Gramsci's Critique of Civil Society

Towards a New Concept of Hegemony

Marco Fonseca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138185876
• eBook ISBN: 9781317288275
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist thinker whose radical ideas on how to build an alternative world from below remain vigorously relevant today. Gramsci's philosophy of praxis critically dissects the institutions of modern liberal democracy to reveal what is perhaps its deepest secret: it is the most successful political system in modernity at preserving an objective condition of domination while transforming it into a subjective conviction of freedom.

Based on a careful reading of Gramsci's The Prison Notebooks, Marco Fonseca shows hegemony as more than leadership of elites over subaltern majorities based on "consent". Following Gramsci's critique of citizenship, civil society and democracy, including the current project of neoliberal "democracy promotion" particularly in the Global South, he discloses a hidden process of hegemony that generates the preconditions for consent and, thus, successful domination.

As the struggles from Zapatismo to Chavismo and from the Arab Springs to Spain's Podemos show, liberation is not possible without counter-hegemony. This book will be of interest to activist scholars engaged in the study of Marxism, Gramsci, political philosophy, and contemporary debates about the renewal of Marxist thought and the relevance of revolution and Communism for the twenty-first century.

1 Rethinking Structures and Superstructures

Like many Marxists of his day, Gramsci took very seriously the general conclusion at which Marx had arrived by 1859 and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of his studies. This is expressed in the famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the founding text on the classic structure/superstructure debate in so-called Western Marxism.¹ The classic text reads as follows:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

(Marx 1859)²

How, then, does Gramsci rethink the dialectical totality of structure and superstructure and how does he go about grasping in thought its various components and moments?³ How does Gramsci conceptualize the crisis that results from the widening of the gap between structures and superstructures, a gap that hegemony can no longer suture and where the confrontation between oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited can no longer be contained, captured or deactivated by the liberal ideas of “freedom” and “democracy”? We start here because this is the conceptual foundation for Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, the quantum site, as it were, for any potentially revolutionary Event rooted in the reality of a widening void “where the owner’s power is unlimited, the power over the life and death of the worker, his wife, and his children,” where we see forms of independent and autonomous organization emerge and nurture the consciousness that “the worker is nothing and wants to become everything.”

In his critique of Croce, Gramsci makes it clear that he intends to redeploy Hegel not only against Italy’s foremost philosopher at the time but also against orthodox Marxist hypotheses on this question, and perhaps even against the tendency to a certain reductionism in the work of the late Marx as well. In his somewhat problematic critical reading of Proudhon and his defense of Hegel’s dialectics, Marx himself had already noted the priority of the whole over the parts, totality over singularity, both in philosophy as well as political economy, and not only in the The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx 1976, 6:167) but also in the Grundrisse (Marx 1993, 199).⁴ This is a lesson that Lukács also takes from Marx when he stated in History and Class Consciousness (1923): “The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science” (Lukács 1972, 27).⁵ But, as Gramsci sees it, “[Croce] treats the structure as a ‘hidden god’, a ‘noumenon’, as opposed to the superstructures as ‘appearances’” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §61, 271; see also Gramsci 2007, Q8 §234, 377). The fact is that there is no such thing as a noumenal “reality” and its purely phantasmatic “appearance” but, instead, only historically constructed structures and superstructures that form a totality where “concept and reality,” substance and surface, form a “historically inseparable unity” (Gramsci 1975a, Q10II §1, 1241).⁶

Gramsci’s initial engagement with the structure/superstructure problematic takes place in direct response to and engagement with the arguments of Second International Russian Marxists like Plekhanov. Consider the following passage, for example:

[H]ow does the historical movement arise on the structural base? The problem is however referred to in Plekhanov’s Fundamentals and could be developed. This is furthermore the crux of all the questions that have arisen around the philosophy of praxis and without resolving this one cannot resolve the corresponding problem about the relationship between society and “nature,” to which the Manual devotes a special chapter.⁷ It would have been necessary to analyse the full import and consequences of the two propositions in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to the following effect: 1. Mankind only poses for itself such tasks as it can resolve; … the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its resolution already exist or at least are in the process of formation. 2. A social order does not perish until all the productive forces for which it still has room have been developed and new and higher relations of production have taken their place, and until the material conditions of the new relations have grown up within the womb of the old society. Only on this basis can all mechanicism and every trace of the superstitiously “miraculous” be eliminated, and it is on this basis that the problem of the formation of active political groups, and, in the last analysis, even the problem of the historical function of great personalities must be posed.

(SPN 431–432; Gramsci 1975a, 1422)⁸

Marx’s famous preface as read by orthodox Marxists like Plekhanov is thus the starting point not only for Gramsci’s discussion on structures and superstructures, but also for the development of some of the most fundamental critical concepts associated with his version of the philosophy of praxis. In fact, as Gramsci acutely sees it, this problematic is “the crucial problem of historical materialism” and the place where the discussion, in his day as in our own, should start. This is, indeed, the “basics for finding one’s bearings” in an age of theoretical confusion and ideological obfuscation, and one can do so, Gramsci says, paraphrasing Marx, along the following lines:

(1) the principle that “no society sets itself tasks for the accomplishment of which the necessary and sufficient conditions do not already exist” [or are not in the course of emerging and developing]; and (2) that “no society perishes until it has first developed all the forms of life implicit in its internal relations.”

(Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 177)

It goes without saying that these principles must first be developed critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanicism and fatalism. They must therefore be referred back to the description of the three fundamental moments into which a “situation” or an equilibrium of forces can be distinguished, with the greatest possible stress on the second moment (equilibrium of political forces), and especially on the third moment (politicomilitary equilibrium).

(SPN 106–107; Gramsci 1975b, 1774)

A crisis exists, sometimes lasting for decades. This means that incurable contradictions have come to light within the structure and that the political forces positively working to preserve the structure itself are nevertheless striving to heal these contradictions, within certain limits.

(Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 177)

Gramsci offers a “description of the three fundamental moments” of an “equilibrium of forces” and develops the above principles “critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanicism and fatalism” in Notebook 4 as part of his own complex discussion on “relations between structure and superstructures” (Gramsci 1996, Q4 §38, 177–178). Following Marx, Gramsci regards these relations as being of primary structural and historical importance for social and political life, but resists – indeed, he revolts against – succumbing to the standard economic determinism and philosophy of actor-less historical necessity of Second International Marxism. More specifically, Gramsci frames the discussion of “relations of forces” and the various “moments or levels” – and combinations – of these “relations of forces” through a complex articulation of various forms of increasingly autonomous and critical forms of political consciousness.⁹ For only a historically constructed and critical consciousness is capable of “reflecting” on the inner and “objective” contradictions of historical blocs. Although Gramsci does not explicitly refer to Hegel in the passage that concerns us here, it was, indeed, Hegel, before Marx, who offered a detailed discussion of the dialectic of “force and its relations” in the Science of Logic, a dialectic that had a profound impact on Marx, Lenin and, of course, Gramsci himself.¹⁰

The first level in the social relation of forces is what appears to be like the level of “objective relations,” a kind of “naturalistic” or positivist fact that, Gramsci argues, can be “measured within the systems of the exact or mathematical sciences,” a level that also corresponds to Hegel’s notion of simple determinate being. On this, Gramsci is simply repeating Marx’s point in the Preface to the effect that “the material transformation of the economic conditions of production […] can be determined with the precision of natural science.” But for Gramsci, this is an abstract level where there are no predetermined or self-constituted forms of cultural, political or economic consciousness or being on the part of fundamental social groups. In his attempt to visualize what is going on at this level – in Žižek’s words, a level of the Real – Gramsci thinks that social groups here are already exerting a relation of force, he thinks that classes here exist as categories of the Real and not of abstract positivity. For Gramsci is dealing here with what he is, already in the early stages of his Notebooks, beginning to conceptualize as the Real or pure facticity that resists the mediations of hegemony, a Real that proceeds “on the basis of the level of development of the material forces of production” and where “each one of these groups represents a function and a position within production itself.” We can certainly try to capture what Gramsci was trying to conceptualize at this level by using the language of structuralism. We could thus say that this is the level of pure productive structures without the subject of hegemony, of functions without normalized subjectivities, and forms of consciousness without ideological apparatuses. Using the language of Spinozism and German Idealism, we could thus say that at this point Gramsci still thinks of this level as a kind of primordial Spinozan substance or a kind of Hegelian “substance without subject” (Macherey 2011). And it is here, in this conception of structure, that Gramsci initially attempts to ground what he calls the “fundamental alignment of social forces,” a structure that is nonetheless already conceived as politicized but in a sort of dynamic quantum state of politics or a substantive condition of pure possibility, the place where someone, at the appropriate moment and from within specific historical situations, has to judge whether there are “sufficient and necessary conditions” for its constitution into a given reality. But that decision and possibility are not yet here.

The second level is the “political,” or a level constituted through relation of forces that Gramsci further breaks into “various moments corresponding to the different levels of political consciousness as they have manifested themselves in history up to now.” This is arguably Gramsci’s own version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in combination with the Science of Logic’s treatment of the becoming of being-for-self and the eventual emergence of historically constituted self-consciousness. First, there is the moment when “consciousness” is born as the “most rudimentary” and “primitive economic level,” that is, at the individual level within what Gramsci calls “fundamental social groups” – particularity in Hegel’s civil society, and incipient class consciousness in Marx. Gramsci thus speaks of an individual merchant or an individual manufacturer “feeling himself in solidarity” with another merchant or another manufacturer. At this abstract, simple or “primitive” level of consciousness, Gramsci emphasizes the “feeling of solidarity” that one member of a fundamental social group experiences towards another member of a similar group. In other words, this basic feeling of solidarity corresponds to the idea of people with consciousness in themselves – such as the notion of a “class in itself” – who have not yet become strategically organized “for themselves” around material or ideological self-interests. Here, a one-to-one identification or a basic Hegelian relation of mutual recognition – or even a sort of Levinasian fundamental encounter with the other – appears to Gramsci to be the primary – if “primitive” – experience of political consciousness. This might very well be what we encounter at the level of an abstract family, a relatively “simple” community or a “primitive” tribe. A second moment within this level of political force and its relations occurs, however, when individual members of a primary or fundamental social group acquire or develop a higher form of consciousness, defined by the “solidarity of interests among all the members of the social group,” particularly within the “purely economic sphere,” and thus, what was merely a dynamic quantum political possibility in the first moment becomes here actualized and stabilized as “class for itself.” This is, thus, the moment when class solidarity and class struggle develop and become entrenched as a second nature. Although this is still a purely “politico-economic phase” in the development of political consciousness, the “question of the state” is already posed here, even if only embryonically and in terms of a “rudimentary political equality” demanded by those who claim the “right to participate in, modify, and reform administration and legislation within the existing general framework.” Class solidarity and struggle thus appear to Gramsci as the primary – but only primary – drive towards the development and institutionalization of the state within the second moment in the formation of political consciousness. But there is a third and final moment at this level, and this occurs when “one becomes conscious of the fact that one’s own ‘corporate’ interests, in their present and future development, go beyond the ‘corporate’ confines – that is, they go beyond the confines of the economic group – and they can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups.” This moment corresponds to the development of political consciousness proper, and is, thus, not properly accounted for by the notions of “class in itself” or “class for itself” and their respective levels of engagement typical of the prior moment. Here, Gramsci has reached the point where he develops the notion of “common sense” an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking Structures and Superstructures
• 2 On Moral and Intellectual Reform
• 3 The Process of Hegemony
• 4 A Critique of Civil Society
• 5 War of Position as Counter-Hegemony
• 6 The Modern Prince: Refounding the State
• Conclusion: Towards a New Concept of Hegemony
• Bibliography
• Index