Gramsci and Global Politics

Hegemony and resistance

Mark McNally, John Schwarzmantel, Mark McNally, John Schwarzmantel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415474696
• eBook ISBN: 9781134025725
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The aim of this book is to explain and assess the relevance of the ideas of Gramsci to a world fundamentally transformed from that in which his thought was developed. It takes some of Gramsci's best-known concepts – hegemony, civil society, passive revolution, the national-popular, trasformismo, the integral state - and uses them creatively to analyse features of present-day politics, assessing to what extent his ideas can aid our understanding of the contemporary political world.

The book contains essays focused on: aspects of global politics (the development of a global civil society, the validity of the knowledge claims of neo-Gramscian IR specialists and the politics of the WTO and the Alternative Globalisation Movement); contemporary feminism; the problem of adjusting Gramsci's theory of political agency to modern conditions; Turkish and Israeli politics; and a series of essays on present-day British politics. The book concludes that while there remain considerable problems in applying Gramsci's concepts to the contemporary world, his political thought still retains an attraction and validity that will continue to inspire political analysts well into the future.

Bringing together a range of essays representing some of the latest research in the field, Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance opens up new perspectives on Gramsci which will be of vital interest to students and scholars in International Relations and Political Science, Sociology and History.

1 Introduction

Gramsci in his time and in ours

John Schwarzmantel

Gramsci in his time

The purpose of this volume of essays is to examine the relevance of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci to a world transformed radically from that in which his writings were conceived. Just over 70 years after Gramsci’s death in 1937, it is timely to probe the question of whether the ideas of one of the master-thinkers of the twentieth century still have the power to illuminate political and cultural struggle in the very different circumstances of the twenty-first century. Gramsci’s life from 1891 to 1937 spanned some of the most turbulent and formative events of the twentieth century: the First World War, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 (February and October), the growth and coming to power of Fascism in Italy and later in Germany, the formation of Communist parties throughout Europe as part of the Communist International, seen as an agent of world revolution, and the failure of revolution, inspired by the Bolshevik model, to spread beyond the borders of what became the Soviet Union. There is no doubting the importance of Gramsci as one of the most influential writers in what has come to be known as ‘Western Marxism’, a branch of Marxist thought which sought to grapple with the complexities and specific characteristics of Western Europe and the prospects for revolution there. Along with other ‘Western Marxists’ like those of the Frankfurt School, but with a perspective very distinct from their more pessimistic analyses, Gramsci’s writings reflected on the defeat of the working-class movement in Western Europe and the rise of Fascism, and attempted to draw lessons from that defeat by suggesting a different way of challenging the existing order. The purpose of this introduction is to pose the question of the continuing relevance of Gramsci’s writings, by presenting some of his key ideas, assessing their reception in the English-speaking world and beyond, and offering some reflections on the ways in which those ideas may still ‘speak to our condition’ in the new circumstances of twenty-first century politics.

The main themes of Gramsci’s thought were developed in close connection with his activity first as a socialist journalist, then as a political militant and leader, and finally as a political prisoner cut off from any effective role as an activist. They can be summarised as a deep concern with the importance of culture and of intellectuals in civil society; the creative role of the working-class movement and its potential emergence from a subaltern or dominated position to one of leadership of all of society; and reflection on the distinctive characteristics of Western Europe compared with the society in which the Bolshevik revolution had taken place. The impact of these ideas was only felt some considerable time after Gramsci’s death, and, at least in the English-speaking world, was all the more forceful precisely because of that time-lag and because of the particular context in which they were received. Gramsci’s most extensive, though highly fragmentary, reflections on politics are contained in his Prison Notebooks, written under conditions of censorship and illness, and with highly limited access to books and source materials. They represent not just a heroic attempt at intellectual and political reflection and at coming to terms with the defeat of the working-class movement, but a personal struggle to rise above the conditions of imprisonment and produce something, as Gramsci wrote, ‘für ewig’ (for ever), without ever knowing whether those notebooks would survive and see the light of day and be read by a wider public. Indeed, they were precisely notebooks, with a series of thoughts, some brief, others developed at greater length, on a whole range of topics to do with politics, philosophy, culture, history and the nature of Marxism (referred to always as ‘the philosophy of praxis’, as a code word to defeat or elude the censor).

The rediscovery of Gramsci

In the English-speaking world, it was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Gramsci’s ideas became more widely known. The publication in 1971 of Selections from the Prison Notebooks made his ideas available to a wider audience, and it is the context of that time which needs some further explanation, since it differed not only from that of Gramsci’s own time (and place), but from that of today, in which we have to reassess the applicability of some of the core Gramscian concepts. Why did Gramsci’s ideas have such resonance in the particular conditions of Western Europe and especially Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s? This was a time when the Cold War orthodoxies of rigid dogmatic Communism, on the one hand, and ‘free world’ liberalism on the other, were being undermined in a host of ways. The impact of the movements of 1968 throughout Europe and North America gave space for a range of radical aspirations, challenging the established order. The rebirth of feminism, the urban riots in the United States and the international protests against the Vietnam War all witnessed a resurgence of radicalism and new sources of hope not just for working-class movements but also for a host of new social movements that mobilised around new political issues and agencies. All those developments were occurring in what, in the language of Cold War politics, was referred to as ‘the free world’. With respect to the Soviet bloc, equally epochal developments had taken place, starting with Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of 1956 on the crimes of Stalin, the attempts at liberalisation of Communist one-party rule initiated by the ‘Polish October’ and the revolution in Hungary in that same year, leading later to the ‘Czech Spring’ and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. These movements challenged orthodox Soviet Marxism in both theory and practice. They revealed the aspiration to a revision of Marxism, opposing Marxism-Leninism in the name of a humanistic Marxism, often related to Marx’s early writings (the 1844 or ‘Paris Manuscripts’ above all, contrasted with the ‘later Marx’ of Capital). The themes of this Marxist revival included an emphasis on human agency, the concept of alienation and the possibility of human beings rediscovering what Marx called their ‘species being’ by throwing off the rigid chains of orthodox established systems, whether those of the capitalist West or the monolithic dogmatic party orthodoxy of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism.

It was thus within that general context of a rejuvenated Marxism and the emergence of new radical movements in civil society that Gramsci’s ideas gained a wider currency on the European Left. With its stress on culture and ideas, Gramsci’s analysis of ‘hegemony’, his key concept, opened the way to a ‘Marxism of the superstructure’ that rejected economic determinism or reductionism. His form of cultural Marxism pointed out, in ways relatively underemphasised in earlier versions of Marxism, the extension of power relations beyond the state and the economy into civil society, where a particular conception of the world was privileged and would have to be challenged before any seizure of political power could be envisaged. Gramsci had no knowledge of the 1844 writings of the ‘early Marx’ with their themes of alienation and species-being. However, his rejection of dogmatic Marxism and his criticism of those versions of historical materialism that claimed to have the ‘key’ to history by offering a picture of inevitable progress, tied in well with the attempt to rejuvenate Marxism. It emphasised a creative view of human agency, free from any idea that human beings were merely passive bearers of economic forces. After all, it was Gramsci who had written in one of his early journalistic pieces that the true significance of the Bolshevik revolution was that the Bolsheviks had made a revolution ‘against (Marx’s book) Das Kapital’, and in so doing ‘they live Marxist thought…which in the case of Marx was contaminated by positivist and naturalist encrustations’ (Gramsci 1977: 34). Thus the circulation or popularisation of Gramsci’s ideas to a wider audience occurred, at least initially, at a time of hope and optimism, from the point of view of radical movements. His ideas were seized on as showing that Marxist thought was not to be simplistically identified with Communist orthodoxy. Above all, his famous distinction between Russia in 1917 and the situation of Western societies opened the way to a type of Marxism relevant to the developed ‘civil society’ of contemporary liberal-democracy where revolution had to take different forms:

in Russia 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 trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.

(Gramsci 1971: 238)

Two examples can be given of the way in which Gramsci’s ideas were utilised and appropriated in the period of their initial wider diffusion, before discussing whether those ideas are still applicable in the changed circumstances of the politics of a new millennium. The first example is the relatively short-lived phenomenon of ‘Eurocommunism’, when the mass Communist parties of Western Europe, notably the Italian and Spanish parties, with the French party lagging some way behind in this process, asserted their own ‘road to socialism’ distinct from that of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). In the heyday, brief though it was, of ‘Eurocommunism’ the dominant themes were those of ‘polycentrism’, ‘national roads to socialism’, and respect or recognition of pluralism. These themes highlighted the distinct nature of liberal-democratic politics in Western Europe and its difference from the countries of what was then the Soviet bloc. They were Gramscian themes to the extent that they recognised the importance of ‘civil society’ and the need to establish a ‘presence’ within its institutions and gain support for radical ideas. Eurocommunist perspectives rejected the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and saw a violent seizure of power based on a traditionally defined working class (workers working in factories in conditions of ‘Fordist’ mass production) as inappropriate to the liberal-democratic context of Western politics. Writing in the late 1970s, in what remains an influential analysis of key Gramscian concepts, Perry Anderson, then editor of New Left Review, wrote that ‘If one political ancestry is more widely and insistently invoked than any other for the new perspectives of “Eurocommunism”, it is that of Gramsci’. And in the same passage Anderson stated that

the great mass Communist Parties of Western Europe—in Italy, in France, in Spain—are now on the threshold of a historical experience without precedent for them: the commanding assumption of governmental office within the framework of bourgeois-democratic states, without the allegiance to a horizon of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ beyond them that was once the touchstone of the Third International.

(Anderson 1976/7: 6)

Over 30 years later, with the disappearance (in Italy) or marginalisation (in France and Spain) of those ‘great mass Communist Parties’, it is impossible to avoid the question of ‘what went wrong’, and the implications of this for Gramsci’s ideas and analysis. If the initial reception of his ideas was focused on his realisation of the complexity of contemporary liberal-democracy and the need for a ‘war of position’ to engage with that complexity, why did that perspective not yield more fruitful results? What are the implications of the failure of Eurocommunism and its Gramscian perspective for the relevance of Gramsci’s ideas in the changed ‘conjuncture’ of the twenty-first century?

The second example of the way in which Gramsci’s ideas were creatively applied in and soon after the period of their initial discovery is taken from the British context. It was in the analysis of ‘Thatcherism’ and its wider resonances that Gramsci’s perspectives seemed particularly appropriate. The ‘time of hope’ discussed above with reference to the movements of 1968 had given way in Britain to the period of Conservative governments following the victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It soon became clear that this was a Conservative government different from its more moderate predecessors, and that it was guided by a distinct ideology. This ideology sought to ‘roll back’ the state, at least in the economic sphere, giving priority to market principles, even though the ‘free market’ required a ‘strong state’ to enforce its principles, in the classic analysis of Andrew Gamble (Gamble 1994). It was Stuart Hall and those influenced by him who found inspiration in Gramsci’s ideas to develop an analysis of the specific novelties of Thatcherism, and the way in which its success seemed to stem from its articulation of a new ‘common sense’, a form of ‘authoritarian populism’ that achieved a temporary hegemony which the Left had severely underestimated. This analysis was much more concerned with the dynamics of ideology in civil society. It used a framework derived from Gramsci to point out the ways in which the Thatcher governments relied on consent, and how they were able to achieve such consent by playing on and heightening certain themes which resonated with established ‘common sense’. In turn the implication was that the parties of the Left would have to engage with and challenge this ‘common sense’ if they were to have any chance of gaining power and of renewing themselves. Hall spoke of ‘the hard road to renewal’ (Hall 1988), and of the creative power of Gramsci’s ideas to analyse the situation in which the British Left found itself. The themes of the Prison Notebooks, used to reflect on the defeat of socialism by Fascism and to develop a new political strategy, were now employed to analyse a modern (British) form of Conservative politics and to indicate ways in which its ideology had percolated and drawn on the sphere of civil society whose importance Gramsci had emphasised.

The question which has to be posed now is that which underlies the essays collected in the present volume and which is its raison d’être: how has the world changed since the time in which Gramsci’s ideas were first conceived, and since the time (post-Second World War) of the reception of those ideas by a wider audience? Do such changes render Gramsci’s ideas irrelevant, or do his ideas offer insights and perspectives which can illuminate the different political and social world in which we now live? If the latter is the case (and this is the premise of the present volume), then does this impose on us a ‘new reading’ or a rereading of Gramsci in the light of changed conditions, and what forms might this new reading take? The discussion here follows the three main parts which organise the subsequent essays: the international context, themes of political agency and organisation, and the changed context of British politics, seen as symptomatic of wider more global changes in politics and society. Why read Gramsci? What does he have to offer us in the new context of global politics? What are the ‘problem areas’ of contemporary politics, and in what ways can analysis of Gramsci’s political theory prove fruitful in a world which has changed so much since his own time? As the title of one recent book tells us, Gramsci Is Dead (Day 2005)—but do his ideas live on in helping us make sense of the real world of contemporary politics? To adapt the title of a famous work written by Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher with whose ideas Gramsci had such a sustained critical engagement: ‘what is living and what is dead in the thought of Antonio Gramsci?’

Gramsci and the new world order

One of the ‘growth areas’ in current work using Gramsci’s ideas is in the field of international relations and international political economy, and this is reflected in the first four essays of the present volume. There are two issues which concern those working in this area, and which focus on the key question of the contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s ideas. The first is whether his ideas, notably the core concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘passive revolution’, can be applied in the field of international relations without distorting Gramsci’s thought by extending his ideas in ways he did not envisage. The second issue goes further: even if there is nothing intrinsically illegitimate in such an application, in what ways have the international system and the nature of the world economy changed so radically as to require tools of analysis that a form of Marxism developed in the first half of the twentieth century cannot provide? It is easy to see why these questions form the testing-ground and area of debate for the current relevance of Gramsci’s ideas. A world in which globalisation appears to constitute the new paradigm and dominant ideology (Steger 2005b), and in which the nation-state seems (at least to some) less important as the framework for political action, appears to constitute a challenge to Gramsci’s apparently more ‘national’ frame of analysis, while simultaneously also suggesting that the sphere of international relations and a new global economy are ‘where the action is’ in our contemporary world. Does Gramscian analysis have anything to offer to this globalised world of neo-liberal dominance? Can terms such as ‘hegemony’ and ‘passive revolution’ be legitimately developed as critical concepts in this area, other than to refer to a straightforward and relatively banal idea of US hegemony in the post-Cold War world?

Those scholars who define themselves, or are so defined, as ‘neo-Gramscians’ or ‘the Italian school’ clearly believe that Gramsci’s analysis can be developed to make sense of a new structure of international power and a new world system. There are two ways in which these claims have been developed, referring first to ‘structure’ and then to ‘agency’. The first way of developing Gramsci’s ideas refers to a new structure or world order, in which a particular economic order and a corresponding way of organising social life are dominant or hegemonic on an international level. In the words of one of the original members of this socalled ‘Italian school’, Robert Cox, ‘A world hegemony is thus in its beginnings an outward expansion of the internal (national) hegemony established by a dominant social class’ (Cox 1983: 171). Cox also observes that ‘World hegemony is describable as a social structure, an economic structure, and a political structure; and it cannot be simply one of these things but must be all three’ (Cox 1983: 171–2). The claim that is made is thus that contemporary world politics and international relations have to be understood as taking place within a particular global structure in which one model of society is hegemonic, a model of society predominantly exemplified by a particular state and its dominant class. Those involved in these debates argue about the extent to which a form of neo-liberalism, in which market relations are the paradigm of all social relations, has been imposed on all actors (state and non-state) in the world system. Such a way of life is policed through a network of rules and institutions exemplified by such organisations as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The whole debate, therefore, relates to the concept of ‘world hegemony’ and its changing nature. Robert Cox uses ‘neo-liberalism’ in a different sense from the usage employed here: for him the ‘neo-liberal form of state’ was typified by the post-Second World War ‘negotiated consensus among the major industrial interests, organised labour, and government—the neo-liberal historic bloc’ (Cox 1993: 265). He suggests that ‘The Thatcher-Reagan model’ broke up this corporatist consensus, and that such a model is better described as ‘hyper-liberalism’, equivalent to ‘the ideology of globalisation in its most extreme form’ (Cox 1993: 272). Other authors analyse the historical transformations of world hegemony, from the Westphalia system of state sovereignty with Holland as its initiator, through ‘free trade imperialism’ under British hegemony to the post-Second World War period of the ‘free enterprise system’ under the leadership of the United States (Arrighi, 1993). Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, extended to the international sphere, has thus proved to be an indispensable tool for describing and analysing world politics. The issue is whether and in what ways the current world order can be described as a hegemonic one, in the sense of a particular model of state, economy and society being diffused on a global level and imposed by regulatory institutions and organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank which could be viewed as part of a global civil society. Global civil society can also be seen as part of ‘the solution’ rather than ‘the problem’, if the term is taken to refer to potentially counter-hegemonic movements such as the Alternative Globalisation Movement, which is analysed in the chapters by McNally and Paterson in this volume.

The claim to relevance for Gramsci’s analysis is thus that a particular way of life, rooted in the economic system of the free market, is now dominant on a world level. His own analysis, developed in the different, less globalised world of early twentieth-century Italy, clearly did not encapsulate terms such as globalisation and neo-liberalism. Nevertheless, his historical analysis showed how the ideas of the French Revolution spread throughout Europe. They constituted the directing or leading ideas of the nineteenth century, expressed with most vigour by the Jacobins in the course of the French Revolution. His analysis suggested that Italy was backward in picking up on such modern ideas, and that the failure of the movement for Italian national independence and unification, the Risorgimento, lay in the absence of a native group that had the same determination as the Jacobins in France. In the same way, on the international level, the world today is marked by the phenomenon of ‘uneven development’, and the pervasive influence of one model of state and society (a neo-liberal one) on states and societies which have to conform to this hegemonic structure, policed by a global civil society and its key economic and social institutions. Gramsci himself had an acute awareness of how peripheral capitalist states such as Italy, and indeed particular areas within such states like the Italian South, suffered because of the glo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Gramsci in his time and in ours
• PART I Gramsci and the new world order
• PART II Theorising the political
• PART III Gramsci and contemporary British politics
• Bibliography