Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy

Constructing the Political Subject

Massimo Modonesi

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745334059
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781849649704
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this bold and innovative book, Massimo Modonesi weaves together theory and political practice by relating the concepts of subalternity, antagonism and autonomy to contemporary movements in Latin America and elsewhere. In a sophisticated account, Modonesi reconstructs the debates between Marxist authors and schools of thought in order to sketch out informed strategies of resistance. He reviews the works of Gramsci, Negri, Castoriadis and Lefort, and engages with the arguments made by E. P. Thompson, Spivak, Laclau and Mouffe. Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy firmly roots key theoretical arguments from a range of critical thinkers within specific political movements in order to recover these concepts as analytical instruments which can help to guide contemporary struggles.

1

Subalternity

The concept of subaltern, a formidable analytical instrument, has turned into a passepartout in academic and intellectual language and an elegant verbal resource of the progressive or erudite radical political discourse. As a synonym of oppressed or dominated, the word subaltern avoids the economic or ideologizing connotations of the notion of the exploited while it amplifies and pluralizes the notion of the working, labour or proletarian class by including other popular forms and modalities.

This common usage of the concept seeks the categorical opening that Antonio Gramsci sought in his creative itinerary of Marxist thought. Nonetheless, its instrumental naturalization dilutes the explanatory impact of the notion of subalternity and dissolves the articulations that Gramsci himself established around him, which might result in the formulation of approximated and slippery political analyses and theories. Particularly in academia, a tension between the concept of subaltern, a theory of subalternity and a subaltern focus can be observed.

To exemplify this problem and rescue the theoretical density of the concept as a perspective of analysis of the processes of political subjectivation, after locating its origins and background in Marxist thought, we will review its development from its inception in the work of Gramsci until its application on behalf of the School of Subaltern Studies in India, the movement that recuperated and used this notion more systematically.

Subalternity, Domination and Subordination

The notion of subalternity was created to speak of the subjective condition of subordination in the context of capitalist domination. Nevertheless, Marx never used the word subaltern, while Engels, Lenin and Trotsky – to name a few representative examples – used it frequently in its conventional sense, referring to a subordination derived from a hierarchical stratification, mainly in relation to army officers and, eventually, to officials in public administration. As we will later expose, in an explicit attempt to enrich the categorical heritage of Marxism, the notion of subalternity acquires, for the first time, a theoretical density by Antonio Gramsci’s initiative in relation to his reflections on hegemony in his Prison Notebooks, with the aim of finding a conceptual correlation of alienation in the superstructural terrain, the sociopolitical equivalent on the plane of domination of what this indicates in the socioeconomic plain: the relative deprivation of the subjective quality by subordination.

This Gramscian initiative departs from the assumption that, not proposing a specific context, Marx left at the core of the Marxist problematic the need to characterize subordination as a relationship, experience, social condition and subjective politics. Marx’s constant effort is evident in his political and historical work to understand the clues that explain and maximize the emergence and formation of a transformative sociopolitical subject, from its subordinated condition and the restrictions that prevent, delay and sidetrack it.

In this sense, there exists in Marx’s thought an ante litteram preoccupation for subalternity – without a name or specific context – that opens the field of analysis. No subsequent Marxist reading of reality could and can do without the study of social relations that, in the historical context of capitalism, lay down forms and rules of a social and political domination of a class to which corresponds the subordinated condition of another class. In the frame of this theoretical and methodological assumption shared by all Marxisms, the specific interest in the understanding of forms of production and reproduction of subordination has been deployed, from which studies and analyses were carried out that developed and tuned the analytical and explanatory capacity of Marxism in this fundamental, even genealogically primary, aspect for every theory of social process.

Within this vast theoretical field – whose revision does not make up the objective of this work – the theoretical contribution of Antonio Gramsci is emphasized and, within it, the genesis and theoretical elaboration of the concept of subalternity is particularly relevant.

Subaltern Subjectivation in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci

In order to understand the concept of subalternity in his Prison Notebooks, it is fundamental to show that Gramsci wrote his notes in prison according to an evaluation of his previous political experiences: the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution, the councils and occupations of factories between 1919 and 1920, the foundation of the Communist Party in Italy (PCd’I) in the historical Congress of Livorno in 1921, the debates within the Third International and the rise of fascism. The purpose of the Notebooks is to review and develop the group of ideas that were forged due to these events. It is debatable whether the process of reflection in prison forced Gramsci to strengthen his thought concerning continuity, rupture and renovation. Beyond these three possible interpretations, their nuances and implications, at the very least a change in emphasis and thematic hierarchy has to be acknowledged.

Prior to his reflections on subalternity, Gramsci focused his attention on antagonism and autonomy, that is, on the subjective emergence built from the experiences of insubordination and gestation of areas of independence and emancipation for the working class. The wave of occupations of factories and the workers’ councils between 1919 and 1920 led by communist groups under the auspices of the Bolshevik Revolution encouraged an enthusiasm that turned towards the exaltation of the autonomous formation of the worker and communist subject, its capacity to struggle, and the construction of a new society. Gramsci’s thoughts and the political and intellectual effort set in L’Ordine Nuovo headed in this direction in those years. The first stage of the newspaper directed by Gramsci himself (65 volumes between 1 May 1919 and 24 December 1920) is an unequivocal showcase of this emphasis.¹ The revolutionary subjectivism inspired by Bolshevism was built around the idea of autonomy even when it was not made nominally explicit and did not constitute the centre of the theoretical reflection,² which instead spans the classic themes of Third International Bolshevism, en primis the topic of the soviets, and announces what will be known later, inside the communist movement, as councilism.

Therefore, even though this set of reflections does not belong to the topic of subalternity we want to highlight in this chapter, it is very important to note the existence of a Gramsci who, in his Leninism, exalts the dimension of political struggle as rupture –antagonism – and aims for the realization of a soviet revolution, based on workers’ councils and, thus, maintains the tendency towards autonomous reflections.³

The following passage from an editorial in L’Ordine Nuovo was written by Gramsci as editor of the paper:

The Factory Council, as autonomous form of the producer in the industrial field and as base of the communist economic organization, is the instrument of a mortal fight for the capitalist regime as it creates the conditions in which the society divided in classes is suppressed and a new division of class becomes ‘materially’ impossible. (Gramsci, 1921: 2)

The autonomy of work acquires political shape in the Council: the producer becomes a political subject. However, after the defeat of the Factory Councils’ movement in northern Italy, Gramsci takes up the idea of autonomy in an exclusively classical manner, as synonym of the political independence of class rather than as process and experience of emancipation; as a line that traces the process of political subjectivation, from the relative autonomy of work towards the self-determination of the worker by means of the control of the productive process. He writes, for example, already in the fascist period in 1926:

Our party ended up being the sole mechanism that the working class has at its disposal to select new leading cadres of class, that is to regain their independence and political autonomy. (Gramsci, 1926)

An in-depth analysis of the diverse meanings of the concept of autonomy and its theoretical implications occurs in the third chapter, so this mention of Gramsci’s work in the 1920s is essential in order to understand his later theories on hegemony and to locate the origin of the concept of subalternity as counterpart or as correlation of previous autonomist positions.

Gramsci’s Notebooks are a complex work due to their elaboration throughout years of incarceration during which notes on different lines of thought, some of which eventually led the author to reproduce and rewrite entire paragraphs in the so-called ‘special notebooks’ where he attempted to arrange them by theme, accrued over time. The philological approaches have permitted the reconstruction of various passages of an arborescent work. In particular, after the thematic compilations made by Palmiro Togliatti in the 1950s, the thorough work by Valentino Gerratana allowed the publication of the Notebooks in 1975 in the order in which they were written, accompanied by an entire volume of references by Gerratana.

The interpretation of Gramsci’s thought branched out and at times polarized due to the heterogeneous character and the dispersion of the notes that make up the Notebooks. Thus, within Gramscian studies several guiding ideas have been emphasized in the Notebooks, among which one stands out for its centrality: that which has to do with hegemony. Gramsci weaved a web of reflections around this problematic and it developed into noteworthy theorizations such as the organic intellectual, passive revolution, integral State, organic crisis and Americanism and Fordism, as well as a conceptualization of civil society, and so on. The notion of the subaltern stands centrally among them.

It should be noted that the selection of the noun and adjective subaltern in the Prison Notebooks is not circumstantial or a simple way to avoid fascist censorship, as Gramsci did not stop using the notion of working class and labourers in other notes. Therefore, the use of the concept provides a perspective or a theoretical insight that corresponds to the core of a creative thinking within Marxist debate. This reflection emerged from a historical juncture – the defeat of the workers’ council movement and the rise of fascism in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s – and Gramsci’s polemical will: the historicist positioning in defence of the centrality of the praxis that translates into a critique of economism and voluntarism. This polemical locus results in complex thinking that, to my knowledge, will be overinterpreted in the subsequent dispute about Gramsci’s place within theoretical and political Marxist debates.⁴

Beyond the full, partial or differentiated recuperation of his thinking, he provides a conceptual tool to Marxist theory, the subaltern as expression of the experience and subjective condition of the subordinated, determined by a relation of domination – in Gramscian terms, of hegemony – and a sketch of a theory of subalternity. However, Gramsci did not use the noun (subalternity) – which tends to fix a relationship or a property – always preferring the qualifying adjective (subaltern), by which we infer he did not intend to formulate a theory of subalternity, instead, he opted for a theoretical insight linked to historical observation. Gramsci established a concept as a theoretical base for concrete analysis. After Gramsci, no reflection on conflict and emancipation can diminish the importance of subalternity as expression and counterpart of the domination incorporated in oppressed subjects, base, and thus inescapable starting point of all processes of conflict and emancipation.

We will review some fundamental passages of the creation of the concept in the Prison Notebooks and their main characteristics. Before jail, Gramsci did not use the adjective subaltern to refer to the dominated classes even though the reflections in ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1926) pointed in that direction. (See, for example, Green, 2007: 199–32.) In fact, this adjective appears in the Notebooks for the first time in relation to the hierarchical structure in the army in reference to subaltern officials (Gramsci, 1975, Q1, Vol. 43: 37; Vol. 48: 60 and Vol. 54: 67). This conventional use still sets the origin of the concept in the context of the analysis of the power of direction, of the hierarchical relationship of command and obedience and the condition of subordination. In the first notebook, the notion of subaltern is used to refer to the subordination of an individual or an institution – for example, the Catholic Church (ibid.: Q1, Vol. 116: 105 and Vol. 139: 127).

In the third notebook, written in 1930, the concept moves to the terrain of social and political relations, when Gramsci places subalternity as a fundamental characteristic of the dominated classes and thus titles note 14 History of the Dominant Class and History of the Subaltern Classes, a programmatic title that inaugurates a line of reflection in the Notebooks. The concept is born in this note and one of the fundamental nodes of Gramscian theoretical thinking is presented and a horizon of investigation is opened, as demonstrated by the fact that this theme will be the object of a special notebook – Notebook 25 – in which the notes on the history of the subaltern classes are compiled.

14 History of the Dominant Class and History of the Subaltern Classes. The history of the subaltern classes is necessarily disaggregated and episodic: there exists a tendency towards unification even if only in provisional levels, but that is the less visible part and demonstrable only after consummated. The subaltern classes suffer the initiative of the dominant class, including when they rebel; they are in an alarmed state of defence. Thus, any outbreak of autonomous initiative is of invaluable wealth. (ibid.: Q3, Vol. 14, 299–300)⁵

According to the notion of hegemony, the ‘initiative of the dominant class’ refers to the use of power as consensus and not primarily as coercion. Gramsci sets domination (hegemony) against subalternity, creating an equation that accompanies his theoretical work and seals the specificity of his thought within Marxism. This emphasis on the relationship of domination marks the preoccupation of the author with the superstructure –methodologically differentiating dimensions in its interior (political society and civil society) – and its relationship with the economic base. The meaning of the notion of civil society that – along with hegemony – was taken as Gramsci’s great contribution to both Marxist theory and political theory in general, is a logical derivation of the problem of domination as a superstructural counterpart to exploitation. Gramsci understands domination as a relation of forces in permanent conflict and defines the dominated as subalterns, proposing a new concept and outlining their characterization. This characterization will be systematically called subaltern classes (or subaltern groups), and it starts to take shape from the following distin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by John Holloway
• Introduction
• 1. Subalternity
• 2. Antagonism
• 3. Autonomy
• 4. Articulations
• Afterword: Passive Revolutions in Latin America: A Gramscian Approach to the Characterization of Progressive Governments at the Start of the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index