Perspectives on Gramsci

Politics, culture and social theory

Joseph Francese

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415485272
• eBook ISBN: 9781134012701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Antonio Gramsci is widely known today for his profound impact on social and political thought, critical theory and literary methodology. This volume brings together twelve eminent scholars from humanities and social sciences to demonstrate the importance and relevance of Gramsci to their respective fields of inquiry. They bring into focus a number of central issues raised in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and in such other writings as his Prison Letters including: hegemony, common sense, civil society, subaltern studies, cultural analysis, media and film studies, postcolonial studies, international relations, linguistics, cultural anthropology, and historiography.

The book makes an important, and up-to-date, contribution to the many academic debates and disciplines which utilize Gramsci's writings for theoretical support; the essays are highly representative of the most advanced contemporary work on Gramsci. Contributors include: Michael Denning – highly respected in the field of cultural studies; Stephen Gill – an eminent figure in international relations; Epifanio San Juan, Jr. – a major writer in post-colonial theory; Joseph Buttigieg —translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks —; Stanley Aronowitz, a distinguished sociologist, Marcia Landy — an important scholar of film studies; and Frank Rosengarten — editor of Gramsci's Prison Letters.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political philosophy, economics, film and media studies, sociology, education, literature, post-colonial studies, anthropology, subaltern studies, cultural studies, linguistics and international relations.

1 Gramsci’s concept of political organization

Stanley Aronowitz

Introduction

Since the publication of his Prison Notebooks¹ after World War II, the figure of Antonio Gramsci has loomed large in the radical imagination. Gramsci has been received, along with Georg Lukács and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Karl Korsch, and especially Rosa Luxemburg – who might be understood as the mother of this tendency – as part of a broader effort to generate what has been termed an “open Marxism” against the doctrinaire theorists of the Second and Third Internationals who ossified historical materialism in deterministic formulae. Like Luxemburg and Korsch, Gramsci, a radicalized “traditional intellectual,” was an active participant both in the Socialist Party and in the formation of the Communist International and its Italian section. Like Luxemburg, Lukács and Korsch among many others of his pedigree, as Socialist Party militant he joined Lenin in the call for revolutionary opposition to World War II, and eventually for the organization of a party of a “new type,” and finally for a break with the parties of the Second International. That is, in opposition to the growing reformist and electoralist trend of twentieth-century social democracy, Gramsci argued for a conception of political organization whose central precepts are to upend capitalism root and branch by any means necessary, including revolutionary action. Like Lenin he not only asserted, but developed a method for implementing the key role of professional intellectuals recruited, largely, from the ranks of the traditional intellectuals and the most advanced industrial workers. Yet, despite the fact that he, along with many others, were constrained to forge an anti-reformist alliance with Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other leaders of the Bolsheviks, his approach to questions of political strategy reflected an acute appreciation of what Korsch was later to call the “principle of historical specification” in forging a theory of social change, where specification refers to conditions of social time and social space, the particular aspects of national history, its economic aspects, but also the cultural, philosophical and political features that constitute the make-up of the nation.² At the same time, Gramsci was an internationalist and never held to the Stalinist slogan of building “socialism in one country.” But he remained acutely attuned to the specificity of Italian history, its uneven economic and social development, and the forms of cultural production that corresponded to the struggle for Italian nationality, as opposed to its centuries of chronic regionalism.

English and French speaking readers relied until very recently on several different versions of excerpts from the Notebooks, his prison writings, and the political writings published before his incarceration in 1926, his influence has been felt in far-flung fields of intellectual discourse. At this writing three volumes of the projected five-volume complete Prison Notebooks have appeared in English translation, but they have not yet amplified or altered our collective understanding of the significance of his contributions. And, as is well known, they span many different fields of the human sciences: literature, political philosophy, Italian history, social and cultural theory and, of course, politics. As the secondary literature on Gramsci has expanded into a relatively large cottage industry, we can discern several trends. Among them is the reading that places Gramsci in the tradition of Italian history and philosophy. Gramsci’s contribution to our understanding of what he calls the “Southern question” informs much of the current work on globality, particularly the concept of uneven development, but also inflects recent discoveries in the postcolonial literature that political independence does not necessarily lead to political autonomy, or to greater social equality. And he has earned a huge reputation in the corridors of Machiavelli scholarship, a unique place in educational theory and, especially, in the still nascent study of the role of intellectuals in modern societies. Harvard University Press has issued a volume of Gramsci’s cultural writings, where culture refers almost exclusively to literature and other aesthetic topics. The range of Gramsci’s interests surely confirms his status as a “traditional” intellectual although even here I want to insist that these studies can only be fully understood as moments in his theory of politics and political organization, and his elaboration of the many dimensions of the struggle for communism.

Consistent with the predispositions of academic disciplines, indeed in the more general division of labor that elevates segmentation and repetition to a principle of production, Gramsci’s work is often abstracted from its specific context in early twentieth-century Italian politics, and even more his positions in the turbulent post-Bolshevik history of the interwar Communist movement. Above all, these singularities obscure the fundamental perspective from which all of his interventions spring: that he was a leader, and for a time just before his imprisonment, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Italy.

In this chapter I will argue that one of the more neglected aspects of his theoretical writing is precisely what he regarded as a basic component of any possible struggle for a communist future: the question of political organization, that is, an examination of the concrete processes of social transformation and particularly how revolutionary forces ought to proceed from the present conditions of capitalist economic, political and ideological hegemony to a moment when the “historical bloc” of excluded classes and other social formations, may contest and win power. By historical bloc Gramsci should not be read to downgrade the crucial role of the working class, since he views the Communist Party as, putatively, the expression of that class, but in concert with Lenin’s trademark insistence, from the French Revolution to our times, that revolutions are never made by isolated social classes, but instead are the result of the struggle over radical formation among different, allied classes and social formations. Against the tendency of some commentators to situate Gramsci’s work exclusively within the framework of Italy, its history, intellectual currents and political contemporaneity confining the significance of much of his thought to a national context, or to the situation of underdevelopment, I will argue that the issues raised in his writings are relevant to our times and our problems in the most developed industrialized societies as well as those in which uneven economic and cultural development prevails. As with any question within historical materialism, doctrinal aspects are often hobbled by their historicity; what commends the best that has been “thought and said” (Arnold 1971) are not the predictions and other prognostications of events but the concepts that inform inquiry. In this sense Gramsci’s Marxism consists as much in his method as it does in its results, where method is not equated with “methodology” of empirical investigation, but with a taxonomy of relevant domains that bear on the historical process and the social totality.

Many of Gramsci’s concepts have provoked widespread discussion: the aforementioned “uneven development” that bids us to recognize regional differences at both the national and transnational levels; the distinction in the class war between “position” and “maneuver” where the former connotes the period of indirect combat where the cultural struggles play, perhaps, the dominant role. Among them the term “hegemony,” and the social formation “intellectuals” as the bearers of both the prevailing common sense and the counter-hegemonic battle to impose a new good sense occupy a central space; the notion of “passive revolution” about which more below; and the invocation of the revolutionary party as the “modern Prince,” an explicit reference to Machiavelli’s classic exposition (in this regard Gramsci’s refusal to separate consent and coercion as modes of political rule; and his invocation of political “will” as a decisive component of the theory of political organization). All of these are integrated by questions of politics and especially political organization. To abstract them from these questions is to neutralize and de-politicize their significations.

One of the earlier entries (1931) of The Prison Notebooks concerns the question of political organization. The central figure of the “prince” is carried to the present in the form of the “modern Prince.” The modern Prince is invoked here as an extension of Gramsci’s critique of Georges Sorel whose concept of the myth of the general strike was, and remains, a key component of the anarchosyndicalist theory of revolution (see Sorel 1915). Gramsci describes the theory as a “passive” activity because it contains only a program of a “negative and preliminary kind … it does not envisage an ‘active and constructive phase of its own’” (SPN: 197) – no plans, no platform only the promise that the confluence of wills might create a new society on the basis of spontaneity. Gramsci argues that the Sorelian myth, indeed the philosophy of pure refusal and resistance will “cease to exist scattering into an infinity of individual wills that “in the positive phase then follow separate and conflicting paths” (SPN: 128–129).

To this dead end of pure voluntarism Gramsci counterposes the modern Prince:

The modern prince, the myth prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and to some extent has asserted itself in action, begins to take different form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.

(SPN: 129)

While “every party is the expression of a social group,” one of its main functions, under certain conditions is to “cement” relations between the group it represents and other “allied” groups to form, eventually at least, a new historical bloc. But in relation to the distinction between the war of position and the war of maneuver, Gramsci says that for all political parties, at some moments – when the war of position predominates – the cultural function takes precedence. The “cultural function” refers, in the case of the leading forces, the task of preserving the old morality and common sense or, for the insurgent and otherwise “marginal” forces to create a new morality and “good” sense. In this respect Gramsci’s ideas about the role of intellectuals in society cannot be separated from his conception of political organization. The party as a complex organism recruits, trains and deploys (Gramsci is forever evoking military metaphors) traditional intellectuals as well as “advanced” workers to wage the war for hegemony. The war is waged on many fronts: politics; the analysis of the economy; labor struggles; literature and art; education; the reading of historical experience and by extension the task of transforming bourgeois into radical and revolutionary consciousness. In short, in this moment, the party, and particularly its leading intellectuals, are engaged in the struggle for ideological hegemony against the dominant influence of the bourgeois media, their control over the most powerful institutions of civil society – schools, religion, cinema and other artistic organizations, most voluntary associations such as sports organizations and social clubs – to which Louis Althusser, in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is later to add the trade unions (Althusser 1970). This list expands the purview of the counterhegemonic forces.

The counterhegemony has two distinct “audiences.” The members of the social group of which the party is putatively the expression, many of whom are in the ideological thrall of the dominant class(es), major expressions of which are religion, various mythologies, nationalism, militarism and those of other allied social groups and classes who are equally the field upon which the struggle for hegemony is fought. Under the best of circumstances where the party has sufficient resources, especially cadres, it contests bourgeois hegemony on all fronts, not merely in the sphere of electoral politics.

In this regard Gramsci’s theory of the party was honed in the struggle to create the Communist Party after 1919 which, as expected, was itself rife with factions. For while the factions were united in opposition to the bourgeois parties and to the socialists who had forsaken revolutionary will for a policy of permanent compromise with the existing regime and envisioned social reform as the farthest horizon of politics, (a strategy that remains, against all reason, within all socialist and labor parties and the liberal wing of the US Democratic Party), the main issue among the Communists was the International’s post-revolutionary strategy of the united front. Gramsci’s reading of the united front was significantly different from many interpretations, notably that of the German KPD and perhaps the most important leader of the PCd’I (Partito Comunista d’Italia) in the years of the factory occupations of 1919–1920 and their aftermath, Amadeo Bordiga. Lenin’s famous pamphlet Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder had excoriated the left-communists for failing to come to terms with collapse of the revolutionary upsurge of the immediate post-war period in Western and Central Europe and to recognize that the capitalist world had entered a prolonged stabilization that militated against the possibility of the revolution. He addressed the position of the councilists, Korsch and the Dutch communists, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter and Henrietta Roland-Holtz, perspectives that could be described as intransigent with respect to social democracy and, more generally, to the peasant and middle class social formations. This intransigence was expressed, in the first place, in their sharp critique of the tendency among the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state to abandon workers’ councils, both in theory and in practice and to substitute the concept of the state as an organ of revolutionary transition. While Gramsci was by no means an orthodox Leninist, he was not prepared to forsake the Communist International even as it became increasingly subservient to the Soviet state and the Bolshevik party. Bordiga refused to acknowledge Lenin’s evaluation of the defeats of the German and Hungarian revolutions, the Turin factory occupations of 1919–1920, and the uprisings in Steel and Rail in the United States as occasions for entering a period of relative “capitalist stabilization” where Lenin argued, against the council communists that the strategy of the party had to shift from the revolutionary war to consolidation of the party’s position within civil society by forming alliances with the social-democratic led unions and other organizations.

The logic of the councilist position is to thrust the struggle “from below” in the factories and other sites of capitalist domination to a privileged position and to assign the party chiefly to an educational and ideological role. For the councilists, the seed of the revolution was direct action, the highest form of which is the mass strike. They envisioned not the capture of “state power” but the smashing of the state and its replacement by a network of councils that perform both the legislative and administrative functions of society. From a “government over men” they foresaw the administration of “things” and the transfer of all power to the councils, an echo of the slogan of the 1905 Russian Revolution. A decade later Korsch and Paul Mattick, a councilist, renounced the concept of the party itself as a hierarchical and bureaucratic form that impeded rather than advanced the workers’ cause.

At this juncture we encounter two important paths in which Gramsci’s ideas converge with those of Lenin: Gramsci foresees the party’s ultimate task as the achievement of “state power,” a task that, at the moment of the “final conflict” entails iron discipline analogous to that of an army. But the war of maneuver can only succeed to the extent that the party literally “merges” with the masses and in this sense risks and, hopefully, welcomes its self-destruction, its redundancy. Thus as the expression of a social group, the distinction between leaders and led, the historic gulf that separates elite from mass is entirely unacceptable, but only in the long run. To abolish inequality, the real hierarchies of economic and political power, requires leadership, a general staff, a tacit recognition that the party, for the time being is not yet a “conspiracy of equals” (the term conspiracy is that of the extreme left-wing of the French Revolution. Its key figure was Gracchus Babeuf who was killed by the Thermidor). Gramsci writes:

When does a party become historically necessary? When the conditions for its “triumph,” for its inevitable progress to state power, are at least in the process of formation and allow their future evolution … to be foreseen. … For a party to exist, three fundamental elements (three elements) have to converge:

1 A mass element composed of ordinary, average men, whose participation takes the form of discipline and loyalty, rather than any creative spirit or organizational ability. Although without them “the party would not exist” they are the necessary but not the sufficient force for success. Two other elements are necessary.

2 The principal cohesive element, which centralized nationally and renders effective and powerful a complex of forces which left to themselves would count for little or nothing. This element is endowed with “great cohesive, centralizing and disciplining powers”; and here is a key distinction “one speaks of generals without an army, but in reality it is easier to form an army than to form generals” hence the crucial task of the party to educate and train leaders.

3 “An intermediate element” really a mediating force between the first and the third, not only physically but also morally and intellectually.

(SPN: 152–153)

Clearly the second element is fundamental for performing the tasks of welding the mass into a fighting force but also to make sure the party survives the inevitable attacks from within and from without that accompany its relative strength. The attacks from the state are well known, both from the fascist rise to power and subsequent suppression of the opposition by coercion as well as propaganda and the frequent assaults by liberal democracies on the left in the name of the fight against terrorism and subversion of “free institutions” such as was in evidence during the 1920s and again in the 1950s against the Left in the United States.

The education and training of leadership is a major function of the party. Numerous socialist and communist parties and organizations since the beginning of the twentieth century have organized political schools, study groups on the “classics” of Marxism and anarchism and, for the so-called stratum of “advanced workers” recruited from the party’s own ranks and, especially, its trade union cadres, some have gone as far as to sponsor “general education” schools where students are exposed to philosophy, literature and general history as well as the important ideological texts. Gramsci himself acknowledges that the party must recruit from the ranks if only because there are simply not enough intellectuals who have affiliated with it. In this context Gramsci’s famous term “organic” intellectuals refers primarily to those who have sprung from the ranks of the workers and other subaltern social formations.

The organic intellectual is one whose work is that of expression of the world view of the proletariat or of any other class that aspires to power. All classes that aspire to attain or retain economic, political and ideological power recruit and, if necessary, train a social category of organic intellectuals. State colleges and universities are more or less adequate institutions for the education of the organic intellectuals of capital and of the state. Their curriculum, networks, administration are dedicated, more consciously than not, to the tasks of producing and reproducing the moral and intellectual capital of the prevailing system and of training a large corps of technical intellectuals for the professions – principally medicine, law, teaching, social services – and for the occupations associated with the development of the productive forces and the administration of the state: science and technology on the one hand, and the various bureaucratic skills such as accounting, economics, especially finance, management, public administration occupations such as planning and budget management.

Of course party intellectuals and other cadres must possess many of the same skills since many are trained in the same institutions as the organic and technical intellectuals of capital and the state. The problems for the party are twofold: on the one hand, it needs to incorporate many of the elements of bourgeois education into its work. After all, running an organization entails many of the same skills: membership lists must be maintained, fund-raising is a constant, bills must be paid, and, of course the party leader must be a good public speaker, a coherent writer and a thinker whose scope presupposes wide learning, most of which may be obtained in elite schools; on the other hand, while the actual functions of social-democratic and left-liberal politicians are often identic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Notes on the text
• Introduction: “Gramsci now”
• 1 Gramsci’s concept of political organization
• 2 Reading Gramsci now
• 3 Sinking roots: using Gramsci in contemporary Britain
• 4 Gramsci and Labriola: philology, philosophy of praxis
• 5 “Once again on the organic capacities of the working class”: Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor
• 6 Power and democracy: Gramsci and hegemony in America
• 7 Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will: reflections on political agency in the age of “empire”
• 8 Gramsci, in and on media
• 9 Common sense in Gramsci
• 10 The contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question”
• 11 Rethinking Gramsci: class, globalization, and historical bloc
• 12 Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” and socialist revolution in the Philippines
• Works cited