Gramsci #1: Preliminary discussion
The concept of hegemony is repeatedly brought up by the post-Marxist Left as justification for their political programme. Whether it is Tom Miller citing Antonio Gramsci as one of his inspirations or men like Laclau, Mouffe or the critical theorists, hegemony appears often as a replacement for the bedrock of Marxist theory on which it was originally based.
It is my contention that groups such as Compass are the modern successors to the Eurocommunists and philosophers such as Nicos Poulantzas. Their analysis, wittingly or unwittingly, has succumbed to the post-modernist attempt to undermine Marxism, and shares with that post-modernism the tendency to pick upon the most deterministic, least flexible and least realistic mode of Marxism available.
I want to see how much truth there is in their assessment (.doc) of key thinkers such as Gramsci. To do this, I will investigate the collection, Pre-Prison Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy. I shall then proceed to the Prison Notebooks. Terms such as ‘hegemony’, ‘sub-altern’ or ‘historical bloc’ need to be deconstructed to examine precisely what Gramsci was referring to when he used them.
There is also the need to examine, as with the Compass piece linked to above, whether or not these terms have maintained in common usage the meaning that Gramsci gave them. Finally, there will be a need, having resolved the differences between Gramsci and those who view themselves as his inheritors, to study how accurate I think Gramsci was in his analysis of the Italian state, the ruling class and how it maintained control.
At an early stage in my research, it seems that there are certainly grounds for doubting the most clichéd statements about Gramsci. For example, the editor of the Pre-Prison Writings discusses how the relative autonomy of economic and political struggle is a ‘characteristic Gramscian theme’ (p. x). However Bellamy himself seems to undermine this notion of economic and political struggle having a degree of autonomy.
He discusses how the leaders of the CGL preferred economic as opposed to political agitation and improvements (p. xli), something not uncommon even today. During the General Strike of 1926, this was a correlative of those who were afraid that the strike would become a revolution. Economic struggle produced political demands, and opposition to those political demands had both economic and political ramifications.
Similarly, Bellamy admits that Gramsci’s Study of the Italian Situation conceived of two Fascist factions with primarily economic motivations (p. xxv). Gramsci’s thinking on the Italian state was underpinned by an economic determinant; the existence of ‘a broad band of intermediate classes’ (p. 298) kept the Italian state weak and hindered the exercise of political hegemony over the working class.
Clearly, in many respects, Gramsci was a traditional Marxist. Just how far that proves to be the case shall be examined in subsequent articles.
Mmm, and again a longish comment that in my hurry too bash out I forgot to save appears to have gone missing (and it covered some of the stuff I had said in an earlier missing comment.
Anyway, very briefly instead
a) I look forward to your investigation of the real Gramci
b) he has been appropriated inappropriately by much of British left and for understandable reasons incl ‘hippie 60s, Thomas Kuhn and ‘pardaigm shifts’, late translation
c) Laclau and Mouffe misappropriate him post 1884 (but not before)
d) I think you WILL find him more economic reality and Marxist than we have all been led to believe by L and M (and others)
e) But not all in L and M is worthless
If the other longer comments terms up, delete this
Good article.
Gramsci was really quite a traditional Marxist, and I think a lot of modern ‘Gramscians’ ignore that Gramsci felt the need to use a certain code to get past the prison censors. As such, as you suggest, the development of the idea of hegemony (which was quite new – kind of post-Leninist, developing the ‘two cultures’ idea) and the theory of praxis get reified as being post-Marxist or Marxian rather than Marxist.
If you read the Prison Notebooks, you’ll see that Gramsci’s use of the term culture is intensely political. It is tied up entirely in notions of class consciousness.
What Gramsci adds to the gumbo of Marxist thought is that the battle is harder than it had often previously been supposed. That there needs to be a revolution in people’s minds as well as in the streets. To turn that into a non-revolutionary idea is utterly wrong-headed.
I think the link between Compassites and Eurocommunists is a real tangible one as well as an ideological one. The Eurocommunist/Democratic Left/New Politics Network/Compass path is a real one.
It’s not exactly a secret. They cite Gramsci on the Compass website: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/uploads/documents/GramsciforCompass.doc
Thank you for that link Rory – I’d read that piece about a year ago, I think, around the time I first started blogging. Have never been able to find it since. Party time.
I look forward to this series. I was shocked when I actually read Gramsci himself in the mid-1990s, having known him via the cultural studies post-Marxists like the Marxism Today crew. Reading him I found he was very much a harcore Leninist and, in many ways, quite an orthodox Marxist. However, his work does represent a huge advance on orthodox Marxism, even if it has been misappopriated by the likes of Laclau.
I don’t know what orthodox Marxism is, truthfully. Certainly Gramsci marched more in step with Lenin and Trotsky than with the Second Internationalists – and that school has survived to this day. I’d like to think myself part of it.
To say Gramsci (or the others) differed from Marx is, I suppose, true enough – but I don’t think it requires a special effort at exegesis to see in Marx embryonic versions of Gramsci’s hegemony or Lenin’s analysis of the nature of leadership and so on.
The way that, for me, Gramsci represented an advance on the orthodox Marxism that the Second International reformists like Kautsky shared with the Third International is precisely in the extent to which he returned to and recovered the real theories of Marx himself.
When I use the term “orthodox Marxism” I mean a simplistic base/superstructure model, a certain degree of economic determinism, a view of history as governed by “iron laws”, a 19th century faith in science, and too little attention on the core Marxist issues of alienation, exploitation, proletarian subjectivity and the objective antagonism between capital and labour.
All versions of Marxism have the danger of misinterpreting the ‘economy in the final instance’ rule of Marx I suppose, 3I as much as 2I. In that sense, yes, I’d agree Gramsci was an advance on ‘orthodox’ Marxism – but similarly so were the better writings of Lenin and Trotsky.
Some of the lesser writings of Gramsci likewise fall into strange areas – such as a few articles in which I noticed an epistemology that might have caught Lenin’s ire in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, had Lenin been familiar with the works.