Perspectives on Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci is widely known today for his profound impact on social andpolitical thought, critical theory and literary methodology. This volume bringstogether 12 eminent scholars from humanities and social sciences to demonstratethe importance and relevance of Gramsci to their respective fields of inquiry.They bring into focus a number of central issues raised in Gramsci’s PrisonNotebooks and in other writings such as his Prison Letters including: hegemony,common sense, civil society, subaltern studies, cultural analysis, media andfilm studies, postcolonial studies, international relations, linguistics, culturalanthropology, and historiography.

The book makes an important, and up-to-date, contribution to the many acad-emic debates and disciplines which utilize Gramsci’s writings for theoreticalsupport; the chapters are highly representative of the most advanced contempor-ary work on Gramsci. Contributors include: Michael Denning – highly respectedin the field of cultural studies; Stephen Gill – an eminent figure in internationalrelations; Epifanio San Juan Jr. – a major writer in post-colonial theory; JosephButtigieg – translator of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; Stanley Aronowitz – adistinguished 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-colonialstudies, anthropology, subaltern studies, cultural studies, linguistics andinternational relations.

Joseph Francese is Professor at Michigan State University. He is Senior Editorof Italian Culture, and is the author of numerous articles on topics in Renaissanceand contemporary literature. He has written monographs on Pasolini, postmodernnarrative, and Italian cultural politics in the 1950s. His most recent book isSocially Symbolic Acts: The Historicizing Fictions of Umberto Eco, VincenzoConsolo, and Antonio Tabucchi.

Routledge studies in social and political thought

1 Hayek and AfterHayekian liberalism as a researchprogrammeJeremy Shearmur

2 Conflicts in Social ScienceEdited by Anton van Harskamp

3 Political Thought of André GorzAdrian Little

4 Corruption, Capitalism andDemocracyJohn Girling

5 Freedom and Culture in WesternSocietyHans Blokland

6 Freedom in EconomicsNew perspectives in normativeanalysisEdited by Jean-Francois Laslier,Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Graveland Alain Trannoy

7 Against PoliticsOn government, anarchy and orderAnthony de Jasay

8 Max Weber and Michel FoucaultParallel life worksArpad Szakolczai

9 The Political Economy of CivilSociety and Human RightsG.B. Madison

10 On Durkheim’s ElementaryForms of Religious LifeEdited by W.S.F. Pickering, W. Watts Miller and N.J. Allen

11 Classical IndividualismThe supreme importance of eachhuman beingTibor R. Machan

12 The Age of ReasonsQuixotism, sentimentalism andpolitical economy in eighteenth-century BritainWendy Motooka

13 Individualism in ModernThoughtFrom Adam Smith to HayekLorenzo Infantino

14 Property and Power in SocialTheoryA study in intellectual rivalryDick Pels

15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of aCritical Social TheoryA critique of Giddens, Habermasand BhaskarNigel Pleasants

16 Marxism and Human NatureSean Sayers

17 Goffman and Social OrganizationStudies in a sociological legacyEdited by Greg Smith

18 Situating HayekPhenomenology and the neo-liberalprojectMark J. Smith

19 The Reading of Theoretical TextsPeter Ekegren

20 The Nature of CapitalMarx after FoucaultRichard Marsden

21 The Age of ChanceGambling in western cultureGerda Reith

22 Reflexive Historical SociologyArpad Szakolczai

23 Durkheim and RepresentationsEdited by W.S.F. Pickering

24 The Social and PoliticalThought of Noam ChomskyAlison Edgley

25 Hayek’s Liberalism and itsOriginsHis idea of spontaneous order andthe Scottish EnlightenmentChristina Petsoulas

26 Metaphor and the Dynamics ofKnowledgeSabine Maasen and Peter Weingart

27 Living with MarketsJeremy Shearmur

28 Durkheim’s SuicideA century of research and debateEdited by W.S.F. Pickering andGeoffrey Walford

29 Post-MarxismAn intellectual historyStuart Sim

30 The Intellectual as StrangerStudies in spokespersonshipDick Pels

31 Hermeneutic Dialogue andSocial ScienceA critique of Gadamer andHabermasAustin Harrington

32 Methodological IndividualismBackground, history and meaningLars Udehn

33 John Stuart Mill and Freedomof ExpressionThe genesis of a theoryK.C. O’Rourke

34 The Politics of Atrocity andReconciliationFrom terror to traumaMichael Humphrey

35 Marx and WittgensteinKnowledge, morality, politicsEdited by Gavin Kitching andNigel Pleasants

36 The Genesis of ModernityArpad Szakolczai

37 Ignorance and LibertyLorenzo Infantino

38 Deleuze, Marx and PoliticsNicholas Thoburn

39 The Structure of Social TheoryAnthony King

40 Adorno, Habermas and theSearch for a Rational SocietyDeborah Cook

41 Tocqueville’s Moral andPolitical ThoughtNew liberalismM.R.R. Ossewaarde

42 Adam Smith’s PoliticalPhilosophyThe invisible hand andspontaneous orderCraig Smith

43 Social and Political Ideas ofMahatma GandiBidyut Chakrabarty

44 Counter-enlightenmentsFrom the eighteenth century to the presentGraeme Garrard

45 The Social and PoliticalThought of George OrwellA reassessmentStephen Ingle

46 HabermasRescuing the public spherePauline Johnson

47 The Politics and Philosophy ofMichael OakeshottStuart Isaacs

48 Pareto and Political TheoryJoseph Femia

49 German Political PhilosophyThe metaphysics of lawChris Thornhill

50 The Sociology of ElitesMichael Hartmann

51 Deconstructing HabermasLasse Thomassen

52 Young Citizens and New MediaLearning for democraticparticipationEdited by Peter Dahlgren

53 Gambling, Freedom andDemocracyPeter J. Adams

54 The Quest for JewishAssimilation in Modern SocialScienceAmos Morris-Reich

55 Frankfurt School Perspectiveson Globalization, Democracy,and the LawWilliam E. Scheuerman

56 HegemonyStudies in consensus and coercionEdited by Richard Howson andKylie Smith

57 Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday LifeMajia Holmer Nadesan

58 Sustainability and Securitywithin Liberal SocietiesLearning to live with the futureEdited by Stephen Gough andAndrew Stables

59 The Mythological State and itsEmpireDavid Grant

60 Globalizing DissentEssays on Arundhati RoyEdited by Ranjan Ghosh andAntonia Navarro-Tejero

61 The Political Philosophy ofMichel FoucaultMark G.E. Kelly

62 Democratic LegitimacyFabienne Peter

63 Edward Said and the Literary,Social, and Political WorldEdited by Ranjan Ghosh

64 Perspectives on GramsciPolitics, culture and social theoryEdited by Joseph Francese

Perspectives on GramsciPolitics, culture and social theory

Edited by Joseph Francese

First published 2009by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2009 Joseph Francese for selection and editorial matter; individualcontributors their contribution

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced orutilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writingfrom the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPerspectives on Gramsci: politics, culture and social theory/edited byJoseph Francese.

p. cm. – (Routledge studies in social and political thought; 64)Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937. 2. Communism–Italy–History. 3. Political science–Italy–History. I. Francese, Joseph.

HX289.7.G73P47 2009335.4092–dc222008044850

ISBN10: 0-415-48527-4 (hbk)ISBN10: 0-203-87907-4 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-48527-2 (hbk)ISBN13: 978-0-203-87907-8 (ebk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’scollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

ISBN 0-203-87907-4 Master e-book ISBN

Contents

Notes on contributors xiNotes on the text xiv

Introduction: “Gramsci now” 1J O S E P H F R A N C E S E

1 Gramsci’s concept of political organization 7S T A N L E Y A R O N O W I T Z

2 Reading Gramsci now 20J O S E P H A . B U T T I G I E G

3 Sinking roots: using Gramsci in contemporary Britain 33K A T E C R E H A N

4 Gramsci and Labriola: philology, philosophy of praxis 50R O B E R T O M . D A I N O T T O

5 “Once again on the organic capacities of the working class”: Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor 69M I C H A E L D E N N I N G

6 Power and democracy: Gramsci and hegemony in America 80B E N E D E T T O F O N T A N A

7 Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will:reflections on political agency in the age of “empire” 97S T E P H E N G I L L

8 Gramsci, in and on media 110M A R C I A L A N D Y

9 Common sense in Gramsci 122G U I D O L I G U O R I

10 The contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s views on Italy’s“Southern question” 134F R A N K R O S E N G A R T E N

11 Rethinking Gramsci: class, globalization, andhistorical bloc 145D A V I D F . R U C C I O

12 Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” andsocialist revolution in the Philippines 163E P I F A N I O S A N J U A N J R .

Works cited 186Index 199

x Contents

Contributors

Stanley Aronowitz has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University ofNew York since 1983, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology. He isdirector of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at theGraduate Center. He is author or editor of 23 books including: Just around theCorner: the Paradox of the Jobless Recovery; How Class Works; and FalsePromises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. He is found-ing editor of the journal Social Text and is currently a member of its advisoryboard, and sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Critique and Ethnography. Heis also co-editor of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination.He has published extensively in publications such as Harvard EducationalReview; Social Policy; The Nation; and the American Journal of Sociology.

Joseph A. Buttigieg, the William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English, has been amember of the Notre Dame faculty since 1980 and a Fellow of the NanovicInstitute for European Studies since its inception. A specialist in modern liter-ature and critical theory, his more recent work has focused on the relationshipbetween culture and politics in twentieth-century Europe. In addition tonumerous articles, Professor Buttigieg has authored a book on James Joyce’saesthetics, A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective. He is also theeditor and translator of the multi-volume complete critical edition of AntonioGramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Several of his articles on Gramsci have beentranslated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. A found-ing member of the International Gramsci Society, he now serves as its presid-ent. The Italian Minister of Culture appointed him to a commission of expertsto oversee the preparation of the edizione nazionale of Gramsci’s writings.He is also a member of the editorial collective of boundary 2.

Kate Crehan is Professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center,CUNY. She is an anthropologist who has carried out fieldwork in Zambia andBritain. Her publications include: The Fractured Community: Landscapes ofPower and Gender in Rural Zambia and Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology.

Roberto M. Dainotto is Professor of Romance Studies and of Literature at DukeUniversity. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures,

Communities and Europe (in Theory). He has edited Racconti americani del’900, and his new research project is a book on the debate on the “philosophyof praxis” from Labriola to Gramsci.

Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies atYale University. He is the author of Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels andWorking Class Culture in America; Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology inthe British Spy Thriller; The Cultural Front: The Laboring of AmericanCulture in the Twentieth Century; and Culture in the Age of Three Worlds.He is currently leading a working group on globalization and culture.

Benedetto Fontana teaches political philosophy and American political thoughtat Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author ofHegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli,and the coeditor of Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoricand Democracy. He has published in various journals, such as boundary 2;History of Political Thought; Journal of Classical Sociology; Journal of theHistory of Ideas; Italian Culture; and The Philosophical Forum. Currently heis working on Antonio Gramsci and his notions of politics and the state, onMachiavelli and his Romans, and on politics and rhetoric.

Joseph Francese is Professor at Michigan State University. He is Senior Editorof Italian Culture, and is the author of numerous articles on topics in Renais-sance and contemporary literature. He has written monographs on Pasolini,postmodern narrative, and Italian cultural politics in the 1950s. His mostrecent book is Socially Symbolic Acts: The Historicizing Fictions of UmbertoEco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi.

Stephen Gill is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at YorkUniversity, Toronto, Canada and Senior Associate Member, St Antony’sCollege, Oxford specializing in International Relations and PoliticalEconomy. His publications include The Global Political Economy (withDavid Law); American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission; Gramsci,Historical Materialism and International Relations; and Power, Productionand Social Reproduction (with Isabella Bakker). His Power and Resistance inthe New World Order was the winner of Choice, Outstanding AcademicAward.

Marcia Landy is Distinguished Service Professor of English/Film Studies witha secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian Languagesand Literatures Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books includeFascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1929–1943; Imitations ofLife: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama; British Genres: Cinemaand Society, 1930–1960; Film, Politics, and Gramsci; Cinematic Uses of thePast; The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality and Spectacle in ItalianCinema 1929–1943; Italian Film; The Historical Film: History and Memoryin Cinema; Stars: The Film Reader (co-edited with Lucy Fischer); Monty

xii Contributors

Python’s Flying Circus; Stardom Italian Style: Screen performance andPersonality in Italian Cinema.

Guido Liguori is Professor of History of Modern Political Thought at theUniversity of Calabria and vice-president of the International GramsciSociety-Italia. The editor of Critica Marxista, Liguori has published numer-ous essays on twentieth-century political philosophy and on the Marxisttradition in Italy. He also enjoys an international reputation as one of themost widely-cited Gramscian scholars. In addition to his seminal workGramsci Conteso, Liguori is the author of Sentieri Gramsciani and, withChiara Meta, Gramsci: Guida alla Lettura. Liguori has also co-edited (withFabio Frosini) Le Parole di Gramsci.

Frank Rosengarten is Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative Literatureat the City University of New York. Among his publications are VascoPratolini: The Development of a Social Novelist; The Italian Anti-FascistPress; Silvio Trentin: From Interventionism to the Resistance; The Writingsof the Young Marcel Proust; and Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James andthe Struggle for a New Society. He is editor of the English language transla-tion of Letters from Prison of Antonio Gramsci, and is a co-founder, withMichael Brown, of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy.

David F. Ruccio is Professor of Economics and Policy Studies, University ofNotre Dame, and Editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics,Culture, and Society. His most recent book is Economic Representations:Academic and Everyday. He is currently working on three new books:Planning, Development, and Globalization: Essays in Marxian ClassAnalysis; What’s Wrong with Exploitation?, and Economics, the University,and the World.

Epifanio San Juan Jr is Director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center andCo-director of the board of Philippine Forum, New York City. He wasvisiting professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University ofthe Philippines, Quezon City, and will be a fellow at the W. E. B. Du BoisInstitute, Harvard University, in 2009. He has received awards from theRockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Society and Culture (Ohio), MELUS(Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), the Gustav Myers HumanRights Center, the Association for Asian American Studies, and a CentennialAward for Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. San Juan isauthor of US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. He is a memberof the advisory boards of Atlantic Studies; Nature Society and Thought;Amerasia Journal; Cultural Logic; and other international journals.

Contributors xiii

Notes on the text

Gramsci employs the phrase “moderno Principe” (with lower case for“moderno” and upper case for “Principe”) in two ways: (a) as the title of a bookthat he is thinking of writing and that he conceives as the modern analogue ofMachiavelli’s Prince; (b) as the political party (specifically, the communistparty) that he conceives as the collective modern analogue of Machiavelli’sfigure of the Prince. In such instances, it is here rendered as “modernPrince.” Similarly, “Southern question” is rendered in upper case when itrefers to a lengthy essay written by Gramsci, Alcuni temi sulla quistionemeridionale [Some Aspects of the Southern Question], in 1926; when it refers tothe global “South,” the impoverished, underdeveloped areas of our planet, it isrendered as “Southern question.”

Introduction“Gramsci now”

Joseph Francese

The chapters collected in this volume were presented at a conference hosted by theCollege of Arts and Letters of Michigan State University in early November 2007.The college, as part of its research, teaching, and land-grant missions, wished tooffer lectures with broad appeal among college and university faculty and graduatestudents, undergraduates, and the community. To that end, 12 internationallyrecognized scholars, from diverse fields throughout the humanities and socialsciences, were invited to campus for a weekend of intense discussions centeringon the results of research projects that utilized the thought and writings of AntonioGramsci (1891–1937). The conference attracted an exceptionally broad audience;the high level of success was due in part to the support offered by Karin Wurst,Dean of Arts and Letters, the efforts of members of the College’s dedicated staff,especially Betsy Caldwell, and to the intellectual reputations of the participants.However, it was also due in large measure to the ongoing interest in Gramsci in amultitude of scholarly fields.

The work of Gramsci was chosen as the topic for the symposium because theencyclopedic breadth and uncommon depth of his thought are more unique thanrare. His impact on social and political thought, critical theory and literarymethodology is profound. Gramsci was an Italian journalist, activist, and socialand political theorist whose writings are heavily concerned with the analysis ofpopular and elite culture and political theory. He is notable as a highly originalthinker within the Marxist tradition, especially for his ideas concerning the roleof civil society as lynchpin between the economic base and the ideologicalsuperstructure of societies. He is also renowned for his theorization of theimportance of cultural hegemony as a non-coercive means of maintainingbourgeois dominance in capitalist societies.

The title of the symposium, Gramsci Now, reflected the relevance and useful-ness of Gramsci to the understanding of our contemporary world. Indeed, all paperspresented at the conference discussed the applicability of Gramsci’s thought tocrucial questions at the crux of contemporary US and world civilization.

In his introduction to Raymond Rosenthal’s translation of Gramsci’s Lettersfrom Prison, Frank Rosengarten, one of the participants in our symposium, tells ofthe “immediate and prolonged” impact in Italy of those letters after theirpublication in the early 1950s. This effect, Rosengarten writes, was partially

attributable to their artistic value. Indeed, the letters cast into high relief theprofound humanity that animated Gramsci’s activism and all of his writings, anattribute that comes forth with special clarity thanks to the exceptional beauty of hisepistolary style. But this effect was also due to the high ethical standards to whichGramsci held himself, a trait that emanates with great clarity from his epistolary. Inone of the more poignant prison letters Gramsci describes himself as “simply anordinary man, who has deep convictions, which [he] would not barter for anythingin the world.” In point of fact, Gramsci could have quickly and easily avoidedprison and lived a life of comfort and influence had he come to some compromisewith his jailers. His ethical coherence precluded such compromise. In fact,Gramsci’s moral fiber and his courage – along with his remarkable erudition, greatintellect, and extraordinary insight into an exceptionally wide range of issues, inaddition to his courage and physical resilience – makes him an uncommon man.

The conditions of Gramsci’s incarceration are proof that the fascist regimenot only intended to silence him, but to stop his mind from functioning. YetGramsci succeeded in transforming the discomforts and forced idleness ofprison into a monumentous contribution to twentieth-century thought. Eventhough prison killed Gramsci before the ideas collected in the Prison Notebookscould be transformed into studies of the history of Italian intellectuals in thenineteenth century, the theory of history and historiography, and popular culture,as he had planned, Gramsci’s legacy lives on in the many concepts we cull fromhis writings such as hegemony, modern Prince, subalternity, organic intellectualand national-popular literature, to name a few.

In referencing a national-popular literature, I would like to quickly point outthat in post-World War II Italy Gramsci’s readers attempted to breathe life intohis thoughts with new art forms that could be considered both national andpopular because they spoke to and reflected the lives of the masses. In the artsthis idea occasioned the rise of neorealism, a trend whose proponents believedthat they were not practitioners of merely another esthetic; for them neorealismwas both an ethic and a banner to be defended. And, I would submit, it could nothave been otherwise, because what unites and defines the Prison Notebooks, theexploration of what Gramsci calls the philosophy of praxis, was anything butanother bookish concept. It was of a piece with the political and cultural struggleto which Gramsci dedicated his life. It was both a means for understanding thereal living conditions of the working classes and for putting an end to centuriesof ignorance and to social, economic, and political oppression.

Through the priceless legacy of the Prison Notebooks Gramsci the thinkersucceeded where Gramsci the politician failed: the fragmented thoughts col-lected therein are a tribute to what a human mind can accomplish even under themost adverse conditions. They continue to spark what Thomas Kuhn calls anintellectual revolution, a change in paradigm: we think, and perceive and actdifferently because of Gramsci. Indeed, one cannot help but be struck by theenduring value of Gramsci’s writings in Italy and far outside their country oforigin while the chapters collected in this volume allow us to hear Gramsci’swritings resonate through a broad array of fields of intellectual inquiry.

2 J. Francese

For example, in the present volume Marcia Landy focuses on the uses andabuses of media (which dwarf those analyzed in the Prison Notebooks) from thepost-World War II era to the final decade of the twentieth century and the begin-ning of the twenty-first in a Gramscian context. In “Gramsci, in and on media” shetraces the impact of Gramsci’s rich observations on history, culture, folklore,language on films and on critical writings about media from the 1960s to thepresent, so as to identify elements of continuity and difference relevant for arethinking of the present and future fate of cultural politics. Another importantexample of the value of Gramsci’s thought to contemporary cultural studies is KateCrehan’s “Sinking roots: using Gramsci in contemporary Britain.” Crehan main-tains that Gramsci’s writings on intellectuals and the production of knowledgeprovide a useful starting-point for analysis of the role of experts and the nature ofexpertise in present-day societies. The specific area of expertise on which herchapter focuses is that of the visual arts, drawing on data from a study of acontemporary British arts organization, Free Form Arts Trust. Free Form has a longhistory of working in impoverished neighborhoods and central to this history hasbeen the attempt to find ways in which those living in such neighborhoods mightplay a more significant role in shaping their built environment. Understanding thenature of the relationship between Free Form artists as experts, and the residents ofthe neighborhoods in which they work requires, however, going beyond conven-tional definitions of ‘art.’ Crehan’s chapter explores how Gramsci’s insights mighthelp us understand the particular nature of this relationship.

The utility of Gramscian thought to contemporary post-colonial studies is thesubject of chapters by Epifanio San Juan Jr. and Frank Rosengarten. Rosen-garten argues that Gramsci’s evolving perspectives on Italy’s “Southern ques-tion,” while circumscribed within the relations of force in the Italy of Gramsci’stime, are also relevant to a larger set of issues having to do with the history ofcolonialism from the late nineteenth century to the anti-colonial struggles thattook place in the wake of World War II. An important and controversial aspectof Rosengarten’s chapter is the claim that Gramsci followed lines of inquiry intoItalian and European politics that, in some respects, anticipated trends of thoughtamong various theorists of postcolonialism. In “Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the‘national-popular’ as a strategy for socialist revolution,” San Juan argues how,within the overarching framework of historical materialism, Gramsci’s conceptof the national-popular is a most innovative tool in postcolonial studies andinternational relations. San Juan’s contention is that Gramsci’s “open Marxism”is founded on the primacy of human agency in the shaping of history. Thisagency takes the form of the “nation-people” in a society characterized by classinequality, particularly in peripheral or ‘Third World’ formations where thepeasantry predominates. As a theorist of historical blocs, Gramsci’s principle ofanalyzing the changing relations of forces in any specific conjuncture maycorrect the stereotyped notion of a mechanical class analysis often ascribed toorthodox Marxism. At the same time, Gramsci, unlike postmarxists, neverabandons the primacy of the social relations of production (which are notreducible to market economics) as the key to the mix of coercion and consent in

Introduction 3

any strategy for socialist revolution. Thus, San Juan’s chapter is exploratory andexperimental in its attempt to apply the heuristic theory of the national-popularto an existing neocolonial dependent formation, the Philippines.

For his part, David F. Ruccio, in “Rethinking Gramsci: class, globalization, andhistorical bloc,” explains how the project of Rethinking Marxism, the journal heedits, overlaps with Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxian theory in four key areas(epistemology, methodology, the focus on class analysis, and ethics) and how thedifferences between the two projects make them complementary (to explain:Rethinking Marxism’s development of Marxian class analysis provides what ismissing in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony). Thus, Ruccio argues that the twoapproaches can be usefully combined to rethink globalization and to carry out ananalysis of movements and changes in the current dominant historical bloc.

Stephen Gill contends that Gramsci’s writings are of continuing relevance toa theory of global political agency in the emerging world order of the earlytwenty-first century. In “Political agency and world order in an age of ‘empire’ ”he utilizes Gramsci’s conception of a critical historical materialist method andGramsci’s reflections on the relations between rulers and ruled in the globalrelations of force to identify some of the key conditions of existence that nowshape the political limits of the possible for progressive social forces.

Benedetto Fontana explores the ways in which Gramsci and his thought havebeen used in American politics. In “The uses and abuses of Gramsci” he assertsthat both the left and the right in the United States meet on common ground –that of pluralism. Conservatives exploit Gramsci’s thought to mask the inher-ently subordinate and reactive character of their politics in their critique ofthe progressive left, while the identity and diversity politics of the left is but there-translation of Madison’s multiplicity of factions in contemporary language,modified to include groups whose existence Madison could hardly dream of.Indeed, the linking together of class, race, gender, and gay politics by the leftreproduces Madison’s conception of factional politics. When all is said anddone, in reproducing the pluralism of Madison and Hamilton, the left reinforcesthe prevailing hegemonic conception of politics.

In “Gramsci’s concept of political organization” Stanley Aronowitz arguesthat Gramsci’s writings on education and intellectuals must be seen in the contextof the distinction Gramsci draws between the “war of maneuver” – that is themoment of direct assault on the power of the capitalist state – and the “war ofposition” – what the party does in a period of relative political and economicstability. This leads Aronowitz to conclude that, in addition to direct practicalinterventions in current reform struggles, the main work of the Gramscian party isin the fields of education and culture – particularly the creation and maintenanceof institutions (such as autonomous media, political schools, books and pam-phlets) that contest the prevailing bourgeois common sense and pose the altern-ative of “good sense.” Such a ‘party’ cannot be conceived as chiefly an electoralvehicle for achieving reforms. Rather, it is, at best, a powerful intellectual force,throughout society, that succeeds in posing the burning questions facing thepeople and, finally, organizing for the solution of those problems.

4 J. Francese

Roberto M. Dainotto’s chapter, “Gramsci and Labriola: philology, philosophy ofpraxis,” is a philological examination of the locution “philosophy of praxis” whichfirst appears in Antonio Labriola’s third essay on historical materialism, Discor-rendo di Socialismo e di Filosofia (1897). Dainotto’s thesis is that the link Labriola–Gramsci may be more relevant than the canonical Croce–Gramsci in fully under-standing the sense of Gramscianism. In “Common sense in Gramsci” Guido Liguorianalyzes how Gramsci utilizes the term “common sense.” Liguori argues that in theNotebooks Gramsci does not proffer an unequivocal or ambiguous evaluation of“common sense,” but instead uses it as is a popularized form of “ideology.” InGramsci’s parlance, “common sense” is a sort of “people’s philosophy” bereft ofclass consciousness, inevitably subjected to the hegemony of the thought of thedominant classes, which, because it is more highly articulated and elaborated, neverfails to carry the day. Gramsci argues that society’s subaltern strata, with the help ofthe revolutionary party and its intellectuals, must leave “common sense” behind andacquire an autonomous “conception of the world” capable of competing with theideologies of the dominant classes and challenging those ideologies for hegemony.

Joseph A. Buttigieg, in “Reading Gramsci now,” considers how Gramsci’sanalyses of how power operates and is sustained in the modern state continue toshed light on the interactions of culture, politics, and power in a world that hasbecome much more complex than his. Gramsci’s enduring value, Buttigiegcontends, comes to the fore when we unmoor Gramsci from the circumstancesthat generated his work through a complex task of translation – the kind oftranslation that Gramsci performed in his interpretation and use of Machiavelli.1

For Michael Denning – “‘once again on the organic capacities of the workingclass’: Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor” – Gramsci’s writings begin from hisengagement with working-class movements and subaltern life. Thus, he conteststhe position of commentators who have assumed that work – the centerpiece ofGramsci’s early factory council writings – recedes in importance in his later writ-ings, particularly the Prison Notebooks wherein the council gives way to the partyand the factory to the ethical state. While Gramsci is most often seen as a theorist ofthe state and civil society, a theorist of the “superstructures” – religion, culture, edu-cation, intellectuals, Denning proposes that the centrality of work to Gramsci’sthinking is the source of the continuing power of Gramsci’s intellectual legacy.

It may be difficult to glean from the brief allusions just made to the contents of thisvolume that it is not the intent of the authors or of the editor to come forth with acoherent theory. In fact, the proposed volume is neither a meta-commentary onGramsci, nor a critical piece with a specific target it intends to critique. Rather, thecollection underscores both the way Gramscian categories are being used, or couldbe used, in different fields. The result, hopefully, is a much richer, more articulateduse of Gramsci’s many broad and multifaceted interests than would be reachedhad the intention been that of attempting to form a Gramscian school.

Indeed, the basic purpose of Gramsci Now is to provide readers who are inter-ested in the Sardinian revolutionary (whose name and concepts recur with greatfrequency in the work of humanists and social scientists) with an immediate

Introduction 5

sense of how (and why) leading scholars from a wide range of fields findGramsci useful in their scholarship. The point, then, is not so much to explainhow Gramscian research relates to current trends such as postmodernism,subaltern studies, etc., but rather to communicate how scholars – working in thehumanities, social sciences, and other areas of scholarly inquiry – read Gramsciand are now employing his concepts in their work.

Thus, the intention of the volume is not to provide a survey or a retrospectiveof the state of Gramscian scholarship. Moreover, given the volume’s attempt toreflect the interaction of Gramsci’s own interests, the chapters are more likely toprovide readers with fresh points of departure. The chapters, individually andcollectively, implicitly cast into high relief the fact that Gramsci is not being usedin a common way throughout the academy, and reflect how different Gramsciancategories and theories are being used in diverse ways in different fields.

At the same time, it must be underscored how the internal coherence of thevolume comes fully into view when one looks at all the chapters as an ensemble,for only then will it be possible to appreciate how various threads of Gramsci’sthought intertwine in the Prison Notebooks and how his various concepts enrichand reinforce one another. In other words, there is an attempt to reflect throughthis volume Gramsci’s own thought processes. The chapters are ordered alpha-betically by author, rather than being grouped by topical subdivisions (a way oforganizing that would be to some extent artificial and imposed from on high) toallow readers the creative freedom to pursue the volume in their own individualway. There is no need to peruse the collection in a traditional, passive, page-by-page fashion. Instead, a more active, readerly path – one that reflects the mannerin which Gramscian concepts overlap and interact in the Notebooks, and thatsees Gramscian concepts and categories interacting at a cognitive level – isimplicitly encouraged.

In sum, the proposed volume is a set of chapters from diverse individualsfrom a broad array of intellectual fields who have looked closely at Gramsci’swork. The direct access of many of the scholars represented here to the body ofhis writings differentiates their research from that of the overwhelming majorityof critics in the English-speaking world – who have utilized Gramscian conceptsin their scholarship and have successfully adopted and adapted Gramsciancategories by taking them out of a very complicated network of relationshipswithin the Notebooks. Because of this direct access to the Notebooks, theconcepts for which the Sardinian revolutionary is best known are restored in thisvolume to their very rich, original network of cognitive connections.

Note

1 I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to heartily thank Joe Buttigieg for hishelp throughout this endeavor, from the early planning stages of the above-referencedconference through the editing of this volume. I would also like to thank David F. Ruccioand Frank Rosengarten for their assistance at various critical junctures in this process.

6 J. Francese

1 Gramsci’s concept of politicalorganization

Stanley Aronowitz

Introduction

Since the publication of his Prison Notebooks1 after World War II, the figure ofAntonio Gramsci has loomed large in the radical imagination. Gramsci has beenreceived, along with Georg Lukács and the critical theorists of the FrankfurtSchool, Karl Korsch, and especially Rosa Luxemburg – who might be under-stood as the mother of this tendency – as part of a broader effort to generatewhat has been termed an “open Marxism” against the doctrinaire theorists of theSecond and Third Internationals who ossified historical materialism in determin-istic formulae. Like Luxemburg and Korsch, Gramsci, a radicalized “traditionalintellectual,” was an active participant both in the Socialist Party and inthe formation of the Communist International and its Italian section. LikeLuxemburg, Lukács and Korsch among many others of his pedigree, as SocialistParty militant he joined Lenin in the call for revolutionary opposition to WorldWar II, and eventually for the organization of a party of a “new type,” andfinally for a break with the parties of the Second International. That is, inopposition to the growing reformist and electoralist trend of twentieth-centurysocial democracy, Gramsci argued for a conception of political organizationwhose central precepts are to upend capitalism root and branch by any meansnecessary, including revolutionary action. Like Lenin he not only asserted, butdeveloped a method for implementing the key role of professional intellectualsrecruited, largely, from the ranks of the traditional intellectuals and the mostadvanced industrial workers. Yet, despite the fact that he, along with manyothers, were constrained to forge an anti-reformist alliance with Lenin, Trotsky,Bukharin and other leaders of the Bolsheviks, his approach to questions ofpolitical strategy reflected an acute appreciation of what Korsch was later to callthe “principle of historical specification” in forging a theory of social change,where specification refers to conditions of social time and social space, theparticular aspects of national history, its economic aspects, but also the cultural,philosophical and political features that constitute the make-up of the nation.2 Atthe same time, Gramsci was an internationalist and never held to the Stalinistslogan of building “socialism in one country.” But he remained acutely attunedto the specificity of Italian history, its uneven economic and social development,

and the forms of cultural production that corresponded to the struggle for Italiannationality, as opposed to its centuries of chronic regionalism.

English and French speaking readers relied until very recently on severaldifferent versions of excerpts from the Notebooks, his prison writings, and thepolitical writings published before his incarceration in 1926, his influence hasbeen felt in far-flung fields of intellectual discourse. At this writing threevolumes of the projected five-volume complete Prison Notebooks have appearedin English translation, but they have not yet amplified or altered our collectiveunderstanding of the significance of his contributions. And, as is well known,they span many different fields of the human sciences: literature, political philo-sophy, Italian history, social and cultural theory and, of course, politics. As thesecondary literature on Gramsci has expanded into a relatively large cottageindustry, we can discern several trends. Among them is the reading that placesGramsci in the tradition of Italian history and philosophy. Gramsci’s contribu-tion to our understanding of what he calls the “Southern question” informs muchof the current work on globality, particularly the concept of uneven develop-ment, but also inflects recent discoveries in the postcolonial literature that polit-ical independence does not necessarily lead to political autonomy, or to greatersocial equality. And he has earned a huge reputation in the corridors of Machi-avelli scholarship, a unique place in educational theory and, especially, in thestill nascent study of the role of intellectuals in modern societies. Harvard Uni-versity Press has issued a volume of Gramsci’s cultural writings, where culturerefers almost exclusively to literature and other aesthetic topics. The range ofGramsci’s interests surely confirms his status as a “traditional” intellectualalthough even here I want to insist that these studies can only be fully under-stood as moments in his theory of politics and political organization, and hiselaboration of the many dimensions of the struggle for communism.

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

In this chapter I will argue that one of the more neglected aspects of histheoretical writing is precisely what he regarded as a basic component of anypossible struggle for a communist future: the question of political organization,that is, an examination of the concrete processes of social transformation andparticularly how revolutionary forces ought to proceed from the present con-ditions of capitalist economic, political and ideological hegemony to a momentwhen the “historical bloc” of excluded classes and other social formations, maycontest and win power. By historical bloc Gramsci should not be read to down-grade the crucial role of the working class, since he views the Communist Partyas, putatively, the expression of that class, but in concert with Lenin’s trademark

8 S. Aronowitz

insistence, from the French Revolution to our times, that revolutions are nevermade by isolated social classes, but instead are the result of the struggle overradical formation among different, allied classes and social formations. Againstthe tendency of some commentators to situate Gramsci’s work exclusivelywithin the framework of Italy, its history, intellectual currents and political con-temporaneity confining the significance of much of his thought to a nationalcontext, or to the situation of underdevelopment, I will argue that the issuesraised in his writings are relevant to our times and our problems in the mostdeveloped industrialized societies as well as those in which uneven economicand cultural development prevails. As with any question within historical mate-rialism, doctrinal aspects are often hobbled by their historicity; what commendsthe best that has been “thought and said” (Arnold 1971) are not the predictionsand other prognostications of events but the concepts that inform inquiry. In thissense 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, butwith a taxonomy of relevant domains that bear on the historical process and thesocial totality.

Many of Gramsci’s concepts have provoked widespread discussion: theaforementioned “uneven development” that bids us to recognize regional differ-ences at both the national and transnational levels; the distinction in the classwar between “position” and “maneuver” where the former connotes the periodof indirect combat where the cultural struggles play, perhaps, the dominant role.Among them the term “hegemony,” and the social formation “intellectuals” asthe bearers of both the prevailing common sense and the counter-hegemonicbattle to impose a new good sense occupy a central space; the notion of “passiverevolution” about which more below; and the invocation of the revolutionaryparty as the “modern Prince,” an explicit reference to Machiavelli’s classicexposition (in this regard Gramsci’s refusal to separate consent and coercion asmodes of political rule; and his invocation of political “will” as a decisivecomponent of the theory of political organization). All of these are integrated byquestions of politics and especially political organization. To abstract them fromthese questions is to neutralize and de-politicize their significations.

One of the earlier entries (1931) of The Prison Notebooks concerns thequestion of political organization. The central figure of the “prince” is carried tothe present in the form of the “modern Prince.” The modern Prince is invokedhere as an extension of Gramsci’s critique of Georges Sorel whose concept of themyth of the general strike was, and remains, a key component of the anarcho-syndicalist theory of revolution (see Sorel 1915). Gramsci describes the theory asa “passive” activity because it contains only a program of a “negative and prelim-inary 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 willsmight create a new society on the basis of spontaneity. Gramsci argues that theSorelian myth, indeed the philosophy of pure refusal and resistance will “cease toexist scattering into an infinity of individual wills that “in the positive phase thenfollow separate and conflicting paths” (SPN: 128–129).

Gramsci’s concept of political organization 9

To this dead end of pure voluntarism Gramsci counterposes the modernPrince:

The modern prince, the myth prince, cannot be a real person, a concreteindividual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society inwhich a collective will, which has already been recognized and to someextent has asserted itself in action, begins to take different form. History hasalready provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell inwhich there come together germs of a collective will tending to becomeuniversal 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 representsand other “allied” groups to form, eventually at least, a new historical bloc. But inrelation 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 ofposition predominates – the cultural function takes precedence. The “culturalfunction” refers, in the case of the leading forces, the task of preserving the oldmorality and common sense or, for the insurgent and otherwise “marginal” forcesto create a new morality and “good” sense. In this respect Gramsci’s ideas aboutthe role of intellectuals in society cannot be separated from his conception of polit-ical 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 manyfronts: politics; the analysis of the economy; labor struggles; literature and art;education; the reading of historical experience and by extension the task of trans-forming bourgeois into radical and revolutionary consciousness. In short, in thismoment, the party, and particularly its leading intellectuals, are engaged in thestruggle for ideological hegemony against the dominant influence of the bourgeoismedia, their control over the most powerful institutions of civil society – schools,religion, cinema and other artistic organizations, most voluntary associations suchas sports organizations and social clubs – to which Louis Althusser, in “Ideologyand Ideological State Apparatuses” is later to add the trade unions (Althusser1970). This list expands the purview of the counterhegemonic forces.

The counterhegemony has two distinct “audiences.” The members of thesocial group of which the party is putatively the expression, many of whom arein the ideological thrall of the dominant class(es), major expressions of whichare religion, various mythologies, nationalism, militarism and those of otherallied social groups and classes who are equally the field upon which thestruggle for hegemony is fought. Under the best of circumstances where theparty has sufficient resources, especially cadres, it contests bourgeois hegemonyon 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 createthe Communist Party after 1919 which, as expected, was itself rife with factions.

10 S. Aronowitz

For while the factions were united in opposition to the bourgeois parties and tothe socialists who had forsaken revolutionary will for a policy of permanent com-promise with the existing regime and envisioned social reform as the farthesthorizon of politics, (a strategy that remains, against all reason, within all socialistand labor parties and the liberal wing of the US Democratic Party), the main issueamong the Communists was the International’s post-revolutionary strategy of theunited front. Gramsci’s reading of the united front was significantly differentfrom many interpretations, notably that of the German KPD and perhaps the mostimportant leader of the PCd’I (Partito Comunista d’Italia) in the years of thefactory occupations of 1919–1920 and their aftermath, Amadeo Bordiga. Lenin’sfamous pamphlet Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder had excoriated theleft-communists for failing to come to terms with collapse of the revolutionaryupsurge of the immediate post-war period in Western and Central Europe and torecognize that the capitalist world had entered a prolonged stabilization that mili-tated against the possibility of the revolution. He addressed the position of thecouncilists, Korsch and the Dutch communists, Anton Pannekoek, HermanGorter and Henrietta Roland-Holtz, perspectives that could be described asintransigent with respect to social democracy and, more generally, to the peasantand middle class social formations. This intransigence was expressed, in the firstplace, in their sharp critique of the tendency among the Bolsheviks and the Sovietstate to abandon workers’ councils, both in theory and in practice and to substi-tute the concept of the state as an organ of revolutionary transition. WhileGramsci was by no means an orthodox Leninist, he was not prepared to forsakethe Communist International even as it became increasingly subservient to theSoviet state and the Bolshevik party. Bordiga refused to acknowledge Lenin’sevaluation of the defeats of the German and Hungarian revolutions, the Turinfactory occupations of 1919–1920, and the uprisings in Steel and Rail in theUnited States as occasions for entering a period of relative “capitalist stabiliza-tion” where Lenin argued, against the council communists that the strategy of theparty had to shift from the revolutionary war to consolidation of the party’sposition within civil society by forming alliances with the social-democratic ledunions and other organizations.

The logic of the councilist position is to thrust the struggle “from below” in thefactories and other sites of capitalist domination to a privileged position and toassign 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 massstrike. They envisioned not the capture of “state power” but the smashing of thestate and its replacement by a network of councils that perform both the legislativeand administrative functions of society. From a “government over men” theyforesaw 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 andPaul Mattick, a councilist, renounced the concept of the party itself as a hierarchi-cal and bureaucratic form that impeded rather than advanced the workers’ cause.

At this juncture we encounter two important paths in which Gramsci’s ideasconverge with those of Lenin: Gramsci foresees the party’s ultimate task as the

Gramsci’s concept of political organization 11

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 canonly succeed to the extent that the party literally “merges” with the masses andin 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 onlyin the long run. To abolish inequality, the real hierarchies of economic and polit-ical 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 thatof the extreme left-wing of the French Revolution. Its key figure was GracchusBabeuf who was killed by the Thermidor). Gramsci writes:

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

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

2 The principal cohesive element, which centralized nationally and renderseffective and powerful a complex of forces which left to themselveswould count for little or nothing. This element is endowed with “greatcohesive, centralizing and disciplining powers”; and here is a key distinc-tion “one speaks of generals without an army, but in reality it is easier toform an army than to form generals” hence the crucial task of the party toeducate and train leaders.

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

(SPN: 152–153)

Clearly the second element is fundamental for performing the tasks of weldingthe mass into a fighting force but also to make sure the party survives the inevitableattacks from within and from without that accompany its relative strength. Theattacks from the state are well known, both from the fascist rise to power and sub-sequent suppression of the opposition by coercion as well as propaganda and thefrequent assaults by liberal democracies on the left in the name of the fight againstterrorism and subversion of “free institutions” such as was in evidence during the1920s 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 beginningof the twentieth century have organized political schools, study groups on the

12 S. Aronowitz

“classics” of Marxism and anarchism and, for the so-called stratum of“advanced workers” recruited from the party’s own ranks and, especially, itstrade union cadres, some have gone as far as to sponsor “general education”schools where students are exposed to philosophy, literature and general historyas well as the important ideological texts. Gramsci himself acknowledges thatthe party must recruit from the ranks if only because there are simply not enoughintellectuals who have affiliated with it. In this context Gramsci’s famous term“organic” intellectuals refers primarily to those who have sprung from the ranksof the workers and other subaltern social formations.

The organic intellectual is one whose work is that of expression of the worldview of the proletariat or of any other class that aspires to power. All classes thataspire to attain or retain economic, political and ideological power recruit and, ifnecessary, train a social category of organic intellectuals. State colleges anduniversities are more or less adequate institutions for the education of theorganic intellectuals of capital and of the state. Their curriculum, networks,administration are dedicated, more consciously than not, to the tasks of produc-ing and reproducing the moral and intellectual capital of the prevailing systemand of training a large corps of technical intellectuals for the professions –principally medicine, law, teaching, social services – and for the occupationsassociated with the development of the productive forces and the administrationof the state: science and technology on the one hand, and the various bureau-cratic 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 sameskills since many are trained in the same institutions as the organic and technicalintellectuals of capital and the state. The problems for the party are twofold: onthe one hand, it needs to incorporate many of the elements of bourgeois educa-tion into its work. After all, running an organization entails many of the sameskills: membership lists must be maintained, fund-raising is a constant, billsmust be paid, and, of course the party leader must be a good public speaker, acoherent writer and a thinker whose scope presupposes wide learning, most ofwhich may be obtained in elite schools; on the other hand, while the actual func-tions of social-democratic and left-liberal politicians are often identical or closeto those of the hegemonic intellectuals, a radical or revolutionary politicalformation must have leaders with different capacities: they are building anopposition that, one day, will take power and administer many of the functionsof the state and civil society. They need a profound understanding of politicaleconomy, an acute appreciation of cultural forms, principally those that Gramsciterms the “national-popular” which in his time was contained in literature,but now is chiefly, especially for youth, in popular music, sports video gamesand cinema; and they must know the history of their own country as well as thepolitics of many others. The party leader is a “new” intellectual insofar as shecombines wide learning – greater than that available in most contemporarymainstream institutions – and the capacities and methods of the organizer, edu-cator and public tribune. Such is the task of the party to provide the means by

Gramsci’s concept of political organization 13

which cadres become organic intellectuals, not only expressing the economicdemands of the “class,” but embodying their collective capacity to take power ina complex society.

Before passing on to a discussion of the significance of Gramsci’s conceptionof political organization today, I want to conclude this consideration with someremarks on what may be one of his more astute observations that bear on ourown time, the relation of spontaneity and organization. Recall, Lenin’s searingindictment of the “economists” within the early twentieth-century RussianSocial-Democratic Party. He pointed to their advocacy of the pure economicstruggle and, equally, their celebration of spontaneity as serious theoreticalerrors that, if adopted, could thwart the party and the working class advances. Tothese precepts he offers a theory of the party as a revolutionary vanguard con-sisting, in the first place, of professional revolutionaries whose task was, primar-ily, to transcend the limits of the trade union struggle – always confined towinning concessions within the framework of capitalist relations – to the fightfor state power. In the process, Lenin advances the need for national coherencein a manner reminiscent of Gramsci’s second element. For Lenin the “AllRussian newspaper was a major vehicle for achieving this goal.” In subsequentyears, especially after the Bolshevik seizure of state power in 1917, What is toBe Done became a virtual bible of political organization within the communistmovement.

It provoked, among other responses, that of Rosa Luxemburg who, whileacknowledging the need for leadership, reasserted the centrality of the self-organization of the working class, and rejected the vanguardist formulation. ThatLenin misrepresented the position of those he called “economists” matters lessthan his clear difference with what might be described as the position of thoselike Luxemburg, Aximov (the object of Lenin’s polemic) and Marx himself thatsaw the party as not only for the class, but of the class. Recall that in the Com-munist Manifesto he and Engels explicitly deny that the communists sought aimsand organizational forms that were separate from the workers’ movement. It wasonly in the 1870s, nearly 30 years after the appearance of the Manifesto thatEuropean Marxists organized mass electoral parties that were separate from thetrade unions, even as they saw themselves as the expression of class interests.

Gramsci straddles this debate. While his concept of the party is close if notidentical to Lenin’s, his argument that the party will eventually dissolve in favorof a class movement appears closer to Luxemburg. Closer still is his concreteanalysis of spontaneity itself. He begins his remarks with a provocative state-ment: “Meanwhile it must be stressed that ‘pure’ spontaneity does not exist inhistory” (SPN). What we take for the spontaneous action of the subaltern classesis really due to a lack of documentation of what elements of conscious leader-ship were present in, say, the peasant revolts of fourteenth-century England, therebellion against the introduction of machinery into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artisan workshops, bread riots in almost every major city, the New Yorkdraft riots of 1861, the virtually unled 1934 American textile strike (where,despite an incompetent union leadership, much to theirs and the Roosevelt

14 S. Aronowitz

administration’s surprise, tens of thousands of mostly women and southernworkers heeded the union’s call). Since the subaltern classes do not, typically,have a stratum of organic intellectuals to record their activity, these are coded asspontaneous. Yet when, retrospectively, historians and sociologists investigatethe apparently spontaneous actions of workers, they often discover indigenousleaders who were, at once, agitators, organizers and tribunes of the revolt. Asany experienced organizer knows, they are never really the leaders of the move-ment. The leaders most often spring from the “average” members of the groupand the task of the organizer is to find them and provide guidance through thethicket of organizational lore.

So it is not a question of leadership per se. Gramsci, in effect, is arguing thatthe spatial position of “outsider” obscures the intellectual’s comprehension.What some, particularly anarchists and romantics, take as spontaneity merelydescribes a kind of leadership, usually that confines itself to the specific issues athand. In effect Gramsci is describing the limitations of social movements. Thesemovements have conscious leadership but, in our current terminology, it isusually postmodern. That is, it is local and often parochial, confining itself to thespecific issues and grievances of a social group at a particular time and place. Itmay have national presence, but its aims, like those of the trade unions, are con-strained by ideologies of reform and revindication of grievances in terms ofcapitalist social relations. The notion of the possibility of forming a historicalbloc with other social formations is far from its imagination.

Left political organization today

The significance of great events and their consequences can only be fully graspedretrospectively. For example, the debate about the French Revolution is stilllargely unresolved; the question of the United States Civil War has always stimu-lated controversy. Historians still ask whether the war was necessary, or whetherslavery would have collapsed of its own weight, whether the resolve of theFederal Government to protect black civil rights so deteriorated that it could beheld responsible for the defeat of Reconstruction and the resurgency of theplanter class to economic and political power. Similarly, the collapse of theSoviet Union recalls the fateful government and party policies after the victory ofthe Bolshevik Revolution. There are those, following Bukharin, who insist thatthe “new economic policy” of limited capitalist enterprises should not have beenabandoned after Lenin’s death in 1924. One of the central issues remains whetherthe policies of forced collectivization of agriculture and accelerated the extent towhich economic development came at the expense of the working class, particu-larly the party’s abandonment of the Soviets (workers and soldiers councils),except as a fig-leaf for an authoritarian system of production. Certainly thedecision to organize the army and police along conventional repressive lines iscontested, as is its concomitant consolidation of a powerful central state thatproved intractable for more than 70 years. And, equally damaging was the failureof the revolution to transform the fundamental institutions of everyday life –

Gramsci’s concept of political organization 15

family, the relation between men and women, including sexuality, the demandfor shared child-rearing and household tasks.

The collapse of the Soviet Union proved near fatal for the overwhelmingmajority of Communist parties, even those who, like the Italian party had par-tially severed their ties with Moscow in the 1980s. For the PCI and the FrenchCommunist Party (PCF) both of whom had since the end of World War IIachieved solid electoral successes, particularly at the local and regional levels,and were sometimes included in national government coalitions, the end of theSoviet Union constituted the tipping point to their ideological and politicalcoherence. The US party was all but destroyed, first by their decisions in thewake of Cold War repression, then by the Khrushchev revelations at the 1956Soviet Party Congress. To be sure, when the CPUSA responded to McCarthyismby declaring that we were in a pre-fascist moment that required extraordinarymeasures, the degree of persecution of thousands of CP members and many whowere on the party’s periphery was dire. But the CP took this occasion to sendsome of its primary and secondary leaders underground, to suspend almost allpublic activity except in defense of its civil liberties and, with important excep-tions, reconfigured its trade union work from being part of the opposition toconservative leaders, to a caution that drove it to pander to union leaders whowere willing to defend the right of the party to retain legality againstliberal–democratic efforts to outlaw it. But its remnant was seriously reduced bythe events of 1991 and it has never recovered.

Within the decade, the PCI voted to liquidate and reform as the DemocraticParty of the Left and to actively participate in a series of center-left coalitionswhose reason for existence was their mutual determination to thwart a resurgentRight. While the new party retained most of its vote, it ceased to pay even lip-service to revolutionary goals. Similarly the PCF, with some 15 percent ofthe vote in national elections – somewhat reduced from its highpoint of about20 percent – a dominant role in the labor movement and leading numeroustown and city administrations was, for similar reasons, seduced by FrancoisMitterand’s Socialist Party to form first, an electoral alliance, and then to enteras a junior partner the victorious coalition that took office in 1981. Some15 years later the PCF had become a minor party with barely 5 percent of thevote that was reduced with each national election, its local base seriously erodedby socialist and conservative gains, and its commanding position in the maintrade union federation, the CGT, all but ended. Clearly, in all cases the demiseof European Communist influence had roots in the contradictory policies ofadopting the reformist program of modern social democracy which demandedthat it transform itself into a parliamentary institution of government and thepersistence of its revolutionary legacy, at least in theory and rhetoric. Thiscontradiction was resolved by the end of “really existing” socialism in theEuropean East.

Now, there is virtually no rationale for the existence of the remainingCommunist parties. They have, in the main, ceased to advance an anti-capitalistprogram, and in the wake of the electoral defeats of the center-left in all

16 S. Aronowitz

European countries except Spain are, at best, reduced to supporting the sporadicmovements of resistance and protest on issues of war, empire and againstneoliberal assaults on the welfare state. Perhaps the two exceptions are theRifondazione communista in Italy, seeming to have suffered the fate of otherparties in the Center-Left that went down to defeat because it agreed to join thegovernment coalition; and the recently formed German Left (Links) Party, analliance between discontented Left Social-Democrats and the former CommunistParty which, however, has demonstrated no genuine radicality, except on ques-tions of foreign policy. And, of course, the high hopes of left-communists thatChina and Vietnam might provide an alternative to the Soviet disaster have beenfrustrated by their turn toward market capitalism in their quest for modernity.Cuba seems to have weathered the disastrous results of the Soviet collapse betterthan most of the client states, perhaps due to its relative isolation for 50 years, apainful period that forced the state and the party to develop autonomous institu-tions and avoid large debt accumulation. To be sure it has been obliged toaccommodate to the global capitalist market, nurturing a tourist industry andseeking foreign investment in its economy. But it seems that, short of the demo-cratic transformation that can complete the revolution, its economy and politicalsystem seem fairly stable, especially since it has forged ties with the newlyformed democratic governments of Latin America.

We are still in an era of the war of position. The integration of the anti-colonialrevolutions of the post-World War II years by global capitalism thwarted theiremancipatory aspirations in the face of the Soviet demise and the weakeningof world radicalism. Instead, postcolonialism is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts,corruption, civil wars and the brazen return of economic, military and even polit-ical domination by Western powers. The main problem remains the struggle forhegemony; the main need is for radical and revolutionary political formations thatdeclare openly that the economic and political crises that afflict both the globalNorth and the global South are placed squarely on the doorstep of a ruthless andoften rapacious capitalism, that markets are the problem, not the solution, and thatthe task remains to imagine a radically different future in which the key functionsof society are controlled by the producers of things, services and of ideas.

What we learn from Gramsci is that the cultural struggle takes pride of placealongside protest and resistance against the capitalist offensive against livingstandards, collective and individual autonomy, and the hope of a more egalit-arian community. The “cultural struggle” embraces some of the same fronts thathe named 75 years ago, principally what Althusser described as state ideologicalapparatuses. We must still combat the pernicious effects of hierarchy and ofdomination, namely alienation in all forms of social relations – everyday life,education, the family and, of course labor. At the same time the party cannotshrink from the critique of religion while, at the same time, extending its hand tothose within the religious community who remain committed to a liberatorytheology and program of resistance. The party would not disdain alliances withLeft Social-Democrats and anarchists who possess the political will to fightEmpire and the forces of finance capital. In this respect it looks forward to

Gramsci’s concept of political organization 17

formations of a new internationalism as well as a national-popular historicalbloc that unites workers, intellectuals, small farmers and elements of the “oldmiddle class” of craftspersons and small business owners.

However, the experience of the last century has taught many of us that some ofthe old Leninist strategies have been overcome by the course of history. Forexample, the concept of “seizure of state power” needs serious re-examination.While the question of what the process of the actual war of maneuver will looklike remains open, we must spurn statism. Surely we will not reproduce theEuropean experience of socialist, labor and communist parties becoming parties of(capitalist-) government in order to wring out some welfare reforms. The recenthistory of such attempts demonstrates convincingly that the Left in power takes oncharacteristics of the capitalist states they once disavowed. It is not merely thatthey fail to make significant dents in the private ownership of the decisive meansof production. Beginning with the Bolsheviks they lose sight of a future in whichthe needs of the “whole person” are addressed, particularly the transformation ofeveryday life. As a result, when the left governs under conditions of bourgeoishegemony the inevitable counterattack by a capital intent on reversing decades ofhard-won gains at the workplace as well as within public institutions, is likely tosucceed because common sense has not been challenged except marginally.

During the war of position we must continue to test the proposition thatreforms are still possible, even under conditions of the permanent war economyand globality. This is not identical with Left “reformism” which signifies thatthe welfare state and “more equality” are the farthest horizon of politics. We willremain skeptical that, unless the imperatives of war and privatization are largelydismantled, basic social needs can still be fulfilled under capitalism. Indeed,if war no longer propels the US empire, reducing or eliminating corporationsthat rely on government contracts for survival, and public services such astransportation, health care and environmental protections are socialized so thatinsurance companies and private contractors are deprived of their profits, thewhole financial structure of the system may crumble. In short the fight forstructural rather than cosmetic reforms may be understood as “non-reformreforms” because they put capitalism itself in jeopardy.3

The struggle for a new good sense entails challenges to such ideas as thateducation must be subordinated to economic requirements, that the workplacemust revert to what André Gorz termed the “prison factory” and that thefeminist revolution remain in the shadows. It also must involve a determinedstruggle against racism and a renunciation of the myth that we have entered a“postracial” society, among other issues. Perhaps more profoundly it mustengage in discussions of sociobiology and other doctrines that tend to attributethe persistence of inequality and exploitation to “natural causes” based onpseudo-genetic considerations. As Ashley Montagu once argued, man’s mostdangerous myth is the fallacy of race, a fallacy that is implicated in all forms ofinnate difference between humans (1997).

The most delicate question is whether the party must inevitably recognize thehierarchy of leaders and led, as Gramsci argued. Here we note that Gramsci

18 S. Aronowitz

adhered to democratic centralism, where discussion and debate was limited tospecific periods in the formation of policy, but was not a style of work. Thequestion is the degree of centralism. In her debate over Lenin’s theory of polit-ical organization, Luxemburg acknowledged that the preferred horizontalorganization of the party in which the distinction between elite and mass wasalways under scrutiny, did not obviate the need for a degree of centralcoordination. The question is not coordination of information and action, butcommand. How to combat what Robert Michels noted were the wages of themonopoly over information and communication in the turn of the century social-ist parties, indeed of trade unions and many social movement organizations?Will the party tolerate, nay, encourage the existence of caucuses and factionswho enjoy the right to publish their positions, openly campaign for office andrecruit adherents? Will the party publish and disseminate dissident views in itspress and other publications? If so, what are the limits of dissent, the qualifica-tions of freedom to oppose the democratically determined strategies and tacticsof its political organization? These are issues that face all political formations –liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, and anarchist alike.

This raises the final question. Is the state, which embodies principles ofhierarchy in its very constitution, to be the model for all social relations, includ-ing the party form itself? Gramsci foresaw the formation of workers’ councils tobe an outcome of the final conflict that displaces capitalism. He did not haveprefigurative conception that encouraged new forms during the war of position.Recent experiences of the landless peasant movement in Brazil and the workers’cooperatives in Argentina as well as occasional publishing and political collec-tives in industrial advanced Western societies suggest that the party must beginto development ideas of the “not yet” of future forms of social life, not just intheory and program, but as materializations of labor and institution in thepresent. And it needs to undertake a serious evaluation of the state as a viablepolitical form. What are the alternatives to the dream of taking state power? Cana more horizontal form of organization be envisaged that would circumvent amore or less protracted period of coercion against the forces of counter-insurgency or can a federated, rather than hierarchical, institution that preservesa high degree of local autonomy coordinate its necessary administrative andcoercive functions? It would entail new forms of police and military formationas well as a redefinition of “leadership” that, as Marx argued, would be confinedto the administration of things rather than persons.

None of these matters can be definitively settled before the founding of agenuine radical political formation. Gramsci today would disavow any attemptto address the crucial struggles without such a formation.

Notes

1 All citations are from SPN.2 “Notes on Italian History,” SPN.3 The term was coined in Gorz (1967). In the wake of the May, 1968 events in Paris

Gorz himself renounced the strategy, prematurely I believe.

Gramsci’s concept of political organization 19

2 Reading Gramsci now

Joseph A. Buttigieg

The seventieth anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death has been marked bynumerous conferences and symposia all across the world. Invariably, at suchgatherings, attention is drawn to the enormous body of scholarly and criticalwork that he has inspired and to the continued widespread use of his concepts inmultiple fields of inquiry. The Bibliografia Gramsciana, regularly updated andmade available on-line by the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, now lists over15,000 titles in numerous languages.1 No Gramsci specialist, however assiduousand tireless, can possibly hope to master such a massive volume of writing. Thestatistic is impressive, as is the observation made by Eric Hobsbawm some yearsago that Gramsci is among the most frequently cited Italian authors of themodern era (Hobsbawm 1987: 23);2 but all it tells us is that, in some sense oranother, Gramsci is important. Paris Hilton, too, is important, in the sense thatshe is famous. In her case, she is important or famous for being famous; she is acelebrity simply because she is a celebrity. In other words, she is an instance ofimportance without content – a phenomenon probably unimaginable a centuryago. When it comes to Gramsci, though, one would still want to know why he isimportant and to whom. Obviously, there are no succinct, straightforwardanswers. Guido Liguori’s study of the debates surrounding the significanceof Gramsci’s legacy, Gramsci Conteso (Liguori 1996), is 300 pages long – andit concerns itself solely with the Italian cultural–political scene between 1922and 1996.

Perhaps one can venture a generalization: the frequency with which Gramsciis cited suggests that he has attained the status of a classic. Even so, one wouldwant to know what that means and what to make of it. Hobsbawm has somepertinent reflections that are worth recalling here. In his brief introduction tothe second edition of The Gramsci Reader, Hobsbawm notes that Gramsci’s“international influence has penetrated beyond the left, and indeed beyond thesphere of instrumental politics.” Among historians, for example, even non-Marxists find him rewarding, in large measure because of “his refusal to leavethe terrain of concrete historical, social, and cultural realities for abstraction andreductionist theoretical models.” Gramsci’s importance, Hobsbawm adds, “isnow recognized in most parts of the globe,” his “influence is still expanding,”and one may reasonably expect it to last. After all, Gramsci

has survived the political conjunctures which first gave him internationalprominence. He has survived the European communist movement itself. Hehas demonstrated his independence of the fluctuations of ideologicalfashion. . . . He has survived the enclosure in academic ghettos which lookslike being the fate of so many other thinkers of “western Marxism.” He haseven avoided becoming an “ism.”

(Hobsbawm 2000: 12, 13)

A right-wing alarmist might read this as a confirmation of the ominouswarning issued by Michael Novak in 1989 on the pages of a business magazine:“The Gramscists are Coming”; or of Rush Limbaugh’s fear-mongering depictionof leftists who “worship at Gramsci’s altar” adopting their master’s strategy forcultural warfare and plotting the downfall of the West (Limbaugh 1993: 87); orPatrick Buchanan’s assertion that “the Gramscian revolution rolls on, and, tothis day, it continues to make converts” (Buchanan 2002: 78).

Hobsbawm also points out, however, that while the frequent recurrence ofGramsci’s name and the increasingly widespread allusions to the concepts heelaborated may be a measure of his lofty status in the cultural pantheon, they areby no means an index of general familiarity with, or understanding of, histhought – quite the opposite. He writes:

It may seem trivial that an Anglo-Saxon reference work can – I quote theentry in its entirety – reduce him to a single word: “Antonio Gramsci(Italian political thinker, 1891–1937) see under HEGEMONY” (Bullockand Stallybrass 1977). It may be absurd that an American journalist quotedby Buttigieg believes that the concept “civil society” was introduced intomodern political discourse by Gramsci alone. Yet the acceptance of athinker as a permanent classic is often indicated by such superficial refer-ence to him by people who patently know little more about him than that heis “important.”

(Hobsbawm 2000: 13)3

This is not to say that Gramsci’s is an importance without content, like ParisHilton’s. Nevertheless, Michel Foucault’s succinct observation, made over20 years ago, remains true today: namely, that Gramsci is “un auteur plus souvantcité que réellement connu.”4 Much more recently, Timothy Brennan lamented that:

Almost every postcolonial text in the last two decades has deferred toGramsci’s authority, but few went back to immerse themselves in hiswriting with the view of mastering it or learning from it in a novel way. . . .Gramsci’s own theses, styles of thinking, or points of departure are in thesecircles still received at second hand. It is difficult to find work in postcolo-nial studies that does not cite Gramsci, but there is usually little claim toprovide an exposition of his work as such.

(Brennan 2006: 234)

Reading Gramsci now 21

In other words, much too often, Gramsci is cited because he is important and heis important because he is often cited.

There are, of course, several scholars and critics who have studied Gramsci’swritings carefully. Inevitably, especially given the textual complexities as wellas the almost encyclopedic range of the Prison Notebooks, they have producedsignificantly different interpretations and assessments of Gramsci’s thought.There is no consensus as to what in Gramsci is most important, or on why andhow to read him. According to one view, Gramsci is of little relevance today;the value of his work resides, rather, in the light it sheds on the political situationof his own pre-World War II epoch. Richard Bellamy, for example, criticizesthose who “have applied his ideas to events and movements that he neither knewnor could have anticipated.” Recalling Gramsci’s deep involvement in the polit-ical and cultural debates of his time, Bellamy insists that “anyone interested inGramsci, therefore, must be interested in these discussions as well, for it is inthem that his lasting relevance, if any, is to be found” (Bellamy 1992: 5). Thesame line of argument runs through James Martin’s book, Gramsci’s PoliticalAnalysis, which opens with the caution that “we should be careful not to overes-timate [Gramsci’s] contemporaneity” and concludes with the assertion that “toanalyse hegemony today requires us to be critically aware of the distance thatseparates us from Gramsci” (Martin 1998: 6, 171).

In the view of these two critics, the canonical status accorded to Gramsci’swork diminishes its value and distorts its significance; its canonicity encouragesthe application of its insights and concepts to situations and issues that Gramscidid not, could not, and never intended to address. Gramsci, they remind us, “wasno system-builder” (Bellamy 1992: 5). What makes him admirable is the acuitywith which he analyzed the specific circumstances of his particular time.

Two corollary assumptions underlie this argument, namely: (a) for a work tobe relevant to a time and place different from those of its composition it has tocontain a system or grand theory; and (b) a mode of inquiry based on concen-trated attention to the specificities and particularities of its object of analysis andcritique cannot yield insights that are transportable or transferable across time andspace. Oddly, such an approach to Gramsci overlooks one of the most salient fea-tures of the Prison Notebooks in which the extensive, thorough analyses of earlierwriters and past events, while unwavering in their rigorous attention to historicalspecificity and particularity, nonetheless yield valuable insights into the present.One need only look at the very large block of notes on Machiavelli to see howdeeply Gramsci involves himself in the interpretation of the Florentine’s works;how Gramsci’s reading, while always attentive to the historical specificity of theoriginal texts, leads him to an illuminating examination of the relations of powerin the modern epoch (which, in turn, enables him to further develop and deepenhis concept of hegemony) and to a series of reflections on the requirements of apolitical strategy adequate to his own times. Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli’sPrince is an exemplary hermeneutical operation that cautiously avoids instrumen-talizing the text even while “translating” it into a modern idiom. In his treatmentof the Prince (as well as other works), Gramsci illustrates, without betraying his

22 J.A. Buttigieg

historicism, how a text firmly rooted in its time and place can be relevant to thestudy of a much later epoch.

Gramsci’s present relevance or importance cannot be assessed through exper-iments of direct application of his concepts to contemporary phenomena. AsStuart Hall colorfully put it,

We can’t pluck up this “Sardinian” from his specific and unique politicalformation, beam him down at the end of the twentieth century, and askhim to solve our problems for us: especially since the whole thrust ofhis thinking was to refuse this easy transfer of generalizations from oneconjuncture, nation or epoch to another.

(Hall 1988a: 161)

Gramsci’s concepts and insights cannot be readily transferred; what they callfor, rather, is careful translation – in the broader sense of the term. Herein liesthe value of the work being carried out by Derek Boothman and younger schol-ars such as Peter Ives and Rocco Lacorte on Gramsci’s views on translation (see,inter alia, Boothman 2004, and Ives 2004a and 2004b). Further exploration ofthis aspect of Gramsci is more likely to occur now, thanks to the recent publica-tion in Italy of Gramsci’s previously unavailable translation notebooks (Gramsci2007). Exemplary instances of translating Gramsci in this sense – that is, ofbringing his views to bear on the present conjuncture without unmooring himfrom the circumstances that generated his work – can be found in the writingsof, among others, Stuart Hall, Edward W. Said, Michael Denning, and MarciaLandy (see, especially, Hall 1988a: 161–174, and 1988b; Said 1983: 158–177,and 2000: 453–73; Denning 2004: 147–66; and Landy 1994).

I am not suggesting that Gramsci’s text contains some hitherto unnoticedformula of interpretation that would make every classic relevant to one’s ownhistorical conjuncture. Indeed, such a way of reading is sometimes neither possiblenor desirable. This does not mean that a classic should be consigned to oblivionsimply because it embodies values and expresses a Weltanschauung that is incom-patible with the present reader’s conception of the world. Rather, a classic that isnot or cannot be made relevant to the present time could – indeed, should – still beadmired for its intrinsic qualities, even if only dispassionately. Gramsci makessome interesting remarks about this in his letter of 1 June 1931 to his wife Giulia:

Who reads Dante with love? Doddering professors who make a religion ofsome poet or writer and perform strange philological rituals in his honor. Ithink that a modern and intelligent person ought to read the classics ingeneral with a certain “detachment,” that is, only for their aesthetic values,while “love” implies agreement with the ideological content of the poem;one loves one’s “own” poet, one “admires” the artist “in general.” Aestheticadmiration can be accompanied by a certain “civic” contempt as in the caseof Marx’s attitude toward Goethe.

(LP, vol. 2, 38)5

Reading Gramsci now 23

It is, of course, much easier to retain an attitude of detached admiration vis-à-visa work of art than when dealing with a work of political philosophy. Thus, forexample, a politically conservative American who “loves” Tocqueville would findit almost impossible to resist consigning Marx to eternal oblivion, even though DasKapital is as much a classic as Democracy in America; and, needless to say, it is noaccident that in the current conservative cultural–political atmosphere Tocqueville’sbest known work is regarded as a paradigmatic example of a classic text that isunquestionably relevant to the present time. More often than not, though, the per-ception that Tocqueville’s classic text has remained relevant stems from simplistic,a-historical readings of Democracy in America that totally ignore the specifichistorical situation and political orientation of its author – to say nothing about thenaivety of treating the twenty-first century’s only super-power as if its economic,social, and political structures are the same, in essence, as those observed byTocqueville in the early 1830s. This manner of reading a classic uncritically fromthe perspective of the present has nothing in common with the procedures of inter-pretation and “translation” that characterize Gramsci’s approach to Machiavelli.What it calls to mind, instead, are the crude efforts that have been made time andagain to appropriate classic texts and instrumentalize them for crude and immediatepolitical purposes. Mussolini’s edition of Il Principe is one of the most notoriousexamples of this practice.

Gramsci’s work has proven to be especially susceptible to instrumental(mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations, despite the fact that the Quadernidel Carcere contain several explicit warnings against textual manipulation andhermeneutical dishonesty. One of the most poignant is the following thatappears under the heading “Past and Present”:

“Importuning the texts.” In other words, when out of zealous attachment toa thesis, one makes texts say more than they really do. This error of philo-logical method occurs also outside of philology, in studies and analyses ofall aspects of life. In terms of criminal law, it is analogous to selling goodsat lesser weight and of different quality than had been agreed upon, but it isnot considered a crime unless the will to deceive is glaringly obvious. Butdon’t negligence and incompetence deserve to be sanctioned – if not ajudicial sanction, at least an intellectual and moral sanction?

(Q6 §198: 838)6

Gramsci’s own philological rigor has not safeguarded his text from distortionsby careless and incompetent readers; worse still, some of the abuses ofGramsci’s work can also be attributed to “the will to deceive.” In many cases,unscrupulous, instrumental, or merely selective readings of Gramsci have beenanimated by the impulse to make him appear relevant to the present time,particularly when he has been used to lend authority to or legitimize a specificpolitical stance, ideological tendency, or theoretical position (see, inter alia, thecritique of the misuse of Gramsci’s concept of subalternity in Brennan 2006,especially 2006: 256–64). From the other end of spectrum, some prominent

24 J.A. Buttigieg

conservatives in the US, such as the ones I have already mentioned, havebeen propagating the notion that “Gramscism” is very much alive today. Intheir eyes, Gramsci is the master theoretician and strategist of a resilient anti-capitalist, anti-democratic political current that has survived the communistdebacle of 1989 and represents, even now, an imminent threat to the political,social, and cultural foundations of the prevailing order. In other words, Gramscihas often been made to look relevant and important on false grounds andfor the wrong reasons by putative admirers as well as by those who seek todemonize him.

Paradoxically, however, the significance of Gramsci’s ideas for the presenttime is sometimes made manifest by the selective use – and misuse – of hisideas for politically instrumental purposes. An interesting instance of thisoccurred in the summer of 2007 when Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela,delivered a speech7 at a mass rally supporting his refusal to renew the broadcast-ing license of the RCTV television station. Here are some extracts from hisspeech (my translation):

For a hundred years or more in practically every part of America, theChurch, the media, and the educational system – the three huge organicentities that Gramsci identifies as the fundamental institutions of civilsociety – have been used to disseminate their own dominant ideologyamong the social classes, including the popular ranks. Gramsci classifies thedifferent levels of ideology. The most developed form of ideology is philo-sophy. The dominant classes . . . have their own philosophers, their schools,and their philosophical books through which they impregnate society withthe dominant ideology. There is a second level below that of philosophy.Neoliberalism, for example, has its own philosophy but it is much tooelaborate for the subaltern social strata to digest. The dominant class there-fore develops the theses of the free market, of the freedom of expression. . . .It elaborates a body of ideas related to bourgeois democracy with the sepa-ration of powers, rotation [alternanza], and representation . . . great lies thatconstitute the ideological corpus of the hegemonic philosophy that hasreigned in Venezuela and in a large part of the West for over 100 years. Athird level of ideology is what Gramsci calls common sense which is theresult of the diverse forms of immersion in the dominant philosophy andideology through TV soap operas, film, popular music, propaganda, etc. . . .We are liberating the state, because bourgeois civil society controlled theVenezuelan state as it wished; it manipulated the government, legislativepower, the judiciary, state enterprises, the central bank, and the nation’sbudget. They are losing all of this, if not completely at least in substance.And now they resort once again to the core elements of bourgeois civilsociety, using – sometimes in a desperate manner – the spaces still availableto them in those institutions identified by Gramsci: the Church, the media,and the educational system. That is why it is important to understand thebackground of this battle.

Reading Gramsci now 25

Chávez then went on to talk about Gramsci’s concept of historical bloc, urginghis supporters to continue “constructing from below, from the base, the newstate, the new political society. . . . A socialist society, a socialist state, a socialistrepublic, a socialist structure, a socialist superstructure! That is what the bour-geoisie of Venezuela fears.”

It would take too long to disentangle the various threads of Gramscian thoughtthat Chávez plucked out of context and wove into his speech. Neither is this theright occasion to dwell on other actions and policies of Chávez that are profoundlyun-Gramscian, such as, his embrace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who presidesover a theocracy – the very type of regime that Gramsci detested most. What isinteresting, in this context, is the manner in which Chávez’s speech brings intorelief, albeit idiosyncratically and in garbled fashion, the central feature ofGramsci’s concept of hegemony, at the heart of which resides his analysis of therapport between political society and civil society. It is worth recalling here thefamous passage in which Gramsci makes a distinction between, on the one hand,the kind of state that was exemplified by Czarist Russia where topplingthe monarch ensured the seizure of power, and, on the other hand, “modern”bourgeois liberal states where the conquest of power is much more convoluted:

In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelati-nous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civilsociety, and when the state tottered a sturdy structure of civil society wasimmediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stooda succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements – needless to say, theconfiguration varied from state to state, which is precisely why an accuratereconnaissance on a national scale was needed.

(Q7 §16: 866)

Interpreting this passage one has to bear in mind that Gramsci is here using theterm “state” in its liberal, conventional sense to mean government. If he wereusing his own vocabulary, Gramsci would have written: “a proper relationbetween political society and civil society”; for, according to Gramsci, “statedoes not mean only the apparatus of government but also the ‘private’ apparatusof hegemony or civil society” (Q6 §137: 801).8 In Gramsci’s theory, then, thestate is not counter-posed to civil society as it is in classical liberal theory and inthe theory of global civil society elaborated by Mary Kaldor and her colleaguesin the Global Civil Society program at the London School of Economics.9 The“succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements” Gramsci refers to in thispassage is the ensemble of elements that constitute civil society. In order toattain power in the modern state, according to Gramsci, one would have toprevail in civil society. This is a point he makes in that note in the Prison Note-books where we first encounter the term hegemony. The note is headed “Polit-ical class leadership before and after assuming government power,” the maintopic is the Risorgimento, and the question Gramsci is considering is how theModerates prevailed politically over the Action party even though the latter

26 J.A. Buttigieg

spearheaded the struggle for unification. Early in the note, he enunciates a“political-historical criterion” which, he says, constitutes the ground of hisresearch. The criterion is this:

A class is dominant in two ways, namely it is “leading” and “dominant.” Itleads the allied classes, it dominates the opposing classes. Therefore, a classcan (and must) “lead” before assuming power; when it is in power itbecomes dominant, but it continues to lead. . . . There can and there must be“political hegemony” even before assuming government power, and inorder to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solelyon the power and material force that is given by government.

(Q1 §44: 41)

In one respect, at least, Chávez’s speech seems to be contradicting Gramscieven though it purports to be deriving its inspiration from him. For if, asGramsci says, the governing party should not have to rely on power and materialforce, then why did Chávez use the coercive power of the state to shut down theTV station that opposed him? On the other hand, one could argue that Chávezwon the national election in December 1998 because he successfully exercisedthe kind of “leadership” that enabled him to achieve “political hegemony”before assuming government power. Chávez’s electoral success was the culmi-nation of a struggle that took place in civil society – a struggle to obtain theconsent of the majority of Venezuelans through persuasion. At the same time,though, a good part of his speech of 2 June 2007 consists of an attack on civilsociety. He seems to be saying: now that “we” are in power we need to disem-power the key institutions of civil society that oppose us. Of course, there aremany other factors involved, not the least of which is the possibility that ele-ments of civil society opposed to Chávez could have been using the spaces ofoperation available to them and the institutions they controlled (including thecontroversial TV station) in order to subvert the government and bring aboutits downfall by means other than the electoral consent of the majority of thepopulation. Also, in order to analyze the Venezuelan situation with the aid ofGramscian concepts one would have to take account of Gramsci’s reflections onCaesarism and Bonapartism.10 Doing so would greatly complicate the issue, forone would have to ascertain whether there is a “progressive” element in Chávezif he were to be seen as a Bonapartist; and even if Chávez were deemed to be aBonapartist with progressive tendencies, one would still have to determinewhether those tendencies are not accompanied by a mode of politics that ismuch too dangerous to embrace. A central claim in Chávez’s speech is that thegovernment (in liberal terminology, the state) is more progressive than the mostinfluential elements of civil society. The question, then, becomes whether thegovernment can be trusted to decide which segments of the opposition it canjustifiably threaten to disempower by silencing them.

In any case, the intent here is not to adjudicate Chávez’s politics. What I wantto suggest, in this most minimal of sketches, is that Gramsci’s reflections on

Reading Gramsci now 27

hegemony and especially on the relations between political society and civilsociety remain a valuable critical tool for examining the political phenomena ofour time. The concept of hegemony as elaborated by Gramsci, furthermore, hasa strategic dimension – it describes a political strategy that is not, per se,Marxist, or socialist, or even leftist. In developing his ideas on hegemony,Gramsci was seeking to arrive at a better understanding of the configurations,processes, and relations of power in modern liberal societies. So, it should comeas no surprise that conservatives, too, sometimes employ his concepts. That is,in fact, what happened when, in the run-up to the 2007 French presidentialelection, Nicolas Sarkozy declared (in an interview published in Le Figaro on17 April 2007): “I have made Gramsci’s analysis mine: power is won by ideas.It is the first time a rightwing politician has fought on that ground.” The boast isinvalid. Conservatives in the US have been fighting on that ground for quite along time. The so-called “culture wars” provide abundant evidence of this. Byway of illustration, here is Rush Limbaugh’s variation on the theme:

Gramsci succeeded in defining a strategy for waging cultural warfare . . .But the Culture War is a bilateral conflict, my friends. There’s no reasonon earth we should be content to sit back and watch our values and our cul-tural heritage slip away. Why don’t we simply get in the game and startcompeting for control of [the] key cultural institutions? . . . Don’t bedaunted and intimidated by the thought police. . . . Stick to your principles;don’t be afraid to unapologetically admit your belief in those corny oldtraditional values. Ultimately, this will get you respect. Once you haverespect, then you will have the ability to persuade. That’s the way to reclaimour culture.

(Limbaugh 1993: 87–8)

Limbaugh wrote this at a time when the right imagined itself as the savingremnant and was using every means at its disposal to depict the Clinton presi-dency apocalyptically as both the expression and the agent of social disinteg-ration and national collapse. Since then, we have become accustomed toconservatives in the US portraying themselves as embattled even as they havecome to dominate some of the most powerful institutions of civil society – thechurches, the most lavishly endowed think tanks, the broadcasters with thebiggest audiences, etc. – in addition to acquiring executive power in politicalsociety. They achieved their ascendancy in ways that are loosely analogous tothose that enabled the Moderates to prevail in nineteenth-century Italy.

In what forms – Gramsci asks – did the Moderates succeed in establishingthe apparatus of their political leadership? In forms that can be called“liberal,” that is, through individual, “private” initiative (not through an“official” party program, according to a plan worked out and establishedprior to practical and organizational action).

(Q1 §44: 41)

28 J.A. Buttigieg

The radically conservative movement in the US (including the especiallyinfluential neoconservative faction within it) did not come to power suddenlywith the victory of the junior George Bush in the 2000 presidential election. Itneeded first to acquire a leading role within the Republican Party, and it didnot – nor could it – do so through an internal putsch; rather, it prepared theground for the march to power over a very long period of time. The earlieststirrings of the radical strain of conservatism prevalent today can be traced as farback as the mid-1950s, when intellectuals like Russell Kirk and William F.Buckley Jr. embarked on an “intellectual and moral reform” of conservatism.“Intellectual and moral reform” is a phrase that Gramsci used to describe anaspect of Benedetto Croce’s activity that he admired, but he also pointed out thatCroce failed because

He has not gone “to the people,” he has not become a “national” element . . .because he has not been able to create a group of disciples who could havemade his philosophy “popular,” so that it could become an educationalfactor even in the elementary schools (and thus an educational factor for theordinary worker and peasant, in other words, for the common man).

(Q7 §1: 852)

Unlike Croce, however, Kirk, Buckley, and their circle conceived of their task aseducational. With his book, The Conservative Mind, Kirk sought to provide con-servatism with a coherent philosophy produced by and based on a distinctivetradition; then, abandoning academia, he went on to disseminate his viewsthrough the publication of numerous books (including novels and short stories),essays, lectures, newspaper columns and articles in conservative journals. In1955, with Kirk’s help and encouragement, Buckley launched The NationalReview; through it he assembled an impressive group of young intellectuals,cultivated serious thinking about conservative principles, and belied the wide-spread notion that conservatism was bereft of ideas or, as Lionel Trilling memo-rably put it, incapable of expressing itself other than “in irritable mental gestureswhich seek to resemble ideas” (Trilling 1979: vii). Those were the rather modestbeginnings of a very long march characterized by perseverance in the face ofmany setbacks and dispiriting defeats – none more severe, perhaps, than BarryGoldwater’s humiliation in the 1964 presidential election.11

For decades the conservative intellectuals and publicists operated mosteffectively in the sphere of civil society “through individual, ‘private’ initiative”(Q1 §44: 41). They established think tanks, cultivated relations with a broadrange of institutions and organizations, set in motion a home schooling move-ment, and took over a number of school boards.12 Through persistence and hardwork – but also deviousness – they were able to get their voices heard: they pre-pared detailed strategic studies that enabled them to influence and eventuallyeven guide government policy; they launched new journals and placed theirarticles and columns in already existing newspapers and periodicals; and theylearned to make effective use of radio and television. Above all, they figured out

Reading Gramsci now 29

how to appeal to a mass public, forging strong alliances with popular religiouspreachers and media personalities. In short, they attained political hegemonythrough their work and strategic alliances on the terrain of civil society. Theypenetrated society at the capillary level, transforming the way people look at theworld and instilling a new common sense, in the Gramscian meaning of the term.If the coming to power of radical conservatives – associated, as they understand-ably are, by many progressive intellectuals with extreme or reactionary currents –came as a surprise or shock, it is because many self-proclaimed cultural expertsfailed to acknowledge the degree to which the conservative agenda has beenarticulated in a manner that appeals to huge masses of people.

The conservative movement was able to forge a set of alliances that becamehegemonic insofar as it exercised leadership by gathering a huge followingthrough what Gramsci terms “persuasion”13 and Noam Chomsky calls the “manu-facturing of consent” (Herman and Chomsky 1988). The conservatives translatedtheir success in the cultural sphere into political victory; they came to powerbecause the ensemble of social groups they brought together into a more or lesscohesive movement had become hegemonic. Conservatism did not become hege-monic because it came to occupy the seat of government power – quite thereverse. In many important respects, the trajectory of the conservative movementexemplifies Gramsci’s contention that, in modern societies, civil society is thesite where the contestation for power takes place and from where a hegemonicgroup or stratum derives its resilience. Martin and Bellamy correctly pointed outthat there are enormous differences between Gramsci’s world and ours: for onething, the hegemonic apparatuses of today are incalculably more complex thananything Gramsci was familiar with. Yet, reading Gramsci’s analyses of howpower operates and is sustained in the modern state can hardly be said to shedlight on nothing more than the events and movements of his time.

There is, of course, one more turn in the story of the conservative march tohegemony that I have not mentioned in my brief sketch. Once they attainedgovernment power, conservatives (and, particularly, the most militant neoconserv-atives among them) were not content to use their considerable advantages –particularly, the advantage that government has in fashioning public opinionand broadening its base of popular support – to consolidate their hegemonic posi-tion. Instead, once in power, conservatives sought to reinforce their positionthrough the employment of a variety of coercive tools available to the state. Hege-mony, Gramsci maintained, is sustained by the consent of the governed and thesurest sign of its success is that it does not need to resort to the use of force butholds it in reserve. During the administration of George W. Bush, however, thetactics of persuasion and the generating of consent often took second place to theraw exercise of executive, legislative, and judicial power aimed at marginalizing,intimidating, or silencing dissentient voices: the punitive de-funding of suchentities as public radio and television; measures to ban certain practices and activ-ities (e.g. stem-cell research, same-sex marriage) through legislation or the appoint-ment of right-wing ideologues as judges; persecution of individuals declared“enemies”; assaults on academic freedom in the universities; surveillance of

30 J.A. Buttigieg

private communications; abolition of environmental controls by government agen-cies; and so on. The same conservatives who over the years displayed their masteryof the strategies and processes that lead to the attainment of hegemony in modernsociety, embarked on an illiberal course of action that, as Zbigniew Brzezinski hasforcefully argued, endangers democracy itself (see Brzezinski 2004).

Conservatism has used its conquest of state power to stimulate a strongcurrent in US political culture and cultural politics that is anti-modern and anti-liberal; a current so strong that even certain intellectuals who do not associatethemselves with neo-conservatism are writing books about the limitations ofdemocracy (see, for example, Zakaria 2003). The shift away from a foreignpolicy of leadership (and the derision of “soft power”) to a policy of dominationis coterminous with and enabled by a similar shift on the domestic front. It is ashift that can be described, in Gramscian shorthand, as an abandonment of thepolitics of hegemony in favor of the politics of coercion and domination. And,most disturbing of all, this has been done with the consent of the majority of thecitizenry. Examining this apparent paradox would entail the kind of concrete,painstaking study that Gramsci conducted in the Prison Notebooks of thecultural and political practices that contribute to the corruption of civil society.

Critics and theorists of various stripes have long been interested in theintersections of culture and politics, none more so than the practitioners of cul-tural studies. Nowhere does Gramsci’s name appear more frequently nor are hisconcepts – hegemony, common sense, passive revolution, subalternity, etc. –employed more extensively than in the academic books and articles produced bycultural studies scholars. All too often, though, cultural studies has focused itsattention on the potential or latent elements of subversion and resistance inpopular practices and culture. In the US, especially, cultural theory and criticismhas evinced less interest in hegemony than in counter-hegemony – a term, inci-dentally, that Gramsci did not use. In their eagerness to extol the subordinateand marginalized strata of society, cultural critics find evidence of resistance andsubversion in the most unlikely sites, including the supermarket and Hustlermagazine (see in this regard, Fiske 1992, and Kipnis 1992). With evidence ofsubversion and resistance so abundant, with counter-hegemonic tendencies sowidespread, how does one begin to explain the triumph of the forces of conser-vatism and reaction? Maybe, this is the time to start re-reading Gramsci.

Notes

1 The first comprehensive Gramsci bibliography was compiled by John Cammett(Cammett 1991). It has been updated regularly by John Cammett, Maria Luisa Righi,and Francesco Giasi and is now accessible in electronic form (with a very useful searchengine) at the website of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci. Online, available at:www.fondazionegramsci.org.

2 Hobsbawm’s observation is based on the data provided in Garfield 1986.3 The American journalist to whom Hobsbawm alludes is Flora Lewis; her article, “The

rise of ‘civil society,’ ” appeared in her regular column in the op-ed page of New YorkTimes in 1989. See also Joseph A. Buttigieg 1995.

Reading Gramsci now 31

4 Letter to the author, 20 April 1984.5 While in prison, Gramsci translated excerpts from an anthology of Marx’s writings

from German into Italian. One excerpt that discusses Goethe was, in fact, written byEngels (“German socialism in prose and verse”) that the editor of the anthologyerroneously attributed to Marx (see PN vol. 3: 460–1).

6 All translations from the Quaderni del carcere are mine.7 A complete transcript of the speech Hugo Chávez delivered in Caracas on 2 June

2007 can be downloaded from the official Venezuelan government website. Online,available at: www.minci.gob.ve/alocuciones/4/14173/discurso_del_presidente.html.

8 Much of the confusion surrounding Gramsci’s concept of civil society and manysimplistic accounts of his theory of hegemony are attributable to the failure to appre-ciate the crucial importance of his expansion of the concept of the state (i.e. what hecalls the “integral state”). For the best elucidation, see Buci-Glucksmann 1980.

9 See, for example, Kaldor 2003, and for a critique, see Buttigieg 2005.10 For an explanation of the terms Caesarism and Bonapartism see the note on

“Caesarism” in Forgacs 2000: 420.11 For an account of the emergence of the new conservatism, see Brennan, M.C. 1995.12 The degree to which the successes of the conservative movement are due to the

prominent role they have played in education is brought into sharp relief in Goldberg2006.

13 Gramsci’s comments on the mechanisms that generate consent through persuasion arescattered through the Prison Notebooks. One of his most interesting observations onthe topic is this: “In order to achieve a new adaptation to the new mode of work,pressure is exerted over the whole social sphere, a puritan ideology develops whichgives to the intrinsic brutal coercion the external form of persuasion and consent”(Q1 §158: 138).

32 J.A. Buttigieg

3 Sinking rootsUsing Gramsci in contemporary Britain

Kate Crehan

Every individual, including the artist and all his activities, cannot be thought ofapart from society, a specific society.

(SCW: 112)

The prison notebooks Antonio Gramsci wrote during his long incarceration arerooted in very different political realities to those of the early twenty-firstcentury. Nonetheless, the writings of this early twentieth century Italian revolu-tionary can still help us untangle the complex workings of power in contempor-ary societies. It is important, however, to begin with a caution. As a number ofthose who have engaged in depth with Gramsci’s work, such as Joseph Buttigieg(1992) and Stuart Hall (1988), stress it is above all from Gramsci’s approach tothe workings of power that we can learn; Gramsci never provides us with ready-made theoretical templates which we can apply in any simple way to our timesand our questions. Gramsci himself, I like to think, would have agreedwith Wittgenstein, who writes in the Preface to Philosophical Investigations,“I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But,if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own” (Wittgenstein 1968:viii). It is, above all, the roads down which Gramsci sends us, not necessarily theparticular destinations at which he arrives, that are so useful. Here the roaddown which I want to travel is one that begins with the concept of “expertise”and the role played by experts and expertise in the modern world, a topic towhich Gramsci repeatedly returns in the Prison Notebooks.

An ever increasing division of labor and proliferation of specializations is forGramsci a central reality of the modern world (see, for example, SPN: 10). And asintellectuals become increasingly specialized and their knowledge more and morerarified it becomes ever harder for those not recognized as having the requisiteskills to play any genuine role in the myriad decision-making processes shapingthe world in which they live. It is easy enough to make rhetorical demands for theinclusion and empowerment of the “poor,” but how in our technologicallycomplex societies could any of the ordinary, non-expert inhabitants of contempor-ary cities in the global North in a meaningful sense determine, for instance,their built environment? The “public,” particularly its more prominent and

well-organized elements, may be able to put pressure on the politicians, but almostalways those given the responsibility of coming up with appropriate and feasiblesolutions will be those recognized as having the appropriate expertise, whether inurban planning, design, financial matters or any of the other ever proliferatingforms of required contemporary competence.

For several years now I have been studying a small, London-based artsorganization, Free Form Arts Trust, with a long history of working in poor anddeprived neighborhoods. A product of the late 1960s counter-cultural moment,Free Form was founded in 19691 by three painters, Martin Goodrich, Jim Ivesand Barbara Wheeler-Early. All three were trained at leading British art schools2

but were strongly critical of the elitism they felt had informed their trainingand were in search of a way of working that would allow them to make theirart school expertise available to those beyond the established art world.They were not alone, of course, in their aspirations for a different kind of art.They were part of a widespread movement of artists in the 1960s and 1970s whowanted to take art out of the gallery, get away from the static art object andmake socially relevant art. Much of Free Form’s early work involved event-based art; they were very much part of the festivals and happenings that weresuch a central feature of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. Over time, however,their work began to shift toward more permanent forms, as they sought to findways, based on collaborative relationships between experts and non-experts,through which those living in poorer neighborhoods, those whose voices arerarely heard, might play some role, albeit small, in the design of their builtenvironment. And by the mid-1980s this had become the central focus of theorganization. Currently Free Form describes itself on its website as “makingartwork for the environment.”3 One of the reasons I am interested in this groupof artists is precisely because they provide an interesting context in which tothink about what modest and realistic form of participation in the design of thebuilt environment might look like.

The interventions I am talking about here are certainly very modest ones:attempts to give those who normally have no voice, such as social housingtenants, some small say in how their everyday living environment might bemade a little better. We are talking reform here, not revolution, whereasGramsci’s aim, as a committed political activist and one of the founders of theCommunist Party of Italy, was, of course, the radical transformation of society.Nonetheless Gramsci’s writings can help us identify some key threads thatweave through the production of experts and expertise. And these threads canhelp us imagine how the relationship between experts and non-experts might bemade more collaborative, and what the implications of this might be.

Particularly relevant here are Gramsci’s writing on intellectuals. The natureand role of intellectuals in different societies, and how this has changed overtime, is one of the central themes in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci’s under-standing of who intellectuals are and what they do, however, runs counter tomost conventional definitions of intellectuals. It is important, therefore, to beginwith some clarifications.

34 K. Crehan

The production of knowledge

Central to Gramsci’s writings on intellectuals is a fundamental shift from theconventional focus on the characteristics of intellectuals as individuals to a focuson the social relations within which knowledge is produced. For Gramsci whatmakes someone an intellectual is not that they, as the OED definition has it,“possess superior powers of intellect,” but that they occupy a position in societythat gives them a responsibility to produce knowledge and/or to instill thatknowledge into others. Intellectuals are society’s acknowledged experts. Theproblem with conventional understandings of intellectuals, as Gramsci sees it, isthat people have looked for what defines an intellectual,

In the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities, rather than in the ensemble ofthe system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectualgroups who personify them) have their place within the general complex ofsocial relations. Indeed the worker or proletarian, for example, is not specifi-cally characterized by his manual or instrumental work, but by performingthis work in specific conditions and in specific social relations.

(SPN: 8)

Intellectuals are not merely those who think, however “superior” their thoughts,but those whose thoughts – at least within the context within which they are seenas having “expertise” – are considered to have authority. And consequently ourprimary focus should be on the social relations within which intellectual activitytakes place rather than on “the intellectual groups who personify them.”

Gramsci’s definition of intellectuals is in addition very broad, encompassingnot merely “great thinkers” but all those who play a part, however minor, in thereproduction of a given way of seeing the world. Crucial here, for instance, arethat multitude who perform organizational tasks, “the entire social stratumwhich exercises an organizational function in the wide sense – whether in thefield of production, or in that of culture, or in that of political administration”(SPN: 97). In a certain sense, that is, all those who are granted the status of“expert” – however circumscribed their sphere of expertise may be – can beconsidered intellectuals in that they have been given by society the respons-ibility of producing and/or reproducing authoritative knowledge. Gramsci’sultimate concern is always with the structures and processes by which power isproduced and reproduced, or possibly transformed, and how intellectuals arelocated within these, rather than with individual intellectuals themselves. Toreiterate, intellectuals for Gramsci are defined not by their superior abilityto “think” but by the fact that their thinking is done “in specific conditionsand in specific social relations”; this is what legitimates them as expert in agiven field.

Another key point to note is the distinction Gramsci makes between “the‘organic’ intellectuals which every new class creates alongside itself and elabo-rates in the course of its development” (SPN: 6), and traditional intellectuals.

Sinking roots 35

Traditional intellectuals, who were themselves originally organically linked toparticular classes have over time become

A crystallised social group . . . which sees itself as continuing uninterrupt-edly through history and thus independent of the struggle of groups4 ratherthan as the expression of a dialectical process through which every domin-ant social group elaborates its own category of intellectuals.

(SPN: 452)

And in line with intellectuals’ vision of themselves as an entity that continues, asGramsci puts it here, “uninterruptedly through history,” traditional intellectualscontinually reproduce themselves (ibid.). This reproduction is achieved througha complex institutional apparatus that includes both formal elements, such asschools, colleges, and professional associations, but also a whole series of moreinformal networks.

Ultimately any new social group that is genuinely rising to dominance willcreate its own organic intellectuals. In a note entitled “The Formation of theIntellectuals” Gramsci writes:

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of anessential function in the world of economic production, creates togetherwith itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give ithomogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economicbut also in the social and political fields.

(SPN: 5)

These new organic intellectuals, however, do not emerge fully formed, likeAthena from the brow of Zeus; the new intellectual visions and ways of beingnecessarily begin with what already exists. Some of these new intellectuals –and Gramsci himself is a good example here – will have been formed initially intraditional intellectual institutions but in response to the new realities in whichthey live, who they are and what they do as intellectuals undergoes a process oftransformation. The very demands of the new economic and political worldbring into being new kinds of intellectuals: “The capitalist entrepreneur createsalongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy,the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.” (SPN: 5). And, justas it would have been impossible to predict in pre-industrial times the emer-gence of the industrial technician, so to it is impossible to know precisely whatshape the organic intellectuals of future societies will assume.

Traditional intellectuals may like to see themselves as “independent of thestruggle of groups” but this independence is illusory; intellectuals are alwaysembedded in the power structures of their societies (SPN: 7–8). And one dimen-sion of this is that the narratives that intellectuals produce explaining how theworld is – and producing such narratives is an important part of what intellectu-als do – are ultimately rooted in specific class5 experiences. What intellectuals

36 K. Crehan

do, among other things, is precisely to provide coherent narratives which capturehow the world appears from a particular social vantage point, and how it feels tolive in that social location. One way in which artists can be seen as part of theintellectual infrastructure is in that part of what they do, at least when they aresuccessful, is to produce in whatever medium they work in, consciously orunconsciously, images which resonate in emotionally convincing ways with howthe world appears to a particular group. Another passage from the Prison Note-books where Gramsci is discussing the relationship between literature andpolitics, and what a new progressive literature would look like is particularlyrelevant in this context:

The premise of the new literature cannot but be historical, political andpopular. It must aim at elaborating that which already is, whether polemi-cally or in some other way does not matter. What does matter, though, isthat it sink its roots into the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastesand tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it isbackward and conventional.

(SCW: 102)

However, sinking roots into the humus of popular culture is not something thatan artist can simply choose to do; organic intellectuals in the field of art, likeother organic intellectuals emerge, although never automatically, as part oflarger social and economic processes. One of the reasons for my interest in FreeForm is that their rejection of the traditional gallery world of fine art became astruggle to find new ways of being artists that spoke to the working-classcommunities in which they wanted to use their expertise. And speaking to thosecommunities demanded that they “sink roots into the humus of popular culture.”This was a project that would call into question some of the fundamentalassumptions underlying the training they had received at their elite art schools.Indeed finding new ways of being artists that break free of traditional modelscan be especially challenging for artists trained in elite art schools preciselybecause of how art as a category is generally understood (at least in the globalNorth), and how this category is entangled with power. To explain what I meanby this it is necessary to look at this apparently straightforward category “art” ina little more detail.

“Art with a capital A”

Both scholarly and popular writings on the arts have a tendency treat the arts asif they existed in their own distinct domain; “art” is seen as some universal,timeless category, located in a realm beyond the ordinary, workaday, moneygrubbing world. In 1951 the art historian Paul Kristeller published an essay,“The Modern System of the Arts,” subsequently widely reprinted, in which heargues that far from being a timeless, universal category, “the term ‘Art,’ with acapital A and in its modern sense, and the related term ‘Fine Arts’ (Beaux Arts)

Sinking roots 37

originated in all probability in the eighteenth century” (Kristeller 1990a: 164).The rise to dominance of this understanding of “Art” can be seen as closelylinked to the rise of Romanticism and the Romantic notion of the artist:

The Romantic movement exalted the artist above all other human beings.For the first time “creative” was applied not only to God but also to thehuman artist, and a whole new vocabulary was developed to characterizethe artist and his activity . . . The artist was guided no longer by reason or byrules but by feeling and sentiment, intuition and imagination; he producedwhat was novel and original, and at the point of his highest achievement hewas a genius.

(Kristeller 1990b: 250)

Interestingly, however, while Kristeller’s thesis has apparently beenwidely accepted, this seems scarcely to have disturbed the basic assumption that“art” is universal. As the aesthetic historian Martha Woodmansee puts it in herstudy of the links between the emergence of a market for literary works inGermany and the modern notion of art, philosophers of art “are given to citingor alluding to Kristeller’s article approvingly and then proceeding to operate asif ‘art’ were timeless and universal” (Woodmansee 1994: 3–4). “Art with acapital A” has, it seems, become the implicit, common sense understanding ofart, an understanding which – in part because it is implicit – is extraordinarilyhard to dislodge.

Kristeller sums up the key characteristics of this common sense notion asfollows:

The basic notion that the five “major arts” [painting, sculpture, architecture,music and poetry] constitute an area all by themselves, clearly separatedby common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences and other humanactivities, has been taken for granted by most writers on aesthetics fromKant to the present day . . . and it is accepted as a matter of course by thegeneral public of amateurs who assign to “Art” with a capital A that evernarrowing area of modern life which is not occupied by science, religion, orpractical pursuits.

(Kristeller 1990a: 165)

It is significant that this essentially Romantic notion of “Art with a capitalA,” “that ever narrowing area of modern life which is not occupied by science,religion, or practical pursuits,” (ibid.) emerges in Europe around the same timeas the first stirrings of industrial capitalism. The emergence of “Art with acapital A” is intimately connected with the development of economic systemsorganized around the production of commodities. Kristeller describes thechanges in the social location of the artist that lie behind the elevation of artto Art, as he, and occasionally she, increasingly came to depend not on anindividual patron, but on an art market:

38 K. Crehan

The social position of the artist underwent a profound change after themiddle of the eighteenth century. He gradually lost the patronage of theChurch and the state, of the aristocracy and patriciate that had sustained himfor centuries, and found himself confronted with an anonymous, amor-phous, and frequently uneducated public which he often despised and whichhe would either flatter with a bad conscience or openly defy, claiming thatit was the public’s duty to approve and support the artist even when itcould not understand or appreciate the products of the artist’s unbridledself-expression.

(Kristeller 1990b: 250–251)

In the same passage Kristeller notes how examples of “geniuses unrecognized intheir time,” so much a part of contemporary notions of the Artist, were “some-thing rarely heard of before the nineteenth century.”6

It is in the context of the rise of capitalism that “Art” comes to be defined, wemight say, as the negative of the commodity. That is, we have, on the one hand,the commodity, the defining characteristic of which, as classically described byMarx in volume I of Capital (Marx 1976: 125–177), is precisely that it is pro-duced to be sold, its value expressed in its price in the market place; while, onthe other hand, we have “Art” which, like the affections of the human heart, isseen as inhabiting its own non-commodifed realm, a realm that must be keptremote from the crass marketplace where money rules. According to this under-standing “Art” represents transcendent goods sullied by any too obvious contactwith commerce.

In reality, however, all human activities require material resources in someform or another. The production and consumption of art, with or without acapital A, simply cannot be isolated from the rest of the economic system. In thefirst place, its producers need to make a living or be supported in some form orother, which requires them having access to some part of the social product, andthat locates these activities squarely within the economy of their society. Artistsget to be accredited as genuine artists, and their works imbued with value,through their association with the established institutions of the art world.However seemingly revolutionary the content of their works, in Gramscianterms such artists remain traditional intellectuals, firmly embedded in the socialhierarchies of their society. Second, the consumption of art, whatever its form,demands resources. There need to be, for example, museums, galleries, cinemasand theaters for the consumers and audiences of art objects, films and plays.Even the contemporary world’s increasingly privatized consumption in thehome means televisions, sound systems, home theaters and so on, and the appro-priate conditions, including the necessary time, to take advantage of them. If weignore the reality that people’s encounters with art are always deeply embeddedin the specificities of particular forms of consumption in given times and places,we are left with what Pierre Bourdieu described as “the miracle of unequal classdistribution of the capacity for inspired encounters with works of art andhigh culture in general” (Bourdieu 1984: 29). Understanding this “miracle,” as

Sinking roots 39

Bourdieu’s own tour de force, Distinction, maps out, demands that we paycareful attention to the material realities of consumption, and the particularsocial nexus in which it takes place. Bourdieu’s point here echoes Gramsci’srejection of the idea of a separate cultural domain beyond the economy.

It should be noted that neither Gramsci nor Bourdieu’s insistence on thematerial realities of the production and consumption of the arts should betaken as implying that high art is irredeemably alien to non-elite audiences;numerous successful experiences of putting on, for example, Shakespeare’splays in workshop settings with audiences quite unfamiliar with his plays, bothin Britain and the United States, demonstrate that, given the opportunity toengage with a piece of unfamiliar high art over time and in a supportive environ-ment, it is possible for all kinds of people to discover that this apparently alien,high culture can indeed speak to them in very powerful ways.7 My point is ratherthat “inspired encounters with art and high culture” necessarily depend on acertain familiarity with the art in question, and a knowledge of its conventions –a knowledge that the more privileged are likely to have internalized, just as theyhave the basic grammatical rules of their mother tongue, so that they are nolonger even conscious of the rules they are applying. Those denied the opportun-ity of acquiring literacy in high culture at an early age – when learning anylanguage is so much easier – are certainly able to acquire it later but it is likelyto be more of a struggle and to require more conscious effort. Gramsci’scomment on the advantages that certain children have when they enter school isrelevant here.

In a whole series of families, especially in the intellectual strata, thechildren find in their family life a preparation, a prolongation and a comple-tion of school life; they “breathe in,” as the expression goes, a wholequantity of notions and attitudes which facilitate the educational processproperly speaking. They already know and develop their knowledge of theliterary language,8 i.e. the means of expression and of knowledge, which istechnically superior to the means possessed by the average member of theschool population between the ages of six and twelve.

(SPN: 31)

And this is equally true when the language to be mastered is that of “Artwith a capital A”: neither the making of Art nor its consumption can everbe completely divorced from the various power relations that inevitably, insome form or another, thread through that making and that consumption. Animportant dimension of knowledge of Art that has been “breathed in” andinternalized, for instance, is that those who have it simply take it for grantedthat this Art is theirs by right. The British artist and former winner of theprestigious Turner prize, Grayson Perry, commenting on what many inBritain see as a growing “apartheid” in the arts, captures the sense ofexclusion often felt, especially perhaps in Britain, by those not brought up withhigh-culture:

40 K. Crehan

Students from working-class backgrounds are also often saddled with whatis known as “imposter syndrome”. This is a deep-seated sense that theworld of culture, particularly so-called “high-culture”, is not for the likes ofthem, a feeling that at any moment they will be tapped on the shoulder andasked to leave.

(Asthana and Thorpe 2007)

Let me also make it clear here, that just as I would not want to argue that highart is inherently alien to non-elite audiences, neither would I want to question ordeny the importance and value of “Art with a capital A.” What seems to me theproblem is that all too often other forms of human creativity and expressivenessare dismissed as bad or failed art because while not conforming to the model of“Art with a capital A,” they still get caught in the broad net of common senseunderstandings of what constitutes “genuine art” – a net woven out of theassociations conjured up by the category “Art with a capital A.” There is, forinstance, the attitude required of the spectator. When in the presence of an Artobject a spectator is expected to adopt a particular stance: focused, earnest, andquasi-religious. Indeed, it could be argued, as does the anthropologist AlfredGell, that:

[i]n so far as modern souls possess a religion, that religion is the religion ofart, the religion whose shrines consist of theatres, libraries, and art galleries,whose priests and bishops are painters and poets, whose theologians arecritics, and whose dogma is the dogma of universal aestheticism.

(Gell 1992: 41–42)

Above all, in line with this essentially Romantic notion of art, the spectator isrequired to give full concentration to these sacred objects; any object that fails todemand such focused attention cannot, it seems, qualify as genuine Art. And tofacilitate the proper reverential concentration, modern galleries tend to take theform of the familiar white-cube, from which all potentially distracting clutter hasbeen removed, and within which a hushed silence is expected.

Defining art as that which demands focused attention, however, rules out awide range of work. There is, for example, the long tradition of signs painted forinns and shops; the gardens created for the wealthy and the more modest horti-cultural endeavors of those lower in the social scale; typography in all its forms;and in the modern era, the public lettering and other signage that has playedsuch an important role in defining the distinct physical character of the LondonUnderground and other Metro systems. To quote Gell again,

Western categories of (generic) “art works” are inadequate to the task ofidentifying aesthetic practices even in western societies – including, as theydo, the products of every obsolete Sunday painter, but excluding those ofthe imaginative gardener, home decorator, or budgerigar-breeder.

(1995: 21)

Sinking roots 41

The rise of “Art with a capital A” in the later eighteenth century led toeverything – particularly in the case of the visual arts – that was seen as servingsome utilitarian purpose being relegated to what was now thought of as the farless prestigious realm of craft. In Britain a key moment is the establishment ofthe Royal Academy in 1769 under the presidency of Joshua Reynolds, a painterto the aristocracy bent on raising his own social status and that of his fellow“fine artists.” The official title of this institution was the Royal Academy inLondon for the Purpose of Cultivating and Improving the Arts of Painting,Sculpture, and Architecture; and Reynolds, much to the fury of William Blake,ensured that no engravers, coach painters, metalworkers or other craftsmencould be elected to it. Part of Free Form’s struggle to escape their formationas traditional intellectuals involved going back to older, more inclusivedefinitions of art.

At the heart of Gramsci’s understanding of intellectuals (who for him wouldinclude visual artists) is his assumption that the coherent knowledge producedby intellectuals emerges out of an ever-continuing dialogue between the realitieslived, and the systematizing structures that intellectuals bring to bear on theserealities. One of the ways in which Gramsci’s approach is relevant to a study ofan organization like that of Free Form is because it directs our attention to thecharacter of the relationship between intellectuals (especially organic intellectu-als attempting to render coherent working-class experience) and those who livea given reality. Ultimately, as I have argued, for Gramsci it is a particular classexperience itself that creates intellectuals; this experience bringing into beingnew kinds of intellectuals with different forms of expertise. Part of what definesthe degree to which given intellectuals are indeed organic intellectuals is pre-cisely the degree and quality of linkage between a specific lived reality and theintellectuals’ rendering of it as coherent narrative. It is important to stress that inGramsci’s writings, in contrast to those of some other Marxist theorists, intellec-tuals are never seen as having some mysterious power that allows them to intuitthe “truth” of a particular class experience, which they then have the respons-ibility to instill in the inert mass of non-intellectuals. Rather it is that classexperience itself, albeit in complex and mediated ways, that brings into being itsown organic intellectuals. For Gramsci the creation of intellectuals is always aprocess, often a long and difficult one (see, for example, SPN: 334, 418). Thelonger study of Free Form I am currently completing explores how theexperience of working in working-class neighborhoods over a number of yearshelped to shape the organization, and in many ways transform the nature of theFree Form artists as artists, as they tried to find ways of translating the aspira-tions of working-class residents into coherent and feasible improvements of thebuilt environment. Their aim was essentially to use their expertise as visualartists to find solutions to problems presented to them by the residents –solutions the residents would see as being their own. A 1974 Free Form projectin Liverpool, and what developed out of it, shows something of how this processworked, and how a Gramscian approach can help us better understand the natureof these artists and of their project.

42 K. Crehan

Dead fish and totem poles9

By the early 1970s the organization’s founders, Goodrich, Ives and Wheeler-Early, had attracted a shifting group of like-minded visual artists and performers,all interested in finding new ways of working with new kinds of audiences, andnew aesthetic languages. In 1973 this group had found a base for itself in aformer butcher’s shop in the Borough of Hackney in London’s East End. Tocelebrate their new building and announce their arrival in the area, Free Formmounted an exhibition, entitled “The Growth of Public Art” that showcased thework they had done up to that point. One of the visitors to the exhibition was asocial worker from Liverpool, Chris Elphick. Impressed with how the groupseemed to have found ways of using their artistic expertise that spoke to working-class people, Elphick asked if Free Form might be interested in coming tothe particularly bleak Liverpool neighborhood, Granby, where he worked. FreeForm was interested and together with Elphick they successfully applied for somevery modest funding for a Free Form team, led by Goodrich, to go to Liverpoolfor six weeks to run a series of arts workshops with local children, culminating ina festival. It was this work that would lead to Free Form’s first environmentalproject.

Granby, where they were to work, was a harsh and violent place in the 1970s,rife with racial tensions; one of the most impoverished areas of an impoverishedcity. Even this team of artists used to harsh conditions in the far from genteelEast End were shocked by the violence and wildness of the children with whomthey now had to work. Nonetheless, their workshops were successful and bydevising various very physical activities they managed to channel the violencein more productive ways. The festival, which featured a range of performancesand a spectacular fire show, drew a big crowd, and the whole event was judgedto have been a great success – sufficiently so for it to be repeated for the nextthree years. It is worth noting that the audiences, like the workshop participants,were not the normal art world ones and primarily local.

In 1974, by which time there had been two Granby Festivals and Free Formwas both liked and trusted by local residents, Elphick and some of these resid-ents again turned to Free Form for help in a struggle they were waging with thecity authorities, Liverpool City Corporation. The residents were attempting toget the corporation to do something about four ugly, derelict sites on localcouncil estates.10 The corporation’s offer was to tarmac them. Enthused by thesuccess of the Granby Festival, the residents demanded more; they wanted themturned into community gardens, allotments or play areas. “Too expensive,” thecorporation responded. The residents persisted, demanding that the corporationgive them the £2,000 tarmacking would cost and let them organize the workthemselves. This did not appeal to the entrenched and traditional City Corpora-tion and things began to get increasingly tense. In a pattern that would berepeated a number of times over the years, an awkward situation for which thereseemed no easy solution became an opportunity for Free Form. It was agreedthat Free Form, working with local residents, would be given a budget of £500

Sinking roots 43

to transform one of the sites as a demonstration project to show what could bedone on a very modest budget. The Corporation could after all recognize FreeForm and its accredited artists as having genuine expertise. A Free Form team,this time directed by Wheeler-Early and Ives, together with a group of localpeople, whose labor was paid for through a government job creation scheme, setabout the transformation. First the artists talked with local residents to find outwhat they wanted. Taking the suggestions they were given, they then con-structed a series of scale-models to show how these might be realized. Moremeetings with residents were then organized, at which, using an approach nowcalled “planning for real,” people were given the scale-models and a site plan.By moving the models around the plan various options could be explored andpeople could decide what they liked best. Detailed notes of their responses weretaken and on the basis of these the artists came up with a final design.

Led by the artists, local residents, who included a number of skilled carpen-ters and other craftsmen, then carried out the landscaping. Workshops wereorganized to teach specific skills. These included the making of mosaics, theconstruction of concrete paving slabs for pathways and sculptural woodenseating (see Figure 3.1).11

Running through the whole design was a surreal playfulness. Ives describesthem building a pond out of fiberglass, encased in which were real dead fish, andcreating totem poles from old telegraph poles. Wheeler-Early gave this account:

We did the first mosaic mural on the wall with people, with broken tilesand china and stuff. And it was fantastic. It was very raw. Again becausein Liverpool 8 the streets were like everyone’s front room we had thiscommunal seating on the corner where they could all sit and talk and therewas a little stage where the kids could do their performances. And alltheir mosaic work was embedded in the pathways and so on, and there wasplanting.

The finished work was certainly not polished, given the minuscule budget it isdifficult to see how it could have been, but the response from the residents of thisneglected, bleak area was enthusiastic. And out of this work a new organizationemerged, the Diggers, created by one of the locals who worked with them, whichtook on the task of carrying out the work on the remaining three sites. TheDiggers continued to exist and to work locally, long after these three sites werecompleted. The work itself, never intended to be permanent, lasted for asurprising number of years and was in general well looked after by localresidents. While acknowledging the rawness of the work, Wheeler-Early noted:

Now the Arts establishment would look at what we did and say in designterms we could have done more than that. But no designer was taking onthose issues and if they’d have done it without involving [local people] itwould have been smashed to pieces. But that project was not ruined. Soquality, you have to see quality in context.

44 K. Crehan

The environmental work in Granby was followed by other environmentalprojects particularly as government money for urban regeneration becameincreasingly available in the later 1970s. The earliest projects usually involvedsimilar transformations of small, derelict corners of the urban landscape, orpublic spaces on council estates, with mosaics, seating, planting and so on. Butwhatever the project it would always be based on collaboration between FreeForm and local residents, with the residents providing the essentials of the briefto which Free Form worked. A central concern was to find artistic forms andimagery that would resonate with those who would be living with the results; theaim was, to use Gramsci’s formulation quoted above, to sink “roots into the

Sinking roots 45

Figure 3.1 The Granby Project, Liverpool 1974 (source: Free Form Arts Trust).

humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with itsmoral and intellectual world” (SCW: 102). At the same time, the Free Formartists did not want simply to reproduce what they saw as the often sentimentaland banal, visual languages characteristic of commoditized, mass-producedvisual culture. One of the ways this was achieved was through workshops inwhich people could develop ideas about imagery as well as various practicalskills. In the longer study I am working on I explore the various negotiationsover aesthetics involved.

Over time the scope of the projects became more ambitious and the work ofthe organization broadened to include larger issues of planning, and a search forhow the arts might be incorporated into working-class social and built environ-ments in an organic and more permanent way. By the early 1980s the raw begin-nings at Granby had developed into far more polished work,12 helped by aten-year core funding grant from Hackney Council, which enabled Free Form toemploy an architect and a landscape architect. A natural development seemed tobe the creation of a more structured mechanism to make Free Form’s profes-sional expertise available to local people – a move very much in tune with thethinking of a number of progressive architects in the 1970s. These architects,who had begun calling themselves community architects, were also searchingfor more collaborative ways of working. And in 1983 this movement led tothe creation of the Association of Community Technical Aid Centres, a nation-wide body (of which Free Form was a founding member) intended to promotethe provision of various forms of technical aid to those who would otherwise nothave access to such professional expertise.

Free Form’s Design and Technical Aid Service offered free consultationsto those wanting to improve their often dilapidated and depressing estates, orto do something about local eyesores like the derelict sites Free Form hadworked on in Liverpool. As Free Form saw it, what they were offering weresolutions grounded in art, but art here was defined extremely broadly. Theservice was very popular, receiving hundreds of inquiries each year; Free Formwas by now well known in the area and their shop front provided a walk-incenter where information and explanatory leaflets (with translations into over tenof the languages spoken locally, including Turkish, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujerati,Swahili, Hausa, Somali, and Amharic) were available. An individual, a tenantsgroup, or some other organization would hear about the service and approachFree Form for advice about how they might improve their estate or tackle aproblem area. One or two of the Free Form professionals would then visit thesite, and meet with local people, listening to their concerns and getting an initialidea of the place. There would then be subsequent meetings and Free Formwould help people develop ideas for feasible projects and write up fundingproposals to be submitted to one of the various government or other regenerationfunding schemes. If successful the funding proposal would provide the money topay Free Form, together with the residents, to carry out the work. All the prelim-inary work done by Free Form was provided free, their core funding allowingthem to devote many hours to visiting with different groups, listening to them,

46 K. Crehan

and working on possible solutions. Once funding had been secured, workmight well extend over a number of years and involve a whole series of differentprojects. Throughout Free Form’s history a key means of enabling localpeople to participate and genuinely shape projects has been workshops. Theworkshops both help to generate the imagery that will be used and teachpeople the practical skills they need if they are to play an active role in projects.These labor-intensive workshops are perhaps the central mechanism thatenable people to develop their skills and come up with their own solutions tothe problems they confront in their built environment. The basic idea, asWheeler-Early explained, was to make their particular expertise available:“it wasn’t that we were de-professionalizing anything but we wanted to makethe professions available to people; to work for them and not work againstpeople.”

In the 30 years since the Granby project the world in which Free Form hashad to survive has become an ever more hard-nosed, profit-driven one. There isalso the growing obsession in the funding world with accountability and the riseof what has been called the audit culture. Nonetheless Free Form has not onlysurvived, it has grown. In 2004 it had an annual turnover of around £1,000,000,with approximately half of the organization’s income coming from grants andhalf directly earned from projects. A crucial expertise this group of fine artistshas had to develop is skills in navigating the continually shifting demands offunding agencies. Indeed, knowledge of how the funding world works and howtenants groups and others could tap into regeneration funds was an importantpart of the expertise that the Design and Technical Aid Service could offer. FreeForm’s survival has depended to a significant degree on always keeping a sharpeye out for ways to exploit the latest funding fashions in ways that might openup new possibilities. As various opportunities have presented themselves theorganization has expanded into a number of different areas of work, such as pro-jects with the private sector, and running courses for artists interested in workingin the public realm. We could see Free Form’s continual reimagining of theirexpertise, initially formed in traditional art schools, as representing a search forinnovative and collaborative ways in which art (if not “Art with a capital A”)rooted in working-class experience can be made an organic part of the fabricof the built environment in which everyday life is lived. In the course of thissearch the very nature of their expertise has changed. A key point here is that theskills they have developed, for instance, in navigating the world of funding arenot simply additional expertise to be added on to existing artistic skills; they areorganic to the process of becoming the kind of artists they aspire to be, whichbrings us back to the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci stresses that newly emergingorganic intellectuals necessarily have to begin with the language that alreadyexists but that nonetheless, “the content of language must be changed, even if itis difficult to have an exact consciousness of the change in immediate terms”(SPN: 453). Here we can think of the Free Form artists as necessarily beginningwith the expertise (which can be thought of metaphorically as a language) of thevisual artist they had acquired at art school, then through their experience of

Sinking roots 47

working with those living lives remote from the elite, established art world,transforming the content of that expertise.

At the same time, chasing down grants and fulfilling the ever mushroomingdemands for accountability in the form of the documented meeting of pre-determined “targets” are enormously time-consuming. The work with socialhousing tenants and others has continued. It has become much more difficult,however, for the organization to provide the all important hours of free advice,help with devising proposals and writing grants to fund them, and the time-consuming workshops. This is particularly ironic given that it is precisely, Iwould argue, this labor-intensive process – a process which is by its very natureopen-ended and unpredictable as to what it produces and consequently tends tobe viewed with suspicion by the practitioners of the audit culture – that explainsFree Form’s reputation among a number of funders and regeneration bodies as,in their language, being able “to deliver participation.” Gramsci’s notion oforganic intellectual can help us think through just what the participation centralto Free Form’s practice involves. One thing is clear; this participation is farmore complex than that implied by breezy populist language simply demandingthat it be “delivered.”

I discussed above Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intel-lectuals. The Free Form artists may not be Gramscian organic intellectuals in thestrong sense of giving a newly emergent class that represents “an essential func-tion in the world of economic production . . . homogeneity, and an awareness ofits own function not only in the economic but also in the social and politicalfields” (SPN: 5). Nonetheless, I would argue, the particular kind of collaborativerelationship Free Form has sought to create between experts and non-experts canbe seen as representing an attempt to create a more organic relationship betweenartists and working-class experience. These artists trained in art schoolsdesigned to produce traditional (in the Gramsci sense) intellectuals have soughtto find ways of putting this expertise at the service of working-class peoplestruggling to improve their built environment. And, in line with Gramsci’scharacterization of organic intellectuals, this attempt has resulted in the FreeForm artists becoming rather different kind of artists from those of the tradi-tional gallery world of “Art with a capital A”; artists who have perhaps managedto sink a few roots into the humus of popular culture.

Notes

1 Originally the artists called themselves Visual Systems. The name Free Form ArtsTrust was adopted formally in 1974 when, at the suggestion of the Arts Council theorganization became a registered charity. For the sake of simplicity I refer to theorganization as Free Form throughout.

2 Goodrich and Ives’ initial training was at Walthamstow Art College, Wheeler-Early’sat Manchester College of Art, with Goodrich going on to Royal College of Art, Ivesto the Royal Academy Schools, and Wheeler-Early to Goldsmith’s College of Art.

3 freeform.org.uk, accessed 15 August 07.4 By “the struggle of groups” Gramsci means class struggle. This is one of the

euphemisms he sometimes used to avoid arousing the suspicions of the prison censors.

48 K. Crehan

5 Class for Gramsci is never narrowly economic. Essentially it names a location ofstructural inequality which, while rooted in fundamental economic relations, alsoalways has political, cultural, and other dimensions (see Crehan 2002 for an extendeddiscussion of the concept of class in Gramsci’s writings).

6 See also Woodmansee (1994) for a persuasive elaboration of this argument.7 For instance, the American Shakespeare Behind Bars theater troupe and The London

Shakespeare Workout Prison Project are two very successful groups that both workwith prison inmates using Shakespeare’s plays.

8 Most Italians at this time used regional dialects in their daily lives.9 My account of Free Form and the Granby project is based on tape-recorded inter-

views with the artists I carried out from 2001 to 2005, and Free Form’s own archives.All quotations of the artists come from transcripts of these interviews.

10 Housing built and managed by local councils. Until the Thatcher “revolution” thiswas the standard form of social housing in Britain.

11 The illustrations of the Granby project are reproduced by permission of Free FormArts Trust.

12 Crehan 2006 describes one of the projects in some detail.

Sinking roots 49

4 Gramsci and LabriolaPhilology, philosophy of praxis

Roberto M. Dainotto

Theory is a plagiarism of things.(Antonio Labriola)

“Nowadays” – Maria Rosa Cardia wrote (perhaps too much in earnest) at theturn of the millennium – “Gramsci’s writings can finally be taken away from theconcrete political history in which they were born, away from the sphere ofcontingency, and can enter into the history of ideas, into the sphere of thepermanent” (Cardia 1999: 89).1 The idea of Gramsci’s work leaving the “contin-gency” to reach permanence, universality, and, in short, the status of a canonizedclassic, was certainly surprising for those who had taken the immanence ofGramsci’s thought for granted (see for instance Frosini 2004a; Golding 1988:545, 553–554). As Joseph Buttigieg remarked, the problem was not whetherGramsci’s legacy could amount

[t]o a monument für ewig, whether it deserves the status of a classic as, say,Goethe’s work does – but rather how it could be read today in order that itmay inspire, reinforce and help direct current struggles against the forces ofdomination, the concealed nexuses of power and privilege, and the unequaldistribution of spiritual and material wealth.

(Buttigieg 1986: 15)

But so things go: Gramsci did become a monument, a classic – and, of allthings, a classic of “ideas” rather than of praxis. Like all classics, Gramscistarted telling us so many new things at every reading, that in the end his veryname became a formula, an empty signifier, good to decorate arguments onvirtually anything, from hegemony and subalternity, to the most reactionaryof right-wing causes (on this, see Kranenburg 1999; Zipin 2003; Diggins1988).

In such a context, one wonders if, instead of providing new readings ofGramsci, it may not be worth returning instead – in order to start re-imaginingwhat the role of Gramsci can be today – to a note penned by Gramsci in 1933regarding some “Methodological Questions”:

If one wants to study the conception of a world view whose author has notdeveloped it systematically (and whose essential coherence is to be found notin a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of allhis intellectual work, in which the elements of such view of the world areimplicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work, carried outwith the greatest scruples of exactness, of scientific honesty, of intellectualloyalty, and without preconceptions or prejudice.

(Q16 §2: 1840)2

This note was the re-elaboration of an early entry, specifically Q4 §1. Thenovelty of this rewriting consisted in the introduction of the word “philology,” aword that Gramsci, in the earlier draft of 1930, had probably resisted for its pejora-tive connotations. To explain, in 1930 Gramsci was reading Benedetto Croce’sStoria dell’età barocca in Italia, a work from which he gleaned a fundamentalantithesis between the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe, and the almostcoeval Renaissance that occurred in Italy: whereas the Reformation was a progres-sive “popular movement,” the Renaissance was instead a “high,” “aristocratic”culture of the intellectual elites, incapable of speaking to the popular masses (Q4§3: 425), that soon turned into the regressive mythologizing and erudite humanismof the Baroque and of Mannerism. Thus, for Gramsci “classical philology” was thecharacteristic methodology of the “aristocratic” High Renaissance (Q7 §60: 900),and “old philology” was, at best, an “ingenuous form of dogmatism” (Q4 §5: 425).

By 1933, however, Gramsci had abandoned Croce’s antithesis Reformation–Renaissance (Frosini 2004b: 184–187) – and, in fact, Croce himself: in the attemptto go beyond Croce’s opposition of popular and high, and in order to make ofcommunism not only a popular (like the Reformation), but also a culturally hege-monic movement (like the Renaissance), Gramsci was now re-reading the works ofAntonio Labriola. As early as March 25, 1929, Gramsci had asked his sister-in-law,Tania Schucht, to send to him in prison the collected works of Labriola (LC 247).As Gramsci had annotated already in Q3 (written in 1930), such works were ofparticular importance to him, since Labriola had convincingly argued that “thephilosophy of Marxism is contained within Marxism itself” (PN vol. II: 30). Howto make of Marxism a hegemonic philosophy? By reading and amending it throughCroce’s exogenous idealism? Or by interpreting it through Labriola’s endogenousMarxism? If the latter was indeed the choice, the entries of Q16 from 1933–1934clearly indicate that Gramsci was, at that point of his intellectual development,starting to abandon Croce and was returning to Labriola in order to re-construct thephilosophical basis for a hegemonic Marxism – an original basis that had been“subjected to a double revision” on the part, on the one hand, of “idealistic trends(for example Croce),” and, on the other, of “so-called orthodox” vulgar materialists,who “believe they are orthodox insofar as they identify the philosophy of praxiswith traditional materialism” (Q16 §9: 1854–55).

As an antidote to such “double revision,” Antonio Labriola was the key forreturning Marxism to its own internal and original logic – to its true orthodoxy.Along with a recuperation of Labriola, a parallel appropriation of the “critical

Gramsci and Labriola 51

method” (Q7 §43: 892) of philology became then essential in order to return tothe original and internal coherence of Marxism. Pronounced dead by its oppon-ents, and debased by its proponents’ trivial materialism, Marxism had tobe reconstructed from its very foundation: only such philological restorationcould now prepare it for a rebirth, a “Rinascimento.” And if using philologymeant appropriating a method proper of “aristocratic” Renaissance humanism,Gramsci was quick to add that “in the Holy Family, in fact, the expression‘humanism’ is used to mean non-transcendence. Marx, moreover, wanted tocall his philosophy ‘neohumanism’ ” (Q17 §18: 1922); this was, in short, a“neohumanism” (Q5 §127: 657), an “absolute humanism” (Q11 §42: 1437),different from the old one to the extent that neohumanism meant an immanentscience of humanity and of historical institutions stripped of any remainder ofmetaphysical transcendence. What for a hegemonic conception of the worldwas transcendental truth, philology made contingent, relative, immanent andhistorical.

As a method of immanence, Gramsci’s philology begins with the assumptionthat there are no immutable, transcendent meanings. For example:

There is no such thing as an abstract “human nature” fixed and immutable(such concepts derive from religious thoughts about transcendence); . . .rather, human nature is the totality of historical determined social relations.In other words, it is a historical fact that can be ascertained, within limits,with the methods of philology and criticism.

(Q13 §20: 1599)

Meanings are determined by the complexity of social and historical relations.Philology, in this sense, is not merely a method to apply to the study of Marxism,but is the methodological marrow of historical materialism itself, a conception ofthe world, that is to say, which “asserts theoretically that every ‘truth’ thought tobe eternal and absolute has practical origins and has represented or represents aprovisional value” (PN vol. II: 188).

Yet, Gramsci’s philology is not only deployed to reconstruct an originalmeaning. Philology is also productive of new ones, it is “reconstruction” and“renaissance”: while it ascertains textual facts in order to determine their conditionsof meaning in the past historical moment of their production, it also hypothesizes“trends” for future possibilities of meaning:

[Ascertaining facts] does not mean that one cannot also construct an empiri-cal compilation of practical observations that widen the sphere of philologyas it is understood traditionally. If philology is the methodological expres-sion of the importance that particular facts must be ascertained and definedin their unique “individuality,” the practical utility of identifying a numberof its more general “laws” and “trends” of philological development cannotbe excluded.

(Q11 §25: 1429)

52 R.M. Dainotto

If we were to apply Gramsci’s own philological and critical method to hiswritings today, we would then be confronted with a double task: first, we wouldneed to ascertain the textual facts of what Gramsci wrote, keeping in mind thatwhat Gramsci meant cannot be anchored simply to a single piece of writing (or,worse, to a simple word), but should rather be seen within the entire developmentof his intellectual work, situated in the cultural, social, and political context inwhich it matured. Second – while keeping aware of the immanence of his writingsand of the fact that those writings do not aim to any eternal truth, but are cognizantof their own provisional value – we would try to individuate some “trends” that canbe useful still in thinking Gramsci now. This second side of the work that Gramscicalls “philology” is essential if we want to avoid the danger of reifying, freezing,and/or monumentalizing Gramsci as a given, a catechism, or a dogma. After all,“The theory and practice of philological criticism found in the notebooks constitutein themselves a most important contribution to the elaboration of an anti-dogmaticphilosophy of praxis” (Buttigieg 1990: 81).

Given these general premises, we could indeed begin our philological workby locating the origin of Gramsci’s method in the proper context of Gramsci’sre-reading and re-evaluation of Antonio Labriola. Gramsci, in all likelihood,took the expression “neohumanism” from Antonio Labriola’s attempt at found-ing a “new science” of “critical communism” based on Giambattista Vico’shumanist historicism (Dainotto forthcoming). The sort of humanistic or philo-logical method Gramsci outlines in Notebook 16, “derived not from the naturalsciences but from the field of criticism and interpretation” (Buttigieg 1990: 76),was par of Gramsci’s long-standing organic intention to “re-circulate Labriola’sphilosophical positions” (Q3 §31: 309).

A re-evaluation of philology had already been proposed by Labriola in his 1896essay on historical materialism: “Where would our historic science be without theone-sidedness [unilateralità] of philology, which is the fundamental theoreticalsupport [sussidio] of all research [. . .]?” (Labriola 2000: 129).3 Moreover, whatGramsci’s note on “Methodological Questions” calls “philology” (ascertainingfacts, but also determining trends of possible development) is in fact more than are-phrasing of the very method that Labriola, in 1899, had called “genetics” whilecommenting on a critical edition of Marx and Engels’ writings:

These writings are in reality monographs, and in most cases they comein response to special occasions. In other words, they are fragments of ascience and of a politics in a process of continuous becoming. In order tounderstand them fully . . . we must read them in the manner of, so to speak,traces and imprints, and, sometimes, as the marks and reflections, of thegenesis of modern socialism.

(Labriola 2000: 210)

In the absence of an organic exposition of a theory (that is, historical material-ism), what remains, writes Labriola, are occasional works, “fragments” – or, inGramsci’s parlance, “single works.” Such “units” need now to be understood as

Gramsci and Labriola 53

parts of a whole, as the organic development of a single intellectual work that isin a process of continuous becoming. The fundamental unity and coherence ofMarxism, despite the somewhat fragmentary nature of its exposition, can thus bepreserved by a method, which Labriola called “genetic” and Gramsci “philologi-cal,” and which could see in the different epiphanies of its utterances one singlescience and one single politics developing through various philological/geneticalstages as the historical unfolding of modern socialism. Here lies the fundamentalpremise of what Gramsci calls “orthodoxy”:

The concept of “orthodoxy” must be renewed and brought back to itsauthentic origin, orthodoxy should not be sought after in this or that discipleof Marx, in this or that tendency connected to movements that are extrane-ous to Marxism, but, rather, in the notion that Marxism is self-sufficient,contains within itself all the fundamental elements for building not only atotal and unified view of the world, a complete philosophy, but also torenew a complete practical organization of society – to become, that is tosay, an integral, complete civilization.

(Q4 §14: 435)

“Orthodoxy,” as Gramsci understood the term philologically (“brought back to itsauthentic origin” and “renewed” at the same time), does not involve monumental-izing and reifying the writings of either Marx or Engels. Rather, it indicates theirrevitalization, which is not synonymous with revisionism, but necessitates areturn to the fundamental elements of a doctrine which is re-adapted to new needsand circumstances.

Why this return to philology and to Labriola on Gramsci’s part? Labriola’s“genetic” method had been conceived as an answer to a perceived crisis ofMarxism. Attacked from the positivist front for its failure to predict a proletarianrevolution, Marxism had been dismissed by the likes of Enrico Ferri as an“imperfect philosophy” (see Barbano 1985: 203). “Orthodox” voices againstFerri, like Filippo Turati’s, turned Das Kapital from a living text into a sort of abible written in stone.

Confronted with these two possibilities, Labriola had proposed a “geneticmethod” that would re-conceptualize Marxism as a living philosophy “in continu-ous becoming” (Labriola 2000: 129). Always cautious with analogies, Gramscimust have seen the situation of Marxism in the 1930s as similar indeed to that ofMarxism in Labriola’s time. In addition to the continuing positivist attacks fromthe likes of Achille Loria, Gramsci had singled out, as an emblem of the “so-calledorthodox” vulgarization of Marxism, the publication, in 1921, of NicholajBukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism: Manual of Popular Sociology, abook “which betrays all the shortcomings of conversation” (Q1 §153: 136). Theeditorial success of the Manual, and, even worse, its growing influence in theSecond and Third International, presented the danger of reducing Marxism to amere sociology fashioned upon the models of natural sciences and vulgar material-ism. As programmatically announced by the very title of the book, Bukharin’s

54 R.M. Dainotto

Manual aimed at being “popular”; however, for this very reason, its vulgarizationof Marxism ended up offering a theory which was anything but “superior,” andwhich remained incapable of raising the popular masses from a state of ideologicalsubalternity.

Bukharin had translated Marxism into a series of philosophical paradigmswhich were not only theoretically weak, but also extraneous to Marxism itself:

A theory of history and of politics conceived as sociology, to be constructedaccording to the methods of natural sciences (above all experimental andtrivially positivistic sciences), and a philosophy coinciding with philosophi-cal materialism, or metaphysical and mechanical (vulgar) materialism.

(Q11 §22: 1425)

For Gramsci, instead, “positivism and mechanicism are the vulgarization of thephilosophy of praxis” (Q8 §235: 1088); and the latter cannot be confused “withvulgar materialism, or with a metaphysics of ‘matter’ ” (Q11 §62: 1489). “Forthis reason,” Gramsci insisted, “Antonio Labriola’s position should be reevalu-ated . . . Labriola is differentiated from [vulgar materialism, but also idealism] byhis affirmation that Marxism is itself an independent and original philosophy”(PN vol. II: 140).

To single out in Labriola’s work the recovery of Marxism understood as a novelphilosophy, original and independent from the others, meant therefore to begin,through Labriola, a philological study of the origin and genesis of Marxism – aphilology that, alone, could prevent a misreading of the latter as a mere repetition ofpositivism, materialism, or idealism. Such philology, in addition, could find inMarxism ideas that could still be useful in a different context, in Gramsci’s “now” –a “now” often radically different than the one in which Marx’s and Engels’s con-cepts were first formulated. Finally, Gramsci’s use of Labriola’s “genetic” method,now turned into a new philology, entailed a general recuperation of the philosophical“superior culture” of Labriola’s Marxism, which Gramsci had started to propose bythe end of 1930 as an answer to vulgarizations. Such vulgarizing tendencies hadbegun “in the Romantic period of . . . popular Sturm und Drang,” when, around1848, the seeming imminence of a revolution had led Marxists to focus theirinterests “on the most immediate weapons or on problems of political tactics” (PNvol. II: 31). However, even in the 1930s, when a revolution was hardly imaginable inthe heyday of triumphant fascism, Gramsci saw Italian and international Marxismstill blinded by a search for immediacy, still preoccupied with short-term tactics, andstill uninterested in developing a more long-lasting philosophical basis for Marxismfrom where to begin a long-term war of position. In the name of a misunderstoodidea of praxis, Marxism was too quick in concocting next-day tactics, and too unin-terested in developing a hegemonic philosophy. If a philosophy had to be given tothe masses, vulgar materialism was enough – possibly a materialism rinsed in thewaters of the dominant philosophical paradigms of positivism and idealism.

A philological return to the original foundations of Marxism through Labriolameant then to restitute to praxis the dignity of a philosophy, and to make the first

Gramsci and Labriola 55

moves in a war of position whose eventual goal was cultural hegemony – thetransformation of Marxism into a “superior culture” that could create consensusamong the masses. What the latter needed was a new view of the world, notsimply tactics: and such view of the world had to be restored from Marxism’sown texts; not on the basis of exogenous idealist and positivist philosophies, butthrough a scrupulous work of philology on the footsteps of Labriola.

Contrary to Luporini’s assumption that the relation between Labriola andGramsci can at best be characterized as one of discontinuity and interruption(Luporini 1973: 1587), it seems that through both a methodology, and a series oflinguistic echoes, Gramsci institutes a precise and solid genetic link betweenhimself, Labriola, and the Marxism of Marx and Engels. More precisely, ratherthan a discontinuity, Labriola represents the indispensable philological linkconnecting Gramsci to the “marrow” of theoretical Marxism. “The philosophyof praxis . . . is the marrow of historical materialism,” had written Labriola; andGramsci explicitly echoed him by asserting that the philosophy of praxis was“the marrow-substance” of Marxism (Q11 §22: 1425). Philology was becominga search for a historical continuity within theoretical Marxism.

Insisting on the link between Labriola and Gramsci helps to reframe the oldquestion of whether there is a persistence of idealist thought in Gramsci’s work.Already in 1970, Christian Riechers, in Antonio Gramsci: Marxismus in Italien, hadseen Gramsci as imprisoned within the schemes of idealism, led by a “voluntaristic”and “subjectivistic” view of historical processes indebted both to Croce and toGentile’s actualism. Traces of this idealistic reading of Gramsci are still pervasive(see for instance Natoli 1989; Schechter 1990; Mancina 1999; Racinaro 1999).

However, if a leading influence exists on Gramsci’s thought, it is that of Labriola– the same Labriola who, as a teacher of Croce, posed some fundamental questionsthat idealism on the one hand, and Gramsci on the other, answered in radicallydifferent ways. Through Labriola, Gramsci prepares a re-conceptualization ofhistorical materialism understood as nothing less than a refutation of idealism (seeFergnani 1976: 68–70). Central to such a refutation is the conception of historicalmaterialism as a “philosophy of praxis,” a philosophy, that is to say, fundamentallydifferent from idealist philosophy, and more specifically from Gentile’s “philosophyof pure act”:

Neither idealistic nor materialistic “monism,” neither “Matter” nor “Spirit,”evidently, but rather “historical materialism,” that is to say, concrete humanactivity [history]: namely, activity concerning a certain organized “matter”[material forces of production] and the transformed “nature” of man. Philo-sophy of the act [praxis], not of the “pure act” but rather of the “impure” – thatis, the real – act, in the most secular sense of the word.

(PN vol. II: 176–177)

“Matter” and “Idea,” within such philosophy, are nothing else than “relation” –in this sense, they are impure “in the most secular sense of the word.” They are notgiven per se, but they are the by-product of “labor” (PN vol. II: 197). Labor, in

56 R.M. Dainotto

turn, is not relation between substances (such as “reality” and “thought,” or worldand man) that exist for themselves; even less it is activity of a “pure” Spirit orThought that posits reality, solipsistically, as its creation. Rather, labor is a relationthat, only as relation, can posit reality and will, matter and thought, world and man:

For the philosophy of praxis, “matter” should not be understood neither inthe sense given to this word by natural science [i.e. positivism], nor accord-ing to the meaning given to it by sundry materialist metaphysics. . . . Mattershould not be considered as such, but only insofar as it is socially andhistorically organized for production, and therefore . . . as an essentiallyhistorical category, as human relation.

(Q11 §30: 1442)

At the same time, and in opposition to any form of idealism, such a relation,which is a historical category, institutes not only matter or man, but also thought,which is not the “abstract thought” of idealism, but always the correlative,thought of some thing (Q7 §1: 853):

Only the philosophy of praxis has managed to make forward progress in thehistory of thinking . . . avoiding any tendency to solipsism [i.e. idealism],historicizing thought in so far as it assumes it as view of the world. Itteaches there is no “reality” per se, in and of itself, but only in historicalrelation with men who modify it.

(Q11 §59: 1486)

As we start noticing from all these brief citations, a central concept inGramsci’s differentiation of historical materialism both from vulgar materialismand from idealism is that of the “philosophy of praxis,” a concept that firstappears in the Notebooks in 1932. What did Gramsci mean by that? Where didthe locution come from? Omnipresent in the Notebooks, the expression is one ofthose that, to quote from the note on method again, “the author has not exposedsystematically.” For an adequate understanding of what Gramsci means here, weneed “a careful philological work, carried out with the greatest scruples of exact-ness, of scientific honesty, of intellectual loyalty, and without preconceptions orprejudice.”

Despite attempts at explaining away the notion of “philosophy of praxis” asa mere prison expedient that Gramsci would have used to escape the censorinstead of the synonymous “Marxism,”4 we know that the term has in fact aprecise and polemical intent in Gramsci, “as part of a long-standing traditionopposed to positivist, naturalist and scientific deformations of Marxism”(Piccone 1977: 35). However, Gramsci’s opposition to positivism is not, con-trary to what has been suggested (Piccone 1977: 36; Finocchiaro 1988: 91), anattempt to retrieve and valorize elements of idealist thought. Instead, it consti-tutes a defense of Marxist “orthodoxy” (i.e. originality) against both positivismand idealism.

Gramsci and Labriola 57

The first time the locution “philosophy of praxis” appears in the Notebooks,in a long note on Machiavelli, it is enclosed within quotation marks that indicateit is a borrowed term:

In his treatment, in his critique of the present, [Machiavelli] articulatedsome general concepts . . . He also articulated a conception of the world thatcould also be called “philosophy of praxis” or “neohumanism,” in that itdoes not recognize transcendental or immanent (in the metaphysical sense)elements, but is based entirely on the concrete action of man, who out ofhistorical necessity works and transforms reality.

(PN vol. II: 378)

Gramsci most certainly does not borrow the term “philosophy of praxis” fromGiovanni Gentile’s “La filosofia della prassi” of 1899, nor from BenedettoCroce’s “Recenti interpretazioni della teoria marxistica” of the same year.Certainly, Gentile and Croce had put the term into circulation and had engen-dered a fiery philosophical debate over it. They had, in a sense, appropriated theterm in order to articulate a theory of the idealist overcoming (superamento,Aufhebung) of Marxism. Gramsci, however, with philological scruple indeed,wants to bring the philosophy of praxis to its original meaning – the oneconceived by Antonio Labriola in his Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia of1897.

Discorrendo was the last of a series of three essays that Labriola had devotedto establishing the philosophical foundations of historical materialism. His first,“In Memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti” of 1895, had laid the basis for whatGramsci would later call “neohumanism” by translating Marxism in terms ofVico’s Scienza Nuova (New Science), which “had reduced history to a processwhich man himself makes through successive experimentation consisting in theinvention of language, religion, customs and laws” (Labriola 2000: 78).

Going back to Vico’s Scienza Nuova and to its philosophy of history, Labri-ola had stressed exactly the historicist dimension of historical materialism: “thedistinctive character of this work [Manifesto],” had argued Labriola, was not tobe found in its materialistic conception, but, rather, is “all contained in the newconception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explainedand developed” (Labriola 2000: 37). The importance of such claim had not beenlost on Gramsci: “As for this expression ‘historical materialism,’ greater stress isplaced on the second word, whereas it should be placed on the first: Marx isfundamentally ‘historicist’ ” (PN vol. II: 153).

In the second essay, “Del materialismo storico. Dilucidazione preliminare” of1896, Labriola had clarified, anticipating Gramsci once again, the confusion of theterm “materialism” in the context of Marx’s philosophy (see Dal Pane 1968: 328).Against an idealist conception that opposes matter “to another higher or noblerthing which is called spirit,” but also against a vulgar materialist conception of thesame which attempts to explain the whole of man “by the mere calculation of hismaterial interests” (Labriola 2000: 94), Labriola had proposed that matter was

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the by-product of human labor, and that the latter produced, as terms of a singlerelation, both the real (material circumstances) and the ideal (will).

If Labriola’s two essays had already given material for thought to Gramsci, itwas especially the third one, written in 1899, that must have caught his attentionin a passage in which historical materialism was defined not merely as a tactic orpraxis, but, rather, as a “philosophy of praxis”:

The philosophy of [praxis] . . . is the [marrow] of historical materialism. It isthe immanent philosophy of things about which people philosophize. Therealistic process leads first from life to thought, not from thought to life. Itleads from work, from the labor of cognition, to understanding as an abstracttheory, not from theory to cognition. It leads from wants, and therefore fromvarious feelings of well-being or illness resulting from the satisfaction orneglect of these wants, to the creation of the poetical myth of supernaturalforces, not vice-versa.

(Labriola 2000: 238)

Certainly “philosophy of praxis” was not a new term in philosophy (seeLobkowicz 1967). However, when Labriola adopts the terminology, “philosophyof praxis” is no longer the Aristotelic notion of life as incessant activity, unityof energeia and entelechy (Mora 2002: 171), but, rather, an investigation of therelation between philosophy and socialism that Marx’s last thesis on Feuerbachhad posited in the notorious slogan: “Philosophers have only interpreted theworld; the point is to change it.”

If the meaning of Marx’s thesis, for both philosophy and socialism, is thatphilosophy needs now to be transcended and transformed into action, thenLabriola’s shift from praxis to a philosophy of praxis is of polemical import-ance: the genitive “of ” is not to be understood as a disjunction between the twoterms as in “philosophy about praxis,” but rather as a qualifying attribute of aspecial kind of philosophy that is praxis in itself. To assume that philosophyshould be transformed into something else (i.e. praxis) means, to use Gramsci’swords, to reduce Marxism to “popular Sturm und Drang,” into a populisticsearch for “immediate weapons” of political struggle. It is to oppose dialecti-cally philosophy and praxis, as if these were things in themselves, whileprivileging the second term of antithesis over the first. Hence, Labriola’s appre-hension in using the very word “philosophy,” which he would rather replacewith “Lebens-und-Welt-Anschauung, a conception of life and the universe”(Labriola 2000: 204).

It is the fundamental limit of dialectical procedure, after all, to assume thatthere is such a thing as philosophy, understood as a superstructure. Because forLabriola, philosophy is nothing per se, it is neither structure nor superstructure.Philosophy, rather, is a continuous process, labor, relation – between reality andthe human understanding of reality; and between such human understanding andthe reality accordingly modified by it. In fact, in the way of Vico, even reality andhumankind per se are merely irrelevant and “unknowable” (Labriola 2000: 257).

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They exist only as “mutual relations of movements” that philosophy catches intheir becoming (Labriola 2000: 253).

The very dialogical structure of Labriola’s third essay seems then much morethan a mere formal expediency. “Discorrendo,” whose dramatic structure is thatof a series of letters sent by Labriola in response to questions posed by GeorgesSorel, was published in Italy on December 6, 1897, by Benedetto Croce, an ex-student of Labriola; and then in 1899 in a French edition. This “sin of minorliterature” (Labriola 2000: 300) dramatizes already in the formal choice of theepistolary genre a firm refusal of the book, product of:

This closing century, which is all business, all money, [which] does notfreely circulate thought unless it is likewise expressed in the revered businessform and endorsed by it, so that it may have for fit companions the bill ofthe publisher and the literary advertisements from frothy puffs to sincerestpraise.

(Labriola 2000: 198)

The “discussion” immediately opposes to the fixity and immobility of thebook a Socratic idea of philosophy as relation, discourse. The stylistic frame ofthe exchange well fits Labriola’s preference for spontaneity and flexibility. Here,philosophy is not a monologue that exists prior to a relation, to a discourse, but,rather, a game of continuous adaptability. It changes and becomes according tothe colloquial intercourse between interlocutors, it becomes “spontaneous, aliveand flexible speech, as fitted the occasion” (Labriola 2000: 300).

Programmatically, the function of Discorrendo is that of “clarifying” some ofthe points already raised in Labriola’s previous two essays. Between the publica-tion of the first in 1895 and the composition of the letters to Sorel, the discussionopened by Labriola around theoretical Marxism and the philosophical legiti-macy of historical materialism had continued with a number of authoritative andpolemical interventions in the debate: in June 1896 Croce himself had published“Sulla concezione materialistica della storia”; in October 1897, GiovanniGentile positioned himself in the debate with “Una critica del materialismostorico”, and in November 1897, having read already the manuscript ofLabriola’s Discorrendo, Croce had published “Per l’interpretazione e la criticadi alcuni concetti del marxismo.”

Aware of such contributions to the debate, Labriola refuses to confront thosetexts in any explicit way, to the point that Gentile, in a letter to Croce, complainsabout Labriola’s disregard of his Critica (Vigna 1977: 69). Implicitly andbetween the lines, however, Discorrendo can certainly be seen as an answer toboth Croce and Gentile’s misreading of Marxism from an idealist position – aposition that only in the Postscript to the French edition of 1898, Labriola willangrily label, this time in explicit response to Croce, as a form of “hedonism”(Labriola 2000: 318) – Gramsci will later talk of “solipsism” regarding idealistphilosophy. At any rate, it seems exactly the intention to answer Croce’s andGentile’s idealism in an implicit way that leads Labriola to his first formulation

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of “philosophy of praxis” in Discorrendo. If such philosophy marks the end ofvulgar materialism, it also does so of idealism:

Historical materialism, then, or the philosophy of practice, takes account ofman as a social and historical being. It gives the last blow to all forms ofidealism which regard actually existing things as mere reflexes, reproduc-tions, imitations, illustrations, results, of so-called a priori thought, thoughtbefore the fact. It marks also the end of naturalistic materialism, using thisterm in the sense which it had up to a few years ago.

(Labriola 2000: 238)

More than a confrontation with Croce and Gentile, however, “Discorrendo”opens an interrogation, all internal to a theory of historical materialism, regard-ing the validity of dialectics, which Marx and Engels had inherited from theidealist philosophy of Hegel. Already in a letter to Engels of June 13, 1894,Labriola had raised his objections concerning dialectics:

You use as antithetical terms dialectic and metaphysical method. In orderto say the same, in Italy, instead of dialectic, one should say geneticmethod. The word “dialectics” is degraded in common usage, understoodas the art pettifogging rhetoricians, and, in sum to sophistic Scheinbe-weiskunst. Nothing is known here in Italy of the Hegelian tradition. Butin the present state of the philosophical culture in Germany, do you thinkit is clear, obvious, fitting and exhausting the designation of “dialecticmethod” in order to say what you want to say? You think it is clear thatyou mean that such method is the shape of the thought that conceives ofthings not as they are in themselves (factum, fixed species, category etc.)but as they become? Is it clear that through such method also thoughtshould be understood as act in motion? I would believe that the designa-tion of “genetic” conception would make things clearer; and for sure itwould make things more comprehensible, since the concept comprehendsboth the real content of the things that become, and the logical–formalvirtuosism of thought that understands them as they become. With theword “dialectics,” only the formal aspect is represented (a form that forHegel, as for all idealists, was everything). And as we say “genetic,” bothDarwinism and all materialistic conceptions of history can take theirproper place. I want to say that the expression “genetic method” leavesuncontaminated the empirical nature of each individual formation: this iswhat the vulgarizers of Darwinism, and the great admirers of the eunuchSpencer, don’t seem to understand.

(Labriola 1949: 146–147)

What is presented at the beginning as a mere nominalistic qualm – should theword “dialectics” be used in Italy? – soon unfolds in a precise denunciation of thelimits of dialectics: dialectics formalizes thought, loses its movement. The issue

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is handled again in “Discorrendo,” where dialectics is presented again as the“obstacle” of historical materialism (Labriola 2000: 302). As a general distrustfor dialectics is often remarked upon by Labriola, its fundamental and mostserious problem remains that of generating misunderstanding. Dialectics, saysLabriola “throws into the saddest of confusions all those readers of Capital whocarry into its perusal the intellectual habits of the empiricists, metaphysicians, andauthors of definitions of entities conceived for all eternity” (Labriola 2000:212–213). Dialectics make readers perceive antitheses as mere contradictions(Labriola 2000: 213); but more importantly, dialectics runs the perpetual risk ofmistaking the terms of antithesis as if they were things in themselves, “entitiesconceived in aeternum.” In other words, to say, as the dialectician does, thatknowledge proceeds from the confrontation and antithesis of Spirit (or thought)and Nature (or matter), risks to mistake Spirit or Matter as things in themselves,whereas for Labriola Spirit and Matter, man and nature, thought and materialreality exist only in their relationship: they are not, but rather become in theirrelation to each other; they are made the one by the other, in the same way inwhich there is not Thought but only thought of something, while there is humanlyno thing but what we think, make, and know. Here lies the mechanism of thephilosophy of praxis – a philosophy, that is to say, pitted against both idealistsand materialists, “people who mistake links and relations for beings and sub-stances” (Labriola 2000: 238).

[. . .] In these statements lies the secret of a phrase used by Marx, which hasbeen the cause of much racking for some brains. He said that he had turnedthe dialectics of Hegel right side up. This means in plain words that therhythmic movement of the idea itself (the spontaneous generation ofthought!) was set aside and the rhythmic movements of real things adopted, amovement which ultimately produces thought. . . . The intellectual revolu-tion, which has come to regard the processes of human history as absolutelyobjective ones, is simultaneously accompanied by that intellectual revolutionwhich regards the philosophical mind itself as a product of history. Thismind is no longer for any thinking man a fact which was never in themaking, an event which had no causes, an eternal entity which does notchange, and still less the creature of one sole act. It is rather a process ofcreation in perpetuity.

(Labriola 2000: 238–239)

The stake of the philosophy of praxis is exactly that of preserving a continuous“flux of thought” (Labriola 2000: 253), always “in the making,” perpetually chang-ing and “in process,” from the danger of reducing it into formal abstractions –thesis and antithesis, things as fetishes which “had no causes,” and which “do notchange”:

There is always the temptation (or at least the danger) of personifying[sostantivare] a process, or its terminal points [i suoi termini dialettici]. By

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means of an illusory projection, relations become things, and by cogitatingfarther upon them these things become operative subjects.

(Labriola 2000: 245)

Indebted to Herbart (Poggi 1978), this science of becoming that is the philosophyof praxis, truly clarifies then what Labriola’s first essay had meant by saying thathistorical materialism was a new humanism. As Gramsci’s Notebooks wouldnotice, the central question is always one:

What is man? This is the first and fundamental question of philosophy.How to answer? The definition can be found in man itself; that is, inevery single man. But is this correct? In each single man we can findonly what is in each “single man.” But what interests us here is not whata single man is, which would mean, anyway, what a single man is in eachsingle moment. If we think of it, we see that what we mean by posingsuch question is: what can man become; if, in other words, man candetermine his destiny, can “make himself,” can create a life for himself.Let us say, then, that man is a process, and, precisely, the process of hisactions.

(Q10/II §54: 1343–1346)

The human in its historicity, in its becoming: this was the new science that,through Vico as much as through Marx, Labriola had proposed as a philosophy ofpraxis. In such becoming, the human is never Thought, as it is never Matter – itbecomes as the relation of a thought that makes and is made by a reality that isthe human world. Being a science of relationships, and since relationships areendless – between man and nature, between man and labor, between labor andsocial labor, between society and individual . . . – Marxism’s goal has to be “totake society as a whole” as a totality of discreet relationships, avoiding “torepresent fixed things,” pre-existing, or independent from, the relationship itself(Labriola 2000: 253).

One should never forget that any object of knowledge is not per se, but it isonly “il divenuto del divenire,” what becomes under the influence of otherforces. In itself and for itself, outside of the web of relations, that object isunknowable, remains metaphysical illusion:

A queer thing (that so-called thing in itself), which we do not know, neithertoday, nor tomorrow, which we shall never know, and of which we never-theless know that we cannot know it. This thing cannot belong to the fieldof knowledge, [for there can be no knowledge of the unknowable].

(Labriola 2000: 258)

Labriola does not spare Marxism itself from the criticism implied in thephilosophy of praxis. Positing a thing in itself, such as “economy,” as a givenstructure from which all superstructures arise, is after all yet another schematic

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abstraction that misses how “the form of thought reveals itself alive and becom-ing” (Labriola 2000: 302). It is not that – Labriola insists – Marx or Engels fallinto such schematic abstractions. Instead, the vulgarizers are to be blamed. Yet,despite the effort to rescue both Marx and Engels, the perilousness of dialectics,its tendential formalization of “becoming,” of the “living,” is too present toLabriola not to add a few words of warning:

I became firmly convinced of the great injury done to young minds bysteeping them without warning in formulae, diagrams, and definitions asthough these were the forerunners of real things, instead of leading them bygradual and well weighed steps through a chosen department of reality andfirst observing, comparing, and experimenting with actual objects beforeformulating theories. In short, a definition placed at the beginning of a studyis meaningless. Definitions take on a meaning only when geneticallydeveloped.

(Labriola 2000: 303)

What could this mean if not that dialectics, as a formal method, is empty? Marxand Engels – Labriola insists – do know that, and dialectics is only a methodo-logical tool in their philosophy of praxis, a reduction of the complexity ofthe web of total relationships to conceptual “facts.” Yet, even as a tool, as atransient moment in the unfolding of the philosophy of praxis, dialectic is, evenin the pedagogical praxis, a “great injury”: it begins from abstractions – thesisand antithesis – as if the formula was the prototype of something really existent.

The “marrow” of historical materialism, in other words, must be recovered,philologically or genetically indeed, not simply in the text, but in the intention ofMarx and Engels. This is an intention, to spell it clearly, that Marx and Engelsthemselves may have confused and betrayed because of the influence on them ofthe hegemonic philosophies of their time – positivism, and more specifically in thecase of dialectics, Hegelian idealism. Little matters what Marx and Engels wrote,suggests Labriola’s “discussion”: scripta manent – unfortunately! More than theirwriting, it is their thought that matters, a thought that philology needs to re-construct, sometimes going against the grain of canonizations, monumentalizations,reifications, and traditions: “Tradition must not weigh upon us like a nightmare. Itmust not be an impediment, an obstacle, an object of a cult or of stupid reverence”(Labriola 2000: 240). And later, in the “Postscript” to the French edition:

Here you have it: I am not the knight in white armor defending Marx. Iacknowledge all possible criticisms, I am myself a critic in what I say. I donot deny the validity of the sentence: to know is to overcome.

(Labriola 2000: 327)

All of this Labriola is willing to accept – if, and only if, “overcoming” isaccompanied by philological scruples, or, as Labriola puts it, if one is aware that“overcoming means to have well understood” (Labriola 2000: 327). As if to say

64 R.M. Dainotto

that to go beyond has nothing to do with the revisionism of “that cretin Bern-stein” (letter to Croce of January 8, 1900, cited in Gerratana 1974: 578), butmeans, rather, philologically to understand a meaning correctly, behind the veilof a lectio facilior that translated historical materialism into a form subservientto dialectical idealism. Philosophy of praxis for Labriola is then not a form ofrevisionism, but scrupulous philological, genetic work: the same founders ofhistorical materialism, after all, were theorizing not an “absolute eternal Truth,”but rather a truth immanent to the very historical context of their own theorizing.In other words, Marx and Engels themselves had written and produced theory ina specific historical context, determined not only by certain contextual needs,but also by the epochal hegemony of positivist and idealist philosophies. Labri-ola’s philological work is therefore that of cleansing the very words of Marx andEngels from what was merely accidental, determined by the historical context inwhich some words were produced; such work meant to recover, behind whatwas accidental, the essential “marrow,” which a strenuous philological work hadto bring back to light.

If not revisionism, what is ultimately at stake in Labriola’s philosophy ofpraxis is the possibility to understand philosophy and praxis, not in a dialectical,but in a relational way – as interdependence. Can it be said that philosophy isone thing and praxis another? For Labriola:

To think is to produce. To learn means to produce by reproduction. Wedo not really and truly know a thing, until we are capable of producing itourselves by thought, work, proof, and renewed proof. We do this only byvirtue of our own powers, in our social group and from the point of viewwhich we occupy in it.

(Labriola 2000: 228)

To think and to act are not two separate activities that dialectics can put in arelation; they are, rather, the very same process of becoming. Is not a philosophythat mentions a proletarian revolution an act, something that “produces,” pre-pares and moves minds and spirit of an imagined community called “proletariat”to see itself as one and reshape the world around? The problem, for Labriola, isnot that of an Aufhebung of one thing – philosophy – into another – praxis; butrather Vico’s interdependence of scienza e vita.

Labriola, in other words, tries, through the locution “philosophy of praxis,” togo around one of the most problematic aporias of Marxism. Roberto Finellisummarizes well:

For Labriola it is essential that the refusal of philosophy recommended byEngels and Marx in the German Ideology and in the Holy Family, and byMarx in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the Antidühring, is somewhatattenuated and marginalized. Their demand for a “totally practical praxis,”and the consequent abandonment of any political praxis identified withtheory, had imposed on Marx and Engels the necessity to conceive of

Gramsci and Labriola 65

thought, and of philosophy more specifically, as the most abstract by-productof the social division of labor. If labor is the most real and most true locus ofreality, since it is rooted in the materiality of life, all that is distinct and sepa-rated from that primary locus must accordingly become secondary at thelevel of ontology and fallacious at the level of knowledge. Particularly falla-cious and mystifying must be philosophy, which represents the most abstractand speculative extreme of that derived and secondary sphere of life. Theconsequence is an aporia, a contradiction inherent in historical materialism:because the exclusion of philosophy from the sphere of truth disallows thephilosophy of historical materialism itself the possibility of claiming anyscientific validity. In other words, Marxism, at the same moment in which itclaims that the knowledge is an abstraction from praxis and labor, constitutesitself, paradoxically, as an exception to its own claim.

(Finelli 2006: 78–80 my translation)

It is in fact from the very first appearance of the term “philosophy of praxis” thatLabriola starts insisting not on the idea of a philosophy that ought to becomepraxis, nor on any idea of praxis as “immediacy,” as the fatalistic product ofmaterial circumstances, but rather on the precise notion of a philosophy and apraxis that are always inseparable one from the other, thus forming a relation, atotality:

Historical materialism will be enlarged, diffused, specialized, and will haveits own history. It may vary in coloring and outline from country to country.But this will do no great harm, so long as it preserves that kernel which is,so to say, its whole philosophy. One of its fundamental theses is this: Thenature of man, his historical making, is a practical process. And when I saypractical, it implies the elimination of the vulgar distinction between theoryand practice.

(Labriola 2000: 225)

Historical materialism becomes, has a history; it is a process. In itself, it is nothing,but what becomes “from country to country.” Its inner logic, its “marrow,” is “theperfect coincidence of philosophy, that is to say of a thought critically aware ofitself, with the material that is known. In other words, it is the complete liquidationof the traditional separations between science and philosophy” (Labriola 2000:249). In this “perfect coincidence,” therefore, the separation of the two terms,“philosophy” and “praxis,” is not an ontological one. It is, rather, a methodologicalabstraction, separating, for simplifying things, what in fact should be thought of asa totality:

This is historical materialism, taken as a threefold theory, namely as a philo-sophical method for the general understanding of life and the universe, asa critique of political economy reducible to certain laws only because itrepresents a certain historical phase, and as an interpretation of politics. . . .

66 R.M. Dainotto

These three aspects, which I enumerate abstractly, as is always the customfor purposes of analysis, form one single unity in the minds of the twoauthors [Marx and Engels]. For this reason, their writings . . . never appearto literary men of classic traditions to have been written according to thecanons of the art of book writing. These writings are in reality . . . fragmentsof a science and politics in a process of continuous growth [divenire].

(Labriola 2000: 210)

So, if a philosophy of praxis is an immanent philosophy, it is also somethingmore than that: it is the re-interpretation of Marxism as a neohumanism, as aphilology; and the parallel cleansing of historical materialism from both natural,empirical sciences, and from idealism itself.

In this rich and polemical sense Gramsci understands the philosophy ofpraxis as the marrow of historical materialism: through it, Gramsci begins a re-evaluation of so-called superstructural elements in his conception of Marxism.Philosophy of praxis is also a vitalist conception of history that has little to dowith Gentile’s attualismo, and has more in common with Vico’s humanisticunderstanding of history as a relation between Man and Reality. It seems as if,along with the locution “philosophy of praxis,” Gramsci also inherits fromLabriola a distrust for the formal logic, and for the systemic fixity of dialecticsitself. If Labriola had abandoned dialectics altogether, Gramsci would be moreconcerned with establishing a “real” dialectic (Golding 1988: 553–558); and ifthe former had addressed his distrust directly to Engels, the latter contentshimself with addressing Bukharin. Yet, the address does touch the very marrowof historical materialism:

One no longer understands the importance and meaning of dialecticswhich, from doctrine of knowledge and marrow of historiography andpolitical science becomes degraded to a subgenre of formal logic and to aform of elementary scholasticism. The meaning of dialectics can only beunderstood in all its importance only if the philosophy of praxis can beconceived as an integral and original philosophy that goes beyond (anddoing so includes comprehends all vital elements of) both idealism andtraditional materialism. If the philosophy of praxis is thought of as some-thing subordinated to another philosophy, we will not have any new dialec-tics, which alone can determine and express the overcoming of all otherphilosophies.

(Q11 § 22: 1425)

To what extent can a new dialectic be different than the old one? Whichdialectics, if not Labriola’s Viconian science of relationships, can adequatelydetermine and express Marxism’s overcoming of Hegelian idealism? And willsuch Viconian new science be a science of dialectics after all, or even whatMarx understood as “dialectics”? As Labriola had warned his reader through theFaustian epigraph to Discorrendo, his dialogue, apparently civilized and polite

Gramsci and Labriola 67

in its tone, was to pose a set of diabolical questions concerning the relation ofMarxism and dialectics – questions that still concern Gramsci now:

I’ve had enough of a sober tone,it’s time to play the real devil again.

(Goethe, Faust)

Notes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.2 Translations of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, through Notebook X, are from the

Columbia University Press edition. All other translations from the Notebooks are myown.

3 Translations from Labriola’s Saggi are from www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/index.htm.

4 For instance, in the “Glossary” prepared for the 1966 Einaudi edition of Il material-ismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, the term “philosophy of praxis” is under-stood as a prudent substitute for the proper “Marxism” in order to escape jailcensorship.

68 R.M. Dainotto

5 “Once again on the organiccapacities of the working class”Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor

Michael Denning

“Once again on the organic capacities of the working class”: that was the title ofan article Antonio Gramsci published in Unità in October 1926, one of his finalpublications before his arrest a month later. It was a reflection on the factoryoccupations six years earlier, provoked by questions at a meeting of CommunistParty sympathizers: “Explain to us,” a blacksmith asks, “why we workers . . .abandoned the factories which we had occupied in September 1920” (SPW2:418). Gramsci’s reply points to the working-class capacities the factory occupa-tions demonstrated – the capacity for self-government, the capacity to maintainproduction, the capacity for defense, even the capacity for Sunday “theatrical . . .performances, in which mise-en-scène, production, everything was devised bythe workers.”

It was really necessary to see with one’s own eyes old workers, who seemedbroken down by decades upon decades of oppression and exploitation, standupright even in the physical sense during the period of the occupation – seethem develop fantastic activities.

(SPW2: 419–20)

He also notes the failures: the inability to solve problems of communication,transportation, and financing, the national and international problems that only achallenge to state power could address.

Two and a half years later, after Gramsci finally received permission to write inhis prison cell, he opened his prison notebooks in June 1929 with two notes thatbegin from the words of workers: “remember the answer,” he writes in the firstnote, “given by a French Catholic worker” to the objection that Christ has affirmedthat there would always be rich and poor: “we will then leave at least two poorpersons, so that Jesus Christ will not be proved wrong” (Q1 §1; PN vol. 1: 100).For Gramsci, this exchange opens an examination of the social doctrines of theCatholic Church. In the second note, Gramsci turns to courtroom speeches ofworking-class anarchists, and suggests that their rhetoric – their malapropisms,their moral justifications (their assertion of a “right to well-being”), and their“mixture of Prince Charming and materialistic rationalism” – “may be used toshow how these men acquired their culture” (Q1 §2; PN vol. 1: 100–1).

Both of these passages remind us that Gramsci’s writings begin from hisengagement with working-class movements and subaltern life. However, theymight also be seen as emblems of contrary Gramscis: the first, a “workerist”celebration of the revolutionary potential of proletarian direct action, character-istic of the “young” Gramsci of the Turin factory occupations; the second, a“subalternist” reflection on the symbolic forms of resistance and accommodationin the popular rhetoric of everyday life, characteristic of the incarceratedGramsci of the Notebooks. I would like to argue that these apparently dissimilarpassages on the “organic capacities of the working class” are linked by a theoryof work that is fundamental to Gramsci’s thought. Though Gramsci has mostoften been seen as a theorist of the state and civil society, of the “superstruc-tures” (religion, culture, education, intellectuals), he begins with and alwaysreturns to – “once again,” as he puts in the title of the 1926 article – the capacityfor work and the capacities of workers.

It has been common to see a dramatic break in Gramsci’s writings betweenthe prophetic tone of his theorizations of the factory council movement inOrdine Nuovo and the continually deferred formulations of the “modern Prince”in the Prison Notebooks. There have been partisans of both Gramscis, butall have generally assumed that work – the centerpiece of the factory councilwritings – recedes in importance in the later Gramsci. There are only a handfulof references to the councils or to the Turin movement in the Notebooks. Thecouncil gives way to the party, the factory to the ethical state. The voice ofthe Communist worker – why did we abandon the factories? – recedes, and thevoices of the Catholic worker reflecting on Jesus and of the anarchist workermixing Prince Charming with materialist rationalism resonate.

In this chapter I will challenge this view and suggest that work remains centralto Gramsci’s thinking; moreover, far from being a weakness – a workerism, a pro-ductionism, a labor metaphysic – this focus on work is the source of his continuingpower. First, I will argue that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is a philosophy oflabor and depends on the central concept of the “forms of organization” of workand workers. Second, I will show how his key concept of the “collective worker”emerges from his reflections on the factory council movement and on Fordism.Finally, I will argue that Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern can only be understoodas the dialectical counterpart of the “collective worker.” Through these concepts,we might grasp what he means by the “organic capacities of the working class.”

What does it mean to say that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is a theory oflabor? Is it an ontology of labor? Critics of labor theories have insisted that theydepend on a notion of homo faber, a founding assumption that work is constitu-tive of humanity. For religious or romantic labor theories – work as the “curse ofAdam” or work as the form of human fulfillment, linked to art and play – thismay not be a telling rebuke; they are intended as ontological theories. But isMarxism such an ontology of labor (as sometimes appears in the young Marx):is it our nature to work? Not for Gramsci, I would argue. In fact, for Gramsci,the organic ideology that links art and labor is a product of a certain form oflabor organization, the world of artisans and craft-workers.

70 M. Denning

Gramsci’s discussions of work are scattered throughout the Prison Notebooks,but the key formulations really emerge in a series of notes in the middle of Note-book 4 (from Q4 §47 to Q4 §55), which was written in the summer of 1930. It wasduring that summer that Gramsci’s miscellaneous reflections begin to coalesce inessayistic notes that formulate the core concerns of his years in prison.1 In thesenotes, Gramsci begins not from an ontology of labor – we work, therefore we are –but from a historical account of the ever-transforming relations between work anddaily life. “New methods of work are inseparable from a specific mode of livingand of thinking and feeling life” (Q22 §11; SPN: 302), he writes, and he gives apowerful account of the “brute coercion” that accompanied the transformation inmodes of production.

Who could describe the “cost” in human lives and in the grievous subjec-tion of instinct involved in the passage from nomadism to a settled agricul-tural existence. The process includes the first forms of rural serfdom andtrade bondage, etc. Up to now all changes in modes of existence and modesof life have taken place through brute coercion, that is to say through thedomination of one social group over all the productive forces of society.The selection or “education” of men adapted to the new forms of civilisa-tion and to the new forms of production and work has taken place by meansof incredible acts of brutality which have cast the weak and the non-conforming into the limbo of the lumpen-classes or have eliminated thementirely.

(Q22 §10; SPN: 298)

New methods of work are not simply technical matters for Gramsci; theyinvolve the re-making of the body – “life in industry demands a general apprentice-ship, a process of psycho-physical adaptation to the specific conditions of work,nutrition, housing, customs, etc. This is not something ‘natural’ or innate, but has tobe acquired” (Q22 §3; SPN: 296). For Gramsci, this process reaches to sexualityitself; the “sexual question” is “a fundamental and autonomous aspect of theeconomic” (Q22 §3; SPN: 295). Furthermore, Gramsci understands schooling as aprocess that conforms a society’s working bodies and working minds. Elementaryeducation, he writes, “hinges on the concept and the reality of work, because it iswork that grafts the social order (the ensemble of rights and duties) onto the naturalorder” (Q4 §55; PN vol. 2: 226). And it is in this context that Gramsci insists on theinseparability of mental and manual labor: “no occupation is ever totally devoid ofsome kind of intellectual activity” (Q4 §51; PN vol. 2: 214); inversely

[s]tudying, too, is a job and a very tiring one, with its own special appren-ticeship, not only of the intellect but of the muscular-nervous system aswell. . . . Would a thirty- or forty-year-old scholar be able to sit at a desk forsixteen hours on end if, as a child, he had not acquired “compulsorily,”through “mechanical coercion,” the appropriate psycho-physical habits.

(Q4 §55; PN vol. 2: 230, 227)

Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor 71

In a sense, these psycho-physical habits – manual dexterities, sexual practices,proverbial wisdoms – become the “organic capacities” of workers.

Thus the key concept in Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is less “work” or“labor” than the “organization of work.” It is “the most widespread methodo-logical error,” he writes, to look at the “intrinsic nature” of an activity rather thanat the “system of relations wherein this activity is located”: therefore “the workeris not specifically characterized by his manual or instrumental work but by hisworking in specific conditions and within specific social relations” (Q4 §49; PNvol. 2: 200). The notion of the “organization of work” unites his early account ofthe Turin factory councils with his prison reflections on the “American” methodsof Ford and Taylor.

The two sets of writings are in one sense quite different. Gramsci’s writingsabout the factory councils emerged directly out of his experience as a participantand organizer in the movement. Turin, one of the key metal-working cities of mod-ernism, had a huge concentration of machinists and engineering workers (SPW1:151, 312): a third of its population was involved in industry (Clark 1977: 27) andGramsci spent much of 1919 and 1920 among them, organizing and speaking inSocialist Circle rooms, at party branch meetings, and in the occupied factories. Hisknowledge of the new US production methods came in part from the same moment– FIAT’s Agnelli had visited Ford in 1912 and had installed Italy’s first assemblyline – and in part from his reading of the Tocqueville of Taylorism, the FrenchSocialist André Philip, who had spent two years in the United States visiting facto-ries before publishing a massive study of Fordism, Taylorism and the Americanlabor movement, Le problème ouvrier aux Etats-Unis in 1927.2

For Gramsci, the Turin factory councils and the “American system of produc-tion” were – despite their differences – revolutionary attempts to re-organizework. “The Factory Council is the model of the proletarian State,” Gramsciwrites in October 1919, in the midst of a month when metal workers in “nearlyall the main factories in Turin” elected delegates (Clark 1977: 82).

All sectors of the labor process are represented in the Council, in proportionto the contribution each craft and each labor sector makes to the manufac-ture of the object the factory is producing for the collectivity. . . . TheCouncil is the most effective organ for mutual education and for developingthe new social spirit that the proletariat has successfully engendered fromthe rich and living experience of the community of labour.

(SPW1: 100)

A year later, in September 1920, when Turin workers occupied between 100 and200 factories and continued to work, re-organizing production under their owncontrol, Gramsci wrote that “every factory has become an illegal State, a proletarianrepublic living from day to day, awaiting the outcome of events” (SPW1: 341). ForGramsci, the factory council was a new “organization of work” in several senses: itwas a new organization of workers, a new way of organizing production, and ademonstration of the organic capacities of working-class life.

72 M. Denning

If the factory councils represented the revolutionary re-organization of work,the American system represented by Ford and Taylor might be seen as the “passiverevolution,” the “revolution from above,” in the organization of work. “TheAmerican phenomenon . . . is,” he writes in Q4 §52, the note that summarized histhoughts on “Americanism and Fordism,” “the biggest collective effort [ever made]to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose unique inhistory, a new type of worker and of man” (Q4 §52; PN vol. 2: 215). This is aremarkable assertion; one might think that Gramsci would write this of the SovietUnion rather than of the United States. After all, Gramsci’s note begins from areflection on the re-organization of labor in the Soviet Union, specifically onTrotsky’s militarization of labor. Gramsci says Trotsky’s “practical solutions” – the“labor armies” – “were wrong,” but that “his concerns” – “the principle of coercionin the sphere of work” – “were correct” (Q4 §52; PN vol. 2: 215).3

Gramsci’s reflections on Fordism culminate with the key question:

The problem arises: whether the type of industry and organisation of workand production typical of Ford is rational; whether, that is, it can and shouldbe generalised or whether, on the other hand, we are not dealing with amalignant phenomenon which must be fought against through trade-unionaction and through legislation?

(Q22 §13; SPN: 312)

As usual in the Prison Notebooks, the question is more developed than theanswer, though Gramsci does write: “it seems possible to reply that the Fordmethod is rational” (Q22 §13; SPN: 312). Moreover, he had argued earlier that,in contrast to the United States, in Italy, skilled workers had not only notopposed the innovations in the labor process, but had themselves “brought intobeing newer and more modern industrial requirements” (Q22 §6; SPN: 292).

Thus Gramsci recognized the affinities between Fordism and the factory coun-cils; his first note on “Americanism” mentions that Ordine Nuovo “supported an‘Americanism’ of its own” (Q1 §61; PN vol. 1: 169, later revised as “its own typeof ‘Americanism’ in a form acceptable to the workers,” Q22 §2; SPN: 286). Oneincident stands as an emblem of this affinity: the attempt by FIAT founder Gio-vanni Agnelli – the Italian Henry Ford – to, in Gramsci’s words, “absorb theOrdine Nuovo and its school into the FIAT complex and thus to institute a schoolof workers and technicians qualified for industrial change and for work with‘rationalized’ systems” (Q22 §6; SPN: 292).4 Though Gramsci and Ordine Nuovorejected Agnelli’s overture, critics of Gramsci have often suggested that his “pro-ductionism” is a mirror image of Taylorism. For example, in his fine study ofGramsci’s theory of the councils, Darrow Schecter rightly notes the connectionsbetween the early writings and the notes on Americanism and Fordism, and con-cludes that “Gramsci makes the same mistake that he made in 1919–1920 byfailing to clearly distinguish what is brutal and exploitative in the Taylor systemfrom what he thinks is progressive and indispensable in it for socialism”(Schecter 1991: 170).5

Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor 73

Is Gramsci a left-wing Taylorist? Is he too narrowly focused on the point ofproduction? Though the powerful shorthand of the famous line about the UnitedStates – “Hegemony here is born in the factory” (Q22 §2; SPN: 285) – has inspireda fundamental re-understanding of the politics of the labor process, it can seemmore limited than his other definitions of hegemony, encompassing state and civilsociety, structure and superstructure. When linked to his early claims that “the newsociety will be based on work” and that “tomorrow the work-places where theproducers live and function together will be the centers of the social organism”(SPW1: 95), one might think that revolution must be born in the factory as well.

However, this is to misread the thrust of Gramsci’s work; he is neither aFordist/Taylorist nor a council communist. The key theoretical point in both thefactory council writings and the Americanism and Fordism notes is that the forms oforganization of labor must be understood historically, and that there is a continuingdialectic between the way work is organized and the way workers organize them-selves. Thus, it is a profound mistake to take the forms of workers’ organization aspermanent or natural (SPW1: 74–6). That, Gramsci argues, was the error of syndical-ists and parliamentary socialists alike (SPW1: 74,76): the syndicalists fetishized theunion, the parliamentary socialists fetishized the party. But the union – as importantas it was and continues to be – is a form of worker’s organization built on “the needto organize competition in the sale of the labour-commodity” (SPW1: 90), and thusmirrors the logic of the labor market. The party, on the other hand, is a form rootedin “the electoral markets with their empty and inconclusive speech-mongering”(SPW1: 92), and the young Gramsci explicitly rejected the notion that the form ofthe party would model a future socialist society:

To imagine the whole of human society as one huge Socialist Party, with itsapplications for admission and its resignations, inevitably excites the fondnessfor social contracts of many subversive spirits who were brought up more onJ.J. Rousseau and anarchist pamphlets, than on the historical and economicdoctrines of Marxism.

(SPW1: 142)

The historical breakthrough of the factory councils in the uprisings of 1917 to1920 lay in part in the way they developed from the organization of the factory:its labor processes and its work units. A new form based not on the sale of laborpower (SPW1: 90, 110, 114) but on what Gramsci called the “shopfloor way oflife” (SPW1: 96), the councils modeled new forms of “sovereignty” of the workunit (SPW1: 91) which were rooted not in the “tumult and carnival atmosphereof Parliament” (SPW1: 92), but which would “replace the person of the capitalistin his administrative functions and his industrial power, and so achieve theautonomy of the producer in the factory” (SPW1: 77). The factory council brokefrom both of the imposed roles of parliamentary capitalism: neither wage earnernor citizen, Gramsci argued, but rather producer and comrade (see, for example,SPW1: 100). But the councils also demanded – like work itself – more thanpassive solidarity on the part of workers. Gramsci wrote, six years later:

74 M. Denning

In normal mass activity, the working class generally appears as a passiveelement awaiting orders. During struggles, strikes, etc., the masses arerequired to show the following qualities: solidarity, obedience to the massorganization, faith in their leaders, a spirit of resistance and sacrifice. . . .The occupation of the factories required an unprecedented multiplicity ofactive, leading elements.

(SPW2: 418–9)

Gramsci’s historicist analysis of the factory councils would warn againstfetishizing the council form, and I think this explains his recognition of thelimits of the council form, the limits of a workplace-centered view of society.The factory council depends on the “concentration” of workers, not only inspecific factories but in specific cities. In the earliest essays on the councils, he isalready trying to figure the complex relation of factory to neighborhood (throughthe question of the relation of factory councils to ward councils (SPW1: 67), aswell as the relation to “non-concentrated workers,” including domestics, waitersand other service workers, and of course to rural workers outside Turin (here hetries to link the factory occupations to land seizures, see SPW1 141). Inside andoutside the factory becomes a leitmotif of Gramsci’s writings of the mid-1920s.

By the time of his incarceration, Gramsci’s conception of the “organization ofwork” has extended to a new reflection on the international division of labor. TheSouthern question is not simply the question of Italy’s regional inequalities and theneed for an alliance between northern workers and southern peasants; it is also thequestion of Italian emigration as a fundamental part of world capitalism, the “roleof Italy as a producer of labor reserves for the entire world” (Q1 §149; PN vol. 1:228–9). Here we might rethink his curious insistence on the importance of Corra-dini’s conceptualization of Italy as a “proletarian nation.”

One can see this trajectory of thought in Gramsci’s use of the relatively rare butnonetheless central concept of the “collective worker.” It first emerges in Q9 §67,written in 1932, a note that was part of the “Past and Present” rubric (Q9 §67;SPN: 201–2), a group of reflections on the failures of the Italian left, which wereinterwoven with the notes on the history of the subaltern classes. In Q9 §67,Gramsci writes,

In a critical account of the post-war events, . . . show how the movement tovalorise the factory by contrast with (or rather independently of) craftorganisation corresponded perfectly to the analysis of how the factorysystem developed given in the first volume of the Critique of PoliticalEconomy.

In other words, he suggests that the factory council movement rather than thecraft union corresponds to the modern factory system analyzed in Marx’sCapital. The reason, Gramsci goes on to argue, is that, as a result of the work-shop division of labor in detail, “the complexity of the collective work passesthe comprehension of the individual worker”; but at the same time, “work that is

Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor 75

concerted and well organised gives a better ‘social’ productivity, so that theentire work-force of a factory should see itself as a ‘collective worker.’ ”

“These were the premises,” Gramsci argues, “of the factory movement,which aimed to render ‘subjective’ that which was given ‘objectively.’ ” Heinsists that the “junction” between “the requirements of technical development”and the interests of the ruling class are merely “transitory”; the new technicalrequirements can be “conceived in concrete terms . . . in relation to the interestsof the class which is as yet still subaltern.” Indeed, “the very fact that such aprocess is understood by the subaltern class” is a sign that the class is “no longersubaltern, or at least is demonstrably on the way to emerging from its subordi-nate position.” “The ‘collective worker,’ ” Gramsci concludes, “understands thatthis is what he is, not merely in the individual factory but in the broader spheresof the national and international division of labour” (Q9 §67; SPN: 202).

This notion of the collective worker will turn up in Gramsci’s later revisionsof notes on Bukharin’s Popular Manual and on Americanism and Fordism, but Iwant to note three particular aspects of this important note.6 First, Gramsci’s 1932reconsideration of the council movement does not reject the politics of the move-ment, but neither does it simply reiterate them. Rather he recasts the councilmovement historically and theoretically as a moment in the dialectic between thechanging organization of work and the forms of self-organization of workers, adialectic he finds in Capital. Second, it is in this reconsideration of the councilmovement that he sees the “collective worker” not only through the lens of thefactory, but through the figure of the “international division of labor,” a conceptwhich, as I have argued elsewhere, is central to any contemporary re-imaginationof the working class (Denning 2007: 143–4). Third, in this passage, the notion ofa collective worker is articulated with Gramsci’s other key concept in theorizingthe working or “instrumental” classes, the subaltern.

For Gramsci was not just the theorist of the emerging “collective worker.” Hisnotes on the new modes of work that Fordism dictated are interwoven with “Noteson the History of the Italian Workers’ Movement,” and the “History of SubalternClasses.” In his accounts of the “new methods” of work, he always noted the resis-tance of workers to that reshaping, and argued that “every trace of independentinitiative on the part of subaltern groups” was “of incalculable value for the integralhistorian” (Q25 §2; SPN: 54–5). Curiously, the handful of celebrated short notescollected in Notebook 25 – “On the Margins of History: History of Subaltern SocialGroups” – are rarely linked with either the factory council writings or the notes onAmericanism and Fordism; their sober realism seems far from the productivistutopias of socialist Taylorism. Yet they were, for the most part, first drafted in thesummer of 1930 at the same time as the “Past and Present” reflections on the Italianleft and the key note (Q4 §52) that summed up his reflections on Americanism andFordism. To separate Gramsci’s reflections on the subaltern groups from hisaccount of the re-organization of work falls into the precise failing that he identifiesin the work of the Belgian socialist and labor educator, Henrik de Man.

De Man is one of the four great contemporary socialist interlocutors of thePrison Notebooks: the others are the Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin, the

76 M. Denning

French anarcho-syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, and the Italian “post-Marxist”philosopher Benedetto Croce.7 De Man’s The Psychology of Socialism (1926)(which Gramsci knew from the 1929 Italian translation of the German original)was, and remains, one of the major socialist theoretical works of the 1920s, thoughit has been eclipsed by the New Left revival of the works of Lukács and Korsch.De Man’s powerful socialist critique of Marxism is based not only on a profoundunderstanding of the actualities of working-class life but on a full-fledged labormetaphysic: “all the social problems of history are no more than variants of theeternal, the supreme, the unique social problem – how can man find happiness, notonly through work, but in work.” For de Man, factory councils and soviets,worker’s control and industrial democracy were attempts to solve this problem,essential preliminaries “to the revival of delight in labor.” And de Man is highlycritical of Marxist admirers of Taylor: sounding much like New Left critics ofGramsci, de Man argues that “In Marxist doctrine, the ‘ideal workman’ is, at anyrate in respect of his position in the industrial enterprise, remarkably and suspi-ciously like the ‘ideal workman’ of the ultra-capitalist Taylor system” (de Man1928: 65, 79, 69).

Given that prescient critique, what does Gramsci say of de Man’s sense ofthe capacities of workers? In Q3 §48, one of the “Past and Present” notes that dis-cusses the “history of subaltern classes,” Gramsci asks “a fundamental theoreticalquestion”: “can modern theory be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ sentiments ofthe masses?” (Q3 §48; PN vol. 2: 51). For de Man the answer is yes, and Gramscirecognizes that de Man opposes “modern theory” – that is, Marxism – by appeal-ing to the empirical reality of subaltern sentiments: the fact that popular commonsense rarely transcends traditional conceptions of life and that popular leadersoften embody this taken-for-granted folklore. Gramsci does not disagree with deMan’s account of subaltern sentiments. “De Man,” Gramsci writes, “demonstratesthe need to study and work out the elements of popular psychology,” thoughGramsci adds that it should be done “historically and not sociologically, actively(that is, in order to transform them by means of education into a modern mental-ity) and not descriptively, as he [de Man] does” (Q3 §48; PN vol. 2: 49). It is thisspirit that places the voices of the French Catholic worker and the Italian anarchistworkers at the very beginning of the Prison Notebooks. However, de Man’s“stance,” Gramsci writes in a subsequent note, “is that of the folklore scholar whois always afraid that modernity will destroy the object of his study” (Q4 §33; PNvol. 2: 174) One is tempted to remark that some contemporary subalternists aremore de Manians than Gramscians. De Man’s defense of “joyful work” is, forGramsci, nostalgia for a craft era that is already past. Gramsci rarely romanticizedwork: he stressed its coercive, wearing and brutal character. He also rarelyimagined a world without work; he lived in the realm of necessity, not the realmof freedom, though he was fascinated by popular utopias of abundance withoutwork, sorting those notes under his “history of subaltern social groups.” Gramsciseems closer to the famous slogan of his contemporary, the Swedish migrantworker and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) songwriter, Joe Hill: Don’tmourn, organize.

Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor 77

Gramsci’s lasting theoretical accomplishment lies in the unraveling of thedialectic between the way work is organized and the way workers organize: “themodern state abolishes many autonomies of the subaltern classes,” he writes, “butcertain forms of the internal life of the subaltern classes are reborn as parties,trade unions, cultural associations” (Q3 §18; PN vol. 2: 25). If hegemony is bornas much in the school, the office, and the mall as in the factory, Gramsci’s theoryof the forms of organization of work should lead us to attend to new laborprocesses, new workplaces, and new forms of worker’s self-organization, whichmark the refusal of subalternity.

For Gramsci reminds us that the organization of work – even joyless, alienatedwork – and the organization of workers produces capacities that transcend thatwork. “The active man of the masses” has two contradictory consciousnesses, hewrites in the essay-long note, “Some preliminary points of reference” (Q11 §12):“one, superficially explicit and verbal, which he has inherited from the past anduncritically absorbed,” fossilized fragments of obsolete conceptions of the world,and “one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with allhis fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world” (Q11 §12;SPN: 333). Across an international division of labor that continually re-organizeswork and brutalizes workers, the subaltern is usually more visible than the“collective worker.” But that was also true of the moment in 1926, when underintensified fascist repression, Gramsci recalled the occupation of the factories as areminder, “once again,” of the organic capacities of the working class.

Notes

1 Gramsci later re-copied and recast these notes on work in two main places. The ones oneducation are re-copied and recast in the famous short Notebook 12 on intellectuals andschooling; the ones on Fordism end up in the thematic Notebook 22 on Americanism andFordism. Throughout these notes, there is a rhetorical hesitation between psychological,educational and management vocabularies: at times, Gramsci speaks of the repressionof instincts and animality, echoing a popular Freudianism; at other times, he speaks ofregulation, manipulation and management, echoing popular Taylorism.

2 Gramsci’s other sources on Taylorism and the US labor movement seem to be HenryFord’s own writings. Gramsci had French translations of My Life and Work and Todayand Tomorrow (see PN vol. 1: 468), as well as European works on the US by AndréSiegfried and Lucien Romier (see LP vol. 1: 257). By the summer of 1929, Gramscihad obtained Philip’s book, and somewhat later the 1931 Italian translation ofH. Dubrueil’s Robots or Men? A French Workman’s Experience in American Industry(PN vol. 3: 464).

3 Moreover, Gramsci explicitly shared Trotsky’s interest in Americanism and in the needfor a cultural revolution in the habits and customs of “everyday life.” Gramsci strenu-ously rejected a cultural critique of Americanism: it is wrong, he argued, to read Ford’smoralizing or the US’s prohibition and sexual morality as versions of “puritanism.”

4 This was apparently connected to Agnelli’s offer in the fall of 1920 to turn FIAT into acooperative, an offer provoked by the factory occupations and rejected by the FIATworkers (Gramsci argued against the plan). There is a second incident that serves a similarfunction in Gramsci’s writings about this a decade later: the overture to Ordine Nuovo bythe young radical, Massimo Fovel, who later comes to see Italian fascism as the vehiclefor Americanism. See Gramsci’s note on Fovel (Q1 §135, later revised as Q22 §6).

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5 Schecter also cites the Italian labor historian Stefano Musso, arguing that there is asmall difference between Taylor’s “trained gorilla” and Gramsci’s new type of worker(Schecter 1991: 177 n. 79). Carl Levy also suggests that “Gramsci uncritically trans-ferred the factory system of capitalism into his own future socialist commonwealth,”citing Gramsci’s enthusiasm for the 1919 essays on Taylorism and the councils by theanarchist Pietro Mosso. According to Levy, Mosso saw the councils as an opportunityto separate the scientific kernel of Taylorism from its capitalist content. However, Levyis not really able to show that Gramsci shared Mosso’s views; it is worth noting thatGramsci does not mention Mosso’s essays in his prison notebooks (Levy 1999: 179).

6 Gramsci returns to this notion of the “collective worker” in two subsequent notes thatrevise earlier formulations. The first is the note titled “Quantity and Quality,” part ofhis critique of Bukharin’s Popular Manual, the leading introduction to Marxism of thetime. In Q11 §32, Gramsci rewrites an earlier note (Q4 §32) dealing with the claim byEngels and Bukharin that a social aggregate is greater than the sum of its parts. Reject-ing the mechanism of Bukharin’s account, Gramsci turns to the factory in Capital as ameans of thinking the quality of the collective, and imagines society on the model ofthe factory:

In the factory system there exists a quota of production which cannot be attributedto any individual worker but to the ensemble of the labour force, to collectiveman. A similar process takes place for the whole of society, which is based on thedivision of labor and of functions and for this reason is worth more than the sumof its parts.

(SPN: 469)

The second is in Q22 §11, the thematic notebook on Americanism and Fordism, wherehe recopies and slightly revises the key note I have already discussed: Q4 §52, the firstto be titled “Americanism and Fordism.” Here it appears from the point of view of theindustrialist:

It is in the industrialist’s interest to put together a stable, skilled work force, apermanently attuned industrial ensemble, because the human ensemble is also amachine that cannot be dismantled too often and renewed cog by cog withoutserious losses.

(PN vol. 2: 216)

When Gramsci recopies the passage in Q22 §11, he inserts a parenthetical “(thecollective worker)” to specify “the human ensemble.”

7 One might add Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, but their works are directly engagedonly rarely.

Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labor 79

6 Power and democracyGramsci and hegemony in America

Benedetto Fontana

I

Antonio Gramsci is the theorist of the failure in Italy of two revolutions: the firstis that of the Risorgimento and the liberal state it produced, and the second isthat of socialism. In Gramsci’s mind both revolutions, and both failures, arerelated (see Clark 1977 and Miller 1990). Italian liberalism created a weakItalian state, as well as a weak and desiccated political culture. State and societywere backward and underdeveloped because, to Gramsci’s mind, they lacked themajor defining element of modernity, a politically aware and active populace.The absence of a popular mass base produced a wide gulf between the state andits institutions and the life and everyday activity of large strata of society. It isthis weakness that made possible both the rise of fascism and the defeat ofsocialism and democracy.

Hegemony, civil society and the war of position – and its related notions ofdirezione/dominio (force and consent) – are concepts that deal with the strength andresilience of a political order. Gramsci developed them by means of a theoretical,political, cultural and historical investigation into the causes and sources of Italianpolitical failure and weakness.

This point is significant in weighing the status of Gramsci in the contempor-ary US. For state and society in the US have been and remain strong and power-ful. The divorce between the state and its social bases, and between the elitesand their followers, that Gramsci saw as the major flaw in the formation of thestate in Italy does not exist in the United States. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s critiqueof state and civil society in Italy provides a fruitful explanation and analysis forthe strength of their counterparts in the United States. Gramsci’s analysis of theabsence of a hegemonic civil society in Italy in the late nineteenth century and inthe early decades of the twentieth century functions as a mirror image of thestrength and endurance of American political and social order.

From the nation’s inception in its war of independence to its two most signific-ant and destabilizing crises, the Civil War of 1861–1865 and the Depressionyears of the 1930s, its political and economic elites have managed to establishand to maintain a close and intimate relation with the lower strata of society.Social and class conflict in the United States does not undermine or delegitimate

the state; rather, such contests, by widening and expanding the electoral andpolitical bases of the various elites, place the system on an increasingly solidfoundation of mass support. And even though American history is permeatedwith class, ethnic and racial violence, the political has not only remained stablebut its legitimating myths and ideologies of democratic inclusion, progressiveindividualism, and economic opportunity have successfully repelled and out-lasted competing systems of belief. In Gramsci’s terms, both state and societyhave managed to maintain a “proper” balance or equilibrium (Q2 §7: 8661), suchthat opposition groups could not manage to pose a dangerous threat to the socio-political order in the United States.

Since the publication in 1967 of John Cammett’s ground-breaking work,Antonio Gramsci and the Orgins of Italian Communism, interest in Gramsci in theUS has increased exponentially. Scholars in many fields of research have producedworks on Gramsci’s major political and theoretical concepts, while others haveintroduced these ideas into their fields of inquiry. Thus, we find Gramsci acting asan important and even a central intellectual figure in areas ranging from literarystudies to history to international politics. Joseph Buttigieg’s translation intoEnglish of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, an endeavor of great learning as well asdeep passion, is the crowning proof of the continuing significance of Gramsci incultural, intellectual and academic circles in the United States.

Antonio Gramsci is the only major Marxist of the twentieth century whoseworks and ideas have survived the fall of Marxism and socialism. There aremany reasons for this, some political, others intellectual. The political reason isthat in the United States, where Marxism and socialism have always beenviewed as marginal to mainstream politics, Gramsci is a figure whose life andwork are not tainted with Stalinist totalitarianism. Even Gramsci’s support of theBolshevik Revolution and of Lenin is seen in terms of the context of his era.Similarly, his communism is seen as peculiarly Italian or Western, and quiteunlike that expounded by Lenin in the “East” (Q2 §7: 866). And the secondreason, this one intellectual, is that his major ideas and concepts have assumeda role and significance independent of the time and place in which they wereformulated. As a revolutionary and then as an inmate in Mussolini’s prisonsystem Gramsci developed ideas to be used as weapons and as instruments inthe on-going struggle for power. Yet the intellectual force and the originalityof his writings, which exhibit both a profound depth and a sweeping breadth,propelled Gramsci to a status as a thinker whose work has become central tocontemporary cultural and intellectual life in the United States. That Gramscihas achieved such a position is testimony to the intellectual resilience of histhought, and it is also an irony that Gramsci himself would have found amusing,as he saw his intellectual effort as an element of his revolutionary activity, not asa form of mere literary or academic work.

In effect, Gramsci is not only indelibly embedded in American scholarlydiscourse; he is also a major presence in contemporary polemical and politicalconflicts between conservatives, rightists and republicans on the one hand, andleft liberals, progressives and the left, on the other.

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II

When we think about the reception of Gramsci in the United States, two paradoxes,one political, the other conceptual and intellectual, immediately come to mind.Gramsci has become quite famous among right-wing thinkers, and religious andconservative ideologies. In the conservatives’ polemics Gramsci’s ideas, especiallythose regarding hegemony and attendant ideas such as the organic intellectual, areused to attack liberals and the left generally and at the same are seen as a model tobe emulated. Thus, former Republican presidential candidate and commentatorPatrick Buchanan, and conservative ideologues such as John Fonte, James Cooperand Samuel Francis warn of the danger of Gramsci’s ideas to US society by attack-ing its cultural and moral/intellectual structure. They select from the Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooks to show how Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, organicintellectuals and civil society are disseminated by the left to undermine and to infil-trate cultural, academic and political institutions. Electronic mass media polemicistsof the right such as Rush Limbaugh take this vulgarization even further. Gramsci isused to attack their left/liberal opponents as anti-American and anti-Christian, as(Marxist) wolves in (democratic) sheep’s clothing.

Representative of this conservative understanding of Gramsci is JamesCooper, who writes:

Seventy years ago, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) wrotethe most important mission for Socialism was to “capture the culture.”By the end of World War II, the liberal Left had managed to capture notonly the arts, theater, literature, music, and ballet, but also motion pictures,photography, education and the media.

Through its control of the culture, the Left dictates not only the answers,but the questions asked. In short, it controls the cosmological apparatus bywhich most American[s] comprehend the meaning of events.

This cosmology is based on two great axioms: the first is there are noabsolute values in the universe, no standards of beauty and ugliness, goodand evil, The second axiom is – in a Godless universe – the Left holdsmoral superiority as the final arbiter of man’s activities.

(1990: 3)

In a similar vein, John Fonte of the Hudson Institute writes that Gramsci’sthought is radically subversive of the moral and intellectual foundations of thesocio-political order in the US as well as antithetical to its history and to itsfuture trajectory. He notes that Gramsci’s thought is based on

“Absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truth, standards andhuman nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are noabsolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outsideof a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”

(2000: 17)

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Fonte sees Gramsci’s historicism as acting as an acid on the cultural, moral,political and educational institutions of US society. The view that human natureacquires its specificity, particularity and subjectivity (its consciousness as aconcrete and embodied self) within a social and historical context, and that thiscontext is in constant movement as the product of various subjective and objec-tive forces, is a deadly assault on the stability and continuity of Western historyand culture which is provided by Christian and classically liberal values.

Finally, Patrick Buchanan sees Gramsci as a disciple of Marx “who has latelybegun to receive deserved recognition as the greatest Marxist strategist of thetwentieth century” (2002: 76). Buchanan sees in the Prison Notebooks “blueprintsfor a successful Marxist revolution in the West” (ibid.). He equates what he calls“our cultural revolution” with Gramsci’s notion of the war of position. Buchananbelieves that American leftists have learned Gramsci’s lesson, with its emphasison culture, intellectuals and civil society, and paraphrasing Bill Clinton’s 1992presidential campaign slogan – “It’s the economy, stupid!” – Buchanan says thatthis lesson is summarized in the slogan “It’s the culture, stupid!” (ibid.: 77).Buchanan concludes his discussion of Gramsci by noting that “the Gramscianrevolution rolls on, and to this day, it continues to make converts” (ibid.: 78). Thisrevolution is what Buchanan and Fonte call the “long march through the institu-tions,” a phrase, as Joseph Buttigieg has pointed out, that does not occur inGramsci (2005: 50). These institutions are located precisely within the sphere ofcivil society: arts and letters, schools, universities, religious groups, cinema,theater, electronic and print media. Buchanan and Fonte are concerned byGramsci’s emphasis on the centrality of religion in civil society, its resilience andmoral/cultural force because of its ability to connect with the common sense ofordinary people.

To these authors it is the university and academia that are the major instru-ments of the Gramscians’ attempt to undermine the culture in order to introducea new conception of the world supported by new hegemonic institutions. Theacademy has imposed an “inclusive” curriculum and politically “correct” dis-course. And it has generated such new ideological trends as multi-culturalism,ethnic studies, diversity, postmodernism, relativism, and feminism. The avant-garde of this Gramscian revolutionary transformation is the university, whichhas replaced the political party as the modern Prince (Fonte 2000: 50; see alsoButtigieg 2005: 49). The demise of a viable revolutionary left and the superses-sion of Marxist and socialist ideology have shifted the locus of radical actionfrom the specifically and overtly political institutions to the educational andcultural structures of society (see Donadio 2007). These latter perform basicsocialization and legitimating functions without which the existing systems ofpower could not exist and without which their power could not be reproducedand transmitted. Thus the university is the new “collective intellectual” (seeQ13 §1: 1555–1561) and as such it generates the organic intellectual the leftrequires to generate the new hegemonic conception of the world, one that isreplacing the conventional narrative of liberal democracy (Donadio 2007:50–53).

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In this regard, it is obvious that the right sees Gramsci as a bête noire. It isalso obvious that this depiction of Gramsci as an ogre is a useful sword to wieldwithin the American cultural and political context. Whether the struggle takesplace in the political, social or educational field, linking one’s opponent toGramsci, the only Marxist whose ideas and life continue to resonate throughoutthe globe, is a common practice, one that predated the arrival of Gramsci to theUS. But what is more important, and certainly ironic, is that the view of Gramsciand the left as waging a war of position against US society and culture is aportrayal that more appropriately fits the tactics and strategy of the conservativeright rather than the liberal left. For beginning with the founding of the journalNational Review by William F. Buckley Jr., to Nixon’s calling forth of the“silent majority” in the early 1970s, to the Reagan presidential years, to the riseof fundamentalist and Christian Right, to the “culture wars” of the past 20years,2 the right in the US has generated a plethora of intellectuals and opinionmakers organized in think tanks, newspapers and various media outlets, researchinstitutes, prestigious universities such as Stanford and Chicago, religiousdenominations and sects,3 government agencies from the cultural (NEH andNEA) to the economic (taxing power and tax subsidies) all of which representthe classic application of the strategy of the war of position. In other words,notwithstanding their protestations, Buchanan, Fonte et al. recognize the utilityand efficacy of Gramsci in the right’s pursuit of political and cultural hegemony.

III

A second, and more telling, point is that both the left and the right misunderstandGramsci. In the United States the progressive left is associated with such issuesas radical feminism, identity politics, multi-culturalism, diversity, pro-immigrantpolicies (see Hollinger 1995, and Rorty 1998). In American politics the left ofteninvokes the formula of “race, gender and class.” The formula means thatethnic/racial minorities, women and gays, and the poor are subordinate groupsthat the system oppresses and relegates to the margins. The category of class,however, for all practical purposes has dropped out of the radical left’s languageand is no longer seen as a central element in political conflict. It is also suggestedby some on the left – Terry Eagleton, for example – that the political program forequality and for justice has changed into a post-Marxist, post-colonial strugglethat encompasses issues and ideas unknown to Marx and his successors (Eagleton2007; see also Hardt and Negri 2004: 219–227). Yet to see Gramsci as the grand-father of such a politics is to misread the most important concept for which heis noted. These issues, and the social movements that they promote, may beprogressive, and they certainly stand in opposition to the conservative and rightistagenda;4 yet the ideas they represent have little or no connection to Gramsci’sthought. Indeed, quite the contrary.

Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony operates on two separate but closelyrelated levels. It describes the process by which alliances and coalitions aremade and remade: a process that presupposes not merely the articulation but,

84 B. Fontana

crucially, the aggregation of interests. Such a process involves moving fromparticular to general or universal interests. The movement from the particular tothe universal, from what Gramsci calls the “economic–corporative” to the hege-monic, is precisely a movement from a pre-political stage to the political. It alsoinvolves, at the second level, the generation of a given conception of the worldand its consequent proliferation and dissemination throughout society. Allianceformation demands the recognition of common interests, common values, aswell as the generation of an encompassing discourse and narrative. Thus thehegemonic is the political, and to become hegemonic is to become political, thatis, a conscious, disciplined actor or subject capable of ruling and being ruled (touse an Aristotelian formulation).

Diametrically opposed to the practice and consciousness of a hegemonic groupis what Gramsci calls the subaltern, or a subordinate group (Q3 §25: 2283–2289).The subaltern is characterized by fragmentation, disaggregation, incoherence, anddisorganization. Gramsci attempted to discover within Italian history and societyinstances of subordinate group activity that might reveal incoherent or instinctiveforms of rebellion, discontent and revolt. Such instances, Gramsci shows, arereflected or refracted through the prisms of the prevailing hegemonic group, whichperceives them in negative terms, thus the language used to characterize the groupor its activity will reinforce the distinction between hegemonic and subordinate.Gramsci writes:

The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily disaggregated andepisodic. Undoubtedly these groups have historically shown a tendencytoward unification if only provisionally. Yet this tendency is continuallyundermined by the dominant groups. . . . The subaltern groups are alwayssubject to the initiatives of the dominant groups even when they rebel orrevolt.

(Q25 §2: 2283)

In any case, the subaltern represents the inner core of Gramsci’s concept ofhegemony: he wants to discover within existing society, and within the prevail-ing hegemonic system, the germs that might offer opposition to the prevailinghegemony, and that might eventually develop the capacity to pose the questionof power to the ruling groups. Fragmentation is the condition of those withoutpower and without property, and so the problem is how to overcome thefragmentation and disorganization that forestall the principled and coherentopposition necessary to establish a new order.

Throughout his writings, including his pre-prison work, Gramsci focuses onthe incoherence and disorganization of subordinate groups. He begins with sub-alternity and moves to hegemony. That is to say that he begins with fragmenta-tion and tries to discover ways in which a conscious and coherent subject can beidentified and cultivated such that it is capable of rule (see Fontana 2002:25–40). This movement from subaltern status to self-rule and eventually tohegemonic rule becomes possible once the subordinate groups develop from

Power and democracy 85

within their own stratum of intellectuals. These organic intellectuals will trans-form the fragmented subaltern groups into a disciplined and critical actor. InGramsci’s words, they act

To raise the intellectual level of ever growing strata of the populace, to give apersonality to the amorphous mass element. This means working to produceelites of intellectuals of a new type, which arise directly out of the masses, butremain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in thecorset.

(PN: 340)

The production of organic intellectuals gives a “personality” to subaltern groups,one that will enable them to acquire “critical self-consciousness” (PN: 334) andconsequently to become both self-ruling and ruling. To acquire such a person-ality means to move from fragmentation and disaggregation to integration andcoherence. As Gramsci writes in a pre-prison essay,

Consciousness of self which is opposed to others, which is differentiatedand, once having set itself a goal, can judge facts and events other thanin themselves but also in so far as they tend to drive history forward orbackward. To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself,to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist asan element of order – but of one’s own order and one’s own discipline instriving for an ideal.

(SPW1: 10–13)

The question of personality defines Gramsci’s project. The dynamic interactionbetween subaltern action and hegemonic, the conflict between the subordinategroup trying to define itself and to overcome itself simultaneously as it encountersresistance from the hegemonic group as it tries to maintain its integrity, constitutea process by which the various and differing subaltern groups slowly and painfullybecome aware of themselves and the world, and overcome their incoherenceand isolation to form a personality capable of self-rule and thereby capable ofhegemonic rule.

IV

The politics of the left, characterized by identity issues, diversity and multi-culturalism, rather than offering an alternative to the prevailing order, is thepurest reflection of that order. The social and political system in the United Statesis best understood in terms of the analysis provided by Alexander Hamilton andJames Madison in The Federalist Papers. This is a series of essays written in1787–1788 whose purpose was to mobilize public opinion to support and to ratifythe newly written US Constitution. In Federalist no. 10, Madison notes thatfactional conflict is endemic to society, and thus cannot be eliminated without

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also eliminating liberty (see Dahl 1956). As he says, “The latent causes of factionare thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought intodifferent degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civilsociety” (Hamilton et al. 1999: 47). The factional struggle for power and advant-age is contingent upon the concrete political, economic and material configura-tion of society, such that the greater the economic and material complexityof “civil society” the greater the number of factions and the more prevalent thefactional conflict. Madison recognizes two fundamental types of faction: one isbased on interest (material/economic), and the second on “opinion” (ideologiesand belief systems). He also recognizes the intimate relation between economicinterest and opinion/belief.

Yet what seems a striking parallel between postmodernist ideology andMadisonian thought is the latter’s position regarding the nature of reason and itsrelation to thought and to the generation of opinion. Madison notes that

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exerciseit, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsistsbetween his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have areciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which thelatter will attach themselves.

(Hamilton et al. 1999: 46)

The thesis regarding the “fallibility” of reason is crucial, and it may beviewed as both the product and herald of the modern world. In the first place,since reason is “fallible,” it does not have the capacity to judge and to determinethe authenticity nor the truth content of any socio-political, moral/ethical orphilosophical proposition. What is determining, as a consequence, is whatMadison calls “self-love” or “passion,” which in Federalist no. 51 is trans-formed into “ambition” or “power” (Hamilton et al. 1999: 290–291). Thus weare back to Hume and especially to Hobbes, for whom a system is establishedwhere appetite, passion, desire and interest are the underlying characteristics of asocio-political order, and thereby determine the direction and purpose of thesystem. In such a conception the demand for equality is merely the rationaliza-tion for an underlying “jealousy of power” and the struggle for justice is a merecover for the ambition to dominate.5

In the second place, the displacement of reason as the arbiter or standard ofsocial and political life leaves a vacuum into which flow various other forms ofjudgment and value, based on non-rational or extra-rational factors. Hobbes andHume have shown how reason can act as an acid not just on traditional values, buton itself – that is, various uses of reason may undermine reason. There is a longtradition in the West in which reason is used to attack reason. Beginning with thepre-Socratics through Nietzsche to contemporary post-modern ideologies thestatus of reason has been constantly put to the test and been found wanting. Theselatter attack the very notion of the utility and stability of reason in order to criticizethe established order, which, in the process, questions the value of thought itself.

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At the same time, the fallibility of reason leads to the surmise that human activ-ity is inherently valueless and meaningless, that no stable and just human ordermay be attained in the here and now. This tradition goes back to Augustine and hisconcept of original sin and the consequent necessity of God’s grace. Since humannature is irremediably corrupt and intrinsically degenerate, any human action isuseless because it carries with it the taint of sinful nature. Only the grace of Godcan give value to human action, and without it it is powerless. Thus the importanceof extra-rational faith in God and of the Christian religion especially. The attemptto use reason to construct a new order of things is counterproductive, and it leadsultimately to consequences originally unintended and unforeseen by the actor.

The postmodern critique of reason paradoxically parallels the Christianemphasis on faith and on God’s grace, and both join together in the de-valuationof political action and in the retreat into the private sphere. In effect, in bothinstances, the attack on reason by secular critics, and the attack on reason byreligion and faith, lead to a conception of society and to a conception of politicswhere the established order and the established values are taken as a given.What is more important, the attempt to reform or to transform the establishedorder is not only seen as impossible, but also as reproducing in different formsthe existing structures of power. What remains is power, presented and assertedin various disguises (that is, in various ideologies, theories and belief systems orfaiths). One center of power counteracts and checks an opposing structure ofpower. In this sense, “passion” and “fallible reason” may and do lead to a plural-ity of factions based on opinion (political ideologies, ethical systems, sects andchurches, economic and social theories, etc.).6

Yet Madison believes that the factions based on, and organized by, economicself-interest are the major determinants of social strife. He writes that “the mostcommon and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distrib-ution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have everformed distinct interests in society” (Hamilton et al. 1999: 47). Madison joins along line of thinkers, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, through Machiavelli andTocqueville, and up to Mosca, Gramsci, Schumpeter and Dahl, who see socialand political questions through the prism of the conflict between the few and themany, the minority and the majority.

In a modern liberal system the problem for thinkers such as Madison,Tocqueville, Mosca and Schumpeter is the advent and the rise of the people topower such that their desires, needs and opinions must be considered. TheEnglish Revolution of the 1640s and early 1650s, the American Revolution andthe French Revolution introduced into history and into politics the people (that is,the majority who do not hold property) as a force, and their opinions havebecome a factor in the power equation. The generation and deployment of massopinion is the central issue in modern politics. More specifically, according toMadison, the question is the development of mechanisms by which to control themajority without property in such a manner that the minority who hold propertyis not threatened. Madison’s solution is the multiplication of groups and factionssuch that the fundamental class cleavage is obscured and attenuated. He calls for

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a “multiplicity of interests” and a “multiplicity of sects” such that the majorityfaction is fragmented and disaggregated.

Thus, the left and the right in the United States meet on common ground:namely, pluralism. The identity and diversity politics of the left is but there-translation of Madison’s multiplicity of factions in modern (or postmodern)language, whose content now includes groups whose existence would have beeninconceivable for Madison. Indeed, the linking together of class, race, gender andgay politics by the left reproduces Madison’s conception of factional politics. Atthe same time, the conservative critique of the progressive left, in basing it onGramsci’s thought, masks the inherently subordinate and reactive character of thelatter’s politics. For in reproducing the pluralism of Madison and Hamilton theleft reinforces the prevailing hegemonic conception of politics.7

The left is accused of undermining core values and core institutions bywaging a Gramscian war of position. Rather, what undermines the conservat-ive’s value system is the preeminence of the market and the relentless drive ofcapital to penetrate the entire globe and to refashion it. Marx’s assertions in theManifesto have never had greater meaning than today: capital is making andremaking the world in its own image. As Marx notes, the bourgeoisie

Compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode ofproduction; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into theirmidst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a worldafter its own image.

(Marx and Engels 1978: 477)

The spread of capital from Europe and the Unites States to the rest of the worldmeans that economic modernization, technological innovation and socio-culturaltransformations that together undermined the traditional and customary usages ofthe West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are today reproduced on afar vaster scale throughout the world. During these centuries many observersfrom Marx to Nietzsche recognized the revolutionary and radical character ofcapital as it undermined all forms of pre-modern cultures and societies. As Marxcomments in the Manifesto,

All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerableprejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones becomeantiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that isholy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, hisreal conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

(Marx and Engels 1978: 476)

The conservative desire and need to protect traditional American values and topreserve religious and especially Christian faith clashes with the technological andeconomic innovations unleashed by capitalist hegemony. To speak of traditionalAmerican values is to speak of contradictory and antagonistic ideas. Since the

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founding of the American republic (and extending back to its Calvinist and Protest-ant origins) economic utility and capital accumulation have been inextricablywedded to religious enthusiasm and to Christian faith. This means that the freemarket is the not-so-hidden god of the conservative critique of Gramsci in theUnited States. At the same time, the supremacy of the market and the hegemony ofcapital clash with the rhetoric of democratic rule and the belief in equality. Marketcompetition necessitates strict authoritarian control of capitalist enterprises.

Conservative ideologues fail to recognize that their critique of Gramsci inAmerica presupposes a defense of classical liberal thought and of the classicalliberal state (see Hartz 1955, Auerbach, M. 1959, Guttmann 1967, Cook 1973,and Crick 1955). The first reduces politics to economic utility, where individualsare seen as rationally maximizing their appetites and desires, and the secondsees politics and the state as spheres of coercion and force, in which the role ofthe state is to protect property and to rationalize economic activity.

V

The Madisonian conception of politics leads directly to Gramsci’s notion of hege-mony. They mutually imply one another precisely because they are antitheticallyopposed to each other. One desires to preserve a newly established order, theother desires to overthrow a misbegotten pre-existing order in order to establish anew one.

The relation between Madisonian politics and Gramscian politics operates atvarious levels. It is encapsulated in Gramsci’s distinction between two over-arching types of politics, which encompass all the different forms and permuta-tions of political activity: grand politics and petty politics (Q2 §48: 970; Q3 §5:1563–1564; Q3 §72: 1832–1833), as well as the parallel distinction betweenpolitics (politica) and diplomacy (diplomazia) (Q1 §38: 457–458; Q2 §86:760–762, Q2 §87: 764–767; Q2 §10: 943–944; Q2 §41: 1309–1310; Q3 §16:1577; Q3 §16: 1583–1585). Grand politics focuses on “the founding of newStates, the struggle for the destruction, the defense, and the preservation ofdeterminate organic socio-economic structures” (Q3 §5: 1563–1564). Pettypolitics is characterized by conflicts and struggles defined by the establishedideological consensus and conducted within a pre-existing structure of power.The first attempts to generate a new consensus and to create a new order: itpresents a countervailing conception of the world in opposition to the prevailingone, and in so doing it seeks to transform the subaltern into a hegemonic“personality” capable of establishing this new order. The second acts within themoral/intellectual and political/ideological categories of the established given; itcannot, or refuses to, see beyond them, and thus it is concerned with issues,policies, programs and conflicts that arise out of normal everyday politicalcompetition. Grand politics establishes or founds entirely new structures,whereas petty politics takes place within an already constituted socio-politicalorder. An analogous distinction between politics and diplomacy parallels thatbetween grand and petty politics. Here too the defining principle is a politics

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conceived as foundational and innovating and distinguished from a politics seenas restorative and preservative.

In Gramsci, stages of political action parallel stages of political consciousness,and both reflect the movement from narrow self-interest to common interest, fromthe particular to the general, from fragmentation to coherence, from subordinationto self-government, from incoherence to self-discipline.

In Q13 §3 Gramsci formulates a politics directed to the launching of fundamen-tal historical and social movements that go beyond the merely personal strugglesfor leadership or the day-to-day policies of the government. The latter deals withimmediate “quasi” incidental or accidental incidents (Q13 §3: 1579–1580). Theproblem is to identify the proper relation between these two moments. Gramsciasks of the level of organization and consciousness that may enable a subalterngroup to transcend its immediate objective environment and its particular narrowinterests and develop a consciousness and a politics sufficiently universal andgeneral to attract and to lead other groups. He then identifies various stages inthe process by which a subaltern group attains political leadership, stages whichparallel levels of political consciousness. The first is the most elemental: theeconomic–corporative. At this level a baker identifies and unites with baker,plumber with plumber, laborer with laborer, and so on. Yet at this state the bakerand plumber do not achieve a common basis of action or of solidarity. Identity quaidentity acts to inhibit the formation of a more inclusive and more encompassingpolitical “personality.” The organization is narrow, not yet capable of overcomingits immediate interests. The second is the attainment of a consciousness of commoninterests among all the members of a social group, but still remains within the realmof the purely economic. At this stage the political question of state power isrevealed, but only to achieve equal rights with the dominant groups, to demand theright to participate in the making of laws and their administration in order to changethem or to reform them. And the third stage is the realization that the corporateinterests of a given group can transcend the merely economic, and can become orbe transformed into the interests of other subordinate groups (Q13 §3: 1583–1584).It is at this final stage that the question of power is posed, and that the contours of anew structure are revealed.

For Gramsci this last is the purely and properly political stage. It is more“straightforwardly political,” and it signals the “decisive” passage from the levelof the purely corporate and economic to the level of complex political forma-tions (Q13 §3: 1584). This is the phase where the ideologies that were germinat-ing in the earlier stages transform into a political party – they become organized,self-aware and disciplined. The “battle” (Q1 §44: 54; Q2 §10: 1229–1231; Q2§65: 1493) of ideologies takes place here, a battle in which one or a combinationwill prevail, proliferating and disseminating throughout the society, uniting andaggregating both economic and political, as well as moral and intellectual ends,such that the struggle is raised from the merely corporative to the “universal”level (Q3 §17: 1584), and finally, creating the hegemony of a “fundamentalsocial group” over a series of subordinate groups. Such a process describes thecoming to consciousness of a social group, its passage from a subordinate or

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subaltern status to a hegemonic status. It is also an analysis describing theprocess by which a state or a new order is founded.

VI

The transition to the modern world, the breakdown of traditional communalties, the rise of the bourgeois and mercantile classes, were accompanied by the riseof the “people” or the “masses” as a force in politics and in history. The movementfrom the pre-modern to the modern initiated a new form of politics, mass politics,in which the organization and deployment of the people became crucial. Theproblem now became: how to control and to check the power of democracy, that is,the power of the many (see Burnham 1943). In Europe, there were three possibleresponses: the classical liberalism of Mill, Croce, and Mosca; the reactionaryconservatism of Maistre and Bonald, and the revolutionary politics of assorted leftwing social movements. In the United States the emergence of the people as apolitical force was recognized and addressed by the very leadership that wonindependence and that established and set the contours and boundaries withinwhich politics and power struggles were to be conducted.

It is noteworthy that the debate over power acquired particular force duringthe second half of the last century in the controversy in the US between plural-ists like Dahl and elitists like C. Wright Mills. This controversy, ostensibly overthe methodological problem concerning the conceptualization and measurementof power, was central to democracy, both as an empirical and a normative idea.It was widely recognized that democracy in both senses depended upon aparticular form of organized power and a particular manner of its deployment.

This pluralist/elitist debate regarding democracy in America was also a contro-versy regarding the nature of power, its distribution and stratification, which inturn was also a debate over the nature of social science and the methodologyappropriate to the study of these issues. Dahl’s emphasis on power as a relationbetween two observable actors issuing in an observable decision, Bachrach andBaratz’s analysis of power in terms of non-decision-making, Schattschneider’snotion of the mobilization of bias, and Mills’s idea of an interlocking directorate,are simultaneously discussions regarding power, its method of analysis, as well asthe democratic or oligarchic character of society.

Thus the debates over power are also debates over democracy, or rather overthe relationship between democracy and oligarchy. This debate, beginning in thelate nineteenth century with the works of social theorists like Weber, Pareto,Mosca and Michels, transformed radically the traditional and classical conceptionof democracy – that is, democracy as rule of and by the people (see Sartori 1987).

Mosca posits a permanent and unbridgeable cleavage in all societies (past,present and future) between the minority and the majority, a condition in whichrule is always by a minority, and in which such rule is legitimated by a “politicalformula” whose form is determined by the character of society and government. Inthe modern world democracy is the formula that legitimates rule by the few. Healso talks about the circulation of elites, either by revolution or by co-optation,

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where the latter occurs in an open society and the former in a closed society.Michels, too, talks about the rule of the few. The iron law of oligarchy is theformula he uses to describe the determining character of organization: that is,organization and minority rule presuppose each other. Under these conditionsmodern society can look forward to at best the free (“open”) percolation ofindividuals from the bottom to the top, that is, the open and free formation ofoligarchies. In a similar vein, Schumpeter builds on these ideas and uses them todefine democracy as an “institutional arrangement” established to insure free andopen competition among various elites and different oligarchies.

Dahl “democratizes,” so to speak, the formulations of Schumpeter, Mosca, andMichels. While the latter three look at democracy in a typical European liberalmanner, that is, narrowly, with politics occurring within a delimited and circum-scribed social base, Dahl enlarges the social foundations to make it as inclusive aspossible. To use Dahl’s term, “polyarchy” is democracy understood as the rule ofmany oligarchies or plural elites, in competition with each other, and in alliancesconstantly forming and reforming; it is a competition for power that occurs on awide social base in which the people legitimate the struggle by their consent. Thisconsent is gained in various ways, the primary political way being electoralcompetition. In effect, since the nineteenth century, what has occurred is a radicalre-definition of democracy. Classical, that is pre-nineteenth century, notions ofdemocracy understood democracy in terms of class, or factional, rule: the rule ofthe many. This many was mostly and always understood to be poor, or at least lesswealthy than the few.

What elitists such as Mosca and Michels accomplished was to compel theo-rists and thinkers such as Dahl and other pluralists who valued democratic idealsto redefine the concept of democracy and to modernize it. The empirical work ofthe former, in addition to that of Schumpeter, Lasswell, Kaplan and others,showed that democracy seen as rule by the many was no longer tenable (seeLasswell and Kaplan). Thus the meaning of democracy was changed, from aform of rule where the many dominated, to a form of rule where no one domin-ated: that is, democracy was now no longer a type of rule, but a method ofruling.

Gramsci directly addresses the problem regarding the disparity betweenempirical theories of power and the ideal notion of democracy. It is importantto avoid an overly idealized version of democracy and to ground it in aversion of power suitable to a just society and yet remains empiricallygrounded.

In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci notes that

The supremacy of a social group is manifested in two ways: as “domina-tion” and as “intellectual and moral leadership.” A social group is dominantover those antagonistic groups it wants to “liquidate” or to subdue evenwith armed force, and it is leading with respect to those groups that areassociated and allied with it.

(Q3 §19: 2010)

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For Gramsci modern Western societies – liberal and democratic politicalregimes – are systems of hegemonic equilibrium characterized by a “combinationof force and consent which are balanced in varying proportions, without forceprevailing too greatly over consent” (Q3 §13: 1638). Violence and persuasion,force and consent, domination and leadership together form the defining andessential character of the political. This means that Gramsci understands the stateas characterized by two analytically separate, but historically and mutually penet-rating, spheres: “dictatorship + hegemony,” and “political society + civil society,”where the symbiotic unity of the two spheres represents what Gramsci calls the“integral State” (Q2 §6: 763–764). Hegemony never replaces, though it may veil,dictatorship, in the same way that consent never replaces force. Both moments ofthe dyad are necessary. In modern mass democracy the issue is never the elimina-tion of the moment of force, dictatorship and domination: rather, the point is theidentification of the “proper” (Q2 §7: 866) balance or proportion between the twomoments of force and consent, dominio and direzione. What Gramsci showsis that the generation of consent is necessary for force and for its successful use.As already stated, hegemony is a conceptual bundle in which are woven severalhighly complex and interrelated notions, and one of these is the generation ofconsent by means of organic intellectuals acting within the sphere of civil society.Yet consent in its political context of modern democracy is nothing more thanthe formation and deployment of mass opinion in order to capture the state(“political society”). Thus the generation of consent is the precondition for thecapture of state power and consequently for the deployment and use of force (seeFontana 2005).

Discussions of Gramsci in the United States tend to accentuate the elements ofconsent, persuasion, and opinion formation while de-emphasizing elements suchas force, coercion, violence and domination. Because the former are locatedwithin civil society much time and space are devoted to expounding the variousgroups, institutions and organizations that together constitute this type of society.It is said therefore that Gramsci, in his analysis of civil society, points to a newtype of politics, a “cultural” or “ideological” struggle that excludes the elementsof domination and force. Gramsci is reduced to a liberal (in the American sense)or a social democratic (in the European sense) thinker whose work and writingsare concerned with the ameliorative, social welfare and inclusionary tendenciesof modern democracy.

The element of force and coercion, which is crucial to politics and to power, andwhich thinkers, in addition to Marx and Gramsci, as varied as Plato, Machiavelli,Hamilton, and Croce recognize, has disappeared into the Parnassian realms of“deliberation,” “discourse,” “pure speech,” and the catch-all category of democraticand liberal “culture.” Domination and force are de-politicized, and transformed intocultural forms of power, in the same way that the state itself is de-politicized (thatis, shorn of its coercive and repressive element), and reduced to civil society, whichis seen as the sphere and locus of consensual action (and thus of liberty).

Crucial is the emphasis on democracy and its equation with civil society. Ifpolitics is now a question of persuasion and consent, and conflict solely cultural,

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then the element of domination central to Gramsci’s concept of politics is elimi-nated, and “antagonism” (Q3 §19: 2010) is replaced by conversation and discus-sion. It should not be forgotten that hegemony, arguably the central focus ofGramsci’s thought, cannot be understood in isolation, without linking it to itsopposite polarity, dictatorship, in the same way that “allied” (Q3 §19: 2010)cannot be understood without “antagonistic.” Gramsci’s polarities are analytical,but they are not mechanical. They presuppose each other, and acquire meaningand direction in close relation to each other.

It is precisely such a conception of politics and society that led Madison todevelop his notion of a Realpolitik founded upon a multiplicity of interests anda multiplicity of opinions. Since Plato’s discussion of justice in the Republic(31 E-336 A, 336 B-347 E), in which Polemarchus defines justice as helpingone’s friends and injuring one’s foes and Thrasymachus sees justice as the inter-est of the stronger faction or group, politics and the state have been seen as bothcause and consequence of the conflict between two encompassing factions, thefew and the many. Both Madison and Gramsci recognize the centrality of thisidea. One tries to diminish and to reduce its consequences such that the few maymaintain their political and cultural supremacy, the other tries to develop waysin which the many may attain hegemonic rule.

From this perspective, Madisonian politics is a politics designed to channelmass and popular activity within the confines of the pre-existing order; and itacts to insure that political activity can never transcend or escape the establishedboundaries of the system. Madison helped to found a new order that guaranteedthat only petty politics could thereafter be practiced; it provided the scaffoldingfor a structure that inhibits the birth and the growth of a new order. As such, it isa politics of a very high order – what Gramsci calls “grand politics.”8

Notes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are mine.2 See in this regard Hunter (1991), who sees Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and

organic intellectual useful in explaining the “battle” over ideas and culture in the US.3 Gramsci’s distinction between popular culture and high culture is useful in understanding

the dynamics of religion (especially Protestant) in the US. The character of Americanculture and society is a blend of high and low, in which the “high” and the “low” mirroreach other, in the sense that the former is a more “rigorous” or “disciplined” version ofthe latter. This is especially evident in American religion, particularly fundamentalist andevangelical Christianity, in which certain groups evince what on the surface appears to bea bifurcated conception of the world, at once a belief in the literal inerrancy or truthof the Bible and a sophisticated, rigorous knowledge of the mechanisms of moderneconomic business practices as well as an intimate familiarity with modern technologyand modern capitalist markets.

4 See Alexander 2007 and see its review by Wolfe.5 In Federalist no. 6, Hamilton writes:

The causes of hostility among nations [and, by implication, among factions andother social groups] are innumerable. There are some which have a general andalmost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description

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are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion–-the jealousy ofpower, or the desire of equality and safety.

(Hamilton et al. 1999: 22)

6 I omit discussion of thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and theirfollowers, who have developed a theory of democracy based on deliberation, conversa-tion and discourse. These deliberative democrats posit a realm of “pure speech” and“public reason” from which are excluded all forms of emotion, sentiment, interest andpower. This realm is basically an idealized and romanticized version of civil society,within which rational discussion and deliberation define democratic practice. Shorn ofthe struggle for power and conflict for competitive advantage democratic politics isreduced to a philosophical contest over ideas. Madisonian liberals emphasize the falli-bility of reason and the preeminence of passion, and deliberative democrats posit theautonomy of reason. See Fontana, Nederman, and Remer, especially the introductoryessay by the editors.

7 For a different perspective see Hardt and Negri 2004: 348–358.8 I thank the Eugene M. Lang Foundation and the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation

for their generous support and help. Special thanks are due to Doris L. Suarez for herincisive critique and insightful comments.

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7 Pessimism of the intelligence,optimism of the willReflections on political agency in theage of “empire”

Stephen Gill

My starting point for this chapter is the early 1990s, when Fukuyama arguedthat alternatives to liberal capitalism seemed to have been defeated, not onlyin the postcolonial Third World, but more acutely in the former eastern bloc(Fukuyama 1992).1 A key illustration was how at US insistence the reconstruc-tion of communism in Europe took the form of shock therapy. Indeed it becamea commonplace of political discourse to argue that the global strategic situationof the post-Cold War world was unprecedented: for the first time since theRoman Empire a majority of the world’s military power was concentrated inthe hands of a single state and its institutions of national security.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century it even became fashionableamong both conservatives and liberals, in a manner reminiscent of nineteenth-century discourses of the civilizing mission of the Western powers, to ascribebenevolence to the new forms of supremacy and to hail the revival of Americanimperialism and empire as a universal force for progress.

However, as I shall argue, rather than the end of history, a new phase of histor-ical struggle began in the 1990s. Counterhegemonic and alternative movementsemerged precisely as the contradictions of the reassertion of US dominance andthe US-led “war on terror” intensified after 2001. Despite the US reassertion of theprerogatives of empire in ways that had institutionalized a type of global state ofemergency and, despite the attempts to intensify what I call disciplinary neoliberalpatterns of globalization, social forces from across the political spectrum through-out the world began to reassert political alternatives. Challenges to the dominantglobalization projects of the powerful became more widespread, in ways thatreconfigured the political limits of the possible in the new world order.

So, in what follows we explore some of the implications of this conjunctureand by focusing on the question of global leadership we will seek to highlighthow progressive social forces are responding to new conditions of existenceand in some ways beginning to form a collective political will on a global scale.We can view this as similar in some respects to a novel form of transnationalpolitical party or peoples’ International. At this stage it is a network of move-ments and social forces, but in important ways it is coming to assert itself as akey collective force in the making of our contemporary history. I call this newand emerging political form “The postmodern Prince” (Gill 2000, Gill 2003a).

The methodological perspective that frames my analysis is drawn fromGramsci’s favorite political maxim, which he derived from Romain Rolland:“pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will”:2

On daydreams and fantasies. They show lack of character and passivity.One imagines that something has happened to upset the mechanism ofnecessity. One’s own initiative has become free. Everything is easy. Onecan do whatever one wants, and one wants a whole series of things which atpresent one lacks. It is basically the present turned on its head which is pro-jected into the future. Everything repressed is unleashed. On the contrary, itis necessary to direct one’s attention violently towards the present as it is,if one wishes to transform it. Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism ofthe will.

(SPN: 175 n. 75)

Gramsci meant that we should look at contemporary political challenges with asober realism in order to be able to transcend the political limits of the possible thatwere posed by national and international conditions. Note that Gramsci’s maximwas linked to the injunction that we should examine contemporary conditions withan analysis that directs attention “violently towards the present as it is, if one wishesto transform it” (my emphasis).

Thus Gramsci’s historical materialism was also a form of political realism thatwas historically grounded in the appraisal of a violent world order. It was focusedon how power and its potentials serve to define constraints and opportunities forresistance and progressive change – at any specific moment. Indeed, the dialecticof power and resistance is therefore linked in this type of historical materialism tofundamental ethical questions, such as the relationship between rulers and ruledand indeed the question of whether political leaders seek to either sustain ortranscend existing social relations and world order structures.

Thus a neogramscian perspective addresses two basic questions concerningleaders and led in a very clear way:

In the formation of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intentionthat there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create theconditions in which this division is no longer necessary? In other words, isthe initial premise the perpetual division of the human race, or the belief thatthis division is only an historical fact corresponding to certain conditions?

(SPN: 144)

Theorizing world order

I have already noted that the terms imperialism and empire are now embraced byliberals and conservatives to capture key aspects of the power relations of thecontemporary world order. Writers on the left have also focused on what they callthe “new imperialism” (Panitch 2000; Harvey 2005) of the US. It is a moot point

98 S. Gill

as to whether the forms of imperialism are indeed all that new, although in somerespects the combined forces at work have novel elements. Perhaps it is better tosuggest that they are being practiced in a conjuncture that combines elements ofboth the old (the use of organized violence to intensify the extraction of surplusand tribute from subordinated peoples and classes) and the radically new (e.g. theacceleration of the global tendency to turn increasing aspects of life and natureinto exploitable commodities). Perhaps the term “imperialism of our time” ismore appropriate since for many nations and subordinated peoples, the strugglesagainst imperialism have continued for centuries (Ahmad 2003).

Nonetheless, many writers on the question concerning the imperialism of ourtime – from across the political spectrum – have focused much of their attentionon rather immediate questions, notably the degree to which American unilateral-ism and its massive military footprint are placing severe strains on the unity andlegitimacy of its primary alliance structures associated with its allies, e.g. inthe G-7 and NATO. Others have emphasized not only concerns and diverginginterests of allies but also forms of resistance that have crystallized, such as aresurgent left in Latin America as well as Islamic resistance movements, antiwarmovements, and efforts by other states such as Russia and China to countervailUS power and authority in global politics.

Nevertheless, while liberal, neorealist and neomarxist approaches to inter-national relations have focused on the question of the US as a superpower or asan imperialist force, relatively few have done so from the perspective of theanalysis of the complex of social forces and historical blocs that constitute theseforms of dominant political agency.

Here it is worth pointing out that much of the mainstream analysis of hege-mony, supremacy and imperialism – including that of a number of Marxists – isoften based on simplified Realist geopolitical perspective. It therefore tends topresent a reified view of power in world order as defined narrowly by the interac-tions among territorial states, often ignoring more fundamental social forces(Gowan 1999; Ferguson 2001; Foster 2003; Ikenberry 2004). This error is notfound in the strategic forums of business (e.g. the World Business Council onSustainable Development) or in the scenario planning used by corporations andgovernment agencies (e.g. by Shell Oil, whose methods have been used by theCIA) to not only influence policy but also to anticipate and to curtail political chal-lenges, e.g. to the continuation of neoliberal economic and cultural globalization(United States National Intelligence Council 2004).

I would argue that a weakness of most approaches to world order is that theyavoid basic questions of and links between political economy, political theory andpolitical sociology – e.g. the relations between rulers and ruled, in this case, on aworld scale. They thus obscure power relations and transnational links betweenkey social and political forces – forces that are often highlighted in more “critical”geopolitical perspectives. By shifting to a more complex analysis of social forceswe can bring into relief various social struggles (e.g. workers’ struggles and theirlinks to processes of primitive accumulation, such as in China where a new prole-tariat is being created; struggles over social reproduction and the question of the

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biosphere). A more critical geopolitical approach also allows for relatively morenuanced and open visions of world order prospects.

On the other hand some of the critical literature is both too structuralist andinsufficiently dialectical, thus evacuating agency from the making of worldorder, in ways which may be disempowering to progressive forces. An exampleis the very influential “empire hypothesis,” namely that a decentered networkstructure is the emerging form of global order, a structure with no leadershipper se (Hardt and Negri 2000).

By contrast other writers go too far in the opposite direction, and ascribe toomuch to the agency and instrumentality of a hegemonic “transnational capitalistclass” said to rule the globe (Sklair 2001). This tends to obscure how a complex oftransnational social and political forces, combining elements of capital and labor,struggles to come to agreement or to negotiate a range of local/national/regionalquestions, and how it must seek to co-opt and outflank forces opposed to itsprojects of global leadership. It should be noted here that the Gramscian conceptof a transnational historical bloc as I have used it differs from other concepts usedin the radical literature: e.g. a “transnational capitalist class alliance,” a “super-imperialism” or indeed what the neokautskians would call an “ultraimperialism”of “core capital.” This is because elements of more than one class (i.e. both capitaland incorporated elements of labor) are necessarily involved, under the leadershipof an internationally oriented class fraction with its own organic intellectuals whoseek to articulate its ideas and ideology in political and civil society. A dominanthistorical bloc is one that is anchored in the ruling elements of one or more of themost powerful states that seek to defend, strengthen and extend the leading modeof production, relative to rivals and challengers (Gill 1986; Gill 1990).

Global relations of force and changing conditions of existence

Thus, my approach draws upon a detailed analysis of social forces and historicalblocs that operate both within and across what Gramsci called complexes of civi-lizations. It then advances a concept of global leadership connected to patterns ofpower and resistance on the terrain of an effective reality configured by whatGramsci called the “relations of force.” For Gramsci, these are threefold, asfollows:

• Those connected to the fundamental economic and social structure ofsociety (and we would add its ecological constraints).

• Those connected to the “strategic” aspect, namely military–strategic relations,or the capacities for use of organized violence.

• Those connected to the “political” moment – which for Gramsci was themost important – since it involved forms of state, political association andpolitical organizations. The political moment was associated with differentlevels of consciousness, e.g. the relatively narrow corporate consciousnessof business associations, unions etc. or the more universal or hegemonicconsciousness of actual or potentially ruling classes.

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At the apex of world order hierarchies – and straddling the global relations offorce – is an interstate political formation that my earlier work identified in ratherprecise terms as the “G-7 nexus” that embodies and seeks to direct some of theprevailing relations of force (Gill 1998b). It involves social forces led principallybut not exclusively by the ruling classes of the US. The nexus includes not onlygovernments but also networks of transnational corporations and other socialforces active and influential in political and civil society across borders. Thisnexus is now expanding to incorporate some of the ruling forces of other states(e.g. the G8+5 initiative launched in 2007, to add not only Russia but also fiveinfluential Third World states to some – but not all – of the summit discussions atthe “top table”).

Underpinning this nexus – which is currently leading the forces of discipli-nary neoliberalism – is a historical bloc of social, economic, cultural and polit-ical forces, a bloc that is transnational in its structures and scope. Its materialand political base rests on the power of giant oligopolistic firms and marketforces that operate politically both “outside” and “inside” the state and that formpart of the “local” and “global” political structures, which includes some parts oforganized labor, as a kind of new labor aristocracy, as it were. Its social nucleusis the relatively small percentage of affluent people who are the primary benefi-ciaries of neoliberal political economy (Gill 2003b). This includes not only bigbusiness and the people who make huge fortunes from financial services andhedge funds, but also smaller and midsized businesses, such as contractors orsuppliers, import–export businesses, stockbrokers, accountants, consultancies,lobbyists, educational entrepreneurs, architects, and designers, as well as sportsand other stars of entertainment and the celebrity culture.

A central political purpose of this bloc is to enlarge the power of capitalwithin state and civil society. Indeed, during the 1990s over 80 jurisdictions for-mally adopted new liberal constitutions, and most countries joined the WorldTrade Organization, accepting its conditions of entry which formally committedthem to the “progressive liberalization” of their economies – all moves thatenhance the power of capital on a world scale. For example, many multilateraland bilateral investment treaties make nationalization of and control over privateproperty illegal (Schneiderman 2000). I call this the new constitutionalism. Itis legal and political process to lock in the power gains of capital by means ofdisciplinary neoliberal frameworks of law, regulation and indeed constitutionalreforms, such as the replacement of the former communist constitutions withneoliberal ones in the 1990s (Gill 1998a).

In sum, the supremacy of the G-7 nexus is connected to disciplinary neoliber-alism and the relatively arbitrary use of military power by the US and its allies.This involves several moments or characteristics of our time that configure theglobal relations of force:

• The effective restoration of the political power of the propertied, reflected,perhaps in an unprecedented way in the rapid growth of a global plutocracy(Gill 2004).

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• The increasing subordination of state forms to capital (following somesocialization and nationalization of the means of production between 1917and 1991).

• The reconfiguration of state forms so they act as if they are market place actorswho regulate the political economy to permit the accelerated commodificationof social life. The restructuring of the state’s obligations for social reproduc-tion, e.g. rolling back welfare, public education and healthcare, leading togreater privatization of services and increased social atomization (Gill 2002b;Bakker 2008; Bakker and Gill 2003; Bakker 2007; Bakker 2003).

• The associated trend toward intensified exploitation of human beings andnature allied to tendencies toward extreme inequality of income, wealth andlife chances – the obverse of rising stock prices and the growing fortunes ofthe plutocracy.

• The apparent acceleration in the ongoing process of primitive accumulation,involving expropriation or dispossession of producers of their means tosubsistence – with parallels to early forms of dispossession, enclosure andcolonization (Wherlof 2000; Shilliam 2004; Federici 2003; Di Muzio 2007;Harvey 2005).

• The US-led war on terror, interventions and wars have prompted concernsnot only over “humanitarian intervention” and aggressive wars, but also overcoercive, arbitrary use of military force and the means to make politicalleaders legally and morally accountable to law and humanity (Falk 2007;Falk 2003).

• The contradictions between legality and legitimacy in world order andglobal governance, e.g. whether global justice is understood in liberal, pro-cedural terms or as substantive in nature. A procedural conception – as innew constitutionalism – sees the World Trade Organization as legal andlegitimate (since it was freely made by governments). Others interpret themain organs of the WTO as a product of relatively closed-door proceduresdominated by illegitimate and unaccountable corporate interests, in waysthat are intensifying maldevelopment (Gill 2002a).

Social forces in an emerging global political and civil society

These moments – and others – have prompted diverse political responses toimagine and seek to create political alternatives. Here we can identify at least foursets of political and civil society forces – some progressive, some conservative,some reactionary – associated with struggles over world leadership and the futureworld order:

• Dominant forces such as the G-7 nexus that encompasses not only mainstreampolitical forces in the metropolitan states, but also elites and ruling classes inthe Third World, with its leading personnel often drawn from Ivy League andOxbridge universities and other agencies of elite socialization. The unity andcoherence of these forces should not, however be overstated.

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• Counterhegemonic forces associated with rival groupings of states, somewhich are state-driven, left-wing models based on social needs, e.g. HugoChávez’s regional plans for Latin America. Others are regional powers suchas India and China that are undergoing rapid integration into the capitalistworld market and that seek greater global influence.

• Alternative forces that are forging regional or global initiatives involvingprogressive, grass roots and citizens organizations, e.g. parts of the WorldSocial Forum and Via Campesina (small farmers and peasants).

• Reactionary forces, e.g. conservative forces, those on the far right (e.g. thepan-European Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty) and other forces associatedwith religious fundamentalism in North and South in rejection of liberal andmodernist projects. Again the unity of these forces is often more apparentthan real.

These very diverse forces reflect a new phase of historical struggle akin to whatPolanyi called the “double movement”: i.e. the changes of 1918–1939, in reactionto attempts principally on the part of financial interests to restore key institutionsof the liberal world economic order of the nineteenth century such as the GoldStandard (Polanyi 1957). The economic chaos associated with internationalmarket forces in the 1930s prompted massive and relatively spontaneous chal-lenges from agriculture and industry, the ranks of peasants, workers and owners.Some rallied behind reactionary concepts of global leadership, e.g. Nazism andFascism.

Of course the UK–USA–USSR alliance defeated the Axis Powers. Themarket-based liberalism of the 1930s was redefined in the post-1945 war settle-ments in the West as a system of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982). Thepostwar settlement involved the transnational leadership of a coalition of corpor-ate, labor and civil society forces in the US and its allied partners. A general,and in some limited senses, progressive social purpose governed the regulationof market forces. However, in the post-Cold War order, disciplinary neoliberal-ism reverses this progressive and redistributive regulatory principle. It promotesthe world market as the principal form of governance. One effect of this shift isto marginalize most organized labor from its previous positions of influenceover some of the key national and international leadership institutions, forumsand initiatives in the post-1945 capitalist world order. Disciplinary neoliberalismis a form of governance and a pattern of accumulation that is dominated bycapital, particularly big capital, and its influence has become increasingly globalsince the early 1980s, although its scope and depth varies across jurisdictionsand localities.

More recently, and partly because of significant resistance and pressure fromsocial forces, some of the more farsighted global business interests have soughtto mobilize civil society support for a new development paradigm: sustainabledevelopment. In a search for greater consent and legitimacy, there have alsobeen shifts in some flanks of global business (particularly mining corporations)away from market based shareholder capitalism toward stakeholder models

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more attuned to the needs of communities. Such initiatives also involve govern-ments and international organizations, e.g. the Commonwealth Business Councilseeks to mobilize “good corporate citizenship.”

However in much of Latin America and in parts of Eastern Europe – aftermore than a decade of disciplinary neoliberalism and “shock therapy,” somegovernments and elements of society increasingly seem to reject the neoliberalvision of a “market democracy” and stakeholder capitalism and are looking to thestate to shape economic, social and environmental policies. In Latin America, itseems, this part of the new double movement has privileged more progressivepoliticians. On the other hand, in Europe there has been a rise of more authorit-arian nationalist politics – chiefly but not exclusively in Russia. There is also amore reactionary and conservative critique of disciplinary neoliberalism andmarket civilization, sometimes linked to theocratic and fundamentalist move-ments. For example, longstanding efforts to constitute a pan-European “national-ist” force culminated in January 2007 with the formation of a new extremeright-wing political grouping in the European parliament: Identity, Tradition,Sovereignty. Its founding statement espouses concepts of national interest andChristian heritage that other far-right parties such as the NationaldemokratischePartei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany) have articulatedinto a rival conception of a European League of Nations.3

At the same time in North and South, workers, feminists, environmentalists,scientists and technical experts are combining to produce a shared analysis andcommon critique of market civilization and “sustainable development,” e.g. in theWorld Social Forum, which was created in 1999 as a strategic response to theWorld Economic Forum. It seeks an alternative world order premised on social-ism and earlier demands for a New International Economic Order. ATTACoriginated in France is active in many countries on various issues: the WorldTrade Organization, international financial institutions, debt, taxation of financialtransactions, tax havens, public services, water rights and free-trade zones. Itseeks to propose concrete alternatives to neoliberalism based on solidarity.

While detractors use the terms “antiglobalists” or “antiglobalization” todescribe such social forces, their opposition to neoliberal policies rather thanglobalization per se is perhaps better encapsulated by the label “ethical global-ists” (Podobnik and Reifer 2005; Clark 2003). Such initiatives may well presagea new form of progressive internationalism.

Thus despite the reassertion of US supremacy and disciplinary neoliberalism,new forms of political agency have arisen. In the global South and in LatinAmerica, new political forces are, to paraphrase Marx, concerned with imagin-ing new possibilities and the making of history, although not necessarily underconditions of their own choosing. Indeed history is being made in far frompropitious, in key ways deteriorating, world order conditions for the majority ofpeople.

This may seem to be all the more surprising given the way that the economicand social crises that characterized the 1980s and 1990s for example in LatinAmerica – crises that created economic stagnation and social atomization and that

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were governed under the policy regime of disciplinary neoliberalism associatedwith the so-called Washington Consensus and its successors.

In Latin America for example, the authoritarian regimes that held power inthe 1970s were replaced by transitions to limited electoral democracy in the1980s, overseen by the military and economic power of the United States(Robinson 1996).

Nevertheless, particularly following the debt crises of the early 1980s, localruling classes and their overseas allies managed to channel and constrain moreradical democratization movements during the 1980s and much of the 1990s viamechanisms that separated economic power from popular control – in effect anew constitutionalist strategy that in Latin America dates back to the periodbetween the two world wars (Teivainen 2002). Indeed, for much of the last tenyears much of the left in Brazil moved toward the political center while engagingin some redistributive programs to contain popular challenges from below.President Lula – despite his radical background and years of engagement in classstruggle associated with the new proletariat of industrial workers in Brazil – hasmaintained Brazil’s incorporation into disciplinary neoliberalism.

At the same time throughout Latin America in the 1990s there were many otherspontaneous uprisings and organizations of urban, peasants and indigenous move-ments which occurred outside of the formal political institutions (Petras 1997). Ithad been anticipated by many on the left that the US would confront and represssuch popular mobilization and intervene militarily or use covert action and “lowintensity warfare” – perhaps under the guise of the “wars” on drugs and on terror,for example the US’s massive investment in Plan Colombia. And of course, someof the region’s governments tried to brand the new social movements as terroristsand indeed confronted them with coercion and intimidation.

However, despite being confronted with other Pentagon threats designed toproduce “shock” and “awe” in the minds of its adversaries, there is clearly aresurgence of defiant left-wing populism and state capitalism in Latin America,e.g. Chávez has openly repudiated new constitutionalism and the US Republicanleadership to advance his so-called Bolivarian Revolution, paradoxicallyfinanced by a windfall in oil revenues as oil prices rose dramatically duringthe early twenty-first century – in no small part due to the US-led war in theMiddle East.

More broadly throughout the world – in Asia, Africa, Latin America – variousworkers’ and peasant movements, feminists, and environmentalists and othershave combined to construct a relatively common framework of analysis of theproblems associated with neoliberal globalization. Some, like the LandlessWorkers Movement in Brazil (MST) are forging real and practical alternatives tothe rule of capital. However, more to the point is that many of these new forcesare much more radical than those of orthodox leftist parties, and they haveengaged in new practices and discourses of politics. Indeed, in many respects themost radical stronghold for left-wing resurgence is found among the landlesspeasantry – which has formed a large, strong, dynamic, innovative and effectivesocial movement in Brazil. In Bolivia and Paraguay, as well as in Mexico,

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peasant movements have been prominent in reshaping and redefining the terrainof politics, often in combination with traditional civic and union movements.

What often unites these diverse movements is the way that global accumula-tion along disciplinary neoliberal lines has entailed the mass dispossession of thebasic means of livelihood for growing numbers of people. People are beingdeprived of their customary rights to clean water, to use of the land for fuel andfor grazing, and not least, they are losing control over their food supplies and theuse of other natural resources. A small number of giant corporations increasinglydominate global agriculture and they promote export-oriented energy-intensiveproduction for the world market, in ways that often undercut the local productive,social and ecological base. It follows, therefore that the resistance of peasants todisenfranchisement and dispossession is also a resistance to capital, even if someof the terms of resistance reaffirm premodern social and political forms. Anexample is Rigoberta Menchú Tum, whose narrative defends communal forms ofland tenure that are threatened with violent expropriation when governments seekto impose “modern” (her term) private property forms to commodify the land(Menchú Tum 1984). This position is not blanket opposition by indigenouspeoples to modernity as such (i.e. it recognizes some of the benefits of scienceand technology). Rather it is an insistence that certain institutions of modernitysuch as capital and private property need to be rejected since they represent anexpropriation of the right to livelihood (Beverley 2004: 271).

The contrast between such new organic intellectuals and the older moreincorporated intellectuals of the traditional left is striking indeed.

Rulers and ruled: methodological propositions on thenew progressive movements

As Gramsci noted in the 1930s, often neglected in discussions of leadership arethe “first elements” of political science. These elements concern the “primordial”and to an extent the “irreducible fact” that there do exist rulers and ruled, leadersand led, in this case on a world scale (SPN: 144). The vision and goals of theprogressive, subaltern movements I have just described are ultimately designed toabolish this primordial distinction. They are concerned to imagine and createforms of political economy that allow for these divisions to be eliminated andindeed for a diversity of civilizations to flourish – both within and across coun-tries and regions. The forces of globalization from below ask whether a purelymaterialist and singular monoculture of the market, dominated by corporations onbehalf of their shareholders, can be a mark of civilized life.

Beyond this ethical question, of course, the new movements and groups shareconcerns at the social dislocations and wider ecological consequences of intensifiedglobalization for present and future generations. As the new millennium beckoned,they became more self-conscious and sought to challenge the constraints anddisciplines that had sought to redefine the parameters of the political.

Nonetheless, a number of commentators have pointed out that the alternativeforces from the global North, e.g. in the US, have weakened in the face of the

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neoconservative politico-military offensive since 2001. It is claimed that wehave reached a juncture where many are questioning the political potential ofthe new movements. As a contribution to addressing these questions I wouldhighlight a number of methodological propositions we might consider as welook to the future.

• We need to take a longer-term view, linking past, present and future in ourpolitical assessments. Contemporary progressive movements need to beunderstood in terms of the successes and failures associated with the longuedurée of progressive politics with a lineage that goes back to the very earliestdemocratic struggles for political representation, for rights, equality andrecognition, including the struggles of generations against colonization andimperialism. These struggles for basic rights and representation still continueand must continue in their most basic sense.

• The most fundamental thing about the new forces of global politics is thatthey go well beyond earlier forms of progressivism. While many gains wereproduced by the Socialist and Communist movements of the past twocenturies and indeed many are still being produced by traditional forms ofleft-wing populism, one of their weaknesses was linked to relatively restricteddefinitions of politics – primacy was given to the politics of production andthe struggles between industrial labor and capital. Many fundamental issues –associated with livelihood, racism and the relations between men and women,and more broadly what feminists call social reproduction and the relationsbetween human beings and nature – were relegated to secondary importance.Today’s global progressive movements may therefore be grounded in a muchbroader grasp of conditions of existence.

• We should avoid the fallacy of assuming that all forces of opposition are orshould be unified in a specific response to all problems, or that they need tobe unified organizationally in the form of a traditional political party with asingularity of purpose, aims and, not least restrictive membership require-ments. The counter forces are much better understood as a movement ofmovements (Patomäki and Teivainen 2004). While this can suggest lack oforganization, the leadership is largely the membership, which is diverse andpotentially unlimited, and difficult to co-opt, intimidate or decapitate.

• We should reimagine political agency as involving forces in movement as wellas forces that are expressed in specific forms of political organization. The newprogressive forces are characterized by great diversity; their unity comes fromrecognition of common problems, empathy with the suffering of others andshared principles of collective action. These are North–South movements thatdo not simply focus on the primacy of industrial workers as the “vanguard” ofthe proletariat. They also encompass peasants, other urban workers, feminists,ecologists, anarchists, indigenous peoples and a wide range of forces, includ-ing churches and experts who possess high levels of scientific and techno-logical expertise. These movements are globally interlinked through powerfulmeans and modes of global communication such as the Internet; their message

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is propagated by cultural and communications innovations and popularized byradical media outlets. Such outlets – in conjunction with many institutions andforces associated with an emerging global political and civil society – canpotentially place practices of dominant power under surveillance and scrutiny,with critiques that can be instantaneously communicated worldwide.

• It is therefore difficult, if not impossible for established power to fullycontain these movements, and to constrain the growth of their knowledgeand capabilities. This point is underlined by the fact that despite the inten-sification of police powers associated with the global state of emergencydeclared following 9/11, and in face of threats of “shock and awe” themovements continue to be radical and far-reaching in their potential toincorporate relatively unlimited numbers of people – perhaps more so thancould their Socialist or Communist predecessors in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries.

• Finally, to fully understand the future potentials of these new movementsand forces we need not only to examine the credibility of their politicalproposals and policy frameworks but more fundamentally – as we have justshown – to go beyond narrow assumptions of how political agency is tobe conceived, and to connect to the feasible utopias or myths that thesemovements actually do or may embrace, that is why I call their alternatives,both real and imagined.

The postmodern Prince: progressive strategy and a newform of political party

Any effective political force needs a credible strategy and set of policy proposalsthat can have practical impact, e.g. the proposals of ATTAC on global investmentby workers’ funds, equitable taxation and the regulation of financial markets; thereorganization of agriculture on locally-based organic principles as promoted by theMST.4 Since the movements seek to protect hard earned social gains and to protectthe means of livelihood of different communities, their political strategy will benecessarily defensive – in view of the tendency of capital to pursue privatizationand the commodification of key aspects of everyday life and nature.

However, an effective long-term political strategy can never be purely defen-sive. It must reshape the political terrain by delivering victories or gains that signalits political strength, growing potential and appeal. This is why the agenda anddebate of the counter movements has concentrated on specific issues such as debt,food sovereignty, rights to livelihood, and struggles against privatization of publicservices and the means of life such as water supplies.

Perhaps, therefore, the concept of a progressive party needs to be rethought.It needs to relate to the contemporary global political, social and ecologicalsituation, which involves a combination of premodern, modern and postmodernsocial forces and historical conditions. Thus the political forms of the newmovements are more flexible and diverse than the political parties of themodernist era, e.g. as reflected in Gramsci’s modern Prince:

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The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concreteindividual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society inwhich a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to someextent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.

(SPN: 129)

Any new myth-prince needs to relate to the contemporary global political, socialand ecological situation, which involves a combination of pre-modern, modernand post-modern social forces in movement, i.e. a postmodern Prince in whichdiverse movements are combining the pessimism of the intelligence with anoptimism of the will.

Thus our basic hypothesis is that there is a new fluid form of a transnationalpolitical party in formation. It is not institutionalized nor under centralizedcontrol. It should be understood as something plural. This new “party” is both amovement and a process, one that is social, economic, ecological and political. Itsimultaneously involves an ethical and pedagogical moment that is associatedwith feasible utopias. It has a novel, multiple, flexible and capillary form. In sumthis postmodern Prince embodies a moment of hope to progressive forces;indeed it is central to the way that they not only imagine but also make anotherworld possible.

Notes

1 This chapter draws on some parts of the second (2008) edition of my book Power andResistance in the New World Order (Palgrave), particularly pp. 255–260 and 264–269.I thank Isabella Bakker, Tim Di Muzio and Adrienne Roberts for their helpful com-ments and suggestions, and Julian Germann for his invaluable research assistance.

2 The citation that follows was written in 1932 although Gramsci used this slogan asearly as 1919, in the radical newspaper, Ordine Nuovo.

3 See www.its-pe.eu/pages/groupe.php?TYPE=G2&LANG=EN4 An example is the MST’s agroecological alternative (with its own organic seed

producer, Bionatur), an alternative to the corporate takeover of global agriculture andthe reframing of food security as a market commodity (see McMichael 2003).

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8 Gramsci, in and on media

Marcia Landy

Antonio Gramsci has been the subject of a substantial number of biopics, docu-dramas, non-fiction films, and interviews with still living comrades, descendants,and scholars from the late 1950s to the present, listed in the closing credits ofGramsci: La forma della memoria (Isaja and Melandri 1997). The distinctivenessof this film resides in what the Audio-Visual Archive in Rome describes as being“a study of the diverse forms of memory, transmitted in the idiom of audio visu-ality.” The film’s focus on Gramsci includes extracts from classic political docu-mentaries on film and television, feature films, animated cartoons and drawings,interspersed with commentaries by individuals who knew him and by familymembers, and a montage of images of his works in Italian, European, LatinAmerican and Asian languages. Judging by the books, articles, and even filmsthat continue to appear on the life and writings of Antonio Gramsci, his workcontinues to be germane to cultural and political analysts. Thus, the film offers aninitial testimony to Gramsci’s influence in and on media.

Moreover, media technology was relevant to Gramsci’s considerations ofconnections between culture and politics explicit in his references to cinema andimplicit in his mode of analysis of cultural politics as evident in the work of inter-nationally prominent Italian filmmakers, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini,Bernardo Bertolucci, the Taviani brothers and Gianni Amelio. Gramsci’s writingson culture with their political emphasis also influenced the writings of Britishthinkers identified in the 1960s and 1970s with the Birmingham Centre for theStudy of Culture and particularly with the writings of Stuart Hall. The center’sstudies were to animate international media critics in their attempts to find alanguage to account for the production of consent and coercion in the social andpolitical arenas. Furthermore, the writings of Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, andGayatri Spivak in a postcolonial context have demonstrated how Gramsci’s workon culture and politics continues to resonate.

This chapter is a modest attempt to focus on the vicissitudes of media fromthe postwar era to the final decade of the twentieth century and the beginningof the twenty-first. Through Gramsci and his analysts, I will address thespecter of fascism that has been summoned and enhanced by the practicesof contemporary media in collusion with the avatars of neoliberalism andneoconservatism.

My comments are animated by a question raised by Tony Judt in an essay inThe London Review of Books, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” in which Judt asked,“Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophicforeign policy?” (Judt 2006: 3). A similar concern about consensus subtendsGramsci’s analysis of the Risorgimento and the rise of fascism. Gramsci’swritings are vital for the present defeat of democracy and socialism, since theyexamine the structures of consent and coercion that made this failure possible.He wrote:

The course of events in the Risorgimento revealed the tremendous importanceof the demagogic mass movement, with its leaders thrown up by chance,improvised, etc., nevertheless in actual fact taken over by the traditionalorganic forces – in other words, by the parties of long standing.

(SPN: 112)

Since the “power and reach of the state and the achievement of capitalism’sglobal ambition” today (Harootunian 2007: 1–15) have also resulted in are-structuring of capital and social relations as witnessed by a redistribution ofwealth to the top of the economic pyramid on an international scale, Gramsci’sconcept of “passive revolution” remains cogent as a concept that can accountfor continuities and changes within the order of capital that have resonance incontemporary terms (Morton 2007b: 68). The “passive revolution” begun inthe 1970s has been greatly aided by academic and public intellectuals viamedia, film, television and journalism. Gramsci’s concept is an antidote to thedeleterious effects of disregarding past history that occludes understanding ofthe processes that subtend the dictum that “everything must change so thateverything can remain the same.”

In his writings on Italian history, Gramsci characterized the Risorgimento andits political, cultural, and economic reforms (as he did the emergence of fascism)as serving the interests of the traditional ruling classes with the incorporation ofnew friends and allies at the expense of the population at large. To account forthis “revolution from above” he marshaled evidence and produced analyses froma number of sources: historical texts, classical and popular literature, theater,philosophy, an examination of folklore and common sense and a number ofreflections on language and literature. Moreover, Gramsci was aware of the then“new media” and recognized them as a “source of linguistic innovation” inherentto forms of cultural hegemony. In seeking the sources of this innovation, he lists:

1) the school; 2) newspapers; 3) popular and artistic writers; 4) theater andsound cinema; 5) radio; 6) public and religious congregations of every type;7) connections in “conversation” among the most and least cultivated of thepopulation (a question which perhaps is not accorded the importance itdeserves in relation to the “word” as verse that is learned through memoryin the form of songs, fragments of lyric opera, etc.).

(Q29 §3: 2345)

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His sustained stress on language “is crucial because it cannot be separated fromall aspects of social life” (Ives 2005a: 33).

For Gramsci, “the history of language is the history of linguistic innovation,but these innovations are not individual (as happens in art) but are of an entiresocial community that has innovated its culture” (Q6 §71: 738). These innova-tions in language are connected to folklore and common sense insofar as theyare conceptions of a world and of life. According to Peter Ives,

Linguistic values and meanings are human creations that always exist withinhistory . . . subject to human collective and individual manipulation within theparameters set by past human action. Thus language is not a non-productiverealm of communication or merely the transmission of information. . . . Lan-guage products – whether Hollywood movies or computer programs – areconstituted by language, and this requires that Marxism and all progressivesocial movements comprehend the importance of language to politics.

(Ives 2005a: 174)

For filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti the question of the forms of language(including the arts and media), their innovativeness, and their importance in theformation of hegemony became a critical feature of his films.

Following Gramsci’s thought, Visconti, in his film adaptation of Giuseppe diLampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo, portrays the Risorgimento as a “revolutionfrom above” in which “Restoration becomes the first policy whereby socialstruggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gainpower without dramatic upheavals” (SPN: 115). This policy “resulted in bothcolonial exploitation at home (in the form of exploiting the southern masses ofthe Mezzogiorno with the support of Catholic Action and the monarchy as the‘state form’ of the fascist regime” (Morton 2007b: 71). Furthermore, the vitaleconomic base generates its masked and/or obfuscating reflective superstructure,by changing the nature of the relationship from one of reflection to one ofreciprocity” (Lucente 1997: 94–95).

The film is a reflection on this masking by means of visual and auditoryspectacle, gesture and music. Melodrama and opera are instrumental in the film’sdramatization of this critical historical moment and also as a meditation onliterary, operatic, and cinematic language. Of the operatic, Gramsci wrote“Verdian music, or better the libretto and the plots of Verdi’s musical dramas areresponsible for an array of ‘artificial’ expressions, of forms of thinking, of astyle” (Q8 §46: 969). Visconti’s film incarnates and undermines this conceptionof the operatic. The film’s spectacular style is testimony to the power ofcinematic language to visually and aurally create a “realization of the theory oftrasformismo, the absorption of members from other social classes into the rulingclass” (Said 2006: 108). But if in other popular historical films, the language ofmelodrama and opera is used to enhance the spectacle of a visually and aurallydazzling world, in Visconti’s film – through the costumes, the frescoes, and themusic from Verdi’s La Traviata and Vincenzo Bellini’s (a Sicilian composer) La

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Sonnambula – the spectator is treated to the decomposition of spectacular andmelodramatic images of aristocratic splendor and power.

Visconti spared no cost in creating a sense of actual paintings, garments wornby the actors, and decor. The emphasis on the “authenticity” of this past worldmight seem to belong to the familiar conventions of the epic film with itspenchant for monumental spectacle. Here, however, the appeal of “authenticity”is unmasked whenever possible. For example, the princely Salina family’sarrival at the church of Donnafugata – set, ironically, to the strains of a Verdianopera, links monumental architecture and sculpture to aristocratic patronage. Butthen the scene produces a curious reversal of expectations. At first, the spectatoris provided with breathtaking images of the edifice, bas-reliefs, religious icons,and rituals, only to be wrenched from this exalted moment. As the members ofthe Salina family sit immobile in their appointed carved seats, covered with thedust from the journey to Donnafugata, the camera films them as immobile. Theyappear like the statuary in the church, identified with historical stasis.

The transition of The Leopard from novel to film dramatizes a fusion of thearistocratic and imminent bourgeois family as an event that allegorizes the unionof the family and the state, and of new landowners in collusion with the aristoc-racy. The realization of the Prince of Salina’s motto, “All must change, so that allcan remain the same,” depends on his bringing the struggle for national unity intoline with his own, his social class, and his family’s self-interest. The Risorgimentoas “a revolution from above” excludes the peasants (presented by Visconti assilent subalterns). Of this type of “revolution” Gramsci wrote:

Restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficientlyelastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramaticupheavals. . . . The old feudal classes . . . are not eliminated, nor is there anyattempt to eliminate them as an organic whole; instead of a ‘class’ theybecome a ‘caste’ with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, butno longer with predominant economic functions.

(SPN: 115)

A critical scene for understanding the film’s Gramscian perspective on theRisorgimento occurs between Don Fabrizio and a representative of the newgovernment, Chevalley, who has come to Donnafugata from the North to invitethe prince to participate in the new Italian parliament. The encounter betweenthe two men highlights the language of unity, progress, and the blessings ofmodernity identified with Risorgimento mythology, something the wary specta-tor might perceive as irony. Like the structure of the film itself, this episodeconveys repetition not forward movement. Chevalley’s invocation of progressinvokes instead the Gramscian motif of political betrayal that haunts the film.Ironies that link the historical past to the future (which is for the spectatoralready the past) are evident in Chevalley’s assumption that Sicily’s incorpora-tion into the nation is indeed a “happy annexation” and in the prince’s decliningto participate in this “progress” (though he has helped to engineer it).

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This “annexation” will bring bourgeois opportunist Don Calogero Sedara, hisdaughter, Angela, and Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, into the new nation-statebut “what was involved,” in Gramscian terms,

[w]as not a social group which “led” other groups, but a State which, eventhough it had limitations on as a power, “led” the group which should havebeen “leading,” and was able to put at the latter’s disposal an army and apolitico-diplomatic strength.

(SPN: 105).

“Law and order” and its forms of coercion and consent are now the domain ofthis new “family.” Thus the film’s ending, with its echoes of the shooting of theGaribaldians in the name of law and order, and the ominous statement of DonCalogero concerning its restoration, evokes Gramsci’s observation, “perhaps itis not without significance that fascism in the first years of its developmentaffirmed its ties to the Old Right” (Q10 §9: 1228).

In a similar Gramscian vein, Bernardo Bertolucci in 1900 (1976) presentsportraits of a “liberation manqué” through telescoping the pre-fascist years, therise and impact of fascism, and the Resistance and Liberation (Bondanella 2001:312). What the spectator views is, as was the case in Visconti, an exploration ofthe hegemonic formation of fascism through a focus on families as an allegoryof the history of the politics of passive revolution and its relations to fascism.The films of the Taviani brothers, particularly Allonsanfan (1974), return to theRisorgimento as a failed revolution, and explores the role of intellectuals in thatfailure. The Tavianis’s Padre Padrone (1977) in a particularly Gramscian vein,is invested in the Southern question, subaltern life, and the importance of educa-tion and of verbal, technological, and artistic language as a means of identifyingnew types of intellectuals. Lamerica (1994), directed by Gianni Amelio, alsobears a Gramscian legacy as it conjoins past and present in its flashbacks to thefascist era to develop a series of contemporary political concerns: the historicalrole of the Mezzogiorno, the role of emigration, the frangibility of nationalcitizenship, and the role of media, television in particular, as producer of falsepromises of economic and social “opportunities” in neocolonial Albania.

Pasolini too was influenced by Gramsci’s work, though he sought to bring itinto alignment with the changing cultural realities he perceived wrought byItaly’s “Economic Miracle.” In Heretical Empiricism, he wrote: “Gramsci’sinfluence is palpable . . . not only in its frequent references to hegemony but inPasolini’s concern with linguistics and the development of an Italian language”(1988: xv). Moreover, Pasolini felt “authorized to announce that Italian has beenborn as a national language” (ibid.: 17). He prophesied, “The guiding spirit oflanguage will no longer be literature but technology (ibid.: 19). InvokingGramsci, Pasolini wrote that,

[f]or a man of letters who is not ideologically bourgeois it’s a questionof remembering once again, with Gramsci, that if the new Italian reality is

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producing a new language, a national Italian, the only way to take posses-sion of it and make it one’s own is to know with absolute clarity andcourage what is the national reality that produces it is.

(Ibid.: 20)

Language for Pasolini was not merely confined to the written word butextended to include spoken language and cinematic images. Of language, Pasoliniwrote, “For some time now I have been speaking of a code of cinematographicdecoding as analogous to that of the decoding of reality. This implies the definitionof Reality as Language” (ibid.: 262). This assertion would seem to place him atodds with Gramsci; however, it is neither a-historical nor metaphysical. ForPasolini “the language of reality [is] in its physicality” (ibid.: 261).

Pasolini’s films are theoretical and practical explorations of the vicissitudesof the language of folklore and common sense. In Accattone (1961), Pasoliniportrayed the culture of the Roman subproletarian world dominated by a rulingclass that makes little attempt to assimilate it, but peripheralized it. He returnedto this world in Mamma Roma (1962) where he probed the catastrophic effectsof a prostitute’s attempts to integrate herself and her son into the petit bour-geoisie. Thereafter, Pasolini in the style of his films articulated a profoundconcern over the social and political character of what he observed was a change“from humanistic to technocratic dominance in both superstructure and infra-structure, from a heterogeneous to a homogeneous bourgeois culture” (Pasolini2008: xxiv) that he termed “technocratic communicativeness.” He claimed thatbetween 1961 and 1975, something essential to the culture changed and becamea linguistic genocide responsible for the destruction of a total population.Pasolini’s animadversions on television and his attempts to create an “unpopularcinema” were a response to what ultimately became for him a new form offascism dramatically and terrifyingly unleashed in his Salò (1975).

Pasolini’s (and Gramsci’s) theoretical and practical concern with passiverevolution, its connections to forms of fascism, and the power of language toenhance or challenge this political possibility migrated to the UK. The purelyeconomistic and bureaucratic tendencies of the revolution from above could beseen to reign in the triumph of the British Conservatives from the late 1960s to the1990s. For intellectuals of the left, it became imperative to understand the genea-logy and character of changing economic, political, and cultural formations, andGramsci’s writings played a significant role in analyzing these formations. Hiswritings were disseminated throughout Europe and the United Kingdom in the1960s and 1970s, giving rise to forms of cultural analysis directed to rethinkingprevailing forms of Marxist analysis. Stuart Hall drew on the Prison Notebooks todevelop the thesis that Thatcherism was understandable through Gramsci’s con-ception of “passive revolution.” He saw that moment as a “defeat” for the forcesof the left and for the rise of a “new political project of the right” and “regressivemodernization” (Hall 1988: 164).

Following Hall, among others, “British Gramscianism” involved the productionof cultural critiques focused on questions of education, ethnography, language,

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community and social institutions in mass media, particularly film and TV. Theburgeoning of cultural studies, for better or worse, has left its marks in the ongoingstudies of popular and mass culture that desperately seek “sites” of “resistance”and “subversion.” For John Fiske culture is always at its heart, political. “Fiskefinds semiotic struggle everywhere: in wearing jeans, in shopping malls, on thebeach, in the video games arcade, among Madonna fans, in rock videos. . . .“(Harris 1992: 166–167). However, according to Joel Pfister, cultural analysisbegan lose to track of the theories and the history that had animated its initial work(Pfister 2006: 152–153). Gradually “politics” came to mean any form of culturalstruggle (Baker Jr et al. 1996: 60). Identity politics shorn of its historical speci-ficity and contradictions took center stage in much cultural analysis. While there isno shortage of historical, religious, feminist, racial, postcolonial, global, and anti-imperialist productions, there is a lack of theoretical and self-critical examinationin the works and in the commentaries on it by intellectuals. Many writings seemsgeared to reanimating the past, the traumas wrought by earlier atrocities, exclu-sions, and failure or to celebrating the “end of history,” of traditional “culture,”often placing hope in the “New Media” as a profound futurist rupture in subjectpositions via digital modes of interactivity and the emergence of a “differentialdigital transculture” (Poster 2007: 391).

Media critics fervent about the emergence of new virtual realities, now on aglobal scale, dismiss the importance of historicizing and hence neglect to focuson what is continuous in the “new” forms of power and social subjection wroughtby advances in technology. Their fascination with global utopianism is apocalyp-tic: it smacks of chiliasm, and, even worse, it blindly places its faith in machineryand not human intelligence. In fact, professionalism reigns among intellectualworkers in the realm of what Gramsci described as “traditional intellectuals.”

Since issues of subalternity, technology, media, the reorganization of socialformations as a consequence of changing dimensions of capital, and the charac-ter of intellectual life is under siege, the writings of Gramsci remain importantfor assessing the cultural and political landscape. While they may not offer apanacea, they do offer an opportunity to engage with necessary forms forrethinking the relation between inherited forms and their “new” incarnations.

As Stuart Hall once cautioned, “I do not claim that, in any simple way,Gramsci ‘has the answers’ or ‘holds the key’ to our present troubles. I do believethat we must ‘think’ our problems in a Gramscian way – which is different” (Hall1988a: 161). This difference is urgently bound to human intelligence and thecontemporary role of intellectuals. Gramsci’s insights on intellectuals, subalter-nity, passive revolution, relations between civil society and the state, nationformation, and historicity remain essential to the writings of Edward Said, ParthaChatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakravarty, and Gayatri Spivak (and to therelated works of scholars on Indian media such as Ravi S. Vasudevan andMadhava Prasad). These thinkers can be described, in Tariq Ali’s words aboutSaid’s work, as being distinguished from those critics “who feel that the twentiethcentury erred in attaching too much importance to intellect and reason, convictionand character” (Ali 2007).

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In “The Contemporary Discourse on Civil Society,” Joseph A. Buttigiegreminds his reader that rather than thinking “of intellectuals as either out oftouch with political reality or as inveterate leftists,” intellectuals of variouspolitical persuasions have played an important role in the creation of the presentpolitical moment, “in the policies that are now being enacted by the Bushadministration.” Buttigieg adds: “This work of preparation was carried outby groups or clusters of extremely well-educated, technically sophisticatedindividuals hosted and funded by various think tanks and research institutes”(Buttigieg 2005: 47).

The intellectual in the modern democratic state is increasingly dependent onspecialized expertise tied to cultural and political functions that Gramsci sawdeveloping (e.g. “Americanism and Fordism”), including the noteworthy expan-sion of media technology. These intellectual functions range from direct domi-nation to indirect involvement in and direction of political parties, business andallied civil institutions. This distinction is fundamental to any understanding ofhow consent and coercion operate not only from the state but also in diffusedfashion from other economic, educational, philanthropic, medical and juridicalinstitutions. The difficulty posed by the concepts of coercion and consent entailsa more historically inflected definition of their meaning in the age of mediadominance to identify when consent becomes coercion.

Invoking Gramsci on the meaning of consent, Buttigieg writes,

[w]hat makes the modern democratic state robust and resilient in Gramsci’sview, is not the power of coercion that it can exercise through politicalsociety (the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the police, etc.), but,rather the myriad ways in which the core elements of self-definition andself-representation are internalized, or, to some degree or another, endorsedby most of its citizens – including those who belong to social strata otherthan the ruling or privileged groups.

(2005: 43)

Therefore, in order to understand if, or when, consent becomes coercion, it isnecessary to think about the “triadic elements (economic, political, and civilsociety) that compose the modern State.”

The Gramscian text provides a nuanced means to understand the character ofcoercion and consent, but, given the prominent role played by media in ourtimes, greater elaboration, beyond description and decoding of texts, is requiredto determine the character and social role of media and the relations of the mediato the three component elements of the modern state. What role, Buttigieg asks,have the mass media (newspapers, radio and television) played in the contextof economic, political and civil society and what role do they now play “tobring the overwhelming majority of citizenry into line and to marginalize thedissenters through a campaign of vilification?” (Buttigieg 2005: 46). And, Iwould add, how have media played an active role in creating the illusion ofchoice, if not of bewilderment? The misinformation and contradictory reporting

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on national and international politics since 9/11, the Iraqi war, and the selective,melodramatic, and celebrity-oriented treatment of the 2008 presidential electionare exemplary of the strategies and sway of the conservative media moguls andtheir employees. As Christopher Wagstaff finds in relation to advertising – butalso to information – “it is not the program that is being sold to the viewer. It isthe viewer who is being sold to the advertiser” (Wagstaff 2001: 295).

One of the major commodities that television has to offer is the packaging andselling of time. Time in non-commercial television is dependent on licensing (asin the UK and Ireland) or on subscription drives in US public television. Televi-sion can do many of the things that cinema and other media do. It can createfeature-length films; it can document events (biographies, catastrophes, scientificand medical documentaries); it is a news medium; it can produce short and longprograms including cartoons; and it can serve as an educational medium. Televi-sion “offers a continuous flowing river of experience from which we have cometo draw the substance of our identities” (Smith 1998: 2). This “flowing river” oftime is characterized by interruption; major events are broadcast that constitute“rare realizations of the technological dream of the electronic media – to reacheverybody, directly and simultaneously” (Smith 1998: 97). Now, with recentelectronic advances, these parallel programs can be viewed on one screen at thesame time and at the time they are happening. The televisual potentially has nobeginning or endings: it is a medium that is always on even when the individualset is turned to off: television never sleeps, though the spectator does. In thisrespect, the medium is identified with an annihilation of memory and special-ization in catastrophic events. “The televisual construction of catastrophe seeksboth to preserve and to annihilate indeterminacy” (Doane 2005: 257).

These characteristics are endemic to the late capitalist society of the UnitedStates “where crisis is produced and assimilated directly to the circulation ofcommodities” (Doane 2005: 261) and multiplied through repetition, selection, andcensorship. The control of the medium is evident in the reportage surrounding9/11 and then the Iraqi war buttressed by the government restructuring of socialand political life via the Patriot Act. A return to the Gramscian concern withdemocratic consensus suggests that coercion in the guise of consent seems to havetriumphed. The spectator is barraged by images of events ranging from domesticcrises, criminality, subversion of institutions, extended and repetitive displays ofall forms of violence identified under the rubric of the threat of “terrorism.” Theviewer is enlisted through the mobilization of anxiety, the menace of annihilation,governmental corruption, the threat of natural disasters, prophecy, and of domesticoutbreaks of “lawlessness.”

Further, the reign of the celebrity not only continues unabated, but has metas-tasized. The “stars” of the present, along with political figures, men and womenof wealth, media magnates, demagogues and dopesters, have gained near totalcontrol of media. The example of the political figure of Silvio Berlusconi isinstructive about the intertwinings of politics, stardom, and media in the latetwentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Paul Ginsborg, in accounting for theBerlusconi phenomenon, writes that he is

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[n]ot just the President of the Council of Ministers, he also presides over theimagination of a consistent segment of the nation; not just those whoalready enjoy considerable wealth, but also those who would like to. . . .Perhaps it is his charisma that is forged, in the sense of being constructedwithin the confines, practices and symbols of modern communication andconsumption, carefully manufactured.

(Ginsborg 2004: 110–111, emphasis original)

Berlusconi’s putative “charisma” has relied on his being a “master of evasion,”an “unrivalled salesman of escapist dreams,” a “self-made tycoon,” and apersonification of a “part-Dallas, part Mediterranean chic” (Ginsborg 2004: 111).

Berlusconi is a mirror for Italians to regard themselves as “opulent and power-ful” (Ginsborg 2004: 111). He embodies the social, economic, and cultural trans-formations from the 1970 to the present. In keeping with the rhetoric and politicsof neo-liberalism, Berlusconi is associated with anti-communism, the RomanCatholic Church, privatization, the free market, and individual initiative. Suchpositions that unite him in the popular imaginary to other European and Americanleaders from Thatcher to George W. Bush as well as to other powerful mediamagnates. Berlusconi and Murdoch have played a critical role in establishing newand homogenizing trends in journalism and TV that have altered the transmissionof information and entertainment in relation to both quantity and quality.

The efforts on the part of right-wing politicians to “radically transformAmerican society from within by “stealthily corrupting or taking over the majorinstitutions of civil society” (Buttigieg 2005: 50) have also been expressedthrough government policy and the White House collusion with media.Buttigieg’s injunction not to underestimate the nature and effects of this direturn of events is an appeal to intellectuals to summon the strength to recognizeand assess “the adversary’s strengths” (Buttigieg 2005: 52). This position isinstructive for concluding my own brief journey through the various expressionsof Gramsci’s insights on media and politics and their role in generating the illu-sion of “consent.” However, it is inadequate to focus on media alone. Mediamust be considered in relation to the nature and operations of the state in collu-sion with civil institutions so as to engage analytically and critically with thechanges wrought by “technocratic liberalism” and its effects in transforming thepublic space into a “market place” (Judt 2005: 543).

In the last years of his life and work, Pasolini agonized over the televisualworld we now inhabit. He wrote

Audiovisual techniques are in large measure already a part of our world,that is the world of technical neocapitalism, which moves ahead, and whosetendency is to deprive its techniques of ideology or to make them ontologi-cal; to make them silent and unrelated; to make them habits; to make themreligious forms. . . . we must therefore fight to demystify the “innocence oftechnique” to the last drop of blood.

(Pasolini 1988: 221–222)

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Buttigieg’s examination of the conservative movement’s attempts to “move beyondhegemony . . . to acquire a ‘monopoly of the organs of public opinion” (Buttigieg2005: 51) is an equally stringent assessment of “technical neocapitalism.”

But how can Gramsci’s ideas on media from an earlier moment in twentiethcentury culture and politics contribute to an understanding of these techniquesand thus fuel efforts to combat them? Gramsci did not set himself up as anarbiter of “correct” cultural artifacts, nor did he promote a taste for tendencyliterature on behalf of proletarian concerns. Instead, he was concerned toexamine how cultural artifacts are deeply imbued with the process of intellectualcivilizing. Our challenge is to identify and evaluate the multiple determinantsand changes in cultural and political forms and their effects. To use Gramsci’sown phrasing: “implicit in this research [is] that of the quantitative as well asqualitative modifications (mass extension) brought about in ways of thinking bythe technical and mechanical development of cultural organization.” And“spoken communication,” he wrote, “is a means of ideological diffusion whichhas a rapidity, a field of action, and an emotional simultaneity far greater thanwritten communication (theatre, cinema and radio, with its loudspeakers inpublic squares, beat all forms of written communication” (SPN: 377).

These remarks are echoed in the concerns articulated above concerning the natureof mass media and further reinforce the importance of identifying their effects.Instead of regarding the media as evacuating meaning, Gramsci offers insights intostrategies whereby the media and, more broadly, culture still draw on common senseas folklore (nowadays as religiosity). Folklore as common sense functions as “asubtle system involving survival, exchange of services, and uncritical [affective]adherence to tradition” (Landy 1994: 80). Folklore as common sense, is a residualaspect of these earlier cultures, involving the anastomosis of elements from the pastto new forms of communication, particularly radio, cinema, and TV. Standingmidway between folklore (religion, superstition, ritual, cliché), science, and philo-sophy, common sense is not static but renewed and altered to accommodateto contemporary exigencies, requiring study and critical elaboration in its presentincarnations (Landy 1994: 382–383). As a fusion of archaic and modern beliefsand practices, folklore migrates between high and popular forms of expression, and,therefore, deserves careful attention so as to identify its character, circulation, andimpact on social and political life.

For Morton, this invocation – through contemporary media – of commonsense as folklore is characterized by promises of freedom and democracy effectedthrough “the new constitutionalism of disciplinary neo-liberalism and the con-comitant spread of market civilisation” (Morton 2007b: 126). David Harveyattributes this diffusion to:

[p]owerful ideological influences circulated through the corporations, themedia, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society – such asthe universities, schools, churches, and professional associations. . . . theorigination of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the captureof certain segments of the media, and the conversion of many intellectuals

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to neoliberal ways of thinking, created a climate of opinion in support ofneoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom.

(Harvey 2005b: 40)

Media, bolstered by the common sense of triumphant global capitalism, hasplayed a critical role in reinforcing belief in the inevitability of war, corporategreed, and natural disasters. Television outlets such as CNN and Fox News havebecome state channels to articulate these views. Sectors of the film industryhave largely succumbed as well in their offering a spate of war films, portraitsof dysfunctional social life, and dramas of social uplift and personal fulfillment.At the same time, for discerning viewers, the media makes visible the persis-tence of the long march of capitalism and its updated and diverse mechanisms ofconsent and coercion that involve state and civil institutions. Disaffection withthe new order is apparent along the political spectrum expressed in antagonismto “mismanaged” wars, fiscal irresponsibility, lack of economic and social bene-fits promised by the old/new order of capital, the proliferating expansion of theunderclass, and abuses of state power.

The reign of information and expertise needs to be understood as a variant onthe folklore of common sense that must be understood as a mode whereby theeffects of contemporary culture serve to maintain a familiar tendency of disorganiz-ing the masses, thus rendering them vulnerable to coercion cloaked as consent.Thinking with and beyond Gramsci on media requires an orchestrated address ofthe multivariate strategies – production, financing, distribution, and intellectuallabor – whereby institutions and individuals passively and actively endorse formsof common sense as folklore that blend religion, patriotism, passion, and economicgain to create the illusion of choice and of private gain as public good.

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9 Common sense in Gramsci

Guido Liguori

Two meanings

“Common sense” appears for the first time in the Prison Notebooks in the list of“main topics” that Gramsci drew up on 8 February 1929 at the beginning of hisfirst notebook. The entry, unlike any other in the same list, is accompanied by aparenthetical reference to another one of the “main topics”, namely “the conceptof folklore” (Q1: 5). A later listing of “principal essays” on the opening page ofNotebook 8 contains the item: “Folklore and common sense” (Q8: 935) – here,Gramsci joins the two topics that in the initial list were connected onlyindirectly. Gramsci’s interest in the concept of “common sense,” then, manifestsitself at the earliest stage of his work in prison and the phrase recurs frequentlyin the first as well as most of the subsequent notebooks.

Following its inclusion in the list of “main topics”, the term “common sense”reappears for the first time in Notebook 1 §16. Commenting on a column,“Readers’ Postcards,” published in the popular weekly Domenica del Corriere,Gramsci writes: “the ‘readers’ postcards’ are one of the most typical documents ofItalian popular common sense. Barilli belongs to an even lower level than thiscommon sense: philistine for the classical philistines of the Domenica delCorriere” (Q1 §16: 14). It is noteworthy that in this passage: (a) “common sense”is qualified by “Italian popular” which suggests that Gramsci believes that thereexist multiple “common senses” that are distinguishable by social connotation andgeographical region; and (b) common sense is considered as something negativesince the music critic Barilli is scorned for belonging to a level that is “even lower”than the very low bar set by common sense. Does (a) conflict with (b)? If there aredifferent forms or types of common sense, depending on geographical region andabove all on social group, how can one place them all at the lowliest level? Whatthis passage contains, in nuce, are two partially different ways (that can sometimesconverge) of understanding common sense: (a) as the prevailing and often implicit“conception of the world” of a social or regional group; and (b) as something thatis the opposite of a developed and coherent world view. I will argue that in keepingwith meaning (a) Gramsci maintains, among other things, that intellectuals, too,have their common sense, whereas in keeping with (b) he uses the term “commonsense” in a patently negative, when not derogatory, sense.

The next appearance of “common sense” in Notebook 1 occurs in a note enti-tled “Types of periodicals” where it carries the pejorative connotation indicated in(b) above. Gramsci’s study of “types of periodicals” in the notebooks is importantbecause, among other things, it explores the terrain of the organization of hege-mony and thus examines the conscious efforts to disseminate an ideology, thatis “the educational–formative work that a homogenous cultural center performs”(Q1 §43: 34). It seems that in writing this, Gramsci was also thinking, albeitin coded terms, about the efforts that a communist party should undertake. Hecautions against the “‘enlightenment’ error” of thinking that “a well propagated,‘clear idea’ enters diverse center consciousnesses with the same ‘organizing’effects of widespread clarity.” He then adds:

The ability of the professional intellectual skillfully to combine inductionand deduction, to generalize, to infer, to transport from one sphere toanother a criterion of discrimination, adapting it to new conditions etc., is a“specialty”; it is not endowed by “common sense.” Therefore, the premiseof an “organic diffusion from a homogeneous center of a homogeneous wayof thinking and acting” is not sufficient.

(Q1 §43: 33)

The “enlightenment” error, then, consists in believing that all human beingsare the same. If the goal is to enable all humans to become equal, it is necessaryto start from the realistic assumption of existing disparities – including culturaland intellectual disparities. There is a clear difference between someone whocan be said to be an intellectual by profession and someone whose culturaldevelopment is arrested at the level of common sense. While all men andwomen are intellectuals, as Gramsci states elsewhere, it does not follow thatthey are all intellectuals in the same sense. Obviously, there are people whohave had the privilege of developing their intellectual capacity; common sense(in its predominantly negative sense) lies outside and beyond this citadel of theprivileged.

“Common sense” appears for the third time in a note – Notebook 1 §65 – thatis, once again, entitled “Types of periodicals.” Here common sense receivessomewhat more ample treatment as Gramsci provides some clarification of whathe means by the term. He begins the note by referring to a number of periodicalsthat, in his view, “belong to the sphere of ‘good sense’ or ‘common sense.’ ”They fall into this category because they try “to modify the average opinion of aparticular society, criticizing, suggesting, admonishing, modernizing, introduc-ing new clichés.” To succeed, these periodicals must be seen to occupy themiddle of the road. They “must not appear to be fanatical or exceedingly parti-san: they must position themselves within the field of ‘common sense,’ distanc-ing themselves from it just enough to permit a mocking smile, but not contemptor arrogant superiority” (Q1 §65: 75–76). Setting aside the remark that makes itseem there is no difference between common sense and good sense, this notecontains some tactical cautions (apparently directed at the “homogenous center”

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carrying out the “educational–formative work” discussed above). Therein onecan already locate a conception of common sense: in order to have an impact oncommon sense it is necessary to occupy a position “within the field of ‘commonsense.’ ” Common sense, then, is not simply an enemy to be defeated. Rather, adialectical and maieutic relationship has to be established with common sense inorder to transform it (and enable it to transform itself) so that a “new commonsense” will prevail – a crucial achievement in the struggle for hegemony.

Even richer and more complex is the following passage in which Gramsciproceeds with his reflection, making a logical-argumentative leap that reveals tothe reader how far he has arrived in his elaboration of the concept:

Every social stratum has its own “common sense” which is ultimately themost widespread conception of life and morals. Every philosophical currentleaves a sedimentation of “common sense”: this is the document of itshistorical reality. Common sense is not something rigid and static; rather,it changes continuously, enriched by scientific notions and philosophicalopinions which have entered into common usage. “Common sense” is thefolklore of “philosophy” and stands midway between real “folklore” (thatis, as it is understood) and the philosophy, the science, the economics of thescholars. “Common sense” creates the folklore of the future, that is, a moreor less rigidified phase of a certain time and place.

(Q1 §65: 76)

This passage provides a number of significant insights. The most relevant are:(a) “every social stratum has its own common sense”; (b) common sense isdefined as “the most widespread conception of life and morality” (in a givensocial stratum); (c) common sense is the “folklore of philosophy”; (d) commonsense changes constantly, always incorporating new philosophical and scientificfragments and evolving with the evolution of society. What we have here seemsto be a variant of the concept of ideology – what Gramsci calls a conception ofthe world or world view. Common sense, in light of this passage, is the worldview that a social stratum receives, for the most part passively. This passivereceptivity stands in contrast to the active manner in which the intellectuals andthe ruling group of that same society elaborate their world views. Insofar as it ispassive, common sense is marked by belatedness and minimal development.However, the emphasis placed on the fact that “every social stratum has its own‘common sense,’ ” excludes any definition that would designate “commonsense” solely as a world view of the lowest level. In general terms, commonsense is the most widespread and often implicit ideology within a social group atthe most basic level – even in the sense of being the basic common denominator.Hence, it has a dialectical relation with philosophy, that is, with that advancedlevel of ideology typical of the upper echelons of the various social groups.

Broadly speaking, Gramsci’s concern here is with the terrain of the “pre-intentional” wherein the great majority of subjects are not only “acted upon” butalso “defined” (in their subjectivity and their mode of individual and collective

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existence) by ideology and, therefore, also by common sense. This gives rise tothe problem – that will not be confronted here – of how to connect the broadlypre-intentional character of common sense with the activity of the “homogenouscenter” engaged in “educational–formative work” in such a way as to change itand create a new common sense. Obviously, the “homogenous center” mustresist the delusion that it can create a whole new common sense. The formationof common sense is influenced by many factors that one cannot control; this hasto do with the open character of the historical process that cannot be defined inadvance. It is hard to determine to what extent Gramsci was aware of thisproblem, but in discussing of the “pre-intentional” one must not forget that theconcepts of “will” and “collective will” have an important role in Gramsci’sthought and are indicative of the complexity of the conception of anthropologyfound in the Notebooks.

Spontaneity and backwardness

How does Gramsci describe common sense in the earliest notebooks? He definesit as “the traditional world view” (Q3 §48: 328) of a given social stratum, with anapparent emphasis on “traditional,” an adjective that Gramsci inserted betweenthe lines in the manuscript. This note is devoted to an analysis of the nexus“spontaneity and conscious leadership” with explicit reference to the weeklynewspaper he edited, Ordine Nuovo. Here Gramsci, to some extent, rehabilitatesthe importance of spontaneity at the popular level, albeit as an element that needsto be educated. In Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci writes,

This element of “spontaneity” was not neglected, much less disdained: itwas educated, it was given a direction, it was cleansed of everything extra-neous that could contaminate it, in order to unify it by means of moderntheory but in a living, historically effective manner.

(Q3 §48: 330)

This is an example of an approach that is not marred by the “enlightenment error”he decried in earlier notes (i.e. Q1 §43 and Q1 §65, discussed above). Thisundoubtedly constitutes a re-evaluation of common sense. In the first place, it istreated in connection with the “the ‘spontaneous’ sentiments of the masses”which are formed “through everyday experience in the light of ‘common sense’”(Q3 §48: 330–31). More importantly, Gramsci affirms that there is a quantitativerather than a qualitative difference – i.e. a difference “of degree not of quality” –between philosophy and common sense: “Kant considered it important for hisphilosophical theories to be in agreement with common sense; the same is true ofCroce” (Q3 §48: 331).

The fascinating discussion in Notebook 3 §48 is not taken up again, either inNotebook 3 or in later notebooks. The positive evaluation of common sense thatappears in this very early notebook remains an almost totally isolated case. If wewish to observe Gramsci’s well known injunction to avoid clinging to isolated

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assertions and seek, instead, to grasp “the rhythm of thought in development”(Q16 §2: 1841), we would have to start from the fact that, in the Prison Note-books, the explicitly and implicitly negative evaluations of common sense arefar more numerous and significant. For example, in Notebook 4, in a noteentitled “The technique of thinking,” Gramsci writes:

The technique of thought will certainly not produce a great philosophy, butit will provide criteria for judgment and it will correct the deformities of themodes of thinking of common sense. It would be interesting to comparethe technique of common sense – i.e. of the philosophy of the man in thestreet – with the technique of the most advanced modern thought. In thisrespect, it is also worth taking into account Macaulay’s observation on thelogical weaknesses of a culture formed by oratory and declamation.

(Q4 §18: 439)

In other words, common sense has clearly identifiable weaknesses of a logicalnature and its deformations need correction.

Even more severe is the critique of common sense in its relation to an issue onwhich Gramsci dwells at length, namely “the objective existence of reality” whichhe regards as the “most important question concerning science” but “as far ascommon sense is concerned the question does not even exist” (Q4 §41: 466). Beliefin the objective existence of reality comes to common sense from “religion (at leastWestern religions, above all Christianity)” that makes it “the most widespread anddeeply rooted ideology.” Common sense, in Gramsci’s view, is a retrograde worldview both because it is conditioned by religious ideology, which is inescapable andbecause it does not accept scientific innovations:

Common sense affirms the objectivity of the real in that this objectivity wascreated by God; it is, therefore, an expression of the religious conception ofthe world. Moreover, in its account of this objectivity, common sensecommits the grossest errors; for the most part it is at the stage of Ptolemaicastronomy, it is unable to establish the real connections between cause andeffects, etc. – in other words it is not, in fact, really “objective” because itcannot conceive of objective “truth.” For common sense, it is “true” that theworld stands still while the sun and the whole firmament turn around it, etc.Yet, it makes the philosophical affirmation of the objectivity of the real.

(Q4 §78: 745)

Gramsci thus equates common sense with a pre-modern world view. Furtheralong, in Notebook 6, in the course of some reflections on Pirandello, hedescribes common sense as stuck in “the Aristotelian–Catholic way of conceivingthe ‘objectivity of the real’” (Q6 §26: 705). Several pages later, still in the samenotebook, Gramsci characterizes common sense as conservative and traditional-ist: “common sense is led to believe that what exists today has always existed”(Q6 §78: 745).

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In the course of the composition of the Prison Notebooks, the negativeevaluations of common sense – often described as “vulgar” – continue to greatlyoutnumber the positive ones. It is superfluous to insist on this, but I wish to drawattention specifically to a passage in Notebook 7 in which Gramsci characterizescommon sense as backward in both content (it stops at “formal logic”) and form(it is “dogmatic”). The note is one of many devoted to a critique of NikolaiBukharin’s Historical Materialism. In this instance, Gramsci accuses Bukharinof having “capitulated before common sense and vulgar thought” (Q7 §29: 877).Taking his cue from the “Theses on Feuerbach” – and specifically from the thirdthesis with its assertions on the reciprocal relations between humans and theircircumstances and on how the educator must be educated – Gramsci links“vulgar common sense” with an “uneducated and crude environment” to arriveat the conclusion that “the uneducated and crude environment has exercisedcontrol over the educator; vulgar common sense has imposed itself on scienceinstead of the other way round. If the environment is the educator, it must in turnbe educated” (Q7 §29: 877). Here, Gramsci unmistakably contrasts commonsense with science (and Marxism, understood as a materialist science of historyand society) and consciousness. Why?

Why is it that confronting the Janus-face of common sense (and folklore) –which is reactionary but also necessary, conservative but also potentially acomponent of a new hegemonic project – Gramsci insistently stresses the negat-ive face of this rudimentary level of the ideological continuum? The answerresides in the simultaneously practical and theoretical character of the PrisonNotebooks: in addition to an inquiry into the cognition of the real, Gramsci takeson the task of developing a line of political action that displaces power relationsand reopens the struggle for hegemony – and that, therefore, transforms commonsense. In order to achieve this, one must not only start with the criticism of whatexists but also repudiate all populist temptations.

Common sense, neoidealism, and misoneism

Discussing Croce’s philosophy in the opening pages of Notebook 7, Gramsciasserts that “Croce is continuously flirting with the ‘common sense’ and the‘good sense’ of the people” (Q7 §1: 853). The theme of Croce and commonsense is important because it enables us to place Gramsci’s reflections oncommon sense within the context of philosophical discussion (in Italy andelsewhere) in the 1920s and 1930s; it also foregrounds Croce as a fundamentalpoint of reference of Gramscian discourse in a complex relationship of filiationand repudiation.

In “Filosofia come vita morale e vita morale come filosofia,” Croce maintainsthe need to “abandon the traditional distinction between ordinary andextraordinary thought,” that is, between philosophy and common sense, since“every thought is always ordinary and is always tied to experience.” The distinc-tion between philosophical and non-philosophical thinking is, for the neoidealistphilosopher, “not a logical distinction, but merely a psychological one.” The task

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of the professional philosopher is to overcome incoherence and incompleteness,whereas the non-philosopher is content to live them. Croce also points out,however, that “no man is entirely a non-philosopher and no philosopher is per-fectly and completely such.” Furthermore, he adds, someone can be a philosophereven though “he does not write on philosophy nor so much as know the name ofthe discipline” (Croce 1928: 77). While it hard to miss the paternalistic tone ofCroce’s discourse, his assertions are rather close to Gramsci’s even though thelatter’s views are animated by a quite different spirit.

Gramsci’s thinking on common sense is developed most extensively in Note-book 8 where he confronts the views of Bukharin, Croce, and Giovanni Gentile.In an extremely important note that is also concerned with the shortcomings ofBukharin’s Historical Materialism, Gramsci returns to and intensifies hiscritique of neoidealism on the question of the philosophy of philosophers andthe philosophy of common sense. He writes:

Croce often seems to take pleasure in the fact that certain philosophicalpropositions are shared by common sense. But what can this mean, con-cretely? In order to prove that “all men are philosophers,” there is no needto resort to common sense in this way. Common sense is a disorderlyaggregate of philosophical conceptions in which one can find whatever onelikes. Furthermore, Croce’s attitude towards common sense has not led to acultural attitude that is fruitful from a “popular–national” point of view. Inother words, Croce’s attitude has not led to a more concretely historicistconception of philosophy – but that, in any case, can only be found inhistorical materialism.

(Q8 §173: 1045–1046)

Despite its obvious indebtedness to some of Croce’s views on this topic,Gramsci’s critique of common sense goes well beyond Croce’s. Since the purposeof Gramsci’s work is to bring people out of their condition of subalternity, heemphatically underscores the inadequacy of existing common sense. As long asthey remain attached to common sense the subaltern classes cannot launch a realchallenge for hegemony; they will be condemned to remain subaltern – anoutcome that, on the political level, Croce would favor.

A couple of pages later, in another note, Gramsci examines Gentile’s positionon the same question: “Gentile talks of an ahistorical ‘human nature,’ and of the‘truth of common sense,’ as if one could not find whatever one wanted in‘common sense,’ and as if there were just one, immutable, eternal ‘commonsense’ ” (Q8 §175: 1047). In a subsequent revision of this note, Gramsci addssome very important observations:

What has been stated to this point does not mean that there is no truth incommon sense. It means that common sense is an equivocal, contradictory,and multiform concept and that to refer to common sense as proof of a truthmakes no sense. We can say with precision that something true has become

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common sense to show that it has spread beyond the circle of intellectualgroups, but in that case we are doing no more than noting a historical factand asserting historical rationality; in this sense, provided that it usedsoberly, the argument has some value, precisely because common sense iscrudely misoneist and conservative so that to have succeeded in forcing theintroduction of a new truth is a proof that the truth in question has powerfulevidence and capacity for expansiveness.

(Q11 §13: 1399)

This is not a positive appraisal of common sense; Gramsci is simply pointingout that even in common sense, which contains a bit of everything, there areelements of truth. It is certainly important, especially for those who want tocreate a new common sense, to take note of a thesis that has become commonsense. The fact remains that, in this passage, common sense is associated with amisoneist ideology that is conservative and averse to innovation. Most importantof all, then, in a given historical situation, common sense is a huge obstacle torevolutionary strategy. It is an unavoidable case of hic Rhodus, hic salta!; itmust be engaged in the present, not set aside until some utopian future.

Marxism and common sense

Gramsci’s harsh criticism of Bukharin in Notebook 8 also targets the Russian’sevaluation of common sense. In the most pertinent note “common sense” appears18 times as Gramsci reasserts and extends his definition of the term. Gramsciexplains that common sense is: (a) a “philosophy,” albeit the “philosophy of non-philosophers”; (b) a “conception of the world”; and (c) the “folklore of philo-sophy.” It is a part of what one might call the conceptual kinship structure ofideology in the Gramscian sense. Gramsci writes: “The fundamental characteris-tic of common sense consists in its being a disjointed, incoherent, and inconse-quential conception of the world that matches the character of the multitudeswhose philosophy it is” (Q8 §173: 1045). Here, too, he criticizes common sensevery severely; it is a conception of the world “absorbed a-critically”; it issyncretic (“it appears in countless forms”), “incoherent,” and “incongruent”; it isthe philosophy of the “multitude” where “multitude” refers to a social subject ofindeterminate class or social group and has a negative connotation. The note con-tinues: “Historically, the formation of a homogeneous social group is accompan-ied by the development of a homogeneous – that is, systematic – philosophy, inopposition to common sense” (Q8 §173: 1045). The significance of this passagecan hardly be overemphasized. Revolutionary theory is born in opposition toexisting common sense. What is at stake is the conception of the world of thesubalterns, a world view that needs to be transformed or replaced. In Gramsci’sview, Bukharin’s Historical Materialism is fatally flawed not because it is basedon common sense, but because it is not based on a critique of common sense.

In the same note Gramsci moves on to a discussion of the spread of commonsense in French culture. He writes:

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“Common sense” has been treated more extensively in French philosophicalculture than in other cultures. This is due to the “popular–national” charac-ter of French culture. In France, more than elsewhere and because ofspecific historical conditions, the intellectuals tend to approach the people inorder to guide it ideologically and keep it linked with the leading group.One should therefore be able to find in French literature a lot of usefulmaterial on common sense. The attitude of French philosophical culturetoward “common sense” might even provide a model of hegemonic culturalconstruction.

(Q8 §173: 1045)

For Gramsci, France represented a model of bourgeois hegemony, but the pointhe is seeking to establish here is of a broader, more general nature. Commonsense, Gramsci observes, has been treated in two ways: “(1) it has been placed atthe base of philosophy; (2) it has been criticized from the point of view ofanother philosophy.” Nevertheless, he argues, both approaches have the sameoutcome: “In reality, however, the result in each case has been to surmount oneparticular ‘common sense’ in order to create another that is more compliant withthe conception of the world of the leading group” (Q8 §173: 1045). In otherwords, common sense cannot be eliminated; it is part of what is at stake in thestruggle for hegemony. It is a widespread, basic “conception of the world” thatcan be replaced or transformed but not eliminated. Gramsci leaves open thequestion of whether one day, as humanity moves toward self-emancipationfrom its own economic, social, political and cultural limitations, it will be pos-sible to eliminate common sense in its pejorative sense – that is, as the passiveadaptation by the led to the world view developed by those who lead.

In a note on Gentile, a couple of pages later, Gramsci cites Marx:

When Marx alludes to “fixed popular opinion,” he is making a historical-cultural reference in order to point out the “solidity of beliefs” and theireffectiveness in regulating human behavior; implicitly, however, he isaffirming the need for “new popular beliefs,” that is, for a new “commonsense” and thus for a new culture, a new philosophy.

(Q8 §175: 1047)

The invocation of Marx in this passage allows Gramsci to reaffirm and lendgreater weight to his dynamic conception of common sense as something thatmust be superseded. Ideology is a material force in particular situations. Whatinterests Gramsci is the production of a “new philosophy” that overcomes exist-ing common sense and becomes a mass ideology – that is, a new common sense.

Common sense and philosophy

Gramsci also discusses common sense in a series of notes gathered under thetitle “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy.” In one of them he sketches a

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number of “preliminary points” for the kind of “Introduction” he had in mind.Here, common sense is characterized as “everyman’s” philosophy whereasphilosophy is described as “the critique of religion and of common sense” (Q8§204: 1063). It is clear that Gramsci appreciates two qualities of philosophy inparticular: coherence and self-awareness. As he sees it, philosophy constitutes aworld view that is potentially hegemonic – which common sense can never be.

It is noteworthy that Gramsci insists on talking of “philosophies” in theplural, that is, as multiple world views in conflict with one another, the mostsignificant conflict being progressive philosophy versus “existing” or “vulgar”common sense. The different forms of philosophy and common sense aredivided up on a vertical axis that might be called “political” (Right/Left) and ona horizontal axis according to their characteristics of coherence, awareness, andoriginality. Thus, there will be both philosophies and types of common sense (inshort, ideologies) that are more or less progressive and more or less developed.It should be added that in a subsequent elaboration of the same note (Q11 §12:1375) he lists three ways in which the world view of the common man manifestsitself: (a) in language; (b) in “common sense and good sense”; (c) in popularreligion.

In the first draft of “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,” Gramsciwrites:

Religion, common sense, philosophy. Find out how these three intellectualorders are connected. Note that religion and common sense do not coincide,but religion is a component of disjointed common sense. There is not justone “common sense” but it, too, is a product of history and a historicalprocess. Philosophy is the critique of religion and of common sense, and itsupersedes them. In this respect, philosophy coincides with “good sense.”

(Q8 §204: 1063)

In the later version of this passage the “connection” is expressed in negativeterms: philosophy is an “intellectual order” whereas religion and common senseare not “because they cannot be reduced to a unity or made coherent even in anindividual mind, let alone a collective one” (Q11 §12: 1375). In first draft ofanother note entitled “An Introduction to the Study of Philosophy” Gramscifurther explains his view on the relationship between philosophy and commonsense:

Perhaps it is useful to make a “practical” distinction between philosophy andcommon sense in order to be better able to show what one is trying to arriveat. Philosophy means, rather specifically, a conception of the world withsalient individual traits. Common sense is the conception of the world that ismost widespread among the popular masses in a historical period. One wantsto change common sense and create a “new common sense” – hence theneed to take the “simple” into account.

(Q8 §213: 1071)

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Gramsci’s goal is clear: to create a new common sense. In this passage, thecharacterization of common sense as “the conception of the world that is mostwidespread among the popular masses in a historical period” cannot be said tobe negative. Indeed, in the later version of this passage, he points out that “everyphilosophy has the tendency to become the common sense of a particular milieu,even a circumscribed one” (Q11 §12: 11382) before reasserting the need toremain culturally in touch with the people – which is, in fact, what Gramscialways sought to do in all his work, from his Ordine Nuovo days through hisyears of study and writing in prison.

In Notebook 11, the description of common sense as the most widespreadworld view within a certain sphere or milieu does not have the same negative con-notations as the characterization of common sense as “spontaneous philosophy.”Elsewhere, Gramsci also attributes to common sense the merit of functioning as acounterweight to “abstruse metaphysics” (Q10 II §48: 1334), thus assigning it apositive trait at the technical-philosophical level. At the same time, though,Gramsci never loses sight of the fact that

A philosophy of praxis must initially adopt a polemical stance, as supersed-ing the existing mode of thinking. It must, therefore, present itself as acritique of “common sense”. . . . The relation between “high” philosophyand common sense is assured by “politics” in the same way that politicsassures the relationship between the Catholicism of the intellectuals and ofthe “simple.”

(Q8 §220: 1080–1081)

When he rewrites this passage, Gramsci adds an important clarification: “the posi-tion of the philosophy of praxis is antithetical to that of Catholicism” since thegoal of Marxism is “not to keep the simple people within their primitive philo-sophy of common sense but rather to lead them to a superior conception of life.”Marxism seeks “to build an intellectual and moral bloc that enables the intellectualprogress of the masses and not just of restricted intellectual groups” (Q11 §12:1384–1385). Another noteworthy element of this note that is absent in its first draftis Gramsci’s reiteration that common sense is just a primitive philosophy that hasto be superseded. Superseding common sense opens the way for “the politicaldevelopment of the concept of hegemony” (Q11 §12: 1385). Hegemony does notbase itself on common sense; rather, hegemony is only possible if existingcommon sense is superseded.

Conclusion: a double return to Marx

It is clear that, in the Notebooks, common sense has mostly negative connota-tions. Does this mean that Gramsci’s thinking had changed since his OrdineNuovo years, or since his reference to “the creative spirit of the people” in the19 March 1927 (LC 57) letter to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht? Yes,Gramsci’s view did change. There are several reasons: not only does Gramsci

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learn the Leninist lesson of the 1920s regarding the NEP and the defeat of therevolution in the West, but also his prison reflections – crucially spurred by the“defeat” of his movement – on the relation between politics and economics leadhim to understand the full complexity of the ideological and social structure ofthe West. Through his examination of the forms of hegemony which he links tothe state – and, here, one must bear in mind Gramsci’s “integral” concept of thestate – Gramsci arrives at a new theory of collective subjectivity that is basedlargely on “pre-intentionality.” Perhaps, in returning specifically to the Theseson Feuerbach, Gramsci took special note of the “ontological” lesson of themore mature, anti-subjective phase of Marx. To be sure, Gramsci retains hisconvictions about the role of the (collective) subject and (collective) will buthe also comes to understand, more than ever before, the inertia, passivity, andsubalternity that imbue common sense.

For Gramsci, common sense is something to supersede rather than conserve.The choice is always from among different world views in conflict with oneanother, and the choice is not “merely intellectual” (Q11 §12: 1378) – it is thestruggle for hegemony. The alternative to hegemonic bourgeois culture, however, isnot to be found in a philosophy based on common sense. The historical-materialistworld view, in Gramsci’s view, is established by superseding existing commonsense in order to create another common sense. Furthermore: to avoid beingperverted and defeated, the new conception of the world must remain in touch withthe “simple” and “connected to and implicit in practical life” (Q11 §12: 1382). Forthe new philosophy – i.e. the new conception of the world – to become widespread,it is necessary, in dialectical fashion, to take into account common sense (the needsit expresses, the level of consciousness of the masses that it reflects, etc.) while atthe same time enabling the subaltern classes to acquire a new awareness and, thus,a new “spirit of cleavage (cf. Q3 §49: 333).”

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10 The contemporary relevance ofGramsci’s views on Italy’s“Southern question”

Frank Rosengarten

Preface

Antonio Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” are relevant today inseveral ways. Not only do his writings shed light on regional and interclass ten-sions in contemporary Italy, they provide a critical entry point through which tolook at the dynamics of colonial and neocolonial power relations elsewhere inthe world. After reviewing the salient themes of these writings, I will concludethe chapter with a few remarks about Gramsci and postcolonialism.

Gramsci’s writings on the “Southern question” (1910–1924)

Gramsci’s early perspective on Italy’s Southern question appears in a schoolessay he wrote in 1910 or 1911, entitled “Oppressed and Oppressors” (SPW1:3–5). This youthful work attests to his awareness of the new wave of imperialistdepredations that, in the 1890s, had swept over almost all of Asia and Africa andthat by the outbreak of World War I resulted in the colonization or control byWestern powers of nine-tenths of the globe (Young 2001: 2). In a number ofpassages he refers sardonically to French and British imperialist claims thatthe new colonialist ventures were really attempts to “civilize” the still primitivebarbarian peoples. In addition to exposing the hypocrisy that lay behind suchclaims, young Gramsci pointed out the “colonial” or “semicolonial” nature ofthe relationship not only between conquering and conquered nations, butbetween dominant and dominated classes and groups within a single country.Indeed, Sardinia, like its sister island Sicily, had long suffered from a mixture ofneglect and exploitation by its own ruling classes, which were linked to power-ful economic interest groups on the Italian mainland.1 By his mid-teen years,Gramsci had become an ardent Sardinian “patriot.” In this early essay Gramscialso insisted on the idea that both national and class oppression were rooted inparticular historical conditions, and as such were capable of being remedied.“Social privileges and differences,” he said, “being products of society and notof nature, can be overcome.”

The last decades of the nineteenth century were rife with theories of inheritedand unchangeable racial and ethnic traits that still have many adepts today. Young

Gramsci was familiar with the work of Italian social scientists such as CesareLombroso and Alfredo Niceforo, whose theories had many adherents at preciselythe moment when his political consciousness was undergoing rapid development.Of paramount importance to us in this discussion is that, by the 1890s, as MaryGibson points out, racist theory had ceased being based exclusively on biologyand skin color and had begun to insinuate itself into debates about social class,with especially dire implications for how the Italian peasantry was perceived inpolite society and by many members of the Italian intelligentsia.2 “Race,” Gibsonexplains, “was used in Italy . . . to explain persistent differences within the nation,especially divergences between North and South” (Gibson 1998: 100). Thisadmixture of racial and class-based prejudices underlies the politics of UmbertoBossi’s Northern League today, with its regionally based network of groups claim-ing identification with the exalted civilization of “Padania,” which obviouslydraws a prejudicial dividing line between North and South.

In his writings from 1916 to 1924 on the North–South relationship, Gramscigradually freed himself from the effects of a childhood and early manhoodhaunted by poverty, by periods of physical and mental labor that stretched hiscapacities to the utmost, and by the strains of coping with a misshapen anddiminutive body that often gave him the feeling of being isolated and cut offfrom his fellow human beings.3 Despite these handicaps, his point of viewbecame more objective and analytical, closer in spirit to the Gramsci we come toknow in the Prison Notebooks: methodologically rigorous, psychologicallyacute, philosophically mature in his effort to reconcile the idealist concepts hehad absorbed from Benedetto Croce with the critical realism he had taken fromhis readings of Marx, Antonio Labriola, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, andothers of the classical Marxist tradition.

It was during these same years that Gramsci became a full-fledged politicalactivist, first as a member of the Italian Socialist Party, and then, beginning in1921, as a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, which owed itsallegiance to the international communist movement. On the one hand, his newpolitical commitments enabled him to link the struggles of the working class inhis own country to the vicissitudes of this class worldwide; on the other hand, itmade him more aware of the particularities of these struggles in different placesand circumstances.

The success of the Russian Revolution had a transfiguring effect on Gramsci.In their excellent edition of Gramsci’s writings on the Southern question, FrancoDe Felice and Valentino Parlato are right in saying that under the influence of theRussian Revolution, Gramsci began to see new possibilities for raising the Italianpeasantry from its subordinate role vis-à-vis the industrial working class to one ofequal responsibility as a protagonist of the Italian revolution (QM: 12–14). Oneof the key aspects of his writings as a revolutionary was the parallels he began tosee between Russia and Italy as countries with a limited industrial base combinedwith a backward and oppressed peasantry. But Russia offered Gramsci somethingmore: the life and writings of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who in Gramsci’s viewprovided an incomparable example of political realism mixed with an unflagging

Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” 135

commitment to a revolutionary transformation of Russian society as part of aninternational workers’ movement.

Gramsci’s article of 1 April 1916, entitled “The South and the War”(QM: 55–58), brings to the foreground the historical perspective I mentioned abovein my comments on the essay “Oppressed and Oppressors.” Specifically, hepointed up what he regarded as the fatal tendency of Italy’s conservative politiciansin the 1860s and 1870s to conceive of national unification as possible only under “asingle centralized regime,” which for the South had had disastrous consequences.Instead of recognizing and validating the particular needs and problems of theSouth, the new Italian ruling class, in slavish imitation of the French model of stateformation, had moved immediately to centralize all major state functions, and indoing so, ironically, had created a new united Italy that was in reality more dividedthan ever into two trunks, southern and northern, “in absolutely antithetical con-ditions.” Working within this historical framework, Gramsci reiterated a judgmentoften expressed before him by the historian Gaetano Salvemini and the economistGiustino Fortunato: what he called the “bestial” centralization practiced by theItalian governments of the 1860s and 1870s had only aggravated the de facto exist-ence of “two Italies,” a center-north with a burgeoning industrial sector and a richtradition of communal self-government, and a South burdened by centuries offeudal monarchical rule that had virtually paralyzed the forces of progressivechange. Added to this burden was the alliance between northern industrialists andlarge southern landowners that had nullified every effort in the South to alleviatethe miseries of peasants and itinerant farm-workers.

Gramsci did not confine himself to political history. He extended his discussionto economic conditions that had deteriorated dramatically at the turn of the twenti-eth century. On this subject, he spoke of the constant flow of liquid capital fromthe South to the North, as a result of government policy that encouraged wealthylandowning southerners to invest their capital in northern industries rather than ininitiatives designed to improve southern agriculture and give a boost to nascentindustries in the South. The imbalances produced by these investment practiceswere further aggravated, Gramsci argued, by a recalcitrant industrial protection-ism, which was not compensated for by an agricultural protectionism that wouldhave benefited the producing class in the South. Furthermore, such policies hadnegated the otherwise beneficial effects of emigration. It made no sense, Gramscicontinued, to blame southern miseries on a southern lack of initiative. The factwas that capital would always seek its most profitable outlets and means ofemployment, unless those responsible for guiding social and economic policymade a concerted effort to bring the inherent profiteering of private capitalist inter-ests under democratic control. But attempts to do this had been blocked, Gramscisaid, by the ever-expanding accumulation of profits accruing to industrialistswhose productive resources were indispensable to the prosecution of the war,which Italy had entered on 24 May 1915. While the regions of Piedmont,Lombardy, and Liguria had begun to reap colossal profits from their war indus-tries, the South had continued to languish, while providing the bulk of the man-power needed to fight the war.4

136 F. Rosengarten

Three years later, in a seminal essay entitled “Workers and Peasants” thatappeared in Ordine Nuovo on 2 August 1919 (SPW1: 83–87), Gramsci con-fronted the Southern question in its connections with the war and with thenew opportunities opened up to the proletariat and to the peasantry by theRussian Revolution. Here we witness the strides in confidence and convictionthat he had made since his first tentative exploration of economic and socialinjustices in the school essay “Oppressed and Oppressors.” No longer washe tempted even fleetingly to see suffering and inequality as ineluctablefacts of the human condition. Now, with the support of his fellow editorsof Ordine Nuovo he denounced the war as a carnage that had “equalized”only one thing, the deprivations and death experienced by the proletarianmasses. However, he also glimpsed some positive outgrowths of the war:mainly that four years of trench warfare had strengthened ties of solidarityamong men who had shed their blood together, a majority of whom were ofpeasant origin. This sense of solidarity, he observed, was one of the essentialconditions of revolution.

At the same time, Gramsci was also able to step back from this hopeful visionto take stock of a discouraging aspect of life in countries where modern capitalistindustry was still in a relatively undeveloped stage – Russia, Italy, Spain – namelythat in these countries there was still a sharp separation between city and country,which discouraged constructive collaboration between workers and peasants. As aresult of its long isolation from the advances of modern civilization, the peasantryin these countries had remained mired in prevalently feudal social relations, whichhad engendered a mentality where

Economic and political institutions . . . are conceived as natural, perpetual,irreducible. . . . The mentality of the peasant has therefore remained that of aserf, who revolts violently against “the lords” in particular instances, but isincapable of thinking of himself as a member of a collectivity (the nationfor the landowners and the class for the proletarians) and of carrying ona systematic and permanent revolt aimed at changing the economic andpolitical relationships of social coexistence.

(QM: 64)

Gramsci then boldly announced his view that “the historical conditions ofItaly were not and are not very different from those in Russia.” Suddenly, hethrew all reservations and qualifications to the wind and, perhaps for the firsttime with such vehemence, made the following assertion:

Factory workers and poor peasants are the two founts of energy of the pro-letarian revolution. . . . They are the backbone of the revolution, the robustbattalions of the proletarian army that is advancing, impetuously overturn-ing obstacles or besieging them with its human waves that wear them down,that corrode them with patient labor, with relentless sacrifice. Communismis their civilization, it is the system of historical conditions in which they

Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” 137

will acquire a personality, a dignity, a culture, for which they will becomethe creative spirit of progress and beauty.

(QM: 67)

Those who know Gramsci only through the Prison Notebooks might have somedifficulty in recognizing him as the author of such incandescent prose and thebearer of such impassioned political enthusiasm. It is important to remember thatthe Gramsci who penned this essay in 1919 was in a different state of mind thanthat of the man who ten years later toiled away in prison on notes written für ewig[for posterity]. Yet this difference is something that needs to be carefully ponderedbecause the difference is more one of tone than of substance. Although muted inthe notebooks, Gramsci’s overall ideological position in prison was anchored tohis youthful idealism. In any event, the essay of 2 August 1919 and two otherswith the same title published in Ordine Nuovo on 3 January and 20 February 1920,mark a turning point in Gramsci’s conceptualization of the Southern question thathe now viewed on a far larger canvas than he had in 1910 and 1916. It was notsimply a matter of numbers and raw power that informed Gramsci’s thinking in1919 and 1920. It was a matter of enriching the cultural patrimony of people pre-viously stunted and disempowered by a system that rewarded capital investmentsfar more generously than it did labor in the factories and fields of Italy, Russia, andother nations.

Two of Gramsci’s writings of 1923 and 1924 on the Southern question callfor comment. They are a letter he sent from Vienna to his comrades in Romedated 12 September 1923 (QM: 79–81), explaining why he had chosen the nameUnità for the new party newspaper, and an article of 15 March 1924, in OrdineNuovo entitled “The South and Fascism” (QM: 83–88). Again, we need to takeinto account the different moments and contexts in which these two writingswere conceived.

The political orientation underlying the letter on Unità was somewhat differ-ent from the one that he had expounded from 1919 to 1922, inasmuch as theItalian Communists, after a period of alienation from the “united front” policypursued since 1921 by the Soviet Communist Party, had in 1923 come around toaccepting the broader definition of unity given by the Comintern, which nowfavored parliamentary and extra-parliamentary collaboration with non-communistlabor and social-democratic groups, especially with the “Third-Internationalist”Socialists. There was concern in the Comintern about the failure of revolutionarymovements in Europe, especially in Germany, and the advent to power of fascismin Italy. Gramsci saw himself at this point in his political life as much moredirectly joined to the world center of communist activity in Moscow, where hehad served on several important committees from June 1922 to the fall of 1923,when he left Russia for Vienna for the purpose of coordinating contacts betweenthe Italian and other European communist parties.

In his appeal for unity, Gramsci made two proposals. One was to endorse thedecision made by the Enlarged Executive of the Comintern, on which he hadserved while in the Soviet Union, to move resolutely toward “a worker and

138 F. Rosengarten

peasant government, and to give a special importance to the Southern question.”This involved seeing the relations between workers and peasants in Italy notonly as “a problem of class relations, but also and especially as a territorialproblem, that is, as one of the aspects of the national question.”

His other proposal was equally far-reaching and portentous in its aims, incalling for a worker and peasant government that in Italy would embrace theslogan “Federal Republic of Workers and Peasants.” By using the term “Repub-lic,” Gramsci and his party were signaling their repudiation of the Italian Monar-chy, which had acquiesced to the dictates of the fascist regime, in power sinceOctober 1922. What we see happening here is a threefold evolution in Gramsci’spolitical thought toward a broadened alliance with other left parties, adaptationof Soviet strategy on a workers and peasants government to Italian conditions,and forthright opposition to fascist policies, including an implicit return to andvalorization of the republican theory of popular government championed in theRisorgimento by Italian federalists and by Giuseppe Mazzini and his disciples.The word “federal” in the Italian context meant looking at the relations betweenvarious regions and territories in terms of their relative autonomy within aunitary but decentralized state. This is why Gramsci spoke of the Southern ques-tion here as a “territorial” problem forming part of the Italian “national ques-tion.” This historical framework is what gives Gramsci’s proposals at this pointtheir relevance not only to the immediate outcome of events in the 1920s and1930s but also to the form and substance of the Italian Republic that was toemerge from World War II and the anti-fascist Resistance. In effect Gramsciwas talking implicitly about the need for a fundamental constitutional reform inItaly as part of a revolutionary collective struggle for socialism and democracy.

The article of 15 March 1924 on “The South and Fascism” is important forthree reasons. First, Gramsci resolutely confronted fascist policy in the area ofrelations between the national fascist party, as the ruling party of both thegovernment and the state, and the South. This policy had, in Gramsci’s view,reached an extreme calcification and arbitrariness entirely contrary to the realinterests of the southern regions. Second, referring mainly to the National Unionof Liberal and Democratic Forces led by Giovanni Amendola from 1923 to1926, Gramsci emphasized that the South, where Amendola had his primarybase of operations, had become the special reserve of the anti-fascist constitu-tional opposition. Third, he concluded his article by alluding to the inextricableconnections between the South and the watchword of a worker and peasantgovernment. There was thus an obvious continuity of theme between the letterof 23 January 1923 and the article of 15 March 1924.

Gramsci on the “Southern question” from 1926 to theprison years

Gramsci’s speech at the third congress of the Communist Party of Italy – held inLyons, France, in January 1926 (SPW2: 340–375) – which he wrote jointly withPalmiro Togliatti, was in many respects a summary of Gramsci’s own and his

Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” 139

party’s positions since its founding in 1921, and an attempt to track certain cur-rents in Italian political history that had favored or in some way foreshadowed aradicalizing turn in Italian politics after World War I. Speaking now as generalsecretary of the Communist Party of Italy, and operating in an increasinglyrepressive and threatening climate, he also tried to take the measure of otherleftwing and anti-fascist parties, especially the Italian Socialist Party, whosedeficiencies he subjected to an acute analysis. A noteworthy feature of thespeech was the assessment by Gramsci and Togliatti of the “Italian social struc-ture,” in the course of which they carried out a provocative class analysisdesigned to show how politics and class were enmeshed with each other in anow fascist-dominated country.

In several sections of his speech, Gramsci returned to the “territorial” as wellas class character of relations between industry and agriculture in Italy. It was inthis context that he gave voice to a theme I mentioned at the beginning of thischapter, in which his penchant for seeing a close analogy between the way impe-rialist countries dominated their colonies and the kind of relationship that existedwithin certain nation-states, notably Italy, between ruling and subordinate classesand social groups. As previously noted, this is a contemporary theme at the centerof passionate controversies where the conventional categories of relationsbetween states have been applied to oppression based on racial, class, and genderdifferences.

This theme comes up three times in the 1926 address. In the eighth section, forexample, Gramsci highlighted what he called “the semi-colonial relationshipbetween northern and southern Italy.” In economic terms, he said, the South was acaptive market and a source of cheap labor for the North. Lenin’s considerations inhis Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, of 5 June 1920, and otherwritings on the same subject formed the theoretical substratum of some of whatGramsci had to say in his speech. Lenin had described oppressed groups withincountries, such as African Americans in the United States, as “colonialized”peoples. The Russian leader had urged his fellow communists to reject “bourgeoisabstract and formal principles” and to make “a precise appraisal of the specifichistorical situation, and primarily of economic conditions” (Lenin 2005: 620).Lenin had also stressed the special importance of “backward states and nationscharacterized by feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal–peasant relations,” of whichItaly and Russia were prime examples. Lenin’s analysis was in all likelihoodpresent in Gramsci’s mind when he, Gramsci, made the following observationsabout the Italian situation:

The relations between industry and agriculture, which are essential for theeconomic life of a country and for the determination of its political super-structures, have a territorial basis in Italy. In the North, agricultural produc-tion and the rural population are concentrated in a few big centers. As aresult of this, all the conflicts inherent in the country’s social structurecontain within them an element that affects the unity of the State and puts itin danger. The solution of the problem is sought by the bourgeois and

140 F. Rosengarten

agrarian ruling groups through a compromise. None of these groups natu-rally possesses a unitary character or a unitary function. The compromisewhereby unity is preserved is, moreover, such as to make the situation moreserious. It gives the toiling masses of the South a position analogous to thatof a colonial population. The big industry of the North fulfills the functionvis-à-vis them of the capitalist metropoles. The big landowners and even themiddle bourgeoisie of the South, for their part, take on the role of those cat-egories in the colonies which ally themselves to the metropoles in order tokeep the mass of working people subjugated. Economic exploitation andpolitical oppression thus unite to make of the working people of the South aforce continuously mobilized against the State.

(SPW2: 344–345)

This passage makes it clear that Gramsci wanted his readers to grasp thepotential for anti-fascist resistance that existed within the economically as wellas politically subjugated sectors of Italian society. At the same time, he wasanxious to point out a distinctive aspect of fascism that needed to be taken intoaccount by the Communist Party, namely that

Fascism reacts to the dangerous shifts and new recruitment of forces pro-voked by its policies, by subjecting the whole of society to the weight of amilitary force and repressive system which hold the population riveted tothe mechanical fact of production – without any possibility of having a lifeof its own, expressing a will of its own, or organizing to defend its owninterests.

(SPW2: 353)

We come now to a work that is generally regarded as Gramsci’s most import-ant analysis of the Italian Southern question, an essay he wrote in October 1926,only a few weeks or possibly even a few days before his arrest and imprisonmenton 8 November of that year. Entitled Some Aspects of the Southern question(SPW2: 441–462), it was published in 1930 in the Paris-based Italian CommunistParty journal Lo Stato Operaio, so that its impact was much more direct onItalian anti-fascist organizations abroad than on the scattered anti-fascist forces inItaly. The language Gramsci employed in this essay, in recalling the work of theOrdine Nuovo group in 1919 and 1920, was more nuanced than that of the speechhe delivered at the Party Congress in Lyons eight months earlier:

[In 1919 and 1920] the Turin communists posed concretely the question ofthe “hegemony of the proletariat”: i.e. of the social basis of the proletariandictatorship and of the workers’ State. The proletariat can become theleading and the ruling class to the extent that it succeeds in creating asystem of class alliances which allow it to mobilize the majority of theworking population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy,in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it

Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” 141

succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. But thepeasant question is historically determined in Italy; it is not the “peasant andagrarian question in general.” In Italy the peasant question, through the spe-cific Italian tradition, and the specific development of Italian history, hastaken two typical and particular forms – the Southern question and that ofthe Vatican. Winning the majority of the peasant masses thus means, for theItalian proletariat, making these questions its own from the social point ofview; understanding the class demands which they represent; incorporatingthese demands into its revolutionary transitional program; placing thesedemands among the objectives for which it struggles.

(SPW2: 443)

This passage is closer in spirit to the mode of analysis typical of the PrisonNotebooks than to the passages cited above from the January 1926 Partyspeech. In one of the few such instances in Gramsci’s pre-prison writings,Gramsci used the word “hegemony” not only to designate rule based on supe-rior material and armed power but also in the sense of rule that wins over theideological consent of the ruled. Gramsci speaks here of the possibility that theproletariat can become “the leading and ruling class” whose aim is to “mobilizethe majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeoisstate.” The distinctions made in this sentence are the ones often associated withGramsci’s whole approach to politics in countries where groups struggling tochange society in fundamental ways must win a leadership role before they canbegin to envision themselves as potentially “ruling.” This dyadic conceptionrests on sociologically complex concepts that are largely absent elsewhere fromGramsci’s writings of these years. Also significant is his use of the phrase “themajority of the working population,” a much more comprehensive formulationthan “the majority of the working class.” It embraces virtually all people whowork for a living, not just industrial and agricultural workers. Beyond that, theclass alliance of which Gramsci speaks would have to “gain the consent of thebroad peasant masses.” The ordinarily conventional term “consent” acquires adenser specific gravity here within the context of Gramscian social theory. Wealso see in the above-quoted passage the kind of historical consciousness thatprefigures the many brilliant pages on Italian history in the Prison Notebooks.In sum, we begin to see in this passage the emergence of a strain of thought thatwill constitute the core of Gramsci’s writing on cultural politics in prison.

I can only touch fleetingly on how Gramsci treats the Southern question inthe Prison Notebooks. In general, the distinguishing trait of passages on thisquestion in the Notebooks is that whatever Gramsci had to say about southernpolitics and society was placed firmly in a historical framework, in a much moredefinitive manner than in his pre-prison writings.

Gramsci made a giant leap in complexity in the Notebooks, even in compari-son with the essay “Some Aspects of the Southern question.” The difference liesin the fact that in these notes, far from the din of daily political strife, and deter-mined to expound ideas and insights that might stand the test of time in a way

142 F. Rosengarten

that his journalistic pieces and official writings could not, Gramsci was notaiming so much to clarify as to complicate the problems of interest to him. Hiswriting in the Notebooks – in a special way when dealing with Italian history –has something of the “thickness” of which Clifford Geertz speaks in his discus-sion of the methods available to cultural anthropologists (see Geertz 1973:3–30). Several of the rubrics under which Gramsci gathered his thoughts onthemes of interest to him in prison (two of which deal precisely with “TheSouthern Question” and “North and South,” but also others scattered in a widevariety of thematic sub-categories, such as “Regionalism,” “The Concept ofNational-popular,” and “Town and Country”) shed further light on how he struc-tured his understanding of the North–South relationship against the wider back-ground of Italian history from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies.

Gramsci and postcolonialism

Postcolonialism, as one offshoot of postmodernism, is a body of thought andpractice that in the domains of social, cultural and literary theory has placed con-cepts such as hybridity, indeterminateness, and unpredictability at the center ofits investigations. Underlying this turn away from traditional norms and certain-ties is a deep-seated skepticism about the ability of language and other means ofexpression to represent reality in any secure or reliable way.

Most postcolonial theorists would agree that, after World War II, formerly colo-nialized and underdeveloped countries had a natural tendency to work out theoriesand systems of government that were radically different from the ones they hadlearned from their former colonial masters. Yet at the same time, generally speak-ing, postcolonial theory also recognizes that, as Anurada Dingwaney Needham hascogently argued in Using the Master’s Tools, these “masters” had also left an intel-lectual heritage behind that could not simply be rejected out of hand, but demandedto be integrated into a reconstructed political project.

The main direction of thought and the methodological innovations associatedwith postcolonial theory have been critically examined in brilliant fashion byE. San Juan Jr. One of his arguments is that

the anti-Marxism of postcolonial theory may be attributed partly to EdwardSaid’s eclecticism, his belief that American left criticism is marginal, andhis distorted if not wholly false understanding of Marxism based on doctri-naire anticommunism and the model of “actually existing socialism” duringthe Cold War.

(San Juan Jr. 1998a: 29)

It seems to me that this argument errs on the side of a too doctrinaire versionof Marxism. What Said has to say in Culture and Imperialism about Gramsci’sessay Some Aspects of the Southern question (1993: 49) does not really divergefrom a fundamentally historical-materialist reading of that work, provided that we

Gramsci’s views on Italy’s “Southern question” 143

understand materialism in the way the mature Gramsci understood it, as referringnot only to the processes of material production underlying the economic systemof any society, but also to ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and in general the domains ofdiscourse and subjectivity, which he regarded as constitutive facets of social life(Crehan 2002: 34).

At issue here is Gramsci’s whole approach to the study of history, philosophy,culture, and society, which precluded a version of Marxism that one can somehowpry loose from its Hegelian idealist origins, as received and elaborated in Italyprimarily by Benedetto Croce. No doubt Said did not adhere to a strict Marxistconceptual paradigm. San Juan is right when he states that Said favored a theoryof liberation that goes well beyond what most Marxists understand to be the aimof revolution. There is ample textual evidence of Said’s non-Marxist conception oflife. But I do not believe that Said’s work negates the premises of a Marxist worldview. As I see it, Gramsci is in fact a mediating link between Marx’s synthesis ofidealist and materialist thought and Said’s attempt to open up new possibilities fora multi-faceted exploration of our era that avoids all ideological abstractions andorthodoxies. If my point of view is a defensible one, and if Said’s Orientalismis one of the foundational texts of postcolonialism, then it is not unreasonable toconclude that Gramsci helped establish the premises of certain currents of thoughtand practice of basic importance to postcolonial theory.

Notes

1 In an autobiographical note of 1933, Gramsci spoke of his “continuous attempt to gobeyond a backward way of living and thinking typical of a Sardinian at the beginningof the century who wanted to appropriate a way of living and thinking no longerregional and village-like but national,” to which he added that

If it is true that one of the most prominent needs of Italian culture was todeprovincialize itself even in the most advanced and modern urban centers, thisprocess should appear all the more evident as experienced by a “triple or quadru-ple provincial” such as a young Sardinian certainly was at the beginning of thecentury.

(PN: 1776)

2 For an exhaustive study of this aspect of Italian social history see Moe (2002).3 See Germino (1990) for a study that emphasizes this aspect of Gramsci’s life.4 Among military detachments from the South and the Islands that were to bear an espe-

cially heavy share of military operations in World War I, the Sardinian Sassari Brigadewas of course of special interest to Gramsci. He used his command of the Sardinianlanguage and his familiarity with Sardinian traits of character to do some effectiveproselytizing when the brigade was given police duties in Turin at the time of somemajor labor-led actions against the war.

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11 Rethinking GramsciClass, globalization, and historical bloc

David F. Ruccio

Antonio Gramsci’s work is mostly ignored in economics. This is the case both inmainstream economic discourse and among those of us who are Marxists andwork in heterodox theoretical traditions. Indeed, attempts to interpret and useGramsci’s writings have been confined mostly to the humanities (particularlyliterary theory and cultural studies) and politics (especially political theory andinternational relations).1 In this chapter, I endeavor to cross this disciplinarydivide.

I venture into this relatively uncharted territory because, from an intellectualand political position, that is, from the perspective of the philosophy of praxis,Gramsci’s contributions to the Marxian tradition are indispensable for analyz-ing the world today – for investigating how current hegemonies work and forproducing alternative hegemonies. In short, for analyzing the contemporaryhistorical bloc.

In this chapter I discuss why and how Gramsci matters, especially forsomeone who comes out of the Rethinking Marxism tradition. The RM projectwas initiated some 25 years ago as an attempt to identify and recover what isdistinctive about a Marxian approach to economic and social theory – to redis-cover and further develop the antiessentialist moments of Marxism and theconcepts of Marxian class analysis. Here, I create a theoretical confrontationbetween Gramsci’s contributions to Marxian theory and the work that some ofus do in and around RM, especially in relation to two concepts that are directlyrelated to Marxist attempts to understand the world today: globalization andhistorical bloc.

My view, to be succinct, is the following: the scholars associated with RM havedeveloped and extended Marxian class analysis in ways that simply cannot befound elsewhere in the Marxian tradition (let alone non-Marxian theoretical tradi-tions) but have largely sidestepped or ignored the analysis of how capital rules, thatis, of how capitalist class projects are created and reproduced in the modern world.Gramsci’s great contribution, on the other hand, is precisely the analysis of hege-mony, the use of force and consent whereby capitalist class rule is secured. And, ofcourse, how alternative hegemonies can be created. But he has little to contributethat is interesting or new about class structures themselves. Therefore, in my view,the two projects need – or, at least, complement – one another, both intellectually

and politically, especially in the analysis of the changing configurations of capitalistglobalization.

I understand that such a formulation leaves out many nuances and subtleties.But in this chapter I focus on the basic concepts and methods of analysis thatguide the two traditions – a rethought Marxism and Gramsci – and where theymeet. I also point out the main tensions and open questions that remain, andsome of the theoretical and empirical work that remains to be done.

Globalization and Rethinking Marxism

Many of us associated with Rethinking Marxism have been quite critical of pre-vailing theories of globalization, on both the Right and the Left. That is certainlythe case with my own work on issues of international economics and politicaleconomy, as I have struggled to make sense of existing discourses of globaliza-tion and to produce a different, particularly Marxian analysis of the institutionsand processes that fall under the rubric of globalization.2 It is also true of othercontributors to the RM tradition. Rather than attempt an exhaustive examinationI want to present three examples that pertain to this topic.

First, in a recent article, J.K. Gibson-Graham ask us to imagine a scheme inwhich an “ethics of the local” is not confined and constrained by the global but,instead, is allowed to flourish – as a new “space of freedom and capacity” (2003:50). The path to the local traced by Gibson-Graham involves, first, the specifica-tion of a set of basic principles or guidelines and, then, the description of a set ofresearch projects in which local subjects are encouraged to cultivate themselvesin accordance with an ethics of the local. The principles are drawn from recentwork in postmodern or poststructuralist social theory: a recognition of particu-larity and contingency (which “establishes parity between global and local”[ibid.: 52] ), a respect for difference and otherness (“between localities but alsowithin them” [ibid.: 53] ), and cultivating local capacities (such as the “capacityto modify ourselves” and “to enact a new relation to the economy” [ibid.: 54] ).The second step, the process of resubjectifying local actors, is already takingplace in research projects in Australia and the United States. There, Gibson-Graham have sought to overcome the fixation on global capitalism in order touncover and produce a new language of diversity within the regional economy.Such a language has made it possible for the people involved in their researchconversations to “become something other than what the global economy wantsus to be” (ibid.: 56). But they also discovered the need, beyond language, forsocial practices and bodily sensations that are capable of nurturing and sustain-ing new, communal subjectivities. For Gibson-Graham, these capacities pointtoward a new ethical stance – making it possible to move beyond the politics ofopposition within global capitalism in order for people to cultivate themselvesas “subjects rather than objects of economic development” (ibid.: 68) withindiverse, local economies.

In the same issue of Rethinking Marxism, I (Ruccio 2003) suggest acomplementary way of untangling the juggernaut of globalization: to recover and

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rethink the traditional Marxian concept of imperialism. In my view, contemporarydiscourses of globalization (including those on the Left) exaggerate the novelty ofthe current process of global expansion and fail to appreciate the parallels with theexpansion that took place in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Suchdiscourses also produce false choices – both theoretical and political – between, forexample, free trade and regulated trade that are defined by and limited to the termsof mainstream economics. One alternative move available to radical thinkers andactivists is to retrieve the notion of imperialism in order to “characterize andoppose at least some significant events and activities, frameworks and projects, inthe world today” (ibid.: 85). In order to place imperialism back on the agenda, Ichallenge the apparent resistances to the notion (which led to its virtual disappear-ance from radical thinking about the first Gulf War although, fortunately, despitethe falsified information about weapons of mass destruction, not about the invasionof Iraq) and distinguish it from globalization (such that imperialism can be seen asa partial and incomplete project to remake the world, thereby shedding theinevitability and uniformity often associated with globalization). I then turn myattention to analyzing the economic dimensions of the new “imperial machine,”focusing on the flows of value associated with the class dimensions of globalcapitalism. Finally, I challenge the “disciplinary machine” of economic discourse,which conditions the existence of imperialism, in order to open up a space forimagining and enacting “new, noncapitalist class arrangements and forms ofglobalization” (ibid.: 92).

The third example comes from Antonio Callari (2008), who challenges thewidely held view that contemporary globalization signifies the decline of US hege-mony and/or undermines the possibility of any territorially centered imperialism. Infact, Callari argues, the ability of finance capital to capture an increasing share ofsurplus-value represents a new type of imperialism – different from the old imperi-alism, which was built around the production of surplus-value in the metropolitannations, but still a form of imperialism, in the sense that the dominion of finance isbased on the use of state power in international relations. Even more, Callari viewsit as an Anglo imperialism, because of the ability of the United States and GreatBritain to capture distributions of surplus-value produced around the globe. Thenew imperialism is also different because it seeks to manage its political andcultural conditions of existence in a manner that gives priority to a certain conceptof democracy (rather than humanity, culture, or nationalism/independence) as away of articulating political agency and property relations within the domestic andinternational agendas of globalization discourse. The conclusion that Callari drawsfrom this analysis is that the Left needs to take democracy seriously as a space foremancipatory politics. Because the imperialist project of democracy involves anexpansion of the fantasy of property at an international level and a retreat of thepromise of democracy within the center, the Left has an opportunity both to contestthis process of rearticulating and retreating from democracy and to struggle for ademocracy in excess of property.

There’s a great deal more RM-related work on globalization I coulddiscuss – on sovereign right (Buck-Morss 2007), territorialization (Cocco

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2007), the anti-sweatshop movement (Erçel 2006), the politics of globaljustice (DeMartino 2004), time and space (Jessop 2002), immaterial labor(Dyer-Witheford 2001), history (Dirlik 2000), and so on. I simply wantto suggest that in the context of the rethinking of Marxism, we have beencritical not only of the more-trade-is-better fantasies of mainstream econo-mists but also of many left-wing approaches that embrace the idea of globalcapitalism as a way of mapping the world while criticizing its effects.

The rethinking of Marxism

I have observed many overlaps between such a critique of globalization and thework that Adam David Morton and others have been carrying out in the area ofinternational political economy. However, while Morton’s approach (which Idiscuss in detail below) is based firmly on Gramscian principles, the RM frame-work is not, at least in any direct fashion. Let me, then, devote a few paragraphsto outlining the rethinking of Marxism that we have been carrying out over thecourse of the past 25 years or so.3

What I am referring to as the Rethinking Marxism theoretical project began atthe University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the Department of Economics, inthe late 1970s.4 It has had as its main goal to open up the Marxian tradition andto elaborate an approach to Marxian theory, especially the Marxian critique ofpolitical economy, which is quite different from existing approaches. I am refer-ring, in particular, to the traditional Marxisms associated with the Old Left aswell as the approaches to Marxian theory produced by Monthly Review andradical political economics as it was practiced in the United States in thepostwar period. These are Marxisms that, for all their positive contributions tokeeping the critique of bourgeois economic thought and capitalism alive undervery difficult cultural and political conditions (such as the McCarthy period andthe Cold War), we identified as essentialist and deterministic, for example, basedon traditional theories of knowledge, tracing out the laws of capital accumula-tion, and/or conflating Marxian class analysis with analyses of unequal power orproperty. We, for our part, were influenced by the work of Louis Althusser,starting with Reading Capital and For Marx, which served both to identify thedistinctiveness of Marxian theory vis-à-vis mainstream social science – as anepistemological “break” – and to reread the Marxian tradition, from Marx andEngels through Lenin, Gramsci, and Mao on up to the present day.

This project is sometimes referred to as antiessentialist or overdeterministMarxism (especially as it was initially formulated in the work of StephenResnick and Richard Wolff [1987, 2006] ), more recently as postmodernMarxism (in that some of us further developed the initial ideas in conjunctionwith explorations into the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and other poststructuralist and postmodern thinkers). Giventhe names we have used, or which (like postmodern Marxism) are names thathave been applied to our work by others, readers can probably discern the mainpoints and trajectory of this project. The affinity with Gramsci and his attempts

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to open up and rethink key concepts in the Marxian tradition should already beapparent.

In any case, the four dimensions of the project are:

Epistemology

This involves a refusal and critique of all correspondence theories of know-ledge, both rationalism and empiricism (including, e.g., critical realism), infavor of what has come to be known as a more constructivist, poststructuralist,or relativist epistemology. The idea is that different theories produce differentknowledges, which are incommensurable and which have different conditionsand consequences. Thus, for example, in the domain of economics, neoclassicaland Marxian economic theories produce radically different conceptions ofcapitalism – how it works, how problems arise, how such problems can befixed, and so on – and there is no neutral arbiter or fixed point from which tojudge one a better, more accurate conception of the world than the other. But,of course, such different knowledges or discourses have different effects in andon the world. Thus, theoretical stances, whether those of academics or nonacad-emic intellectuals, cannot be neutral. So, another name for this epistemologicalposition is partisan relativism, in that it becomes possible to criticize sometheories but only from the perspective of another theory.

Methodology

The aim here is to distance Marxism from any and all determinisms, such ashumanism and economism, in favor of an alternative, “overdetermined” concep-tion of society. What this means is that the project of theoretical and socialanalysis – the development of concepts or the analysis of economic and socialreality – neither presumes nor looks for any kind of causal priority amongaspects or levels of social reality but, instead, is based on specifying the ways inwhich economic and social processes are constituted in a contradictory fashionby all other social and natural processes. Thus, whether an analysis of individualagents or social subjects, events or institutions, the idea is to produce a concep-tion that cannot be reduced to one or another or even a small subset of causalfactors. Even more: the focus of such analyses is on concreteness and contin-gency instead of the playing out of one or another immediately or ultimatelycausal factor. Another way of referring to such a methodology is in terms of analeatory or postmodern materialism that eschews any and all causal hierarchiesand is characterized, instead, by the relative autonomy and mutual effectivity ofthe various dimensions of social reality.

The critique of determinism clearly overlaps with key strains of the theoreticalwork carried out in the Prison Notebooks.5 In contrast to what the authors ofHegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) concluded (thatGramsci’s references to classes necessarily reaffirm an economic determinism),my view is that Gramsci’s rethinking of Marxism (in his arguments against

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mechanicism and positivism, from his treatment of politics and common sense tohis critique of Bukharin) is based on a thorough-going rejection of essentialismand the elaboration of a nondeterministic approach to both knowledge and socialreality. In this, the RM and Gramscian traditions are really quite similar.

Class

Here, the theoretical work carried out by the people associated with RM has beenboth to narrow and to expand Marxian class analysis. It is a project of narrowing,in the sense that class is defined in terms of surplus labor – and not one of themany other conceptions of class (based on power, property, income, wealth,lifestyle, etc.) that abound inside and outside the Marxian tradition. Class thusrefers to the manner in which surplus labor (the labor performed above andbeyond what is necessary to reproduce the social existence of the direct produc-ers) is produced and appropriated and, then, distributed and received. And, onceclass is defined in such a narrow fashion, it becomes interesting – even more,important – to analyze the specific connections to other social phenomena, suchas patterns of ownership of property, amounts of income, forms of power exer-cised by one social group over another, and other senses of class that can befound throughout academic and popular culture. The point is, these notions ofclass are not the same, either theoretically or empirically, although they certainlyaffect one another.

The project of rethinking Marxian class analysis also involves an expansion,in the sense that class as surplus labor identifies a class structure that, in the caseof capitalism, goes beyond the two fundamental class positions of bourgeoisieand proletariat (or, in the case of feudalism, lords and serfs, and similarly withother forms of noncapitalism). One way to think about expanding class analysisis this: it brings together or bridges the gap between the first and third volumesof Capital, between the processes whereby surplus-value is produced by produc-tive laborers and appropriated by industrial capitalists, and then is distributed bythose capitalists to still others (such as merchant and financial capital, the state,supervisors, other industrial capitalists, and so on).

So, we end up producing a more complex class structure than has tradition-ally been the case in the Marxian tradition. As a result we refer to classprocesses defined by the distribution/receipt of surplus labor in addition to itsproduction/appropriation. This means we can analyze the ways class stamps itsmark throughout the social formation, as surplus labor, once it has been pumpedout of the direct producers, is distributed to still others, thereby affecting a widevariety of institutions and events. Another implication is that there can be classstruggles – struggles over the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of theappropriative and distributive class processes – across the social formation. Suchstruggles may take place not just over how much surplus labor is extracted fromlaborers but also over how much and in what manner that surplus labor is sharedout among occupants of distributive class positions. So, in the case of capital-ism, tensions and struggles can arise not only between industrial capitalists and

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productive laborers (over the rate of exploitation) but also between industrialcapitalists and the state (over taxes), finance capitalists (over the rate of interest),merchant capitalists (over discounts), landlords (over rents), other industrialcapitalists (over super-profits, in the context of competition) and so on.

The rethinking of Marxian class analysis suggests that, in any social formation –whether the United States or Brazil or wherever – we can look for and expect tofind various and changing combinations of both capitalist and noncapitalist classprocesses. There will likely be productions/appropriations and distributions/receiptsof surplus labor that assume both capitalist and noncapitalist forms, with no neces-sary movement or transition from one form to another. Thus, it is incumbent onsocial analysts to examine economic and social institutions such as enterprises,churches, schools, governing bodies, and households in terms of their particularclass processes – capitalism in some, noncapitalism in others, and combinationsof both or neither in still others. Finally, any individual person or social groupmay and probably will occupy more than one class position (in addition to other,nonclass social positions) during the course of a day, a year, or a lifetime. It is quitepossible, for example, for someone to be an exploited laborer in a capitalist enter-prise and then to return home and extract feudal surplus labor from their spouse.Similarly, members of the so-called upper class may variously appropriate, distrib-ute, and receive surplus-value (not to mention other, noncapitalist forms of surpluslabor).

Such an approach to class analysis makes reference to “classes” as social actorssomewhat problematic. There is no one-to-one correspondence between class(when used as an adjective for referring to a subset of social processes) and classes(when used as a substantive attached to particular social groups). But it does putclass transformation on the agenda, beside and in addition to other progressivesocial projects. It creates an imaginary in which it is possible to identify exploita-tive class processes and to eliminate them, in favor of nonexploitative – communalor collective – class processes, in which the direct producers, and smaller or largerportions of the wider community of which the direct producers form a part, arealso the first appropriators of the surplus. In other words, we have the opportunityof developing a particularly Marxian notion of class ethics (and, of course, aMarxian class politics).

Ethics

The fourth and final aspect of this rethinking of Marxism to which I draw atten-tion in this brief sketch pertains to ethics. The most recent development withinthe RM project, a particularly Marxian approach to ethics or justice, is character-ized by both its radical historicism and its attention to class. The historicismrefers both to the way Marxian ethics arises within and is characterized by – tothe extent that it takes up and moves to the limit of – the notions of fairness andjustice that pertain to a capitalist society and to the manner in which it capturesand is acted upon by social forces. A Marxian ethics is therefore antifounda-tional (it does not transcend history, in the manner of absolutes) and social (it is

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not a matter of individual ethical judgment but represents a critique of the exist-ing social order). The class dimension, for its part, refers to the way the surplusis produced, appropriated, and distributed. Thus, a Marxian critique of exploita-tion means that the producers of the surplus should not be excluded from partici-pating in the collectivity that appropriates the surplus. In addition, the traditionalmaxim from the Critique of the Gotha Program – from each according toability, to each according to need – can be interpreted as referring not to the pro-duction and distribution of wealth (as is commonly understood) but to themanner in which the surplus is produced (those who are able should participatein producing the surplus) and distributed (to individuals and the communityaccording to their needs).6

Again, there are obvious overlaps between the RM project and Gramsci’s inter-pretation of Marxian theory: both approaches are defined by their focus on classanalysis and by the need for a particularly Marxian ethics (although the discussionof Gramsci’s notion of ethics – as against his thinking about politics, etc. –remains relatively underdeveloped). And I do not consider this observation of thesimilarities between the two theoretical projects particularly controversial, as itappears to coincide with much of the existing critical literature.

But, on the RM side, there remains the thorny problem of the critical import-ance of analyzing and changing the world today: how capital rules. The fact is,the class of industrial or productive capitalists is relatively small: the membersof the boards of directors of capitalist enterprises comprise a few thousandindividuals in the United States.7 However, there are also many more who arebeholden to the capitalists, who “share in the booty,” who receive a cut ofsurplus-value for providing some of the conditions of existence of the continuedextraction of surplus-value. While such numbers are not inconsequential (eitherin number or in public awareness, as scandals of escalating CEO pay and theaccumulated wealth of Fortune 500 members provoke concern and sometimeseven outrage), it is still the case that the vast majority of the population do notappropriate, distribute, or receive the surplus. Then how, given the small numberof those who control the surplus, does capitalism come into existence and getreproduced over time? How, given the small number who benefit, do capitalistclass projects get produced historically and continue to exist within society?And how, given the fact that the masses are excluded from appropriating and,except in relatively small amounts, do not receive distributed shares of thesurplus, do not alternative class projects emerge? For all the richness and com-plexity of the RM class analysis, the framework I outline above is lacking.

Gramsci, hegemony, and historical bloc

This is precisely where Gramsci’s writings (and those who have developed anddeployed his thoughts on this topic) gain in significance. Although Gramsci issometimes characterized as providing merely a theory of politics or of culture orof applying Marxian theory to Italian history, he must instead be recognized asan important theoretician and analyst of hegemony (the way in which class

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projects – in particular, capitalist class projects – are created and reproduced,brought into existence and change, in modern society). And, of course, theway such projects can be challenged, through the formation of an alternative,noncapitalist hegemony – especially in societies where civil society is welldeveloped, where the majority is governed by consent (with, of course, thethreat of force), where the state equals both political society and civil societyand the capitalist class project is embedded in and governed through both.

Rather than explore in detail the textual evidence of the various concepts andconceptual strategies Gramsci uses to analyze hegemony, I want to argue that,while Gramsci’s class analysis is rudimentary (it is not where he focuses hisefforts, although references to classes and class-like social groups can be foundthroughout his writings, e.g., in his writings on Americanism and Fordism andthe Southern question) class is central to his conception of hegemony. That is,hegemony is class hegemony; it is the hegemony of dominant classes and, withthem, the hegemony of a particular class project. Hegemony therefore refers tothe dominance within society of a particular class structure, a specific configura-tion of capitalist class relations and struggles. That is what makes it Marxist andserves to distinguish a Gramscian conception of hegemony from other uses, suchas those that prevail today in debates about international political economy,which conflate hegemony with the leadership of one nation, or a group ofnations, within the world economy or international system of nations.

One does not need Gramsci to refer to the power exercised by one nation (orset of nations) over others – just as Gramsci is not indispensable for discussingcivil society as distinct from and in opposition to the state, to the government orpolitical society narrowly understood. Or, for that matter, to talk about the roleof common sense, intellectuals, passive revolution, and so on. These conceptsare emptied of their Gramscian – and, more generally, Marxian – content whenthey are wrenched apart from class issues, from the various and changing formsof capitalist and noncapitalist exploitation, when they are separated from theconditions and effects of such exploitative class relations. The philosophy ofpraxis is precisely a Marxian philosophy to the extent that it focuses on the waysin which the hegemony of a class project is created, reproduced, and contested.

The same is true, in my view, of historical bloc. It is a particularly Gramscianway of conceiving of a social totality – in traditional Marxian terminology (whichwe do not use much these days), the relationship between structure and super-structure, between material base and ideological and political superstructure.8

The concept of totality is important because it allows us to examine the wayformations are constituted and have effects on other elements of the socialstructure, freeing us from considering aspects of society or social agents orevents in isolation. Therefore, it represents a critique of and counter to apositivism of individual aspects, agents, events, and of history itself. Suchelements cannot be taken as given. Thus, for example, against a “mainstream,”neoclassical conception of a given human nature – of preferences, technology,and productive abilities – Marxists see these aspects of individuals as histori-cally and social constituted. They are created by social forces but, of course,

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not in circumstances of their own choosing. Understanding such elements asendogenous to history and society, viewing them as constituted within ratherthan as exogenous determinants of historical and social processes, underminesall the major propositions of neoclassical theory – from individual rationalchoice to international trade theory. Such a perspective:

• methodologically, undermines any notion of stasis or equilibrium;• theoretically, necessitates an analysis of how agents and institutions are

created historically and socially, e.g., through advertising, the so-calledsnob effect, struggles over the surplus, and so on;

• politically, allows for the possibility that interventions in markets, oreliminating markets altogether, can create better alternatives than allowingmarkets to operate freely.

What is particularly important for the Marxian tradition is that no element –be it human nature, ideas, or relations of production – can be taken in isolation,or serve as the given cause of all other phenomena. More specifically, againstliberal thought inside and outside the discipline of economics, the notion oftotality serves to cross or blur received boundaries. Thus, the economy is alwaysunderstood to be political (not a technical given but constituted by politicaldecisions and projects) and politics is economic (constituted, at least in part, bythe ways surplus labor is performed/appropriated and distributed/received),while culture is both an economic and political phenomenon (in the sense that itincludes the different philosophies and common senses whereby the existingeconomic and political order is both constituted and challenged).

So, the Gramscian historical bloc is a totality that connotes a configuration offorces that is moving in a particular direction, and that can be pushed further inthat direction or moved in still other directions. In other words, it is a dynamictotality. And so, when we analyze a historical bloc, a Gramscian analysis requiresus to examine both the structure of the totality, the way economic and noneco-nomic elements affect one another, but also the direction in which that complexsocial structure is moving. In particular, we need to determine not only what theclass project is that rules society at any point in time but the way it is moving andchanging (that is to say, whether or not it is ascendant or declining, and are thereother class projects that are in formation and capable of challenging it). This is avery difficult kind of work, especially in the contemporary United States, wherewe are currently confronted with an increasingly severe economic crisis, thecontinuing war in Iraq, and the effects of a crucial presidential election.

The rest of Gramsci’s concepts give concrete content to the concept of histor-ical bloc, suggestions of where to look, aspects in movement that the social analystis encouraged to investigate in some detail: hegemony (particular configurations offorce and consent, of political and civil society, that lead to the dominance of oneclass project over others) and crises in hegemony (in which spaces are createdfor new class projects to emerge and, perhaps, become hegemonic); the role ofintellectuals (especially organic intellectuals, who represent and articulate in the

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realm of ideas those class projects) and the formation of common sense (whereideas become a material force, for and against the existing hegemony); the devel-opment of language (because this is how both intellectuals and subaltern classesrepresent and challenge the existing hegemony), and so on.

Therefore, in my view, there are strong affinities and complementaritiesbetween the RM theoretical project and Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxiantheory, in all four dimensions discussed above: epistemology, methodology, thediscursive centrality of class, and ethics understood as class justice. At the sametime, I must stress that I am not arguing that the two projects are exactly thesame. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were, given the different times andcontexts in which they were carried out. But, in both cases, the specificity ofMarxism is defined by its critique of traditional theories of knowledge andmethodology (all the various forms of idealism and metaphysics) and by thefocus on class, for understanding and changing the world.

Globalization

Class hegemony and capitalist globalization

If we now turn to how – from the perspective of both of these projects – wemight begin to make sense of globalization we encounter more questions thananswers. This is especially the case, given my suspicion of the term: it hasbecome too easy to subsume everything that is going on in the world to this oneconcept. It seems that everything – forms of governmentality, subject formation,the role of nation-states, the limits on political possibilities – can be explainedby recourse to globalization, a term I admittedly use at my own peril.

Thus, it is necessary to proceed carefully, admitting, as we go forth, what wedo not know, and perhaps cannot know at this point in time. If our point ofdeparture is what we know, then the basis for discussion is the fact that nation-states have not been eliminated, nor are they in the process of being eliminated;indeed, we know that national boundaries and national characteristics continueto matter.

Within such a context, the continuing value of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony(the creation and reproduction of a class project) is readily apparent because it isprimarily constituted at the national level, at the level of the nation-state. There aretwo fundamental reasons for this: one theoretical, the other political.

The theoretical reason is that class projects (and their associated class groupings,organic intellectuals, common senses, claims to universality, and so on) are articu-lated in and through the state and thus become hegemonic within nations. This istrue even when such projects have international conditions and effects, when globalfactors contribute to defining the possible and when those who articulate and carryout class projects at the national level aspire to control – through forms of consentor domination – conditions elsewhere in the world.

The political reason is that the nation-state is the primary arena in which classstruggles, struggles over existing and possible class projects, take place. It is the

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space within which politics is practiced. Where class politics combines with,overlaps with, dovetails with – in short, overdetermines and is overdeterminedby – the politics of race, gender, sexuality, knowledge, the environment, andso on. Where a class project becomes hegemonic, enters into crisis, and ischallenged by an alternative class project, an alternative hegemony.

Furthermore: I contend that there is no such thing as global capitalism(although I am willing to countenance the idea of a capitalist globalization).Again, this idea or thesis has both an intellectual and a political dimension.Intellectually, there is no privileged space of capitalism, at least not in the wayMarxists define it. Capitalist class exploitation, the extraction of surplus-value,the productive consumption of the commodity labor power – whatever short-hand we want to use – is neither national nor international, neither local norglobal: not in its concept or in its historical trajectory. It is not the case thatat one time it could be defined nationally (for example, in the eighteenth ornineteenth centuries) and then must be redefined internationally (say, in the last20 years). Nor is it the case that capitalism (whether defined in terms of its classprocesses or their conditions of existence) was at one time an exclusivelynational phenomenon and is now international. This is not to say nothing haschanged, but I return to that important issue below.

Politically, those who seek to challenge capitalism and create other, nonex-ploitative class projects cannot be either nationalist (supporting the regulation ofcapitalism in one nation, in a battle against the success of capitalism or of someparticular class grouping – such as workers – in other nations) or internationalist(in the sense of worrying about conditions in far-off lands and denying theimportance of intervening to shape national realities or attempting to configuremore stable systems of international relations). To do so would be to privilegeone space of capitalism over another. The goal for Marxists is to place classtransformation on the agenda at whatever level political issues are being posed –whether in terms of the closing of a local factory or raising the nationalminimum wage or the formation of the European Union or the negotiation of theprovisions of a new binational or international trade agreement.

In my view, both these themes – the existence of hegemony at the nationallevel and the critique of the notion of global capitalism – challenge the “commonsense,” a sort of conceptual laziness, inherent in contemporary intellectual debatesand encourage us to do some serious rethinking. They prompt us to take a criticallook at the ideas we invoke and use, and reexamine where and how we engage inour politics. They provoke us to develop a better understanding of what it meansto analyze hegemonic class projects in the context of changing historical blocs andwhat our role is in challenging the existing class hegemony and participating in theformation of an alternative hegemony.

The spaces of capitalist globalization

We reconstruct globalization from the perspective of a rethought Marxian classanalysis in the following two ways: in terms of the spatiality of the class

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processes themselves, and in terms of the space within which their conditions ofexistence are secured.

Analyzing the spatial dimensions of class processes is a way of constructingan accounting system that focuses on when and where surplus labor is performed,appropriated, distributed, and received.9 An appropriate point of departure forsuch an analysis is the appropriative class process, which necessitates distinguish-ing between the places where the surplus-value is performed and where it isappropriated. While the performance and appropriation of surplus take placesimultaneously (as labor power is productively consumed in a capitalist enter-prise, whether an office or a factory), they can occur in the same or differentplaces. So while there can be exploitation within one nation (when the nationalsites of performance and appropriation coincide, such as exploitation within theUnited States or Brazil), there can also be exploitation across national boundaries(when, e.g., surplus-value is created in Brazil but appropriated by the capitalistboard of directors in the United States, or vice versa). Therefore, contemporarycapitalism involves different and changing combinations of the spaces ofexploitation.

Moreover, the national sites of performance and appropriation can be addedup. If we sum any set of national appropriations, regardless of where thesurplus-value was performed, we have an indicator of how much capitalistsurplus labor is appropriated by capitalists within one nation from workerswithin that nation and from other locations around the world. Similarly, if wesum the national performances, apart from where the surplus-value is actuallyappropriated, we have an indicator of how much surplus is created in a capitalistform within enterprises located within one nation, some of which may be appro-priated by capitalists in that nation while the rest is appropriated by capitalistslocated in other countries. In this way, we end up with two different indicatorsof the level of capitalist development within a nation, which take into accountboth national and international dimensions of the performance and appropriationof surplus-value. Is contemporary capitalism national or global? It is, at least atthis level of definition, neither – or, if you prefer, a combination of both.

We can expand on this by conducting a similar spatial analysis of the distribu-tions of surplus-value. Thus, surplus-value, once appropriated from the directproducers, is distributed to still others, who provide some of the conditions ofexistence of capitalist exploitation. And, again, we can expect both national andinternational dimensions. For example, surplus-value produced in a Brazilianfactory can be appropriated by the board of directors of a Japanese corporationand, in turn, interest payments be made on a commercial loan from a US bank. Ingeneral, there are many different distributive class payments: inside a nation (tothe state as corporate taxes, to supervisors in the form of salaries, to landlordsas rental payments, and so on) and to occupants of distributive class positionsin other nations (to merchants as price discounts, financial capitalists as interestpayments, to off-shore supervisors in the form of salaries, and so on).

Thus, we have a spatialized account of capitalist appropriative and distribu-tive class processes.10 Based on this account, there are four different ways we

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can analyze the extent to which capitalism is global, that is, we can refer tocapitalist globalization:

• when the conditions of existence of extraction of surplus-value in industrialsites located within one country are performed outside the borders of thatcountry, for example, when goods and services (whether as inputs or outputs)take the form of internationally traded commodities, when money loans aremade across national boundaries, and so on;

• when sites of capitalist exploitation exist within different nation-statesacross the globe;

• when surplus-value that is produced in one country is appropriated in othercountries; and/or

• when surplus-value, wherever it is produced and appropriated, is distributedto individuals or entities in other countries.

These different senses of the international dimensions of capitalism demon-strate both that capitalism has been global (as well as national) from the verybeginning and that the international (as well as national) dimensions of capitalismhave changed over time. This spatialized configuration of capitalist class processesand their conditions of existence leads to new ways of analyzing the changingforms of capitalist globalization and new ways of intervening to transform andhopefully eliminate capitalist class exploitation wherever it occurs.

Thus, for example, we can distinguish two periods of global economic rela-tions: when the global South was deindustrialized (and its exports, often producedin a noncapitalist manner, were inputs into capitalist production in the North) andwhen many of the countries of the global South became reindustrialized (whendomestic markets were protected and the conditions of existence of specificallycapitalist production, often under the aegis of the state, were created). And, ofcourse, once capitalist class processes exist – once surplus labor is appropriated inthe form of surplus-value – the conditions of existence need to be reproduced overtime. Once the capitalist class process exists, the appropriated surplus-value can bedistributed in an attempt (never guaranteed, of course) to secure those conditionsof existence. And, of course, there are struggles not only over the appropriation ofthe surplus-value but also over its distribution. Thus, we need to take into accountnot only struggles between industrial capitalists and productive laborers but alsobetween industrial capital and the state, between industrial capital and financecapital, and so on. Each one of these struggles over the qualitative and quantitativedimensions of the appropriative and distributive class processes is, in Marxianterminology, a class struggle.

Historically, what we have is a process of the widening and deepening ofcapital, the production of absolute and relative surplus-value, in the center aswell as in the periphery. In my opinion, one key mistake many contemporaryobservers make is to conflate neoliberalism with capitalism instead of under-standing that (a) capitalism existed prior to neoliberalism, in the form of what inshorthand we refer to as import-substitution industrialization in the South and

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Fordism in the North and (b) that if neoliberalism refers to anything useful, if itis capable of shedding light on anything instead of shortcircuiting the necessaryanalytical work we need to do, it refers to the changed manner in which theconditions of existence of capitalist exploitation are reproduced, in both theNorth and the South, and thus to the changing flows of surplus-value. It involvesa movement toward more private forms of capitalism with less state ownershipand a decline in certain forms of state provisioning and regulation – although nota decline in state regulation per se. The state, in the Gramscian sense, is noteliminated.

Gramsci and globalization

In any case, this is how those of us involved in the RM project have begun toanalyze the class dimensions of globalization, of capitalist globalization, and ofthe national and international spatial dimensions of capitalist development. Ofcourse, the widening and deepening of capital does not occur spontaneously ornaturally or inexorably. They are the outcomes of specific class projects, of thehegemony of projects to transform society such that the conditions of existenceof capitalist class exploitation are secured.

And this is where the class framework elaborated above shows its shortcom-ings and where Gramsci’s work is invaluable. Gramsci’s theory makes no sensewithout a conception of class (a nonessentialist conception of class, I would add)but the concept of class makes no sense without an understanding of the concrete,contingent processes in and through which the rise of capitalist class exploitationand its social conditions of existence are articulated, naturalized, and made hege-monic. In other words, here we have a way of approaching history that focuseson, that pays respect to, “difference, multiplicity, the specificity of the particular”(Buttigieg 1990: 78). The method that Gramsci suggests and employs eschews allgeneral laws (of the sort that both Croce and Bukharin sought to privilege, andthat form the basis of positivism and metaphysics). Not metaphysical materialismor idealism, “instantly subjecting individual actuality to the requirement of thetotality” (ibid.), as if the general laws were already known, or even knowable, buta more concrete, contingent materialism – along the lines of what Althusserreferred to in his later writings as “aleatory materialism.”11 This is also how Ithink about such concepts as overdetermination – less a general scheme forunderstanding the interconnections of social reality and more a way of clearingthe ground of all metaphysical schemes in order to focus on the particularities ofhistory (including, of course, those of contemporary society).

Herein lies the problem with such terms as global capitalism, neoliberalism,empire, and the like: they are too often deployed to explain all that is happening inthe world (the novelty, the “break” from the past and its governing logic) and tosubsume all particulars into a general scheme, a totalized mapping of the world.This is not what Gramsci refers to in discussing the concept of historical bloc. He isreferring to a totality but not a totalizing logic: his focus is on a concrete ensembleof “historically determined social relations,” a particular configuration of structure

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and superstructure. He is referring to an ensemble that is both the product of socialstruggles and the context within which such struggles take place. This subtends hisattempt to “record history in its infinite variety and multiplicity” (SPN: 428). Inspecifically Marxian terms, Gramsci provides an example of how to look at particu-lar class processes, particular conditions of existence: of culture, of intellectualactivity, social groups, governing alliances, regional differences, and commonsenses, what Buttigieg describes as Gramsci’s “contribution to the elaboration of ananti-dogmatic philosophy of praxis” (1992: 64).

The project of criticism and analysis found in the Notebooks provides us withgeneral concepts that aid our comprehension when they help us make sense ofhow historical blocs are articulated, an understanding that enables us to interveneand change one or another aspect of the particular configuration of relations, and,hopefully, create the conditions for a noncapitalist class hegemony.

This is exactly how those associated with RM think about the Marxianconcept of class. It does not provide a general scheme – of society or history –into which everything else can be subsumed, nor does it aspire to do so. Rather,our focus is on the particular: class defined in terms of surplus labor (not incomeor wealth or lifestyle), which, once distinguished, can be related to otherinstances or aspects of the social totality. We proceed step by step, fragmentby fragment, conceptually and empirically – to come to grips with hegemonicclass projects and the possibility of alternative hegemonies: through criticismand solid class-analytic social and cultural analysis that takes into account theprecautions outlined by Gramsci: “[a] structural phase can be studied concretelyand analyzed only after it has completed its whole process of developmentand not during the process itself, except hypothetically and with the explicitadmission that one is only dealing with hypotheses” (Q7 §24: 174).

The RM project parallels the work Morton (2007b) has been doing on globalpolitical economy and Mexico, using a Gramscian framework to make sense of the“passive revolution” that brought a neoliberal form of the capitalist class project topower in the late 1970s. It is an approach he has elaborated (2006) and defended(2007a) in his debate with Randall Germain (2007) about critical internationalpolitical economy in the journal Politics. Morton expresses his concern that schol-ars of international political economy tend mostly to efface class struggle and thenarticulates what he calls an emergentist theory of class identity as the way forward.In this way he aims to link problems of “subjectivity, identity, and difference” toissues of “materiality, inequality, and exploitation.” He does so by “focusing on thevertical capital–labour relation as well as the more common focus on horizontalrelations between capitals (or inter-capitalist rivalry).”

Further reflection on how we view the historical bloc of social relations, ofclass processes and the state, in movement, is necessary. My own past work hasinvolved analyzing class structures and at least some of their conditions of exist-ence (economic, as well as political and cultural) without a good way of makingsense of the balance of forces, forces in movement, and therefore changing thevery hegemony that exists into something else. In the case of the United States,much of the academic work (in economics and other disciplines) that is being

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done is simply not useful for this purpose. It meets professional standards, andgarners professional accolades but fails to engage the issues (whether in analyz-ing economic conditions, political forces, or intellectual culture) necessary forcriticizing present conditions and analyzing class processes and their conditionsof existence, what they look like and the direction in which they are moving.

Much more important is the work being done by certain nonacademics, suchas Thomas Frank (2005), Kevin Phillips (2003), and Naomi Klein (2007), whodemonstrate, in a way that many of our academic colleagues do not, what itmeans to assume the role of a critical intellectual. Nonacademic intellectuals likeFrank, Phillips, and Klein – in contrast to many academics who, as Gramsciphrased it, “give the impression of someone who is bored, who is kept fromsleeping by the moonlight, and who busies himself slaying fireflies in the beliefthat the brightness will dim or go away” (2007: 177; Q7 §26) – are carrying outthe work that Gramsci initiated. This is the work and the responsibility criticalintellectuals – inside and outside the academy – must take up today.12

Notes

1 Although, as Boothman (1995) reminds us (and as we might expect given Gramsci’srelationship with Piero Sraffa), Gramsci did think and write about economic issues,from the history of economic thought to statistics regarding tax revenues and land-holdings. But Gramscian scholarship, in the United States and elsewhere, has tendedto focus mostly on questions of culture and politics, almost to the exclusion of polit-ical economy.

2 Ruccio (forthcoming) contains many of my essays on the topics of planning, develop-ment, and globalization.

3 One caveat: I refer to Rethinking Marxism, but not everything that is published in thejournal itself is what I would identify as RM work. In fact, only a small portion is. Thejournal project (and, with it, the national and international conferences RethinkingMarxism has sponsored) encompasses a wider orbit of ideas, including over 30 essayson Gramsci and his work. Looking at the journal, one might even call it a Gramscianjournal, certainly in comparison to the relative paucity of writing inspired by or relatedto Gramsci in other left-wing and Marxist journals around the world today. (See theAppendix to Ruccio [2006] for a list of essays related to Gramsci’s life and writingsthat, to that point, had been published in RM. Since that time, RM has published morethan a dozen others.) The reason for this is that, relatively early on, scholars discovereda range of affinities between the work that was being carried out under the rubric ofRethinking Marxism and the contributions Gramsci himself and later Gramscians havemade to the rethinking of Marxism.

4 During 2008, RM celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Much of the history of thejournal is covered in an interview with the editors (Erçel et al. 2008) published in thespecial anniversary issue.

5 See Wolff (1989) for a more detailed discussion of the parallels between Gramsci’swritings and RM’s approach in the areas of epistemology and methodology.

6 For further discussion of Marxian ethics in the RM tradition, see DeMartino (2003)and Amariglio and Madra (forthcoming).

7 I am referring here to boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies, in and throughwhich most of the corporate activity in the United States is conducted. In order to estimatethe total number of capitalists, one would have to add all those who appropriate surplus-value within smaller, both publicly traded and privately owned, capitalist enterprises.

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8 See Boothman (2000) for a subtle and sophisticated interpretation of Gramsci’s use ofthe concepts historical bloc and totality.

9 Other analyses of the spatial configuration of class processes in the RM traditioninclude Ruccio et al. (1990) and Resnick and Wolff (2001).

10 To which we could add, of course, the spatial configurations of noncapitalist – feudal,slavery, communal, etc. – performances, appropriations, and distributions of surplus-value.

11 See, e.g., the discussion of aleatory materialism in Ruccio and Callari (1996).12 I want to thank Joseph Francese for his gracious invitation to participate in the

symposium on “Gramsci Now: Cultural and Political Theory” at Michigan StateUniversity and for his extensive changes to the first draft of my chapter, and col-leagues at the University of Wollongong – especially Charles Hawksley, RichardHowson, and Kylie Smith – who, along with Adam David Morton, gave generouslyof their time, ideas, and hospitality during a workshop on “Globalisation and theHistorical Bloc.”

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12 Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the“national-popular” and socialistrevolution in the Philippines

Epifanio San Juan Jr.

Though in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bour-geoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, ofcourse, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. . . . The workingmenhave no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since theproletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be theleading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is so far itselfnational, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Gramsci has been pronounced “dead” so many times that one suspects theannouncement to be unwittingly premature and question-begging (Day 2005).Of all the Western Marxists, Gramsci is exceptional in being the subject of animmensely burgeoning archive of scholarly studies and the object of furiousworldwide political debates (Rosengarten 1994). Except for the somewhatopportunist inflection of “subaltern” by Derrideans/Foucaultians and the trendyfashion of reinterpreting “hegemony” as pluralist consensus, Gramsci’s thoughtseems useless for postmodernists, including establishment postcolonialists.Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School successfully popularized Gramsci as aninnovative cultural theorist and founded the academic discipline of mainstreamCultural Studies. It was Gramsci’s resurrection in advanced capitalist forma-tions, the birth of what David Harris (1992) calls “gramscianism.” This followedthe Eurocommunist view of Gramsci’s “revolution against Capital” – to quotehis famous article of 1917 – in which the Italian road to socialism (classlesssociety, socialization of crucial productive means) would be won not throughrevolutionary violence but through cultural reform – through education andmoral/ethical persuasion. Communist parties will thus gain hegemony, that is,domination by consent, peacefully or legally.

Communism will win without replacing the prevailing “common sense.” Pre-sented as ideals to be aspired for, and naturalized as “common sense,” the beliefsystem of bourgeois society does not require armies or police; only a finelytuned art, schools and mass media, ideological apparatuses that would do the job(Finocchiaro 1995). From this prophylactic stance of postcolonial scholastics,

Gramsci is seen as a precocious neoliberal avant la lettre, committed to “rationalpersuasion,” political realism, methodological fallibilism, liberal democracy,and pluralism. Something is surely wrong with this picture.

Clearly, history – or, better yet, neoliberal metaphysics exacted a vengeanceon Gramsci’s historicist “good sense.” While reborn as a theoretician of thesuperstructures, civil society, rule by consent, and non-economistic “openMarxism,” Gramsci became irrelevant to socialist revolutions as they wereoccurring in the “Third World.” He had nothing to say to peoples strugglingagainst finance–capital imperialism, old-style colonialism that ruled by bruteforce, or neocolonial rule masquerading as latter-day “civilizing mission,”humanitarian intervention. For postcolonial studies, in particular, the obsessionwith Eurocentrism (the fallacious subsumption of capitalism into an abstractWestern modernity) in the case of Edward Said, as Neil Lazarus (2002; see alsoSan Juan Jr. 2007a) has shown, led soon to the speechless subalterns of GayatriSpivak and the sly mimics of Homi Bhabha. Meanwhile, the logocentricdiscourse of poststructuralism wrought its dire effects on the critique of thenation/nationalism launched by Bhabha and the Australian “high priests” of thediscipline after the collapse of “actually existing socialism.” With nations andnation-states abolished or rendered defunct by the “New World Order” and laterby triumphalist globalization, we are on the way to the heady disjunctures ofArjun Appadurai and the nomadic multitudes of Hardt and Negri’s Empire.Until September 11, 2001 exploded over this academic scenario and overtookour missionary enlighteners who had attended Gramsci’s redundant burials.

We owe it to Benita Parry’s appraisal of the historical-political contextssurrounding the disciplinary formation of postcolonial studies that we can nowbegin to appreciate Gramsci’s relevance to “Third World” social transformations.Parry’s argument on the centrality of Marxist principles (internationalism, perman-ent revolution) in liberation theory actualized in anticolonial revolutions, is salutary.The erasure of socialism and an anticapitalist modernity in postcolonial discoursecoincides with the refusal of a national-democratic stage in anticolonial revolutionsled by a historical bloc of anticapitalist forces. What kind of nation-state do post-colonialists have in mind? Certainly not the Italian nation of 1861 that witnessedthe colonization/annexation of the South through the subjugation of the insurgentpeasant masses, and produced the “Southern question” that Gramsci considereddecisive in carrying out a socialist revolution in the twentieth century (Verdicchio1997). Postcolonialists erase the ugly fact of neocolonized nation-states (thePhilippines, Haiti, Colombia, etc.) resistant to their fantasy of a world-system ofhybrid social formations equal in power and wealth, all inhabited by transnationalconsumer-citizens.

Postcolonial obfuscations

The asymmetry of uneven and combined development distinguishes the structure ofnation-states born in the shadow of finance–capital imperialism. Archaic, feudal,and modern sectors coexist in these societies. The Althusserian idiom of Bhabha

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is revealing when he problematizes the “ambivalent temporalities of the nationspace.” For Bhabha, nationalism is fascism tout court. Ultimately, the culprit is“that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one –” and so,Marxist theories of culture and community defined as holistic, expressive socialtotalities should be repudiated. Unity, solidarity, the multitude envisaged byGramsci as “national-popular” collective will (Jessop 1982) are all anathema,contaminated by bourgeois universalism and other archaic irrationalities.

For her part, Spivak rejects anticolonial revolutions as hopelessly controlledand manipulated by a native bourgeoisie. The colonized subaltern is made notonly speechless but immune to experience. Parry’s comment applies a Gramscianoptic to this fantasized self-erasure:

It dismisses the experiential transformation of the “subalterns” through theirparticipation, and disregards situations where an organic relationship wasforged between masses and leaders sharing the same class interests andrevolutionary goals – there is after all no essential and invariable correlationbetween objective class position and ideological belief or political stance.

(2002: 144)

In short, history as a dialectic of subject–object is denied by postcolonialists forwhom pacified subalterns are speechless or tricky ventriloquists (for Gramsci’sconcept of subaltern, see Green 2002).

With the formalization of canonical postcolonial studies as an academicdiscipline, a reconciliatory attitude seems to have emerged. Stuart Hall’s inflectionof this fetishism of ambivalence or difference is only symptomatic: anti-imperialistopposition, for Hall, must be conceived in terms of “transculturation” or culturaltranslation “destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever” (1996:247). This postcolonialist bias against binarism, telos and hierarchy, as we haveseen, returns us to the question of agency and the role of the subaltern in arevolutionary disruption of the colonial predicament. But, as Parry notes, thisimpulse to find a middle ground between domination and oppression, to describecolonialism as “generically ambivalent,” the site of dialogue and cultural assimila-tion, is both historically mendacious and “morally vacant” (2002: 144). This appliesto the tendentious genealogy of nation/nationalism offered by Ashcroft et al. (1998;see my critique in San Juan 2001). In effect, the nation (and its attendant set ofbeliefs called “nationalism”) is a foul ideological invention, a dangerous myth ofexclusivism, homogeneity, and naturalness. It refuses internal heterogeneities anddifferences. It informs the violence of the nation-state (such as the Stalinist SovietUnion, as well as European imperialism as “an extension of the ideology of a‘national’ formation”) against those who are different, thus making the cause ofnational liberation for oppressed colonies suspect if not hopelessly tainted.

Postcolonialists cannot face the truth of sustained colonial legacies and theirinsidious resonance in everyday lives. As to the notion of the “subaltern,”Ashcroft et al. (1998) cannot but invoke Gramsci’s terminology but not the polit-ical project that motivates it. They elide the whole issue of hegemony (consent

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armored by coercion) and replace Gramsci’s framework with the entirely dis-parate paradigm of the Indian historians’ Subaltern Studies Group (with whichSpivak is affiliated). This group’s primary preoccupation is the criticism of elitesand elite culture in India whose anti-British nationalism worsened the oppressionof the landless peasantry. Consequently, they criticize Marxist class analysiswhich to them ignores the “politics of the people,” and by implication Gramsci’snotion of the popular as a transcendence of economic–corporatist position, and anational-popular culture as a crystallization of the diverse interests/sectors consti-tuting the nation (SCW: 203–212). Their concern with power and authority, withgovernability (a variant of Foucault’s governmentality), displaces the question ofsovereignty vis-à-vis the occupying colonial power. While Gramsci envisionedthe “national-popular” as a process of lay intellectuals expanding and elaboratinga secular “humanism” attuned to the grassroots, for the Subaltern Studies Group,an implacable fissure exists between the nation represented by the native elite andthe people, specifically the peasantry. Gramsci is accused of essentialism, thoughit is unclear how the Indian historians can be credible when they themselves pos-tulate a rigid distinction between the elite and the subaltern, subject-positionswhich are constituted by converging and diverging lines of differences. Again,difference becomes fetishized or reified when Spivak claims to establish afixed incommensurability between elite and subaltern, even canceling the at leastrelational category of dominant/subordinate groups in structural-functionalistsociology. Since the categories of nation and class are rejected, subalternitybecomes mystified or trivialized as all or any kind of subordination removed fromany revolutionary socialist telos.

The habitual imposition of a monolithic grid of difference in postcolonialmethodology sets it apart from a historical-materialist analysis such as thatsubtending Gramsci’s “Notes on Italian History” (1934–1935) in the PrisonNotebooks. It accords with a nihilistic and even cynical skepticism toward anyemancipatory project of overthrowing capitalist social relations of production.For those desiring to change the impoverished and exploited condition of what isnow called the global “South,” it is better to forego Establishment postcolonialstudies and go straight to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (see the lucid expositionof Bellamy and Schechter in Gramsci and the Italian State). The twin issues ofthe peasantry and national sovereignty constitute the blind spot that defines thelimit of postcolonial critique.

In quest of Gramsci

“A new way of being Gramscian” – to quote Pasolini’s (1982) slogan – is toapply Gramsci’s dialectical–materialist (not homological) approach to the taskof popular democratic mobilization against finance capital in specific nationalsettings. I am not interested in deriving axiomatic truths or formulas fromGramsci’s texts. Nor am I interested in ascertaining which text represents the“real” Gramsci among the multiple Gramscis now available (Holub 1992),including the “rightist” Gramsci quoted by neoconservatives. My task here is

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circumscribed: to see how we can deploy or adapt certain modes of analysisinitiated first in Gramsci’s historical studies. I would locate Gramsci’s useful-ness today in the application of precisely the speculative tools he devised earlierin his vocation as a radical activist. One key concept is the “national-popular”and its resonance with the conceptual archive of alliances, anti-corporativism,blocs, ensembles, etc. Following the nuanced approach of Nicola Short (2007)and Stephen Gill (1993) to the historical-materially structured nature of inter-national production in the context of antagonistic core-periphery relations, Iwould argue that Gramsci’s dialectical analysis of class realignments, especiallythe stratified divisions of epochal and conjunctural sequences, would prove mostuseful in elucidating what is involved in the theory of combined and unevendevelopment first formulated by Lenin and Trotsky and explored by activistsin the Marxist tradition. Gramsci is, as Boothman (1995: liii) aptly puts it,“the theorist of the historical bloc” engaged in a concrete analysis of relations/articulations of social forces in a given country at specific conjunctures orperiods for the purpose of calibrating at which exact point human agency canproduce the most decisive transformative effects.

The “Southern question” epitomized for Gramsci the problem of uneven,disarticulated, non-synchronous development carried out by the bourgeois liberalstate. Before Gramsci became a socialist, around 1913, he was a Sardiniannationalist, alienated as he was by the industrial North’s subjugation of thepredominantly rural South. Even when Gramsci became an active socialist intenton constructing a proletarian-led state within the fabric of civil society, he neverstopped insisting on the need to concentrate on the specificity of the Italian situ-ation, its “particular, national characteristics,” compelling the party to assume “aspecific function, a particular responsibility in Italian life” (LP: 4). The premisehere is the forced unification of Italy by the northern bourgeoisie’s subjugation ofthe southern peasantry and the unresolved issue of landed property. What thisimplies is an active program to counter the transformist politics of the liberal statewhich maintained the fragmented social reality of Italy characterized by diver-gent regional traditions, polarized classes and economic disparities. The materialinequalities were reflected, and in turn sustained by, the ideological/culturalincompatibilities between a popular culture of the quasi-feudal, rural areas andthe elite culture of the caste of cosmopolitan intellectuals. To mobilize themasses, a whole program of education and organization of the entire populacewas needed, a pedagogical mobilization led by a political party of the proletariatand its organic intellectuals. New values and ideals were needed to generate acritical consciousness – “unitary” and “coherent” thinking, as he put it – ofthe social situation, together with the ethico-moral imperative for organizedcollective action.

Gramsci had in mind a national-democratic liberation project based on theprotagonism or participatory mobilization of the people that would constitute theemergent nation. What was needed is a mass movement to emancipate the prole-tariat, together with the peasantry, and the establishment of a communist society,the precondition for the full liberation of the individual. This fundamental

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Marxist belief Gramsci enunciated in his articles of 1914 and 1916, “An Activeand Functional Neutrality,” and “Socialism and Culture.” It was specifically inthe 1917 article “The Revolution against Capital” that Gramsci expressed for thefirst time his distinctive Marxist conviction that without organized political willand social consciousness of the people, even the most favorable objective con-ditions of crisis will not lead to revolutionary change. Economic statistics do notmechanically determine politics; it was necessary for people “to understand . . .and to assess them, and to control them with their will, until this collective willbecomes the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality itself ”(LP: 40). In colonial and peripheral societies, historically sedimented divisions ofclass, race, religion, nationality, and so on present more formidable obstacles tomass mobilization. The appeal of national self-determination in such colonialformations as India in the 1920s and 1930s led Gramsci to conceptualize the“national-popular” movement as a powerful agent of revolutionary change(Bocock 1986). The centrality of organic intellectuals and the pedagogical strat-egy of mobilizing the masses is immediately relevant to peripheral societies (suchas the Philippines) where bureaucratic and authoritarian institutions support andare reproduced by patronage, clientelist politics, reinforced by police–militarycoercion and para-military gangsterism and warlordism, all beholden to thedictates of US finance capital.

We owe it to Forgacs’ review of its historical context that Gramsci’s conceptof the “national-popular” has been foregrounded into a site of controversy andrevaluation. While textually faithful in his reconstruction of its genealogy,Forgacs’ renovation is qualified by the British/European political and ideologicalmilieu of the 1980s – the rise of neoconservatism in the UK, North America andthe industrialized nation-states. Like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (againstthe background of the Althusser/Poulantzas/Foucault orbit of dissonance),Forgacs’ chief concern lies in using Gramsci’s idea to transcend economisticMarxism and assert that there is no necessary correlation or link between classand ideology. Forgacs is correct in appraising Gramsci’s concept as integral,fusing the political and cultural, but at the expense of the economic – a termmisconstrued as a separate, independent sphere usually isolated to the “base” inthe misleading couplet “base–superstructure.”

Removing “national- popular” from the underlying historically specific relationsof production in any given society, Forgacs concludes that the notion “recognizesthe specificity of national conditions and traditions” in which multi-sectoral andcross-cultural struggles are strategically linked together to promote commoninterests (1993: 219; compare Hall 1981).

In effect, Forgacs has re-inscribed Gramsci’s idea in the process of “passiverevolution,” or transformism, at the same time as he marginalizes the role of thestate. By detaching the “national-popular” from its Gramscian framework ofsocialist transformation, its link with the abolition of private property and classinequality, in short, an expansive proletarian hegemony, Forgacs confuseshimself and others in wondering how a class alliance can contain a collectivewill, and how such an alliance can become reorganized by bourgeois hegemony.

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This is due to the mistake of using the term “alliance” for a populist, sponta-neous trend that has no will, no purposive direction. Once a collective will isdefined as non-class (in the functionalist sense) since it has transcended narrowcorporatist class interests, then it is impossible to fashion a collective willlacking goals that are defined as simultaneously national and popular. Nationand people (both the discourses and institutional practices associated with theseterms) are class-stratified and acquire coherence by articulation into a hegemo-nized nation-people. Hegemony is not only ethico-political but also economic,given “its basis in the decisive function exercised by the leading group in thedecisive core of economic activity” (Boothman 1995: li). Why this is so fromGramsci’s perspective, can be explained by his own singular understanding of“collective will.”

Beyond idealist hermeneutics

Two earlier texts may illuminate the political condition of possibility for thetheory of the “national-popular” will. The first is the 1916 article “Socialism andCulture.” Here Gramsci defines culture as a creation of humans as products ofhistory, not natural evolution. Culture is:

The organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’spersonality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we cancome to understand our value and place within history, our proper functionin life, our rights and duties.

(Gramsci [1916])

This inventory and ordering of the layers/aspects of one’s self becomes thestaging-ground of class consciousness. Change occurs gradually, through “intelli-gent reflection” of a few, then of a whole class. Revolutionary change comes aboutthrough critical reflection and enlargement of one’s awareness via solidarity orcollective mobilization of the people constituted as nationwide directing agency(Jones 2006).

The formation of a socialist collective will thus results from “a critique ofcapitalist civilization.” Gramsci emphasizes the growth of a collective willthrough critique, through the discovery of the self (ultimately social) as aninventory of traces inscribed by history. Gramsci focuses on the objective orgoal pursued through discipline and order:

Discovery of the self as it measures itself against others, as it differentiatesitself from others and, having once created an objective for itself, comes tojudge facts and events not only for what they signify in themselves, butalso according to whether or not they bring that objective nearer. To knowoneself means to be master of oneself, . . . to emerge from chaos andbecome an agent of order. . . . And one cannot achieve this withoutknowing others, . . . the succession of efforts they have made to be what

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they are, to create the civilization they have created, and which we areseeking to replace with our own.

(Buci-Glucksmann 1980: 348–349)

The labor of acquiring self-knowledge is key to grasping the nation/people as asite of constituting oneself as an agent of change. The dialectical interface ofnation/people found in self-understanding – a form of cognitive appropriation ofthe world – leads to the integral state, thus abolishing the liberal distinctionbetween civil society and state: “State = political society + civil society, in otherwords hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (SPN: 263; Williams1980). Learning has an ultimate emancipatory drive (LP: 11–12). It epitomizesthe “catharsis” bridging economics and politics (ideology). Space limitationsprevent my elaborating on this “catharsis,” the cognitive praxis enacted bythe national-popular subject; as a corrective to the sanitized interpretation ofGramsci (e.g. Germino 1990; see Gedo 1993; Haug 2000; Thomas 2007).

The second text for elucidation is the 1917 article, “The Revolution againstCapital.” Here Gramsci spells out the versatile diagnostic power of historicalmaterialism, “the real, undying Marxist thought” purged of positivist, naturalistincrustations. This Marxism upholds, as the most important factor in history “notcrude, economic facts but rather men themselves, and the societies they create, asthey learn to live with one another and understand one another; as, out of thesecontacts (civilization), they forge a social, collective will.” This collective willunderstands and controls facts, becoming “the driving force of the economy, theforce which shapes reality itself, so that objective reality becomes a living,breathing force, like a current of molten lava, which can be channeled whereverand however the will directs” (LP: 40). Knowledge, will, and practice/action allcoalesce in the collective transformation of social life in a determinate historicalmilieu.

Beyond being a united front tactic, the project of a national-popular ensembleis the project of a mass-based proletarian party constructing hegemony – moral-intellectual leadership – as it confronts “the problems of national life.”Gramsci’s collective will arising from historically determined “popular forces”is premised on “the great mass of peasant farmers” bursting “into political life”(SPN: 132). This event will materialize through a Jacobinist strategy: when theworking class overcomes its “narrow economic–corporative” outlook andincorporates the interests of the peasantry and urban artisans into its ownprogram and praxis. In the “Notes on the Southern Problem,” Gramsci predi-cates the capacity of the proletariat to govern as a class on its success in shed-ding “every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice or incrustation”(1995: 27). While this may be described as an educative, universalizing andexpansive alliance, the strategy does not abandon class – does not break theconnection between ideology and class, as Forgacs et al. (1985) insist. Rather,the class ideology used to dominate the peasantry and other intermediate strata isthoroughly analyzed (as witness Gramsci’s meticulous anatomy of traditional,petty-bourgeois intellectuals, their ethos and worldviews). Gramsci thus asserts

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that aside from getting rid of inherited prejudices and sectarian egoism, theyhave to take one more step forward: they have to think like workers who aremembers of a class that aims to lead peasants and middle classes into a collect-ive project of releasing human potential for the benefit of all; “members of aclass which can win and build socialism only if it is helped and followed by thelarge majority of these social strata” (LP: 28) – the majority – whose subsump-tion by bourgeois leadership serves as the chief obstacle to socialist reconstruc-tion. This process of a generating directed consensus through organicintellectuals who will synthesize the cultural traditions of the whole people is aprocess not only of education but of organization for class war. Proletarianagency is thus universalizing and sublating at the same time. This entails theimperative of further elucidating the purpose of a national-popular alliance andthe goal of constructing a national-popular will.

Again, Gramsci directs our attention to the shifting balance (equilibrium/disequilibrium) of political forces. Given the situation of the South as “a socialdisintegration,” and the peasants’ inability “to give a centralized expression totheir aspirations and needs,” Gramsci notes, the landlords and their intellectu-als (Croce, for example) dominate the political and ideological field. Likewise,the proletariat as a class “lacks in organizing elements,” just as it lacks its ownstratum of intellectuals with a left tendency “oriented toward the revolutionaryproletariat.” With the mediation of intellectuals as organizers, the proletarianparty will facilitate the alliance between peasant masses and the workersprepared to “destroy the Southern agrarian bloc.” The party needs to organizethe masses of poor peasants “into autonomous and independent formations”free from the stranglehold of the “intellectual bloc that is the flexible but veryresistant armature of the agrarian bloc” (1995: 47). Thus the people, not thebourgeoisie nor the Church and its cosmopolitan intelligentsia, will proceed toconstitute the nation by releasing the productive forces needed for a morehumane civilizational project, a new social order.

While the educational–pedagogical task seems a prerequisite, Gramsci doesnot envision an ideological-moral reform as an end in itself, a continuous “warof position” regardless of changed circumstances. Nor does it have anything todo with the numerical weaknesses of the proletariat nor of the fascist monopolyof military reserves and logistics. Rather, the problem Gramsci faced then washistorically dictated by the deleterious moral-intellectual leadership of the fascistbloc enabled by the continuing political and economic subordination of thepeasantry and the failure of the workers and their party in mobilizing them. ForGramsci, one of the ways (specific to Italy but not to all social formations) inbuilding a counter-hegemonic bloc is the cultivation of organic intellectuals thatcan help shape a genuinely democratic national unity (the Italian nation as alegal, formal entity had no real cultural unity rooted in the people’s lives) on thebasis of a unified struggle with the popular forces (peasantry, middle elements).

Before applying Gramsci’s theory of the national-popular strategy to the Philip-pines as a model neocolonial formation, I want to summarize its fundamentalelements:

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1 A national life and field of action is needed for the proletariat to settle firstwith its bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels stipulated in the Manifesto, and asynthesizing historical program based on commonality of experiences willbe used to unify, activate and lead the majority of the population.

2 For socialist revolutionaries to defeat the capitalist bloc and its feudal or semi-feudal supports, the party of the proletariat needs to move beyond sectarian-ism, that is, beyond corporatist/syndicalist tendencies and win the consent ofthe peasantry and middle elements by including their interests/demands in acommon program/platform of action through concessions/compromiseswithout abandoning their humanist, secular principles and the goal of aclassless society.

3 To build such an alliance or historical bloc of subaltern masses under theleadership of the party of the working class, organic intellectuals are neededfor organizing the nation-people, and to supervise the inculcation of discip-line in thinking and action; these tasks aim to generate a collective willinformed by a knowledge of the totality of social relations that is itscondition of effectivity.

4 The field of political mobilization involves civil society and the state institu-tions, without any predetermined approach (as always, an orchestration offrontal assault in a war of maneuver needs to be synchronized with political-legal actions in a war of position); the tactics of mass actions will depend onthe concrete situation and the alignment and balance of political forces inany specific conjuncture. Consent is always armatured with the legitimacyof coercion.

5 The national-popular has a socialist orientation based on internationalistsolidarity, geared to utilizing the scientific and progressive achievements ofall of humanity to improve the material and spiritual well-being of allcommunities and national formations.

Historical triangulation

I will now summarize briefly the political history of the Philippines and sketch themost crucial problems of neocolonial development in the epoch of globalizedcapitalism and the US-led “war on terror” gripping the whole planet. This exerciseis intended simply to illustrate the usefulness of Gramsci’s thesis on the imperativeof a “national-popular” will applied to a colonial/neocolonial formation. While Italyand the Philippines belong to sharply disparate temporal and spatial regions andscales, with incommensurable singularities, one can discern rough similarities. Theprincipal difference, of course, is that the Philippines was colonized by theocraticfeudal Spain for 300 years and by the industrialized capitalist United States fornearly a century. US colonial rule preserved the feudal infrastructure, heightenedethnic divisions (principally between Christian and Muslim), and deepened classinequality by supporting a comprador-merchant class and an army of bureaucraticintelligentsia. After forcibly subjugating the revolutionary forces of the first Philip-pine Republic, it used a transformist “passive revolution” to win the subaltern

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intelligentsia and thus incorporate the peasantry into a colonial order and eventuallya neocolonial setup. It suppressed the birth of a Filipino national-popular will.

The parameters of revolutionary socialist change in the Philippines areclearly drawn by the legacy of its colonial history, first by Spain and then by theUnited States. This resulted in the continuing fragmentation of the country interms of class, language, and religion with deadly consequences (instanced bythe undefeatable Moro separatist struggle). Spain used the Philippines primarilyas a trading post for the galleon trade with China, using natural and humanresources it found, until primitive mercantilism took over in the nineteenthcentury. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philip-pines as a result of tribal conflicts which the Spanish civil authority resolvedmainly by force and partly by concessions to the local chieftains. Unable tooccupy the Muslim territories with its limited resources and personnel, theSpanish colonial administration used this conflict to heighten insecurity andlegitimize their authority. They relied mainly on the friars of the religious ordersto extract tribute from the Christianized inhabitants who were reduced toserfhood or abject slavery.

In time the encomienda system generated a stratum of Spanish landlords who,together with the Catholic Church, maintained a tributary system in which only afew selected natives functioned as petty administrators and bureaucrats. SoSpanish hegemony was tenuous, obtained mainly through the disciplinary regimeof religious practices and institutions. When the children of Chinese and Filipinocreoles or mestizos succeeded in acquiring formal education in schools adminis-tered by the religious orders, and also in Europe, they absorbed liberal ideas thatformed the basis for the nationalist movement which began in the 1870s andripened in the 1898 revolution. But this consciousness of Filipino nationality wasconfined mainly to the artisans and professions led by the ilustrado gentry class.It was not shared by the peasantry who were mobilized in terms of kinship ortraditional loyalty to their village elders; or in terms of affiliation with millenary,chiliastic sects. In time, because of the organizing efforts of the Propagandists(reformist intellectuals, ilustrados, from the classes of rich farmers, artisans andpetty traders) with their ideals of enlightenment rationalism and autonomy, andthe recruitment of the petty landlords–merchants, a hegemonic social bloc ofanticolonialists emerged: the Malolos Republic led by General Emilio Aguinaldo.This signaled the emergence of a Filipino national-popular intelligence andcommunal-oriented sensibility.

A sense of Filipino nationhood founded by the cosmopolitanized petty bour-geoisie with allies in the merchant and small landlord class was aborted when theUnited States suppressed the young Republic in the 1899–1903 Filipino–AmericanWar. The formal republican institutions built on the ruins of Spanish theocracycollapsed when the ilustrado leadership surrendered to the US colonial authority.While the Spaniards used violence armored by Christian evangelization, the UnitedStates occupied the islands with brutal force armored by diplomatic propaganda,the promise of “Benevolent Assimilation” and eventual independence. Usingscorched earth tactics, torture and mass imprisonment, the US killed 1.4 million

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Filipinos, 10 percent of the population. Unable to defeat the Moros (FilipinoMuslims) despite a series of massacres, the US deployed a combination of diplo-matic chicanery, subterfuge and “bribery” to pacify them. Up to the present, USSpecial Forces are still battling the Moros (Muslims living in the Philippines) in theform of the “Abu Sayyaf” terrorist bandit group, a proxy for the massive and moreformidable Moro insurgency forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)and disaffected sections of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (San Juan2007a) who refused to cooperate with the current US-subservient administration.

One can summarize the 50 years of direct US colonial rule as an illustration ofhegemony won initially through military power and stabilized through the twinmethods of bureaucratic coercion and cooptation. When the Philippines wasgranted formal-nominal independence in 1946, the US had set in place anAmericanized privileged minority, an oligarchy of landlords, bureaucrat-capitalists,and compradors that would fulfill US economic needs and global foreign policy.Consensus on elite democracy and the formal trappings of representative govern-ment was obtained through decades of violence, cooptation, moral persuasion, anda whole range of pedagogical–disciplinary methods, with the active collaboration ofthe religious institutions (both Catholic and Protestant). Hence the Philippinestoday is a nation of impoverished peasants and workers, with less than 1 percent of90 million people comprising the middle class and landlord-comprador elite(Lichauco 2005). It is basically agricultural and dependent on foreign investments(lately, on remittance of Overseas Filipino Workers [OFW]), devoid of the fullexercise of its sovereignty (the US has veto power over its military and foreignpolicy). Its political system is characterized by the presence of formalistic liberal-democratic institutions administered by a tiny group of oligarchic families,reinforced by the Church, and a vast military–police apparatus chiefly dependent onUS aid (economic, military, political) rationalized by the US-led “war on terror”(on US support of “low-intensity conflict” [see Agee 2003]). There is as yet nonational-popular will exercising genuine independence, only a subalternized elitewhose ascendancy and survival depend on direct or mediated (via WorldBank–IMF–WTO) US military and political patronage.

The Southern question in the Philippines

Gramsci of course did not directly engage with the process of Westerncolonization of a “Third World” country. However, even though there areconsiderable differences, one can consider the Philippines as analogous to theItalian “southern region” vis-à-vis the US industrial metropolis. The currentmetaphorical use of “North” (industrialized nations; center) and “South”(underdeveloped regions; periphery) in international relations is clearlyindebted to Gramsci’s geographical–economic polarity. To be sure, Gramsci’scategorization of the North–South binary is less economic than sociopoliticaland cultural, in contrast to the orthodox Marxist definition of a nation histori-cally predicated on the existence of a market and a commodity exchangesystem.

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Contrary to orthodox Marxism (Rosenthal and Yudin 1967: 304), whichconsidered the capitalist national market as the basis for nationhood, the sense ofa Filipino nation was born in armed struggle against Spanish theocratic rule andlater against US military aggression. No full-blown commodity market existed ina feudal-theocratic mercantilist order. However, the emergent national identitywas cancelled outright when Filipinos were excluded in the 1898 Treaty of Paris(Spain, militarily defeated, was forced to cede the islands to the US for 20 milliondollars). Laws were immediately promulgated to criminalize anticolonial dissent:the 1901 Sedition Law and 1902 Brigandage Act punished anyone advocatingseparation from the US. The 1903 Reconcentration Act relocated entire ruralcommunities into towns to deny refuge to rebels; the Flag Law, which prohibiteddisplays of the revolutionary flag of the Filipino Republic, was enacted in 1907,the same year when the last revolutionary Filipino general, Macario Sakay, washanged in public. Nationalist discourse and symbols were proscribed, thusdestroying the material practices sustaining the collective spirit of resistance andwill to independence. This period of pacification (1898–1935) involved a variableif shrewd application of force and consent, violence and persuasion, guided over-all by a transformist, “passive revolution” strategy administered by the localoligarchy and its bureaucrats tutored by American overseers.

US colonialism thus applied “transformism” by supplementing coercive tacticswith a long-range strategy of ethnocentric, opportunistic extraction of consent fromthe new subjects (Pomeroy 1970). After Filipino guerilla resistance waned in thefirst decade of the twentieth century, the US established the Philippine Assembly asan auxiliary law-making body under the US-dominated Philippine Commissionappointed by the US President to manage the colony. It was one way of implement-ing the slogan of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the natives proclaimed by PresidentWilliam McKinley in the midst of the violent pacification of the islands under theaegis of the white-supremacist slogan of “Manifest Destiny.” This Assembly servedto co-opt the native elite (elected by at most 3 percent of the population) and defusethe popular agitation for “immediate independence,” a submerged, repressedtendency in the majority of colonial subjects.

A neocolony was born from the destruction of the insurgent nation and thesystematic deepening of divisions among the people (Schirmer 1987). Theprincipal instruments for winning consent were the school system of universalpublic education and the enforcement of English as the official medium ofinstruction, government communication, and mass media. Among progressiveintellectuals, Renato Constantino (1978; see also Martin 2001) was the first tostress the crucial role of the pedagogical apparatus and the modes of theproduction and transmission of knowledge, specifically through the Englishlanguage, in enforcing the allegiance/conformity of the majority of citizenswhose national imaginary has thus been captured and detained. Americaniza-tion of the Filipino through education and cultural domination may be viewedas a kind of “passive revolution” aimed chiefly to defuse nationalist impulsesin the peasantry and working class, and re-channel the energies of the middlestrata of intellectuals–professionals to serve the interests of US policy in Asia

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especially in a time when Japan was rising as an imperial power and revolu-tionary ferment in China and other countries was dangerously looming in thehorizon. Future independence was promised to pacify the nationalist intellec-tuals while recruitment to the Hawaii plantations gave temporary relief tounmitigated misery in the countryside.

In the process of revolutionizing the political and cultural institutions “fromabove,” the US colonial regime also cultivated its own intelligentsia. Politicsimitated the prevailing patronage system binding landlord and tenant. Filipinoilustrados serving the defeated Republic – the educated gentry – were enticed tojoin the colonial administration as teachers, policemen, clerks, and technicalhelp in the bureaucracy; as judges and municipal legislators. One example of atraditional intellectual who participated in this negotiated compromise wasTrinidad Pardo de Tavera. In 1901, Tavera wrote to General Arthur MacArthur,the chief administrator of the military occupation:

After peace is established, all our efforts will be directed to Americanizingourselves, to cause a knowledge of the English language to be extended andgeneralized in the Philippines, in order that through its agency the Americanspirit may take possession of us, and that we may so adopt its principles, itspolitical customs, and its peculiar civilization that our redemption may becomplete and radical.

(Quoted in Constantino 1978: 67)

This stratum of neocolonized intellectuals cemented the tie between theoligarchic elite and the colonial rulers, performing a necessary role in disinte-grating the popular memory of past revolutionary struggle and alienating thiselite from the everyday lives of the masses.

When the Philippine Commonwealth was established in 1935, the Filipinointellectuals who came from the peasantry and working class gathered aroundthe US-sponsored President Manuel Quezon and his program of “socialjustice.” This populist rhetoric re-channeled nationalist impulses toward legalameliorative schemes won as concessions from Washington. The social bloc oflandlords–bureaucrats–compradors funded cultural programs with a sentimentalpatronizing attitude toward the native or aboriginal populace. While writers inthe vernacular gravitated toward more activist left-leaning circles on the fringesof the Communist Party of the Philippines (formed in August 1930), the writersusing English remained “cosmopolitan,” as can be gleaned from this reflectionof a progressive-minded critic, Salvador P. Lopez (written during the Japaneseoccupation circa 1942–1944):

For culture is fluid, volatile, impossible to confine in an air-tight compart-ment; and nothing is truer than that real culture is universal, the exclusiveproperty of no particular nation but of all nations that have intelligence toharness it to their own uses.

(1945: 61)

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Cosmopolitanism Filipino-style lurked astutely behind this left-wing nationalistfigure who eloquently voiced proletarian sentiments in the 1930s and 1940sagainst European fascism and Japanese militarism.

Uneven and combined development

Unlike Italy, then, the Philippines was distinguished as an undeveloped rural-agricultural economy without any heavy industry, under US ideological-moralcontrol and political “tutelage.” Utilitarian and pragmatic norms permeatedthe social habitus of the middle strata. This hegemony flourished due to theacquiescence of the oligarchic bloc of landlords, comprador merchants, andbureaucratic intelligentsia, complemented by overt and covert tactics of violenceand bribery unleashed on the unruly sections of landless peasants, workers, andartisans. Challenged by numerous peasant insurrections and workers’ strikes, UShegemony continues as a compromise setup enforced by juridical-police meansof untenable legitimacy.

Filipino cacique/elite democracy is built on the parasitic dependency of thelocal clients on US military, economic and political assistance. The Philippinesis a polity formally identified as “national” (since the Philippines is recognizedby the United Nations as a “nation-state”) without genuine sovereignty, butonly “popular” on the basis of periodic elections. This is concealed by JohnGershman who, in a historical survey of the country, describes the Marcos dicta-torship as a hybrid of personalistic caudillo rule, aided by technocrats andregional alliances of governors, without any mention of US dependency of thewhole structure validated by bilateral treaties and secret stipulations (1993: 162).

From 1899 up to 1946, the US utilized the Philippines as a source of cheap rawmaterials and labor (the colony began earlier to supply the Hawaii plantations withcontract workers), as well as a military-naval outpost. The semi-feudal system ofland tenure, especially in the sugar plantations, maintained landlord/rentier powerthat shared governance with the comprador merchants in the cities. Clientelismand patronage regulated class friction. More impoverished than before, the peasantmasses staged regular revolts culminating in the numerous peasant uprisings in the1920s, the Sakdal uprising of the 1930s and the Communist-led Hukbahalap rebel-lion of the 1940s. The Moros for the most part followed their tribal chieftains whowere allowed limited local power by the central government. After World War II,the neocolonial government re-located landless peasants, former Huk partisans, tothe southern island of Mindanao, temporarily relieving population pressure andunemployment in the North. The question of land and the demands of the peas-antry eluded the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines because, in aone-sided manner, they gave priority to the issue of formal independence, thussubordinating them to elite politicians like Quezon and abandoning the peasantryto the military, church and landlord private armies. Based on the small urbanindustries (printing, cigar-making, etc.), Crisanto Evangelista and other tradeunionists set up the party with 6,000 members, a few from the peasant sector.Impatient, they tried to skip the necessary stage of winning hegemony in civil

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society, opting mainly for confrontational tactics within a narrow geopoliticalarena. Within less than one year, however, the leaders were in jail and the partycriminalized and substantially dismantled.

James Allen, a leading Communist Party USA functionary, visited thePhilippines in 1936–1938 and helped amalgamate the urban-based CommunistParty with the peasant-based Socialist Party led by Pedro Abad Santos. In hismemoirs, Allen criticizes the limitations of the Filipino Marxists, influenced byanarchist and syndicalist notions absorbed from Spanish progressive intellectu-als rather than from “liberal and radical ideas emanating from the United States”(1993: 27) – for example, the Popular Front perspective. Allen describes thepeasant leaders Juan Feleo, Mateo del Castillo, and Pedro Abad Santos who, incontrast to the Communist Party leaders, emphasized the need for unifying thepeasant and proletarian movements. Even though they were not familiar with thedebates among Western Marxists, at least they paid attention to the “Southern[peasant] question.” With the merger in 1938 of the communists and socialistsinto one Communist Party, the theme of national independence was eclipsed bya “democratic front policy” to oppose the victory of fascism in Europe andJapan. The mediation of Allen and other patronizing mentors displaced the“national-popular” agenda with an internationalist one, thus legitimizing thecontinuing authority of the US-patronized cacique, Quezon, who had terrorizedthe party and persecuted its officials, and only grudgingly tolerated their 1938convention. Proletarian and socialist principles were displaced by the virtues ofentrepreneurial individualism and US-style pluralism, ironically conveyed by atrusted “tutor”/adviser from the US Communist Party.

From a Gramscian point of view, a shift of party policy from the national to theinternational (in Gramsci’s specific case, this was brought about by the need toconfront the rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s) sacrifices the interests of the party’smass base. It subordinates the party to the oligarchy whose defense of elite/caciquedemocracy would conceal their subservience to US authority. The outcome in thePhilippines was disastrous. When the US forces returned in 1945, the axiomatics ofUS imperialism, which disappeared in the struggle against Japanese occupation, hadto be re-learned after the arrest and killing of anti-Japanese Huk (Filipino commu-nist-led) guerillas. A similar situation occurred 30 or so years later when formerleftists made a fetish of “civil society” as an entity separate from the state, followingUS Cold War strategy against the Soviet state. Filipino postmarxists (now flunkeysof the Establishment or ideologues of globalization) glamorized a hypothetical“democratic space” and electoral democracy without any substantive land reformor even token social-democratic improvements during Corazon Aquino’s presi-dency. Meanwhile, Aquino and her successors welcomed US advisers to superviseterrorist and fascist measures against the left, up to inviting US Special Forces tohelp wipe out Moro dissidents. This policy of systematic terror against leftists,nationalists, and indigenous advocates continues under de facto president GloriaMacapagal Arroyo, with over 1,000 extra-judicial killings (also designated byhuman rights monitors as “summary executions”) and enforced disappearancessince 2001.

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Again, Gramsci’s lesson here is clear: replacing the need for an anti-imperialist“national-popular” bloc fighting for genuine national sovereignty, and thedemocratization of social property to abolish class privileges, means abandoningthe entire socialist project. It is a formula for defeat.

During the Marcos dictatorship (1972–1986), the revolutionary project ofbuilding socialism through a worker–peasant alliance took the form of a unitedfront – the National Democratic Front (NDF) agenda initiated by a party estab-lished under “Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tsetung Thought.” Established in April1973, the NDF sought to fight Marcos’s authoritarian-martial rule through thetransitory alliance of the proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and thenational bourgeoisie in a national-democratic revolution – a people’s war gearedto forming a democratic coalition government (on the postwar elite, see Agoncilloand Guerrero 1970: 670–671). According to the 1985 draft program, the NDF

Provides a framework and channel for the unity and coordination of allgroups and individuals adhering to, and advancing, the general line of fight-ing for national liberation and genuine democracy. It wages armed struggle –specifically a people’s war – as the principal form of struggle at this stage ofthe Philippine revolution; but it also recognizes the importance of otherforms of struggle, and in fact combines and coordinates the armed strugglewith all types of clandestine and open, non-legal and legal struggles.

(National Democratic Front Secretariat 1985: 5)

In later elaborations of this program, one finds the “armed struggle” accentuatedas the primary form of struggle nationwide, taking pride of place over all theother forms. The first item in the 12-point general program reads: “Unite theFilipino people to overthrow the tyrannical rule of US imperialism and the localreactionaries.”

Clearly, the NDF may have sidetracked, at certain conjunctures, the primacyof the armed struggle in favor of peace negotiations with the government begin-ning with the Hague Joint Declaration of 1992 (NDFP 2006). Combined witharmed political mobilization, I see these negotiations as an astute move of theNDFP to build public consensus on the most crucial issues of land reform, socialjustice, and sovereignty. This is an opportunity denied to it except in theliberated zones where the New People’s Army (NPA) exercises precariousascendancy. However, the NPA cannot win consent in the domain of civilsociety (including the economic sphere) unless its program is translated intocommunity-wide practicable agendas. But the drive for winning consent(through a wise strategic balancing of frontal assault and positional warfare)seems premised on a mechanical reading of the prevailing social productionrelations (not just the economic base, in the conventional sense). For example,there is a recurrent stress on the developing crisis as engendering the imminentcollapse of the regime. Conversely, there is a belief that a spontaneous outburstof mass action may precipitate revolutionary victory, ahead of any nationwideacceptance of the legitimacy of the NPA as the liberating people’s army.

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Whereas Gramsci proposed that what is decisive is moral-intellectual leadershipof the historical bloc of social forces subtending the people’s army, a leadershipwhich does not passively anticipate crisis breakthroughs but in fact prepares theground for such direct confrontations. In addition, the forces of the ruling blocneed to be sufficiently demoralized, disaggregated, and decapitated of itsintellectual-moral leadership before proletarian hegemony can be assured.

Toward clarifying the problem of transition

The problem of the national-democratic transition to socialism in the Philippineshas been surrounded with the endless and often futile debate on the mode ofproduction, in particular, whether feudalism or capitalist social relations obtain.Numerous volumes have appeared contradicting Sison and De Lima’s (1998)thesis of the Philippines as a semi-colonial and semi-feudal formation. Forexample, Ben Reid (2000) argues that the Philippines is now overdetermined byrent capitalism which is more vulnerable to urban insurrections, therefore apeasant-based insurgency is no longer valid or tenable as a revolutionary strat-egy. This kind of empiricist-positivist thinking is what Gramsci warns us toreject when he states: “it is not the economic structure which directly determinesthe political action, but it is the interpretation of it and of the so-called lawswhich rule its development” (quoted in Bobbio 1979: 33). And for Gramsci,such laws in Marxism are tendential laws that are historical, not methodological,because they always beget unpredictable countervailing forces. “Economiccontradiction becomes a political contradiction” and economic law passes intopolitical strategy (Bensaid 2002, 283).

Statistics proving uneven and combined development in neocolonial formationslike the Philippines can be interpreted to serve either progressive or reactionarypurposes; they cannot by themselves propose a revolutionary strategy. A leader-ship formation is needed. Gramsci writes that the mythical “modern Prince” (van-guard political party) is a creator or initiator, basing itself “on effective reality”which is not something static or immobile, but rather “a relation of forces incontinuous motion and shift of equilibrium.” Hence, normative ethical judgmentand realistic critical analysis fuse in political action: “What ‘ought to be’ is there-fore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality,it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics”(SPN: 171). The ascendancy of the national-popular will as the sign of accom-plished hegemony does not hinge on the resolution of the feudal-or-capitalistdebate but on the meticulous analysis of the balance of political forces, that is, ontheorizing the alignment and conflict of social blocs on the terrain of a specifichistorical formation.

The Philippines is indeed a complex test case for any revolutionary socialistpolitics removed from its European provenance. In such a highly differentiatedpolitical economy with divisions and fragmentation on every level, what isimperative is precisely an inventory of social-political forces. For there to be arevolutionary change there has to be a national-popular movement in which

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masses will be “led to think coherently and in a unitary manner an existingreality” (Fontana 1993: 45). This critical and coherent practice of understandingis expansive, moving beyond sectarian, corporatist or parochial views.Gramsci’s strategy of striving for a national-popular bloc is premised on thenotion of catharsis, the dialectic of the war of position and the war of maneuver,neither one nor the other but always contingent on the highly mutable balance ofpolitical forces:

The term “catharsis” can be employed to indicate the passage from thepurely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, thatis the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the mindsof men. This also means the passage from “objective” to “subjective” andfrom “necessity” to “freedom.”

(SPN: 366)

In short, proletarian class ideology becomes universalized; it becomes thenation-people’s “common sense,” pervading everyday life. All these have beenprefigured in the emphasis Gramsci laid on the need for self-inventory, ordergained from self-discipline, knowledge of social relations, and collective will inthe essays I have cited earlier.

Failure to heed this dialectical analysis of the ever-shifting equilibrium ofpolitical forces, which is essentially a symptom of positivistic or dogmatic think-ing, has led to catastrophes in the past. Most notable is the prediction by theleadership of the Huks in the 1950s that the neocolonial regime would collapsebecause of the sharpened crisis of international capitalism (Dalisay 1999: 116).This error stems from ignoring the form of the state being challenged and theexisting balance of political forces, allowing the supposed transnationalization ofproduction and finance to dictate the terms of the national-democratic struggle. Itis the current malady afflicting anti-globalization “leftists” who consider thebattle against the IMF/World Bank/WTO as more important than fighting theruthless fascist acts of the US–Arroyo regime. The other lesson in ignoringthe problematic of achieving hegemony via a national-popular bloc may be foundin the CPP/NDF’s boycott of the “snap elections” of February 1986, a mistakedue (to quote the official explanation) to the mechanical analysis in terms of classstandpoint and subjective intentions, without taking into account “the objectivepositioning of each of the political forces in motion and in interaction withothers” (Schirmer and Shalom 1987: 384). But that self-criticism does notmention at all where and how the protagonism of the masses will intervene in theconjuncture.

With the demise of the Soviet system and the proliferation of Western-fundedNGOs (Non-governmental organizations) in the civil society of “Third World”countries, Gramsci was discovered as a quotable sage. In the Philippines, the“new social movements” opted for US-promoted electoral democracy instead ofsocialism or national independence. In this milieu, Gramsci’s notion of engagingthe state from bases within civil society was refunctioned to resolve the crisis of

Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” 181

left-oriented political forces. It was purged of its historically realist theorems(see Jaluague 1993). The Filipino “civil-society” advocates were dutifully silentabout US imperial plunder of the Philippines and the utter subservience of itsrapacious local agents to the Washington Consensus. Thus Gramsci is instru-mentalized to deflect attention away from the lack of national sovereignty, thefragmentation and anomic decay of society, and the unprecedented impoverish-ment of the masses – a majority of Filipinos subsist on $2 a day – and theendemic unemployment, which explains why eight out of ten households arestricken with hunger (Lichauco 2005; Oliveros 2008), and why between nineand ten million Filipinos are exploited migrant workers in over 200 countriesaround the world. This use of Gramsci was surely an exercise in tendentiousextrapolation at the tail of the Cold War when neoliberal themes/sloganspurveyed via privately funded NGOs led by managerial technocrats flourished.Gramsci’s hegemony was equated with radical democracy, all struggle beingreduced to the ideological realm (Wood 1986). In fact, the call for hegemony(construed as electoral supremacy) eclipsed and erased the call for revolution,for people’s war. This is of course a prelude to the trendy, chic sectors of theanti-globalization movement embodied in the World Social Forum and itseclectic, opportunist accommodationism.

Imperial terror contra revolution

Immediately after September 11, 2001, the Philippines was declared the “secondbattlefront” after Afghanistan in the “war on terror” (Tuazon 2002). In October,Secretary of State Colin Powell classified the CPP and the New People’s Armyas “terrorist” organizations, clearly revealing the normative unilateral criterionof “terrorist” as any group or individual that opposes US imperial policies andits effects. President Bush dispatched thousands of US Special Forces andMarines to pursue members of the Moro guerilla contingent called “AbuSayyaf,” actually a kidnap-for-ransom gang, alleged to be Al Qaeda followers.The informed public in the Philippines already knows that this group was set upby government military/police, local politicians and businessmen to split up theMoro revolutionary camp and also channel ransom money into their privatebank-accounts (Vitug and Gloria 2000; International Peace Mission 2002).Notwithstanding this truth, the Bush regime utilized the brutal 1899–1903 colo-nial pacification of the islands to justify sending US troops to the Philippines asan example of the US spreading democracy and freedom to benighted lands athorrendous costs for both Americans and Filipinos (Katz 2004; Kolko 1976).

There is no doubt that US policies of hegemony succeeded in making thePhilippines one of the first genuine neocolonies on the planet. Concluding hishistory of Philippines in the twentieth century, Renato Constantino states thatafter the 1946 grant of formal independence, “the culture, the institutions, thesciences and the arts that evolved only served to confirm in the minds of orthodoxFilipinos the need for some form of dependence on the United States” (1975:393–394). Lichauco contends that “the contradiction between colonialism and

182 E. San Juan Jr.

nationalism remains the principal contradiction of Philippine society” (2004; seealso CENPEG 2005; Bauzon 1991).

Consequently, parasitic on US support, the Filipino ruling bloc has neverreally won hegemony over the nation-people. Like the previous administrationsfrom day one of the Republic up to the present, the Filipino elite has neverenjoyed the full and total consent of the governed, as witness the uninterruptedpeasant rebellions in the first 50 years of the last century, as well as the periodiceruptions of Moro antigovernment resistance. Even after the end of Marcos’s“constitutional dictatorship,” the military and police apparatus of the neocolonialstate continues to be fully deployed both against the communist guerillas andthe Moro insurgents – the Moros in fact receiving worldwide recognition of itslegitimacy by the Organization of Islamic Conference. Class war persists in bothits positional and confrontational dimensions, across ethnic, sexual, and regionalheterogeneities (Eadie 2005).

Despite their unflagging struggle against fascist violence in defense ofpeople’s rights and welfare, the NDF, CPP and NPA are branded as terrorists byall those who succeeded Marcos. At present, the Arroyo regime has beenaccused of unprecedented and massive extra-judicial killings and abductions ofover 1,000 citizens, priests, lawyers, journalists, human-rights advocates, laborunion leaders, women, and activists from “civil society.” Amnesty International,the UN Special Rapporteurs, World Council of Churches, Human Rights Watch,and others have all agreed that Arroyo’s government, in particular the US-funded and supervised Armed Forces of the Philippines and the National Police,are all guilty or complicit with those crimes. In March 2007 at The Hague,Netherlands, the Permanent People’s Tribunal held a trial of the US–Arroyoregime and found it guilty of “crimes against humanity,” a judgment conveyedto the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the International Court ofJustice (San Juan 2007b). It would be logical to conclude then that followingGramsci, the war of maneuver, frontal assault, may be considered appropriate(as it was in Russia in 1917), especially if the state (military-police power) waseverything and civil society “primordial and gelatinous” (SPN: 238). But is thatthe case in the Philippines today where, behind the army and bureaucracy, thetrenches and fortifications of civil society – church, media, schools, etc. – havealready been taken over by the national-popular bloc, the alliance of workersand peasants? If so, then the revolution has won. If not, we need to go back tothe mass grass-roots organizations and reassess our frameworks, paradigms,conceptual tools, and experiences.

We may sharpen our inquiry further. While the situation may be crisis-riddenand Arroyo deprived of majority support in “civil society,” has the working classparty achieved hegemony in that realm? Apart from the current logistical weak-ness and decreased size of the NPA (the Moro insurgents, though massive andwell-equipped, appear to be plagued with leadership problems), the CPP andother left-leaning or socialist-oriented groups have not yet fully attained“national-popular” stature. That is, their leaders and intellectuals have not yetachieved that “organic cohesion in which feeling–passion becomes understanding

Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” 183

and thence knowledge,” precisely that moment when they can be said to berepresentative insofar as a “shared life” exists “which alone is a social force . . .the ‘historical bloc’” (SPN: 418). We do not yet have proletarian-oriented“common sense” operating in everyday social life. In other words, the historicalbloc of national-popular forces has not been realized as yet, despite the utterlycorrupt, mendacious and criminal actions of the illegitimate president. The neo-colonial state survives by virtue of superior military-police organization (thoughrent by factional in-fighting, as attested to by several mutinies in the last decade,which persist up to now), the inadequacy of its challengers, and sheer psycho-cultural inertia. Above all, the neocolonial state is able to function with asemblance of normality (though quotidian life is replete with emergency episodesand punctual ruptures) because of unremitting US support. Aside from USmilitary-political aid, the elite is able to survive because of the $12–14 billionannual remittance of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers), enough to pay thegrowing foreign debt and fund the irredeemably corrupt bureaucracy andmilitary-police apparatus.

Globalizing the nation?

Viewed from the neo-Gramscian perspective of international political economists(Gill 1993; Bieler and Morton 2003), we need to take account of the current worldorder, the appearance of trends such as “the new constitutionalism” and “discipli-nary neoliberalism.” Future research should take into account the “recomposition ofstate-civil society relations” that generate new structures of exploitation, forms ofclass-consciousness, modes of resistance and class struggle (Bieler and Morton2003). World-systems analysis has to be supplemented by a historical-materialistcritique of mutable forms of political subjectivities generated by new innovativeforms of commodification and marketization of both private and public spheres, aswell as the corresponding changes in the planet’s bio-eco system (Gill 1993).

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony operating through the historic bloc of thenational/popular conceptualizes the idea of socialist revolution as a transformationin the relation of political forces. Protracted people’s war, if it is not just a carry-over slogan from the Chinese experience, needs to be judged as a tactic, not along-range strategy of political struggle where the land problem coexists withinthe question of neocolonial dependency. “People’s war” also needs to concede ifnot incorporate the more urgent demand for Moro self-determination within itsparameters. Within the dual perspective that Gramsci applies to the revolutionaryprocess, the military moment of a relation of forces – the moment of maneuver orfrontal assault – must be located within the unity of the whole formation and thecomplex relation of the elements within it. Gramsci warns us that it is foolish to befixated by a military model since politics must have priority over its militaryaspect: “only politics creates the possibility for maneuver and movement” (SPN:232; Sassoon 1980).

Notwithstanding the primacy of class struggle in historical materialism, thepeople-nation (mainly in the “Third World”/global South) remains the pivotal

184 E. San Juan Jr.

agency for a strategy against finance–capital imperialism. The people (prefiguredby the revolutionary worker–peasant alliance) and the emergent nation endowedwith critical universality (Lowy 1998) remains the dual thematic and narrativevectors of any socialist praxis in neocolonized formations. In the case of thePhilippines, as long as the peasantry, rural middle stratum, and indigenouscommunities remain the base of landlord–comprador power, and therefore ofbourgeois (US and local capitalist–bureaucrats) control, the insurgency in thecountryside will always be an irrepressible part of the “civil society + political-ideological domain” (the integral state) which is the paramount terrain of thenational-democratic struggle (Q2 §6: 763–764). Again, we need to be remindedthat civil society includes the economic sphere lest everything be reduced to thecultural or ideological realm. The immiserated countryside and its urban exten-sions continue to serve as the reservoir for the millions of migrant contractworkers who now remit billions of their earnings, enough to pay the country’shuge foreign debt to the World Bank and financial consortiums. And as long asthe Philippines is a deformed or inchoate “nation-state,” without real sovereignty,the nationalist project-global decolonization as “the most significant correlate ofUS hegemony” (Arrighi 1993) remains pivotal and decisive in socialist trans-formation. Without the Filipino nation-people, there is no agency to carry out thesocialist revolution in a neocolonial location. Without the national-popular, therecan be no historical specificity to analyze, no particularity to authenticate theuniversal drive of global socialist transformation of the global capitalist system.By grasping the full implications of Gramsci’s “national-popular” as applied tothe historicized formation of a neocolony like the Philippines, by exploring itsheuristic and explanatory value for socialist goals, we may be able to find themost fruitful way of being Gramscian in this new millennium of imperial terrorand impending planetary ecological disasters.

Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” 185

Works cited

A note on the Italian and English editions of Gramsci’swritings quoted in this volume

There exist a number of editions of Gramsci’s writings; those directly cited inthis volume are referenced in the following manner:

LC – the critical edition of Gramsci’s Lettere dal carcere edited in 1996 by AntonioSantucci (Palermo: Sellerio Editore).

LP – Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, edited by Frank Rosengarten and translated byRaymond Rosenthal in 1994 (New York: Columbia University Press).

PN – the first three volumes of the critical English edition of the Prison Notebooks (orNotebooks), edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, vol. 1, 1992; vol. 2, 1996;vol. 3, 2007 (New York: Columbia University Press).

Q – the first complete and critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, edited byValentino Gerratana in 1975 (Torino: Einaudi). This edition is at the basis of mostGramsci scholarship today. All references to this edition will include indication ofthe notebook (Q), followed by the paragraph quoted (designated by §, followingGramsci’s original annotations) and a specific page indication. This allows thereader to consult any of the existing critical editions in different languages (French,German, Portuguese, Spanish, and English), all of which follow the numeration ofthe notebooks and individual notes established by Gerratana. It also makes it pos-sible for the reader to locate the cited notes in the different volumes of “selections”from the Prison Notebooks published in English by using the concordance preparedby Marcus Green for the International Gramsci Society – online, available at:www.internationalgramscisociety.org/ resources/concordance_table/index.html.

QM – La questione meridionale, edited by Franco De Felice and Valentino Parlato in1996 (Roma: Editori Riuniti).

SCW – Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs andGeoffrey Nowell-Smith in 1985 (London: Lawrence and Wishart).

SPN – Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated byQ. Hoare and G.N. Smith in 1971 (New York: International Publishers).

SPW1 – Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920), edited by Quintin Hoare, andtranslated by Joseph Mathews in 1977 (New York: International Publishers).

SPW2 – Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926), edited and translated by QuintinHoare in 1978 (New York: International Publishers).

The website of the International Gramsci Society (www.internationalgramscisociety.org) also hosts an index compiled by John Holst and Marcus E. Greenwhere it is possible to locate citations from the different volumes of “selections”from Gramsci’s pre-prison writings in Italian and in English translation.This may be found online, available at: www.internationalgramscisociety.org/resources/pre-prison-index/index.html

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Index

Abad Santos, P. 178Abu Sayyaf 174, 182Agee, P. 174Agnelli, G. 72, 73, 78n4Agoncillo, T. 179Aguinaldo, E. 173Ahmad, A. 99Ahmadinejad, M. 26Al Qaeda 182Alexander, J.C. 95n4, 95n5Ali, T. 116Alighieri, D. 23Allen, J. 178Althusser, L. 10, 17, 148, 159, 164, 168Amariglio, J. 161n6Amelio, G. 110, 114Amendola, G. 139American Revolution 88Americanism 73–4, 76, 78n1, 78n3, 78n4,

79n6Amnesty International 183antiessentialism 150Appadurai, A. 164Aquino, C. 178Aristotle 59, 88Arnold, M. 9Aronowitz, S. 4Arrighi, G. 185Arroyo, G.M. 178, 181, 183Ashcroft, B. 165Association of Community Technical Aid

Centres 46Association for the Taxation of Financial

Transactions to Aid Citizens (ATTAC)104, 108

Asthana, A. 41Auerbach, M. 90Aufhebung 58, 65Augustine, St. 88

Aximov, V. 14Axis Powers 103

Bachrach, P. 92Baker Jr., H.A. 116Bakker, I. 102Baratz, M.S. 92Barbano, F. 54Barilli, B. 122Bauzon, K.E. 183Bellamy, R. 22, 30, 166Bellini, V. 112–13Bensaid, D. 180Berlusconi, S. 118–19Bernstein, E. 65Bertolucci, B. 110, 114Beverley, J. 106Bhabha, H. 164–5Bieler, A. 184Bionatur 109n4Birmingham Centre for the Study of

Culture (Birmingham School) 110, 163Blake, W. 42Bobbio, N. 180Bocock, R. 168Bolshevik: Party 7, 8, 11, 14, 18;

Revolution 15, 81Bonapartism 27, 32n10Bondanella, P. 114Boothman, D. 23, 161n1, 162n8, 167, 169Bordiga, A. 11Bossi, U. 135Bourdieu, P. 39–40Brennan, M.C. 32n11Brennan, T. 21, 24Brzezinski, Z. 31Buchanan, P.J. 21, 82, 83–4Buci-Glucksmann, C. 32n8, 169–70Buck-Morss, S. 147

Buckley Jr., W.F. 29, 84Bukharin, N.I. 7, 15, 54–5, 67, 76, 79n6,

127–9, 150, 159Bush, G.W. 11, 29, 30, 117, 119, 182Buttigieg, J.A. 5, 21, 31n3, 32n9, 33, 50,

53, 81, 83, 117, 119–20, 159, 160

Cable News Network (CNN) 121Caesarism 27, 32n10Caldwell, B. 1Callari, A. 147, 162n11Cammett, J. 31n1, 81Cardia, M.R. 50catharsis 170, 181Center for People’s Empowerment in

Governance (CENPEG) 183Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 99Chakravarty, D. 116Chatterjee, P. 110, 116Chávez, H. 25–7, 32n7, 103, 105Chomsky, N. 30Christianity 82–3, 88–90, 95n3, 126civil society 1, 5, 10, 11, 13, 21, 25,

26–30, 31n3, 32n8, 70, 74, 80, 82–3, 87,94, 96n6, 164, 167, 170, 172, 178, 179,181–5

Civil War (US) 80Clark, J. 104Clark, M. 72, 80class 4, 35–7, 40–3, 46–8, 145–62,

163–85; analysis 4, 140, 148, 152, 166;consciousness 5; dominant 5, 25, 27,134; dominated 134; economic 149;inequality 3; leading 27; processes 151;structures 145, 147, 152; working 2

Clinton, W.J. 28, 83Cocco, G. 147Cold War 16, 148, 178, 182collective worker 70, 75–7, 78, 79n6colonialism 3, 164–5, 175, 182–3Comintern (Communist International) 7,

11, 138common sense 4, 5, 9, 10, 18, 25, 30, 31,

111–12, 115, 120–1, 122–33, 150, 153,154–6, 160, 163, 181, 184

Commonwealth Business Council 104Communism 8Communist movement 8, 14Communist Party of France (PCF) 16Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 11Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) 8, 10,

34, 69, 135, 139–49Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)

181, 182–3

Communist Party of the Soviet Union 138

Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA)16, 178

Confédération générale du travail (CGT)16

Conservatism 31, 32n11Constantino, R. 175, 176, 182Constitution (US) 86Cook, S.D. 90Cooper, J.F. 82Crehan, K. 3, 49n5, 49n12, 144Crick, B. 90Croce, B. 5, 29, 51, 52, 58, 60–1, 65, 68n4,

77, 125, 127–8, 135, 144, 171Cultural Studies 31, 163

Dahl, R.A. 87–8, 92–3Dainotto, R.M. 5, 53Dal Pane, L. 58Dalisay, J.Y. 181Day, R.J.F. 163de Bonald, L.G.A. 92De Felice, F. 135De Lima, J. 180de Maistre, J. 92de Man, H. 76–7de Tocqueville, A. 24, 72, 88del Castillo, M. 178DeMartino, G. 148, 161n6democracy 80, 83, 92–4, 96n6Democratic centralism 19Democratic Party (US) 11Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) 16Denning, M. 5, 23Derrida, J. 148, 163Di Muzio, T. 102Diggins, J.P. 50direction (direzione/dominio) 9, 84, 87, 94,

95Dirlik, A. 148diversity 83, 84, 86, 89Doane, M.A. 118Donadio, R. 83Dubrueil, H. 78n2Dyer-Witheford, N. 148

Eadie, P. 183Eagleton, T. 84education 4, 5, 8, 10–13, 17, 18, 70, 71,

72, 77, 78n1, 163, 167, 171, 173, 175Elphick, C. 43Empire 159

200 Index

Engels, F. 14, 32n5, 53–6, 61, 64–5, 67,79n6, 89, 148, 163, 172

English Revolution 88Erçel, K. 148, 161n4essentialism 166ethical state 70Eurocommunism 163European Parliament 183Evangelista, C. 177

factions 87–90, 95, 95n5factory councils 5, 70, 72–7factory occupations 11, 69, 70, 75, 78n4Falk, R.A. 102fascism 78n4, 80, 103, 138, 141, 165, 177,

178fascist regime 2feasible utopias 108–9Federici, S. 102Feleo, J. 178feminism, radical 84Fergnani, F. 56Ferguson, N. 99Ferri, E. 54FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili

Torino) 72, 73, 78n4Filipino–American War 173Fine Arts (Beaux Arts) 37Finelli, R. 65–6Finocchiaro, M.A. 57, 163Fiske, J. 31, 116folklore 111–12, 115, 120–1, 122, 124,

127, 129Fondazione Istituto Gramsci 20, 31n1Fontana, B. 4, 85, 94, 96n6, 181Fonte, J. 82–4force (coercion, violence) 80, 90, 93–4Ford, H. 72, 73, 78n2, 78n3Fordism 70, 72–4, 76, 78n1, 79n6Forgacs, D. 32n10, 168, 170Fortunato, G. 136Fortune 500 152, 161n7Foster, J.B. 99Foucault, M. 21, 148, 163, 166, 168Fovel, M. 78n4Fox News 121Frank, T. 161Frankfurt School 7Free Form Arts Trust 34, 37, 42–8, 48n1,

49n9, 49n11free trade 147French Communist Party (PCF) 16French Revolution 9, 12, 15French Socialist Party (PSF) 16

Freudianism 78n1Frosini, F. 50, 51Fukuyama, F. 97

G-7 99, 101, 102G8+5 101Garfield, E. 31n1Gedo, A. 170Geertz, C. 143Gell, A. 41Gentile, G. 56, 58, 60–1, 67, 128, 130Germain, R. 160German Left (Links) Party 17Germino, D.L. 144n3, 170Gerratana, V. 65Gershman, J. 177Giasi, F. 31n1Gibson, M. 135Gibson-Graham, J.K. 146Gill, S. 4, 97, 100, 101, 102, 109n1, 167,

184Ginsborg, P. 118–19globalization 4, 97, 99, 104–6, 145–8,

155–61, 161n2Gloria, G. 182Goldberg, M. 32n12Golding, S. 50, 67Goldsmith’s College of Art 48n2Goldwater, B. 29good sense 4, 9, 10, 18, 122–33, 164Goodrich, M. 34, 43, 48n2Gorter, H. 11Gorz, A. 18, 19n3Gowan, P. 99Gramsci, Julca Schucht (Giulia) 23;

Gramscianism 163grand politics 90, 95Great Depression 80Green, M. 165Guerrero, M. 179Guha, R. 116Gulf War 147Guttmann, A. 90

Habermas, J. 96n6Hall, S. 23, 33, 110, 115–16, 163, 165,

168Hamilton, A. 4, 86–9, 94, 95n4, 95–6n5Hardt, M. 84, 96n7, 100, 164Harootunian, H. 111Harris, D. 163Hartz, L. 90Harvard University Press 8Harvey, D. 98, 102, 120–1

Index 201

Haug, W.F. 170hegemony 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 21–2,

26–8, 30–1, 32n8, 74, 78, 80, 82, 84–5,89–91, 94–5, 95n2, 123, 124, 127, 128,130–2, 133, 141, 142, 145, 147, 152–6,159–60, 163, 165, 168–70, 173–4, 177,180–5

Herbart, J.F. 63Herman, E.S. 30high culture 95n3Hill, J. 77Hilton, P. 210, 21historical bloc 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 18, 26,

99–101, 132, 145, 152–5, 156, 159–60,162n8, 163–85

historical materialism 3, 5, 7, 9, 52–4,56–67, 98, 128, 143–4

historical materialist method 4Hobbes, T. 87Hobsbawm, E. 20–1, 31n2, 31n3Hollinger, D. 84Holub, R. 166homo faber 70Human Rights Watch 183Hume, D. 87Hunter, J.D. 95n2

idealism 51, 55–7, 60–1, 64–5, 67;Hegelian 144; idealist philosophy 56,60–1

Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty 103, 104identity politics 84, 86, 89, 91ideological superstructure 1, 5, 70, 74,

164, 168, 181ideology 5, 25, 32n13, 122–33, 165, 168,

170, 181Ikenberry, G.J. 99imperialism 147, 164–5, 178–9, 182–5Industrial Workers of the World 77intellectuals 2, 3, 4, 5, 8–9, 18, 33–7, 111,

114–20, 122–4, 130–3, 149, 153, 160,161, 166–8, 170–3, 175–6, 178, 180,183; hegemonic 13; new 13; organic 2,13–14, 35–7, 42, 47–8, 82–3, 86, 94,95n2, 154–5; professional 7; traditional7–10, 35–6, 39, 42, 48, 116

International Court of Justice 183International Monetary Fund (IMF) 174,

181International Peace Mission 182Iraq 147, 154Isaja, P. 110Italian antifascist resistance 139Italian Communist Party (PCI) 16

Italian national unification 136Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 7, 135, 140Ives, J. 34, 43–4, 48n2Ives, P. 23, 112

Jaluague, E. 182Jessop, B. 148, 165Jones, S. 169Judt, T. 111, 119

Kant, I. 38, 125Katz, W.L. 182Khrushchev, N.S. 16Kipnis, L. 31Kirk, R. 29Klein, N. 161Kolko, G. 182Korsch, K. 7, 11, 77Kranenburg, R. van 50Kristeller, P.O. 37–9Kuhn, T. 2

Labriola, A. 5, 50–68, 135Laclau, E. 168Lacorte, R. 23Landless Workers Movement (MST) 105,

108, 109n4Landy, M. 3, 23, 120Lasswell, H.D. 93Lazarus, N. 164Lenin, V.I. 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 79n7,

81, 135, 140, 148, 167, 179Levy, C. 79n5Lewis, F. 31n3Liberation theory 164Lichauco, S. 174, 182Liguori, G. 5, 20Limbaugh, R. 21, 28, 82Lobkowicz, N. 59Lombroso, C. 135Lopez, S.P. 176Loria, A. 54Lowy, M. 185Lucente, G.A. 112Lukács, G. 7, 77Lula da Silva, L.I. 105Luporini, C. 56Luxemburg, R. 7, 14, 19, 79n7, 135Lyotard, J.-F. 148

MacArthur, A. 176McCarthyism 16, 148Macaulay, T.B. 126Machiavelli, N. 5, 8, 9, 22, 24, 58

202 Index

McKinley, W. 175McMichael, P. 109n4Madison, J. 4, 86–90, 95, 96n6Madra, Y. 161n6Magellan, F. 173Manchester College of Art 48n2Mancina, C. 56Mao Tse-tung 148Marcos, F.E. 179, 183; Marcos

dictatorship 177, 179Martin, I.P. 175Martin, J. 22, 30Marx, K. 14, 19, 23–4, 28, 32n5, 39, 52,

53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63–5, 67, 70,75, 83, 89, 94, 104, 129–30, 132–3, 135,163, 172, 179

Marxian: class analysis 3, 4, 145–6, 148,150–3, 156–8, 160; epistemology 4;ethics 4, 146, 151–2, 15, 161n6;methodology 4, 149–50, 155, 161n5;theory 4

Marxism 68n4, 74, 79n6, 81, 127, 132,146, 148–52, 155, 155n; economistic164, 168; as ontology of labor 70–1;open 3, 7, 164; orthodox 3; andpostcolonial theory 143–4; postmarxism3, 77; theoretical 56, 60

Marxist: epistemology 149, 155, 161n5;revolution 83; tradition 1, 145, 167;world view 144

Mattick, P. 11Mazzini, G. 139Melandri, M.P. 110Menchú Tum, R. 106Mezzogiorno 112, 114Michels, R. 19, 92–3Mills, C.W. 92Mitterand, F. 16modern Prince 2, 9–10, 70, 108, 180Modernity 80Moe, N. 144n2Montagu, A. 18Mora, F. 59Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)

174Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)

174Moros (Filipino Muslims) 173–4, 177–8,

182–4Morton, A.D. 111, 112, 120, 148, 160, 184Mosca, G. 88, 92–3Mosso, P. 79n5Mouffe, C. 168multi-culturalism 83, 84

multiplicity; of interests 89, 95; ofopinions 95; of sects 89

Murdoch, R. 119Musso, S. 79n5Mussolini, B. 24, 81

nation-people 3National Democratic Front Philippines

(NDFP) 179, 181, 183National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

84National Endowment for the Humanities

(NEH) 84national-popular 2, 3, 4, 13, 18, 128, 130,

163–85national sovereignty 166, 174, 177, 179,

182, 185Nationaldemokratische Partei

Deutschlands (National DemocraticParty of Germany) 104

nationalism 164–6, 182–3Natoli, S. 56Nazism 103Nederman, C.J. 96n6Needham, A.D. 143Negri, A. 84, 96n7, 100, 164neohumanism 52, 53, 58, 63, 67neoliberalism 25, 158–9, 184neorealism 2new constitutionalism 101–2, 105, 184New Economic Policy (NEP) 15New Left 77New People’s Army (NPA) 179, 183Niceforo, A. 135Nietzsche, F. 87–9Nixon, R.M. 84North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO) 99Northern League 135Novak, M. 21

oligarchy 92–3Oliveros, B. 182oppression: class 134, 140; gender 140;

national 134; political 141; racial 140Ordine Nuovo 70, 73, 78n4, 109n2, 125,

132, 137, 138, 141Organization of Islamic Conference 183overdetermination 159Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) 174,

184

Padania 135Panitch, L. 98

Index 203

Pannekoek, A. 11Pardo de Tavera, T. 176Pareto, V. 92Parlato, V. 135Parry, B. 164–5Pasolini, P.P. 110, 114–15, 119, 166passive revolution (revolution from above)

9, 31, 73, 111–16, 168, 172, 175Patomäki, H. 107Patriot Act 118peasantry 3, 135, 137, 166–7, 170–7, 185people-nation 184–5people’s war 179, 182, 184Permanent People’s Tribunal 183Perry, G. 40Petras, J. 105petty politics 90, 95Pfister, J. 116Philip, A. 72, 78n2Philippine Commonwealth 176Phillips, K. 161philosophy of praxis 2, 5, 50–68, 70, 72,

145, 153, 160Piccone, P. 57Pirandello, L. 126Plan Colombia 105Plato 88, 94, 95pluralism 4, 89pluralist/elitist debate 92–3Podobnik, B. 104Poggi, S. 63Polanyi, K. 103political economy 146, 148, 153, 160,

161n1political society 26, 28politics of coercion 31, 32n13polyarchy 93Pomeroy, W.J. 175popular culture 37, 45–6, 48, 95n3Popular Front 178positivism 55, 57, 64postcolonial studies 164–6postcolonialism 17, 134, 143–4, 163–6Poster, M. 116postmarxism 178postmodern Prince 97, 108–9postmodernism 6, 15, 83, 87, 88, 89, 143,

146, 148, 149, 163postracial society 18poststructuralism 146, 148, 149, 164Poulantzas, N. 168Powell, C. 182power relations, colonial and neocolonial

134

Prasad, M. 116professional revolutionary 7progressive party 108–9pro-immigrant policies 84proletarian agency 179proletariat 13puritanism 78n3

Quezon, M. 176–8

Racinaro, R. 56racist theory 135Rawls, J. 96n6Reagan, R. 84Reconstruction 15Reid, B. 180Reifer, T.E. 104relations of force 100–2religion 126, 131Remer, G. 96n6Republic of Italy 139Republican Party 29Resnick, S. 148, 162n9Rethinking Marxism (RM) 4, 145–8, 150,

151–2, 155, 159–61, 161n3, 161n4,161n5, 161n6, 162n9

Reynolds, J. 42Riechers, C. 56Rifondazione communista (PRF) 17Righi, M.L. 31n1Risorgimento 26, 80, 111–14, 139Robinson, W.I. 105Roland-Holtz, H. 11Rolland, R. 98Roman Catholic Church 25Romanticism 38, 41Romier, L. 78n2Rorty, R. 84Rosengarten, F. 1, 3, 163Rosenthal, M. 175Rosenthal, R. 1Rousseau, J.J. 74Royal Academy 42, 48n2Royal College of Art 48n2Ruccio, D.F. 4, 146, 161n2, 161n3, 162n9,

162n11Ruggie, J.G. 103Russia, czarist 26Russian revolution 135, 137Russian Social-Democratic Party 14

Said, E.W. 23, 110, 112, 116, 143–4, 164Sakay, M. 175Salvemini, G. 136

204 Index

San Juan Jr., E. 3–4, 143–4, 164, 165, 174,183

Sarkozy, N. 28Sartori, G. 92Sassari Brigade 144n4Sassoon, A.S. 184Schattschneider, E.E. 92Schechter, D. 56, 73, 79n5, 166Schirmer, D.B. 175, 181Schneiderman, D. 101Schucht, T. 51Schumpeter, J.A. 88, 93Second International 7sexuality 71Shakespeare, W. 40, 49n7Shalom, S. 181Shell Oil Company 99Short, N. 167Siegfried, A. 78n2Sison, J.M. 180Sklair, L. 100Smith, A. 118social relations 35socialism 80, 81, 82Sorel, G. 9, 60, 77Southern question 3, 8, 134–44, 164, 167,

174–7Spencer, H. 61Spivak, G.C. 110, 116, 164–6spontaneity 9, 14, 15Sraffa, P. 161n1Stalin, J. 165state ideological apparatuses 17Stato Operaio 141Sturm und Drang 55, 59subaltern classes 14–15, 70, 75–8, 85–6,

90–2, 113–14, 174Subaltern Studies Group 166subalternists 70, 77; studies 6subalternity 2, 24, 31, 114, 116, 163–6,

172surplus labor 150, 154, 157–8, 160surplus-value 147, 150–2, 156–9, 161n7,

162n10

Taviani, P. and Taviani, V. 110, 114Taylor, F. 72, 73, 77, 79n5Taylorism 72–3, 76, 78n1, 78n2, 79n5Teivainen, T. 105, 107Thatcher, M. 49n10Thatcherism 115Third International 7Thomas, P. 170Thorpe, V. 41

Togliatti, P. 139–40Tomasi di Lampedusa, G. 112totality 153–4, 159–60, 162n8trade union movement 10, 13–16, 19transformism 168, 175Treaty of Paris 175Trilling, L. 29Trotsky, L. 7, 73, 78n3, 79n7, 135, 167Tuazon, B. 182Turati, F. 54

UK–USA–USSR alliance 103Unità 138united front 11, 170, 179United Nations 177, 183United Nations Special Rapporteurs 183United States Civil War 15University of Massachusetts-Amherst 148USSR 11, 15–17, 165, 178, 181

Vasudevan, R.S. 116Verdi, G. 112–13Verdicchio, P. 164Via Campesina 103Vico, G. 53, 58, 59, 63, 65, 67Vigna, C. 60Visconti, L. 110, 112–14Vitug, M.D. 182von Goethe, J.W. 23, 32n5, 50, 68vulgar materialism 51, 54–5, 57, 58, 61, 64

Wagstaff, C. 118Walthamstow Art College 48n2war: of manuever 4, 9, 12, 18, 172, 181,

183; of position 4, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19,55–6, 80, 83–3, 89, 171–2, 181; onterror 97, 102, 172, 174, 182

Washington Consensus 105, 182Weber, M.C.E. 92Wheeler-Early, B. 33, 43–5, 47, 48n2Williams, R. 170Wittgenstein, L. 33Wolfe, A. 95n4Wolff, R.D. 148, 161n5, 162n9Wood, E.M. 182Woodmansee, M. 38, 49n6work, organization of 70, 72–8workers’ councils (Soviets) 11, 15, 19working class 8, 14, 15World Bank 174, 181, 185World Business Council on Sustainable

Development 99World Council of Churches 183World Economic Forum 104

Index 205

World Social Forum 103, 104, 182World Trade Organization (WTO) 101,

102, 104, 174, 181World War I 140, 144n4World War II 7, 16, 17, 139, 143Wurst, K. 1

Young, R.J.C. 134Yudin, P. 175

Zipin, L. 50

206 Index