Reviving Gramsci

Crisis, Communication, and Change

Marco Briziarelli, Susana Martínez Guillem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138854444
• eBook ISBN: 9781317520986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

Engaging debates within cultural studies, media and communication studies, and critical theory, this book addresses whether Gramscian thought continues to be relevant for social and cultural analysis, in particular when examining times of crisis and social change. The book is motivated by two intertwined but distinct purposes: first, to show the privileged and fruitful link between a "Gramscian Theory of Communication" and a "Communicative Theory of Gramsci;" second, to explore the ways in which such a Gramscian perspective can help us interpret and explain different forms of political activism in the twenty-first century, such as "Occupy" in the US, "Indignados" in Spain, or "Movimento Cinque Stelle" in Italy.

1 Gramsci in/for Critical Times

Gramsci Is Dead, or Is He?

Asking whether Gramsci’s legacy is dead is not a stylistic move, but rather a legitimate inquiry. In our current context of crisis, and almost 80 years after his death, much of the social, political, and cultural ground that stood at the basis of Gramsci’s considerations seems to have crumbled. The Russian revolution, the Communist party, the Fascist regime, even the revolutionary subject par excellence, the proletariat—understood as the industrial wage earner—have, in the context of Western capitalism, drastically changed its features.

Gramsci’s most immediate political legacies, such as the Italian Communist party and its organ of information l’Unità, have also almost vanished. The Italian Communist party dissolved in 1991, after its leader, Achille Occhetto, declared the communist experience over, and today it only survives in fragmentary and increasingly weaker references in the political rhetoric of the Italian left. L’Unità, the Italian communist newspaper founded by Gramsci one year after Mussolini came to power, ceased its activities on July 31th of 2014 due to financial unviability. While the newspaper has been recently re-started, its transitory death confirmed to many commentators the end of an epoch in which L’Unità played as an intellectual referent for the left.¹

Nevertheless, at the academic level the question about Gramsci’s relevance in contemporary times has triggered an important and lively debate. This debate can be synthetized into two recent publications whose titles eloquently reveal the distance of positions on this matter: on the one hand, in 2005, Richard Day published a book tellingly called Gramsci is dead, where he decries the “hegemony of hegemony” or the “assumption that effective social change can only be achieved simultaneously and en masse, across an entire national or supranational space” (p. 8). Joining the consistent body of literature—reviewed in more detail below—that advocates for a post-hegemonic framework of analysis as well as activism, Day claims that the anachronistic state-centered vision of Gramsci should be replaced by a post-anarchist and autonomist perspective, which more effectively acknowledges the heterogeneity and multilevel nature of contemporary struggles.

On the other hand, Peter Thomas (2010) argues in The Gramscian moment that Gramsci’s thought should be revived for its substantial contributions to contemporary philosophic and political questions. For Thomas, in order to recover the significance of Gramsci, we need to unpack what for many was just a euphemism for Marxism—the philosophy of praxis—as a theoretical and practical theory in its own right. This philosophy of praxis materializes in Gramsci’s dialectics, absolute historicism, and immanentism. Thomas explains that these:

Can be considered as brief resumes for the elaboration of an autonomous research programme in Marxist philosophy today, as an intervention on the Kampfplatz of contemporary philosophy that attempts to inherit and to renew Marx’s original critical and constructive gesture. (p. 448)

Day is representative of an important body of literature that, while recognizing the profound impact of Gramsci, evaluates his thought for its diminished capability to describe and understand the present, thus arguing, together with authors such as Beasley-Murray (2003, 2011), Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), Lash (2007), Moreiras (2001), Thoburn (2007), Williams (2002), and Yúdice (1995), for the need to re-think ‘Gramsci beyond Gramsci,’ in a context of ‘post-hegemony.’ Conversely, Thomas is representative of a smaller strand of scholarship including authors such as Ives (2004) and Morton (2007) that aims at extracting from the complex Gramscian narrative a broader method of inquiry, rather than a historically constrained and specific content.

In this sense, while certainly recognizing the important task of historicizing Gramsci, we align with Thomas in claiming that, within the wealth of Gramsci’s intellectual legacy, there is a critical method of inquiry and evaluation that is still remarkably valid. We see the continuous relevance of Gramsci particularly amplified in the context of the current all-encompassing Western crisis, as we consider him the Marxist theorizer of the dialectical outcomes of critical times. In fact, historicizing his thought, it is important to remember that one of the factors that contributed to the characteristics of his thinking—i.e., its intrinsically dialectic, fluid, and flexible aspects—derived from the object of his reflections: a social context profoundly marked by crisis, the tumultuous years after the end of World War II and the 1929 Great Depression.

We thus believe that the enormous intellectual effort of Gramsci, in trying to capture the contradictory and complex phenomena produced by the crisis of those years, and the significant parallelisms of that crisis with the present one in the West, provides us with powerful tools to understand and evaluate current critical circumstances. We also think that the level of analysis proposed by Gramsci allows us to counter the call for a post-Gramscian framework. This call is pushed by arguments about the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production, as well as about the process of de-territorialization and de-centralization of national-states under the current pressure of globalization.²

It is in this context that the present study must be situated. Our book examines the communicative aspects of several contemporary episodes of social mobilization in the West, in critical times—Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the United States, Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy, and Indignados/Podemos in Spain—through a Gramscian lens in order to demonstrate the continuous relevance of a Gramscian framework, as well as its privileged relation with communication. The project engages with the following fundamental questions: what are the conditions that (do not) allow for social mobilization and its specific communicative strategies to develop? How do these same conditions influence the extent to which these practices are successful? What is the relationship between a particular movement’s objectives and its participants’ rhetorical means to achieve such goals? How can particularistic and individualistic economic interests be translated into a collective and ethical-political project? How does the tension between progressive and regressive interests and practices both produce and constrain social movements?

More concretely, in relation to the existent body of scholarship that in critical and cultural approaches to communication has dealt with Gramsci’s body of work, in this book we advance two main perspectives: first, a ‘positive’ idea of hegemony beyond its most prevalent conceptualization as a modern theory of oppressive power—a prevalence that is certainly significant in communication literature, as we discuss later in this chapter. From our reading of Gramsci, hegemony can be constructively embraced as a concrete and practical evaluation of the historical conditions that allow for a given group to shape a particular social order.

Second, as will become more clear throughout our three case studies in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, a practical approach that advances the revolutionary doctrine of the united front—intended as an interclass alliance against the ruling class—invites the examination of the whole spectrum of social actors that can be mobilized for social change. Thus, as the three experiences we study here demonstrate, the potential for social mobilization for change comes from not only the most marginalized sites in civil society, but also from actors that have a more direct experience with privilege, as they operated closer to the ‘center’ before the economic crisis began in 2008.

Altogether, we use the three social movements analyzed in this book to constructively historicize Gramsci. Thus, while not necessarily following the same venues indicated by Thomas, we agree with him on the crucial relevance of Gramsci in the current circumstances, and we have tried with this book to complement his monumental theoretical work with an empirical engagement of concrete social phenomena. In this sense, we offer an operationalization of Gramscian tools for the understanding and evaluation of three influential social movements in three different Western countries. However, as we explain in more detail below, our own detection of a “Gramscian moment” is historically determinate as it is linked to the idea of an organic crisis.

Social Change in Critical Times

In the summer of 1989, Fukuyama’s (in)famous article, “The end of history,” argued that human socio-cultural development had reached an end point, the final stage that would lead to the universalization of liberal democracy. His essay spelled out the capability of capitalism to ideologically reduce history to a category of nature, thus creating the myth of its eternal presence by “treat[ing] labor and the division of labor as human natural force in general, ahistorically linking the latter to capital and rent” (Mészáros, 2011, p. 277).

However, despite the powerful neoliberal rhetoric of T.I.N.A. (i.e., There Is No Alternative) and its reification power, capitalism can still find moments of demystification. One of those occasions has been recently provided by the Western financial/economic crisis that started in 2008 and the shrinking of life chances for a wide segment of the middle class that followed it (Marshall, 2010). In this context, current economic interests are pushing (not only particular groups—some of them relatively integrated until recently—but also entire nations) toward a peripheral, precarious status where painstakingly won rights are no longer guaranteed.

When seen from a broader point of view—as Gramsci did—a crisis represents a complex phenomenon with contradictory outcomes. In fact, in this book, our treatment of crisis parallels Schumpeter’s (1992) treatment of capitalism, i.e., we understand it as an ambivalent phenomenon that creates by destroying and destroys by creating. Thus, in the current dramatic scenario, it is important to point out that not everything has been loss and devastation; rather, loss and devastation have not affected all segments of the implicated economies equally. As the etymological origin of the word “crisis” reminds us—from the ancient Greek κρίσις: a turning point, an unstable situation—destruction is intrinsically linked to production.

Certainly, one constructive element of the crisis is its capacity to estrange people. Thus, if capitalism achieves its own hegemony by transforming “history” into “nature,” an alleged crisis of hegemony has the potential to denaturalize the class-driven interests that move capitalism by producing painfully concrete contradictions in society. An especially telling example of this dialectical process is provided by the role that rating agencies such as Moody’s, Fitch, or Standard and Poor have played—and continue to play—in the current economic turmoil. Thus, as suggested by the Italian government in a fairly recent initiative to file a law suit against them (Onado, 2012), these agencies may have disseminated false figures and information in order to manipulate the financial markets, thus producing gains for their shareholders at the expense of the most vulnerable nations—which have in turn placed the burden of the crisis on increasingly wider sectors of their populations.

The concurrence of both reproductive and transformative elements in the current crisis has thus shown the dialectical nature of such processes. Hence, while the destructive forces of capitalism impoverished most people, fund managers and financial brokers have still found spectacular ways to accumulate financial capital. In other words, and to borrow Marx’s account, “the violent destruction of capital” took place “not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation” (1993, p. 750).

In this context, a particularly interesting product of the crisis of capitalism is the wave of protest movements that demanded radical change. In the European context, the recent assistance conceded by the ‘Troika’ (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) to countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain derived into a series of imposed “austerity measures” in these nations that have seriously damaged their welfare states, impoverished vast segments of their populations, and dramatically raised unemployment rates (Robinson, 2013).

As the ethically charged term implies, austerity characterizes a condition marked by severity and frugality, which, in the case of the many countries on which the measures were applied, implied the cast of strict moral judgment on allegedly irresponsible financing, extravagance, or lack of work ethic—ultimately suggesting that people were responsible for their own predicament (Krugman, 2015). In the US, even though the recession officially ended in 2009, the average household income has continued to decrease, thus exacerbating the social distance between the economic elite and the rest of the population (Chossudovsky & Marshall, 2010). In this sense, the three political projects examined in this book represent a historical product of the crisis, based on the explicit rejection of either anti-austerity measures or a series of economic policies that accentuate an already highly stratified society.

In the European context, what was presented as a cure for allegedly reckless spending has been so plagued by its contradictory outcomes that different patients/countries are starting to see it as the “cause” for their misery. In fact, so far austerity has only created a condition for more “punishment” (more austerity) because the rigorous impositions on a struggling economy have frequently suppressed the internal demand, hindering companies’ willingness to invest and encouraging households to save instead of spend—a propensity that ultimately shirks the demand even further. Finally, as the economy contracts, government revenues decline, and public debt increases, de facto calling for more austerity by forcing further public-spending cuts.

According to Markantonatou (2013) the social cost of the crisis and its accompanying policies has systematically been: a constant drop in the affected countries’ GDP, the shrinking of domestic demands, loss of jobs, dramatic increase of youth unemployment, aggravation of working conditions due to the loss of workers’ rights under processes of “flexibilization” of work, marked impoverishment of the most precarious social strata, and last, but definitively not least, a dramatic increase in suicides. Especially in countries such as Italy and Spain, where the state has historically been operating as a powerful social service provider, the cutbacks have diminished the state’s role of social mediator between entrepreneurs and workers, thus further exposing the contradictions of capitalism.

The social costs of the economic crisis thus went far beyond the immediate economic repercussions and led to what Gramsci defines as an “organic crisis,” or a crisis of hegemony. This happens when the cement of a given social order that provides a perception of cohesiveness to a hegemonic organization of society starts to fade away. In other words, from a Gramscian perspective, we can argue that in specific historical conjunctures, in specific countries, the dialectical but relatively stable connection between economic base and superstructure weakens. When this link loosens, ideas, beliefs, and practices that provide the support and consent of the majority of the population start to appear as void and meaningless.

In this context, when the functioning of a social order no longer operates in an organic fashion, determinate social forces, such as the ones at the basis of the movements we study in this book, have the best chance to develop. Therefore, the “organic crisis” goes beyond the economic downturn and becomes an impasse of the ruling group, a stall of the mechanisms that legitimate a given social order.

At this level, and following Gramsci, we see the crisis as giving room to the development of critical consciousness as well as alternative, potentially hegemonic worldviews.³ When the leading group, as Gramsci states, no longer leads but mostly dominates through the exercise of force, the crisis becomes organic in two different ways: it is an impasse of the old regime that is dying, as well as of the ‘new’ that struggles to be born. This is precisely the context in which we examine the three social movements studied, in a moment in which their emergence could translate into defeat by the repressive apparatus of the older regime, or into an opportunity for victory.

Gramsci’s body of work allows us to understand how the organic crisis, far from being just destructive, produces a considerable amount of social phenomena: poverty for most, wealth for a few, contestation, and reactions to contestation. In this context, a particularly interesting aspect of the crude social re-distribution of wealth caused by the crisis, leading to its even sharper stratification, consists of the increasing amount of until-now economically comfortable citizens who have begun to seriously question the inherent characteristics of the current mode of production, such as the volatility of capital and the dramatic repercussions it has on the ‘real’ economy.

Far from engaging in simplistic idealizations of the movements we analyze, we would like to stress here that it was only when the pressure exerted by material constraints produced a considerable and generalized risk of social exclusion that mobilizations such as the Indignados in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the US, and the emergence of new political parties such as Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy, and Podemos in Spain, became possible. Not surprisingly, then, and although under different motivations, these movements mostly attracted former economically integrated, even privileged actors, thus disrupting the typical—and maybe more socially manageable—image of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Gramsci in/for Critical Times
• 2 Selective Gramsci(s)
• 3 Gramsci and Communication: Dialectics and Translation
• 4 Occupy Wall Street: The Limits of War of Position
• 5 Movimento Cinque Stelle: Dialectics of Passive Revolution
• 6 From Indignados to Podemos: Sublating Vernacular Rhetoric into National Popular Rhetoric
• 7 A Dialectical Image
• References
• Index