to mainland industrial Italy raised cultural and political contradictions for the young Sardinian, whose identity had been deeply formed by the conditions of uneven development in the ‘South’. These issues were pursued by Gramsci whilst he devoted his energy to journalism (between 1914 and 1918) in the newspapers Il Grido del Popolo, Avanti! and La Cittá Futura. His activity centred on the Factory Council movement in Turin – a radical labour mobilisation – and editorship of the journal L’Ordine Nuovo (1919–20). Exasperated by the Italian Socialist Party’s lack of leadership and effective action during the Biennio Rosso, Gramsci turned his attention to the founding and eventual leadership of the Italian Communist Party (PCd’I) as well as the organisation of the workers’ newspaper L’Unitá until 1926. Gramsci spent from May 1922 to December 1923 in the Soviet Union actively involved in organisational issues within the Communist International (Comintern). This included functioning on the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow as the representative of the PCd’I and as a member of various commissions examining organisational, political, and procedural problems that linked the various national communist parties. During this period, Gramsci had direct contact with Leon Trotsky and led discussions on the ‘Italian Question’, including the united front tactics to tackle Fascism, the trade union relationship, and the limits of party centralism. These issues were developed by Gramsci through the work of ideological hegemony carried out by the PCd’I and, following his Moscow period, as a central author and architect of ‘The Lyon Theses’ – a collection of positional statements on the tactics and strategies needed in response to Fascism. The theses are regarded as a major survey of the conditions of uneven development confronting social forces within Italy and the European states-system at the time.

By 1926, after drafting his famous essay ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, Gramsci was arrested as a Communist Party deputy by the Fascist authorities and was incarcerated until a few days before his death in 1937. Gramsci wrote almost 500 letters in prison; over half were to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, who was living in Rome and became his key supporter and his most frequent visitor. She also conveyed Gramsci’s ideas to another significant patron, Piero Sraffa, the Italian economist then at Cambridge. These letters constitute a rich mixture of intellectual, cultural, and political analysis as well as representing the daily struggle of prison life including Gramsci’s increasingly severe health problems. But the most enduring and influential component of his legacy is the 33 notebooks penned between 1929 and 1936 that together constitute the Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks). Tatiana Schucht hid these notebooks in a vault at the Banca Commerciale Italiana while she arranged for their transportation to Moscow. Publication of the Prison Notebooks in Italian ensued from the late 1940s onwards and has continued in various languages ever since.

The breadth of the above political and intellectual journey is perhaps matched by the depth of detail and coverage contained within Gramsci’s pre-prison and prison writings. The study of intellectuals in Italy, their origins and grouping according to cultural currents; his engagement with, and critique of, Italy’s most important intellectual of the time, Benedetto Croce; the study of comparative linguistics and the Italian language question; analysis of the Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello and the potential his plays offered for transforming Italian culture and society; and discussion of the role of the serialised novel and popular taste in literature would be later expanded into a wider plan. This chiefly focused on Italian history in the nineteenth century, with special attention being directed to Italy’s faltering entrance into capitalist modernity under conditions of ‘passive revolution’, including the imposition of a ‘standard’ Italian language; the theory of history and historiography; and the expansion of the capitalist labour process through assembly plant production techniques beyond the United States under the rubric of ‘Americanism and Fordism’. In summary, issues of hegemony, consciousness, and the revolutionary process are at the centre of Gramsci’s attention. It is for such reasons that Antonio Gramsci can be regarded as one of the most significant Marxists of the twentieth century, who merits inclusion in any register of classical social theorists.

Reading Gramsci, however, is no easy task. He plunges into the complexities of debates of his time that are now obscure to many readers and engages in an enormous range of topics that at first seem unrelated. Moreover, the prison conditions and his own method yield a set of open-ended, fragmented, and intricately layered Prison Notebooks whose connections and argumentation do not lead linearly from one note to the next, but seem to ripple and weave in many directions. This has sometimes led to aggravation on the part of Gramsci scholars when they see how often his name is invoked by those with quite partial or superficial understanding of these complexities. It has also generated frustration on the part of those who want to use Gramsci’s ideas to illuminate their own studies, analyses, and political acumen. After all, while Gramsci himself was a meticulous researcher with a rigorous philological method, he was deeply committed to people understanding their own political and cultural contexts in order to engage and change them. These points, about the necessity of deploying an openness of reading Gramsci to capture the branching out of his thought and the necessity of deploying a practical interest in understanding the here and now of contemporary events, were central to Joseph Buttigieg’s original idea for initiating this ‘Reading Gramsci’ series. Buttigieg’s contributions to Gramscian scholarship extend also to his monumental and superbly edited and translated English critical edition of the Prison Notebooks (Columbia University Press), the final volumes of which are still in process. In keeping with Buttigieg’s initial goals, this series aims to provide expert guides to key features and themes in Gramsci’s writings in combination with the pressing political, social, and cultural struggles of our time. Rather than ‘applying’ Gramsci, the point of the series is to provide monographs that think through and internalise Gramsci’s method of thinking about alternative historical and contemporary social conditions. Given that no single study can encapsulate the above political and intellectual depth and breadth, each volume in the ‘Reading Gramsci’ series is focused in such a way as to open readers to specific aspects of his work as well as raise new questions about our contemporary history.

Peter Ives

Adam David Morton

Preface and Acknowledgements

The story of this book begins in early 2013. The Arab Spring and the popular mobilisations in Europe and especially in countries like Greece and Spain created a rupture in the political order. The mobilisations gained our interest for several reasons. First of all they carried a social and political message we could identify with. Secondly, they implied some analytical aspects which we were intrigued by. The mobilisations constructed new civil society alliances and constituted new political subjectivities. We did not find it adequate to understand these movements within a conventional social movement framework. Something else was at stake. Later that year we visited colleagues in Norrköping in Sweden and started discussing the relevance of taking up a Gramscian perspective to develop an empirical, conceptual and political understanding of the contemporary forms of protest and mobilisation.

Getting back to Denmark the idea of working on an edited volume emerged. Our intention was to include both experts in Gramsci and experts in the relations between migration and civil society who were developing relevant and interesting work. Pluto Press went along with our idea; the editors of the ‘Reading Gramsci’ series, Adam David Morton and Peter Ives, have given us motivation and continuous support for the project. Likewise commissioning editor David Castle has been very supportive and made our cooperation with Pluto Press easy and fruitful. We are grateful for all the constructive suggestions we have received from all of them. We also thank the contributing authors of this book for their effort and contribution to enrich the perspectives on Gramsci and alliances between migration and civil society. We would also like to thank the three external readers who read the initial proposal and gave us constructive feedback. Our hope for the book is that it will inspire academics, activists, practitioners and those who are, in general, interested in the topic. We hope that it will be read as a tale of practices aiming at transforming the social and political order towards more solidary and inclusive societies. Gramsci was first and foremost a thinker of political practice and he deserves to be read in this way.

We would like to thank the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, for supporting us financially. Special thanks go to Annette Bruun Andersen for help with the English language. We are especially grateful for the support and patience of our families. Martin finished his part of the edited volume while he was in Andalucia with his wife Nienke and daughters Thilde, Sigga and Nellie. It was not easy bringing an infant to a mountain in Spain with no regular electricity after a 7,500 kilometre road trip – and not easy spending so much time in front of a laptop. He owes his family a great deal. Óscar thanks Lise, Kira, Linus and Marcos for helping him throughout the project by forging new and enjoyable forms of solidarity. Finally we would like to dedicate this book to the thousands of people struggling to change society and to expand a solidarity that goes beyond borders. These changes are needed.

Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen

Aalborg, October 2015

Introduction

1

Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian Perspectives on Migration and Civil Society Alliances

Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen

12 September 2015 marked an important day for an emerging solidarity movement. In more than 85 cities in 30 countries across Europe hundreds of thousands of protesters marched under banners of ‘Refugees Welcome’ and ‘Europe Says Welcome’. Citizens participated in marches, demonstrations and other events during the day of action. The message was very clear: refugees are welcome here. In London the newly elected leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, spoke to more than 100,000 people joining the Refugees Welcome Here event. This can be read as an act of solidarity; but support for the message goes beyond participating in a single march and reflects the need for a new politics of migration in which civil society speaks out and opens new spaces of cooperation and of rethinking social identities.

During the months following the refugee crisis in Europe, we witnessed a popular mobilisation. The solidarity actions included a wide range of participants, from veteran activists and leftist militants to people who approached the issue from a humanitarian perspective. All of them agreed on the need for elaborating new migration policies, very different from the existing ones, which were considered inhumane and restrictive. In different countries initiatives have sprung up developing new forms of everyday politics and acts of solidarity. In Austria 2,200 drivers joined a campaign to pick up refugees stranded in Budapest. In Germany, Denmark and Sweden locals have organised support for arriving refugees, donating food, water, clothes and other supplies to those in need, sometimes using civil disobedience by smuggling refugees to neighbouring countries or sheltering refugees privately. In Iceland more than 11,000 Icelanders (out of a total population of approximately 323,000 people) offered to accommodate Syrian refugees in their private homes and pay their costs as a response to the government suggesting that it would accept 50 Syrian refugees. These are citizens’ initiatives which all express a solidarity that is more than a symbolic support, but that constitutes a genuine attempt to spur social and political change and to demonstrate solidarity beyond borders in practice.

The emerging solidarity manifests itself not just from below however; cracks are also opening up in the established political system. In Barcelona the newly elected mayor Ada Colau challenged the Spanish government and proposed creating a network of refugee cities, following up the proposal with the suggestion that 10 million euros of surplus funds from 2015 be allocated for this purpose. In the United Kingdom the prime minister, David Cameron, arguably bowed to the pressure from the popular mobilisations taking place over the previous months and agreed that Britain should take in another 100,000 refugees. On an even larger scale, German chancellor Angela Merkel took the decision on 4 September to suspend European asylum rules and allow tens of thousands of refugees stranded in Hungary to enter Germany via Austria. The consequences of this decision are enormous, both in terms of the numbers of refugees involved and, even more significantly, for the future of the European asylum system.

How can these emerging solidarities between civil society and refugees be explained? It would clearly be insufficient to reduce them (as well as the social and political power they imply) to the political moment. Without denying the importance of that moment and its strong impact on European public opinion, the different kinds of solidarity that have been forged during the years prior to the refugee crisis must not be ignored. The actions of solidarity, many of them developed under unfavourable circumstances, have been carried out in different manners as a rejection of hegemonic migration politics. In this regard, we find it necessary to consider all those alliances and shaping of spaces of resistance which have enhanced a different way of understanding migration politics, produced within the civil society sphere. To account for those solidarities and their effects we find it intriguing to return to the ideas expressed by Antonio Gramsci and place them in dialogue with the current political and social context. The main reason for this choice is that 90 years ago Gramsci was already reflecting upon the potential of such popular mobilisations and the power of alliance building in expanding a conflict and bringing about social and political transformation.

GRAMSCIAN PERSPECTIVES

In ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1926), Antonio Gramsci traces a geographical model (Said 1995) to explain the division of Italy into two regions, North and South, intertwined in a relation of exploitation between the industrialising North and the dependent South with its economy based on agriculture. The bourgeois democracy strengthened this asymmetry and the dominance of the North, using state power to reinforce the industrial development of the North and increasing the South’s dependence. The bourgeoisie in the North and landowners in the South took advantage of this division and the lack of a common response by proletariat and peasants.

Indeed, Gramsci’s main message in the ‘Southern Question’ is that proletariat and peasants should form a new alliance to change the hegemonic order. Solidarity between the subaltern groups (here subjects on the margins of history, immersed in the autonomous space of their own historicity; see Mellino in this volume) should be beneficial for both proletariat and peasants and enable them to transform social and economic relations and eliminate exploitation and dependence. Gramsci assigns to the proletariat the role of the leading class against capitalism that might attract other popular classes and incorporate the claims of the peasants into a unified struggle.

Today, Gramsci’s reflections on the ‘Southern Question’ (and his work in general) are as relevant as they were then. The economic crisis which began in 2008 revealed a structural crisis of capitalism which was not limited to the financial or economic arenas. It turned into an organic crisis (i.e. a rupturing of the structure and superstructure) as political consensus dissolved and the ruling class was incapable of leading society forward. Especially in 2011, citizens mobilised, became politically active and rebelled against the capitalist system in the name of democracy. In 2015 we have seen citizens mobilising under paroles of humanitarian obligations and solidarity. However, it is unclear if these contestations will be constituted as a new historical bloc (i.e. a unity of structure and superstructure) with an alternative hegemonic system (i.e. hegemony obtained by a fundamental class exercising the intellectual, political and moral role of leadership as well as monopolising the ‘common sense’ within the system) (Mouffe 2014). Gramsci proposed an alliance between proletariat and peasants to form a new historical bloc. Nowadays it is still unclear who the social and political actors involved should be. In Gramsci’s words, ‘the old is dying but the new cannot [yet] be born’ (Gramsci 1971: 275–6, Q3§34).¹ However, it is certain that the terrain of civil society has become the terrain for hegemonic struggles in which political society can only use coercion and not persuasion. We add the ‘yet’ in Gramsci’s famous statement and investigate, in the contributions of this book, civil society alliances in historical and especially contemporary perspectives, reflecting on their potential to challenge the hegemonic system.

In recent years, there has been a growing literature on what can be characterised as Gramscian and neo-Gramscian perspectives on transnational solidarities in the era of neoliberalism (e.g. Bieler 2014; Bieler and Morton 2004; Featherstone 2012; Morton 2007). Approaches in this literature include case studies on the (transnational) labour movement, alliances between unions and social movements, subaltern class struggles, the global justice movement, anti-colonial struggles and lately anti-austerity struggles. They underline the fact that exploitation and resistance to exploitation cannot be reduced to material aspects, but include amongst others ethnic, nationalist, religious and gender-based identities, which are all engaged in struggles (Bieler and Morton 2004; Cox 1987). Despite a theoretical openness to diversifying struggles, there has been little focus on migrants. Our objective with this book is to analyse alliances in civil society comprising immigrants and non-immigrant actors that challenge the hegemonic order and undo the political closure which, in the form of consensus, has allowed the implementation of restrictive and exclusionary immigration and integration policies. The contributions offer long historical perspectives as well as case studies on contemporary issues. Their common focus is that they analyse alliances in civil society through Gramscian and neo-Gramscian perspectives.

The category of the migrant is characterised by heterogeneity. The same can be said for the analysis of migrants as political subjects. The chapters conceptualise migrant subjects from four angles: labour mobility, migration (both economic and political), colonialism and transnational relations. We here understand processes of subjectivisation as being produced by mechanisms of social and cultural exclusion, division of labour and ethnicisation in a context of global capitalism. Figures such as the numbers of precarious workers, refugees, undocumented migrants and labour migrants are analysed. Furthermore, we consider the multidimensional conception of migration in the dynamics of global capitalism necessary to understand how new alliances and relations of solidarity, with other members of civil society who are exposed to similar processes of precarisation, can emerge. In our opinion, this scenario makes it particularly relevant to rethink Gramsci in relation to migration.

Following Edward Said’s and later Adam David Morton’s (2013) approach, we read Gramsci’s framework as a ‘travelling theory’. Solidarity struggles are situated in place and space and on a hierarchy of scales. Gramsci’s ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ establishes the framework for understanding how new alliances are composed and their potential to change the capitalist system by different degrees and at different levels. We thus speak against more recent contributions like that of Richard Day (2005), who claims that ‘Gramsci is dead’ because he does not capture the demands of the latest social movements. We argue that Gramsci’s analysis of alliances and solidarities is very much alive in the dynamics of subaltern political activism and the generative character of political struggle (Featherstone 2013). Consider for instance the emerging refugee solidarity movement Venligboerne (literally ‘friendly inhabitants’) in Denmark: its membership now numbers thousands of people across the country. This is not primarily an urban phenomenon; it started in the countryside and spread from there. Its activities include legal aid, practical help, medical support, language training, job-seeking assistance and everyday donations as well as engagement in political protest against what is believed to be a xenophobic policy. Rethinking ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ entails addressing four important topics in order to understand the relation between immigration and civil society as resistance against the current hegemonic policies and political consensus:

1.  The heterogeneity of political actors

2.  Solidarity and alliances across and around borders

3.  Avoiding misplaced alliances

4.  Spaces of resistance

We consider these four dimensions, which correspond to the four parts of this book, useful for explaining the potential (as well as the limits) of civil society as spaces of resistance offering alternatives to the political closure on migration and integration policies.

THE HETEROGENEITY OF POLITICAL ACTORS

Gramsci supports the idea of the proletariat as the class that would propose and lead a new hegemony and defeat capitalism. He explains how Turin communists furthered their cause by including the Southern question on the agenda. Despite their vanguard role, workers could not lead social change without establishing new alliances, especially with the peasants in the South, in order to mobilise the working population. One social class cannot challenge the hegemonic order without opening up to other social actors. This conclusion does not derive from a general reflection about working classes but from a historical and situated reflection that makes every development unique. We have to contextualise social struggles if we want to understand why specific alliances are formed and what possibilities they represent.

The proletariat can no longer be the only class leading a process of social change. Other popular classes must be taken into account as well. As Hall (1986) points out, we cannot expect a homogenous class to be decisive when an organic crisis occurs. It is more reasonable to think that the class composition will be complex. Furthermore, ‘though such a political and social force has its roots in the fundamental class division of society, the actual forms of the political struggle will have a wider social character’ (Hall 1986). For instance, the Occupy Wall Street movement has tried to change the terms of social conflict by distinguishing between the 99 per cent (the people) and the 1 per cent (the representatives of the interests of capital). This reflects the effort of rethinking a more inclusive conception of class composition which is open to other groups, and not only the proletariat. In this sense, it is possible to move beyond the interests of those particular groups and identify common goals. Gramsci talked already about the need to overcome particularism as the only way to include different kinds of workers and peasants:

[I]t is necessary – in order to win the trust and consent of the peasants and of some semiproletarian urban categories – to overcome certain prejudices and conquer certain forms of egoism which can and do subsist within the working class as such, even when craft particularism has disappeared. The metalworker, the joiner, the building-worker, etc., must not only think as proletarians, and no longer as metalworker, joiner, building-worker, etc.; they must also take a further step. They must think as workers who are members of a class which aims to lead the peasants and intellectuals. (Gramsci 1978: 448)

The heterogeneity of the political actors has to be included in and reflected by categories such as ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2004; Virno 2004) or ‘depolarised pluralities’ (de Sousa Santos 2006). However, it is not easy to account for the composition of this complex heterogeneity. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) refer to the ‘logic of difference and equivalence’ to depict how a coalition of plural, quite diverse actors could lead to a new form of hegemony. The economic crisis has intensified the plurality of political subjectivities (Hardt and Negri 2012) and made the economic dimension of social inequalities, which are not necessarily linked only to the division of labour, more evident. All these elements must be taken into consideration to understand how the ‘subaltern’ becomes a subject of history in the constant shaping and reshaping of power relations (Capuzzo and Mezzadra 2012).

The plurality of subjectivities includes workers, the unemployed, different categories of immigrants (political and economic refugees, undocumented and documented immigrants, expatriates, etc.) and less obvious groups such as the indebted (Lazzarato 2012) or what has been labelled as the ‘precariat’ (Standing 2011) and reflects the new economic and social divisions caused by capitalism. The configuration of the plurality of subjectivities should be reflected in a moment of organic crisis and solidarity must be constituted based on such a diversity in which it is difficult to imagine the working class playing a leading role, although it must clearly be included and be an active part of it.

Part I of the book includes three contributions on this topic. Ursula Apitzsch argues, in a historiographical reading of Gramsci, that his thoughts regarding the so-called ‘subaltern social strata’ supply a wealth of ideas relating to precisely the connection between migration and the Southern question: as a hegemonic framework in which dominated and subordinated cultures encounter each other. She further claims that it is necessary to reflect on the process by which the entire complex develops not only in the framework of the Italian nation state but also in the context of new European challenges. In the chapter by Nazlı Şenses and Kıvanç Özcan they employ a neo-Gramscian framework to challenge the now commonly accepted claim that the Gezi protests in Istanbul can be read as a middle-class phenomenon. They emphasise that the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protesters was a conjunction of diverse antagonisms in which different classes, ethnic and religious groups coalesced against the government. They focus on the role of internal migrants and minorities within Turkey and show how especially the Kurdish and Alevi minorities, who reside in migrant neighbourhoods, disturb the idea of homogeneous middle-class participation in the Gezi protests. Miguel Mellino offers a theoretical perspective from cultural and postcolonial studies. He argues that focusing on the anomalies of postcolonial translations of Gramsci’s toolbox reveals the economic and political configuration of the contemporary world and of global (postcolonial) capitalism. He links the postcolonial reading of Gramsci to migration and citizenship struggles in Europe and argues that they constitute a privileged arena from which to regard the current neoliberal capitalism as postcolonial capitalism.

SOLIDARITY AND ALLIANCES

It is made very clear in ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ that the two main social forces, the proletariat and the peasants, must create an alliance in opposition to the hegemonic bloc. It is important to recognise that the resulting unity is not automatic and dependent on the position of the political actors in the mode of economic production but rather emerges due to a system of alliances (Hall 1986). The conformation of alliances among civil society actors opposed to the hegemonic forces raises the question of solidarity:

The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies; by emancipating itself from capitalist slavery, the Northern proletariat will emancipate the Southern peasant masses enslaved to the banks and the parasitic industry of the North. The economic and political regeneration of the peasants should not be sought in a division of uncultivated or poorly cultivated lands, but in the solidarity of the industrial proletariat. This in turn needs the solidarity of the peasantry and has an ‘interest’ in ensuring that capitalism is not reborn economically from