Antonio Gramsci

Mark McNally

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349553655, 9781137334176
• eBook ISBN: 9781137334183
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The thought of Antonio Gramsci continues to enjoy widespread appeal in contemporary political and social theory. This book draws together some of the world's leading scholars on Gramsci to critically explore key ideas, debates and themes in his work in an accessible manner, relating them to contemporary politics and society.

Part I

Historical Context

1

Gramsci, the United Front Comintern and Democratic Strategy

Mark McNally

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci is rightly regarded as one of the most important Western Marxists of the 20th century. This is largely due to the work of scholars like Perry Anderson, Noberto Bobbio, Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. They returned to the history of 20th century Marxism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to rediscover neglected intellectual currents, unsullied by the sins of Stalinism, which might still provide intellectual insights to radical socialist and democratic politics within and beyond the Marxist tradition.¹ Gramsci’s Italian heritage – and critical interest in the work of Croce and Machiavelli – was obviously important here. But of equal significance was the fact that immediately prior to his imprisonment in 1926 by Mussolini’s fascist state, Gramsci had penned two important letters to the Comintern that were critical of the early phase of Stalinism and its attack on party democracy.² For some at least, these letters represented a kind of parting of the ways between East and West within Marxism,³ and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks emerge as one of the first great works of the Western Marxist tradition in its rejection of Eastern-style Marxism (and Stalinism in particular), and its development of a body of ideas tailored to the unique challenges of Western societies and their democratic culture.

One of the most important aspects of this East/West distinction has undoubtedly turned on the issue of political strategy. Gramsci’s later writings in particular argue that a more democratic strategy would be required in the West than that which was employed in Russia in 1917. This strategy, while not rejecting a subsequent moment of revolutionary force, would be primarily characterized by an ideological battle to manufacture mass consent in civil society (a key dimension of the battle for ‘hegemony’). From very different perspectives, Anderson and Laclau and Mouffe acknowledged the ‘Eastern’ sources of this Gramscian reconfiguration of political strategy for the West. Laclau and Mouffe, for example, identify the emergence of the concept of hegemony itself (and its ‘logic of contingency’) as partly a consequence of the necessity of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to develop a political strategy of building democratic alliances in response to the uneven development of capitalism in Russia and the need to defeat and transcend Tsarism.⁴ Anderson, by contrast, points to the ‘Eastern’ origins of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony by relating its emergence to debates in Russian social democracy and the strategic coordinates of the United Front tactic devised by Comintern leaders in 1921–2.⁵

In what follows in this chapter I pick up on Anderson’s second point in particular and explore further the Eastern sources of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and more specifically the democratic strategy embedded in it. I do this by carrying out a closer analysis of the relationship of Gramsci’s thought to the United Front Comintern than Anderson accomplished which, I maintain, is a relatively under-researched aspect of Gramsci’s thought.⁶ Drawing on recent Comintern scholarship, the chapter considers the United Front as chronologically and spatially a broader and more uneven political phenomenon in the 1920s than Anderson or Laclau and Mouffe have recognized. They, in fact, tend to regard the United Front as a relatively short affair that was quickly and emphatically overtaken by extensive ‘Bolshevization’ and ‘Stalinization’ of Comintern parties in the aftermath of Lenin’s death.⁷ I maintain, by contrast, that as a Comintern Representative in Moscow in 1922–3 at the height of the United Front and then as leader of the PCd’I (partito communista d’Italia) responsible for its implementation in Italy from 1924–6, Gramsci continued to engage in the politics of the United Front that had by no means been exhausted in this later period – at least not in Italy. In the above literature in general, Gramsci’s Western Marxism is rightly defined against the Stalinist ‘Third Period’ of the Comintern (1928–33), but the focus on ‘Bolshevization’ and ‘Stalinization’ leads to a certain neglect of the Comintern’s ‘second period’ (i.e. the period of stabilization and the United Front) and consequently obfuscates to some degree Gramsci’s full intellectual debt to the ‘Eastern’ leaders of the Third International in his later writings.⁸ Retrieving this Comintern intervention in Western democratic politics therefore not only complicates any crude distinction between East/West in terms of Marxist theory in the early 1920s but, as I will argue in the conclusion, foregrounds a dimension of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony – its democratic strategy – that explains to some extent the continuing interest in his work today and invites further exploration in the context of its critical appropriation in Laclau and Mouffe’s writings.⁹

The United Front Comintern (1921–6)

As is well known, Lenin and the leaders of the Russian Revolution established the Comintern (or Third International) in 1919 in a wave of revolutionary ardor that swept across Europe in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917).¹⁰ The Comintern, unlike its predecessor (the Second International), was established to be a truly revolutionary socialist movement committed to the violent overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of ‘proletarian dictatorships’ across the world on the Bolshevik model. The famous ‘21 Points’ or ‘Conditions for Admission’ approved at its Second Congress (1920) thus ‘declared war on the whole bourgeois world and on all scab social democratic parties’ and demanded as its conditions of entry ‘a complete break with reformism and “centrist” politics’ and a commitment to ‘regularly and methodically remove reformists and centrists from every responsible post in the Labor movement.’¹¹ This dogmatically sectarian political strategy was orientated by an overly optimistic Marxist–Leninist theory of crisis and a stagist account of economic history that displayed an ill-founded confidence that ‘moribund capitalism’ was in terminal decline and a worldwide proletarian revolution was imminent and inevitable.¹²

By mid-1921, however, the certainty of capitalist collapse and proletarian revolution was rapidly ebbing. Revolutionary actions in Hungary (1919), Italy (1919–20) and Germany (1921) in these early years of the Comintern all ended in failure as the working masses declined to rally to the revolutionary call. The Comintern was in the end forced to acknowledge that in the West at least the masses remained wedded to the pacifist and parliamentary traditions of social democracy.¹³ It was in this context that the United Front strategy gradually emerged in 1921–2 as a call to communist parties to transform themselves into mass-based popular movements. At the Third Congress, in July 1921, the Comintern thus adopted the slogan ‘To the Masses.’¹⁴ This signaled that the era of blind confidence in revolutionary theory and the historical process delivering the people into their ranks had ended, and with it of course went any attempt to define communist strategy as one of pursuing power by an audacious strike on the state by a small, disciplined vanguard party – as some at least read the Bolshevik Revolution. Such ‘leftist deviations’ were now rarely tolerated and the United Front was in fact as much a campaign against intransigent elements within the ranks of the Comintern, who clung to them, as it was a colossal effort to win over the masses from social democracy and other popular forces.¹⁵

As is well known, the strategy was riven with contradictions and inconsistencies from the outset and achieved only partial successes. At times the United Front was presented as a direct appeal for joint action to reformist leaders (‘the United Front from above’); on other occasions the Comintern dogmatically insisted that the appeal was only to be made to the reformist masses (‘the United Front from below’); and in yet another configuration it was sometimes defined as incorporating both approaches simultaneously (‘the United Front from above and below’).¹⁶ Despite these inconsistencies, the United Front had, nonetheless, a number of important and relatively consistent strategic coordinates aimed at winning the masses that Gramsci would inherit and elaborate on.

First, United Front tactics demanded a careful and realistic analysis by all parties of the balance of popular forces and, in particular, the mass capacities of communist parties vis-à-vis their opponents. In October 1922, Trotsky bluntly pointed out that revolutionary socialist movements ‘rest directly only upon a fraction of the working class’ and the task of communist parties was accordingly to ‘win the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the working class.’¹⁷ Crucially, it was this democratic deficit in the West that first placed mass tactics and strategy at center stage in Comintern circles.

Second, the United Front emphasized the necessity for tactical short-term alliances as a means to reach the social democratic and wider popular masses. At the core of this approach was accordingly a strategic maneuver to call on social democrats in particular to engage in ‘joint actions’ for the ‘partial demands’ of the workers.¹⁸ The aim of the Comintern was not, of course, organizational unity, but rather to mount a rearguard action that would disaggregate oppositional popular movements, detaching their base from the leadership by persuading the mass membership of the validity of communist ideology and tactics.¹⁹ The Bolsheviks’ success was accordingly reframed as no longer due to an audacious ‘frontal assault’ in October 1917, but rather to their ability to employ tactics of flexibility, compromise and political maneuver over a longer period before the seizure of power. As Bukharin became a more important figure in the Comintern in 1923–6, and with the success of NEP (New Economic Policy) in Russia, the strategy of the United Front was supplemented with NEP themes and especially the alliance with the peasantry and sections of the rural and urban middle classes.²⁰ As early as the Third Congress, Comintern leaders were thus alerting communists to the importance of these ‘intermediary forces’ in the West – the peasantry, the urban petit-bourgeoisie, technicians, white-collar workers and the intelligentsia – who were being ‘drawn into the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution’ and could ‘assist the proletarian dictatorship in the period of transition from capitalism to Communism by helping with the problems of state and economic administration.’²¹ By the Fourth Comintern Congress (1922), Bukharin was in fact claiming that the lessons of the work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Life of a Reflective Revolutionary
• Part I  Historical Context
• Part II  Key Debates
• Part III  Major Conceptual Issues
• Part IV  Contemporary Relevance
• Conclusion: Contemporary Themes
• Bibliography
• Index