Alternative Modernities

Antonio Gramsci's Twentieth Century

Giuseppe Vacca, Derek Boothman, Chris Dennis, Derek Boothman, Chris Dennis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030476700
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030476717
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Antonio Gramsci lived the Great War as a "historic break," a profound experience that left an indelible mark on the development of his political thought. Translated into English for the first time, Alternative Modernities reconstructs and analyses this critical period of Gramsci's intellectual formation through a systematic analysis of his writings from 1915 to 1935. For Gramsci, Soviet Communism, "Americanism," and the "new" Fascist State were the principle responses to the crisis of the old world order. He portrayed them as the three protagonists of twentieth-century modernity, alternatives destined to tragically clash in the worldwide struggle for hegemony. Among the arguments in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci casts doubt on the political strategy of Soviet Communism and the theoretical underpinnings of "official Marxism." Instead, he suggests a radical revision of Marxism by breathing life into a new interpretation whose fundamental concepts are: politics as the struggle for hegemony, the "passive revolution" as a historical paradigm of modernity, and the philosophy of praxis as the welding between visions of the worlds, historical analyses, and political strategies. Gramsci's intuitions culminate in a new theory of the political subject, supported by a reflection upon the 20th century that still speaks to us today, pointing the way toward a new narrative of world history.

© The Author(s) 2021

G. VaccaAlternative ModernitiesMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47671-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Concept of Hegemony

Giuseppe Vacca¹

(1)

Fondazione Gramsci, Rome, Italy

Giuseppe Vacca

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1 ‘Historical Breaks’: The Great War and the October Revolution

World War I influenced the entire development of Gramsci’s thought; to reconstruct the origin of the concept of hegemony, which forms the basis of his analysis of the twentieth century; it will therefore be useful to start from how he perceived the Great War.

Gramsci’s first important text, an article entitled ‘Active and Operative Neutrality’ (CT, pp. 10–15; SPW 1910–1919, pp. 6–9 and, with alternative title, PPW, pp. 3–7), published in the Turin socialist weekly Il Grido del Popolo on 31 October 1914, suggested to the Socialist Party the need to go beyond the formula of ‘absolute neutrality’. Whether this article contained a position that was favourable to Italy’s intervention in the war is a controversial question, long debated by historians and now clarified, in my opinion, in a well-documented contribution by Leonardo Rapone (Rapone 2007). But rather than his political position, our interest here is to reconstruct Gramsci’s thinking about the war and in this regard the most important analyses date from 1916. The ‘Maximalist’ majority of the Socialist Party, of which Gramsci was a member, was part of the European revolutionary socialism that conceived of socialism as the ‘coming of the International’. In their view, socialism presupposed the worldwide spread of capitalism, because that would have strengthened the proletariat even further, thus preparing the conditions for its rise to power. Revolutionary socialism was thus laissez-faire liberal in outlook since it intended, via the class struggle, to accelerate the achievement of capitalism’s historical ‘mission’, namely the antagonistic unification of a world divided between ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletarians’. Italian ‘Maximalists’ were laissez-faire liberals because they were solidly classist (Losurdo 1997); however Gramsci’s liberalism depended not only on his political position, but sprang also from his intellectual education, for which, as is known, Croce and Einaudi, Salvemini and Sorel, Bergson and the pragmatists had been fundamental (Paggi 1984; Rapone 2011). We therefore need to focus on the influence this culture had on how Gramsci analysed the phenomenon of war. Rapone and other scholars have suggested that his extraneousness to the socialist ‘war doctrine’ and his selective approach to theories of imperialism are due to these cultural influences: this theme calls for further enquiry.

Gramsci analysed the situation from 1916 on from the viewpoint of the change in the subjectivity of the peoples that war was rapidly generating and the first phenomenon upon which he cast his eye was the re-awakening of colonial peoples. The article ‘War and the Colonies’ published on 15 April 1916, was his reaction to an article by Mario Girardon, the Paris correspondent of the Resto del Carlino, and it underlines the ‘universal’ character of the phenomenon. But of equal significance is the conception of colonialism that Gramsci reveals on that occasion. Clearly influenced by the interpretation of Antonio Labriola (Labriola 2012, pp. 97–127), he states that colonialism can be ‘the historical drive necessary for the social agglomerates who were behind the times of civilization to change, to become disciplined, to acquire the consciousness of their being in the world and of having to collaborate in the life of the world’. However this had not been the result of French and British colonialism, since both had ‘obeyed the impulse of their capitalisms and in the colonies [had] created capitalist enterprises, but not within a capitalist society’.

The article contains two concepts that would turn out to be fundamental for Gramsci’s analysis of politics and history: the first concerns the corporativist character of nationalism; the second is that capitalism’s progressive ‘function’ is distorted or even deformed by the force with which restricted economic interests manage to dominate the field of politics. From the outset, therefore, Gramsci’s thought reveals the decisive influence of Marx, since the pathology that he denounced concerns not only the colonial phenomenon, but also the relations between the economy and politics in the contemporary capitalist world (Gualtieri 2007). To Labriola’s influence can also be ascribed the observation that ‘the European world’s contact with coloured people has not been without its consequences’, positive consequences since ‘even indirectly capitalism has succeeded in creating new needs, new wills, latent aspirations which (…) could overflow unexpectedly in a violent action’. (‘The War and the Colonies’, CT 1913–1917, pp. 255–258)¹

The way in which Gramsci initially conceived of capitalism reflects a widespread mentality. The ‘spirit of the time’ that inspired him is well represented by Norman Angell, an author who was very dear to the ‘intransigent’ Italian socialism of the 1910s. This British journalist’s most successful work, The Great Illusion, was published in Italian in 1913 and the actuality of his analyses of the globalization of the world economy between the end of the 1800s and the first years of the twentieth century is of great interest still today. In the preface to the Humanitas edition which we have before us, Angell is presented as the ‘discoverer’ ‘of the economic interdependence of civilized nations’. For Gramsci, ‘economic interdependence’ certainly did not constitute a ‘discovery’; yet the analysis of globalization developed in The Great Illusion was so persuasive as to make Angell one of his favourite authors.² Gramsci accepted the thesis that economic interdependence favours peace among nations and may be an instrument for continually neutralizing if not altogether eliminating the phenomenon of war. He wrote this clearly on 24 July 1916 and reasserted it once more on 23 March 1918, referring explicitly to Angell (‘The Great Illusion’, CT, pp. 446–448; also ‘Norman Angell’ CF 1917–1918, pp. 773–774). In particular, in the first article dedicated to The Great Illusion, he draws a distinction between Angell’s pacifism and humanitarian pacifism, which he did not appreciate at all, asserting that the former was ‘solid’ because it was ‘founded on the recognition of a new state of things, created unintentionally by capitalism, as a pure economic force, and not as the backbone of bourgeois nations’ (‘The Great Illusion’, CT, p. 446). The distinction between capitalism and bourgeoisie not only anticipates the contrast between the cosmopolitanism of the economy and the nationalism of politics, shortly to become the key to explaining the war, but also evokes the possibility of politically radicalizing Marx’s well-known thesis about the global vocation of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism and bourgeoisie are complementary so long as the national market and the nation-State are indispensable to capitalist development. But Gramsci claims that the more capitalism develops as a global economic form, the less it requires the role of the State. Economic cosmopolitanism creates a need for supranational political institutions and at this ‘stage’ of historical development, capitalism and the bourgeoisie are separable or at least distinguishable from each other, thus providing the historical justification for revolutionary internationalism. But even more significant is the fact that Gramsci, in developing in an original manner his vision of laissez-faire liberalism, not only does not adhere to the theories of imperialism, but elaborates his own theory of war based on the perception that imperialism is not an economic category (it does not indicate a change in the nature of capitalism) but a historical and a political one. War is conceived of as ‘a necessity’ he writes, only by certain ‘economic groups’ and political forces, it is the offspring of protectionism and nationalism, which are both political phenomena, not the expressions of supposed ‘economic laws’ (‘The Sirens’ Song’ and ‘The Socialists for Tariff Freedom’, CF, pp. 382–387 and 402–405 respectively). The correlation with his analysis of colonialism, where we started from, is evident.

This is the background to his approach to the project of the League of Nations, proposed by US president Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918. The approach culminates in the claim that if the League of Nations were to be set up following Wilson’s blueprint it would constitute the ‘prerequisite’ ‘for the advent of the socialist International’ (‘Wilson and the Socialists’ NM 1918–1919, p. 315). Limiting ourselves to the salient points of his analysis, the League of Nations, writes Gramsci on 19 January, ‘is an attempt to adapt international politics to the needs of international trade’; ‘it represents the squaring of politics with economics’; ‘it is the great bourgeois supranational State which has dissolved tariff barriers, broadened markets, changed the pace of free competition and makes possible great enterprises, great international capitalist conglomerates’ (‘The League of Nations’ CF, p. 571). These are remarks of great interest, since they contain the basis of the theory of crises and war elaborated by Gramsci in Notebook 15; but no less important is the perception of supranationality as the main highway for bringing political spaces into line with the globalization of the economy. At this point however we need to focus on the categories that Gramsci developed as he analysed the Great War, when his thinking was dominated by his expectation of the ‘advent of the International’. We observe in rapid succession, the presence of ‘interdependence’ as an analytical category of the structure of the world (‘A Socialist Peace Programme?’, CF, pp. 694–697); his assessment of the British Commonwealth as the birth of a ‘new form of society’, thanks to the creation of a ‘colossal federation’ capable of solving ‘the problem of nationalities’; and his prediction that the League of Nations would rotate around an Anglo-American bloc made up of a ‘free federation [comprising] 500 million inhabitants and an immense territory, which would dominate and control the seas of the whole world’. ‘In all probability’ concludes Gramsci ‘it will be the new phenomenon that characterizes twentieth century history’, forcing ‘the Latin nations (…) to become satellites of this new formidable historical power which is coming into being’. And ‘it will be a good thing’ he adds, not only because the Latin nations will be obliged to modernize, but also because, perhaps, peace ‘will be ensured precisely by this emergence of a huge power, against which any other would be weak and would be destroyed in a conflict’ (‘The New Religion of Humanity’, in NM 1918–1919, pp. 175–176).

Gramsci thus describes the emergence of a new hegemony in international relations, founded on the expansivity of the industrial, commercial and cultural power of the more advanced capitalist countries, which are capable of spreading development and promoting peace. The word used is not hegemony but pre-eminence; but the concept is already there and was soon to appear in the expression world hegemony which is present in ‘The Tasca Report and the Congress of the Turin Chamber of Labour’ (5 June 1920, in ON 1919–1920, p. 451; SPW 1921–1926, p. 258). In this piece, the first references to the Bolshevik debate on imperialism surface, irrefutably demonstrating the derivation of the term ‘hegemony’ from Leninism. But returning to ‘The New Religion of Humanity’, it is significant that originally, the concept of ‘international pre-eminence’ was linked to the fact of ‘economic interdependence’ and with an appreciation of Wilson’s project to create new political spaces that were adequate to the expansion of the economy:

The League of Nations is the capitalist Cosmopolis, with a citizenship comprised of millionaires (…) it is the juridical fiction of an international hierarchy of the bourgeois class with the Anglo-Saxon individualists predominating over other bourgeois.

The article comments on the armistice with Germany and the start of the Paris Conference, where Gramsci sees a clash between two representatives of post-war capitalism, with the Wilson-Lloyd George ‘bloc’ destined to prevail over militarism à la Foch. To his mind this clash constituted ‘the supreme revolution of modern society, the genesis of the capitalistic unification of the world, under the discipline of a hierarchy of States, who are equals under a juridical fiction’. The prediction and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Concept of Hegemony
• 2. The Nature of Passive Revolution
• 3. From Historical Materialism to the Philosophy of Praxis: Foundations for a Processual Theory of the Subject
• 4. Hegemony and Democracy
• 5. Afterword
• Back Matter