The Politics, Culture and Social Theory of Gramsci: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

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 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 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 collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 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 any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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.

32

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)

42

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

46

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

48

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

52

R.M. Dainotto

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

56

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.

58

R.M. Dainotto

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).

60

R.M. Dainotto

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

62

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

64

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

66

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

68

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).

70

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)

72

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

74

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

76

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.

78

M. Denning

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.

82

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)

Power and democracy

83

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).

84

B. Fontana

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,

Power and democracy

85

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

86

B. Fontana

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

Power and democracy

87

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.

88

B. Fontana

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

Power and democracy

89

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

90

B. Fontana

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

Power and democracy

91

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

92

B. Fontana

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,

Power and democracy

93

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)

94

B. Fontana

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

96

B. Fontana 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).

98

S. Gill

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

99

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

100

S. Gill

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.

Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will

101

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).

102 •

•

•

•

•

•

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

104

S. Gill

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

Pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will

105

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,

106

S. Gill

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)

112

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).

114

M. Landy

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,

116

M. Landy

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

118

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)

120

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.

Common sense in Gramsci

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”

124

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

126 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).

Common sense in Gramsci

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

128

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:

130

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)

132

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

136

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

138

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

140

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

142

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

144

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

146

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

148

D.F. Ruccio

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

150

D.F. Ruccio

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

Rethinking Gramsci 151 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

152

D.F. Ruccio

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

Rethinking Gramsci 153 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,

154

D.F. Ruccio

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

Rethinking Gramsci 155 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

156

D.F. Ruccio

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

Rethinking Gramsci 157 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

158

D.F. Ruccio

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

Rethinking Gramsci 159 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

160

D.F. Ruccio

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

Rethinking Gramsci 161 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.

162

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,

164

E. San Juan Jr.

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

166

E. San Juan Jr.

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

168

E. San Juan Jr.

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

170

E. San Juan Jr. 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:

172 1

2

3

4

5

E. San Juan Jr. 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

174

E. San Juan Jr.

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

176

E. San Juan Jr.

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

178

E. San Juan Jr.

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.

180

E. San Juan Jr.

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

182

E. San Juan Jr.

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

Secondary sources cited Agee, P. (2003) “Tracking Covert Actions into the Future,” in Ellen Ray and William Schaap (eds.) Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism. New York: Ocean Press. Agoncillo, T. and Guerrero, M. (1970) History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: R.P. Garcia Publishing. Ahmad, A. (2003) “Imperialism of Our Time,” in L. Panitch, L. and C. Leys, (eds.) The New Imperial Challenge: Socialist Register 2004. London: Merlin Press, pp. 43–61. Alexander, J.C. (2007) The Civil Sphere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ali, T. (2007) “Thinking of Edward Said: A Fierce Independent against Despotisms of Every Kind,” Counterpunch. Online, available at: www.counterpunch.org/tariq12242007.html (accessed August 25, 2008). Allen, J. (1993) The Philippine Left on the Eve of World War II. Minneapolis: MEP Publications. Althusser, L. (1970) Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review Press. —— (1980) For Marx, translated by B. Brewster. New York: Verso. Althusser, L. and Balibar, É. (1977) Reading Capital, translated by B. Brewster. London: Unwin Bros. Amariglio, J. and Madra, Y. (forthcoming) “Karl Marx and Ethics,” in J. Peil and I. van Staverern (eds.) Handbook of Economics and Ethics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Arnold, M. (1971) Culture and Anarchy. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Arrighi, G. (1993) “The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism,” in Stephen Gill (ed.) Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (1998) Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Asthana, A. and Thorpe, V. (2007) “Arts Chief Warns of Cultural Apartheid,” Observer, December 2. Auerbach, E. (1984) “Vico and Aesthetic Historism,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Auerbach, M. (1959) The Conservative Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press. Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M.S. (1967) “Two Faces of Power,” in C.A. McCoy and P. Playford (eds.) Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism. New York: Thomas Crowell. Baker Jr, H.A., Diawara, M., Lindeborg, R. (1996) Black British Cultural Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bakker, I. (2003) “Neo-Liberal Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction: Social Provisioning and Shifting Gender Orders,” in I. Bakker and S. Gill (eds.) Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 66–82.

188

Works cited

—— (2007) “Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy,” New Political Economy, 12: 541–556. Bakker, I. and Gill, S. (eds.) (2003) Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —— (2008a) Social Reproduction and Global Transformations: From the Everyday to the Global. London: Routledge/RIPE. —— (2008b) Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction. London: Routledge. Barbano, F. (1985) “Sociologia e positivismo in Italia: 1850–1910: Un capitolo di sociologia storica,” in E.R. Papa (ed.) Il positivismo e la cultura italiana, Milano: F. Angeli. Bauzon, K.E. (1991) “Knowledge and Ideology in Philippine Society,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 19: 207–234. Bellamy, R. (1992) “Gramsci for the Italians,” Times Literary Supplement (14 August): 5. Bellamy, R. and Schecter, D. (1993) Gramsci and the Italian State. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bensaid, D. (2002) Marx for Our Times. London: Verso. Beverley, J. (2004) “Subaltern Resistance in Latin America: A Reply to Tom Brass,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 31: 261–275. Bhabha, H. (1995) “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Bieler, A. and Morton, A.D. (2003) “Theoretical and Methodological Challenges of neoGramscian Perspectives in International Political Economy,” International Gramsci Society Online Article (January). Online, available at: www.italnet.nd.edu/gramsci/ resources/online-articles/index.html. Bobbio, N. (1979) “Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society,” in Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bocock, R. (1986) Hegemony. London and New York: Tavistock Publications. Bondanella, P. (2001) Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum. Boothman, D. (1995) “General Introduction,” in A. Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by D. Boothman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (2000) “A Note on the Evolution – and Translation – of Some Key Gramscian Terms,” Socialism and Democracy, 14 (2): 115–130. —— (2004) Traducibilità e processi traduttivi. Un caso: A. Gramsci linguista. Perugia: Guerra Edizioni. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brennan, M.C. (1995) Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Brennan, T. (2006) Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Right and Left. New York: Columbia University Press. Brzezinski, Z. (2004) The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. New York: Basic Books. Buchanan, P.J. (2002) The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980) Gramsci and the State, translated by D. Fernbach. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Works cited 189 Buck-Morss, S. (2007) “Sovereign Right and the Global Left,” Rethinking Marxism, 19 (October): 432–451. Bukharin, N.I. (1969) Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Burnham, J. (1943) The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. New York: John Day. Buttigieg, J.A. (1986) “The Legacy of Antonio Gramsci,” boundary 2, 14 (3): 1–17. —— (1990) “Gramsci’s Method,” boundary 2, 17 (summer): 60–81. —— (1992) “Introduction,” in PN, vol. 1, pp. 1–64. —— (1995) “Negli Stati Uniti. I,” in Antonio Santucci (ed.) Gramsci in Europa e in America, Roma-Bari: Laterza, pp. 85–105. —— (2005) “The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society: A Gramscian Critique,” boundary 2, vol. 12, 1 (spring), 33–52. Callari, A. (2008) “Imperialism and the Rhetoric of Democracy in the Age of Wall Street,” Rethinking Marxism 20 (October), 700–708. Cammett, J. (1967) Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. —— (1991) Bibliografia gramsciana: 1922–1988. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Cardia, M.R. (1999) “La crisi dello stato-nazione: pluralismo, autonomia, federalismo in Gramsci,” in G. Vacca and M. Litri (eds.) Gramsci e il Novecento. Roma: Carocci. CENPEG (Center for People’s Empowerment in Governance) (2005) “A Neocolony, Not a Sovereign State,” Bulatlat vol. 33 (September 25–October 1). Online, available at: www.bulatlat.org. Clark, J. (2003) Worlds Apart: Civil Society and the Battle for Ethical Globalization. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Clark, M. (1977) Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cocco, G. (2007) “The Labor of Territories between Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization,” Rethinking Marxism, 19 (July): 306–318. Constantino, R. (1975) The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City: Tala Publishing Services. —— (1978) Neocolonial Identity and Counter-consciousness. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Cook, S.D. (1973) “The New Conservatism versus American Tradition,” American Behavioral Scientist, 17: 205–222. Cooper, J.F. (1990) “The Right Agenda: Recapture the Culture,” American Arts Quarterly. Crehan, K. (2002) Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. London and Berkeley: Pluto Press and University of California Press. —— (2006) “Hunting the Unicorn: Art and Community in East London,” in Gerald Creed (ed.) The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 49–76. Crick, B. (1955) “The Strange Quest for an American Conservatism,” Review of Politics, 17: 359–376. Croce, B. (1896) “Sulla concezione materialistica della storia,” in Saggi sulla concezione materialistica della storia. Bari: Laterza, pp. 1–20. —— (1928) “Filosofia come vita morale e vita morale come filosofia,” La Critica, 2: 77–78. —— (1944) “Per l’interpretazione e la critica di alcuni concetti del marxismo,” in Materialismo Storico ed economia marxistica, 7th edition. Bari: Laterza, pp. 57–114. Dahl, R.A. (1956) A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

190

Works cited

—— (1963) Modern Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Dainotto, R.M. (forthcoming) “Historical Materialism as New Humanism: Antonio Labriola’s ‘In Memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti’ (1895),” Annali d’Italianistica, 26. Dalisay, J.Y. (1999) The Lavas: A Filipino Family. Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil. Dal Pane, L. (1968) Antonio Labriola. La vita e il pensiero. Bologna: Forni. Day, R.J.F. (2005) Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. DeMartino, G. (2003) “Realizing Class Justice,” Rethinking Marxism, 15 (1): 1–31. —— (2004) “On the Politics of Global Economy, Global Justice,” Rethinking Marxism, 16 (October): 367–373. Denning, M. (2004) Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso. —— (2007) “Representing Global Labor,” Social Text, 92 (fall): 143–144. Diggins, J.P. (1988) “The Misuses of Gramsci,” Journal of American History, 75 (1): 141–145. Di Muzio, T. (2007) “The Art of Colonisation: Capitalising Sovereign Power and the Ongoing Nature of Primitive Accumulation,” New Political Economy, 12: 1–22. Dirlik, A. (2000) “Globalization as the End and the Beginning of History: The Contradictory Implications of a New Paradigm,” Rethinking Marxism, 12 (winter): 4–22. Doane, M.A. (2005) “Crisis, Information, Catastrophe,” in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds.) New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge. Donadio, R. (2007) “Revisiting the Culture Wars,” New York Times, September (16): 16–17. Dubreuil, H. (1929) Le travail américain vu par un ouvrier français. Paris: Bernard Grasset. Translated by F. and M. Merrill (Robots or men? A French Workman’s Experience in American Industry. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1930). Dyer-Witheford, N. (2001) “Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker,” Rethinking Marxism, 13 (fall/winter): 70–80. Eadie, P. (2005) Poverty and the Critical Security Agenda. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Eagleton, T. (2007) “I Contain Multitudes,” London Review of Books, 29: 12. Erçel, K. (2006) “Orientalization of Exploitation: A Class-Analytical Critique of the Sweatshop Discourse,” Rethinking Marxism, 18 (April): 289–306. Erçel, K., Charusheela, S., and Safri, M. (2008) “Re/membering Twenty Years of Rethinking Marxism: An Interview with David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio,” Rethinking Marxism, 20 (October). Falk, R.A. (2003) The Great Terror War. New York: Olive Branch. —— (2007) The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order after Iraq. New York: Routledge. Federici, S. (2003) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York and London: Autonomedia and Pluto. Fergnani, F. (1976) La filosofia della prassi nei Quaderni di Gramsci. Milano: UNICOPLI. Ferguson, N. (2001) “Welcome to the new imperialism,” Guardian. Finelli, R. (2006) “Le aporie del marxismo storicistico italiano: tra Antonio Labriola e Antonio Gramsci,” in L. Durante and P. Voza (eds.) La prosa del comunismo critico: Labriola e Gramsci. Bari: Palomar. Finocchiaro, M.A. (1988) Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. —— (1995) “Gramsci, Antonio,” in Rogert Audi (ed.) The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Works cited 191 Fiske, J. (1992) “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life,” in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P.A. Treichler (eds.) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 154–165. Fontana, B. (1993) Hegemony and Power. On the relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (2002) “Hegemony and Rhetoric: Political Education in Gramsci,” in C. Borg, J.A. Buttigieg, and P. Mayo (eds.) Gramsci and Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. —— (2005) “The Democratic Philosopher: Rhetoric as Hegemony in Gramsci,” Italian Culture, 23: 97–124. Fontana, B., Nederman, C.J., and Remer, G. (2004) Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. College Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Fonte, J. (2000) “Gramsci’s Revenge: Reconstructing America’s Democracy,” Academic Questions, 13: 49–61. —— (2001) “Why is There a Culture War,” Policy Review. Ford, H. (1922) My Life and Work. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. —— (1926) Today and Tomorrow. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Forgacs, D. (1989) “Gramsci and Marxism in Britain,” New Left Review, no. 17 (July/August). —— (1993) “National-popular,” in Simon During (ed.) Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. —— (ed.) (2000) The Antonio Gramsci Reader. New York: New York University Press. Foster, J.B. (2003) “The New Age of Imperialism,” Monthly Review, 55: 1–14. Francis, S.T. (1997) Revolution from the Middle. Raleigh, NC: Middle American Press. Frank, T. (2005) What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Frosini, F. (2004a) “L’immanenza nei Quaderni del Carcere,” Isonomia, 1: 1–36. —— (2004b) “Riforma e Rinascimento,” in F. Frosini and G. Liguori (eds.) Le parole di Gramsci: Per un lessico dei Quaderni del Carcere. Roma: Carocci. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books. Garfield, E. (1986) “The 250 most-cited authors in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1976–1983,” Current Comments: 48: 3–10. Gedo, A. (1993) “Gramsci’s Path through the Tension Between ‘Absolute Historicism’ and Materialist Dialectics: Marxism as Historical Philosophy,” Nature, Society and Thought, 6 (1): 7–40. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gell, A. (1992) “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.) Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 4–67 —— (1995) “On Coote’s ‘Marvels of Everyday Vision,’ ” Social Analysis, no. 38 (September): 18–31. Gentile, Giovanni (1991) “Una critica del materialismo storico,” in Eugenio Garin (ed.) Opere filosofiche. Milano: Garzanti, pp. 101–138. Germain, R.D. (2007) “ ‘Critical’ Political Economy, Historical Materialism and Adam Morton,” Politics, 27 (2): 127–131. Germino, D.L. (1990) Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

192

Works cited

Gerratana, V. (1974) “Marxismo ortodosso e marxismo aperto in Antonio Labriola,” in A. Zanardo (ed.) Storia del marxismo contemporaneo: Anno XV – Il marxismo dopo Marx. Milano: Feltrinelli. Gershman, J. (1993) “Struggles for Democracy and Democratic Struggles,” in John Gershman and Walden Bello (eds.) Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision. Quezon City: FOPA. Gibson, M. (1998) “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920,” in J. Schneider (ed.) Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 99–115. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003) “An Ethics of the Local,” Rethinking Marxism 15 (January): 49–74. Gill, S. (1986) “American Hegemony: Its Limits and Prospects in the Reagan Era,” Millennium, 15: 311–336. —— (1990) American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —— (ed.) (1993) Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —— (1998a) “European Governance and New Constitutionalism: EMU and Alternatives to Disciplinary Neo-liberalism in Europe,” New Political Economy, 3: 5–26. —— (1998b) “Structural Changes in Multilateralism: The G-7 Nexus and the Global Crisis,” in M. Schechter (ed.) Innovation in Multilateralism. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. —— (2000) “Toward a Postmodern Prince? The Battle in Seattle as a Moment in the New Politics of Globalisation,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 29: 131–141. —— (2002a) “Constitutionalizing Inequality and the Clash of Globalizations,” International Studies Review, 4: 47–65. —— (2002b) “Privatization of the State and Social Reproduction? GATS and New Constitutionalism,” GATS: Trading Development? Warwick, UK: Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick. —— (2003a) Power and Resistance in the New World Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —— (2003b) “Social Reproduction of Affluence and Human In/security,” in I. Bakker and S. Gill (eds.) Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human in/Security in the Global Political Economy. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —— (2003c) “Gramsci, Modernity and Globalization,” International Gramsci Society Online Article. Online, available at: www.internationalgramscisociety.org/resources/ online_articles/ (accessed August 1, 2008). —— (2004) “Contradictions of US Supremacy,” in L. Panitch, L. and C. Leys (eds.) The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005. London: Merlin Press. Ginsborg, P. (2004) Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony. London: Verso. Goldberg, M. (2006) Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. New York: Norton. Golding, S. (1988) “The Concept of the Philosophy of Praxis in the Quaderni of Antonio Gramsci,” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gorz, A. (1967) Strategy for Labor. Boston: Beacon Press. Gowan, P. (1999) The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance. London and New York: Verso.

Works cited 193 Gramsci, A. (1995) The Southern Question, translated by Pasquale Verdichio. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera. Gramsci, A. (2007) Quaderni del carcere. Quaderni di traduzioni: 1929–1930, edited by Giuseppe Cospito and Gianni Francioni. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana. Green, M. (2002) “Gramsci Cannot Speak: Presentations and Interpretations of Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern,” Rethinking Marxism, 14.3 (fall 2002): 1–24. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., and Treichler, P.A. (eds.) (1992) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Guttmann, A. (1967) The Conservative Tradition in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (1981) “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. —— (1988a) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. —— (1988b) “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 35–73. —— (1996) “When was the ‘Postcolonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis (eds.) The Post-colonial Question. London: Routledge. Hamilton, A., Madison, J., and Jay, J. (1999) The Federalist Papers. New York: Mentor. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Harootunian, H. (2007) “The Imperial Present and the Second Coming of Fascism,” boundary 2, 34 (spring). Harris, D. (1992) From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Hartz, L. (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace. Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haug, W.F. (2000) “Gramsci’s Philosophy of Praxis,” Socialism and Democracy, 14.1 (spring–summer 2000): 1–20. Herman, E.S. and Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon. Hobsbawm, E. (1987) “Per capire le classi subalterni,” Rinascita, 44, 8 (February 28): 23. —— (2000) “Introduction,” in David Forgacs (ed.) The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935. New York: New York University Press, pp. 10–13. Hollinger, D. (1995) Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Holub, R. (1992) Antonio Gramsci. New York: Routledge. Hunter, J.D. (1991) Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Ikenberry, G.J. (2004) Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” Foreign Affairs, 83: 144–154. International Peace Mission [to Basilan] (2002) Basilan: The Next Afghanistan? March 23–27: 1–23, typescript. Isaja, P. and Melandri, M.P. (1997) La Forma della Memoria. Roma: Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio Democratico. Ives, P. (2004a) Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2004b) Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. London: Pluto.

194

Works cited

Jaluague, E. (1993) “Hegemony and Radical Democracy: Gramsci and the Philippine Revolution,” in John Gershman and Walden Bello (eds.) Reexamining and Renewing the Philippine Progressive Vision. Quezon City: Forum for Philippine Alternatives. Jessop, B. (2002) “Time and Space in the Globalization of Capital and Their Implications for State Power,” Rethinking Marxism, 14 (spring): 97–117. Jessop, B. (1982) The Capitalist State. New York: New York University Press. —— (2002) “Time and Space in the Globalization of Capital and Their Implications for State Power,” Rethinking Marxism, 14 (spring): 97–117. Jones, S. (2006) Antonio Gramsci. London and New York: Routledge. Judt, T. (2005) Postwar Europe: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Penguin Books. —— (2006) “Bush’s Useful Idiots: What Happened to American Liberalism?,” London Review of Books, vol. 28, no. 18 (September 21). Kaldor, M. (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity. Katz, W.L. (2004) “Splendid Little War, Long Bloody Occupation; Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson,” Counter Punch (April 28). Online, available at: www.williamkatz.com. Kipnis, L. (1992) “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P.A. Treichler (eds.) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 373–391. Kirk, R. (1953) The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana. Chicago: Regnery. Klein, N. (2007) Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Kolko, G. (1976) Main Currents in Modern American History. New York: Pantheon Books. Kranenburg, R. van (1999) “Whose Gramsci? Right-wing Gramscism,” International Gramsci Society Newsletter, 4: 14–18. Kristeller, P.O. (1990a) “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press [originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. XII (1951), no. 4, pp. 496–527, and vol. XIII (1952) no. 1, pp. 17–46]. —— (1990b) “Afterword: ‘Creativity’ and ‘Tradition’ ” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 247–258 [originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. XLIV (1983), pp. 105–113]. Labriola, A. (1949) Lettere a Engels. Roma: Rinascita. —— (1977) Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. Online, available at: www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/index.htm (accessed January 17, 2008). —— (2000) Saggi sul materialismo storico. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso. Landy, M. (1994) Film, Politics, and Gramsci. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lasswell, H.D. (1950) Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lazarus, N. and Bartolovich, C. (eds.) (2002) Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lenin, V.I. (1929) What is to Be Done. New York: Little Lenin Library. —— (1975) The Lenin Anthology, edited by R.C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton. Levy, C. (1999) Gramsci and the Anarchists. Oxford: Berg. Lewis, F. (1989) “The Rise of ‘Civil Society,’ ” New York Times (25 June). Lichauco, A. (2004) “The Roots of Crisis: A Neo-Colonial State,” paper submitted to the Pilgrims for Peace Forum, Quezon City, October 27. —— (2005) Hunger, Corruption and Betrayal. Quezon City: Citizens’ Committee on the National Crisis.

Works cited 195 Liguori, G. (1996) Gramsci conteso. Storia di un dibattito: 1922–1996. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Limbaugh, R. (1993) See, I Told You So. New York: Pocket Books. Lobkowicz, N. (1967) Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Lowy, M. (1998) Fatherland or Mother Earth? London: Pluto Press. Lucente, G.A. (1997) Crosspaths in Literary Theory and Criticism: Italy and the United States. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luporini, C. (1973) “Il marxismo e la cultura italiana del Novecento,” in R. Romano and C. Vivanti (eds.) Storia d’Italia. Torino: Einaudi. McMichael, Philip (2003) “Food Security and Social Reproduction: Issues and Contradictions,” in Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (eds.) Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 169–189. Man, H. de (1928) The Psychology of Socialism. London: George Allen & Unwin. Mancina, C. (1999) “Praxis e pragmatismo: Tracce di James nel pensiero di Gramsci,” in G. Vacca and M. Litri (eds.) Gramsci e il Novecento. Roma: Carocci. Martin, I.P. (2001) “Pedagogy: Teaching Practices of American Colonial Educators in the Philippines,” paper presented at the Conference of the American Studies Association of the Philippines, August 24–25, Ateneo de Manila University. Online, available at: www.kritikakultura.org. Martin, J. (1998) Gramsci’s Political Analysis. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Marx, K. (1938) Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers. —— (1976) Capital, vol. I. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1978) “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in R.C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx–Engels Reader. New York: Norton and Norton, 469–500. Menchú Tum, R. (1984) I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. New York: Verso. Michels, R. (1966) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Glencoe: Free Press. Miller, J.E. (1990) From Elite to Mass Politics: Italian Socialism in the Giolittian Era 1900–1914. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Mills, C.W. (1957) The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Moe, N. (2002) The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. Berkeley: University of California Press. Montagu, A. (1997) Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Mora, F. (2002) Filosofia della Vita e Filosofia della Prassi: Heidegger, Simmel, Aristotle: Per una Ricostruzione del Concetto di Vita. Venezia: Cafoscarina. Morton, A.D. (2006) “The Grimly Comic Riddle of Hegemony in IPE: Where is Class Struggle?” Politics, 26 (1): 62–72. —— (2007a) “Unquestioned Answers/Unanswered Questions in IPE: A Rejoinder to ‘Non-Marxist’ Historical Materialism,” Politics, 27 (2): 132–136. —— (2007b) Unraveling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. Mosca, G. (1939) The Ruling Class [Elementi di scienza politica], edited by A. Livingston, translated by H.D. Kahn. New York: McGraw-Hill. National Democratic Front Secretariat (1985) Revised Draft Program of the National Democratic Front. Typescript.

196

Works cited

Natoli, S. (1989) Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. NDFP (National Democratic Front Philippines) (2006) The GRP-NDFP Peace Negotiations: Major Written Agreements and Outstanding Issues. Quezon City: NDFP Monitoring Committee. Needham, A.D. (2002) Using the Master’s Tools – Resistance and the Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds.) (1988) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Novak, M. (1989) “The Gramscists Are Coming,” Forbes, (20 March): 54. Oliveros, B. (2008) “Hunger and Poverty, Dissatisfaction, and Absence of Justice Reveal the True State of the Nation,” Bulatlat, 8.25 (July 27–August 2). Online, available at: http:bulatlat.com/2008/07/hunger-and-poverty-dissatisfaction-and-absencejustice-reveal-true-state-nation.html (accessed August 9, 2008). Panitch, L. (2000) “The New Imperial State,” New Left Review, March/April: 5–20. Parry, B. (2002) “Liberation Theory: Variations on Themes of Marxism and Modernity,” in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (eds.) Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pasolini, P.P. (1982) “Gramsci’s Language,” in Anne Showstack Sassoon (ed.) Approaches to Gramsci. London: Writers and Readers. —— (1988) Heretical Empiricism, translated and edited by B. Lawton and L.K. Barnett. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Patomäki, H. and Teivainen, T. (2004) A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions. London and New York: Zed Books. Petras, J. (1997) “Latin America: The Resurgence of the Left,” New Left Review, 17–47. Pfister, J. (2006) Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Phillips, K. (2003) Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. New York: Broadway. Piccone, P. (1977) “From Spaventa to Gramsci,” Telos, 31: 35–66. Plato (2002) Republic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Podobnik, B. and Reifer, T.E. (2005) Transforming Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities in the Post 9/11 era. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Poggi, S. (1978) Antonio Labriola: herbartismo e scienze dello spirito alle origini del marxismo italiano. Milano: Longanesi. Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon. Pomeroy, W.J. (1970) American Neo-Colonialism. New York: International Publishers. Poster, M. (2007) “Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Planetary Communications,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 24, no. 4: 379–393. Racinaro, R. (1999) “L’interpretazione gramsciana dell’idealismo,” in G. Vacca and M. Litri (eds.) Gramsci e il Novecento. Roma: Carocci. Reid, Ben. (2000) Philippine Left: Political Crisis and Social Change. Manila: Journal of Contemporary Asia. Resnick, S.A. and R.D. Wolff (1987) Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (2001) “Empire and Class Analysis,” Rethinking Marxism, 13 (3–4): 61–69. —— (eds.) (2006) New Departures in Marxian Theory. New York: Routledge. Riechers, C. (1970) Antonio Gramsci. Marxismus in Italien. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanst.

Works cited 197 Robinson, W.I. (1996) Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention and Hegemony. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1998) Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosengarten, F. (1994) “Introduction,” in A. Gramsci, LP, pp. 1–34. Rosenthal, M. and Yudin, P. (1967) A Dictionary of Philosophy. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers. Ruccio, D.F. (2003) “Globalization and Imperialism,” Rethinking Marxism, 15 (January): 75–94. —— (2006) “Unfinished Business: Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks,” Rethinking Marxism, 18 (January): 1–7. —— (forthcoming) Planning, Development, and Globalization: Essays in Marxian Class Analysis. New York: Routledge. Ruccio, D.F. and Callari, A. (1996) “Introduction: Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory,” in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 1–48. Ruccio, D.F., Resnick, S., and Wolff, R. (1990) “Class Beyond the Nation State,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 22 (spring): 14–27. Ruggie, J.G. (1982) “International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Post-War Order,” International Organisation, 36: 379–415. Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Random House. —— (1983) The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1993) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. —— (2000) Reflections on Exile. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2006) “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain,” New York: Pantheon Books. Salvadori, M.L. (2000) La sinistra nella storia italiana. Roma: Laterza. San Juan Jr, E. (1998) Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. —— (2001) “Postcolonialism and the Question of Nation-State Violence,” Denver University Law Review, 78.4 (2001): 887–905. —— (2007a) “Postcolonial Dialogics: Between Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci,” in Nalini Persram (ed.) Postcolonialism and Political Theory. New York: Lexington Books. —— (2007b) US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sartori, G. (1987) The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 2 vols. Sassoon, A.S. (1980) Gramsci’s Politics. New York: St. Martins Press. Schattschneider, E.E. (1975) The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Harcourt Brace. Schechter, D. (1990) “Gramsci, Gentile, and the Theory of the Ethical State in Italy,” Italian Quarterly XXXI, 119–120: 43–56. —— (1991) Gramsci and the Theory of Industrial Democracy. Aldershot: Avebury. Schirmer, D.B. (1987) “The Conception and Gestation of a Neocolony,” in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Shalom (eds.) The Philippines Reader. Boston: South End Press. Schneiderman, D. (2000) “Investment Rules and the New Constitutionalism,” Law and Social Inquiry, 25: 757–787.

198

Works cited

Schumpeter, J.A. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Shilliam, R. (2004) “Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of ‘Primitive Accumulation,’ ” Millennium – Journal Of International Studies, 33: 59–88. Short, N. (2007) The International Politics of Post-conflict Reconstruction in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sison, J.M. and De Lima, J. (1998) Philippine Economy and Politics. Quezon City: Aklat ng Bayan Publishing House. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, A. (1998) Television: An International History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorel, G. (1915) Reflections on Violence. London: George Allen & Unwin. Teivainen, T. (2002) Enter Economism, Exit Politics: Experts, Economic Policy and the Damage to Democracy. London: Zed. Thomas, P. (2007) “Historicism, Absolute,” Historical Materialism, 25: 249–256. Trilling, L. (1979) The Liberal Imagination. New York: Harcourt Brace. Tuazon, B., Villegas, E.M., Quintos, P., Lamchek, J.S., Licaros, E., and Guillermo, R. (2002) Unmasking the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialist Hegemony and Crisis. Quezon City: Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies. United States National Intelligence Council (2004) Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project, based on Consultations with Nongovernmental Experts around the World. Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council. Verdicchio, P. (1997) Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University. Vigna, C. (1977) Le origini del marxismo teorico in Italia: Il dibattito tra Labriola, Croce, Gentile e Sorel sui rapporti tra marxismo e filosofia. Roma: Città Nuova. Vitug, M.D. and Gloria, G. (2000) Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao. Quezon City: Ateneo Center for Social Policy and Public Affairs. Wagstaff, C. (2001) “The Media,” in Z.G. Baranski and R.J. West (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 293–309. Wherlof, C. von (2000) “ ‘Globalization’ and the ‘Permanent’ Process of ‘Primitive Accumulation’ the Example of the MAI, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment,” Journal of World Systems Research, 6: 728–747. Williams, R. (1980) Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso. Wittgenstein, L. (1968) Philosophical Investigations 3rd edition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Wolfe, A. (2007) “Social Skills,” The New Republic, April 23. Wolff, R.D. (1989) “Gramsci, Marxism, and Philosophy,” Rethinking Marxism, 2 (summer): 41–57. Wood, E.M. (1986) The Retreat from Class. London: Verso. Woodmansee, M. (1994) The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Young, R.J.C. (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Zakaria, F. (2003) The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New York: Norton. Zipin, L. (2003) “Gramsci Right and Left: Michael Apple’s View of the Wars of Position along Educational Fronts,” The Australian Educational Researcher, 30 (2): 109–119.

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 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

201

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 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

203

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 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

205

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