The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci 1802208593, 9781802208597

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times
PART I Gramsci in Context
2. Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary
3. Gramsci, Marx, Hegel
4. ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: Constancy, change and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts
5. Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks: passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis
PART II The Philosophy of Praxis: A New Political Vocabulary
6. Hegemony as a protean concept
7. The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
8. State, capital and civil society
9. Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political
10. Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity
11. War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the dialectic of revolution
12. Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci about prefiguration
13. The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy
Part III Gramsci for the Twenty-first Century
Section A: Philosophical and political-economic issues
14. Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism
15. Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy
16. Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living
Section B: Social and cultural reproduction
17. Hegemony, gender and social reproduction
18. Cultural studies: the Gramscian current
19. Antonio Gramsci and education
20. Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism
Section C: Hegemonic Struggle
21. Social movements and hegemonic struggle
22. Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism
23. Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world
Section D: Global organic crisis
24. Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis
25. Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice
Index

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THE ELGAR COMPANION TO ANTONIO GRAMSCI

ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS This vital series brings together cutting-edge scholarship that critically explores the work of social sciences’ most influential thinkers in light of key contemporary issues and topics. Edited by leading international academics, each volume focuses on an eminent figure and aims to stimulate discourse and advance our understanding of their ideas and the enduring significance of their intellectual legacy. From Arendt to Weber, economics to sociology, this series will be essential reading for all academics, researchers and students of the social sciences seeking to understand the profound impact of these great thinkers and how they continue to influence contemporary scholarship. For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series, visit our website at www​.e​-elgar​.com​.

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci Edited by

William K. Carroll Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Canada

ELGAR COMPANIONS TO GREAT THINKERS

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© William K. Carroll 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023949657 This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781802208603

ISBN 978 1 80220 859 7 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80220 860 3 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxi 1

Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times William K. Carroll

PART I

1

GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT

2

Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary Nathan Sperber and George Hoare

31

3

Gramsci, Marx, Hegel Robert P. Jackson

48

4

‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts Derek Boothman

66

5

Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks: passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis Francesca Antonini

83

6

Hegemony as a protean concept Elizabeth Humphrys

PART II

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY

7

The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks118 Panagiotis Sotiris

8

State, capital and civil society Marco Fonseca

136

9

Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido

152

v

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Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity Adam David Morton

171

11

War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the dialectic of revolution Daniel Egan

189

12

Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci about prefiguration Dorothea Elena Schoppek

204

13

The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy Alexandros Chrysis

219

PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SECTION A: PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL-ECONOMIC ISSUES 14

Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism Jonathan Joseph

240

15

Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy Bob Jessop

261

16

Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen

279

SECTION B: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION 17

Hegemony, gender and social reproduction Anna Sturman

299

18

Cultural studies: the Gramscian current Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam

315

19

Antonio Gramsci and education Peter Mayo

334

20

Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism Sourayan Mookerjea

350

Contents

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SECTION C: HEGEMONIC STRUGGLE 21

Social movements and hegemonic struggle Laurence Cox

370

22

Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism Owen Worth

388

23

Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world Thomas Muhr

406

SECTION D: GLOBAL ORGANIC CRISIS 24

Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis Henk Overbeek

428

25

Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice Kevin Surprise

448

Index469

Contributors Francesca Antonini is an Assistant Professor in History of Political Thought at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Derek Boothman is a Full Professor (retired) in the Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione (DIT) at the Università di Bologna, Italy. Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna, Austria. Marco Briziarelli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, United States of America. William K. Carroll is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, Victoria Canada. Alexandros Chrysis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Laurence Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland. Daniel Egan is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA. Marco Fonseca is an Instructor in the Department of International Studies at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada. Carlos L. Garrido is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA. George Hoare in an independent researcher in political theory, based in London, UK. Elizabeth Humphrys is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social and Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Didarul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA. viii

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Robert P. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Political Thought in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Bob Jessop is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, retiring in 2021; he was previously Reader in Government at the University of Essex, UK. Jonathan Joseph is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. Peter Mayo is a Professor in the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta. Sourayan Mookerjea is Director of the Intermedia Research Studio, Department of Sociology, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. Adam David Morton is a Professor in the Discipline of Political Economy within the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Thomas Muhr is Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Studies (CEI-IUL), ISCTE-University Institute Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal. Henk Overbeek is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Jean-Pierre Reed is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Philosophy in the School of Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA. Dorothea Elena Schoppek is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Panagiotis Sotiris teaches philosophy at the Hellenic Open University in Greece. Nathan Sperber is Docteur associé with the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Australia. Kevin Surprise is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.

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Markus Wissen is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany. Owen Worth is Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Acknowledgements I had been ruminating on the need for a companion to Antonio Gramsci for some time, when Harry Fabian, Elgar’s Commissioning Editor, invited me in May, 2021 to edit this collection. Of course, I leapt at the opportunity, and so I am grateful, in the first place, to Harry, for extending that invitation, and for all his subsequent support in the preparation of this volume. In the summer of 2021, I set about writing a detailed prospectus for the Companion. In my conception, it would begin with an examination of Gramsci’s life and times and, within that context, the development of his thought, but would also unpack the central ideas in his reformulation of historical materialism and reflect on his continuing influence across many fields in the social sciences and humanities and in strategic thinking on the left. In the fall of 2021 I began contacting prospective contributors, and was pleasantly surprised that nearly all of the scholars I approached immediately agreed to participate. I am grateful to all the authors contributing to this collection, for their dedication to this project (including peer reviewing of each other’s work) and its occasionally tight deadlines. Finn Deschner came onto the project in March, 2023, as editorial assistant, and has done superbly in getting the full manuscript into final form. I also appreciate the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in funding Finn’s position. Victoria, Canada April, 2023

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1. Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times William K. Carroll INTRODUCTION Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has been hailed as the ‘theoretician of superstructures’ (Texier, 2014) yet eulogized as ‘a practical politician, that is to say a combatant’ (Togliatti, 1979, p. 161). He has been mourned as an anti-fascist martyr (Charles, 1980), declared ‘dead’ as a source of political insight (Day, 2005), and remembered sympathetically as ‘the Hunchback from Sardinia’ whose own subalternity was a ‘formative factor’ in his radical thought (Germino 1990, pp. 1, 24). These varying appraisals are testimonies to Gramsci’s rich and contested legacy. In Perry Anderson’s estimation, Gramsci’s thought aimed to an extent unlike that of any previous Marxist at a unitary synthesis of history and strategy, covering at once the legacy of the pre-capitalist past, the pattern of the capitalist present and the objective of a socialist future in his country. (Anderson, 2022, p. 78)

Particularly since the 1970s, when Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the Prison Notebooks was published in Italian (Gramsci, 1975) and anthologies of his work began to appear in translation (e.g. Gramsci, 1971), Gramsci’s thought has permeated a great range of scholarship and has informed the strategic thinking of left-wing activists (and also right-wing intellectuals (George, 1997)) around the world. Nearly a century after his arrest and imprisonment (and nine decades after what Peter Thomas (2009) has called the Gramscian moment of 1932, when the Italian political prisoner reached particularly stunning theoretical and strategic insights after years of incarceration and reflective writing) Antonio Gramsci remains an iconic political and intellectual figure, on a global scale (Dainotto and Jameson 2020). Although the main reason for Gramsci’s continuing influence stems from the perspicacity of his thought, a contributing factor has been the critical ‘openness’ of his approach to analysing the human condition (Marzani, 1957, p. 6). 1

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Building on Marx, Gramsci developed a dynamic and holistic framework for political analysis and strategic thought, based in concrete history and geared toward actualizing the possibilities for revolutionary transformation of the capitalist way of life. And, like Marx’s concept of alienation, which has fuelled deep insights within historical materialism on the character of advanced capitalism (Marcuse, 1964; Ollman, 1971; Musto, 2021) while also having been taken up by other scholars within mainstream sociology and related fields (Seeman, 1975), Gramsci’s core concepts have shaped thinking both within historical materialism and without. Indeed, a Google search returns more than 60 million results with the h-word ‘hegemony’. Yet this remarkably wide reach, combined with the openness of Gramsci’s approach to language, with many keywords borrowed and repurposed from other writers (including hegemony itself as well as such Gramscian concepts as historical bloc, passive revolution and wars of position and maneuver), poses challenges in assembling a compendium of works on Gramsci and his thought. To be clear at the outset: Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist. He co-founded the Communist Party of Italy and at the time of his arrest by Mussolini’s police in 1926 was General Secretary of the party and a member of the Italian Parliament (with diplomatic immunity that his jailers ignored). The entire corpus of his Prison Notebooks, encompassing 3,369 pages in the critical edition of 1975 (Gramsci, 1975), presents a brilliant elaboration of historical materialism, pulling its centre of gravity back to the foundations Marx laid in 1845 in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx, 2002). In developing further what he called (borrowing from Labriola, (Mustè, 2021)) ‘the philosophy of praxis’, Gramsci attended in particular to Italian and European history and the economic, political and cultural practices and relations that organize consent to a capitalist way of life, as well as the practices that in challenging that hegemony point in a quite different direction. Given that Gramsci’s thought was thoroughly grounded in historical materialism, a Companion to his thought also should be centred in that perspective. This volume follows that precept. Rather than widen the focus to include work that invokes keywords from Gramsci’s theoretical vocabulary without embracing his problematic, the chapters that follow hue closely to Gramsci’s formulations, situated within the living tradition of Marxism. Within that tradition’s broad scope, the Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci offers a comprehensive set of chapters presenting and reflecting on Gramsci’s many contributions to critical social science, social and political thought and emancipatory politics. As Burawoy (1990) has observed, historical materialism is a vibrant, open research programme.1 The goal in this collection, then, is not to exhume the intellectual remains of a century-old corpus. It is, rather, to bring Gramsci’s insights – theoretical and substantive – to life by engaging not only with his

Introduction: recovering a Gramsci for our times

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original work but with the various streams of broadly Marxist scholarship that have flowed directly from that work. A further consideration in framing and compiling this collection is that Antonio Gramsci, although remarkably well read in the social sciences and humanities of his time, was not an academic. Mentored at the University of Turin by Matteo Bartoli, one of Italy’s leading comparative philologists, Gramsci dropped out of his Bachelor’s programme in 1915, to pursue full-time activism and journalism (see Chapter 2). Although his incarceration necessitated a shift from writing newspaper articles on the immediacies of the day-to-day struggles to the ‘disinterested’ writing strategy he adopted in the Notebooks, removed from the pressures of the contingent and immediate (see Chapter 18), those notes were not written for a detached academic readership. In consideration of Gramsci’s insistence on a philosophy of praxis, linking theory and practice, this Companion intends to be of maximal value and interest not only to a wide range of scholars, but to activists and to students (many of whom may be in the process of becoming activists).2 This objective further underlined the need for a treatment that begins with a close engagement with Gramsci’s world and worldview, but extends to the subsequent development of his ideas, up to and including contemporary issues. This volume, therefore, is divided into three parts. In Part I, contributing authors situate Gramsci’s thought within the broad context of his life and times. These chapters engage closely with Gramsci’s work in ways that accentuate and reflect on the context of his life, his influences and in turn his immediate influence, particularly within historical materialism. The contents of Part I, especially when read alongside Gramsci’s own writing on philosophy, politics and history, provide a foundation for the chapters comprising Part II. These chapters present key themes within Gramsci’s perspective, connecting them to the wider framework of his thought, but also tracking their further development within the subsequent Gramscian stream of historical materialism. Part III offers the most contemporary analyses. Complementing Part I, which places Gramsci’s breakthroughs in context, and Part II, which focuses on key concepts and traces theoretical threads from Gramsci forward, these chapters are organized around major fields of scholarship in which Gramscian perspectives are particularly salient in the 21st century. They connect Gramsci’s original problematic with specific domains within recent and contemporary scholarship, wherein Gramscian scholars have applied that problematic in the analysis of late capitalist modernity.

PART I. GRAMSCI IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS TIME Placing Gramsci in the context of his time means situating him in the Europe and more specifically, the Italy, of the 20th century’s early decades. Gramsci

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engaged deeply with a wide gamut of philosophers, from the Renaissance political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli, through to contemporaries of various political stripes – Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Sorel etc. Concurrently, his thought developed through participation in debates within historical materialism and the socialist left, particularly through the critical stances Gramsci took toward the deterministic reading of Marx that became predominant in the 2nd International, the positivism of leading Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin, and the bureaucratic centralism that characterized Joseph Stalin’s leadership in the Soviet Union. Gramsci described his own method as philological. As Ludovico de Lutiis (2021) notes, philology, the ‘methodological expression’ in the study of language ‘of the importance of particular facts’, underlies Gramsci’s writings in the Notebooks and lies at the centre of various reflections; it is indispensable for reconstructing an author’s thought and, indeed, the past. An approach to understanding language and culture within historical context, philology was strongly differentiated from the structural linguistics initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure, which, particularly as later appropriated by poststructuralism, emphasized the internal construction of meaning within systems of signification, detached from concrete historical practice and extra-linguistic relationality.3 The attraction of Euro–North American intellectuals in the 1960s–1990s to the self-enclosed insularity of this theory of language and meaning seemed to consign philological scholarship to the margins. In more recent years, as its socio-ecological limits became increasingly evident, the leading edge of poststructuralism has morphed into ‘new materialism’ – characterized by Terry Eagleton as ‘really a species of post-structuralism in wolf’s clothing’ which ‘emerged in part to replace a currently unfashionable historical materialism’ (2016, pp. 11, 17). Meanwhile, and notably in Italy through Rome-based Fondazione Gramsci and the International Gramsci Society and its journal,4 a new generation of scholars has approached Gramsci, fittingly, from the philological and historical materialist perspective he himself favoured. The chapters comprising Part I of this Companion take up this same perspective, presenting Gramsci’s thoughts within the context of his life and times, and thereby penetrating into the social and political moorings of his conceptual universe. As Dante Germino (1990, p. 7) has observed, ‘the roots of the mature Gramsci’s revolutionary critique of society extended deeply into the Sardinian soil of his youth’. Gramsci’s experiences as ‘a Sardinian hunchback from history’s margins’ (Germino, 1990, p. 265) – his own subalternity – grounded his politics as he became active as a journalist and organizer in his 20s, after moving to Turin, a major industrial centre, to take up university studies in 1911. In Chapter 2, Nathan Sperber and George Hoare recount Gramsci’s life and times, focusing on the two-decade period of Gramsci’s political activism

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and intellectual production, from his early political writing in 1914 to his transfer to a clinic in Rome, extremely weak and exhausted, in 1935. Incarcerated from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937, with the intent ‘to stop this brain from working for twenty years’, the unintended consequence was the Prison Notebooks, a pursuit of politics ‘by other means’, in a novel melding of theory and action and a profound contribution to revolutionary strategy. The four chapters that follow Sperber and Hoare’s biographical overview dive into Gramsci’s oeuvre, setting it within the context of his times. In two highly complementary companion pieces, Robert Jackson and Derek Boothman focus attention on intellectual currents with which Gramsci engaged in developing his own approach to philosophy and politics. These careful readings add nuance to our understanding of Gramsci’s Marxism. Of course, no one is born a Marxist, or a liberal or a fascist. Moreover, these worldviews are neither static nor homogeneous. As Gramsci observed in the Prison Notebooks (and as Robert Jackson recounts in Chapter 3), Marx’s own concept of the organization of collective agency remained entangled within elements such as Jacobin clubs, trade organization and ‘secret conspiracies of small groups’ (Gramsci, 2011, vol 1, p. 154). In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, the prevailing tendency within Marxism, codified in the Second International (1889–1916) offered a deterministic, ‘stagist’ account of history, within which mass political agency was subordinated to a faith in the inevitability of a final economic crisis, provoked by capitalism’s structural contradictions, which would usher in socialism. Jackson notes how Gramsci’s newspaper article, ‘The revolution against Capital’, published a few weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of state power in November 1917, rejected Marxism as a deterministic orthodoxy but celebrated how the Bolsheviks were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’ (Gramsci, 1994, p. 40). In Chapter 4, Derek Boothman’s close reading of this article, its reception and its reverberations in the Prison Notebooks, tracks the development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist, open Marxism, which Gramsci eventually called the philosophy of praxis. While rejecting positivist readings of Marx (including Nicolai Bukharin’s reduction of Marxism to sociology, in his Historical Materialism (1925)), Gramsci embraced the dialectic at the centre of Marx’s thinking – that people make their own history, though not in conditions chosen by them. Gramsci’s Marxism was rooted in his appropriation of Marx’s (2002 [1845]) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which open by criticizing the one-sidedness of ‘all hitherto-existing materialism’, namely, the omission of human sensuous activity – praxis – as integral to materiality itself. As Marx went on to note, this ‘active side’ of material reality was grasped philosophically by idealism, which Hegelian dialectics took to its limit.

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Boothman calls attention to the emphasis on collective will and transformative agency running throughout Gramsci’s thought. This may surprise readers familiar with Gramsci as a theorist of ‘dominant ideology’ (as in Abercrombie et al., 1980). It points us toward the Hegelian current that was retained in Gramsci’s mature work. If Hegel’s unique achievement was to join ‘the two moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically’ (Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 143) – enabling one to gain a ‘full consciousness of contradictions’, positing oneself ‘as an element of the contradiction’ and ‘rais[ing] this element to a principle of politics and action’ (Gramsci, 2011 [2007], vol. 2, p. 195) – historical materialism brought this dialectical holism to fruition. In advancing this interpretation, as Jackson points out in Chapter 3, Gramsci criticized both the mechanical materialism of Bukharin and the ‘philosophy of the spirit’ espoused by Benedetto Croce, a neo-Hegelian and the leading Italian philosopher of the 20th century’s first half. Indeed, Gramsci’s historical materialism, the philosophy of praxis, was developed as a critique of what Jackson calls Croce’s pathological dialectic: his ‘subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than specific conditions of class struggle posed by problems of historical development,’ as Adam Morton (2005, p. 439) has put things. Gramsci’s conception of history as praxis is unfolded further in Francesca Antonioni’s essay on historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks (Chapter 5). Importantly, this conception entails a close relationship between history, theory and strategy. As she points out, ‘in Gramsci there is no clear distinction between historical investigation, theoretical reflection and political strategy, each aspect stimulates the other two and is in turn influenced by them’ (this volume, p. 89. For Gramsci, historical reality consists of a multi-tiered ‘relation of forces in continuous motion’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 172), whose trajectory depends on the strategies and struggles of contending agencies. Antonioni reconstructs Gramsci’s view of (European) history as three moments: the first marking the rise of the bourgeoisie up to the French Revolution of 1789, the second encompassing the making of European capitalism under bourgeois hegemony, the third (commencing in the latter decades of the 19th century) witnessing in World War I and the Russian Revolution the inception of the organic crisis of the capitalist world. Transitions from one to another occurred through specific combinations of ‘objective conditions and subjective tendencies’. If the French Revolution epitomized transition under the control of a vigorous and hegemonic bourgeoisie, elsewhere (and particularly in Italy) passive revolutions achieved transformation less through hegemonic leadership than through slow, ‘molecular’ shifts (see also Chapter 10). The fascism that arose in the 1920s amid intensified class struggle and that was consolidated, as passive revolution, in the 1930s, was not only an attack on labour and the left, but entailed an element of state-corporate planning – a new

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strategy for managing capitalism without encroaching on its economic nucleus of private profit. Although as Antonioni notes, Gramsci’s analysis of fascism does not directly bear upon the rise of right-wing populism in the current organic crisis (see Chapter 21) she invites us to adopt Gramsci’s basic attitude, to understand what is really changing and why, and to explore the implications for the elaboration of an alternative political strategy. As a final contribution to Part I and a bridge to Part II, in Chapter 6 Elizabeth Humphrys ponders the concept at the centre of Gramsci’s theoretical/strategic universe: hegemony. Humphrys traces its development, which was inspired by Lenin’s use of the term in the strategy of a worker–peasant alliance that enabled the Bolsheviks to gain state power in Russia in 1917. Given the extremely uneven development of capitalism in Italy and as a southerner himself, early on Gramsci recognized the need for such a strategy, uniting subaltern classes of Italy’s developed ‘North’ and underdeveloped ‘South’. As he wrote in 1925, the proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990, p. 443)

In the Notebooks, in dialogue with Machiavelli and Croce, he extended and deepened his notion of hegemony, from a strategic concept describing a class alliance to a complex theoretical concept. Gramsci took on the challenge of explicating how hegemony – rule with consent of the ruled, leadership as persuasion armoured with coercion – is accomplished, and how an alternative hegemony (sometimes called a counter-hegemony, although Gramsci never used that term) might be advanced through organizing subaltern groups around an alternative social vision. In introducing the conceptual armamentarium associated with hegemony in the Gramscian sense, Humphrys’ essay, along with other chapters in Part I, sets the scene for the chapters in Part II. The theoretical/strategic concepts featured in the latter chapters expand the meaning of hegemony in its various facets, and explore subsequent scholarly and political engagement with these concepts.

PART II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY Perry Anderson (1976) avers that Western Marxism emerged out of the defeat of the left in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Gramsci participated. That defeat brought the ‘rupture of political unity between Marxist theory and mass

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practice’ (p. 55), leading to ‘a seclusion of theorists in universities’ (p. 92). This tendency is best exemplified by the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, who offered penetrating analyses of the contradictions of advanced capitalism but fell silent as to how an exit from capitalism could possibly be brought about. Gramsci was an exception. An activist first, a prisoner later, Gramsci was never cloistered in academe, and in prison he committed himself, as Sperber and Hoare recount in Chapter 2, ‘to pursue politics by other means’. In the Prison Notebooks he developed a rich political vocabulary, attuned precisely to the strategic challenge of creating revolutionary transformation under conditions of advanced capitalism. The middle chapters of this Companion unpack the keywords of that vocabulary. Each chapter presents Gramsci’s original formulation of a core theoretical conception, and tracks the application of his insights, theoretically and strategically, in subsequent scholarship, primarily within the historical materialist tradition. Given the close interrelations of Gramsci’s dynamic concepts, the focus in these chapters on core concepts does not seal one concept off from others. Rather, authors consider how a given thematic fits within the larger Gramscian problematic, and how it has been taken up in subsequent scholarship. Gramsci’s concern to deliver a holistic and dynamic analysis of capitalist modernity, carrying real strategic value, is well registered in his concept of historical bloc. In Chapter 7, Panagiotis Sotiris subjects this complex concept to meticulous dissection, relying on Gramsci’s Notebooks and on more recent discussions. ‘Historical bloc’ enabled Gramsci to reformulate the relation between structure and superstructure, core to historical materialism, in fully dialectical terms, consistent with his view of history. In a famous passage that Sotiris quotes, Gramsci states that ‘structure and superstructures form an “historical bloc.” That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). The key word here, differentiating Gramsci’s formulation from a mechanical and reductionist approach, is ensemble: both structure and superstructure are riven with contradiction and discord; there is no linear, causal relation between them. Historical bloc not only gives Gramsci a perspective on the dynamic unity of the economic, the political and the cultural-ideological; as a strategic node in Gramsci’s thought, historical bloc ‘points to what a strategy for hegemony implies’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 125). If capitalism’s ruling class rules through the complex assemblage of a hegemonic historical bloc, Sotiris, following Gramsci, concludes that the struggle for an alternative hegemony must be the struggle for a new historical bloc. In practice, this means ‘an articulation of transition programmes emanating from the collective struggle, ingenuity and experimentation of the subaltern classes along with the new organizational forms, new

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political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into historical reality’ (Sotiris, this volume, p. 134). In Chapter 8, Marco Fonseca begins from the concept of historical bloc, and proceeds to examine its mutually-constitutive, historically emergent elements. Gramsci saw state, capitalism and civil society as interpenetrating fields of capitalist modernity, furnishing the terrain upon which a distinct way of life takes shape and is reproduced, contested and transformed. Marx and Engels (and Lenin) had conceptualized the state primarily as an apparatus of political coercion, protecting the private property at the core of capitalism. Gramsci retains this insight, but extends our understanding of the capitalist state, which he called the integral state, to comprise a dialectical ensemble of state apparatus and civil society, blending coercive and persuasive forms of power. As for capital, in Fordism (see also Chapter 16) – the mass production of commodities for mass consumption, entailing deskilled labour, relatively high wages calibrated to increasing labour productivity, and the burgeoning of consumer goods – Gramsci recognized the predominant form that industrial capital would take in the 20th century. This not only produced a plethora of commodities, it also required and thus came to produce new forms of proletarian subjectivity. This latter production process ramified from early managerial efforts to inculcate discipline into the mass workforce by promoting puritanical values to the active, educative role of the state, through schooling and social programmes, in creating conditions for a new type of worker: a worker who ‘feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to live successfully in the modern world’ (Fonseca, this volume, p. 143. Key to creating such internal equilibrium are the ‘private’ associations of civil society, formally distinct from the ‘public’ realm of the state yet intimately tied to it. The former, including clubs, church groups and worker associations, comprise the sphere of ethical life, where people acquire the ‘common sense’ that informs their voluntary subjection to market society as a matter of ‘free choice’. Increasingly, the state depends on its dialectical unity with civil society understood as a system of “trenches and fortifications” or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. (Fonseca, this volume, p. 139)

Fonseca’s engagement with recent literature underlines the continuing relevance of this formulation, in understanding the rise of neo-fascism in the

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current crisis as well as the ‘joyful alienation’ of atomized individuals in the consensual service of domination. Within Marxist thought, the ideological basis for voluntary submission to domination has been theorized by means of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ concepts of ideology (Larrain, 1983). In the negative concept, whose clearest exemplar is Lukács’ (1972) analysis of reification (which was based on Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, and subsequently elaborated by the Frankfurt theorists), ideology secures submission through mystification. Gramsci is the key theorist of the positive concept. For him, ideology is not false consciousness, but a fundamental aspect of political struggle. In their discussion of intellectuals, ideology and the ethico-political (Chapter 9), Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido unfold Gramsci’s positive concept of ideology. Famously, Gramsci held that all people are intellectuals, that reflection and inference are universal human capacities. However, only some groups specialize, as organizers of culture, in the philosophical and conceptual elaboration of ideas. Among them are the traditional intellectuals – survivals from pre-capitalist times who continue to perform ideological functions (e.g. clergy, academics) – and the organic intellectuals, whose organizational practices are crucial to the life of capitalism’s fundamental classes. If capital’s organic intellectuals include managers and industrial technicians, liberal economists, lawyers, accountants, mainstream journalists and the managers and minions of the culture industries, organic intellectuals also develop within the proletariat, key examples being labour activists and trade-union political economists. Reed and Garrido observe that organic and traditional intellectuals who are aligned with the capitalist order serve as the bourgeoisie’s ‘deputies’ (Gramsci’s term). Their task is to elaborate, refine and promote the ideas of modern market society, thus providing ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership in organizing consent to the capitalist way of life (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 12, 453). In contrast, the proletarian organic intellectual’s remit is to create ideological conditions for subalterns to gain collective agency in the struggle for socialism. Clearly, Gramsci’s depiction here is not descriptive (the aspirations of many labour activists stop well short of socialism); it is strategic, and normative. Importantly, he recognizes that this process is not unilateral but dialectical, with both sides – the leaders and rank-and-file – learning from each other in a creative collaboration through which ‘the links between reason and emotion and theory and practice are secured in critical and participatory pedagogy’ (Reed and Garrido, this volume, p. 164). The ‘common sense’, often fragmented and inchoate, that informs subaltern practice includes a nucleus of ‘good sense’, grounded in experience and at odds with the ruling hegemony. In fostering counter-hegemonic world views, the task is to refine this nucleus by dis-articulating it from hegemonic meanings and re-articulating it to a socialist conception of the world. Such moral and intellectual reformation, organized to

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some extent through a revolutionary party, enables subalterns to pass from an understanding of their immediate interests (what Lenin called trade-union consciousness) to a broad recognition of the need for fundamental socio-political transformation. For Gramsci, this process is crucial to the formation of an alternative historical bloc. In Chapter 10, Adam Morton picks up the thread of Antonioni’s discussion in Chapter 5 of passive revolution in the geopolitical-economic making of capitalist modernity, and braids it with Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development. Trotsky’s (2008 [1932], pp. 3–5) complex concept, which Gramsci adopted, includes the insight that the geographical unevenness of capitalist development creates a dynamic in which centre and periphery shape each other’s development, in dialectical combination. Gramsci went on to consider how that dynamic has shaped the conditions for capitalist state formation ‘from above’ on the periphery of the capitalist heartland.5 In passive revolution, ‘the state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle for renewal’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 105), a scenario noted by Gramsci in his analysis of the Southern Question within Italy, but applicable to other contexts of ‘revolution from above’, particularly within the dynamic of uneven capitalist accumulation (see for instance Morton’s (2003) own research on Mexico). As Morton notes (this volume, p. 179), (at least) two related processes define the essential form of passive revolution: (1) the revolution issues ‘from above’, without popular initiative and (2) the revolution is pushed along a conservative path that protects and even restores the basis for ruling-class power. Morton’s chapter follows the development of passive revolution in Gramsci’s (and subsequent) thought, arguing that this concept provides ‘a lateral field of causality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development’ (this volume, p. 182), situated, as it is, in the nexus between state forms and uneven/ combined development. Some interpreters of Gramsci generalize the concept of passive revolution to signify a ruling class strategy deployed particularly in settings of organic crisis, to pacify and incorporate dissent by implementing co-optative reforms. Following this line of thought, Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1979) has argued that top-down passive revolution calls for a counter-strategy of ‘anti-passive revolution’. A key strategic element in the latter is what Daniel Egan calls the dialectic of position and maneuver. In Chapter 11, he interrogates the military metaphor, repurposed by Gramsci from historian Hans Delbrück, which contrasts the war of maneuver and war of position. In the struggle for hegemony, the latter becomes particularly important within advanced capitalism. The expansion of civil society and thus the integral state creates ‘a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’ (Gramsci, 2007, vol. 3, p. 169) – necessitating a dialectic between conjunctural struggles focused on seizing state power (the war of maneuver) and the protracted struggle, resembling trench

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warfare, to create the conditions, in an alternative historical bloc, for socialism. Importantly, although the war of position ‘must create a new civil society expressing social relations appropriate for a socialist mode of production’ (Egan, this volume, p. 196), the two kinds of warfare are not sequential but dialectically related. Just as success in trench warfare requires identifying the enemy’s weakest point and staging a direct assault on it (a war of maneuver), socialist revolution requires a war of position that gains ground within and transforms civil society while also developing a well-organized political instrument – a party – capable of centralized leadership in transforming the state. In criticizing post-Gramsci arguments that envisage a two-stage revolutionary process (first war of position, then war of maneuver), Egan implores us ‘to recognize the moments of force that are inherent in a counter-hegemonic strategy, just as moments of consent are inherent in the use of revolutionary coercion’ (this volume, p. 201). The dialectic of position and maneuver thus recommends both the creation of ‘a new civil society’ and a new political instrument (Harnecker, 2007) that can guide a multifaceted and multi-scalar process of transformation. Dorothea Schoppek and Alexandros Chrysis take up these linked issues respectively, in Chapters 12 and 13. An illuminating contemporary example of their interpenetration has been offered by Michelle Williams in her study of the war of position and maneuver in Kerala, India. There, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has long practised a ‘counter-hegemonic generative politics that attempts to establish new institutions and practices that extend the role of civil society over the state and the economy’ (Williams, 2008, p. 9). Through governing within a succession of coalitions while fostering organic ties to Kerala’s vibrant popular sector, the party has coordinated grass-roots initiatives, decentralized, self-reliant development and participatory democracy. Over decades, this war of position has shifted power within civil society, and has fostered one of the highest levels of quality of life in the majority world. As Williams (2008, p. 156) concludes, for such an alternative project to take root, ‘a new type of political party’ must forge a ‘synergistic relation’ with civil society ‘to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and the capacity for civil society participation is developed’. Another compelling contemporary example of prefigurative change within a war of position comes from Venezuela, in the communes, councils and missions that, within the Bolivarian revolution, have advanced local forms of participatory democracy (Duffy, 2012; Bean, 2022). In ‘Welding the present to the future’ (Chapter 12), Dorothea Schoppek traces the theme of prefigurative politics within Gramsci’s thought, beginning with the insights he achieved during the Red Biennium (1919–1920, see Chapter 4) of intense proletarian mobilization in Italy in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Gramsci’s activism and journalism around the 1919

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Factory Councils movement in Turin drew his attention to the need to create the embryonic structure of socialism, ‘to weld the present to the future, satisfying the urgent necessities of the present and working usefully to create and “anticipate” the future’ (Gramsci, 1919). This concern with prefigurative politics, including the importance of moral and intellectual reformation (connecting with themes explored in Chapter 9) is at the centre of this chapter. After reviewing critiques of the anti-statist, nonstrategic and often co-optative tendencies in prefigurative politics as practised today, particularly in the global North, Schoppek revisits Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, for further insight. She concludes that prefigurative politics should be conceptualized not as a free-standing project but ‘as an integral strategic part of a war of position in the struggle for hegemony’ (Schoppek, this volume, p. 215). Alexandros Chrysis carries these ideas further in his incisive account of Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. As we have seen, Gramsci’s thinking is predicated on his dialectical conception of the integral state, as ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ – a unity of coercion and consent, extending well beyond the state apparatus per se. In building a counter-hegemony, the proletariat and its allies must develop capacity for both forms of power. The Modern Prince, the revolutionary party, is the vehicle for this. In view of the tendency for subaltern consciousness to be fragmented and focused on immediate interests, this political party must function as ‘the collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups’ (Chrysis, this volume, p. 227). Yet in view of the coercive power concentrated in the capitalist state, this party must combine ‘the power of ideas with the power of arms’ (ibid.), providing organization and direction within the counter-hegemonic historical bloc and thereby enabling the collective use of force in a war of maneuver. Chrysis goes on to critique several strands of recent scholarship (and activism) – epitomized in Holloway’s (2002) notion of changing the world without taking power – that underestimate the need for a revolutionary party capable of leading both a war of position and a war of maneuver. Instead, and in view of the failures of anti-capitalist movements detached from revolutionary parties to ‘change the world’ in real, substantive terms, Chrysis concludes that it is time to reach the ‘critical balance’ between movement and party.

PART III. GRAMSCI FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Our current setting is, in many ways, different from the Europe Gramsci knew in the first three decades of the 20th century. Yet, compelling similarities also stand out. Like us, Gramsci lived through a global organic crisis. In Gramsci’s time, this took the form of a ‘crisis of European civilization that had been building since 1870’, ignited by the collapse of the world market with World War I (Vacca, 2020b, p. 29). His activism, journalism and later

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carceral writing took place amid the ensuing political crisis, including the Russian Revolution and the crisis-ridden interwar years (punctuated by the Great Depression) during which fascism took hold in Italy and other capitalist states. In our time, no less a hegemonic authority than the World Economic Forum has announced a ‘polycrisis’, a convergence of cascading crises marked by geopolitical confrontations, resource rivalries, economic instability and climate breakdown, ‘with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part’ (World Economic Forum, 2023, p. 57). When we ponder the relevance of Gramsci in the context of our times, we need to keep both the divergences and the parallels in mind. More than any other Marxist of the early 20th century, and particularly since the Prison Notebooks became more widely available in the 1970s, Gramsci’s ideas have influenced a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This Companion’s third part tracks the application of Gramsci’s approach to the philosophy of praxis across these fields, conveying a sense of continuing relevance and power of these ideas – as tools for understanding the changing complex of hegemonic apparatuses and the struggles and collective agencies pressing for transformative change in the world today. Philosophical and Political–Economic Issues The first three essays in Part III are of broad theoretical significance as they take up central philosophical and political–economic issues surrounding hegemony and hegemonic struggle today. Jonathan Joseph, in Chapter 14, critically engages with poststructuralist readings of Gramsci (most influentially, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxism), and then turns to recent work that resituates Gramsci’s thought within an influential philosophical movement linked to contemporary historical materialism: critical realism. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe sought to rescue Gramsci from the economic reductionism they viewed as essential to Marxism. But, as Joseph notes, their constitutive conception of discourse tends to reduce reality to the ideas we have about it, with deleterious analytical and political ramifications. Alternatively, through a critical-realist lens, hegemony is conceived ‘in relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent its conditions of possibility’ (Joseph, this volume, p. 250). Along these lines, Gramsci’s thought can be viewed as a post-positivist intervention that attends to both the social structures through which hegemony is reproduced (structural hegemony) and the concrete hegemonic projects through which collective agency is formed in defence of or in opposition to the ruling order (surface hegemony). On the latter, Joseph points to recent work (e.g. Davies, 2011) that draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how

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emergent, networked forms of governance disperse power, as an element of neoliberal hegemonic strategy.6 In the latter decades of the 20th century, as the post-war class compromise dissolved and as neoliberalism became more clearly articulated, Bob Jessop (1983) applied Gramscian analysis to the emerging order, theorizing the hegemonic projects and corresponding accumulation regimes of late capitalism. Pondering the shifting terrain of state and capital, Jessop built on the Gramsci-influenced analyses of French regulation theory (Aglietta 1979) and state theorist Nico Poulantzas (1978). Jessop’s neo-Gramscian framework has been very influential among social scientists (‘hegemonic project’, a term he introduced, returns more than 20,000 results in Google Scholar). More recently, he has collaborated with Ngai-Ling Sum, whose cultural political economy combines a strong semiotic analysis with Jessop’s neo-Gramscian political economy. Jessop and Sum’s work, discussed by Jessop in Chapter 15, exemplifies the continuing value of Gramsci’s insights and the added value that issues from integrating those insights with contemporary social-scientific thought. As Jessop notes, cultural political economy aligns with Gramsci’s own approach: it retains Marx’s abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of production while focusing on concrete conjunctures, the dynamic movement of leadership within them and the semiotic clusters of meaning activated in reproducing/contesting hegemony (on the last of these, see also Ives’s (2004; 2005) insightful analyses). Gramsci’s notes on Americanism and Fordism have inspired a long train of analyses of the distinct forms of advanced capitalism, typically focused on the Global North. In Chapter 16, Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen look beyond global capitalism’s core, explicating how the generalization of Fordism has brought an ‘imperial mode of living’ predicated on North–South relations that are both imperialist and ecologically destructive. Clearly, the ‘consumer society’ that blossomed in the North had its dark underbelly. Concomitantly, it enabled commodification to enter the pores of working-class life, in an inner appropriation of human subjectivity. Although Fordism fell into crisis in the 1970s, its transmogrification into neoliberal post-Fordism only intensified this process. In our time, as the real costs, both in super-exploitation of labour and environmental ruin, are primarily borne in the South, a ‘new compromise between the elites and subalterns’ is struck, further deepening the imperial mode of living as this way of life becomes globally generalized. Brand and Wissen conclude that the current conjuncture offers three options – an authoritarian stabilization of the imperial mode of living (the project of the Northern extreme right), a passive revolution, through ecological modernization, to green capitalism, and an ‘emancipatory social-ecological alternative’ centred on care rather than profit. I will revisit the third option in this chapter’s conclusion.

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Social and Cultural Reproduction Marx’s (1967) abstract reproduction schemes, in the second volume of Capital, pioneered a macroeconomic analysis of capital as self-expanding value, but it was Gramsci who, in his analysis of hegemony, took up the broader, concrete issue of how capitalist social formations are reproduced. As generalized commodity production, capitalism produces not only monetized goods and services; its ‘second product’, requiring a continual and contested process of social reproduction, is human beings and their creative capacities, commodified as labour power (Lebowitz, 2020). Producing that second product has been a gendered process, sited in such institutions as the family, schools, health care and other components of the welfare state. In the past half-century, socialist-feminist scholars have developed a Gramscian perspective on social reproduction that offers keen insights on gender and hegemony. In Anna Sturman’s contribution to this Companion (Chapter 17), Gramsci’s reflections on Americanism and Fordism offer an opening for feminist analysis and critique, beginning with the patriarchal nuclear family as a hegemonic form within capitalism. While taking note of some deeply problematic currents that have emerged within the ambit of feminism as the organic crisis of neoliberalism has deepened (see also Chapter 22), Sturman provides a compelling account of how social-reproductive feminism has amplified some key Gramscian insights on hegemony and counter-hegemony. She argues that participation ‘in expansive acts of care and solidarity which fall beyond the formal workplace’ is integral to building a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. As the morbid symptoms of ecological collapse proliferate, our understanding of the stakes widens to include the conditions for socio-ecological reproduction – as in a stable climate, fertile soils, green urban infrastructure and health/ healthcare in the broadest of senses. Integral to social reproduction, of course, is cultural reproduction, as Chapters 18, 19 and 20 in this volume affirm. In the first of these, Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam reflect on the Gramscian current in cultural studies, which blossomed as an interdisciplinary field from its centre in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The intellectual leadership of Raymond Williams (1977) and Stuart Hall (1980) inspired many in the Anglosphere to rediscover Marxism through a Gramscian lens while accentuating the cultural moment in their analyses. Gramsci’s own expansive concept of media, which refused the technological fetishism that is typical in media studies and emphasized the social organization of communication, offers an especially relevant perspective in our times of digital social media and platform capitalism. Indeed, in attending to the social media prosumer as a new kind of active audience whose self-activation via digital practices seems to shape their own

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subjectivity, an expansive, Gramscian understanding of media as a social process intrinsic to contemporary capitalism is a crucial resource. Schooling and education comprise a fundamental element in social and cultural reproduction. Just as he viewed media expansively and relationally, Gramsci considered education in its broadest sense, not simply as formal education, observing that ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 350). Elemental to his conception of hegemonic struggle is ‘the pedagogical force of culture’ (Giroux, 2002, p. 59), which features also in his notion of the Modern Prince, tasked in part with a programme of intellectual and moral reform (see Chapters 9 and 13). In Chapter 19, Peter Mayo recounts Gramsci’s views on education, and takes up subsequent scholarship that has elaborated Gramsci’s original formulations, building a radical pedagogy that also serves as a critique of capitalist hegemony in educational relationships, North and South. If Gramsci’s views on education emphasized the development of ‘good sense’ and intellectual self-discipline through dialogical practices, Mayo shows how far the contemporary neoliberal university has departed from that conception. While a few elite universities continue to discharge their function of providing the ruling class’s next generation with the needed elite habitus and skill-set, mass universities, largely serving the requirements of industry, ‘have morphed into glorified training agencies’ (this volume, p. 342) – which is not to say that campuses are no longer contested ideological terrain. As a leading advocate of critical pedagogy, Mayo concludes with a reminder that such pedagogy must continue the struggle to become less Eurocentric. In this, he recommends, as a theoretical/practical companion to Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, the pedagogy of praxis that Brazilian activist-scholar Paulo Freire pioneered in the 1960s (see Mayo 1999). If, as Adam Morton shows in Chapter 10, the Southern Question and the issue of uneven and combined development were strategically central for Gramsci, a century later they are all the more urgent, at global scale. Centuries of Euro-centred colonialism and imperialism have established sturdy transnational structures of political, economic and cultural power, punctuated and sometimes punctured by ongoing decolonizing struggles. In Chapter 20, Sourayan Mookerjea engages with Subaltern Studies, an influential stream of post-colonial thought whose initial formulation made creative use of Gramsci’s insights on hegemony and the Southern Question. Rereading Ranajit Guha’s masterwork, Dominance without Hegemony (1997), a definitive contribution to Subaltern Studies, Mookerjea strives to historicize the concept of hegemony in our current setting. He incorporates insights from social reproductive feminism; indeed the chapter forms a good companion piece to Sturman’s analysis in Chapter 17. For Mookerjea (following Silvia Federici, 2004), in the formative era of capitalism, the dispossession of direct producers from the

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land contained at its heart a violent subalternization of social reproduction. The latter set the stage for multiple colonialisms, their many wars against subsistence, and ‘their accumulated violence of interlocking oppressions on which contemporary racial capitalist class power and the racial capitalist interstate system still depend’ (this volume, p. 361). From this vantage point, the traditional concept of civil society as a field of predominantly non-coercive relations should be re-thought as ‘a world-ecological labyrinth of colonizing institutions’ (this volume, p. 362). Moreover, within ‘civil society’, the subalternized field of social reproduction, wherein work directly sustains life, constitutes an autonomous domain of subaltern class politics, global in scale, the basis for a many-headed hydra politics portending a decisive break from the colonizers’ model of the world. Hegemonic Struggle In the modern era, social reproduction has been riven with contestation, and a significant portion of that contention is centred upon social movements. Gramsci’s problematic has opened historical materialism to the analysis of the varied popular-democratic movements that have emerged in late capitalism, highlighting the challenge of articulating a widening range of democratic struggles into an alternative historical bloc. As Sturman’s analysis of feminism in Chapter 17 suggests, the ‘new social movements’ that (re)emerged in the 1960s and 1970s are ideologically and politically diverse, rendering them, according to Joachim Hirsch, a ‘contradictory battlefield in the struggle for a new hegemony’ (1988, p. 51). In Chapter 21 Laurence Cox considers why Gramsci matters for social movements, and how some of his fundamental political insights can be applied in counter-hegemonic struggle today. Cox develops a contemporary strategic analysis of what Gramsci (1971, pp. 181–185) called the ‘relations of forces’ (see also Chapters 5 and 25), how the structure of alliances sustaining hegemony frays in an organic crisis, and how left movements can discern the weaknesses in that structure while developing their own alliances into an incipient historical bloc. Recalling Gramsci’s insistence that a revolutionary party is indispensable in this process, Cox, in tension with Chrysis’s Leninist reading of the Modern Prince in Chapter 13, registers some scepticism based in the ambiguous record of left parties, worldwide. Of course, a focus on the possibilities of progressive movements, unified through revolutionary parties, transforming social formations from below, gives us only part of the picture. Indeed, in the advanced capitalist North, the contemporary political landscape offers no compelling instances of the movement/party synergy that was central to Gramsci’s strategic thinking. As in Gramsci’s time, the deep organic crisis of contemporary capitalism has offered fertile soil for all manner of right-wing authoritarian movements

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and parties, which is not to say that history is repeating itself. In Chapter 22, Owen Worth traces the war of position in which these parties and movements have been active, particularly as the utopian promise of a borderless world of global market society has devolved into increasingly chaotic and degraded conditions of life. As the morbid symptoms of neoliberal capitalism’s organic crisis have proliferated, authoritarian populist/neofascist currents have stirred, particularly across the Global North, and now are shaping the future of class dynamics and social relations. Thomas Muhr’s study of movement activism and state power in Latin America (Chapter 23) complements Lawrence Cox’s discussion of social movements in Chapter 20, and offers a glimmer of hope for advocates of social and economic justice. Yet while Cox trains his essay primarily (though not exclusively) on hegemonic struggle within a given national state, Muhr’s focus is on the challenge of integrating the national with the transnational in hegemonic struggle from below. Disputing claims that dismiss Gramsci as a Eurocentric Northerner, Muhr presents him as ‘a decolonial Global Southerner’ (this volume, p. 407). Beginning from Gramsci’s (1971, p. 240) adage that ‘the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national”’, Muhr discusses the ‘pluri-scalar war of position’ that 21st century formations (in particular the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA)) are conducting, and the barriers they have faced in attempting to construct a transnational alternative historical bloc. Initiated by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004, ALBA involves both an alliance of progressive Latin American governments within a fair-trade bloc and an articulation of progressive movements in the same countries, reaching across borders. As Muhr observes (this volume, p. 420), ‘in a globalized world, state apparatuses, national and transnational civil societies, and institutions of the global governance regime simultaneously become strategic places, spaces and scales in/of hegemonic struggle’. Global Organic Crisis Our final cluster of chapters in Part III keeps the focus at the transnational level, but emphasizes the challenges humanity now faces in an era of capitalist civilizational crisis that has intensified North/South contradictions while raising existential threats of an ecological nature. The growing strength of right-wing authoritarianism that Worth considers in Chapter 22 is placed in a global political-economic context by Henk Overbeek in his discussion of transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis (Chapter 24). Overbeek engages with the influential stream of Gramscian perspectives within International Political Economy and International Relations, to which he has been a key contributor (Overbeek, 2004). In the work of Robert Cox (1987), Stephen Gill

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(1993), Kees van der Pijl (1998) Andreas Bieler and Adam Morton (2004) and others, the contours of a hegemonic world order, now in chronic disarray, have been clearly drawn. Overbeek recounts how, in the globalizing neoliberal order, ‘workers have been transformed from members of collective work forces to highly individualized workers or nominally self-employed “entrepreneurs” beyond the reach of party or union activists’ (this volume, p. 438). In such conditions as Michael Lebowitz (2020, p. 112) has observed, workers enact the ‘tragedy of atomism’ as they compete with each other for jobs and income. As atomized self-seekers, workers come to equate their interest with that of their employers, ‘thus making every single section of workers into an auxiliary army for the class employing them’ as Frederick Engels (1976, pp. 83–84) observed. The political paralysis that issues from neoliberalism’s intensified atomization is, for Overbeek, one of the factors that pre-empted the emergence of a rival historical bloc, as neoliberalism consolidated itself globally in the 1990s. However, the global financial crisis of 2008 signalled the beginning of the end of neoliberalism as we have known it, and the ensuing period has witnessed neoliberalism’s delegitimization, together with moves toward a ‘non-hegemonic global order structured by the strategic rivalry between the US and China’ (this volume, p. 443). As the world order is transformed in an ongoing war of position, waged at different scales, Overbeek concludes by taking note of perhaps the greatest challenge: the survival of post-industrial civilization itself, now posed by the exhaustion and destruction of the biosphere. Fittingly, then, our final chapter draws on Gramsci’s conceptions of human–earth relations, relations of forces and passive revolution, to examine responses (from above) to the ecological dimensions of organic crisis, and the emergence (from below) of transformative climate movements. In Chapter 25, Kevin Surprise examines the development of so-called green or ‘climate’ capitalism as a crisis management strategy. As a visibly deepening ecological crisis favours the rising, globalist fraction of climate capital (including Big Tech) over the established yet retrograde fossil-capital fraction (including in its ambit the Military-Industrial Complex), geopolitical rivalries intensify with the waning of American hegemony and the rise of China (and its allies). Within this dangerous conjuncture, Surprise discerns some lines of solidarity among emergent movements for climate justice, including Northern-based initiatives to rebuild working-class power in strategic sectors as a basis for a just transition, and Southern-based initiatives collecting around anti-imperialism, demilitarization and ecologically sound land management.

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CONCLUSION Taken as a whole, the essays in this Companion affirm the continuing power of Antonio Gramsci’s thought. Rooted theoretically and methodologically in Marx and historical materialism, Gramsci and the many streams of scholarship that flow from his work offer tools for taking up the challenges of interpreting the world of late capitalism while working to change that world into a radically reconstructed socio-ecological formation in which human beings can thrive collectively in ecologically healthy conditions. This is not to say that the ongoing reception and development of Gramsci’s thought have been without tensions. These have long been evident, for instance, in post-war efforts by the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy to present a Gramsci attuned to their programme (Liguori, 2022), in the debate on the meaning of civil society initiated by Norberto Bobbio at the second convention on Gramsci in 1967 (Vacca, 2020a, pp. 195–198, 256), and in Perry Anderson’s controversial reading of ‘antinomies’ in Gramsci’s thought (Anderson, 2017; Dal Maso, 2021). Indeed, some of these tensions can be noted across the chapters assembled in this volume.7 Ongoing debates, of course, are indicative of the vibrant research programme that forms an integral part of the philosophy of praxis. Without pretending to be comprehensive, in closing, let me recapitulate, from the chapters herein, some of the key insights guiding that programme: • the integration of the materialist interpretation of history (including the critique of capital) with a philological method in analysing labour, politics, culture, ideology, the encoding/decoding texts, education and pedagogy as meaningful material practices; • the comprehension of relations between structure and superstructures as dialectical, implying the contradiction-ridden formation, within advanced capitalism, of an integral state comprised of political and civil society and embedded in a broader historical bloc, whose hegemony is never absolute; • the anti-deterministic focus on agency in the construction of collective will from the bottom up (always with capacities and within conjunctures inherited from past practice), and on the openness of concrete reality to alternative futures; • the emphasis on class and the role of ‘fundamental classes’ whose practices produce and reproduce capitalism as a way of life, and, following from that, the indispensable role of intellectuals, of media and of education as agencies on the contested terrain of hegemonic struggle, which, for the proletariat includes other subaltern and popular-democratic forces whose participation in counter-hegemonic projects is crucial; • the strategic importance of wars of position and maneuver, conceptualized dialectically and implying the need for a transformative political instru-

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ment, a Modern Prince, that can provide integrative leadership, including processes of moral-intellectual reformation and the creation of prefigurative practices that point to an alternative future as they help to construct an alternative historical bloc; • equally, in analysis of each given conjuncture, the strategic focus on the relations of forces – the economic, political, cultural, military/geopolitical relations between the actors in the field – including their dynamic, dialectical interrelations and the openings or closures they pose for transformative praxis; • the Southern Question which continues to loom as uneven and combined development, regionally and globally, consigns most of the world to subalternity on the margins, bolstering an imperial mode of living in global capitalism’s core yet creating a basis for an alternative historical bloc centred in the global South. Essays in Part III of this volume apply these insights and others within our current setting. In these works we find the power of Gramsci’s thought reflected in critical analyses of media, education and gendered and racialized aspects of social reproduction, and in hegemonic struggles that engage a tarnished neoliberal establishment, an insurgent right-wing populism shading toward neofascism in some contexts, and a largely disorganized left.8 In these circumstances of organic crisis, as the neoliberal zombie stumbles onward, the challenge of rebuilding a socialist left, both within countries and, as in ALBA and the Progressive International, across them, is daunting. Meeting that challenge will require an understanding of hegemonic struggles as pluri-scalar, ranging from the micropolitics of everyday life, through to the transnational. The practices that sustain hegemony, and that challenge it, are active at all these levels.9 Analytically, this points to the need for a holistic, dynamic, multi-scalar mode of analysis. Practically, this calls for a progressive program that works across these levels transversally, offering strategic guidance, particularly in view of the massive challenges that a global ecological crisis, combined with sharpening geopolitical-economic contradictions, presents to humanity. Ecological crisis had not reached global scale in Gramsci’s time, but the power of his reformulation of Marxism is evident in the ways in which his thought has been applied in understanding the ecological and civilizational crisis of late capitalism. On this, Brand and Wissen’s closing argument in Chapter 16 bears repeating: on our finite planet, the imperial mode of living cannot be sustained, let alone universalized beyond capitalism’s core; indeed, its generalization within the core as Fordism has provoked climate breakdown while recruiting many in the Northern middle class and its aspirants to the ecocidal project of endless accumulation. This verdict underscores the need for

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fundamental transformation both in the internal relations that form the mode of production and, with that, in humanity’s relation to nonhuman nature. Such an emancipatory socio-ecological transformation will require a shift to a way of life not driven by private profit but anchored upon care – for fellow humans and for the rest of nature. This prospect may seem entirely out of reach, as the window for avoiding ecological catastrophe closes at a worrying pace. Yet, as Gramsci, following Marx (2002 [1845]), insisted, in human affairs, the future always depends upon how we make history now. One can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’. Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 438)

In these times, to avoid making a very bad situation much worse, we would be wise to temper our well-founded pessimism of the intellect with an optimism of will.

NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

At the time of writing, the Web of Science lists more than 5,000 scholarly articles published between 2018 and 2022 featuring the term ‘Marxism’. To create a volume of maximal value and interest to a wide range of readers, it was also important to avoid repetition with recently published work. Davide Cadeddu’s edited collection A Companion to Antonio Gramsci (Brill, 2020, pp. 160) contains insightful essays that are historiographic and biographical in emphasis. As explained above, this Elgar Companion takes a different approach. As Dustin Stolz (2021) points out, Saussure himself did not make such claims, but his latter-day interpreters have attributed them to him. The Foundation’s website is at https://​www​.fondazionegramsci​.org/​. The International Gramsci Society is at http://​www​.interna​tionalgram​scisociety​.org/​ ; its refereed journal is at https://​ro​.uow​.edu​.au/​gramsci/​. The Foundation also maintains the online Gramscian Bibliography, at http://​bg​.fondazionegramsci​ .org/​biblio​-gramsci/​, which was founded by John M. Cammett. For a highly insightful analysis of this dynamic within international relations, see van der Pijl (1998). The relationship between Michel Foucault’s thought and Gramsci is fraught, which is not to say that Foucauldian insights cannot be employed in elaborating Gramscian perspectives on the contemporary world (see, for instance, Joseph’s and Jessop’s chapters in this volume; Poulantzas, 1978; Fairclough, 2017). A critic of Marxism, rendering him attractive to a wide range of non-Marxist intellectuals, particularly in the US, Foucault wrote, in a letter to Joseph Buttigieg, translator of the Prison Notebooks, that Gramsci is ‘an author who is cited more often than he is really known’ (Keucheyan, 2016). There is no evidence that Foucault himself ever read Gramsci, although many of Gramsci’s concepts anticipate, by decades, Foucault’s problematics (ibid). Late in his life,

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7.

8. 9.

Foucault lamented that his own training had entirely excluded engagement with Critical Theory (Dews, 1989), which, again, anticipated many of his key ideas but situated them within historical materialism rather than presenting them as an alternative to it. Foucault’s relationship to the broader left is complex and ambiguous. For instance, running through Foucault’s late-1970s lectures is ‘a deep affinity’ with neoliberalism, based in ‘a shared suspicion of the state’ (Behrent, 2009, p. 545). Foucault’s oeuvre certainly contains insights on late modernity, which can harvested in elaborating a Gramscian Marxism, but we can lament his failure to build on radical perspectives that were available to him. For a range of positions on Gramsci and Foucault, see the essays in Kreps (2016, cf. Sanbonmatsu, 2004). All in all, and notwithstanding the insights Foucault achieved on the ‘how’ of domination (Marsden 2014), Jan Rehmann (2022, p. 143) makes a good point when he writes, based on extensive philological reading of Foucault, that ‘it is high time to think about the intellectual and political price of Foucault’s “overcoming” of Marxism.’ For instance, Reed and Garrido’s interpretation in Chapter 9 (p. 179) of wars of maneuver and position as distinct strategies that ‘operate in different political terrains – the former in the context of revolutionary situations; the latter in the context of robust civil societies’ – can be compared with Egan’s thesis that the two types of ‘war’ ‘are inseparable parts of a dialectical process of revolutionary change’ in Chapter 11 (p. 201). Chrysis’s Leninist interpretation of Gramsci’s Modern Prince and his critique of autonomist readings of Gramsci’s politics (Chapter 13) contrasts with Cox’s movement-centred analysis of counter-hegemony, which registers some scepticism about the leading role of revolutionary parties (Chapter 21). (On this point, I have suggested elsewhere that the Leninist/anarchist (or Leninist/autonomist) binary does not exhaust the possibilities for effective political organization on the left (Carroll, 2006).) Some contributors to this volume retain Gramsci’s original, context-specific usage of passive revolution (Antonioni in Chapter 5, Morton in Chapter 10); others (such as Fonseca in Chapter 8, Brand and Wissen in Chapter 16, Mayo in Chapter 19 and Surprise in Chapter 25) expand its meaning to other contexts. As an ontological/epistemological base for the philosophy of praxis, critical realism (as presented by Joseph in Chapter14) offers scaffolding different from Guha’s post-colonial critique of capitalist modernity, as probed by Mookerjea in his discussion of post-Western Marxism (Chapter 20). This collection, and this essay, cannot resolve these complex debates, but I hope our efforts contribute to clarifying what is at stake. For an incisive critique of the ‘woke’ politics that now masquerades as left, see Neiman (2023). I have analysed the multiscalar character of hegemonic struggle in Carroll (2021).

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Anderson, P. (2022). The H-word: the Peripeteia of Hegemony. London: Verso. Antonini, F. (this volume). Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks: Passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Bean, A. (2022). Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis. Lexington Books. Behrent, M.C. (2009). Liberalism without humanism: Michel Foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979. Modern Intellectual History, 6(3), pp. 539–568. Bieler, A., & Morton, A. D. (2004). A critical theory route to hegemony, world order and historical change: Neo-Gramscian perspectives in International Relations. Capital & Class, 28(1), 85–113. Boothman, D. (this volume). The revolution against ‘Capital’: Constancy, change and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Brand, U., & Wissen, M. (this volume). Fordism, post-fordism and the imperial mode of living. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Briziarelli, M, & Islam, D. (this volume). Cultural studies: The Gramscian current. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1979). On the political problems of the transition, the working class and the passive revolution. In C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory (pp. 202–229). London: Routledge. Bukharin, N. (1925). Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. New York: International Publishers. Available at https://​www​.marxists​.org/​archive/​bukharin/​ works/​1921/​histmat/​index​.htm Burawoy, M. (1990). Marxism as science: historical challenges and theoretical growth. American Sociological Review, 55, 775–793. Cadeddu, D. (ed.). (2020). A Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Leiden: Brill. Carroll, W.K. (2006). Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony. Socialist Studies, 2(2), 9–43. https://​socialiststudies​.com/​index​.php/​sss/​article/​view/​23790 Carroll, W.K. (2021). Conclusion: Prospects for energy democracy in the face of passive revolution. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy (pp. 479–504). Edmonton: UA Press. Charles, S. (1980). In commemoration of Antonio Gramsci. Theoretical Review, 14, January–February. Available at https://​www​.marxists​.org/​history/​erol/​periodicals/​ theoretical​-review/​19801404​.htm Chrysis, A. (this volume). The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Cox, L. (this volume). Social movements and hegemonic struggle. In W. K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Cox, R.W. (1987). Production, Power, and World Order. Social Forces in the Making of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Dainotto, R. & Jameson, F. (2020). Gramsci in the World. London: Duke University Press. Dal Maso, J. (2021). The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci: A rereading. Historical Materialism, (2), 61–99. Davies, J. (2011). Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Day, R.J.F. (2005). Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press. Dews, P. (1989). The return of the subject in late Foucault. Radical Philosophy, 51(1), 37–41. Duffy, M. (2012). Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution: Power to the People? Doctoral Dissertation, University of Manchester. Available at: https://​pure​.manchester​.ac​.uk/​ ws/​portalfiles/​portal/​54518771/​FULL​_TEXT​.PDF Eagleton, T. (2016). Materialism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Egan, D. (this volume). War of position and war of maneuver. Gramsci and the dialectic of revolution. In W. K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Engels, F. (1976). The constitutional question in Germany (1847). In Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, pp. 83–4. New York: International Publishers. Fairclough, N. (2017). CDA as dialectical reasoning. In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (pp. 13–25). Abingdon: Routledge. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch (1st ed.). Autonomedia. Fonseca, M. (this volume). State, capital and civil society. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Germino, D. (1990). Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. George, S. (1997). How to win the war of ideas. Dissent Summer, pp. 47–53. Gill, S.R. (ed.). (1993). Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giroux, H.A. (2002). Rethinking cultural politics and radical pedagogy in the work of Antonio Gramsci. In C. Borg, J.A. Buttigieg, & P. Mayo (eds), Gramsci and Education (pp. 41–66). New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Gramsci, A. (1919). Workers’ democracy. L’Ordine Nuovo, 21 June, translated by M. Carley. https://​www​.marxists​.org/​archive/​gramsci/​1919/​06/​workers​-democracy​.htm Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks [SPN] (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Eds.). Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks. Critical Edition) (Valentino Gerratana, ed.). Turin: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1990). Some aspects of the southern question. In Selections from the Political Writings (1921-1926), with Additional Texts by Other Italian Communist Leaders (pp. 441–462). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gramsci, A. (1994). Pre-prison Writings (R. Bellamy, ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks (Vols 1–3) [PN1–3] (J.A. Buttigieg, ed. And trans.). Columbia University. (Original work published 1992, 1996, 2007). Guha, R. (1997). Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, S. (1980). Cultural Studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society, 2, 57–72. Harnecker, M. (2007). Rebuilding the Left. London: Zed Books. Hirsch, J. (1988). The crisis of Fordism: Transformations of the ‘Keynesian’ security state and new social movements. Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change, 10, 43–55. Holloway, J. (2002). Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press. https://​web​.archive​.org/​web/​20110621144952/​http://​libcom​.org/​library/​change​ -world​-without​-taking​-power​-john​-holloway

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Humphrys, E. (this volume). Hegemony as a protean concept. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Jackson, R.P. (this volume). Gramsci, Marx, Hegel. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Jessop, B. (1983). Accumulation strategies, state forms, and hegemonic projects. Kapitalistate, 10, 89–111. Jessop, B. (this volume). Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Joseph, J. (this volume). Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Ives, P. (2004). Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. London: Pluto. Ives, P. (2005). Language, agency and hegemony: A Gramscian response to post-Marxism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 455–468. Keucheyan, R. (2016). Six ways of conceiving Marx and Foucault. Verso Blog, 14 April https://​www​.versobooks​.com/​blogs/​2601​-six​-ways​-of​-conceiving​-marx​-and​ -foucault Kreps, D. (2016). Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso Larrain, J. (1983). Marxist Theories of Ideology. London: Macmillan. Lebowitz, M.A. (2020). Between Capitalism and Community. New York: Monthly Review Press. Liguori, G. (2022). Gramsci Contested. Leiden: Brill. Lukács, G. (1972). History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Boston: MIT Press. De Lutiis, L. (2021). Dizionario gramsciano / Gramscian Dictionary: Philology. International Gramsci Journal, 4(1), 90–94. https://​ro​.uow​.edu​.au/​gramsci/​vol4/​ iss1/​6 Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, K. (2002 [1845]). Theses on Feuerbach. Translated by Cyril Smith. https://​www​ .marxists​.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1845/​theses/​ Marx, K. (1967). Capital, vol. 2. New York: International Publishers. Marsden, R. (2014). The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault. Abingdon: Routledge. Marzani, C. (1957). The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci. New York: Cameron Associates. Mookerjea, S. (this volume). Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. Possibilities for Transformative Action. London and New York: Zed Books. Mayo, P. (this volume). Antonio Gramsci and education. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Morton, A.D. (2003). Structural change and neoliberalism in Mexico: ‘Passive Revolution’ in the global political economy. Third World Quarterly, 24(4), 631–653. Morton, A.D. (2005). A double reading of Gramsci: Beyond the logic of contingency. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 439–453. Morton, A.D. (this volume). Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: The passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

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Muhr, T. (this volume). Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Mustè, M. (2021). Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci. London: Palgrave. Musto, M. (ed.). (2021). Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Neiman, S. (2023). Left is not Woke. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Overbeek, H. (2004). Transnational class formation and concepts of control: Towards a genealogy of the Amsterdam Project in international political economy. Journal of International Relations and Development, 7(2), 113–141. Overbeek, H. (this volume). Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, Power, Socialism. London: NLB. Reed, J.-P., & Garrido, C. L. (this volume). Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Rehmann, J. (2022). Decontructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism. Leiden: Brill. Sanbonmatsu, J. (2004). The Postmodern Prince. New York: Monthly Review Press. Seeman, M. (1975). Alienation studies. Annual Review of Sociology, 1, 91–123. Schoppek, D.E. (this volume). Welding the present to the future . . . Thinking with Gramsci about prefiguration. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Sotiris, P. (this volume). The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Sperber, N., & Hoare, G. (this volume). Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Stolz, D. (2021). Becoming a misinterpreted source: The case of Ferdinand de Saussure in cultural sociology. Journal of Classical Sociology, 21(1), 92–113. Sturman, A. (this volume). Hegemony, gender and social reproduction. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Surprise, K. (this volume). Beyond ecocidal capitalism: Climate crisis and climate justice. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Thomas, P.D. (2009). The Gramscian Moment. Leiden: Brill. Togliotti, P. (1979). Leninism in the theory and practice of Gramsci. In P. Togliotti (ed.), On Gramsci and Other Writings (pp. 161–181). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Texier, J. (2014). Gramsci, the theoretician of superstructures: On the concept of civil society. In C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory (pp. 48–79). New York: Routledge. Trotsky, L. (2008 [1932]). History of the Russian Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Vacca, G. (2020a). Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century. London: Palgrave.

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Vacca, G. (2020b). The crisis of European civilization in the thought of Antonio Gramsci. In D. Cadeddu (ed.), A Companion to Antonio Gramsci (pp. 29–37). Leiden: Brill. van der Pijl, K. (1998). Transnational Classes and International Relations. London: Routledge. Williams, M. (2008). The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala, India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Economic Forum. (2023). The Global Risks Report 2023, 18th Edition. Geneva: World Economic Forum. https://​www​.weforum​.org/​reports/​global​-risks​ -report​-2023/​ Worth, O. (this volume). Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism. In W.K. Carroll (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

PART I GRAMSCI IN CONTEXT

2. Gramsci: life and times of a revolutionary Nathan Sperber and George Hoare INTRODUCTION In May 1928, just a few weeks before being sentenced to 20 years in prison, Gramsci wrote the following to his mother from his cell in Milan: I am presently under political arrest and will be a political prisoner. I’m not ashamed, nor will I ever be ashamed of this fact. Basically, I myself willed this arrest and condemnation. I’ve always refused to compromise my ideas and am ready to die for them, not just to be put in prison. For this reason, I feel serene and satisfied with myself. (LP, p. 133)1

Three years later, by now jailed in the Apulian town of Turi and suffering from steadily deteriorating health, he would once again write to his mother, in a similar vein: ‘I was a soldier who had bad luck in the immediate battle, and soldiers can’t (at least they shouldn’t) be pitied when they fight of their own free will’ (LP, p. 202). These statements, together with many other letters and with recollections of inmates who encountered Gramsci in prison, reveal the exceptional stoicism that he displayed during his years behind bars. In the face of political defeat, persecution, forced isolation, physical weakness and ill health, he summoned up the willpower and energy to study and to write as much as his captors allowed him to, filling out thousands of pages that would become known after his death as the Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere in Italian). This chapter traces Gramsci’s trajectory, from his birth in Sardinia in 1891 to his tragic death in Rome in 1937 after a decade in prison. We revisit the different environments and events that informed his exceptional biography, including the mass strikes of Turin in 1919–1920, the founding of Italy’s Communist Party, the politics of the Third International and the advent of fascism. In so doing, we aim to show that Gramsci’s thought, as it took shape and matured in the course of dramatic historical developments, is intimately bound up with the revolutionary cause that defined his life. 31

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The following five sections address, in turn: Gramsci’s childhood in Sardinia; his days in Turin as a young socialist journalist coming to terms with the Russian Revolution; the involvement of his newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo in the Turin strike wave of 1919–1920; the early years of the Communist Party of Italy under fascism and Gramsci’s relations with the Comintern; and finally his decade of imprisonment leading to his death. A sixth and final section draws lessons for reading Gramsci in light of his biography. We argue that Gramsci’s intellectual endeavours in prison were a way for him, after having been forcibly cut off from revolutionary action, to continue to engage in politics by other means.

SARDINIAN BEGINNINGS: ANTONU SU GOBBU (1891–1911)2 Antonio Gramsci was born on 22 January 1891 in Ales, a small town in Sardinia. On the matter of his roots, he once wrote to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht from prison in 1931: ‘I myself am of no one race: my father was of recent Albanian origin … my mother is Sardinian on both sides’. ‘Despite these things’, he continues, ‘my cultural formation is basically Italian and this is my world here’ (LP, p. 218). When ‘Nino’ was born, his father Francesco ‘Cicillo’ Gramsci was a bureaucrat in the local civil administration. In 1897, however, disaster struck the Gramsci family when Francesco was accused of embezzlement, extortion and counterfeiting. These accusations were never proved, and it seems Francesco was the victim of a local political vendetta aimed at punishing him for supporting the wrong candidate at a previous election. Francesco was imprisoned from 1898 to 1904, with terrible consequences for his wife and seven children. The family fell into a dire misery. Having sold the patch of land she had inherited from her family in order to pay the lawyer’s fee, Gramsci’s mother, Peppina Marcias, attempted to ensure her children had sufficient food and a dignified life by working as a seamstress. The harsh trials of his childhood would leave a mark on Gramsci for the rest of his life. Among other things, he would develop a deep admiration for his mother, to whom he would often write letters stamped with tenderness and respect after his imprisonment. During his childhood, Nino started to develop symptoms of physical malformation. Seemingly due to Pott’s disease (a variant of tuberculosis), his spine developed abnormally. Having failed to diagnose the medical cause, the town’s doctors, in an attempt to cure him, ordered him to be suspended from a beam in the ceiling, regularly and for long hours. Nino endured the humiliation of this ineffective treatment as well as the bullying of his schoolmates who

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would throw stones at him in the playground and call him ‘Antonu su gobbu’ (the hunchback). Gramsci’s health problems did not stop at his spine, and his physical state was so precarious that his mother kept ready in the house, well into his teenage years, the small coffin and little dress in which he was supposed to be buried. Although life did not exactly smile on the young Gramsci, he reacted to adversity with a determination and a sheer strength of will that was to characterize him throughout his existence. He suffered without complaint the long sessions suspended from the ceiling and, in order to develop his muscles and be able to fight back the assaults of his schoolmates, he built makeshift dumbbells from stones and an old broom handle. In 1902, at the age of 11, along with his older brother, he worked in the local municipality’s offices, where he was compelled to carry heavy registers throughout the day. The physical pain was such after having returned home that he would spend the nights crying. Gramsci’s future, though, was being played out at school. He had been sent to primary school for the first time in Ghilarza in 1898 but later had to interrupt his education to work and contribute to the family’s income. The release of his father in 1904 allowed him to return to his studies. Gramsci attended the small middle school of Santu Lussurgiu and, succeeding in his exams, went in 1908 to the Dettori high school in the provincial capital of Cagliari. There he moved in with his older brother Gennaro, who was a trade union militant and had, since 1906, been sending socialist pamphlets back to Nino. At this time, Sardinia experienced a wave of political rebellion targeted at the central state. Italy had only been unified politically a few decades prior as a result of the Risorgimento. There was a widespread sense that the mostly agricultural Sardinian economy of the early twentieth century was being sacrificed by protectionist policies that Italian authorities were implementing in the interests of Northern industrial production. When troops were dispatched from the mainland to quell the movement, the rebels welcomed them with the cry of ‘continentals into the sea!’ As an islander himself, Gramsci was receptive to this movement and sympathetic to Sardinian regionalism. Although he would renounce this cause soon after leaving Sardinia, he would nonetheless retain throughout his life a keen interest in the regional specificities of Italy and the geographical dimension of political struggles.

YOUTH IN TURIN: JOURNALIST AND SOCIALIST (1911–1919) As a result of his diligence at school, Gramsci won a scholarship and entered the University of Turin in 1911. He selected a linguistics and philology curriculum, and his studies in these disciplines would influence some of the reflections to be found in the Prison Notebooks. However, his true passion

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at the time – and for the rest of his life – was politics. Eventually his political commitments and his activity as a journalist led him to give up his studies and leave the university behind. Around 1913, Gramsci joined the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), which was affiliated to the Second International and in which Benito Mussolini was a prominent figure. Gramsci felt close to Mussolini at first and notably sided with him in hostility to Italian imperialism in Libya. In 1914, at a point where the majority of the PSI advocated neutrality in the First World War, in one of his first published articles, Gramsci defended Mussolini’s support for Italian participation in the conflict. Gramsci justified his stance in the name of the rejection of political passivity, of which ‘neutrality’ was in his eyes one of the forms – something he likened to a ‘Buddhist renunciation of our obligation’ (quoted in Buttigieg, 1991, p. 90). In 1917, in the political brochure La Città futura (‘The city of the future’), he would explain in the same vein that ‘indifference is a powerful force in history. It operates passively but effectively’. Rejecting this, he wrote: ‘I am alive, I take sides. Hence I detest whoever does not, I hate indifference’. In 1915, Gramsci joined the socialist weekly Il Grido del Popolo (‘The Cry of the People’, a reference to Jules Vallès’ paper of the Paris Commune, Le Cri du Peuple). At that time he was also a contributor – and theatre critic – for Avanti!, another socialist newspaper. The Italian government eventually entered the First World War in 1915 on the side of the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. Witnessing the dire consequences of the war on the lives of the working class, Gramsci excoriated mercilessly the authorities’ nationalist propaganda. In August 1917, a wave of arrests hit left-wing circles in Turin after an attempt at anti-war insurrection, and he was catapulted to the position of editor-in-chief of Il Grido del Popolo. In another prison letter to Tatiana, from 1931, Gramsci would refer to his past journalistic output dismissively, commenting that ‘these pages were turned out every day and should have … been forgotten immediately afterwards’ (LP, p. 203). This self-criticism is rather unfair, as one can find throughout the articles of his youth, albeit in half-shaped form, many of the intellectual incursions that would go on to furnish the essential matter of the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci’s wartime journalism addressed matters of culture and daily life as much as political events per se, yet the way he approached culture was itself profoundly radical and transformative (Rapone, 2020). In a 1916 piece entitled ‘Socialism and culture’, he wrote that ‘culture … is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life’ (SPW I, p. 11). Believing in the inextricable link between culture and politics, Gramsci called for cultural renewal in line with his socialist ideals.

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The Russian Revolution of 1917 further radicalized Gramsci’s outlook (Losurdo, 1997; Liguori, 2020), putting him on the path that would lead him, eventually, to give up on the socialist politics of the Second International and embrace Bolshevism. In late July 1917, in between Russia’s February and October revolutions, at a time when Tsarism was no more and when Alexander Kerensky was heading the Russian government, Gramsci penned in Il Grido del Popolo an enthusiastic article about the ‘Russian Maximalists’ (meaning Lenin and his comrades), writing that ‘the revolution is continuing. Every aspect of life has become truly revolutionary: it is an ever-present activity, a continual exchange, a continuous excavation into the amorphous block of the people. New energies are released, new ideas which become historical forces are propagated’ (SPW I, p. 32). In December that same year, reacting to the Bolsheviks taking power in the October Revolution, Gramsci published in Avanti! one of his most famous pre-prison writings, the iconoclastically titled ‘The Revolution Against Capital’ (see also this Companion’s Chapter 4). In it, he argues that events in Russia demonstrated – as against the most rigid and economistic readings of Marx’s Das Kapital – that ‘the dominant factor in history [is] not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through their contacts … a collective, social will’ (SPW I, pp. 34–35). In Gramsci’s understanding, the revolutionary ardour and willpower of the Bolsheviks had made proletarian revolution possible, contra orthodox Marxist tenets, in a country – Russia, but this could equally apply to Italy – where the capitalist mode of production was still far from ‘mature’. Significantly, Gramsci’s target in this piece was not the thought of Karl Marx himself, to which he and the Bolsheviks remained committed. Rather, it was the way in which intellectual and political eminences of the socialist Second International (including Italy’s PSI) had turned Marxism into a dogmatic set of expectations premised on rigid laws of economic and historical development.

L’ORDINE NUOVO (1919–1921) One of Gramsci’s most important formative political experiences occurred during a period of intense political turmoil in Turin in the aftermath of the First World War. A year after the October Revolution, the armistice was signed and the war ended. Despite being on the victors’ side, the standing of Italy’s ruling elites was diminished coming out of the war. A grave economic crisis afflicted the country, while Italian society as a whole had been scarred by an unprecedentedly destructive conflict. In 1919 and 1920, in what became known as the biennio rosso or ‘two red years’, Italy witnessed a wave of mass strikes and workers’ militancy that

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upended industrial relations and threatened the political order. Panic spread among members of the privileged classes – many of whom would only be too happy, before long, to support fascism as an antidote to workers’ power. Nor was Italy alone in Western Europe in displaying ferments of social revolution in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, as illustrated by the Spartacist uprising in Berlin as well as the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic and Hungarian Soviet Republic, both of which drew inspiration from the Bolshevik experience. In Italy, the primary centre of revolutionary activity during the biennio rosso was Turin. Together with Milan, Turin was then the heart of the country’s industrial economy, a textile and metalworking centre as well as the seat of the FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili di Torino) concern that employed 20,000 workers in the city in 1918. As the Turin workers went on strike and occupied their factories, demanding to direct production themselves, Giovanni Giolitti, the head of Italy’s government, attempted to defuse the situation by convincing the FIAT managers to entrust the management of the firm to the unions. This shows how Italy’s governing classes were ready to contemplate concessions that would have seemed unconscionable to them just a few years prior. The political landscape of the biennio rosso also displayed divisions and contrasts within the left. The national leaders of the PSI were hesitant, remaining a step back from the movement at a time when its most radicalized members in Turin, including Gramsci, were participating in it passionately. The unions, including the powerful Confederazione Generale del Lavoro, were present during industrial actions but their leaders were mostly reformists. The main organizers of the struggle were in fact factory-level workers’ councils called commissioni interne, that is enterprise committees, echoing the revolutionary role of Soviets in Russia in 1917. The biennio rosso, therefore, did not foreground a single Leninist political party nor a single union organization, instead it proceeded largely from the ‘councilistic’ activism of the workers themselves. There was, however, a newspaper that embodied the political avant-garde of the movement in Turin: L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), a weekly launched in May 1919 by Gramsci and his comrades, Palmiro Togliatti, Umberto Terracini and Angelo Tasca.3 The first issue of L’Ordine Nuovo – subtitled ‘a review of socialist culture’ – came out in May 1919. At the very beginning its political ambitions were quite limited, Tasca mostly emphasizing an ‘exercise in remembering’ in the area of socialist culture (Santucci, 1992). Yet as the surrounding protests grew in size, the paper started to sense the atmosphere on the streets. In June, Gramsci, Togliatti and Terracini led a newsroom ‘coup’,

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marginalizing Tasca’s ‘culturalist’ line. The unsigned editorial of the seventh issue, of 21 June 1919, entitled ‘Workers’ democracy’, set the new tone: The socialist state already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class. To link these institutions, co-ordinating and ordering them into a highly centralized hierarchy of competences and powers, while respecting the necessary autonomy and articulation of each, is to create a genuine workers’ democracy here and now. (SPW I, p. 65)

It continues: ‘the concrete and complete solution to the problems of socialist living can only arise from communist practice: collective discussion, which sympathetically alters men’s consciousness, unifies them and inspires them to industrious enthusiasm’ (SPW I, p. 68). These remarkable assertions amounted to the expectation that all existing working-class organizations constituted together the embryo of the future socialist state. Gramsci and his comrades were looking to the commissioni interne as potentially chief coordinators of a social revolution, viewing them through the lens of what they knew about the Soviets in the Russian Revolution and, by the same token, de-emphasizing a party-centric model of revolutionary politics. They urged, moreover, the participation of all workers – including non-union members and anarchists – in the commissioni. This in turn drew the ire of many in the PSI against L’Ordine Nuovo’s alleged ‘spontaneist’ and ‘syndicalist’ tendencies. L’Ordine Nuovo rapidly came to stand as the emblematic publication of the biennio rosso. Although it never reached a circulation above 5,000 copies per issue, it managed to exert a profound influence on the workers’ movement. It addressed topics that included socialism, council-based democracy, productive organization and the impact of Taylorism, working class education, and the conditions for the emergence of a proletarian culture. The editorial line cannot be categorized straightforwardly, as Gramsci and his comrades were influenced not only by Marxism but also by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile and the French anarcho-syndicalist thinker Georges Sorel. Looking internationally, L’Ordine Nuovo linked up with the small French communist group Clarté founded by Henri Barbusse. The political-cultural turmoil of the biennio rosso was later described by Togliatti as a ‘proletarian cultural Sturm und Drang’ (1937). Yet, after some time, the revolutionary fervour subsided. In April 1920, a month-long strike by the metalworkers of Turin was defeated, encountering a huge armed force in the city while failing to secure the support of workers outside the Piedmont region. Thereafter, mostly defensive strikes took place in the autumn of 1920 in Milan and Turin. By that point the biennio rosso was in reflux, and the industrial elites of Northern Italy eventually succeeded in abolishing the ‘dual power’ (of capitalist managers and commissioni interne) inside the factories.

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THE PARTY MAN (1921–1926) The editors of L’Ordine Nuovo, however, wanted to carry on the struggle. To them, a social revolution remained an imminent prospect in the Italy of 1921. Yet they had to acknowledge the failure of the attempt at council communism in Turin, which led them to reflect anew on the problem of political organization. Gramsci’s articles show a shift in his thinking on the role of the political party at this point; although he continued in the aftermath of the biennio rosso to stress the need for a plurality of working class institutions, he increasingly called for a leading role to be played by the party. At the same time, he was clearly disillusioned with the PSI, since during the biennio rosso it had been revolutionary in words only and its leadership had made little attempt to push the popular struggle forward. The solution to this problem of political organization came from the creation of a new party. At the Livorno Congress in January 1921, the left of the PSI, under the impetus of the Neapolitan Amadeo Bordiga, seceded and founded the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d’Italia, PCd’I, which would later be renamed Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI, in 1943). The four comrades from Turin – Gramsci, Togliatti, Terracini and Tasca – decided to join since, like Bordiga, they rejected the PSI’s indecision and impotence. There were, however, significant differences between the four and Bordiga, whose theoretical perspective was a dogmatic economic determinism and whose conception of the party was vanguardist to the point of elitism (Bordiga also happened to be one of the targets of Lenin’s 1920 pamphlet ‘Left-wing’ communism: An infantile disorder). After 1921, Gramsci opted not to display these disagreements with Bordiga, who emerged as the main figure of the PCd’I during its early years. When the Comintern (the Third International) demanded of the PCd’I as a member party the establishment of a ‘united front’ with the PSI, Gramsci firmly supported Bordiga when the latter refused to compromise with the ‘reformists’ of the left. Gramsci and Bordiga both saw this option as ‘liquidationist’, risking the dissolution of the revolutionary identity of the PCd’I, although Tasca (who came to embody the right wing of the new party) was favourable to it. The PCd’I operated in an inauspicious political environment. In October 1922, the ‘March on Rome’ led Mussolini to the presidency of the Council of Ministers. Compared with Hitler’s regime in Germany, the fascists in Italy took longer to suppress left-wing organizations. Nevertheless, starting in 1922, the PCd’I endured successive waves of repression and arrests, which drained its working-class membership. The communist press eventually had to become clandestine, and the PCd’I cadres were forced to operate underground.

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In 1922, Gramsci was nominated as a delegate of the PCd’I at the Comintern, and moved to Moscow. He stayed in the Soviet Union from May 1922 to November 1923, attending the Comintern’s Fourth Congress in November 1922 during which Zinoviev – then chairman of the Comintern’s Executive Committee – castigated the Italian party for its intransigence. During his time in Russia, Gramsci encountered not only Lenin and Trotsky but also Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Radek (Del Roio, 2015; Rosengarten, 1984). As a result of exchanges with his Bolshevik comrades, he gradually came to accept the wisdom of some kind of ‘united front’ formula for Italy, in the sense of the PCd’I assuming the task of bringing broad swathes of Italian society under the leadership of the proletariat. This in turn stimulated the train of thought that would lead to Gramsci’s reflections on ‘hegemony’ (McNally, 2015). When he was being treated in a sanatorium, Gramsci met and fell in love with Julia Schucht, a Russian woman of German, Ukrainian and Jewish descent. This was to be an unexpected source of happiness in his life. Antonio and Julia (‘Giulia’) were married in 1923. They were to have two sons, Delio and Giuliano, born in 1924 and 1926 respectively, although Gramsci was never to meet his younger son. Gramsci moved to Vienna as directed by the Comintern from late 1923 to the spring of 1924, at which point he was elected into Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian Parliament, as a PCd’I representative. As he returned to Italy to settle in Rome, Bordiga’s leadership was being increasingly criticized, both within the PCd’I and the Comintern, and the Neapolitan was eventually replaced by a ‘centrist’ leading group with Gramsci as general secretary (who at the same time was heading the PCd’I parliamentary group of 19 deputies). He only had one chance to give a speech at the Chamber of Deputies – Mussolini, present on the day, allegedly had difficulty following Gramsci who was speaking quickly and in a low voice. With hindsight, Gramsci may have underestimated the strength and durability of fascism during these decisive years. In the early 1920s, he and his comrades at L’Ordine Nuovo saw in Mussolini little more than the symptom of a crumbling bourgeois liberal order, with Gramsci writing in June 1921 that ‘it is no doubt significant, for the seriousness of Italian political life, that at the apex of a construction that is held together by a massive system of real forces, there should be found this man [Mussolini] who amuses himself with trials of strength and verbal masturbation’ (SPW II, p. 47). After the March on Rome, many PCd’I cadres including Gramsci entertained the hope that the fascist regime would be submerged soon enough by a social revolution. As leader of the PCd’I in 1924–1926, Gramsci strengthened his commitment to the agenda of a ‘united front’ of all the labouring classes of Italy as a weapon against fascist rule. This political ambition is expressed in the ‘Lyon Theses’,

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a document put out by the PCd’I at its Third Congress which took place in January 1926 in exile in Lyon, France. One of Gramsci’s last political interventions before his arrest was to pen two letters to Togliatti – who had become PCd’I representative in Moscow – criticizing the way in which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), by then under the sway of Stalin, was suppressing debate in the contest with Trotsky and with its internal opposition. ‘You are degrading, and run the risk of annihilating, the leading function which the CPSU won through Lenin’s contribution’, Gramsci wrote (SPW II, p. 430). This Gramscian rebuke of Stalinism anticipated the veiled criticisms of Soviet developments than can be found in the Prison Notebooks (Cospito, 2016). Shortly before his imprisonment, Gramsci also began writing an essay, which remained unfinished, entitled ‘Some aspects of the Southern question’. In this important work, he puts forward a profound sociological reflection on Italy’s socio-political space, focused on the Italian South – incidentally establishing himself as a pioneer of spatial studies in Marxism (Jessop, 2005; Ekers et al., 2012; Loftus, 2019). This text also gives Gramsci the opportunity to revisit the biennio rosso and to address why the movement ran into the indifference or even hostility of popular masses in the South. Building on his adoption of the ‘united front’ strategy and prefiguring many more reflections to come, Gramsci explicitly poses the question of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ over allied classes and social groups, in particular the peasantry (SPW II, p. 443).

IMPRISONMENT AND THE QUADERNI (1926–1937) On 5 November 1926, following an alleged murder attempt on Mussolini by a teenager, the Italian Council of Ministers put forward a series of emergency measures aimed at reinforcing the repressive powers of the state and reducing the prerogatives of Parliament. Some of Gramsci’s comrades foresaw the hardening of the regime and exhorted him to flee to Switzerland. Gramsci, however, was reluctant to leave. As far as we know, he continued to believe in the protection of his parliamentary immunity, and at any rate he decided to stay in the country to participate in the parliamentary debates on the emergency measures which were planned for 9 November. On 8 November, however, he was arrested and imprisoned in violation of his immunity. Shortly after his arrest Gramsci wrote to his mother: ‘I am tranquil and serene. Morally I was prepared for everything. Physically too I will try to overcome the difficulties that may await me and to keep my balance’ (quoted in d’Orsi, 2020, p. 15). Eighteen months would pass before his trial, which took place in May 1928 and handed him a sentence of 20 years. Mussolini had allegedly demanded ‘we have to stop this brain from working for twenty

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years’, and these words were cited during the trial by the prosecutor. But Il Duce’s wish would not be fulfilled. Anticipating a long sentence, Gramsci had already resolved by this point to devote himself to studying and writing in prison. The circumstances of his detention, however, made this impossible for a period of over two years. It is only in January 1929, having been transferred to Turi in southeastern Italy, that he was granted permission to write something other than his correspondence (which itself had been limited to one letter per fortnight, which he often sent to his sister-in-law Tatiana as she was in Italy while his wife was in Russia). Even after being allowed to study and to write, Gramsci did not have unrestricted access to the books and periodicals that he wished to read. Getting hold of Marxist works was not straightforward since prison authorities were liable to view these as politically suspicious. Nonetheless, thanks to Tatiana, he was able to access several volumes of Marx published in French in the late 1920s, in addition to some of Marx’s early writings in German (Antonini, 2021, pp. 75–76). Further, every page that Gramsci wrote was subjected to the examination of prison censors before being returned to him. In a 1936 letter to Julia, Gramsci explained that this humiliating practice has led him over the years to develop a ‘prison style of writing’ that would avoid certain terms in a bitter kind of self-censorship, since he knew that every word would be read with ‘acrimonious, suspicious pedantry’ by the prison director (LP, p. 267). We can recall here Leo Strauss’s remark to the effect that persecution ‘gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines’ (1988 [1952], p. 25). Gramsci thus resorted to paraphrases and circumlocutions in place of certain ‘sensitive’ terms. To illustrate, Lenin is referred to as ‘Illich’ (after his birth name Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) and Trotsky as ‘Bronstein’ (after his birth name Lev Davidovich Bronstein). Most significantly, Gramsci calls Marxism ‘the philosophy of praxis’ while referring to Marx himself as ‘the founder of the philosophy of praxis’. The phrase ‘philosophy of praxis’ has a unique place among his writing stratagems, since it represented for him much more than a mere artifice. Originally used by Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola, it is central to Gramsci’s philosophical reconstruction of Marxism on the basis of human beings’ critical practice, or praxis (Frosini, 2009; Cospito, 2016). Besides this term, the subterfuges he used were often quite rudimentary, suggesting that the prison agents were far from well-versed in the thought of Marx and his successors. In order to further limit suspicion, he also entertained with his captors the notion that his writings were mostly historical, linguistic and literary studies, and not directly political (Frosini, 2016).

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Gramsci wrote in school notebooks, in a round and regular handwriting, with few words crossed out. The notebooks were stored outside of his cell by the prison guards when he was not working on them. Between 1929 and 1935, 33 notebooks were filled out. The substance of Gramsci’s writings addressed a dizzying array of topics, ‘ranging from political economy [to] history and historiography, literary and cultural criticism, comparative sociology, political theory, linguistics, and folklore’ (Thomas, 2006, p. 65). As remarked by Angelo d’Orsi, there was ‘a nexus between the logistical situation (the physical and psychological condition) of the prisoner and his intellectual work’ (2020, p. 15). Studying and writing became a way for Gramsci to preserve his humanity and personality in the face of defeat, persecution, demoralization and physical ailments. Still, he continued to experience his detention as a monotonous and debilitating ordeal. In 1929 he confided to his mother: ‘Boredom is my worst enemy, although I read or write all day long; it’s a special kind of boredom, which doesn’t spring from idleness (because I keep myself occupied) but from the lack of contact with the outside world’ (LP, p. 153). On the basis of philological research carried out on the notebooks themselves by Italian scholars, foremost Gianni Francioni (1984, 2016), Gramsci’s studies in prison can be divided into three phases. First, from 1929 to 1931, while incarcerated in Turi, he completed nine notebooks, which included translations – often from German – whose purpose was also a way for him to retrain his brain after being forbidden to work for three years. In 1932 and 1933, while still in Turi, he re-transcribed and amended some of these early notebooks in a few ‘special notebooks’ (notebooks 10 to 13 in the Italian critical edition of 1975). Finally, from 1933 to 1935, after having been transferred for health reasons to a clinic in Formia in the Lazio region, but still a prisoner, Gramsci continued his work both by furthering the reflections of past notebooks and by introducing some new themes (such as the idea of ‘Americanism’ in notebook 22). Only a small proportion of the 33 notebooks address a single object of study or are based on a systematic mode of exposition. Instead, they contain notes that are more or less brief, and of a disparate and heterogeneous character. Frequently, these notes are simply incursions, leads, sketches, or hypotheses – intellectual starting-points meant to be fleshed out and refined at a later stage. It is the eclectic and often disjointed nature of the Prison Notebooks that has made them such an open-ended resource for critical thought, while also raising the challenge of understanding and interpreting them. Shortly after his trial, there was an international campaign for Gramsci’s liberation, and two of his friends – French writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse – went so far as to set up a support committee in Paris. This was of no avail. With his health steadily worsening in Turi, a gravely ill Gramsci was

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transferred to Formia in 1933 where he finally started to receive a measure of (still inadequate) medical attention. He experienced a brief remission, but his health had already deteriorated too far, and by the time he was transferred to the Quisisana clinic in Rome in 1935 he had become extremely weak. He became unable to digest, and died, exhausted, on 27 April 1937. His sister-in-law Tatiana managed to smuggle his notebooks out of the clinic and send them to Moscow through diplomatic channels.

FROM DEFEAT AND DOWNFALL TO WRITING FÜR EWIG: HOW GRAMSCI PURSUED POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS IN PRISON How did Gramsci himself conceive of his intellectual undertaking in prison? Some of his letters are illuminating in this respect. Writing to Tatiana Schucht in March 1927, several months after his arrest, he revealed: I’m plagued by a notion, common among prisoners, that one has to accomplish something für ewig, to cite a complex idea of Goethe’s … I’d like to set up a plan for the intense systematic study of some subject that would absorb and concentrate my inner life. (LP, p. 79)

The reference to Goethe and the mention of für ewig (‘for eternity’ in German) might feel jarring for a communist revolutionary who less than a year before was the general secretary of a national political party. But it is illustrative of Gramsci’s response to the abrupt severance from the political activism that had defined his life. Forcibly cut off from concrete political events, he foresaw the possibility of making a contribution to his and future generations by the act of writing. At the same time, the shift from political action to isolated study was a difficult one to navigate psychologically for him, as he readily admitted in another letter to Tatiana in 1930: My entire intellectual formation was of a polemical nature, so that it’s impossible for me to think ‘disinterestedly’ or to study for the sake of studying. Only rarely do I lose myself in a particular train of thought and analyze something for its inherent interest. Usually I have to engage in a dialogue, be dialectical, to arrive at some intellectual stimulation. I once told you how I hate tossing stones into the dark. (LP, p. 193)

Gramsci would never fully overcome this tension between, on the one hand, engaging with the political contests and aspirations of his own era, and on the other, striving to set out a kind of knowledge so broad as to apply beyond his own time and place. Yet this tension that runs throughout the Prison Notebooks

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is not so much crippling as it is generative, while Gramsci’s persistent political preoccupations endow his writings with a profoundly strategic character. As Joseph Buttigieg remarks, ‘Gramsci never aspired to the privileged position of the “objective” (i.e. disinterested) spectator, he never ceased being political, he never lost sight of the worldliness of his task’ (1982, p. 25). Grappling with issues specific to the international communist movement, or to Italian society under fascism, his writings offer at the same time lasting insights into human affairs. The Prison Notebooks therefore do not embody a flight from ‘action’ towards ‘theory’ on the part of an incapacitated revolutionary, but a melding of the two in a novel kind of undertaking. Defeated and thrown into prison, Gramsci strived to pursue politics by other means. This point is not merely of biographical interest but is key to reading Gramsci’s writings faithfully. His thought developed on the basis of a trajectory of political action and militancy, making that thought inextricably linked to this life experience. Gramsci’s concern with revolutionary strategy is constitutive of the Prison Notebooks. Situating Gramsci’s place within the historical arc of Marxism in light of his biography, it can further be observed that he shared with his near contemporaries Lenin and Trotsky the combination of political leadership with a lasting intellectual contribution. This would tend to make of Gramsci one of the last of a series of European intellectual revolutionaries, reaching back to Marx and Engels themselves and spanning the First and Second Internationals and the beginnings of the Third. Notably, Gramsci abandoned his academic studies in Turin so early as to never earn a university degree. By contrast, from the 1930s onwards, the most renowned of Marxist thinkers in Europe – such as members of the Frankfurt School – happened to be scholars foremost, and activists only as a secondary pursuit, if at all. Whatever commonalities can be found between Gramsci and other thinkers associated with ‘Western Marxism’ (see Anderson, 1976), it is important to bear in mind this rift between Gramsci’s primary dedication to revolutionary politics and the more academic profile of subsequent Marxist intellectual figures in the West. Another essential lesson to draw from Gramsci’s biography is that his political thought developed and matured in a period – between the October Revolution and the late 1920s – when the international communist movement associated with the Third International was still in its infancy. This meant that Gramsci, both as an activist and as an intellectual, escaped the kind of extreme organizational and ideological conformity that Stalin’s dictatorship would later impose on communist parties across the world. Gramsci’s direct participation in communist politics belonged to a phase that preceded by a few years global Stalinization as well as the rigid codification of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ in the Soviet Union itself. This sheds light on how he simultaneously assumes the identity of a ‘soldier’ (his own term) of the communist movement and

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manifests nonetheless an extraordinary degree of intellectual freedom and creativity when grappling with Marxism in his writings – something that would soon enough become impossible for many communist leaders and cadres of the Stalin era. As for the counterfactual of how Gramsci would have fared politically if he had avoided imprisonment, or survived it, we can recall Eric Hobsbawm’s remark to the effect that ‘Mussolini, by a pleasing irony of history, saved him from Stalin by putting him behind bars’ (1974).

CONCLUSION This chapter has provided an account of Gramsci’s exceptional personal and political trajectory during one of the most tumultuous periods in Europe’s history. After having depicted his humble origins in a small Sardinian town, we have revisited his formative years in Turin during the First Word War and the biennio rosso, his transition from socialist journalist to communist cadre after the foundation of the PCd’I, his decisive encounter with Soviet Russia, and his battle against fascism leading up to his arrest and decade-long imprisonment. The chapter’s final section has set out implications of Gramsci’s biography for a faithful understanding and interpretation of his writings, insisting that what would become the Prison Notebooks should be cast as an intrinsically political undertaking. Gramsci’s times were at once dire, scarred by war and by fascism, and hopeful, as witnessed by the revolutionary ambitions held by himself and his comrades. The way he lived through his era has made him one of the most tragic and inspiring figures on the political stage of the twentieth century. The dramatic events and developments that he witnessed, participated in, and occasionally led, are key to reading and engaging with his writings today. Gramsci was foremost a Marxist revolutionary and it is as such that he approached his political activism as well as his intellectual endeavours.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This contribution is adapted from a chapter of our book: George Hoare and Nathan Sperber, An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy, 2015, published by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London.

NOTES 1.

In line with scholarly convention, we use the following acronyms when quoting from Gramsci’s writings. LP refers to the volume Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci (1979). SPW I and SPW II refer, respectively, to the anthologies

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2. 3.

Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920) (1977) and Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926) (1978). See the list below for the full references. The account of Gramsci’s life and times offered in this chapter draws on full-length biographies of Gramsci by Giuseppe Fiori (1970), Alistair Davidson (2016 [1977]), Angelo d’Orsi (2017) and Jean-Yves Frétigné (2022). Palmiro Togliatti was to become general secretary of the PCd’I (then PCI) from 1927 to 1964. Umberto Terracini would be imprisoned by the fascists from 1926 to 1943 before eventually becoming a PCI senator. Angelo Tasca, purged from the party in 1929, would emigrate to France and rally the Vichy regime during the Second World War.

REFERENCES Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on Western Marxism. New Left Books. Antonini, F. (2021). Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity. Brill. Buttigieg, J. A. (1982). The exemplary worldliness of Antonio Gramsci’s literary criticism. Boundary 2, 11(1–2), 21–39. Buttigieg, J. (1991). After Gramsci. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 24(1), 87–99. Cospito, G. (2016). The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci: A Diachronic Interpretation of Prison Notebooks. Brill. Davidson, A. (2016 [1977]). Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. Brill. Del Roio, M. (2015). The Prisms of Gramsci: The Political Formula of the United Front. Brill. d’Orsi, A. (2017). Gramsci. Una nuova biografia. Feltrinelli. d’Orsi, A. (2020). Antonio Gramsci: The prison years. In D. Cadeddu (ed.), A Companion to Antonio Gramsci: Essays on History and Theories of History, Politics and Historiography (pp. 13–25). Brill. Ekers, M., Hart, G., Kipfer, S., & Loftus, A. (Eds). (2012). Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics. John Wiley & Sons. Fiori, G. (1970). Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary. New Left Books. Francioni, G. (1984). L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei Quaderni del carcere. Bibliopolis. Francioni, G. (2016). Un labirinto di carta (Introduzione alla filologia gramsciana). International Gramsci Journal, 2(1), 7–48. Frétigné, J. Y. (2022). To Live is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci. University of Chicago Press. Frosini, F. (2009). Da Gramsci a Marx. Ideologia, verità, politica. DeriveApprodi. Frosini, F. (2016). Le travail caché du prisonnier entre ‘littérature’ et ‘politique’: quelques réflexions sur les ‘sources’ des Cahiers de prison d’Antonio Gramsci. Laboratoire italien, 18. Gramsci, A. (1917). La Città futura. https://​www​.marxists​.org/​italiano/​gramsci/​17/​ cittafutura​.htm Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920) (Q. Hoare, Ed.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926) (Q. Hoare, Ed.). Lawrence and Wishart.

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Gramsci, A. (1979). Letters from Prison by Antonio Gramsci (L. Lawner, Ed.). Quartet. Hobsbawm, E. (1974). The great Gramsci. New York Review of Books, 4 April. https://​ www​.nybooks​.com/​articles/​1974/​04/​04/​the​-great​-gramsci/​ Jessop, B. (2005). Gramsci as a spatial theorist. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 421–437. Lenin, V. I. (1920). ‘Left-wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder. https://​www​ .marxists​.org/​archive/​lenin/​works/​1920/​lwc/​ Liguori, G. (2020). Gramsci, the October Revolution and its ‘translation’ in the West. In D. Cadeddu (Ed.), A Companion to Antonio Gramsci (pp. 70–78). Brill. Loftus, A. (2019). Gramsci as a historical geographical materialist. In Antonini, F., Bernstein, A., Fusaro, L., & Jackson, R. (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 9–22). Brill. Losurdo, D. (1997). Antonio Gramsci dal liberalismo al ‘comunismo critico’. Gamberetti. McNally, M. (2015). Gramsci, the United Front Comintern and democratic strategy. In A. McNally (Ed.), Antonio Gramsci (pp. 11–33). Palgrave Macmillan. Rapone, L. (2020). Gramsci: From socialism to communism. In D. Cadeddu (Ed.), A Companion to Antonio Gramsci (pp. 3–12). Brill. Rosengarten, F. (1984). The Gramsci–Trotsky question (1922–1932). Social Text, 11, 65–95. Santucci, A. (1992). La perspective du communisme dans L’Ordine Nuovo. In A. Tosel (Ed.), Modernité de Gramsci: actes du colloque franco-italien de Besançon, 23–25 novembre 1989. Les Belles Lettres. Strauss, L. (1988 [1952]). Persecution and the Art of Writing. University of Chicago Press. Thomas, P. (2006). Modernity as ‘passive revolution’: Gramsci and the fundamental concepts of historical materialism. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 17(2), 61–78. Togliatti, P. (1937). Antonio Gramsci capo della classe operaia italiana. Lo Stato Operaio, 5–6.

3. Gramsci, Marx, Hegel Robert P. Jackson INTRODUCTION It would be difficult to advance a coherent reading of Gramsci’s writings, or to explain the contested legacy of his thought, without seeking to establish the coordinates of his relationship with Marx and Hegel.1 On the one hand, Gramsci’s contribution to historical materialism (and his development of Antonio Labriola’s ‘philosophy of praxis’) makes his indebtedness to Marx self-evident, if not straightforward.2 On the other, the historical significance that Gramsci ascribes to Hegelianism is made clear in Notebook 15 of the Prison Notebooks when he suggests that the process of the unification of European culture ‘culminated in Hegel and with the critique of Hegelianism’ (Q 15, § 61, p. 1826; SPN, p. 416).3 At the same time, Gramsci emphasizes that figures such as Hegel are important not only as great thinkers, but as personifications of national cultural processes (e.g., German classical philosophy) subject to a ‘reciprocal translatability’ with other processes, such as the French Revolution and its ‘political and juridical’ implications (Q 15, § 61, p. 1826; SPN, p. 417).4 This is not to claim that the weight of Gramsci’s engagement with Hegel and Marx is equal, nor equally distributed across his pre-carceral and prison work. Surveying the frequency of appearances in his pre-prison writings (1910–1926), Gramsci refers to Hegel, Hegelian [hegeliano/a] thought, and Hegelianism [hegelianismo] in total 16 times in eight discrete pieces.5 By comparison, variations of Marx, Marxist, and Marxism appear 376 times in 152 different articles. In the Prison Notebooks (1929–1935), Hegel appears more often, with 120 direct mentions alongside 105 instances of ‘Hegelism’, ‘hegelian(s)’, ‘hegelists’, ‘neo-hegelian(ism/s)’, and ‘anti-hegelians’ [hegelismo, hegelian/o/a/i, hegelisti, neohegelismo/iane, antihegeliane].6 While the balance sheet is less one-sided than in the pre-prison work, Marx continues to feature more frequently in the Prison Notebooks, with 188 direct instances alongside 161 occurrences of ‘Marxism’, ‘Marxist(s)’, ‘marxistic’, and ‘marxian’ [marxismo, marxist/i/e, marxistic/o/a/che, marxiano]. This is not to mention at least 30 references to Marx and Engels under other guises, 48

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for example as the ‘first theorists’, ‘writers’, or ‘founders’ of the ‘philosophy of praxis’ [primi teorici / scrittori / fondatori/e della filosofia della praxis]. In quantitative terms, Gramsci’s explicit discussion of Hegel increases markedly between his pre-prison and carceral work. This reflects the significant role Hegel plays in the Notebooks in Gramsci’s settling of accounts with Italian (neo-)idealism. Gramsci relates to Hegelianism in the context of debates in Italy regarding the tradition of German idealism, mediated notably by the nineteenth-century Neapolitan philosophy of Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco De Sanctis, and the later neo-idealism of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile.7 Croce’s name appears 26 times in 16 pre-prison articles, and Gentile’s six times in five articles.8 The pre-prison appearances of Hegel all occur in the years 1916 and 1918, as, predominantly, do those of Croce and Gentile.9 These discussions are however eclipsed by around 1,000 references to Croce and 152 instances of Gentile in the Notebooks.10 While empirically interesting, these aggregated figures are difficult to interpret without analysing Gramsci’s qualitative engagement with Hegel and the project of his ‘return’ to Marx in the Notebooks. Adequate resources for this operation have become available only relatively recently for the anglophone reader. It is notable that many of Gramsci’s prison notes discussing Hegel did not appear in the widely known Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971). Other anthologies, such as the Further Selections (Gramsci, 1995), improved the situation in the 1990s by making accessible many notes relating to Croce, Hegel, and philosophy. However, a diachronic analysis has become possible only with the subsequent publication of the three volumes (Notebooks 1–8) of the English critical edition (Gramsci, 2011).11 The restricted availability of the relevant notes may help to explain the lack of discussion of Gramsci’s account of Hegel and philosophy in several well-known English-language introductions to his thought.12 The paucity of attention in English-language studies to Gramsci’s relation with Hegel may relate to Anderson’s influential criticism of Gramsci (Anderson, 1976a, 1976b, 2017), which views his thought through the category of ‘Western Marxism’, understood to be diluted by the speculative residues of idealist thought. Until recently, much Anglophone literature has been inclined to neglect the philosophical import of Gramsci’s thought.13 This attenuation stands in stark contrast to Gramsci’s emphasis on the ‘philosophy of praxis’ as a complete re-conception ‘from head to toe […] of philosophy itself’ (Q 11, § 27, p. 1436; SPN, p. 464). Re-examining Gramsci’s engagement with Hegel (and Marx, Croce and Gentile) has significance for understanding the contested legacy of his thought,14 and helps to adjudicate between diverse interpretations.15 We might consider Althusser’s well-known inclusion of Gramsci in the pantheon of thinkers suffering from a latent logic of ‘historicist’ and ‘humanist’ commitments deriving from their Hegelianism (Althusser and

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Balibar, 1970).16 Or, the reverse of the medal, we might question interpretations that valorize, even against Gramsci himself, the Crocean element of Gramsci’s thought (Bellamy, 2001; Finocchiaro, 1988). Despite Gramsci’s description in the Notebooks of his younger self as ‘tendentially Crocean’ (Q 10I, § 11, p. 1233; FSPN, p. 355), even his early writings are characterized by an approach that is far from uniform. It would be misleading to obscure the diverse impulses animating his thought and their dynamic across the pre-carceral and prison writings. The narrative becomes yet more complex as we expand the matrix to consider the relations Gramsci–Marx–Hegel–Croce. Thomas (2009, p. 256n32) cautions us against an uncritical ‘assumption that the Gramsci–Croce relationship can be modelled on a particular understanding of the Marx–Hegel relationship’. This chapter contributes to reading these myriad connections, first in the pre-prison writings and then Notebooks 1–8 of the Prison Notebooks.17 The aim is to provide an impression of the Gramsci–Hegel relation in (and adjacent to) the first phases of the interconnected project that Gramsci initiates with his three series of ‘Notes on Philosophy’ (in Notebooks 4, 7 and 8), which constitute ‘an extended meditation concerning the nature, meaning, and significance of Marx’s thought’ (Bernstein, 2020, p. 143).

PRE-PRISON WRITINGS Marcello Musté (2018, p. 30) observes that Gramsci’s engagement with Hegel and idealist thought dates back to his university studies in Turin (1911–1915), where he was encouraged by professors, such as Dante scholar Umberto Cosmo, to engage with ‘not only Machiavelli, but de Sanctis and Hegel’ (Davidson, 1977, p. 60). Gramsci himself later noted (in a letter of 17 August 1931 to his sister-in-law Tania) that the intellectual milieu of this period was a ‘movement of moral and intellectual reform initiated in Italy by Benedetto Croce, whose first point was this, that modern man can and must live without religion’ (Gramsci, 1973, p. 466; Gramsci, 1993, vol. 2, p. 56). Davidson (1977, p. 81) observes that Gramsci made very few references to Marx in his newspaper columns before 1917.18 It is notable that half of the pre-prison texts where Hegel appears include reference to Marx. In each case, the occurrence of Marx and Hegel is proximate to each other in the text. Thus, Gramsci discusses ‘Marxism or Hegelianism’, ‘Georg Hegel, master of Karl Marx’, ‘Gentile, who wrote a volume on the philosophy of Karl Marx’, ‘a Marxist Hegelism’ and, discussing reports in the press on conflicts within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), asks: ‘who can take such a miserable game of cups and balls [giuoco di bussolotti] as a Hegelian sense of history, as Marxist thought?’19

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Gramsci’s pre-prison texts in which Hegel and Marx appear concern themes that broadly presage later concerns in the Prison Notebooks. These include topics such as the attitude of Catholics towards Hegel, the social impact of industrialists (such as Giovanni Agnelli), German idealism and the ‘negation of transcendentalism’, the relation between class struggle and parliamentarism in the PSI, and a comparison of Giambattista Vico’s conception of ‘divine providence’ with the ‘cunning of reason’ in Hegel.20 However, it would be premature to impose upon Gramsci’s early work a schematic understanding of his relation to Hegel and Marx. It might be more accurate to describe Gramsci as sketching positions in the course of development, rather than an elaborated conception of these thinkers. Frosini (2009a) and Bernstein (2020) point to Gramsci’s 1917 article ‘The Revolution against “Capital”‘ to demonstrate that, in his youthful writings, Gramsci views Marx as philosophically inconsistent. Gramsci characterizes the Bolshevik Revolution as a revolution against the ‘positivistic and naturalistic encrustations’ afflicting Marx’s Capital, understood as a text implying the ‘iron-clad’ necessity of bourgeois rule in Russia prior to a proletarian revolution.21 By contrast, the Bolsheviks, for Gramsci, while parting with Marxism as a ‘rigid doctrine’, were ‘living out Marxist thought – the real undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism’ (Gramsci, 1982, pp. 513-4; Gramsci 1994, p. 40, emphasis in original). The following year, Gramsci clarifies his view of Marxism’s connection to philosophy, and what he calls a ‘critically-informed communism’, while discussing the relationship between Catholicism and positivism in the ideology of the French monarchist and nationalist group Action Française: Marxism is based on philosophical idealism, which is something that has nothing in common with what is generally understood by the word ‘idealism’ – giving oneself up to dreams and to the treasured illusions of feeling; always having one’s head in the clouds, with no concern for the necessities and needs of practical life. […] That Marx should have introduced positivist elements into his work is hardly surprising, and it is easily explained: Marx was not a philosopher by profession, and even he had his off days. What is certain is that, in its essence, his doctrine is dependent on philosophical idealism, and that the more recent developments in this philosophical tradition constitute the ideal current into which the proletarian and socialist movement historically flows.22

The unorthodox conception of ‘idealism’ that Gramsci refers to in these writings is associated with the ‘negation of transcendentalism’. He will identify this modern conception of ‘immanence’ with Hegel’s thought.23 According to Frosini (2009a, p. 507), Gramsci’s dismissive attitude to the philosophical aspect of Marx’s writings changes during ‘the period of his greatest political commitment’, which ‘coincided with his stay in Moscow and then

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in Vienna’ (1922–1924). This provides Gramsci with the opportunity not only ‘to personally meet the major exponents of the [Communist] International, but also to get acquainted with the state of studies on Marx and Engels’ (Frosini, 2009a, p. 507). During this period, Gramsci’s ‘attitude changed radically’, and he becomes far more attentive to the notion of Marxist ‘theory’ and its relation to philosophy. It is in this sense that the Prison Notebooks represent a ‘return to Marx’, not due to the quantity of references to Marx but rather, for Frosini (2009a, p. 507), the fact that ‘they are structured according to a project’. The marrow of this project is, for Bernstein (2020, p. 142), Gramsci’s translation and reading in prison of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, which he argues is ‘Marx’s affirmation of the this-worldliness [Diesseitigkeit] of thought that demonstrates its truth, reality and power, in practice into the terms of an “absolute immanence”, or an “absolute worldliness or earthliness” of thought’.

PRISON WRITINGS Musté (2018, p. 31) notes that Gramsci’s access to materials in prison was limited to a handful of items at any time. Few of Hegel’s texts and little critical literature were available to Gramsci, so that his analyses are largely the product of his pre-prison readings.24 Despite these impediments to a philological interpretation of Hegel, Gramsci gleans remarkable insights into the Marx– Hegel relation. Musté (2018, p. 33) argues that ‘the importance of Hegelian philosophy for the construction of the theoretical plot of the Notebooks was enormous’. Roberto Finelli (2009, p. 389) notes that in Notebook 8 (February–March 1932) Gramsci credits a passage from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, discussing the ‘[mutual] translatability of national cultures’, of German philosophy and the French Revolution, as the ‘source of the Marxian unity of theory and practice’.25 Gramsci explains that Hegel’s passage is ‘the “source” of the view, expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach, that the philosophers have explained the world and the point now is to change it; in other words, that philosophy must become “politics” or “practice” in order for it to continue to be philosophy’ (Q 8, § 208, p. 1066; PN3, p. 355). Gramsci first discusses Hegel in Notebook 1 (February–March 1930), in relation to his ‘doctrine of parties and associations as the “private” fabric of the state’ (Q 1, § 47, p. 56; PN1, p. 153).26 For Gramsci, Hegel’s concept of ‘associationism’, albeit ‘vague and primitive’, is a product of his political experience of the French Revolution, allowing Hegel to theorize ‘the parliamentary state with its regime of parties’ by giving ‘greater concreteness to constitutionalism’, contrasting an ‘organized’ and educative ongoing ‘consent’ to the ‘generic kind which is declared at the time of elections’ (Q 1, § 47, pp. 56–57; PN1, p. 153). In the following note, discussing the ‘reverse Jacobinism’ of Action Française organizer Charles Maurras, Gramsci summarizes this

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‘Hegelian form of government’ as ‘permanently organized consent (with the organisation being left to private initiative and thus having a moral or ethical character since it was, in one way or another, a “voluntary” consent)’ (Q 1, § 48, p. 58; PN1, p. 155).27 Gramsci judges that Marx’s own historical experience was not ‘greatly superior’ to that of Hegel, his ‘concept of organisation’ remaining ‘entangled within these elements: trade organisation, Jacobin clubs, secret conspiracies of small groups, journalistic organisation’, albeit Marx ‘had a sense of the masses through his activity as a journalist and agitator’ (Q1, § 47, p. 57; PN1, p. 154).28 Gramsci reflects in May 1930 on the importance for Marx of having ‘participated in German university life very shortly after Hegel’s death, when there must still have been a most vivid memory of Hegel’s “oral” teachings’, in which ‘the historical concreteness of Hegel’s thought must have stood out much more clearly than it does in his systematic writings’ (Q 1, § 152, pp. 134–135; PN1, pp. 231–232). For Gramsci, Marx’s use, against Hegel, of Hegel’s own image, of ‘men walking on their heads’ to reflect the period of the Revolution, ‘really seems to have sprung out of conversation, fresh, spontaneous, so little “bookish”’ (Q 1, § 152, p. 135; PN1, p. 232).29 Similarly, in Notebook 3 (June–July 1930), Gramsci re-examines Marx’s use (in the Eighteenth Brumaire) of Hegel’s saying that ‘in history all events occur twice’ (Q 3, § 51, pp. 333–334; PN2, p. 53). Gramsci notes that Marx’s ‘correction that the first time the event occurs as tragedy and the second time as farce’, was: already foreshadowed in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. ‘The gods of Greece, already tragically wounded to death in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, had to re-die a comic death in Lucian’s Dialogues. Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully.’ (Q 3, § 51, p. 334; PN2, p. 54)

In tracing the sources of Marxian ideas that had become sealed aphorisms in the hands of subsequent Marxists, Gramsci develops the project outlined above, which, as Frosini notes, revives ‘the fundamental questions of Marxism’ and delves ‘beneath the aporias into which it has fallen’ (Frosini 2009a, p. 507). In May 1930, Gramsci begins the first series of ‘Notes on Philosophy’ in Notebook 4,30 arguing that Marxism has undergone a ‘double revision’: it has given rise to a double combination. On the one hand, some of its elements have been explicitly or implicitly absorbed by certain idealist currents (Croce, Sorel, Bergson, etc., the pragmatists, etc.); on the other hand, the ‘official’ Marxists, anxious to find a philosophy that comprised Marxism, have found it in the modern derivations of vulgar philosophical materialism or even in idealist currents like Kantianism (Max Adler). (Q 4, § 3, pp. 421-2; PN2, p. 140)

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Croce’s combination is his ‘absorption’ of Marxism as an ‘empirical canon of historical research’, while, on the other hand, ‘Marxism has had to ally itself with extraneous tendencies in order to combat the residues of the precapitalist world among the popular masses’ (Q 4, § 3, p. 422; PN2, pp. 140–141). These tendencies reflect the tasks facing Marxism ‘to combat modern ideologies in their most refined form; and to enlighten the minds of the popular masses’ (Q 4, § 3, p. 422; PN2, p. 141). In search of a current of thought that can match these trials, Gramsci alights upon Labriola’s ‘philosophy of praxis’.31 For Gramsci, ‘Labriola is differentiated from both of these currents by his affirmation that Marxism is itself an independent and original philosophy’ (Q 4, § 3, p. 422; PN2, p. 140). Gramsci sets himself the challenge of ‘resuming and developing Labriola’s position’ (Q 4, § 3, p. 422; PN2, p. 140).32 Gramsci asks why elements of Marxism have been absorbed by or become fused with other philosophies, ideologies, and forms of culture. This involves no less than ‘tracing the history of modern culture after Marx and Engels’ (Q 4, § 3, p. 422; PN2, p. 140). It also leads him to probe the character of modernity and how different cultural movements, such as the Renaissance and the Reformation, have sought to achieve the ‘moral unification’ of society.33 Gramsci describes historical materialism as a development of the Reformation, which, as Frosini (2012, p. 66) explains, is associated with ‘the necessity of the national aggregation of the masses under a unitary principle’: Historical materialism, in its dialectic of popular culture–high culture, is the crowning point of this entire movement of intellectual and moral reform. It corresponds to Reformation + French Revolution, universality + politics; it is still going through its popular phase, it has also become ‘prejudice’ and ‘superstition’. (Q 4, § 3, p. 424; PN2, p. 142)

Later in his prison studies, Gramsci reconceptualizes the related categories of Reformation (‘popular dimension’) and Renaissance (‘abstract thought’), and consequently integrates the ‘French Revolution’ (the ‘point of view of the subalterns’) into ‘philosophy’ (Frosini, 2012, p. 67). Frosini traces this evolution of Gramsci’s notions of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Renaissance’, which begin as opposite moments (with Marxism, as above, initially related to the former) and are later unified ‘under the predominance of the Renaissance’ (Frosini, 2012, p. 63). For Frosini, Gramsci’s study of Hegel’s thought plays a pivotal role in developing this later conception, since ‘Absolute Idealism is not the solitary invention of a frustrated philosopher, but a powerful tool which allows us to conceive of hegemony as the active inclusion of the masses within the new bourgeois power’ (Frosini, 2012, p. 68).

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In the same note (Q 4, § 3), Gramsci provides this account of Hegel: Hegel, straddling the French Revolution and the Restoration, joined the two moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically. Hegel’s successors destroyed this unity, returning to the old materialism with Feuerbach and to the spiritualism of the Hegelian right. In his youth, Marx relived this whole experience: Hegelian, Feuerbachian materialist, Marxist; in other words, he reforged the destroyed unity into a new philosophical construction: this new construction of his, this new philosophy is already clearly evident in the theses on Feuerbach. Many historical materialists have done to Marx what had already been done to Hegel; in other words, they have gone from dialectical unity back to crude materialism, while, as has already been said, modern vulgar idealist high culture has tried to incorporate those elements of Marxism that it needed—also because this modern philosophy has itself sought, in its own way, to join materialism and spiritualism dialectically, just as Hegel had tried to do and as Marx really did. (Q 4, § 3, p. 424; PN2, p. 143)

Hegel’s thought plays an important role in Gramsci’s criticism of Croce, since Marxism and neo-idealism (as twin ‘critiques of Hegelianism’) were both attempts to renew Hegel’s ‘destroyed unity’. As one of the most important elements influencing Marxism, Gramsci returns to the high point of Hegel’s efforts to overcome ‘materialism and spiritualism’, which generates Hegel’s conception of the dialectic and his appreciation of ‘real contradictions’. This is not, however, to elide Marxism with Hegelianism. In May–August 1930, Gramsci explains why Marxism constitutes an original philosophy: Marx’s personal philosophical culture—namely, the philosophical currents and the great philosophers that Marx studied—is (usually) confused with the origins or the constitutive parts of historical materialism, and so the philosophical basis of historical materialism is mistakenly reduced to some system or another. It is certainly interesting [and necessary] to search for and closely examine the components of Marx’s philosophical culture, but one must bear in mind that neither Spinozism, nor Hegelianism, nor French materialism is an essential part of historical materialism. Rather, the essential part of historical materialism is precisely that which none of those currents contained except in embryonic form and which Marx either developed or for the development of which provided the basic principles. The essential part of Marxism consists in its surpassing of the old philosophies and also in its way of conceiving philosophy—and this is what must be systematically demonstrated and developed. In the realm of theory, Marxism is not to be confused with or reduced to any other philosophy; it is original not only because it surpasses previous philosophies but also, and above all, because it opens up a completely new road: in other words, it renews from top to bottom the whole way of conceiving philosophy. (Q 4, § 11, p. 432–433; PN2, pp. 152–153)

Whereas Hegel’s unification ultimately decomposes, for Gramsci, the philosophy of praxis is original because it develops qualitatively new conceptions, e.g., ‘absolute immanence’, ‘absolute historicism’, and ‘absolute humanism’.34 Nevertheless Gramsci ‘acknowledge[s] that out of [Marxism’s] “originative”

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elements Hegelianism is, relatively speaking, the most important’ precisely due to Hegel’s endeavours to surpass the traditional philosophies. (Q 4, § 11, p. 433; PN2, p. 153) In October–November 1930, while discussing the notion that historical materialism should see itself as a ‘transitory phase in philosophical thought’, Gramsci explains the special role that Hegel’s thought plays for Marxism: All hitherto-existing philosophy has been the product and the expression of the inner contradictions of society. But no philosophical system, taken separately, is the conscious expression of these contradictions, since this expression can only be provided by the ensemble of philosophical systems. Every philosopher is, and cannot but be, convinced that he expresses the unity of the human spirit, that is, the unity of history and nature. Otherwise, men would not act, they would not create new history; in other words, philosophies could not become ‘ideologies’ they could not, in practice, acquire the fanatical granite solidity of ‘popular beliefs,’ which have the equivalence of ‘material forces.’ In the history of philosophical thought, Hegel plays a separate role, because in his system, in one way or another, even if only in the form of a ‘philosophical romance,’ it is possible to understand what reality is; in other words, in a single system and in a single philosopher one gets that consciousness of contradictions that previously could be obtained only from the ensemble of systems, from the ensemble of philosophers struggling with and contradicting each other. In a certain sense, then, historical materialism is a reform and a development of Hegelianism: it is philosophy freed from every unilateral and fanatical ideological element; it is the full consciousness of contradictions, the consciousness wherein the philosopher himself, understood both as an individual and as a social group, not only understands contradictions but posits himself as an element of the contradiction and raises this element to a principle of politics and action. (Q 4, § 45, pp. 471–472; PN2, pp. 194–195)

Hegel’s unique contribution is identified with his realist achievements or his ‘consciousness of contradictions’, even if this is only in the form of a ‘philosophical romance’ (Q 4, § 45, pp. 471; PN2, p. 195).35 As Alvaro Bianchi emphasizes, Gramsci’s assertion of the ‘superiority of the philosophy of praxis [surpassing Hegel] would be, precisely, in its ability to be a theory of contradictions “existing in history and in society”’ (Bianchi, 2020, p. 47). The ‘disintegration of Hegelianism’ led not only to the ‘cultural process’ of Marxism (Q 15, § 61, p. 1826; SPN, p. 417), but also to Croce and Gentile’s attempts to reform the Hegelian dialectic. While discussing Machiavelli and the development of political science in November 1930 (Q 4, § 56), Gramsci considers Croce’s role in relation to the autonomy of the political-economic moment.36 Gramsci suggests focusing on Croce’s ‘so-called dialectic of distincts’, which he believes misunderstands the dialectic, since it ‘should refer

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only to opposites, negation of the negation, not to an “implicated” relation’ (Q 4, § 56; p. 503; PN2, p. 231). Gramsci explains: Art, morality, philosophy ‘serve’ politics; that is, they are ‘implicated’ in politics, they may be reduced to a moment of it but not vice versa: politics destroys art, philosophy, morality. Along these lines, it is possible to affirm the priority of the politico-economic fact—that is, the ‘structure’—as a point of reference and as a nonmechanical dialectical ‘causation’ of the superstructures. (Q 4, § 56; p. 503; PN2, p. 231)

While Gramsci acknowledges that there is a ‘legitimate need’ for Croce’s postulation of a ‘dialectic of distincts’, its overall effect (of replacing opposites with distincts), as Finelli (2009, p. 391) points out, is to ‘completely eliminate the moment of opposition and conflict’ in the dialectic, and therefore ‘not authentically valuing, as Hegel did, the moment of the negative and of the antithesis with respect to the thesis’. Gramsci returns to Hegel (and Marx) to advance his criticisms of Croce and Gentile.37 According to Finelli (2009, p. 390), while Marx’s elaboration really overcomes Hegel by radicalizing the ‘identification and interpenetration of thinking and doing’, Croce and Gentile produce a conception which caters only for the ‘ideological and political needs of the Italian moderate tradition’, in Gramsci’s words, a ‘domesticated Hegelianism’ (Q8, § 225, p. 1083; PN3, p. 372). Thus, Gramsci inquires: Have they not lopped off [Hegel’s] most realistic, most historicist features, the very same features that [on the other hand] essentially gave birth to Marxism? In other words, is it not the case that Marx’s move beyond Hegelianism has been the most fruitful historical development of that philosophy, whereas its reform by Croce–Gentile is just that, a ‘reform,’ and not a going-beyond? (Q 4, § 56; p. 504; PN2, p. 232)

It was, for Gramsci, the ‘extremely intense historical period during which all previous beliefs were peremptorily challenged’, namely the ‘French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars’, that gave Hegel the ‘vital and direct experiences’ that impelled his philosophy towards realism and ‘compelled everyone to think in “global” terms’ (Q 4, § 56; p. 504; PN2, p. 232).38 Croce and Gentile were taking Hegel’s thought back to an ‘earlier phase’, represented by the lineage of Vico and Spaventa.39 Gramsci begins his second series of ‘Notes on Philosophy’ in Notebook 7, developing his criticisms of Croce. Thus, in November 1930, he returns to the terms of Reformation and Renaissance, seeing Croce as falling into: the position of the Renaissance man vis-à-vis the man of the Protestant Reformation: the failure to understand that the intellectual coarseness of the men of the

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Reformation foreshadowed classical German philosophy and the vast movement of modern German culture […] The man of the Renaissance and the man of the Reformation have been fused in the modern intellectual of the Crocean type. Yet, even though this Crocean type comprises the man of the Reformation, he no longer understands how the historical process that started with the ‘medieval’ Luther could extend all the way to Hegel. (Q 7, § 1; p. 852; PN3, p. 154)

Gramsci’s nuanced appreciation of Croce nevertheless views the latter’s rejection of historical materialism as based on a faulty logic. For Gramsci, using Sorel’s terms, Croce is ‘judging a philosophy by its literature of intellectual popularisation’ (Q 7, § 1; p. 851; PN3, p. 154).40 Later in Notebook 7 (February 1931), Gramsci suggests Croce misinterprets historical materialism’s relation to traditional philosophies: Notwithstanding what Croce says, Marx did not replace the Hegelian ‘idea’ with the ‘concept’ of structure. The Hegelian idea is [resolved] both in the structure and in the superstructures, and the whole [traditional (and not just Hegelian)] conception of philosophy is ‘historicised’; it has been made a reality by a different linguistic articulation and therefore by a different philosophy—[if] philosophy is taken to mean [a system of] ‘concepts’ concerning reality. (Q 7, § 25; p. 874–875; PN3, p. 176)

Against Croce’s reproaches of Marxism’s ‘“scientism” and materialistic “superstition”’ (Q 7, § 1; p. 852; PN3, p. 154), Gramsci counterposes a non-mechanical and dialectical concept of the relation between structure and superstructures, elaborated through his concept of ‘historical bloc’.41 This, he argues, ‘is the philosophical equivalent of “spirit” in Croce’s philosophy’, the means by which ‘dialectical activity and a process of distinction’ can be introduced without ‘negating its real unity’ (Q 7, § 1; p. 854; PN3, p. 157). In Notebook 8 (February 1932), Gramsci suggests one can take Croce’s ‘“reality” and put it on its feet’, adopting a position similar to Marx in The Holy Family, namely ‘it is possible to arrive at a view of reality in Hegel, even if it is turned upside down’ (Q 8, § 61, p. 978; PN3, p. 272). Gramsci’s approach to intellectuals, such as Croce, is informed by his appreciation of the role Hegel ascribes to intellectuals in the ‘cultural and spiritual life’ of the modern state. In December 1931, he says: With the advent of Hegel, thinking in terms of castes and ‘states’ started to give way to thinking in terms of the ‘state,’ and the aristocrats of the state are precisely the intellectuals. The ‘patrimonial’ conception of the state (that is, thinking in terms of ‘castes’) was what Hegel needed to destroy […] before anything else. Unless one takes into account Hegel’s ‘valorization’ of the intellectuals, it would be impossible to understand anything (historically) about modern idealism and its social roots. (Q 8, § 187, p. 1054; PN3, p. 343)

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Gramsci’s appreciation of this ‘intellectuals–state nexus’ (Liguori, 2015, p. 8) shapes his scrutiny of the ‘domesticated dialectic’ that he finds in Croce and Gentile. Thus, in April 1932, he associates it with the ‘theory of revolution-restoration’ (passive revolution): because it ‘mechanically’ presupposes that the antithesis should be preserved by the thesis in order not to destroy the dialectical process, which is therefore ‘foreseen’ as an endless mechanical repetition. In real history, though, the antithesis tends to destroy the thesis. (Q 8, § 225, p. 1083; PN3, p. 372)

Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis diagnoses this pathological dialectic in much the same way that Marx criticized Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy.42 In mid-April–May 1932, he suggests: this way of conceiving the Hegelian dialectic is typical of the intellectuals, who conceive of themselves as the arbiters and mediators of real political struggles, as personifying the ‘catharsis’ – the passage from the economic aspect to the ethico-political one – i.e. the synthesis of the dialectical process itself […]. (Q 10I, §6, p. 1222; FSPN, p. 343)

On the contrary, Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is committed ‘to a total “engagement” in the real historical process’ (Q 10I, §6, p. 1222; FSPN, p. 343).43 The notes above stem from the first exploratory phase of Gramsci’s prison writings (February 1929 – beginning 1932).44 Proceeding through the later phases of his writings in prison, Gramsci develops his analysis of the themes and figures, which we have begun to elaborate in this chapter, in ‘special’ Notebooks, i.e., on Croce, philosophy, economics, the history of the intellectuals, and Machiavelli. Indeed, this process involves the genesis of, what can now be recognized, as some of his most important concepts, e.g., the extended conception of the state, the symbiotic theories of hegemony and subalternity, passive revolution, translatability, the historical bloc, etc. Taking one example, Frosini (2012) demonstrates the importance of Hegel in the evolution of Gramsci’s conception of the modern state in the Notebooks. Moving from a conception that counterposed Jacobinism to the Risorgimento, Gramsci develops the theory of passive revolution ‘as the most perfect form of bourgeois hegemony’, as ‘an admixture of progressive and regressive impulses, with Hegel as the first and most classical theorist of this admixture, and fascism as its representative in the Europe of Gramsci’s time’ (Frosini, 2012, p. 75). This chapter offers a reading of these notes in Notebooks 1–8 as a resource for adequately engaging subsequent Gramscian interpretative debates, from Bobbio and contests at the intersection of liberal and socialist theory to more

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recent uses of his thought by Laclau, Mouffe, and post-Marxism. There are difficulties in reconstructing and summarizing Gramsci’s reflections on Marx, Hegel and philosophy inherent in the incomplete process of drafting and re-drafting of the notes discussed above. We must be attentive not to obscure the ways in which Gramsci’s research poses open questions and makes tentative hypotheses to be developed and confirmed. It becomes clear that the challenges facing the philosophy of praxis are consonant with the ambitions of its project. The first steps cannot be entirely definitive, cannot be subordinated to the ‘perennial demand for complete and perfect systems’ (Q 8, § 211, p. 1069; PN3, p. 358), if one wishes to open a completely new path for philosophy.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

I would like to thank Francesca Antonini and Giacomo Tarascio for their assistance in accessing several Italian-language studies for this research, as well as Derek Boothman and Bill Carroll for their insightful guidance. On Gramsci’s relationship to Marx, see Cospito (2016), Di Bello (2011), Frosini (2003), Haug (2001), and Liguori (2015). In this chapter, I reference the Italian Gerratana critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1975), using the international standard reference system giving the notebook number (Q), note number (§), and page number. I will also provide a reference to the currently incomplete English critical edition (Gramsci, 2011), or to a relevant anthology of Gramsci’s writings in which an English translation is available. On Gramsci’s conception of ‘translatability’, see Boothman (2010). Gramsci also uses the variant Hegelism [hegelismo] once, in relation to ‘Marxist Hegelism’ in ‘Class Intransigence and Italian History’ [L’intransigenza di classe e la storia italiana] (Il Grido del popolo, 18 May 1918; Gramsci, 1984, p. 35; Gramsci, 1994, p. 65). This does not include first and second versions, designated A- and C-texts by Valentino Gerratana (Buttigieg, 2011, I, p. xv), of Gramsci’s reflections on a report regarding ‘Hegelian studies in France’ [études hégéliennes en France] and ‘of the first Hegel Congress’ [des ersten Hegelskongresses] of 1930, see (Q 8, § 181, p. 1051; PN3, p. 339) and (Q 11, § 4, p. 1369; no trans.). For Italian idealism and Hegel’s reception in Italy, including the Neapolitan Hegelianism of Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa, see Losurdo (1997). D’Anna (2009, p. 391) argues the Neapolitans ‘declination of Hegelian philosophy’ provided Gramsci with a ‘theorisation of the fundamental role of subjectivity as a centre of political will and decision’. Gramsci reinterpreted De Sanctis’s model of literary criticism as a means to theorize the ‘unitary synthesis of theory and practice’ (Q 7, § 31, p. 880; PN3, p. 181). As D’Anna (2009, p. 391) observes, Gramsci ‘therefore reread [De Sanctis] according to the theory of praxis and the hermeneutic lens of Marx’s Hegel’. Croce and Gentile were common intellectual reference points in Italy during these years, and Gramsci had since university read their journal articles and publications (Davidson, 1977, 94).

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9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

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By comparison, Gramsci’s discussion of Marx is spread across the years 1916–1926, with a cluster following 1917 and around the years of the Biennio Rosso (1919–1920). For differing accounts of Gramsci’s relation to Croce, see Bellamy (1990), Finocchiaro (1988), and Frosini (2003, pp. 123–149). On Gramsci and Gentile, see Schecter (1990). Schecter follows Del Noce (1978) in narrowing the gap between them. For the historico-philological approach to reading Gramsci, see Francioni (1984, 2009, 2016). Since the English critical edition remains incomplete, seven texts on Hegel remain untranslated (Q 9, § 97; Q 11, § 2, § 4; Q 15, § 28; Q 17, § 6, § 31; Appx ‘QUADERNO 7’ (VII)*), and six partially untranslated (Q 10II, § 50, § 61; Q 11, § 27, § 66; Q 17, § 18; Q 19, § 24). Hegel does not appear in Jones (2006), and is discussed substantially in Simon (1982, p. 70) only once, in relation to ‘civil society’. Forgacs’s anthology of Gramsci’s writings (Gramsci, 2000) contains only four passages in which Hegel is discussed. This implies that philosophical themes are antithetical to the ‘practical’ value of Gramsci’s concepts, such as hegemony, ideology, and common sense, for ‘concrete’ political analysis. Rejecting this conception, Thomas (2009) marks a turning point in anglophone studies. For the Italian debate, see Liguori (2022). For the English-speaking reception, see Eley (1984), Forgacs (1989), and, especially, Buttigieg (2018). Buissière (1993, p. 301) asks the questions: ‘Who is Gramsci’s Hegel? What is his interpretation of Hegel’s thought and what role does he attribute to it in the history of philosophy and thought?’ See Thomas (2009) for Althusser’s reading of Gramsci (prior to the Italian critical edition by Gerratana) that generated his misdirected criticisms of Gramsci. For an account of the relation between Gramsci, Hegel, and Marxism, see Sichirollo (1958). While broadly correct, Gramsci makes eleven references to Marx in 1916. These include ‘Piazza of Peace’ [Piazza della pace] (Avanti!, 8 May 1916; Gramsci, 1980, p. 297; no trans.), ‘Socialism and “Actualist” Philosophy’ [Il socialismo e la filosofia ‘attuale’] (Il Grido del Popolo, 9 February 1918; Gramsci, 1982, p. 650; Gramsci, 1994, p. 50), ‘Class Intransigence and Italian History’ [L’intransigenza di classe e la storia italiana] (Il Grido del Popolo, 18 May 1918; Gramsci, 1984, p. 35; Gramsci, 1994, pp. 59–69), and in ‘The Ways of Divine Providence’ [Le vie della divina provvidenza] (Avanti!, 21 October 1918; Gramsci, 1984, p. 363; no trans.). In addition to the above, see ‘The Syllabus and Hegel’ [Il sillabo ed Hegel (Il “Papa in guerra” di M. MISSIROLI)] (Il Grido del Popolo, 15 January 1916; Gramsci, 1980, p. 69; no trans.), ‘Indiscrete Questions’ [Domande indiscrete] (Il Grido del Popolo, 13 May 1916; Gramsci, 1980, p. 308; no trans.), ‘Nonsense’ [Sciocchezzaio] (Avanti!, 16 June 1916; Gramsci, 1980, p. 372; no trans.), and ‘The Consolata and the Catholics’ [La Consolata e i cattolici] (Avanti!, 21 June 1916; Gramsci, 1980, p. 392; no trans.). ‘The Revolution against “Capital”‘ [La rivoluzione contro il ‘capitale’] (Avanti!, 24 December 1917; Gramsci, 1982, p. 513; Gramsci 1994, pp. 39–42). ‘Mysteries of Culture and Poetry’ [Misteri della cultura e della poesia] (Il Grido del Popolo, 19 October 1918; Gramsci, 1984, pp. 348–349; Gramsci 1994, pp. 77–78).

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23. See Frosini (2009b, pp. 60–62) on Gramsci, Marx, Hegel, and the idea of ‘another immanence’. 24. On Gramsci’s life and thought during imprisonment (1926–1937), see Vacca (2012). For Gramsci’s use of a Russian anthology of Marx’s writings, see Antonini (2018). 25. On the relation of ‘translatability’ to the ‘unity of theory and practice’, see Frosini (2010). 26. For the chronology of the notes, I refer to the appendix of Cospito (2011). 27. Interpretative debates around Gramsci’s conception of civil society and consent are animated by Bobbio’s intervention (1990). For criticism of Bobbio’s contention that ‘civil society in Gramsci does not belong to the structural moment but to the superstructural moment’, see Vacca (2021, pp. 195–198). See also Gramsci’s comments in Q 6, § 24, p. 703; PN3, p. 20. 28. In February–March 1930, Gramsci reflects on the role Hegelianism plays in the American ‘conception of life’, and whether that conception can progress beyond ‘empiricism-pragmatism’ without a ‘Hegelian phase’ (Q 1, § 105, p. 97; PN1, p. 194). 29. Gramsci also locates Labriola’s reflections on Hegel’s use of this image (Q 1, § 155, p. 137; PN1, p. 234). 30. See Frosini (2009a), Bernstein (2020). 31. On Gramsci and Labriola, see Chapter 17, ‘An unknown legacy: On the Gramsci-Labriola relationship’ [Un’eredità misconosciuta: Sul rapporto Gramsci-Labriola], in Burgio (2014). Gramsci tasks himself with studying Labriola and Hegelianism in November 1931 (Q 8, § 168, p. 1041; PN3, p. 330). 32. At the beginning of Notebook 4, Gramsci elaborates his approach to studying the ‘conception of the world’ of an author such as Marx, which he summarizes as the ‘search for the leitmotiv, the rhythm of the thought’ (Q 4, § 1, p. 419; PN2, p. 137). For the second version (C-text), see Notebook 16, § 2. Cospito (2016) applies this approach to Gramsci’s thought. 33. On the implications of different conceptions of the Reformation and Renaissance, particularly among the Neapolitan Hegelians, see Gallo (2018). 34. See Chapters 7–9 of Thomas (2009) for extended treatment of these concepts. 35. Gramsci’s analysis of Hegel’s realism places him in proximity to Machiavelli in the Notebooks. In the sense of Hegel’s association with the French Revolution, Gramsci reads Machiavelli as a precursor of the Jacobins, see Frosini (2012, p. 64). Conversely, Douet observes that Gramsci criticizes Gentile’s ‘empty and tautological’ making of Spirit the source of all reality. This learns nothing from concrete reality and simply ‘sanctifies the given’ (Douet, 2022, p. 126). 36. See Thomas (2009, pp. 89–90) on Gramsci’s appropriation of Croce’s concept of the ‘ethico-political’. 37. On Gramsci, Croce and Gentile, in addition to note 10, see Finelli (2009) and Douet (2022). For contemporary resonances with post-Marxism, see Morton (2005). 38. In this context, we might consider what role the First World War and the Russian Revolution played for Gramsci, see Frosini (2012, p. 70). For Gramsci, in December 1931, Hegel’s conception (of the ethical state) ‘belonged to a period when the widespread growth of the bourgeoisie might have seemed limitless, and therefore one could affirm its ethical and universal character’ (Q 8, § 179, pp. 1049–1050; PN3, p. 338).

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39.

Vico’s ‘brilliance’ was that, despite the limits of his horizon relative to Hegel’s modern context, he nevertheless ‘conceive[d] the vast world from a dead little corner of history’ (Q 4, § 56; p. 504, PN2, p. 232). 40. Gramsci argues that Croce’s ‘attitude toward historical materialism reveals a process of revision of the core elements of his own philosophy’ (Q 7, § 1; p. 854; PN3, p. 157). 41. On Gramsci’s concept of ‘historical bloc’, see Voza (2009). 42. Jackson (2020) investigates Gramsci’s conception of the ‘mummification of culture’ to account for these pathological forms of conceiving ‘history and the life-death dialectic’ (Q 8, § 219, p. 1079; PN3, p. 368). 43. Gramsci relates this lack of engagement to Erasmus’ position vis-à-vis the Reformation (Q 10I, § 6, p. 1222; FSPN, p. 343). 44. See Frosini (2003, pp. 23–29) or Thomas (2009, pp. 113–116) for an account of these phases.

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Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison notebooks (Vols. 1–3) [PN1–3] (J. A. Buttigieg, Ed. and trans.). Columbia University (original work published 1992, 1996, 2007). Haug, W. F. (2001). From Marx to Gramsci, from Gramsci to Marx: Historical materialism and the philosophy of praxis. Rethinking Marxism, 13(1), 69–82. Jackson, R. P. (2020). The ‘mummification of culture’ in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In Antonini et al. (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s notebooks (pp. 312–335). Brill. Jones, S. J. (2006). Antonio Gramsci. Routledge. Liguori, G. (2015). Gramsci’s pathways. Brill. Liguori, G. (2022). Gramsci contested: Interpretations, debates and polemics, 1922–2012. Brill. Losurdo, D. (1997). Dai fratelli Spaventa a Gramsci: per una storia politico-sociale della fortuna di Hegel in Italia. La città del sole. Morton, A. D. (2005). A double reading of Gramsci: Beyond the logic of contingency. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 439–453. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13698230500204964 Musté, M. (2018). Dialettica e società civile: Gramsci come ‘interprete’ di Hegel. Polemos, 1, 30–46. Schecter, D. (1990). Gramsci, Gentile, and the theory of the ethical state in Italy. History of Political Thought, 11(3), 491–508. Sichirollo, L. (1958). Hegel, Gramsci e il marxismo. In Studi gramsciani: Atti del convegno internazionale organizzato dall’Istituto Antonio Gramsci (pp. 270–276). Editori Riuniti. Simon, R. (1982). Gramsci’s political thought: An introduction. Lawrence & Wishart. Thomas, P. D. (2009). The Gramscian moment: Philosophy, hegemony, and Marxism. Brill. Vacca, G. (2012). Vita e pensieri di Antonio Gramsci: 1926-1937. Einaudi. Vacca, G. (2021). Alternative modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s twentieth century. Palgrave Macmillan. Voza, P. (2009). ‘blocco storico’. In G. Liguori & P. Voza (Eds), Dizionario gramsciano: 1926-1937 (pp. 71–72). Carocci.

4. ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’: constancy, change and collective will in Gramsci’s concepts Derek Boothman INTRODUCTION A characteristic of Gramsci is his methodological approach to the analysis and attempted solution of political and theoretical questions. An early example is his public stance on the attitude adopted by the Bolsheviks and its relation to what was then understood as Marxism, contained in his December 1917 newspaper article ‘The revolution against “Capital”’ (Gramsci 1972 [1958], pp. 149–153 or 1982, pp. 513–517; in English 1978a, pp. 39–42 or 1994, pp. 34–37).1 In this article he takes up a number of subjects he had been dealing with in the newspapers Il Grido del Popolo and Avanti!, the official Socialist Party daily, regarding the ongoing revolutions in Russia. The article is particularly rich in its contents and prefigures aspects later to be developed and, indeed, reworked especially in the Prison Notebooks. What in the first place comes over strongly is his opposition to a theory of stages of social development that societies must pass through: even in September 1917 he was foreseeing that the ‘Russian proletariat, by now strong, disciplined and aware, would succeed him [Kerensky]’ (Gramsci 1972 [1958], p. 360). Stress is laid on collective human will and action, which, as he says near the end of the December article, had emerged from a ‘biologically necessary spontaneous expression’ of the people, represented by the Bolsheviks. At an early stage, then, this approach marks him out from the majority trend of the Second International and from what evolved – via Bukharin – into the vulgate of the Third International. The positions he was adopting in 1917 give an indication of what he went on to develop in his anti-determinist Marxism, which, in the course of his critiques of Bukharin and of Benedetto Croce in the Prison Notebooks, he begins to call the ‘philosophy of praxis’.2 To arrive at this point from his 1917 position involved Gramsci in a longish itinerary, guided however by the constant lodestar of opposition to determinism, on 66

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whatever side it was situated. Accompanying this was the insistence on the action of the masses (cf. the next section), a hallmark of his position from the Turin days onward. At the same time he recognized the stratification of these popular masses though in his view they were tending towards unity. Such actions and movements imply the need for organization and education, hence his critiques of both spontaneism (represented by what he understood as Luxemburg’s positions: see the third section), and of the reformist gradualism of the Second International and its representatives in Italy (the fourth section). What we attempt to illustrate in the various sections of this contribution are some of the steps in the development of Gramsci’s anti-determinist position, including his assessment (similar to that of Lenin) of what, at times, could be philosophical idealism’s positive influence. In Gramsci all this is associated with an innovatory critical stance towards Third Internationalist Marxism, as exemplified in Bukharin’s Manual of Popular Sociology, whose influence continued even after the fall and judicial murder of its author. All this is not to say that future implications were in Gramsci’s mind in his years in Turin, solely that a number of concepts, including the ones discussed here, lay there to be developed, as it were. On their reappearance, in the Notebooks or sometimes even before, they are often characterized by a notable enrichment. The next few lines, the final ones of the introduction to this chapter, may seem a digression but they are of importance for the reasoning regarding modifications in how Gramsci conceived Marxism. At first sight, the notes3 of the Prison Notebooks seem difficult to disentangle. But work done since the publication of the Italian Critical Edition (Gramsci 1975a), especially over the last 30 years or so, to date Gramsci’s prison notes, has helped understand why subject matters are sometimes repeated, and why and how they are sometimes modified between two various drafts. Readers are referred here to work done by Gianni Francioni – starting immediately after the publication in 1975 of Valentino Gerratana’s Critical Edition of the Notebooks – and to that of his collaborators, especially on the anastatic (photostatic) edition of the Notebooks (Gramsci 2009), in which the introductions to its various volumes, and the dating of their various parts, are of great importance.4 We are now more fully aware of the structures involved in what, on the face of it, often appear to be chaotic sequences of notes. Especially at the start (February 1929) of his prison reflections, Gramsci wrote a number ‘miscellaneous’ notebooks, sometimes with ‘special sections’ allotted in advance to specific topics (e.g. the paragraphs in Notebook 4 on Canto 10 of Dante’s Inferno) or to specific areas of work (e.g. the three series of ‘Notes on Philosophy’ in Notebooks 4, 7 and 8). The miscellaneous notes and, to a very extensive degree, the ‘Notes on Philosophy’ often form the background material for what are now called the ‘special’ (but not necessarily ‘monographic’) notebooks. Part of the discussion of subjects first raised in

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the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’ article and going on into the Notebooks, will necessarily take into consideration modifications introduced between the miscellaneous notebooks and the ‘Notes on Philosophy’, on the one hand, and the revised texts in the ‘special notebooks’ on the other.

PEOPLE, MASSES, CLASSES If there is an expression of popular will, as Gramsci claims in the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’, in what is it to be embodied? An inkling is to be found in what he writes about and gives concrete form to somewhat later on in his article ‘Workers’ Democracy’. In his opinion ‘the socialist State already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class’, whose leaders at the time were ‘the Socialist Party and the Confederation of Labour’ through their ‘prestige and enthusiasm, authoritarian pressure and even inertia’. These bodies were however insufficient: there were other ‘institutions and activities which need to be developed, fully organized and co-ordinated’; among these, he mentions the ‘workshop with its internal commissions, socialist clubs and peasant communities’ (L’Ordine nuovo, 21 June 1919, now in Gramsci 1975b [1954], pp. 10–13; in English Gramsci 1978a, pp. 65–68 or Gramsci 1994, pp. 96–100). The reference to the ‘internal commissions’ might take one aback until it is realized that this article appeared before the real start of the ‘Biennio Rosso’ (the ‘Red Two Years’ or ‘Red Biennium’). The criticism and substitution of the ‘internal commissions’ by ‘workers’ councils’ came later on, with the latter being for Gramsci the equivalent not only of the Russian soviets (councils) but similar to the bodies created in the Bavarian Soviet Republic (Räterepublik) of Spring 1919, and the hundred-day Hungarian ‘Republic of Councils’, which was then – but only for a few weeks longer – still in existence, together with other less well-known and even shorter-lived attempts. All this has to be set in the wider context of the irruption of the masses into the societies and State life of the period. But what is, or at that time was, ‘popular’ and what constituted the ‘masses’, the masses who in the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’ are to assume ‘social responsibility and become the arbiters of their own destiny’? This is well illustrated in an essay at the time of the ‘Red Biennium’ published in the November 1920 number of the Comintern monthly ‘Communist International’ in at least three (Russian, German, French) of its various language editions. It subsequently came out in a slightly different form in Italian ‘retranslated from the German’ as explained in the introduction to the article in L’Ordine nuovo (by then coming out as a daily and replacing the Grido del popolo). The general strike, Gramsci writes, of ‘a month for the engineering workers and 10 days for the entire proletariat’ involved ‘around half a million industrial workers and peasants’ in Turin and province. It ‘demonstrated the possibility

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of uniting in practice the workers to the peasants, bringing these latter on to the same plane of struggle as the workers’ (Gramsci 2017b [1920], pp. 50 and 51 and Gramsci 2017a,5 pp. 37 and 39 respectively): the question of such an alliance then became a hallmark of Gramsci’s theorizations and political actions in Italy. The peasant question formed an increasingly important aspect of Gramsci’s (and the International’s) activity, theoretically and practically summed up in the slogan a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’, in the letter in which, writing from Moscow in September 1923, he proposed the foundation of a daily newspaper in Italy, L’Unità. And in the same letter – taking into consideration the North–South divide in Italy – he goes on to say that this watchword ‘has to be adapted in Italy to the ‘Federal Republic of the Workers and Peasants’ (in English, Gramsci 1978b, p. 162; 2014, p. 171). But other social groups to which he pays particular attention in the ‘Communist International’ article are the white-collar clerical employees and the technical staff of the big factories, organized in Unions, and the majority of whom, as he says, had ‘acquired the psychology of the proletarian worker, the psychology of those who are fighting against capital for the Revolution and for Communism’ (Gramsci 2017b, p. 41; Gramsci 2017a, p. 21). Because it was numerically negligible in the Turin of the time, the petty bourgeoisie – dependent for its livelihood on the working class masses – is here not really taken into consideration. With the closure of the period of revolutionary hopes, Gramsci reassessed his position, as is apparent first in his letters from Vienna in early 1924, and then in the letter written on behalf of the Political Bureau of the Italian Communist Party to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (October 1926) together with its follow-up a few days later to Palmiro Togliatti, the PCI’s representative at the Comintern. Key concepts that give an insight into Gramsci’s evolving position at this time are the ‘working-class aristocracy’ in the industrially developed countries, and the stratification that went hand-in-hand with it. In the letter to the CPSU Central Committee, he draws attention to the ‘spirit of corporativism and the stratifications characteristic of the working-class aristocracy’ (Gramsci 2014, p. 375; Gramsci 1978b, p. 431; Gramsci 1994, p. 311), and, in the letter to Togliatti, he makes this perhaps a shade more explicit in defining the ‘great working masses [as] stratified politically in a contradictory way’ although ‘tending in their entirety towards unity’ (Gramsci 2014, p. 378; Gramsci 1978b, p. 437). Gramsci paid great attention to the popular classes and strata other than the industrial working class. In the Notebooks one aspect of this matter is dealt with, famously, in Notebook 12, which includes the notes on organic and traditional intellectuals. In this notebook, we read that while movements

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among the peasant masses are linked to and depend on movements among the intellectuals, in the cities, the phase in which factory technicians do not exercise any political function over the instrumental masses […] has been superseded. Sometimes, rather, the contrary takes place, and the instrumental masses, at least in the person of their own organic intellectuals, exercise a political influence on the technicians. (Q12§1, p. 1521; Gramsci 1971, p. 15)

The word ‘sometimes’ has possibly not always been taken into due consideration: the situation however is complex and, on occasion, fluid: it cannot be taken at all for granted, even in the period discussed by Gramsci, that the technical staff did take their lead from the industrial workers. As he said just before his arrest, despite difficulties, the tendency as a whole – see above – was ‘towards unity’.

COLLECTIVE POPULAR WILL Attention has been paid here to the question of alliances, given the first few words of Gramsci’s article: ‘The Bolshevik revolution is now definitively part of the general revolution of the Russian people’. Here, by ‘people’ Gramsci is referring to the exploited sectors of the population and, in the above, an attempt has been made to show how this translated for him into the Italian situation. He has an ‘activist’ understanding of ‘the people’ – not as an amorphous mass, but a mass that has, or can form, a ‘will’ that is deployed in action, often ‘spontaneously’. It is to be noted that in the Italian original of the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’ article, Gramsci on several occasions uses the noun volontà (‘will’), once glossed as ‘control’ in the 1978a English translation, and always with an emphasis on a social, collective or popular nature. Re-analysing the Turin experience in prison, in a well-known paragraph of the Notebooks (Q3§48), he introduces this subject by saying that the Turin (Ordine nuovo) group was accused of being simultaneously both ‘spontaneous’ and ‘voluntaristic’, of yielding to the first movements that appeared (a ‘characteristic of the “history of the subaltern classes”’), and in the charge of ‘voluntarism’ of giving rise to an ‘arbitrary, “cooked-up” venture’ (Gramsci 1971 p. 198).6 His solution, and defence of the Turin group, is that the ‘element of “spontaneity” was not neglected and even less despised. It was educated, directed, purged of extraneous contaminations; the aim was to bring it into line with modem theory – but in a living and historically effective manner’ (QdC, Q3§48, pp. 328–332; Gramsci 1971, pp. 196–200 or Gramsci 1996, pp. 48–52, here p. 50). The whole question is returned to in the criticism of Luxemburg’s views on spontaneity. Her theory, to use Gramsci’s words, was ‘based on the histori-

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cal experiences of 1905 […] The “voluntary” and organizational elements are ignored, even though they were much more widespread than Rosa was inclined to believe; because of her “economistic” prejudice she unconsciously ignored them’ (Q7§10, pp. 858–859; in English Gramsci 2007, p. 161).7 I have here chosen to quote from the initial draft on Luxemburg (a so-called ‘A text’, the wording not differing essentially from the rewritten text, a so-called ‘C text’, of Q13§24) since the A text leads almost immediately into another relevant paragraph. This is a ‘B text’, i.e. one not found in any revised form, headed ‘Man as individual and man as mass’; here spontaneity and ‘individualism’ are considered as preconditions for the formation of a new type of ‘collective will’ and hence of a ‘collective man’, ‘formed essentially from the bottom up, on the basis of the position that the collectivity occupies in the world of production’, and whose base lies in the ‘big factories, Taylorization, rationalization etc.’. ‘Collective man’ had existed before, Gramsci says, but ‘under the form of charismatic leadership’, here referring to the concept of charisma found in Roberto Michels.8 He concludes this note by saying that the development of new economic forces on new foundations and the progressive establishment of the new structure will heal the inevitable contradictions and, having created a new ‘conformism’ from below will allow new possibilities for self-discipline – that is, new possibilities for freedom, including individual freedom’ (QdC, Q7§12, p. 862–863; in English, Gramsci 2007, p. 165–166 and 1995, pp. 275–277)9

The difference with Michels is striking: the German, naturalized Italian, looks at a movement stemming from the top, while Gramsci stresses that the new form of collectivity must spring up and develop democratically from below. The various notions ranging from ‘collective will’ through Machiavelli’s notions to the actions of the ‘Modern Prince’ and the creation of an ‘intellectual and moral reform’ are then brought together – for which see also below – in the long opening paragraph of the ‘special’ notebook on Machiavelli (QdC, Q13§1, pp. 1555–1561: in English, Gramsci 1971, pp. 125–131). For whatever reason (quite possibly that of health), Gramsci does not gather together the various paragraphs on the collective will and the collective man in a special notebook. As well as the paragraphs mentioned here, there are some later notes on the question, in one of which he says that Every historical act cannot but be performed by the ‘collective man’ which presupposes a ‘socio-cultural’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed individual wills, heterogeneous in their aims, are welded together for the same goal on the basis of an (equal and) common conception of the world (Q10II§44, p. 1331; in English, Gramsci 1995, p. 156)

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A similar notion, but expressed in very different words, is found in what might be regarded as a sort of epilogue, written after both the single draft B text Q10II§44 (Autumn 1932: cf. Gramsci 2009, Vol. 14, p. 4) and well after the first draft note on Luxemburg. This ‘epilogue’ is also a B text, in the last-but-one of the ‘miscellaneous’ notebooks. In this paragraph (March or early April 1933), he again deals with the necessity of spontaneity as a precondition for collective action: ‘a collective consciousness, which is to say a living organism, is formed only after the unification of the multiplicity through friction on the part of the individuals’. In a striking metaphor he goes on to say, in conclusion to this particular passage, ‘an orchestra tuning-up, every instrument playing by itself, sounds the most hideous cacophony, yet these warm-ups are the necessary condition for the orchestra to come to life as a single “instrument”’ (Q15§13, p. 1771; Gramsci 1995, p. 16). We have been dealing in particular here with how Gramsci conceives of the ‘people’ and ‘collective will’. These are anything but separate, and Gramsci returns on many occasions in the Notebooks to this question in his concept of the ‘national-popular’. Very often this is traced through origins in literature or, for Italy – which lacked a well-founded and popular literary heritage – Gramsci indicates an alternative in melodrama10 and in the nationally-oriented feelings expressed in the music of nineteenth-century composers such as Verdi (cf. Q23§§7 and 57, pp. 2194 and 2253 respectively; in English, Gramsci 1985, pp. 122–123 and 254–255). But in the Notebooks, the national-popular appears under another form, more directly linked to the arguments of the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’, namely the ‘modern Prince’. The task of this figure, in whatever guise it assumes, is that of ‘creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilization’ (Q13§1, p. 1560; in English, Gramsci 1971, p. 133). We are back where we set off: the Marxist thought that the Bolsheviks were living out11 ‘sees as the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts, but man, men in societies, men in relation to one another, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts (civilization) a collective, social will’ (Gramsci 1978a, pp. 34–35 or Gramsci 1994, p. 40).

DETERMINISM AND ACTS OF COLLECTIVE WILL The comment to the effect that, for Gramsci, while the Bolsheviks reject some of the statements in Capital, in continuing ‘German and Italian idealism’ they were ‘living out’ Marxist thought, is instructive. Given that the ‘canons of historical materialism’, that would determine ‘how the history of Russia would unfold’ were apparently being exploded by events, it is worthwhile looking

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at the relation of ‘idealism’ to ‘historical materialism’, from what may seem a heterodox stance. There is wide acceptance of Marx’s debt to German idealism, recognizing his critical relation to Hegel in particular. Here, another contribution to Marxism lay for Gramsci in Italian idealist philosophy, including the turn-of-the-century work by Benedetto Croce, continuer in Italy of a Hegelian tradition. Other parts of the input that Gramsci received from Italian idealism (specifically Italian southern idealism) derived from people such as Giovanni Gentile, author of a study of Marx’s philosophy, but later the main philosophical prop of fascism, and also, going back to the nineteenth century, from the literary critic Francesco De Sanctis and the work of another Hegelian, Bertrando Spaventa (cf. Rapone 2011, pp. 47–48). This latter, Croce’s uncle, provided for Gramsci an important link in the chain leading from Hegel to Croce. An indication of Gramsci’s regard for the Italian idealist school at the time may be gleaned from the one-off publication La città futura, published in February 1917 and entirely written by Gramsci, apart from extracts of articles by three other authors. One of these was a version, published the previous year, of Croce’s 1915 article Religione e serenità (in English in Croce 1924). Croce’s mention there of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico is of note in the stimulus it probably gave to Gramsci to develop his thoughts on Italian idealism. As seen, these were at the time positive, and Vico is a recurrent figure in this period.12 However, Gramsci became ever more critical, and in the position expressed in the Notebooks the question is posed, in the link ‘Vico-Spaventa-(Gioberti)’ that connected Hegel to Croce-Gentile, whether this ‘did not this mean a step backward with respect to Hegel?’ (Q10II§41x, p. 1317; Gramsci 1995, p. 401).13 Criticism of the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’ article from an ‘orthodox Marxist’ position of that period came in a January 1918 response by Claudio Treves, a leading representative of the openly reformist wing of the Italian Socialist Party. Gramsci replied in his 12 January 1918 article La critica critica (Gramsci 1982, pp. 554–556; in English, Gramsci 1994, pp. 43–46). Its title referred back explicitly to that used by Marx in The Holy Family, with Gramsci’s criticism of Treves mirroring Marx’s of Bruno Bauer. Treves had levelled against Gramsci and others of the ‘new generation’ the charge that they had substituted ‘voluntarism’, i.e. acts of will, for ‘determinism’ and the ‘heroic or hysteric violence of individuals or groups’ for the ‘transformational force of the instrument of labour’ (emphasis in Gramsci’s original), analogous to the charge that, for Marx, Bruno Bauer had transformed ‘self-consciousness’ ‘from an attribute of man into a self-existing subject’ (Marx and Engels 1975, p. 138, emphasis in original). Gramsci’s charge was that in the place of ‘really existing man’ Treves had substituted ‘determinism’ and in so doing had reduced Marx’s theory merely to ‘an exterior schema, a natural law,

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that inevitably asserts itself outside the will of man’. For Gramsci, Treves’ position led to an ‘inertia of the proletariat’ and, while ‘voluntarism’ (a term accepted by Gramsci for the sake of argument) was not denied in actual fact by Treves, it took on the nature of the ‘petty skirmishes of the reformists’, the will towards ‘ministerial compromises, small victories’ (Gramsci 1994, p. 44). Gramsci’s appreciation and defence of (collective) will appears in the ‘Critical criticism’ article in a link, through Antonio Labriola, once again to Vico. Paraphrasing Labriola’s rhetorical question, ‘had not Vico already recognized that Providence does not act in history from without?’ (Labriola 1908, p. 76), Gramsci describes Vico’s position in the words ‘belief in divine providence has had a positive effect [ha operato beneficamente] in history, as it had become a stimulus for the awareness to act’ (Gramsci 1982, p. 556; in English, Gramsci 1994, pp. 45–46). However, by analogy, divine providence is called into the arena in another way. Gramsci makes a number of telling references in the Notebooks to Calvinism and its doctrine of grace. They are to be found in particular in paragraphs Q10II§31i, pp. 1275–126 (in English, Gramsci 1995, p. 389) and Q11§12 note 1, pp. 1394–1395 (in English, Gramsci 1971, pp. 342–343), i.e. in the first two of what became the series of the ‘special’ Notebooks. The ‘B text’ of Q7§44 (pp. 892–893; in English, Gramsci 2007, pp. 193–194) is also important. In this last-named paragraph, belonging to the second of the ‘Notes on Philosophy’ series, he notes that the strict Calvinist doctrine, according to which there was an ‘Elect’ whose salvation was assured, became transformed such that, from fatalism and passivity, as a ‘dialectical consequence’ there sprang up a ‘real practice of enterprise and initiative on a world scale’, leading to the formation of ‘the ideology of nascent capitalism’. This process, characteristic of the religious Reformation, is compared to the one stemming from what he is still calling ‘historical materialism’: in this particular paragraph, written in November 1931,14 he sees in the Soviet Union the ‘molecular formation of a new civilization currently underway’. Instead of what critics envisaged as ‘fatalism and passivity’ (words repeated for this movement, too), there was a ‘blossoming of initiatives and enterprises that are surprising many observers; cf. the Economist supplement by Michael Farbman’15 (Q7§44, pp. 892–893; in English, Gramsci 2007, p. 193 and Gramsci 1995, p. 271). If at that time, then, Marxism was conceived as a determinism in the Soviet Union and Comintern, as may be gathered from Farbman’s article it was also a spur to action. The politics of the situation bears a resemblance to other aspects of the Calvinist Reformation too. For the seventeenth-century English puritans of various tendencies, the Kingdom of God would arrive, but its coming would be aided by the human agency. This is well exemplified by words perhaps not spoken by Cromwell in addressing the New Model Army, but attributed to him: ‘trust in God and keep your powder dry’. In more formal

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terms, in a transcription of lines from Croce’s (1929) Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, Gramsci observes, analogous to his position in Q7, that Calvinism ‘through its interpretation, development and adaptation of the concepts of grace and vocation, […] ended up promoting energetically economic life, production, and the accumulation of wealth’ (Q4§3, p. 423, first half of May 1930; in English, Gramsci 1996, p. 142). Gramsci does not as yet, at this time, include the Calvinist Reformation as one of the currents feeding into Marxism (whose initial list appears a few lines later in Q4§3) but he does so in a later paragraph, dating to 1933, perhaps influenced by his reading of the Italian translation (in the review ‘Nuovi Studi’, November–December 1931) of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Here, Gramsci refers to the ‘activist conversion of the theory of grace’ (Q8§231, pp. 1089–1090; in English, Gramsci 2007, p. 376).16 And somewhat later again: ‘Calvinism, however, with its iron conception of predestination and grace, […] produces a vast expansion of the spirit of initiative (or becomes the form of this movement)’ (Q11§12, p. 1389; in English, Gramsci 1971, p. 338). It is in the light of these comments, drawing attention to the activist aspect of human will, that we should then read, as a sort of conclusion on Calvinism, after Gramsci’s reading of Weber, a revised text based in part on Q4§3 and contained in Notebook 16: ‘The philosophy of praxis presupposes all this cultural past: Renaissance and Reformation, German philosophy and the French Revolution, Calvinism and English classical economics, secular liberalism and this historicism which is at the root of the whole modern conception of life’ (Q16§9, p. 1860; in English, Gramsci 1971, p. 395).17 A further analysis in English of these questions, bringing in the ‘mass mobilization’ in the Soviet Union of the First Five Year Plan in comparison with the mass spirit of the Reformation, in contrast with the restricted and ‘aristocratic nature of the Renaissance’, may be seen in Fabio Frosini (2012, especially p. 67).

IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM It may seem strange and heterodox that Gramsci held idealism in such high regard, but on the one hand, as seen in ‘The Revolution against “Capital”’, he was reacting strongly against the ‘positivist and naturalist encrustations’ of Marxism, and, on the other, to the use put to Capital by sectors of the Italian intelligentsia, analogous to its use at the turn of the century by Russian industrial bourgeois circles. A point of interest, and not without significance, is that around this time a similar stance was being adopted by Lenin, in a note published even in Russian only in 1928, and thus unknown to Gramsci. Lenin’s comment is in his Hegel Notebooks, now contained in the Philosophical Notebooks, and reads ‘Intelligent idealism is nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism’ (Lenin 1961, p. 276: digital online edition p. 274).

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Here, as Kevin Anderson notes, ‘Lenin seems to argue for some type of unity between idealism and materialism’ and ‘seems to echo what the young Marx wrote in the first thesis on Feuerbach and in the 1844 Manuscripts’ (Anderson 1995, p. 102). Still in the Hegel Notebooks, Lenin further remarks that ‘Objective (and still more, absolute) idealism came very close to materialism by a zig-zag (and a somersault), even partially became transformed into it’ (Lenin 1961, p. 278, emphasis in original; cited in Anderson 1995, p. 103). Writing 20 years on from his 1995 volume, Anderson underlined his assessment of the Hegel Notebooks as constituting an ‘important break with “vulgar materialism,” and [as reappropriating] core Hegelian concepts for Marxism’, writings in which Lenin distances himself from ‘“vulgar materialist” philosophers like Plekhanov’ and – quite likely – from some parts of his own earlier work such as Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Anderson 2015). It is apparent that both Lenin, starting from this mid-1910s period, and Gramsci at the same time show a sharp aversion to ‘vulgar materialism’18 (a description used by Marx: cf. Q7§29, p. 877 and, in English, Gramsci 2007, p. 179):19 at the time of his ‘Revolution against “Capital”’, Gramsci understandably labels ‘historical materialism’, as this was then understood, as one of its offshoots.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS AND THE OPEN DIALECTIC The notion of ‘historical materialism’ may be taken as the starting point for a line of reasoning, studded with interruptions and possibly doubts, that reaches full development in the revised paragraphs in the Notebooks of the critique of Bukharin (Q11, part II), and on occasion in even later notes. Once again, Gramsci uses and partially reformulates arguments used in the drafts contained in the three series of the ‘Notes on Philosophy’. The revised versions occupy a couple of dozen paragraphs, covering about 30 manuscript pages of Notebook 11, or about 55 pages in the Critical Edition. The whole section is headed by Gramsci ‘Observations and Critical Notes on an Attempt at a “Popular Manual of Sociology”’ (in the Notebooks: Osservazioni e note critiche su un tentativo di ‘Saggio popolare di sociologia’), i.e., Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology (Bukharin 1969 [1921]).20 From an early part of the Notebooks, Gramsci emphasizes the independence of what in this period he still calls, this time in a positive sense, ‘historical materialism’ (e.g. Q4§7, p. 430; in English, Gramsci 1996, p. 149), then onwards through much of the First Series of ‘Notes on Philosophy’ in that notebook, and carried on into, for example, the Second Series of Notebook 7, perhaps in particular in Q7§29 (p. 876–877; in English, Gramsci 2007, pp. 178–179). For Gramsci, Marxism is an independent philosophy of which, in this ‘A text’, the dialectic is a ‘theory of knowledge’, translated literally as such in this

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paragraph, and also in the second draft ‘C text’ of Q11§33 – in which Gramsci, however, replaces ‘theory of knowledge’ by the more formal and technical term ‘gnoseologia’ (but still ‘theory of knowledge’ in the translation: Gramsci 1971, p. 431). For Bukharin, on the other hand, Marxism was a sociology21 whose philosophy was that of ‘metaphysical or mechanical (vulgar) materialism’ (Q11§22 p. 1424; in English, Gramsci 1971, p. 434, repeating the assertion made in the first draft of Q7§29). A more-than-likely consequence is that if, as Gramsci claims, ‘the philosophy implicit in the Popular Manual’ could be regarded as ‘an adaptation of formal logic to the methods of physical and natural science’ then the ‘historical dialectic is replaced by the law of causality and the search for regularity, normality and uniformity’ (Q11§14, pp. 1402–1403; in English, Gramsci 1971 p. 437) and, at that point, Marxism becomes deterministic. Gramsci rebuts this, defending the unity and entirety of the philosophy of praxis in the face of a split into a sociology and an attached philosophy. Such a split was defended a decade later by Bukharin who, in Gramsci’s words, stated explicitly at the 1931 London Congress on the History of Science that ‘that the philosophy of praxis has always been split into two: a doctrine of history and politics, and a philosophy, although he now calls the latter dialectical materialism’.22 But, for Gramsci, the ‘true fundamental function and significance of the dialectic can only be grasped if the philosophy of praxis is conceived as an integral and original philosophy […] to the extent that it goes beyond both traditional idealism and traditional materialism’ (Q11§22, p. 1425; Gramsci 1971, pp. 434–435). These last words echo what we read in the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’ article, with ‘traditional materialism’ englobing ‘historical materialism’, and ‘traditional idealism’ paraphrasing the ‘German and Italian idealism’ of the 1917 article. Between Bukharin’s sociological approach and that of Gramsci, which considers the philosophy of praxis to be an ‘integral and original’ philosophy, there is an inversion of the hierarchical relationship. Only by realizing the independence of the philosophy of praxis can the ‘true fundamental function and significance of the dialectic’ be grasped (Q11§22, p. 1425; Gramsci 1971, pp. 434–435). A key aspect in Gramsci’s approach to the philosophy of praxis is provided by the work of the one person in Italy to whom he referred as a guide for Marxism, namely Antonio Labriola. Against the main figures of the Second International, Labriola maintained that Marxism was independent of any other philosophy, though he was ‘not always, admittedly, unequivocal’ (Q16§9, p. 1855; Gramsci 1971, p. 390). In opposition to this, a strong tendency in the Second International saw ‘Marxism’ as dependent on ‘modern derivations of vulgar philosophical materialism’, with some (e.g. the Austro-Marxist, Max Adler) making it depend on ‘idealist currents like Kantianism’ (Q4§3, p. 422, first half of May 1930; in English, Gramsci 1996, p. 140; cf. second draft, Gramsci 1971, p. 389). Gramsci writes that Labriola, on the other hand,

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‘asserts that the philosophy of Marxism is contained within Marxism itself, [and] is the only one who sought to provide historical materialism with a scientific foundation’ (Q3§31, p. 309; in English, Gramsci 1996, p. 30). This note reappears in revised form, yet again in Q16§9 (pp. 1853–1854), but this time with ‘philosophy of praxis’ substituting ‘historical materialism’. It may also be noted that even in discussing Bukharin’s Manual, while in the first draft – to quote just one example – Gramsci consistently uses ‘historical materialism’ (Q4§13: late spring or summer 1930; in English, Gramsci 1996, pp. 154–155); in the rewritten and much extended ‘C text’ of Q11§26 (summer 1932), he again substitutes ‘philosophy of praxis’ in what is a point-by-point exposition, in a more polemical vein, of the weaknesses of Bukharin’s approach (Gramsci 1971, pp. 425–427).23 In all, while in ten paragraphs of the ‘Notes on Philosophy’ in Q4 (pp. 41–80bis, i.e. the last half of the notebook) the designation ‘philosophy of praxis’ is absent, the term ‘historical materialism’ appears over 70 times, excluding its use in citations of book titles. In the reformulated texts of Q11, ‘philosophy of praxis’ consistently replaces ‘historical materialism’, with the latter term used only a tenth as frequently and reserved for discussion of other authors’ interpretations of materialism. Not excluding the role of prison censorship in this substitution, the disappearance of ‘historical materialism’ in the redrafted critique of Bukharin, and in subsequent key paragraphs on Marxism (e.g. Q16§9 yet again), indicates a distancing from the Bukharinite interpretation of ‘historical materialism’, with Gramsci clearly opting for his Labriola-influenced ‘philosophy of praxis’ interpretation. This reading finds linguistic support in a ‘C text’, Q11§24, contained within the critique of Bukharin, in which Gramsci quotes an eye- and ear-witness recollection of Napoleon who commented that when ‘something really new is discovered a completely new word must be given to it, so that the idea remains precise and distinct’ (see Gramsci 1971, p. 452, footnote 99 for the translation of part of this paragraph). As confirmation of the referent, the first draft ‘A text’ (Q4§34) is actually headed by Gramsci – using the earlier name – ‘Apropos of the appellation of “historical materialism”’ (Gramsci 1996, p. 174), while Q11§24, begins simply with the words ‘Apropos of the importance that nomenclature can have for new things’. Within the scope of this chapter, discussion has revolved around the questions of materialism and determinism. But a crucial difference lies in Bukharin’s neglect of a convincing treatment of the dialectic: ‘The Manual contains no treatment of any kind of the dialectic. The dialectic is presupposed, in a very superficial manner, but is not expounded’ (Q11§22, p. 1424, note 4; in English, Gramsci 1971, p. 434); and, indeed, the English translation of Bukharin’s Manual includes just two pages devoted specifically to the dialectic. Without knowing it, Gramsci was echoing the criticism of Bukharin in Lenin’s testament: ‘he [Bukharin] has never made a study of dialectics, and,

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I think, never fully understood it’24 (cf. Stephen Cohen’s 1974 volume on Bukharin, p, 152). On this subject, the anti-determinist stances of a number of later Marxists, which maintain an open nature of the dialectic, may be fruitfully compared with Gramsci’s. The one advanced by Henri Lefebvre may be cited as a representative example: ‘men can and must set themselves a total solution. Man does not exist in advance metaphysically. The game has not already been won; men may lose everything’ (Lefebvre 1969, p. 113). Against attempts to foresee the course of history, Gramsci clearly states that the only thing that can be foreseen is the struggle, not its ‘concrete moments’ and hence, like Lefebvre, not its outcome: In reality one can ‘scientifically’ foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement, which are never reducible to fixed quantities since within them quantity is continually becoming quality. In reality one can ‘foresee’ to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result ‘foreseen’ . Prediction reveals itself thus not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will. (Q11§15, pp. 1403–144; in English, Gramsci 1971, p. 438)

With ‘collective will’ as essential in the attempt to shaping events, the wheel has turned full circle: the 1917 position of the ‘Revolution against “Capital”’ is repeated and elaborated with a vengeance in the Prison Notebooks.

NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Where possible we give references to Italian reprints of the originals, followed by English translations. For a long time, until work was possible using Valentino Gerratana’s critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, i.e. Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1975a), ‘philosophy of praxis’ was regarded, in Italy and elsewhere, as Gramsci’s gloss of ‘historical materialism’ to avoid the prison censorship. Careful philological analysis has indicated that he uses ‘philosophy of praxis’ to define his own interpretation as opposed to ‘historical materialism’, as this latter became understood in the standard interpretation (due largely to Bukharin) in the Soviet Union and the parties of the Comintern. Henceforward usually referred to as paragraphs, following Gramsci’s use of the paragraph sign (§) to indicate the change from one argument to another. Some of this is contained in brief outline in open-access online articles (Francioni 2019). 2017a reproduces in transcription Gramsci’s original hand-written article, contained in the Comintern Archives. Where the English of Gramsci (1971) uses ‘cooked-up’, Gramsci’s original has ‘avventuroso’, i.e., politically adventurist in the negative sense.

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7.

Lest it be thought that Gramsci is being unduly negative, he then adds that Luxemburg’s ‘little book’ (1921 in Italian;1924 in English; original German edition 1906) ‘constitutes the most significant theory of the war of maneuver applied to the study of history and to the art of politics’ or ‘one of the most significant documents’ in the C text (Q13§24, p. 1613; Gramsci 1971, p. 233). Michels’ approach to charisma has recently been analysed by Francesca Antonini (2021) in relation, among other things, to leaders of movements formed from below, notably Lenin, in Gramsci’s appreciation of him in the article ‘Capo’ (‘Leader’) in the first number of the third series of L’Ordine nuovo, 1 March 1924 (in English see Gramsci 1978b, pp. 209–212). Alternative translations to the passages quoted here on conformism, the collective will and the collective man are contained in Gramsci (1995), especially pp. 269–277, which bring together several of the major comments on these subjects in a single sub-section of a chapter on economic questions. Here one recalls his many articles of theatre criticism while still in Turin and before the ‘Red Years’. This is interpreted by Peter Thomas (2016) not as a ‘merely rhetorical metaphor’ but as ‘a dialectical unification of two elements frequently seen as opposites: of life and thought, of practice and theory, or – as we might say today – of politics and philology’. Vico may be present implicitly in the Revolution against ‘Capital’ article, on a reasoning on the use of the participle/verbal adjective ‘materiata’ (‘consists of’ in Gramsci 1978a or ‘made up of’ in Gramsci 1994). Its relative rarity – ‘infrequent usage’ according to authoritative De Mauro (2000) dictionary – but its use by Croce in his 1911 Biografia di Giambattista Vico, cited explicitly on a handful of occasions in the Notebooks, suggests that Gramsci had been reading this volume. The first draft of this note (Q4§56, p. 504; Gramsci 1996, p. 232) contains the same argument, mentioning the Vico-Bertrando Spaventa link, but not mentioning Gioberti. Cf. Gianni ni’s section on dating of the paragraphs in Vol. 10 of the Anastatic edition of the Notebooks, Gramsci (2009, Vol. 10, p. 4). Fabio Frosini (2004, p. 268) correctly identifies this Farbman as Mikhail (sometimes seen as Grigorij) Semёnovič Abramovič (often transcribed Abramowitz, 1880–1933), a long-time economics and stock-exchange journalist who wrote for the Manchester Guardian and the Economist; in Gramsci (1995, p. 553), this Farbman was confused with a namesake, an oppositional member of the Bolshevik Party, then expelled. The three paragraphs – in Q4, Q7 and Q8 – from which quotations have been used regarding Calvinist concepts belong to Gramsci’s three series of ‘Notes on Philosophy’, and therefore occupy a more than usual importance in the arguments of the Notebooks. Dating to after February 1933, and possibly even to November 1933 (or afterwards) when Gramsci had been admitted to the prison-approved clinic in Formia and had regained strength to start writing again. Referred to as ‘crude materialism’ in Q4§3 (p. 424; in English, Gramsci 1996, p. 143). The reference to Marx is not included in the rewritten version of Q11§22, p. 1425 (Gramsci 1971, p. 434).

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

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20. Gramsci had access in prison to the French translation. 21. Lest this be thought a polemical exaggeration of Gramsci’s, Stephen Cohen concurs in his study of Bukharin: see Cohen (1974 [1971]), p. 112, and the Russian original bears the subtitle ‘Textbook of Marxist Sociology’. 22. See especially Section 2 of Bukharin’s speech (Bukharin et al. 1931). He later defended the unity of Marxism but in weaker terms than Gramsci’s: ‘it is stupid’ to separate Marx’s ‘sociological doctrine (historical materialism) from his philosophical doctrine (the theory of dialectical materialism)’ and his ‘economic theory from his sociological theory’ (Bukharin in Bukharin et al., 1935, p. 48). 23. The use of the words ‘historical materialism’ in square brackets in the 1971 translation (p. 426) replaces Gramsci’s ‘ecc.’ [etc.] 24. Cohen translates directly from Volume 45 of Lenin’s Collected Works in Russian. Other translations use ‘appreciated’ instead of his more normal and literal ‘understood’ for the Russian ponimal.

REFERENCES Anderson, K. B. (1995). Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. University of Illinois Press. Anderson, K. B. (attributed online to Kevin A. Anderson). (2015). Revisiting Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks, 100 years later. https://​marxismocritico​.com/​2015/​03/​27/​ revisiting​-lenins​-hegel​-notebooks​-100​-years​-later/​ (last accessed 18 October 2022). Antonini, F. (2021). Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity. Brill. Bukharin, N. I. (1969 [1921]). Historical Materialism, A System of Sociology. University of Michigan Press. (Original Russian edition published 1921 Teorija istoričeskogo materializma. Populjarnyj uchebnik marksistskoi sociologii. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo; French edition used by Gramsci: La théorie du matérialisme historique. Manuel populaire de sociologie marxiste. Published 1927 Éditions Sociales Internationales). Bukharin, N. I., Joffe, A. F., Rubinstein, M., Zavadovskij, B. M., Colman, E., Mitkievič, V. F., … (1931). Theory and practice from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. In Science at the Crossroads. Kniga (repr. Frank Cass, 1971). Bukharin, N. I., Deborin, A. M., Uranovsky, Y. M., Vavilov, S. I., Komarov, V. L., Tiumeniev, A. I. (1935). Marxism and Modern Thought (Trans. R. Fox). In Science at the Crossroads (pp. 1–90). George Routledge. Cohen, S. F. (1974 [1971]). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wildwood House. Croce, B. (1924). Religion and peace of mind. In The Conduct of Life, pp. 27–33 (A. Livingston, Trans.), Harrap. Croce, B. (1929). Storia dell’età barocca in Italia. Laterza. De Mauro, T. (2000). Il Dizionario della lingua italiana. Paravia Bruno Mondadori Editori. Francioni, G. (2019). Struttura e descrizione dei Quaderni del carcere. International Gramsci Journal, 3(2), 46–64 (https://​ro​.uow​.edu​.au/​gramsci/​); and ‘Structure and Description of the Prison Notebooks.’ International Gramsci Journal, 3(2), 65–82 (https://​ro​.uow​.edu​.au/​gramsci/​). Frosini, F. (2004). Riforma e Rinascimento. In F. Frosini and G. Liguori (Eds), Le parole di Gramsci (pp. 170–188). Carocci.

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Frosini, F. (2012). Reformation, renaissance and the state: the hegemonic fabric of modern sovereignty. Journal of Romance Studies, 12(3), 63–77. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (Eds and trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1972 [1958]). Scritti giovanili. Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1975a). Quaderni del carcere, V. Gerratana (Ed.). Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1975b [1954]). L’Ordine nuovo. Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1978a). Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920. Q. Hoare (Ed.) and J. Mathews (Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978b). Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926. Q. Hoare (Ed. and Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1982). La città futura. S. Caprioglio (Ed.). Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1985). Selections from Cultural Writings. D. Forgacs and G. Nowell-Smith (Eds) and W. Q. Boelhower (Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1994). Pre-prison Writings, R. Bellamy (Ed.) and V. Cox (Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, A. (1995). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, D. Boothman (Ed. and Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1996). Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2. J. A. Buttigieg (Ed. and Trans.). Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3. J. A. Buttigieg (Ed. and Trans.) Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2009). Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, 18 vols. (G. Francioni, Ed.). L’Unione Sarda and Biblioteca Treccani. Gramsci, A. (2014). A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters 1908-1926. D. Boothman (Ed. and trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (2017a). Il movimento comunista a Torino. International Gramsci Journal, 2(2), 17–39 (https://​ro​.uow​.edu​.au/​gramsci/​). Gramsci, A. (2017b). The Turin Communist Movement. International Gramsci Journal, 2(2), 40–51 (https://​ro​.uow​.edu​.au/​gramsci/​). Labriola A. (1908 [Italian original 1895]). In Memory of the Communist Manifesto. In Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, C. H. Kerr (Ed. and Trans.). Charles H. Kerr & Co. Lefebvre, H. (1969). Dialectical Materialism. J. Sturrock (Trans.). Jonathan Cape. Lenin V. I. (1961). Collected Works, Vol. 38 (Philosophical Notebooks), C. P. Dutt (Trans.) and S. Smith (Ed.). Progress Publishers and Lawrence and Wishart. Luxemburg, R. (1964). The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. P. Lavin, (Trans.), Young Socialist Publications [repr. Marxist Educational Society of 1925 edition]. Original German edition 1906 Massenstreik: Partei und Gewerkschaften, Erdmann Dubber. Edition referred to by Gramsci. Lo sciopero generale: il partito e i sindacati, (1919), C. Alessandri, (Trans.) Avanti!. Marx, K. H. and Engels, F. (1975). The Holy Family. In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4, R. Dixon and C. P. Dutt (Trans), Progress Publishers and Lawrence and Wishart. Rapone, L. (2011). Cinque anni che paiono secoli. Antonio Gramsci dal socialismo al comunismo. Carocci. Thomas, P. D. (2016). A Revolution against ‘Capital’? Gramsci and the ‘visual angle’ of October 1917. Gramsciana, 3, 35–49.

5. Historico-political dynamics in the Prison Notebooks: passive revolution, relations of force, organic crisis Francesca Antonini INTRODUCTION1 It is difficult to condense the salient points of Gramsci’s historical-political analysis into a few words. Nonetheless, this is an operation that must be carried out if one wants to understand the overall architecture of the Prison Notebooks, their attempt to answer the question of why fascism succeeded and the future scenarios that await Italy and Europe – a question that, although approached from a ‘detached’ point of view, so to speak, is closely connected to Gramsci’s existential experience.2 In Gramsci, too, history is a ‘life’s teacher’3 and as such is always the subject of careful investigation, in close connection with other pivotal elements of Gramsci’s thought, and with his more properly theoretical-philosophical reflection. In this chapter, I will attempt to provide the general coordinates of the historical-political interpretation offered by the Quaderni, relating the main categories developed by Gramsci to account for the transformations that have shaped the contemporary framework – the concepts of ‘passive revolution’, ‘relations of force’ and ‘organic crisis’. This chapter is divided into three main parts. First, I will reconstruct Gramsci’s theory of history as it emerges from the prison writings, trying to highlight the logic behind it. I will then focus on the ‘classical’ conception of revolution and passive revolution, analysing the main passages of the Notebooks in which this emerges. The third and final section will focus on the crisis of hegemony in modernity and on Gramsci’s definition of fascism as a ‘passive revolution’ proper to the twentieth century. Methodologically speaking, this chapter adopts the historico-philological approach developed in the last decades by the Italian scholarship, in the framework of the new critical edition of Gramsci’s writings, currently in course of publication.4 I would argue that this approach, which is gradually also spread83

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ing in Anglophone academia,5 allows us to offer a fresh insight into Gramsci’s thinking, by moving beyond groundless and out-of-date debates.

GRAMSCI’S THEORY OF HISTORY From Pre-modernity to Modernity The understanding of the category of ‘passive revolution’, preliminarily requires the analysis of the general historical framework of the Notebooks. As has been written, they represent, among other things, ‘a great history book’ (Burgio 2002, p. 3). If Gramsci’s ultimate aim is to interpret the turbulent juncture in which he finds himself living and to elaborate a strategy appropriate to the contingent political situation, his gaze goes much further, reaching backwards in search of the deep roots of current phenomena. The historical span of Gramsci’s attention is very wide, coinciding with the history of western civilization itself. If in the Quaderni he sometimes dwells on episodes from classical antiquity or on questions of medieval history, it is, however, the later phase that particularly attracts his attention. It is in this period, which coincides with the rise and fall of the bourgeois class, that he traces the origins of what happens in the present. To put it briefly, we can say that history is divided for Gramsci into three moments.6 The first moment is very broad and embraces all the events that occur from the end of the Middle Ages until the French Revolution. During this phase, the bourgeois class is gradually gaining importance, depriving the old feudal system of its power from within. The second moment, which runs from 1789 to around 1870, corresponds to the ‘expansive’ phase of the bourgeoisie and represents the period of the most profound and radical transformation of European society. The third moment, which begins in the aftermath of the bloody repression of the Paris Commune and the outbreak of the imperialist wars, sees the crisis of the bourgeois world emerge and, after the First World War, intensify. It is this last moment that for Gramsci represents ‘modernity’ properly (Gramsci never, or almost never, uses the term ‘contemporaneity’, which is very common in Italian).7 Everything that happens before is therefore relegated to the realm of ‘pre-modernity’. The crucial moment, at least initially, is certainly the second. The bourgeoisie, having now conquered power, pursues its interests in a manner hitherto unheard of: it does not limit itself to basing its domination on force, but makes consensus (otherwise known as leadership) the strong point of its action, tending to assimilate other social groups and involve them in its political project. As Gramsci writes, ‘the bourgeois class posits itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the whole of society, assimilating it to its cultural and economic level’ (Q 8, § 2, p. 937; Gramsci 2007, p. 234).

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The events in France are paradigmatic in this context: it is in France, in fact, that this historical development is clearly recorded; it is in France that the only, true bourgeois revolution takes place.8 In the other countries (the reference is particularly to Italy and Germany), the development is less strong and, in a certain sense, is a reflection of what happens in the rest of Europe rather than the result of an internal, spontaneous progressive movement. In short, passive revolutions occur in these countries. ‘To Be’ and ‘Ought to Be’ But what are the dynamics that regulate the unfolding of the historical phases quickly sketched here? Such development, in Gramsci’s view, is anything but linear and necessary. It could not be otherwise given the clear rejection of determinism that, as is well known, underlies his ‘philosophy of praxis’, a rejection that constantly returns in the notes in which he mentions the causes that regulate historical becoming.9 According to Gramsci, the transition from one historical phase to another is determined by a peculiar combination of ‘to be’ and ‘ought to be’ – in other words, of objective conditions and subjective tendencies. While the economic situation must be such as to allow the transition to a new form of organization, there must be the political will (and capacity) to bring about this transformation. This is the teaching that, in essence, is enclosed in the two Marxian ‘canons’ from the famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, the resumption of which is a central element of Gramsci’s reflection.10 As he writes, two principles must orient the discussion: 1. that no society sets itself tasks for whose accomplishment the necessary and sufficient conditions do not either already exist or are not at least beginning to emerge and develop; 2. that no society breaks down and can be replaced until it has first developed all the forms of life which are implicit in its internal relations. (Q 13, § 17, p. 1579; Gramsci 1971, p. 177)

The themes evoked here are complex and cannot be analysed in detail.11 Suffice it to point out that these principles underpin the category of ‘relations of force’, which represents in a certain sense a translation in ‘Gramsci’s language’ of these principles and which encapsulates the essence of Gramsci’s historical conception.12 Relations of Force As has been argued, this concept is rarely explicitly mentioned in the Quaderni, but nevertheless plays a central role in Gramsci’s thought, standing behind all

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the ‘concrete’ analyses he carried out.13 The most important note in this regard is certainly Q 13, § 17, entitled Analysis of the Situations: Relations of Force. It is no coincidence that this text is one of the most complex of Notebook 13, the ‘special’ notebook, entitled Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics, and, in which, under the name of Machiavelli, a whole series of notes appear that illuminate the close relationship between Gramsci’s political-theoretical reflection and his historical analysis.14 The relations of force indicate, as the name implies, the relations that are determined at various levels of reality between the actors in the field. These relations help to define the general picture, determining the greater or lesser solidity of a given historical-political configuration and its conservative or progressive character. Gramsci, in particular, distinguishes three ‘moments or levels’ in the relations of force, which I will recall quickly. The first is the objectively measurable ‘relation of social forces which is closely linked to the structure’, that is, the ‘level of development of the material forces of production’, which defines the different classes and their role within the production system. The second moment is the subjective moment of the ‘relation of political forces’ to which corresponds ‘an evaluation of the degree of homogeneity, self-awareness, and organization attained by the various social classes’. This in turn is divided into three sub-levels, the most important of which is the third, the properly political one, which sanctions the shift of ideological struggles to a ‘universal’ level (as opposed to the previous ‘sectarianism’), with the consequent establishment of a form of hegemony. This is the sub-level that corresponds to the birth of the state, conceived as the ‘organ of one particular group’ but whose development is the fruit of ‘all the “national” energies’, of the (constantly renegotiated) coordination of the interests of the dominant group and those of the subordinate groups. Finally, the third and final moment is that of the ‘relation of military forces’ that corresponds to concrete political and war action and which, as such, ‘from time to time is directly decisive’ (Q 13, § 17, pp. 1583–1585; Gramsci 1971, pp. 180–183). Above all, it should be noted how the different dimensions relate to each other: far from being a mere ‘mirroring’ between one level and another, the relationship is dynamic, dialectical, constantly evolving. In this framework, as is clear from the conceptual articulation proposed by Gramsci, the crucial junction is represented by the second moment, in which the ‘decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures’ takes place (Q 13, § 17, p. 1584; Gramsci 1971, p. 181). Here, in fact, the two elements merge, creating the conditions for an effective political transformation (at the beginning of Q 13, § 17, Gramsci recalls the question of the relationship between structure and superstructure and defines it as the problem to be ‘resolved in order to arrive at a correct analysis of the forces operating in history’ – Q 13, § 18, p. 1579).15

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REVOLUTIONS AND PASSIVE REVOLUTIONS A French Pattern? If this is, in short, the content of Gramsci’s category of relations of force, one can also better understand the definition of historical (or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘effectual’) reality as a ‘relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium’ (Q 13, § 16, p. 1578; Gramsci 1971, p. 172).16 Where this movement unfolds ‘harmoniously’, the transition takes place under the control of a hegemonic class which defeats the ‘representatives of the old society’ with the help of its ‘brand new’ elements, in an oscillation between old and new whose final product constitutes a middle way with respect to both and, in any case, a step forward from the previous situation (Q 13, § 17, p. 1581; Gramsci 1971, p. 179). This dynamic of development, as already mentioned, is embodied by the French case, whose recent history is recalled by Gramsci as an example of the ‘“intervals” [waves is perhaps a more appropriate translation] of varying frequency’ that characterize historical development in its expansive phases (Q 13, § 17, p. 1582; Gramsci 1971, p. 180).17 Between 1789 and 1870, in fact, in France, the bourgeois class was not only ‘dominant’, i.e. it did have the brute force of the state and state-linked apparatuses on its side. It also had consensus, possessing the hegemonic capacity necessary to involve all strata of society in its political project.18 The relationship between leadership and domination is a central theme of Gramsci’s historical reflection and it emerges not only from Q 13, § 17, but also from one of the earliest and longest notes in the Quaderni, Q 1, § 44 (Political Class Leadership Before and After Assuming Government Power, later taken up in Q 19, § 24), which states that ‘there can and there must be a “political hegemony” even before assuming government power, and in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by Government’ (Q 1, § 44, p. 41; Gramsci 1992, p. 137). ‘Revolution Without Revolution’: The Italian Risorgimento Now, if this combination of consent and coercion is (or would seem to be) normal, let’s see what happens in countries where political direction is lacking or, at least, is not so clear and effective. The reference is, above all, to Italy in the period of the Risorgimento and in the post-Risorgimento, which is the focus of numerous notes in the Quaderni, not only for obvious historical reasons, but also for equally understandable political reasons – the analysis of

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nineteenth century Italian history being fundamental to the elaboration of an effective political strategy for the Communist party.19 For various reasons related to the peninsula’s millennia of history (but not least to the very character of the Italians themselves), Italy’s Risorgimento, according to Gramsci, is vitiated by a basic weakness, which means that, whereas in France the bourgeois state was being forged, here the bourgeoisie is not very self-aware, and consequently the political class is weak and poorly organized. In short, there is not that favourable, virtuous conjuncture between socio-economic conditions and political will, which alone brings about a radical transformation (see, for example, Q 3, § 119). However, this miserable picture is not quite as static as it might seem. Transformations are taking place here too, although certainly not as profound as in France, but they are still changes (‘it is certain that in the movement of history there is never any turning back, and that restorations in toto do not exist’, writes Gramsci – Q 9, § 133, p. 1195, later reproduced in Q 13, § 27, p. 1619; Gramsci 1971, pp. 219–220). The very action of the Italian moderates in the Risorgimento is taken as an example of political leadership prior to the rise to government in Q 1, § 44. This statement, apparently in contradiction with what has just been stated, is justified by what follows immediately afterwards. Indeed, Gramsci notes that the situation is such insofar as the Risorgimento represents a form of ‘revolution without revolution’ or, as he later specifies, ‘passive revolution’ (Q 1, § 44, p. 41; Gramsci 1992, p. 137).20 Gramsci cites several reasons to explain this.21 First, the greater organicity of the moderate group and the support of the intellectual class for the bourgeoisie (as opposed to the ideological and organizational shortcomings of the Partito d’Azione).22 Then he emphasizes the existence of a ‘sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses’, which the bourgeois ruling class opposes by accepting, however, ‘some part of the popular demands’, thus giving rise to a form of ‘progressive’ restoration (Q 8, § 25, p. 957, later reproduced in Q 10, II, § 41, XIV, p. 1325; Gramsci 2007, p. 252). Finally, he recalls the international political framework and the general drive for renewal that brings the progressive forces relative success on several fronts. Passive Revolution and Molecular Transformations I would like to remind readers first of the more general meaning of the oft-quoted formula of ‘passive revolution’.23 Inspired by Vincenzo Cuoco’s category and approximated to that of ‘revolution-reaction’ proposed by the French historian Edgar Quinet, ‘passive revolution’ is emerging as a ‘criterion of interpretation, in the absence of other active elements to a dominant extent’

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(Q 15, § 62, p. 1827; Gramsci 1971, p. 114). In Notebook 15, the most important on this subject, Gramsci defines it as the mechanism by which under a given political envelope, fundamental social relations necessarily change and new actual political forces arise and develop, which indirectly influence, through slow but incoercible pressure, the official forces that themselves change without realizing it, or almost (Q 15, § 56, pp. 1818–1819)

thus linking it to the question of the ‘molecular’ transformations. ‘Molecular’ in Gramsci are the changes that occur slowly and gradually, that transform the socio-political framework over the long term – this is another very important theme in Gramsci’s thought.24 The most significant passage, however, is certainly represented by another note of this same notebook. In this short note, Gramsci connects the category with the question of the relations of force, choosing as the ‘middle’ term of this relationship the two Marxian methodological canons I mentioned earlier. He writes: ‘the concept of “passive revolution” must be rigorously derived from the two fundamental principles of political science’ (Q 15, § 17, p. 1774; Gramsci 1971, p. 106).25 From this it can be deduced that the concept of passive revolution, like that of the relations of force, is of crucial importance, not only for Gramsci’s concrete historical analyses, but also for the overall theoretical elaboration of the Quaderni, and, therefore, for their ultimate political aim, representing a piece in the general picture he is gradually outlining. What I have highlighted is, in short, the fact that in Gramsci there is no clear distinction between historical investigation, theoretical reflection and political strategy, each aspect stimulates the other two and is in turn influenced by them. From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century On the basis of what has been said, it emerges that the category of passive revolution goes far beyond the Italian Risorgimento (which also has its own specific features). Rather, this appears as the most relevant case of a phenomenon that is repeated in different countries and in different historical contexts. It is precisely on the basis of this formula that Gramsci rereads nineteenth century European history: Vincenzo Cuoco called the revolution which took place in Italy as a repercussion of the Napoleonic wars a passive revolution. The concept of passive revolution, it seems to me, applies not only to Italy but also to those other countries which modernize the state through a series of reforms or national wars without undergoing a political revolution of a radical-Jacobin type. (Q 4, § 57, p. 504; Gramsci 1992, p. 234)

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He is contrasting France with Italy and other countries in which the affirmation of the bourgeois class is the result of a movement of ‘“reaction–national transcendence” of the French Revolution’ (Q 1, § 150, p. 133 – later reproduced in Q 10, II, 61, p. 136; Gramsci 1992, p. 230). It is clear that Gramsci is thinking of the Restoration, where this ‘metaphorical expression’ indicates the form in which, after the Napoleonic wars, a ‘new alignment of forces’ (that means, mainly, a return to the pre-revolutionary political status quo ante) is realized in the various nation-states (Q 16, § 9, p. 1863; Gramsci 1971, p. 398).26 Compared with what has been said above, it is interesting to note how what seemed to be the rule (the revolutionary rupture as an instrument of historical transition) ends up here becoming an exception, given that, in fact, it took place in only one country and at a very specific historical moment. In other words, notwithstanding the catalytic character of French political events, it is the passive revolution that represents the interpretative criterion par excellence of nineteenth century events in Europe (or at least a large part of them). This is a central element that illuminates the essence of the category of passive revolution. As Pasquale Voza (2008) has pointed out, a fundamental characteristic of this category is that it is not tied to a context established once and for all, but, on the contrary, is perpetually in progress. If its first and perhaps most important field of application is the Italian Risorgimento, the extension to the process of the formation of European states that I have mentioned (and which includes, among others, phenomena such as the strengthening of the state apparatuses and the development of the state bureaucracy) is only the beginning of a broader intellectual path that leads Gramsci to make passive revolution a key formula for understanding the present.

MODERNITY AND THE CRISIS OF HEGEMONY Organic Crisis and Hegemony Even more than the second moment of Gramsci’s chronological reading (the one from 1789 to around 1870), however, it is the third that particularly benefits from an interpretation in terms of passive revolution. This phase, defined by Gramsci as ‘modern’ as opposed to the previous one (‘pre-modern’) is characterized by a general retreat of the bourgeoisie to conservative positions. The causes are to be found in the growing difficulties encountered by the capitalist system, which are reflected, on a supra-structural level, in a growing political ungovernability and in the disintegration of the hegemonic apparatus. This long period is the period of the ‘organic crisis’, according to the expression used by Gramsci, where the adjective ‘organic’ describes the structural, profound and non-conjunctural nature of this crisis – in some notes he also speaks of a ‘catastrophic crisis’, where, however, the reference to

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catastrophism has a completely different meaning from the one then current in the communist sphere.27 At this time, society is split into two opposing blocs. On the one hand there is the bourgeoisie which, although already declining, seeks to maintain its domination, remaining anchored to the positions it has achieved. On the other there are the progressive or antagonist forces, led by the proletariat, which would like to take power, but have not yet reached the degree of strength and organization necessary to do so. In short, there is a dramatic stalemate in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Q 3, § 34, p. 311; Gramsci 1992, p. 33).28 What is fought in this framework (and particularly after 1918) is no longer a ‘war of movement’ but a ‘war of position’, long and complex, in which political strategy rather than brute force is pivotal and whose outcome cannot be predicted at the outset.29 In modernity, hegemony is everything. As a result of the transformations that took place between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century (first and foremost the entry of the popular masses onto the political scene), state and society have reached such a level of complexity and the superstructures have become so relevant that the only way to win the battle is to re-organize society around an ideology, creating precisely a new form of hegemony – suffice it to mention here the absolutely pre-eminent role played in this third historical phase by the state and parastatal apparatuses in the broad sense, thus including parties and a whole series of formally ‘private’ organizations.30 Modernity and Politics It will therefore be understood why the ‘lens’ of passive revolution is so appropriate for the analysis of modernity. Although they fall within the same historical epoch, there is a substantial difference between the phase prior to the First World War and the subsequent one: the latter represents a historical fracture, both politically and socio-economically, leading to a further and, so to speak, definitive escalation of the war of position between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. On the other hand, it is precisely that of war of position that becomes a key category for understanding the turbulent period in which Gramsci finds himself living. As he wrote, polemicizing with Croce, in Europe from 1789 to 1870 there was a (political) war of movement in the French Revolution and a long war of position from 1815 to 1870. In the present epoch, the war of movement took place politically from March 1917 to March 1921; this was followed by a war of position whose representative – both practical (for Italy) and ideological (for Europe) – is fascism. (Q 10, I, § 9, p. 1129; Gramsci 1971, p. 120)

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It should be noted that the reference to the revolution and, thus, to the civil war in Russia (March 1917–March 1921) does not invalidate the periodizing character of the First World War.31 Moreover, the chronological scansion sketched here is not alternative or competing with the one mentioned above, but rather complementary to it – as always in the Notebooks, there are multiple points of view on the same issue. However, beyond the chronological distinctions, it is interesting to highlight the definition of fascism with which the quotation closes, a definition that must be put in connection with what was said in the first text from which the note originates. Here (in the first draft text, later modified) Gramsci asks whether fascism is ‘the form of “passive revolution” specific to the 20th century’ as liberalism was to the nineteenth century (Q 8, § 236, p. 1089; Gramsci 2007, p. 378). In short, the fascist regime, read through this dual definition – representative of the war of position and of a form of passive revolution – appears to be the centre of gravity of Gramsci’s analysis of contemporaneity. Totalitarian Dynamics and Progressive–Regressive Trends The issue, as is obvious, is very complicated and here I can only limit myself to a few hints.32 Gramsci emphasizes first of all the ‘totalitarian’ character of fascism, where this adjective (which in the Notebooks is ‘neutral’ and is not to be associated with the unequivocally negative interpretation that was given to it after the Second World War33) indicates a form of regime with a single party, in which only one interest is pursued. That is, there is no room for worldviews that are not aligned with that of the dominant group, as was the case in liberal regimes. This totalizing character is determined by the bourgeoisie’s need to cope with the post-war crisis by regaining control of the system in the only possible way.34 The oppressive forms of the fascist state, the ‘formation of vast State and “private” bureaucracies’ and their intimately ‘police-like’ character in relation to civil society are thus explained in this framework (Q 9, § 133, p. 1195, later reproduced in Q 13, § 27, p. 1620; Gramsci 1971, p. 221). In Q 2, § 150, on the other hand, the police is defined as the ‘much larger organization in which a large part of a state’s population participates’ (Q 2, § 150, p. 279; Gramsci 1992, p. 361).35 Here, however, Gramsci’s remarks stress also the not entirely regressive character of the regime and its ability to realize a form of hegemony, albeit very different from the classical nineteenth-century one. From this point of view, a central role is played by corporatism, which, especially after 1932, increasingly appears to him as a further development of the capitalist economic

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system, and thus as something all in all progressive, as a form of passive revolution precisely.36 Gramsci writes in fact that the corporatist trend, born in strict dependence of such a delicate situation whose essential equilibrium must at all costs be maintained if monstrous catastrophe is to be averted, could yet manage to proceed by very slow and almost imperceptible stages to modify the social structure without sudden shocks. (Q 22, § 6, p. 2158; Gramsci 1971, p. 294)

Ideology is fundamental in this sense, even more than the practical realizations of corporatism (very few, as is well known37). If one interprets this phenomenon as a mode of capitalist rationalization linked to Fordism and Americanism, corporatism appears to be an instance in step with the times, capable of playing a leading role in the war of position played by fascism. As stated in the aforementioned § 9 of the first half of Notebook 10, there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that – through the legislative intervention of the State, and by means of the corporative organisation – relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country’s economic structure in order to accentuate the ‘plan of production’ element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased, without however touching [...] individual and group appropriation of profit (Q 10, I, 9, p. 1228; Gramsci 1971, pp. 119–120)

which is nothing other than the founding element of the capitalist economic system. Past and Present This is, in a nutshell, Gramsci’s assessment of the fascist phenomenon. However, if one recalls the remark made earlier that fascism is the representative of the passive revolution enacted by the bourgeoisie at the European level, the picture becomes even more relevant. The questions to ask at this point are: What direction is history taking? What does this imply for the elaboration of an alternative political strategy? As Gramsci points out, fascism (and with it all the post-war bourgeois reaction) ‘lasts’ but does not ‘make epoch’.38 To put it another way, it is true that the elements just underlined represent an attempt to respond to the catastrophic crisis that threatens the West, but this solution appears to be temporary, provisional: according to Gramsci, no matter how long and strenuously it is opposed, the time of the bourgeoisie is over and there is no turning back. The task of the workers’ movement and the communist party as its most advanced is therefore to elaborate a theory and a political praxis equal to the challenge

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posed, overcoming the contemporary war of position and realizing the transition to a new type of society. Moving from Gramsci’s times to our own, we could wonder whether his concepts are still valuable for interpreting the present, also considering that one of the features of the current political scenario is, among other things, the resurgence of the conservative and neo-fascist movements and ideologies on the global level. If, as has been famously written, history does not repeat twice, and, therefore, we cannot simply apply Gramsci’s analysis as such to our historical-political conjuncture, I would argue, however, that we should treasure his basic attitude, that is to try to move beyond the (often fruitless) day-by-day political debate to grasp the broader dynamics that underlie society and politics; in other words, to understand what is really changing and why. From this point of view, an analysis such as that put forward by Gramsci and summarized here would be inspiring for anyone trying to understand our own times and – perhaps even more importantly – to change it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter is the translation of an essay of mine published in Italian in 2019 (F. Antonini, Rivoluzione passiva, rapporti di forza, crisi organica: dinamiche storico-politiche nei Quaderni del carcere, in L. Pasquini and P. Zanelli (eds), Crisi e critica della modernità in Antonio Gramsci, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2019, pp. 15–30). I am thankful to the publisher for having allowed the permission to republish here. While preparing the present version of the text some new paragraphs have been added; the bibliography has also been updated. Other minor textual changes have been made, mostly to provide some basic information on themes many non-Italian readers of the companion might not be fully acquainted with. I am very grateful to the editor of the volume, William Carroll, as well as to Nathan Sperber and George Hoare for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

NOTES 1.

2.

In the course of the work I will cite the Prison Notebooks referring both to the Italian critical edition (Gramsci 1975) – by simply indicating the notebook number (Q), the paragraph number (§) and, where necessary, the page number – and to the English editions available (when the texts are not already translated I provide my own translation). The reference here is to the famous letter to Tania of 19 March 1927, in which Gramsci, to describe the character of the work he intended to undertake in prison, refers to Goethe and his writing für ewig (Gramsci 1992, p. 55; on this point see also Francese 2009). With this expression, Gramsci is explaining his needs to make a study that does not only respond to contingent needs, but is broader in

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scope. On the other hand, this does not imply a loss of the political dimension of his work, but a redefinition and deepening of it. Historia magistra vitae, in Cicero’s famous words. To put it briefly, this means 3. that the study of the past should serve as a lesson to the future. 4. An Edizione nazionale of the work of Antonio Gramsci is currently in preparation in Italian. On this, see for example the special issue of the International Gramsci Journal (2018, 4 (2)), entitled Readings and Applications of Gramsci/ The National Edition of Gramsci’s Writings. 5. As examples of this tendency, see Antonini et al. (2019), but also the recent special issue of Italian Culture (2022, 40(1)), commemorating the legacy of the English editor and translator of the Prison Notebooks, Joseph Buttigieg (‘Gramsci’s Method’ Thirty Years Later: A Special Issue Dedicated to the Memory of Joseph A. Buttigieg). 6. On these tripartition, see also Burgio (2014). 7. While Gramsci sometimes makes use of the adjective ‘contemporary’ and its variants, contemporaneity as a category in its own right only appears in two notes, where it is derided as a superficial and ridiculous definition (Q 8, § 232, taken up in a second draft in Q 11, § 18). 8. On the centrality of France in Gramsci’s political thinking, see most recently Descendre and Zancarini (2021). 9. On Gramsci’s rejection of determinism, closely linked to his critique of the vulgar conception of historical materialism embodied by Bukharin and his Popular Manual, the bibliography is extensive. See, among others, Thomas (2009). See also Chapter 4 in this volume. 10. The 1859 Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy is one of the most important Marxian writings for understanding Gramsci’s historical, political and philosophical reflection. The text, on the other hand, is among those present in a Marxian anthology in German that Gramsci possessed in prison and whose importance has recently been highlighted (cf. Cospito 2007, pp. 11–40, in particular pp. 25ff.). 11. On Gramsci and the 1859 Preface, see, among others, Frosini (2009). Generally speaking, Gramsci’s (extremely original!) usage of the Marxian canons has to be understood in the framework of Gramsci’s ‘theory of historical transitions’. In short, according to this conception, transitions from one state of things to another do not happen suddenly, but are rather processes, which take time to be implemented. Moreover, one other key element of Gramsci’s theory (which will be proved also precious in ‘deriving’ – as Gramsci writes – the concept of passive revolution from these two Marx principles) is the role played by the ‘marginal forces’ in slowing down the transitions. 12. On these issues, see for example Frosini (2010). 13. See the entry Relations of Force in Liguori and Voza (2009, pp. 687–690). 14. Notebook 13 is called ‘special’ in that it contains only second draft notes, taken from earlier notebooks (‘miscellaneous’ or ‘mixed’, depending on their composition). These labels are taken from Francioni (2009, vol. 1, pp. 21–60). On Notebook 13 in general, see Gramsci (2009, vol. 14, pp. 153–159). See also Liguori (2019). 15. On the structure–superstructure relation see Cospito (2016). 16. For the definition of ‘effectual reality’ see Q 8, § 84, p. 990. 17. On the ‘waves’ of history see also Antonini (2020, pp. 133ff.) and the further texts mentioned there.

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18. For a reconstruction of the concept of hegemony, see Cospito (2004). 19. The Risorgimento was the intellectual and political movement aiming to achieve the Italian unification. It went roughly from 1815 to 1861 (when the Kingdom of Italy was officially established) and was followed by a period of ‘adjustment’ of several years. For an overview on the Italian Risorgimento, see Collier (2003). On the importance of Gramsci’s reflection on the Risorgimento see the still valuable introduction by Corrado Vivanti in the monographic edition of Quaderno 19 (Gramsci 1977). 20. The expression ‘passive revolution’ is added later in the margin by Gramsci (on this variant, see Gramsci 2009, vol. 2, p. 6). 21. I am here summarizing the contents of several notes: Q 1, § 44; Q 8, § 25; Q 10, II, § 61. 22. The Partito d’Azione was a progressive, democratically oriented political party founded by Giuseppe Mazzini in 1853. It played a primary role during the struggle for the unification of Italy. The Partito Moderato, whose members (of liberal and conservative orientation) were also called simply Moderati, was the opponent of the Partito d’Azione. 23. On Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ the bibliography is huge: among the English speaking contributions, see in particular Morton (2007) and (for a more ‘philological’ reconstruction’) Thomas (2020). For a recent Italian reading see also Frosini (2021). 24. On this metaphor and its ‘biological-psychological’ origin see the relevant entry in Liguori and Voza (2009, pp. 551–554). See also Antonini (2020). 25. On these themes, see what I have written previously in note 10. In Antonini (2020), in particular pp. 140–144, I have tried to demonstrate how Gramsci’s reflection on passive revolution is strictly connected to that on the Marxian ‘canons’ insofar as they both deal with the issues of the weakness of the subaltern groups on the one hand, and, on the other, with the role of the ‘latent’ forces of the dominant social bloc (a key text is this regard is Q 14, § 23). 26. As known, a central role in the return to the pre-revolutionary state of things was played by the Congress of Vienna, held in 1815. 27. For an overview of this complex category of Gramscian thought, see the entry Crisis in Liguori and Voza (2009, pp. 175–179). As to the catastrophic dimension, Gramsci is not taking up the theory of the catastrophic crisis of capitalism proposed at the time by the Third International; the adjective ‘catastrophic’ and similar formulations are completely re-semantized in the Notebooks. 28. These themes have been investigated at length in Antonini (2020). 29. On the categories of ‘war of movement’ and ‘war of position’ in Gramsci, see Egan (2016). See also Chapter 12, this volume. 30. On these topics see Antonini (2019) and, specifically on bureaucracy, Antonini (2022). 31. On this issue see Vacca (1988, pp. 129–131). 32. For a summary of the debate on the topic (with a focus on the Italian scholarship, though), see Gagliardi (2016). Particularly illuminating are Fabio Frosini’s contributions (see in particular Frosini 2017). The Anglophone discussion is critically summarized in Antonini (2020), to which I refer also for my personal reading of the theme. 33. The reference is in particular to the interpretation proposed by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and then widely taken up and developed by subsequent scholars.

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34. On Gramsci’s ‘totalitarianism’ see the still valuable De Felice (1977, pp. 161–220). 35. See the entry Police in Liguori and Voza (2009, pp. 651–652). On these themes see also Antonini 2019. 36. On Gramsci’s conception of corporatism see especially Gagliardi (2008). On the connection between Americanism and corporatism see also Di Benedetto (2000). 37. Corporatism is a political theory that claims the necessity to reject the class-based society and to re-organize it on the basis of corporate groups that gather all the workers in the same branch of production. Albeit its origin can be traced back in the previous centuries, a conceptualization of this state-building ideology (which also includes a significant reassessment of some traditionally progressive issues such as that of the political representation of workers) was fully realized first during Fascism – its practical realization being less influential than its theoretical legacy, under many points of view. On these themes, see for example Cerasi (2018). 38. ‘Making epoch’, in Gramsci’s language, describes a radical and substantial transformation of the socio-political landscape (the French Revolution, for example, made epoch). This real upheaval is contrasted with a permanence of a given framework, its, potentially very slow, decay. On this conceptual pair see Burgio (2014, pp. 112–116).

REFERENCES Antonini, F. (2019). Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will: Gramsci’s political thought in the last miscellaneous notebooks, Rethinking Marxism, 31(1): 42–57. Antonini, F. (2020). Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Antonini, F. (2022). Gramsci on Bureaucracy. Italian Culture, 40(1): 16–26. Antonini, F., Bernstein, A., Fusaro, L., & Jackson, R. (eds) (2019). Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks. Leiden: Brill. Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Burgio, A. (2002). Gramsci storico: Una lettura dei “Quaderni del carcere”. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Burgio, A. (2014). Gramsci: Il sistema in movimento. Rome: DeriveApprodi. Cerasi, L. (2018). Intellectuals in the Mirror of Fascist Corporatism at the Turning Point of the Mid-Thirties. In A. Costa Pinto & F. Finchelstein (eds), Authoritarism and Corporatism in Europe and Latin America. London: Routledge, 27–41. Collier, M. (2003). Italian Unification: 1820-1871. Oxford: Heinemann. Cospito, G. (2004). Egemonia. In F. Frosini & G. Liguori (eds), Le parole di Gramsci. Per un lessico dei “Quaderni del carcere”. Rome: Carocci, 74–92. Cospito, G. (2007). Introduzione. In G. Cospito, G. Francioni, & F. Frosini (eds), Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni di traduzioni (1929-1932), vol. 1, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana-Treccani, 11–40. Cospito, G. (2016). The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci: A Diachronic Interpretation of Prison Notebooks. Leiden: Brill. De Felice, F. (1977). Rivoluzione passiva, fascismo, americanismo in Gramsci. In F. Ferri (ed.), Politica e storia in Gramsci. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 161–220. Descendre, R. & Zancarini, J.-C. (eds) (2021). La France d’Antonio Gramsci. Lyon: ENS Éditions.

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Di Benedetto, D. (2000). Americanismo e corporativismo in Gramsci. Critica marxista, 3–4: 88–97. Egan, D. (2016). The Dialectic of Position and Maneuver: Understanding Gramsci’s Military Metaphor. Leiden: Brill. Francese, J. (2009). Thoughts on Gramsci’s Need “To do something ‘Für ewig’”. Rethinking Marxism, 21(1): 54–66. Francioni, G. (2009). Come lavorava Gramsci. In A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, vol. 1. Roma-Cagliari: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana-L’Unione Sarda, 21–60. Frosini, F. (2009). Da Gramsci a Marx: Ideologia, verità e politica. Rome: DeriveApprodi. Frosini, F. (2010). La religione dell’uomo moderno: Politica e verità nei “Quaderni del carcere” di Antonio Gramsci. Rome: Carocci. Frosini, F. (2017). Rivoluzione passiva e laboratorio politico: appunti sull’analisi del fascismo nei Quaderni del carcere, Studi storici, 58, 2: 297–328. Frosini, F. (2021). ‘Rivoluzione passiva’: la fonte di Gramsci e alcune conseguenze. In G. Cospito, G. Francioni, & F. Frosini (eds), Crisi e rivoluzione passiva. Gramsci interprete del Novecento. Como-Pavia: Ibis, 181–217. Gagliardi, A. (2008). Il problema del corporativismo nel dibattito europeo e nei Quaderni. In F. Giasi (ed.) Gramsci nel suo tempo. Rome: Carocci, vol. II, 631–656. Gagliardi, A. (2016). Tra rivoluzione e controrivoluzione. L’interpretazione gramsciana del fascismo, Laboratoire italien. Politique et société, 18 [available online: http://​journals​.openedition​.org/​laboratoireitalien/​1062]. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere, critical edition edited by V. Gerratana, 4 vols. Turin: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1977). Quaderno 19. Risorgimento italiano. Turin: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison Notebooks, edited by J.A. Buttigieg, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks, edited by J.A. Buttigieg, vol. 3. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2009). Quaderni del carcere. Edizione anastatica dei manoscritti, 18 vols. Roma-Cagliari: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana-L’Unione Sarda. Liguori, G. (2019). Machiavelli politico e rivoluzionario nei “Quaderni” di Antonio Gramsci. Filosofia politica, 1: 153–172. Liguori, G. & Voza, P. (eds) (2009). Dizionario gramsciano. 1926-1937. Rome: Carocci. Morton, A.D. (2007). Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. London: Pluto Press. Thomas, P. D. (2009). The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden: Brill. Thomas, P. (2020). Gramsci’s Revolutions: Passive and Permanent. Modern Intellectual History, 17(1): 117–146. Vacca, G. (1988). L’Urss staliniana nelle analisi dei “Quaderni del carcere”. Critica marxista, 3–4: 129–131. Voza, P. (2008). Gramsci e la continua crisi. Rome: Carocci.

6. Hegemony as a protean concept Elizabeth Humphrys INTRODUCTION In 2014, Podemos exploded onto the Spanish electoral landscape. Founded in the wake of the 15M Indignados movement when millions occupied public spaces to protest austerity, the party fed off the movement’s rejection of the political establishment. The mood was encapsulated in the 15M slogan no nos representan – ‘they don’t represent us’ – with elites and the political class attracting the ire of mass mobilizations. Pablo Iglesias, Podemos party co-founder, spoke openly about the organization’s Gramscian orientation. He argued Gramsci was ‘the first to understand hegemony not as the necessity of the socialist organizations to lead subaltern sectors which are different from the working class … but as a set of superstructural mechanisms, especially in a cultural sense’ (cited in Rosso and Dal Maso, 2015). Iglesias was claiming Gramsci had reoriented the notion of hegemony from one centred on the class struggle over economic production, to one focused on and within the cultural and superstructural. This reimagining of hegemony was some distance from the way Gramsci’s developed it in the Prison Notebooks, steeped in the influential work of post-Marxist scholars Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). As such, it was built on the rejection of a Marxist metanarrative. In reading Edward Said’s (1978) masterwork Orientalism, we find a version of Gramsci’s hegemony influenced by Foucault’s notion of discourse. For Said (1978: 7), hegemony is ‘an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life’, for clarifying how culture operates within ‘civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and other persons works not through domination’ but consent. These forms of cultural leadership are ‘hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work’, and what gives Orientalism as a worldview and instrument of domination its potency (Said, 1978: 7). Said did more than Laclau and Mouffe to avoid the ‘descent into discourse’, as Bill Carroll (2006: 10) terms it, which can render analysis of hegemony devoid of a grounding in the material and economic conditions, and purely discursive in content. It is nevertheless the case that Gramsci’s conception of hegemony ‘inadvertently launched’ the discipline of post-colonial theory, which was 99

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founded by Said, as well as the discipline of cultural studies, both of ‘which developed in such a way that Gramsci’s terminology was used freely, in loose combinations with ideas quite alien to, and often incompatible with, Gramsci’s own affiliations’ (Brandist, 2015: 3). Today when we encounter Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, almost 100 years after his carceral writings, varied interpretations clutter scholarly and activist worlds. It is the concept most identified with Gramsci and by far the most used word taken from the Marxist vocabulary, influential across the humanities and social sciences in literature, education, linguistics and international relations. Hegemony has an everyday meaning to refer to the leadership or domination by a nation state or social group over others, or in a general sense to hegemonic ideas. In a simple way this is what Gramsci means, but, as we will see, his use of the term is more specific and multifaceted. Utilizing Gramsci’s notion of hegemony we can locate ways to understand the ruling ideas of the day as inseparable from the processes which secure capital accumulation for particular interests, and as a concept that illuminates the struggle for new forms of social order. This chapter overviews the influences on, and multiple meanings of, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, by situating it in his broader framework of historical materialism as a ‘philosophy of praxis’. The next section considers how we are going to explore Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the Prison Notebooks, and the challenges in doing so. The section after considers how previous uses of the term hegemony influenced Gramsci’s thinking, including how he was developing the notion before he was incarcerated, by focusing on his important essay ‘The Southern Question’. The fourth section investigates how hegemony is elaborated within the notebooks by situating it in Gramsci’s wider conceptual armamentarium, by looking in turn at the terrain of hegemony (in civil society and the ‘integral state’) and the project of hegemony (through Gramsci’s analysis of the role of intellectuals and his notion of the ‘modern prince’).

A STUDY MUST BE MADE Gramsci developed his notion of hegemony to explicate how the dominant class rules, the mechanisms by which this occurs, and how the ruling ideas of the day are connected to the way society is structured. For Gramsci, hegemony is about the way power is secured for particular – bourgeois class – interests within capitalism. He also advanced the concept to illuminate processes whereby non-dominant classes struggle, and how these activities can lead to new forms of social and political order from below. Occupying the centre of Gramsci’s concepts and insights, and developed over and through his life’s

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work, hegemony is fundamental to how he analysed and explained the dynamics of capitalism. Despite the centrality of hegemony in Gramsci’s work, we face three challenges in coming to grips with the concept. First, the notebooks, where it was most significantly elaborated, were not intended for publication in the form we confront them and are evidently incomplete. Second, there is a work-in-progress form to his pre-prison and carceral writings, and their categories. We are reading Gramsci as he is thinking through and developing the scope and applicability of his concepts. He applies the conception of hegemony to various historical circumstances to illuminate both the events and the notion itself, at times making more radical transformations to how he is using it. In other words, the concept of hegemony is protean – changeable – and the term is remade through Gramsci’s own use of it. This context is important, because some have rested on the claim Gramsci was unclear as to what he meant, to argue his intellectual work is contradictory. His work is best thought of as a project of clarification over his life. Third, as indicated above, we also encounter Gramsci indirectly through the writings of those who followed him, whose political frameworks can be some distance from his own. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony has been recast extensively and we need to be conscious of these shifts with theory, and that they are not always made clear. This is not to say that there is a comprehensive disjuncture between (Gramsci’s) past and (our) present, but, rather, there is work of interpretation to be done. The incomplete nature of the notebooks and the protean nature of the concept is not something to be overcome by placing an external order onto Gramsci’s work. Rather, in notebook 16, he provides a path forward for us, in a note titled ‘Questions of Method’: If one wishes to study the birth of a conception of the world which has never been systematically expounded by its founder (and one furthermore whose essential coherence is to be sought not in each individual writing or series of writings but in the whole development of the multiform intellectual work in which the elements of the conception are implicit) … [i]t is necessary, first of all, to reconstruct the process of intellectual development of the thinker in question in order to identify those elements which were to become stable and ‘permanent’. (Gramsci, 1971: 382; Q16 §2)

Using this as our guide, Gramsci (2011b: 137; Q4 §1) tells us we should not ‘search for origins or telos’ but to read him as he suggested we read others, in a search ‘for the Leitmotiv, for the rhythm of thought as it develops’. We might also usefully ask whether debate over what Gramsci meant by hegemony is important, or if it is only a matter of arcane scholarly interest? This chapter, and others in this collection, argue it is important to develop clarity around Gramsci’s concepts given their significant potential to help us understand and act in the world. When a conceptual framework is articulated

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and clarified in relation to – and through – social struggle, the work of politics is done. Gramsci’s methodology, what he calls the philosophy of praxis, was a redevelopment of Marxism as a world view. This was not a revitalization ‘against’ Marx, but the refoundation of an anti-determinist, anti-economistic, and non-instrumental Marxist project. Gramsci (2011c: 187; Q7 §35) argues that ideas are developed through practical activity and reflection within the historical process: ‘Everything is political, even philosophy or philosophies … and the only “philosophy” is history in action, life itself’. Ideas do not float freely, meaning they are not metaphysical in origin, they are embedded in the practical efforts of humans: ‘In this way we also arrive at a fusion, a making into one, of “philosophy and politics”, of thinking and acting, in other words we arrive at a philosophy of praxis’ (Gramsci, 2011c: 187; Q7 §35). Gramsci was not interested in Marxism ‘as defence of some orthodoxy’, but rather what it offered as a philosophy ‘in the conquest of autonomy and historical subjectivity for the working class: philosophy is that specific “power” capable of awakening consciousness and thus producing revolutionary action’ (Frosini, 2008: 676). Thus, for Gramsci, his philosophy of praxis and the actuality of hegemony (current and potential) are dialectically embedded. Gramsci finely balances two things in his writings, which are useful for our own approach: concepts are not ahistorical or fixed, they must be adapted to specific circumstances; and, at the same time, ‘history is not a collection of unique, unrelated episodes’ (Antonini et al., 2019: 162). Gramsci’s concepts always require translation from his past to our present, and we should follow his approach and seek ‘the real identity underneath the apparent differentiation and contradiction and finding the substantial diversity underneath the apparent identity’ (Gramsci, 2011a: 128–129; Q1 §43). The ‘nexus between explication of the past and strategic analysis of the present is characteristic of the originality of Gramsci’s approach’ and thus we are never dealing with static coordinates (Antonini et al., 2019: 1). The elaboration of Gramsci’s concepts in contemporary and specific circumstances is also part of a broader effort in developing Marxist concepts that ‘rise above their place of origin’ and eschew a historicist flattening (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 11).

HEGEMONY BEFORE THE NETEBOOKS Origins and Influences Imported into both Italian and English from the Greek word hēgemonia, which made a first known appearance in the work of historian Herodotus (c. 484 bc – c. 425 bc), the term was initially one with military connotations and referred to a coming together of city-states through agreement for a common interest. Hegemony was ‘leadership freely conceded by members of a league, but it was

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a specific commission, not a general authority’ (Anderson, 2022). This original understanding of the concept ‘as the system of power relations between competing – or between dominant and vassal – states’ is one of the ways Gramsci uses the term in the Notebooks, ‘for example, on how US power was created [Q2 §16] and on the history of subaltern states explained by that of hegemonic ones [Q15 §5]’ (Boothman, 2011: 203). The word was used in Greece for some time in this general fashion, to describe consensual agreement between states, but after the fall of Rome in ad 476 it went into a lengthy abeyance. Hegemony did not return to general use until the mid-nineteenth century, and then only briefly in the context of political efforts to unite various states under the leadership of Prussia in Europe. In this context, of efforts to create a German state, it was used to mean a general political, military and cultural leadership (Anderson, 2022). In the wake of the successful construction of the German nation, the term again entered a period of suspension. While it is unlikely this particular usage had much direct influence on Gramsci, the context is not dissimilar to how Gramsci uses hegemony (on occasion and in a general way) to discuss the unification of Italy in the processes of the Risorgimento. Importantly, we can trace the development of Gramsci’s notion to Marx’s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Marx, 1975), although Marx did not use the word hegemony himself. Gramsci translated part of the Preface in one of the notebooks set aside for this purpose (notebook 7) and acknowledged its influence several times. Marx (1975: 425) argues in the Preface that it is not consciousness that determines a person’s existence, but rather the economic foundations of society (the material productive forces) that determine their social existence (the relations of production). He argues that the economic base of society produces a ‘legal and political superstructure’, which ‘conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ (Marx, 1975: 425). When the economic mode of production changes it comes into conflict with the existing social (class) relations, and this ‘begins an era of social revolution’ as changes in the economic base ‘lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure’ (Marx, 1975: 426). Marx argued the rise of capitalism delivered a very particular state form, but that it does not seek to organize social cohesion as an end in its own right but in order to secure accumulation. This deeply shaped Gramsci’s thinking on how a ruling class operates, gains and maintains hegemony. Lenin and the Bolsheviks Of central importance for Gramsci’s development of the term was its return and prominent use by revolutionaries in the context of political and social struggles

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in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. While in Greece hegemony had been associated with relations between city-states, and in Germany the unification of separate states, in the context of the revolutions against absolutism in Russia the word gegemoniya entered discourse to define political relations within a state (Anderson, 2022). Many believed that in the economically underdeveloped situation of the Russian Empire, the emergent capitalist class was too weak to lead a bourgeois revolution against the remnants of feudalism and the autocratic rule of the Tsars (Byres, 2012). In this context, revolutionaries argued that democracy could only be delivered through the overthrow of the Tsarist state and the institution of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, by which they meant the hegemony of the working class. This proletarian movement would unite with other oppressed sections of society, most notably the far larger in size peasant population, to establish a new hegemonic order under the leadership of the working class but with the consent of the allied classes. This understanding of hegemony spread within communist movements across Europe and was used in writings and speeches by various leaders in the period, including Joseph Stalin, Nicolai Bukharin, Hungarian Béla Kun, and – most influentially on Gramsci – by Vladimir Lenin. In line with Lenin’s understanding of the term, Gramsci argued in July 1925 in L’Unità, an official newspaper of the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI) which he founded, that a key task for the upcoming party congress was to ‘examine what the essential problems of Italian life are’ in order to understand ‘which solution to them will encourage and bring about the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat with the peasants, and accomplish the hegemony of the proletariat’ (Gramsci, 1978: 305). It is important to understand these links to contextualize ‘unilateral or debatable interpretations … by friendly commentators, who sometimes overlook or deny economic and class factors, or by hostile ones, who neglect consensual aspects’ (Boothman, 2011: 55). Some have argued that Lenin did not use the term gegemoniya, most prominently Norbert Bobbio, while others have suggested there was limited direct influence on Gramsci of his deployment of the notion, most notably in and through the reception of Perry Anderson’s (1976) influential The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. Anderson in fact argued the term largely fell into disuse after this period in Russia. This ‘inadvertently encouraged the reader to assume … erroneously, that the concept of hegemony had no cultural or linguistic dimensions in Russian Marxism’, which it did, and in turn ‘legitimised the search for the essential sources of these dimensions of Gramsci’s thought elsewhere’ (Brandist, 2015: 8). However, there is now a range of scholarship demonstrating the Russian use of the term was in general use amongst Communists in Europe, including by Gramsci while

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living in Russia and Italy, in this period (Boothman, 2011: 59–60; Brandist, 2015). Croce and Machiavelli In his essential overview of the sources for Gramsci’s development of the notion of hegemony, Derek Boothman (2011) provides useful context for two important influences from outside the Marxist tradition: the work of Benedetto Croce, an idealist liberal philosopher and the leading Italian intellectual figure of Gramsci’s day, and that of Renaissance philosopher and author Niccolò Machiavelli. Analysis of the writings of both are significant features of the notebooks. Regarding Croce, Boothman (2011: 61–62) considers most significant his writings on ‘ethico-political history’ as the history of ‘moral or civil life’. The ‘history of the complex of moral institutions in the broadest sense, as opposed to histories that consider “economic life as the substantive reality and moral life as an appearance”, or “merely military and diplomatic” ones’ (Croce cited in Boothman, 2011: 61–62). While Gramsci would agree it is essential to understand this aspect of history, he did not believe it to be counterposed to – or able to be separated from – politics and economics. For Gramsci, these are rendered whole in the hegemony of civil society and the state (or more precisely the ‘integral state’). Political and social rule is made manifest on the terrain of civil society and, although deeply rooted in the cultural and ideological trappings that engender consent, ultimately connected and buttressed by coercion: ‘The “normal” exercise of hegemony … is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent’ (Gramsci, 1971: 80; Q 13 §37). As Marx (1976: 272) usefully explicated in his analysis of the ‘double freedom’ of labour, force is not simply the state, or police or military that might legally monopolize physical violence, but also the social relations of production and private property. These are social, legal and economic compulsions that engender consent in the heart of the capitalist system itself. In relation to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony – chiefly understood as a form of rule by consent in liberal and social democratic states – the line between coercion and consent was, as it was for Marx, not always distinct. In Machiavelli’s book The Prince, Centaur Chiron is for Gramsci an influential metaphor that shaped his focus on the symmetry required in political struggle: … Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to

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know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable. (Machiavelli, 1998)

Gramsci argues this ‘dual nature’ represents ‘levels of force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation, of the induvial movement and the universal moment (“Church” and “State”), of agitation and propaganda, of tactics and strategy, etc’ (cited in Boothman, 2011: 62; Q 13 §37). Caterina Carta (2017: 360) also highlights how the dual nature of the Centaur corresponds to the ‘spontaneous and rational components of political action’, to the interplay of popular moments of social upheaval that lead to radical action and the need for a systematic elaboration of a political programme to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat (Carta, 2017: 362–363). As such, she argues that the notebooks ‘eminently and systematically’ connect two texts: Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Marx and Engel’s Manifesto (Carta, 2017: 360). For Gramsci, this liberation would not be found in a leader like Machiavelli’s however, but rather delivered through a mass working-class party he called the modern prince. Pre-Prison Writings While the Prison Notebooks are where Gramsci more fully extends his conception of hegemony, in the two years prior to his arrest he was developing his thinking on the relationship between philosophy and reality, as well as a ‘first interpretation’ of hegemony as the making real of ideology through a political project (Frosini, 2008: 676). Gramsci’s Marxism was emerging as ‘the theory-practice of hegemony’, both ‘aware of the hegemonic character of every ideological reality’ and ‘a political force that works actively in the criticism of the dominant hegemony’ (Frosini, 2008: 677). In Gramsci’s celebrated ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1990), which he was working on when arrested, we can find essential grains of what would be at the centre of his endeavours in prison. This includes an analysis of – although the term hegemony appears only once in the text – the particularities of the Italian state formation and bourgeois rule, and the potential way through this political domination. The ‘Southern Question’ opens by quoting from L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), a newspaper Gramsci co-founded within the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), arguing that the ‘Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies’ and that ‘by emancipating itself from capitalist slavery, the Northern proletariat will emancipate the Southern peasant masses enslaved to the banks and the parasitic industry of the North’ (Gramsci, 1990: 441). He reflects on debates amongst the Turin

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communists several years prior, and the potential for just such a strategic alliance: The Turin communists posed concretely the question of the ‘hegemony of the proletariat’: i.e. of the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and of the workers’ State. The proletariat can become the leading [dirigente] and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State. In Italy, in the real class relations which exist there, this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses. (Gramsci, 1990: 443)

Gramsci (1990: 443) goes on to outline how ‘the peasant question is historically determined in Italy’, and that it is not the ‘peasant and agrarian question in general’. For Gramsci (1990: 443), in his homeland ‘the peasant question, through the specific Italian tradition, and the specific development of Italian history, has taken two typical and particular forms – the Southern question and that of the Vatican’ – and ‘[w]inning the majority of the peasant masses thus means, for the Italian proletariat, making these two questions its own from the social point of view’. In these passages there are the reverberations of the Bolsheviks’ theory and practice of revolution in Russia, and debates about the peasant question within Marxism. Yet, it is not the presentation of a formula – meaning not the ‘peasant and agrarian question in general’ – but an application specific to Gramsci’s location and questions of the Italian South and the Catholic Church (Gündoğan, 2008: 46). If the Italian (bourgeois) state was to be defeated, Gramsci reasoned that the working class needed to lead and dominate the allied classes as well as the intellectuals. To do so, it must shed itself of the bourgeois ideology of the day, which was routinely voiced by those on the left, and which advanced (incorrectly in Gramsci’s view obviously) that: …the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny: if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric – only tempering this harsh fate with the purely individual explosion of a few great geniuses, like isolated palm-trees in an arid and barren desert. (Gramsci, 1990: 444)

Far from a rudimentary articulation of a concept of hegemony, related simply to the conquering of state power to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat, Gramsci is already here weaving elements of the political, economic, and cultural together in his exposition of the mechanisms of the hegemony of the North and a potential strategy for liberation. Gramsci’s ‘mode of thinking

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not only conceives of social life and history as discontinuously and unevenly shaped, but [he] always undertakes to expose the world as a stage for struggle for rule or hegemony’ (Xie, 2003: 77). With the ‘Southern Question’ unfinished, Gramsci was arrested in 1926, and jailed. In March 1927, Gramsci (1979: 79) famously wrote to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, that while prevented from working in the struggle day to day, he wished to devote himself to intellectual work so as to accomplish something ‘für ewig’ (forever). Before him lay ‘a tremendous amount of detailed work and patient reflection … before the ideas first touched upon in the ‘Southern Question’ essay could acquire the weight and the power of conviction of a major breakthrough’ (Buttigieg, 2011: 22). At the centre of this work was his conception of hegemony. Although he had reading materials in his first years, he was only allowed access to writing tools from February 1929, and from this time his efforts commenced in earnest.

HEGEMONY IN THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS When we first encounter Gram­­­­­sci’s deployment of hegemony in the notebooks it is without fanfare. Written in 1929–1930, notebook 1 note 44 undertakes a lengthy examination of the Risorgimento in Italy, and more broadly passive and bourgeois revolutions in Europe. Gramsci (2011a: 136–137; Q 1 §44) outlines that ‘a class is dominant in two ways, namely it is “leading” and “dominant”. It leads the allied classes, it dominates the opposing classes’. He argues that in order to assume power a class must be a ‘political hegemony’, that the dominance of assuming power must be accompanied by this leadership: ‘in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by government’ (Gramsci, 2011a: 136–137; Q 1 §44). Gramsci uses this framework in the remainder of the note to examine the processes of unification of the Italian state, the experience of the Jacobins and the French Revolution (drawing a comparison with the agrarian question in Italy) and the role of intellectuals, and the hegemony of the North over the South. For Gramsci, intellectuals are an essential element of hegemony, and: …there does not exist an independent class of intellectuals, but every class has its intellectuals; however, the intellectuals of the historically progressive class exercise such a power of attraction that, in the final analysis, they end up by subordinating the intellectuals of the other classes and creating an environment of solidarity among all the intellectuals. (Gramsci, 2011a: 137–138; Q 1 §44)

Throughout the notebooks, Gramsci moves between uses of the term hegemony to describe on the one hand leadership/direction and on the other domi-

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nation, and contexts where the distinctions between these are bridged – such as when he uses the term dirigente to mean leading and dominant. Already in this note Gramsci had extended his use of hegemony from the primary way it was used in the Russian context, expanding and generalizing it ‘beyond [only] a working-class strategy, to characterise stable forms of rule by any social class’, to a term to analyse ‘not [only] the adhesion of allies in a common cause, but the submission of adversaries to an order inimical to them’ (Anderson, 2022). Hegemony is discussed from this point in innumerable notes, often in association with other new concepts, to articulate a new way of both understanding and acting in the world. Hegemony ‘designate[s] a terrain where the logic of political strategy and leadership intersects the practical – economic, cultural and pedagogical – organisation of everyday life’ (Shandro, 2014: 3). The Terrain of Hegemony: Civil Society and the ‘Integral State’ Gramsci (2011b: 197; Q4 §46) associates the production and functioning of hegemony, through which the dominant group exerts power over the whole, with civil society. Processes of consent (hegemony) in civil society are just as important as openly coercive state rule (domination) in maintaining power and order. Essential to grappling with the relationship between these in the functioning of hegemony, is Gramsci’s distinct innovation of the ‘integral state’. The integral state concept describes the dialectical unity between what we might usually think of as the state on the one hand (political society and the state apparatus), and civil society on the other (atomized social/economic interests and the relations between them). The most famous of Gramsci’s notes on the nature of the state explains the relationship like this: ...certain elements that fall under the general notion of the state must be restored to the notion of civil society (in the sense, one might say, that State + political society + civil society, that is, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion). (Gramsci, 2011c: 75; Q6 §88)

Conceiving of political society and the state as something that sits above civil society, involved in regulation and coercion alone, even through democratic means, overlooks that it is, in practice, ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’ (Gramsci, 1971: 244; Q15 §10). As such, the integral state is the mechanism for maintaining capitalist hegemony, as ‘a network of social relations for the production of consent, for the integration of the subaltern classes into the expansive project of historical development of the leading social group’

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(Thomas, 2009: 143). However, as Palmiro Togliatti has argued, for Gramsci ‘the difference between civil society and political society is methodological rather than organic’ (cited in Liguori, 2022: 109). Thomas (2009: 189) explains that Gramsci’s definition of political society as an involucro – as an envelopment or enwrapping – ‘in which a civil society can be developed would not seem to correspond in any sense to the concept of the state apparatus’. He argues that ‘whereas the latter is normally conceived as a coercive instrument applied externally in order to regulate civil society’s inherent tendency towards anarchy’, Gramsci articulates an image of ‘political society’ as a ‘container’ of civil society, ‘surrounding or enmeshing and fundamentally reshaping it’ (Thomas, 2009: 189). Far from civil society and political society only being in contradistinction, civil society is in dialectical unity with the state. Civil society and political society are better conceptualized not as geographical locations, but as different sites of social practice: civil society is the location of hegemonic practice and political society is the site of direct domination. For Gramsci, civil society has a fundamental economic content, and the concept of hegemony itself has ‘an economic foundation, as well as socio-economic content’ (Liguori, 2022: 152). Thus, the battle for hegemony is ‘the struggle for power, and superstructural activities have a class character, arising out of those contradictions that Marx had identified as central to modern history’ (Liguori, 2022: 152). Gramsci was concerned with the character of production and accumulation, and the civil society which arises from this, which lead to contradictions that allow openings for hegemonic struggles by subaltern groups against capitalist class rule. As such, the involucro of civil society, can be broken through. Hegemony is never complete, Gramsci argues, and through the role of intellectuals, and the political party as the ‘collective individual’, Gramsci identifies the main instruments for the transformation necessary to realize a new hegemonic system (or indeed to maintain the present one). The Project of Hegemony: Intellectuals and the ‘Modern Prince’ In the notebooks, Gramsci returns many times to the role of intellectuals in the organization of hegemony: ‘a human mass does not “distinguish” itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in its widest sense, organising itself’ and ‘there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is, without organisers and leaders’ (Gramsci, 1971: 334). He analyses the roles of both ‘traditional intellectuals’ – who serve the interests of the dominant class and are essential to the maintenance of the current hegemony – and what he terms the ‘organic intellectuals’, which arise from all groups and are essential to the struggle of non-dominant groups. Gramsci (1971: 10; Q12 §1) articu-

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lates organic intellectuals as the conscious development of a layer essential to a rising class winning hegemony, with their practice consisting of ‘active participation in practical life, as constructor, as organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator’. As such: Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more stratal of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. (Gramsci, 1971: 6)

While the notion of organic intellectuals might appear to be a spontaneous elaboration, the entire purpose of Gramsci’s analysis is to make the process conscious and purposeful. Old conceptions of the world (what he would term the ‘common sense’ of the current ‘historical bloc’1), must be replaced with new ideas (meaning the ‘good sense’ of a new one) – this is as much the case for the bourgeois class as the working class and subalterns. The question of hegemony ‘goes beyond culture…in its insistence on relating the whole social process to specific distributions of power and influence’ (Williams, 1977). It is closely related to what Gramsci calls ‘conceptions of the world’, that being the shared beliefs and values that shape our understanding of the world and place in it. As Raymond Williams argues, the mechanisms of hegemony: not only articulate upper level of ideology which has manipulation and indoctrination; but it is a whole body of practices and expectation over the whole of living … our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It constitutes a sense of reality for people. (Williams, 1977)

Hegemony is, for Gramsci, based on consent to the dominant ideas and ways of thinking, internalized by individuals and collectively, which legitimize the existing social order. As Gramsci (1971: 419; Q11 §13) explains, common sense is essential to this, as a ‘conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed’, although it is not metaphysical, it is based in material realities. Schematically, Gramsci talks of common sense as being halfway between folklore (cultural conceptions of the world such as superstitions and fables) and the philosophy and science of specialists. This process of developing hegemonic common sense is chaotic but purposeful, as ‘[e]very relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ (Gramsci, 1971: 350). ‘Common sense is not something rigid and immobile,

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but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life’, Gramsci (1978: 326n) argues. Set against this is his notion of ‘good sense’, an enlightened understanding of the world that is critical and reflective, which he argues is attainable through working class struggle – meaning, through the philosophy of praxis. In the context of these battles, Gramsci (1971: 340; Q11 §12) argues that organic intellectuals need to complete two tasks: ‘[n]ever to tire of repeating its own arguments’; and to ‘work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace’. These are ‘elites of intellectuals of [a] new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were, the whalebone in the corset’ of the struggle from below (Gramsci, 1971: 340; Q11 §12). In the struggle for a new hegemony, however, these intellectuals need to be organized collectively. ‘What becomes of the political party in relation to the problem of the intellectuals?’ Gramsci asks. In response to his own question, he answers that the ‘political party, it seems to me, can be said to be precisely the mechanism that carries out in civil society the same function that the state carries out, to a greater extent, in political society’ (Gramsci, 2011b: 202; Q4 §49). Earlier in his years in Turin, Gramsci was heavily influenced by the anti-determinism of socialist intellectual Anthony Labriola and had come to believe that revolutionary change was not fated or automatic. Rather, it would only be delivered through conscious intervention of those who understood the nature of capitalism. He believed that a new hegemony would only be possible when people ‘understood and overcame’ current dominant ideas, a phrase taken from Labriola but originally from Hegel (Davidson, 1974: 126). Gramsci held that the role of intellectuals (including himself) was to educate the masses to ensure awareness of social oppression, and of their own role in altering the course of history. However, some argue that at this time he still clung in part to a traditional and idealist conception of the process of enlightenment – one to be delivered through publications, lectures and seminars (Davidson, 1974: 126–127) – and his insights into the philosophy of praxis were still in development. At the same time, Gramsci was deeply involved in the workers’ movement in Turin, and as such this was not a belief in a mechanical Marxism to be imposed on the movement, but rather ‘a practice of collective discussion, the construction of spaces free from the hegemony of the dominant ideology, and the formation of new ideological relations’ (Frosini, 2008: 676). He took the view that philosophy itself was capable of being a liberation from prejudice and hegemonic thought, and ‘forming a critical and independent mass point of view’ (Frosini, 2008: 675).

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In the notebooks, Gramsci moves forward from this approach and begins to articulate a ‘collective intellectual’ in the form of the modern prince, the notion taken from Machiavelli and then recast. For Gramsci the …human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself; and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is without organisers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people ‘specialised’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas. (Gramsci, 1971: 334)

As Gramsci (1971: 129) redefines it, the modern prince […] cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.

The modern prince as a way to establish a new hegemony is no abstract formation for Gramsci, despite the literary tone and origins of his term, rather it is the actuality of a revolutionary Marxist party.

CONCLUSION How then are we to systematize the range of ways Gramsci deploys the term hegemony across his lifetime? Thomas (2013: 24–25) argues that the most useful approach is to see the four key uses of the term as ‘integrally and dialectically’ connected ‘moments’, which ‘constitute a “dialectical chain” along which Gramsci deepens his researches’. Hegemony is: first ‘social and political leadership’; second, ‘a political project’; third, ‘the realization of this hegemonic project in the concrete institutions and organizational forms of a “hegemonic apparatus”’; and fourth, ‘ultimately and decisively, the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement’ (Thomas, 2013: 24–25). Thus, hegemony is both a conceptual lens on, as well as the actuality of, ruling class domination. Alongside this, Gramsci reveals for us that hegemony is always already incomplete, and through the philosophy of praxis there is the potentiality for new forms of understanding and social rule. Gramsci’s efforts were to develop a new Marxism in opposition to that of the Second International, and determinist and instrumental readings of Marx. For many contemporary scholars and activists their task has been to reclaim Gramsci’s intellectual endeavours as ones firmly rooted in the political economy and materialism of the communist tradition, rather that the realm of culture alone. Redrawing a line directly from Marx and Engels, through

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Lenin, to Gramsci, is essential to both salvage Marxism from the actuality of totalitarian communism, as well as to answer contemporary questions as to how hegemony functions. In the battle for new forms of social rule – a new or anti/counter hegemony – Gramsci’s method and insights offer hope of overcoming what is now an existential threat created by capitalism in climate change. This is a climate crisis embedded in the legacy and contemporary actuality of colonialism, as well the intersecting crisis of inequality. While there are tentative signs of struggle in some locations, these remain limited. In key industrial heartlands struggles are often violently repressed. The world is always in the process of being remade, however, and in Gramsci’s celebrated notion we have an essential tool to understand how the subaltern battles for liberation. Gramsci’s insights were not simply about how hegemony is produced by the (bourgeois) integral state, but that the chaos of civil society – as it is produced and reproduced by the anarchic process of capital accumulation – can break through the political container in which it finds itself enwrapped. It is this dual nature of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, as both a mode of rule and potential liberation within the historical processes of class and subaltern struggles, that imbues it with the possibility of new ways of comprehending our world and new forms of social rule. Gramsci’s legacy is one of insight into the radical potential to disrupt and, if organized through a modern prince, end capitalist rule.

NOTE 1.

A ‘historical bloc’ for Gramsci is social order, combining economic, political and ideological institutions and social relations, for the maintenance of hegemony or the wining of a new one.

REFERENCES Anderson, P. (1976). The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review 1(100): 5–78. Anderson, P. (2022). The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony. London: Verso. Antonini, F., Bernstein, A., Fusaro, L., & Jackson, R. (eds). (2019). Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. DOI: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1163/​ 9789004417694 Boothman, D. (2011). The sources for Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In M.E. Green (ed.), Rethinking Gramsci. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 55–67. Brandist, C. (2015). The Dimensions of Hegemony: Language, Culture and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Leiden: Brill. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Buttigieg, J.A. (2011). Introduction. In J.A. Buttigieg (ed.), Prison Notebooks (Vol 1). New York: Columbia University Press.

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Byres, T.J. (2012). The agrarian question and the peasantry. In B. Fine and A. Saad-Filho (eds), The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Carroll, W.K. (2006). Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony. Socialist Studies 2(2): 9–43. Carta, C. (2017). Gramsci and The Prince: Taking Machiavelli outside the realist courtyard? Review of International Studies 43(2). London: Cambridge University Press: 345–366. DOI: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S0260210516000280 Davidson, A. (1974). Gramsci and Lenin 1917-1922. Socialist Register 11: 125–150. Frosini, F. (2008). Beyond the crisis of Marxism: Gramsci’s contested legacy. In Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. Leiden: Brill, pp. 663–678. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (eds Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926) (trans. Q. Hoare). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1979). Letters From Prison (trans. L. Lawner). London: Quartet Books. Gramsci, A. (1990). Some aspects of the southern question. In Selections from the Political Writings (1921-1926), with Additional Texts by Other Italian Communist Leaders. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 441–462. Gramsci, A. (2011a). Prison Notebooks (Vol 1) (ed. J.A. Buttigieg; trans. J.A. Buttigieg and A. Callari). New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2011b). Prison Notebooks (Vol 2) (ed. J.A. Buttigieg; trans. J.A. Buttigieg and A. Callari). New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2011c). Prison Notebooks (Vol 3) (ed. J.A. Buttigieg; trans. J.A. Buttigieg and A. Callari). New York: Columbia University Press. Gündoğan, E. (2008). Conceptions of hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s southern question and the Prison Notebooks. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 2(1): 45–60. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Liguori, G. (2022). Gramsci Contested: Interpretations, Debates and Polemics, 1922–2012 (trans. R. Braude). Leiden: Brill. Machiavelli, N. (1998). The Prince (trans. W.K. Marriott). The Guttenberg Project. Marx, K. (1975). Preface (to ‘A contribution to the critique of political economy’). In K. Marx (ed.), Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 424–428. Marx, K. (1976). Capital I: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. Rosso, F. & Dal Maso, J. (2015). Pablo Iglesias y su Gramsci a la carta. La Izquierda Diario (Red International), 7 May. Available at: https://​www​.laizquierdadiario​.com/​ Pablo​-Iglesias​-y​-su​-Gramsci​-a​-la​-carta (accessed 28 November 2022). Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New York: Pantheon Books. Shandro, A. (2014). Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle. Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 72. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Thomas, P. (2009). The Gramscian Moment. Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden: Brill. Thomas, P.D. (2013). Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince. Thesis Eleven 117(1). SAGE Publications Ltd: 20–39. DOI: 10.1177/0725513613493991. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Xie, S. (2003). ‘The southern question’ and Said’s geographical critical consciousness. In R, Ghosh (ed.) Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World, 4th ed. Routledge. Available at: https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9780203879788.

PART II THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS: A NEW POLITICAL VOCABULARY

7. The historical bloc as a strategic node in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks Panagiotis Sotiris INTRODUCTION Notions coming out of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks sometimes become part of the vernacular of the left without fully grasping their analytical and strategic potential. Such is the case with the notion of the historical bloc. Palmiro Togliatti used it to describe the possibility that the working class is becoming a national class exactly because the conditions exist for a new historical bloc (Togliatti 2014). Enrico Berlinguer used it in relation to the question of alliances (Berlinguer 1977) and Giorgio Napolitano (Napolitano 1970) opposed his conceptualization of the historical bloc to Roger Garaudy’s suggestion that there could be a new historical bloc between the working class and the new forms of intellectual labour (Garaudy 1969).1 And in some of the debates we are going to retrace (such as the Bobbio–Texier dialogue in relation to Gramsci’s theorization of the superstructures) historical bloc played a significant role. Yet most often it has been used to describe something close to a social alliance, which, tends to underestimate its analytic and strategic potential. The identification of the concept of ‘historical bloc’ with social alliances can also be attributed to a surface reading of some of Gramsci’s pre-Prison writings, such as the text on the Southern Question where one can find Gramsci’s elaborations on how to dismantle the Southern agrarian bloc in order to advance the alliance of between proletariat and southern masses. It is all the more required by the alliance between proletariat and peasant masses in the South. The proletariat will destroy the Southern agrarian bloc insofar as it succeeds, through its party, in organizing increasingly significant masses of poor peasants into autonomous and independent formation. But its greater or lesser success in this necessary task will also depend upon its ability to break up the intellectual bloc that is the flexible, but extremely resistant, armour of the agrarian bloc. (Gramsci 1978, p. 462)

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In contrast, my basic hypothesis is the following: the historical bloc is a strategic node in the conceptual architecture of the Prison Notebooks and not a descriptive or an analytical concept. It does not define a social alliance, but a social and political condition, namely the condition when hegemony has been achieved. The historical bloc points to a strategy for hegemony. The struggle for hegemony means the struggle for a new historical bloc. A potential hegemony of the working class, namely their ability to be truly leading within a broader front, a broader social dynamic that could enable a process of social transformation, means the creation of the conditions for a new historical bloc: a new articulation of social forces, alternative economic configurations in rupture with capitalist relations of production and new forms of political organization and participatory democratic decision processes. It is in this sense that the historical bloc was described by Gramsci as the unity between the structure and the superstructures. In order to substantiate this hypothesis, I offer an analysis and interpretation of the references to the historical bloc in the Prison Notebooks. I will begin with the questions associated with the association of historical bloc to Gramsci’s reading of the notion of myth in the work of Georges Sorel. I will then try to retrace the elaboration of the conception of the historical bloc in the Prison Notebooks in order to support my hypothesis that it actually refers to a strategy for hegemony. The reason for this order of presentation and discussion is that in the work in progress of the Prison Notebooks Gramsci uses the notion of the historical bloc in an evolving way, without offering a steady definition of it. This makes necessary a reconstruction of how it is discussed by Gramsci.

FROM THE SORELIAN ‘MYTH’ TO THE HISTORICAL BLOC I will start with the relation between the concept of the historical bloc and the Sorelian ‘myth’. This ‘philological’ question arises because of the reference to the historical bloc in a passage in Notebook 4 dealing with the importance of superstructures, as the terrain where people become conscious of their condition, and to the necessary relation between base and superstructure: Recall Sorel’s concept of the ‘historical bloc.’ If humans become conscious of their task on the terrain of superstructures, it means that there is a necessary and vital connection between structure and superstructures, just as there is between the skin and the skeleton in the human body. (Gramsci, 1992–2007, vol. 2, p. 157 [Q4, §15])

But how can we understand this reference to myth? To answer this question I will follow Fabio Frosini’s suggestion that ‘for Gramsci the bloc does not

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serve in thinking the psychological validity of “myths,” but in thinking the way in which this validity acquires a gnoseological dimension, that is an effective historical reality’, (Frosini 2003, p. 93, emphasis in original). Gramsci’s concept is not limited to ideological constructions that mobilize mass political action, but rather refers to political strategy. In the work of Georges Sorel, a thinker well known for his conceptualization of ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ and with whose work Gramsci was in constant dialogue, there is no reference to the concept of ‘historical bloc’. Valentino Gerratana has suggested that Gramsci, who in prison did not have access to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, had in mind Sorel’s references to myths, and in particular Sorel’s insistence that these images should be taken as a whole (in Italian ‘prenderli in blocco’), as historical forces, probably from a reference in a book by Giovanni Malagodi (Gerratana in Gramsci 1975, 2632 [Q, AC]). Here is the full quote from Sorel’s introduction to his Reflections on Violence. [M]en who are participating in great social movements always picture their coming action in the form of images of battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. I proposed to give the name of ‘myths’ to these constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians: the general strike of the syndicalists and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths. [...] I wanted to show that we should not attempt to analyse such groups of images in the way that we break down a thing into its elements, that they should be taken as a whole, as historical forces. (Sorel 1999, 20)

Again on the references to Sorel, Badaloni (1975, 59–61) has stressed the importance of the following passages from Sorel, and in particular from the Letter to Daniel Halévy where Sorel discusses pessimism. 2)

3)

The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, as something in the form of one block, and which can only disappear through a catastrophe which involves the whole. If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to attribute the evils from which society suffers to a few wicked men; the pessimist is not subject to the bloodthirsty follies of the optimist driven mad by the unforeseen obstacles that his projects meet; he does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists. The most fundamental element of pessimism is its method of conceiving the path towards deliverance. A man would not go far in the examination either of the laws of his own wretchedness or offate, which so shock the ingenuousness of our pride, if he were not borne up by the hope of putting an end to these tyrannies by an effort to be attempted with a whole band of companions. (Sorel 1999, 11–12)

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According to Badaloni, Sorel’s pessimism, which reflects a situation which is socially more advanced but also more compromised, pointing to the direction of the decline of capitalist society, focuses on the subjective side of the productive forces, on the development of the working class consciousness and on the educational role of ‘myth’. (Badaloni 1975, 60–61)

Georges Sorel was an influence on the young Gramsci who, in 1920, stressed that ‘Sorel is in no way responsible for the intellectual pettiness and crudity of his Italian admirers, just as Karl Marx is not responsible for the absurd ideological pretensions of the “Marxists”’ (Gramsci 1977, 330).2 In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci sees more clearly the limits of Sorel. However, as Liguori has stressed (Liguori 2009b), despite Gramsci’s critical stance towards Sorel’s spontaneism and Sorel’s rejection of Jacobinism, he continued his dialogue with Sorel. In the Prison Notebooks the Sorelian myth becomes part of Gramsci’s broader attempt to think questions of ideology, politics and political subjectivity and action. The Sorelian myth is included by Gramsci to that family of lemmas and concepts that define his idea of ideology as a conception of the world and of the sum of beliefs from which collective subjectivity as basis of political action, is formed. (Liguori 2009a, 543)

For Gramsci, the Sorelian myth can be related to Croce’s use of the notion of passion, insisting that ‘[n]or can one say that Croce’s passion is something different from the Sorelian “myth”, that passion means the category, the spiritual moment of practice’ (Gramsci, 1995, p. 389 [Q10II, §41v]). However, he finds Croce’s formulation ‘intellectualistic and illuministic’ (Gramsci, 1995, pp. 389–390 ([Q10II, §41v]) and insists that Sorel’s conception had more theoretical depth despite the fact that Sorel’s political recommendations have been superseded. This relates to Gramsci’s own theoretical development, from his 1919–1921 positions towards the theory of proletarian hegemony, in which his earlier intuitions on the role of factory councils as forms of proletarian self-organization are not discarded but superseded in his theory of a potential proletarian hegemonic apparatus. As Liguori has stressed, Gramsci’s relation to Sorel’s work was crucial in the former’s insistence on grounding revolutionary politics upon social reality and the spontaneous feelings of the subaltern masses. However, the evolution of Gramsci’s thinking led to a reformulation of these thematics in a manner beyond Sorel. The necessity of founding revolutionary political action upon social reality, upon the spontaneous feeling of the masses, beginning from the situation of the subaltern in order to increase the potentiality of understanding and of self-government: all

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these are Sorelian thematics that remained valid, but had been separated from the “intellectualistic and literary elements” that constituted one of the limits of Sorel. The communist movement to which Gramsci adhered in an always more conscious way and always in an emancipation from the Sorelian infusions [...] was not for Gramsci the negation of the previous phase but the concrete reformulation, without arrogance and aiming at coherence, even of the positive aspects present in Sorel’s thinking. (Liguori 2009b, 783)

As part of his conceptual experimentation and reformulation of historical materialism in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci is rethinking and superseding Sorelian themes. In Notebook 13 (Notes on Machiavelli), Gramsci defines Sorel’s limit as his inability to think the organization of proletarian collective political action (and intellectuality) in the form of the party, remaining within the limited scope of the trade-union and the general strike as the highest form of political action. Sorel never advanced from his conception of ideology-as-myth to an understanding of the political party, but stopped short at the idea of the trade union. It is true that for Sorel the ‘myth’ found its fullest expression not in the trade union as organisation of a collective will, but in its practical action-sign of a collective will already operative. The highest achievement of this practical action was to have been the general strike – i.e. a ‘passive activity’, so to speak, of a negative and preliminary kind [...] an activity which does not envisage an ‘active and constructive’ phase of its own. (Gramsci 1971, p. 127 [Q13, §1])

Consequently we can say that although the historical bloc originated as a dialogue with Sorelian themes, its conceptual scope moved beyond these, towards a more strategic conception of political practice.

GRAMSCI’S CONCEPTUAL ELABORATION OF THE HISTORICAL BLOC We can now turn to how conceptualization of the historical bloc evolves in the Prison Notebooks. First of all, the historical bloc refers to the (dialectical) unity of the social whole3 and to the relation between material tendencies and ideological representations and the importance of such a relation between material conditions and ideologies as a condition for revolutionary praxis. In Notebook 7, the concept of the historical bloc forms part of Gramsci’s broader critique of Croce’s philosophy. It is presented as the equivalent of ‘spirit’ in Croce’s idealist conception, referring to a dialectical activity and a process of distinction between the different instances of the social whole that does not negate their real unity. In contrast to Croce’s conception of the autonomy of the distinct instances of the social whole and his ‘dialectic of the distincts’ (Finocchiaro 1988), Gramsci opposed the dialectical conception of the relation

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between structure and superstructures. It is a materialist conception of history and politics that accentuates the specificity of politics, and in particular revolutionary politics, without falling back into the idealism of treating politics as an autonomous activity. Concept of historical bloc; in historical materialism it is the philosophical equivalent of ‘spirit’ in Croce’s philosophy: the introduction of dialectical activity and a process of distinctions into the ‘historical bloc’ does not mean negating its real unity. (Gramsci 1992–2007, vol. 3, p. 157 [Q7, §1])

In the second version of this passage in Notebook 10, the historical bloc is linked to the unity of the process of reality, conceived as ‘active reaction by humanity on the structure’ and in opposition to any dualism and any metaphysical conception of the structure: Croce’s assertion that the philosophy of praxis ‘detaches’ the structure from the superstructures, thus bringing back theological dualism and positing ‘the structure as hidden god’ is not correct [...] it is not true that the philosophy of praxis ‘detaches’ the structure from the superstructures when, instead, it conceives their development as intimately bound together and necessarily interrelated and reciprocal. Nor can the structure be likened to a ‘hidden god’ even metaphorically. [...] Does not the statement in the Feuerbach Theses about the ‘educator who must be educated’ posit a necessary relation of active reaction by humanity on the structure, thereby asserting the unity of the process of reality? Sorel’s construction of the concept of ‘historical bloc’ grasped precisely in full this unity upheld by the philosophy of praxis. (Gramsci 1995, p. 414 [Q10, §41i])

A similar attempt at using the notion of the historical bloc as a way to answer Crocean idealism can be found in Notebook 8. In this, Gramsci insisted on the identity of history and politics, the identity between ‘nature and spirit’, in a dialectic of the distinct instances of the social whole, that would offer a materialist theory of the – relative – autonomy of politics. [W]hat place should political activity occupy in a systematic, coherent and logical conception of the world, in a philosophy of praxis? […] Croce’s approach is based on his distinction of the moments of the spirit and his affirmation of a moment of practice – a practical spirit that is autonomous and independent, albeit circularly linked to all of reality through the mediation of the dialectic of distinct. In a philosophy of praxis, wherein everything is practice, the distinction will not be between the moments of the absolute spirit but between structure and superstructures, it will be a question of establishing the dialectical position of political activity as distinction within the superstructures. […] In what sense can one speak of the identity of history with politics and say that therefore all of life is politics? How could one conceive of the whole system of superstructures as (a system of) political distinctions, thus introducing the notion of distinction into the philosophy of praxis? Can one even speak of a dialectic of distincts? Concept of historical bloc; that is, unity between

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nature and spirit, unity of opposites and of distincts. (Gramsci 1992–2007, vol. 3, p. 271 [Q8, §61])

In the second version of this passage, in Notebook 13, a reference to the unity between ‘structure and superstructure’ is added (Gramsci 1971, p. 137 [Q13, §10]). On the question of the relation between structure and superstructures and Gramsci’s quest for a conceptualization of a relative autonomy of the superstructures that would avoid the idealism of the Crocean dialectic of the distincts, the following passage from Notebook 10 is important: The question is this: given the Crocean principle of the dialectic of the distincts (which is to be criticised as the merely verbal solution to a real methodological exigency, in so far as it is true that there exist not only opposites but also distincts), what relationship, which is not that of ‘implication in the unity of the spirit’, will there exist between the politico-economic moment and other historical activities? Is a speculative solution of these problems possible, or only a historical one, given the concept of ‘historical bloc’ presupposed by Sorel? (Gramsci 1995, pp. 399–400 [Q10, §41x])

In Notebook 7, Gramsci links the historical bloc to the force of ideology and also to the relation between ideologies and material forces and insists that it is a relation of organic dialectical unity, distinctions being made only for ‘didactic’ reasons, thus offering an ‘anti-deterministic and anti-economistic reading of Marx’ (Liguori 2015, 74). The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces. (Gramsci 1971, p. 377 [Q7, §21])

The close dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the ‘complex, contradictory ensemble of the superstructures’ offers the basis for a strategic revolutionary orientation. We can see the shift, within Gramsci’s conceptual experimentation, from ‘historical bloc’ as theorization of the relation between structure and superstructures, to the ‘historical bloc’ as strategic concept. On the one hand, social antagonism runs through both the superstructures, hence their ‘complex, contradictory and discordant’ character and through the social relations of production. On the other hand, the reference to ideologies should not be read as a simple ‘reflection’ but rather as the kind of

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political intellectuality and strategic thinking that enables the ‘revolutionising of praxis.’ Structure and superstructures form an ‘historical bloc.’ That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude: that only a totalitarian system of ideologies gives a rational refection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for the revolutionising of praxis. If a social group is formed which is one hundred per cent homogeneous on the level of ideology, this means that the premises exist one hundred per cent for this revolutionising: that is that the ‘rational’ is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process. (Gramsci 1971, p. 366 [Q8, §182], emphasis in original)

Consequently, the historical bloc is the concept that enables thinking the unity and interrelation between economics, politics and ideology, within Gramsci’s theory and points to what a strategy for hegemony implies. As Fabio Frosini has stressed: The politics of the Communists – and here we come to the ‘revolutionizing of praxis’ [rovesciamento della praxis] – consists instead in building a hegemony that crossing and experimenting in an entire period with the hiatus between part and all, is capable to really come to make the ideology of one part coincide with the social whole, thanks to a theory (a philosophy of praxis) that without interruption, in permanence puts into play the relationship between ideology of unity and real antagonism. This is what Gramsci means with ‘totalitarian system of ideologies’: it is the philosophy of praxis, as it has organically become the ideology of a social group which, for this very reason, dynamically puts into play its own being as ‘group’, gradually absorbing the whole of society into itself and suppressing antagonism. (Frosini 2010, 74)

The importance (and complexity) of Gramsci’s conceptualization of the historical bloc was evident in the dialogue between Norberto Bobbio and Jacques Texier on the question of the superstructures. Bobbio insisted that the historical bloc pointed towards the importance of the superstructures, in a manner not suggested in the classical Marxist tradition, The apparent ambiguity is due to the real complexity of the historical bloc, as Gramsci conceived it. That is, it is due to the fact that civil society is a constitutive moment of two different processes, which happen interdependently but without overlapping: the process which moves from the structure to the superstructure, and the one which takes place within the superstructure itself. The new historical bloc will be the one where this ambiguity as well will be resolved by the elimination of dualism in the superstructural sphere. In Gramsci’s thought, the end of the state consists precisely in this elimination. (Bobbio 1979, 43)

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In contrast, Jacques Texier insisted that the historical bloc pointed towards the relationship (and the ‘unity’) of the structure and the superstructures. Without the theory of the ‘historical bloc’ and the unity of economy and culture and culture and politics which results from it, the Gramscian theory of superstructures would not be Marxist. His ‘historicism’ would go no further than the historicism of Croce (Texier 1979, 49). More recently, Yohann Douet has insisted that the notion of the historical bloc also enables Gramsci to answer and theorize questions of periodization, by means of both pointing to the coherence of a period but also to the dynamics and processes of transformation that lead to the emergence of a new historical bloc: The notion of historical bloc opens up the possibility of capturing the scansions and differentiations that are proper to the historical process. It allows in effect, without obscuring the complexity and the perpetual evolution of socio-historical phenomena, to make right to the regularities and the coherence of an epoch. It also makes it possible to discern the passage to another epoch, when a new historical bloc asserts itself, that is to say when the transformed social relations crystallize into a new relative totality, which corresponds to the overcoming of certain contradictions. In other words, this notion can fulfill a certain number of functions of periodization. (Douet 2022, 79)

I think that this gradual shift in the notion of the historical bloc towards this conceptualization of the unity and potential identity between the structure and the superstructures does not simply answer the broader theoretical and analytical question of the relation between the social relations of production and politics and ideology; it also points to the strategic question of determining the specific condition for the actuality of revolutionary praxis, not just as potentiality but as an active process of transformation. As Fabio Frosini stresses: [T]he historical bloc indicates first of all the intrinsic relation between structure and superstructures in the concrete situation connecting it to the theory of hegemony, that is to the historic-realistic value of superstructures, which later on, gradually, becomes synonymous with a situation in which a perfect adherence is forged between ideology and economy, theory and practice. (Frosini 2003, 132)

This gradual shift in the end connects the notion of the historical bloc to hegemony. Fabio Frosini offers an insightful description of this second signification of the historical bloc. However, now the historical bloc will be nothing other than a synonym for the construction of a collective will on the basis of determinate relations of production in the sphere of the concept of hegemony. Whereas Croce sees only the moment of unity (which for him is not historical, but is history), the philosophy of praxis sees how the unity comes every time to be constructed on the terrain of contradiction, of scission, of non-unity. Indeed, the relations of production separate society and only

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on the ideological terrain it becomes possible to reaggregate it under a hegemonic guidance for a common historical project. (Frosini 2003, 134, emphasis in original)

Similarly, Nicola Badaloni has insisted on the relation between the historical bloc and the formation of a new collective will and a new historical ‘formation’ on the basis of determinate relations of production and the dynamics of the struggles and confrontation that arise in the terrain of the apparatus of production: The Gramscian bloc will be the construction of a collective will which is born out of determinate relations of production, as a new historical ‘formation’, and which has the possibility of imprinting, in an epoch of transition, a determinate direction on the apparatus of production. (Badaloni 1975, 93)

In a note that first appeared in Notebook 8 and was slightly expanded in Notebook 10, Gramsci used the concept of historical bloc to criticize Croce’s conception of the ethico-political history. Gramsci’s dialogue with Croce’s conception of the ethico-political history was an important part of his attempt to rethink revolutionary politics as a politics for hegemony. Ethico-political history was Croce’s idealist answer to what he perceived as the economic reductionism of Marxism and Gramsci also wanted to draw a line of demarcation with an economistic and mechanical reading of Marx. Gramsci transforms the notion of ethico-political history in order to present his own version of a non-economistic historical materialism that does not underestimate the importance of politics, ideology and hegemony. The historical bloc as the relation of social and economic relations with ideological–political forms provides a renewed theoretical relevance for the concept of ethico-political history. Ethico-political history, in so far as it is divorced from the concept of historical bloc, in which there is a concrete correspondence of socio-economic content to ethico-political form in the reconstruction of the various historical periods, is nothing more than a polemical presentation of more or less interesting philosophical propositions, but it is not history. (Gramsci, 1995, p. 360 [Q10I, §13])

In the summary first note of Notebook 10, Gramsci treats the concept of the historical bloc as a crucial aspect of a philosophy of praxis that could answer the questions that Croce’s conception of ethico-political history raised. Hegemony and historical bloc are theoretically linked in the most emphatic way. Credit must therefore be given to Croce’s thought for its instrumental value and in this respect it may be said that it has forcefully drawn attention to the study of the factors of culture and ideas as elements of political domination, to the function of the great intellectuals in state life, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the nec-

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essary form of the concrete historical bloc. Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons of historical interpretation. (Gramsci 1995, p. 332 [Q101, sommario])

The historical bloc also plays an important role in Gramsci’s attempt to offer a critique of any a-historical and individualistic theory of ‘human nature’ and ‘man in general’, exemplified in his highly original (and profoundly relational assertion) that ‘man is to be conceived as a historical bloc’. This combines the insights of Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach (‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’) with the active political aspect of the struggle towards social transformation, stressing the strategic character of the concept of the historical bloc. Man is to be conceived as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship. To transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and to develop oneself. That ethical ‘improvement’ is purely individual is an illusion and an error: the synthesis of the elements constituting individuality is ‘individual’, but it cannot be realised and developed without an activity directed outward, modifying external relations both with nature and, in varying degrees, with other men, in the various social circles in which one lives, up to the greatest relationship of all, which embraces the whole human species. For this reason one can say that man is essentially ‘political’ since it is through the activity of transforming and consciously directing other men that man realises his ‘humanity’, his ‘human nature’. (Gramsci 1971, p. 360 [Q10II, §48])

In a letter to Tania Schucht, dated 9 May 1932, Gramsci outlined his critique of Croce’s idealist conception of ‘ethico-political history’. For Gramsci ‘[e]thicopolitical history is not excluded from historical materialism since it is the history of the “hegemonic” moment’. However ‘Croce is so immersed in his method and in his speculative language that he can only judge in accordance with them; when he writes that in the philosophy of praxis structure is like a hidden god, this might be true if the philosophy of praxis were a speculative philosophy and not an absolute historicism’ (Gramsci 2011, vol. II, 171). Moreover, Gramsci accused Croce of being unable to write a history of Europe as the formation of a historical bloc. Is it possible to think of a unitary history of Europe that begins in 1815, that is with the restoration? If a history of Europe can be written as the formation of a historical bloc, it cannot exclude the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars that are the ‘juridical-economic’ premise of the entire European historical complex, the moment of force and struggle. Croce takes up the following moment, the moment in which the previously unleashed forces found an equilibrium, underwent ‘catharsis’ so to speak, making of this moment an event apart on which he constructs his historical paradigm. (Gramsci 2011, vol II, 171–172)

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The role of the historical bloc in the conceptual architecture of the Prison Notebooks is not limited to the critique of Crocean idealism. The politics of a potential proletarian hegemony is the politics of working towards a new historical bloc. This is evident in the note on the relation of forces in Notebook 9 but also in the note on the structure of parties during a period of organic crisis in Notebook 13 (which Gramsci links to the note 17 from Q13 on the relation of forces). Gramsci stresses the importance of political initiatives in order to liberate the economic and political potential of a new historical bloc. An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies – i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed. And, since two ‘similar’ forces can only be welded into a new organism either through a series of compromises or by force of arms, either by binding them to each other as allies or by forcibly subordinating one to the other, the question is whether one has the necessary force, and whether it is ‘productive’ to use it. (Gramsci 1971, p. 168 [Q13, §23])4

This passage underlines Gramsci’s insight that the emergence of a new historical bloc, as a new dialectical unity of economic and political/ideological forms is not simply the outcome of ‘objective’ tendency but the potential result of a political project and initiative within the contradictory and antagonistic terrain of class struggle, overcoming the ‘disparity between subaltern temporalities’ (Douet 2022, 144) and putting ‘into relative coherence the rhythms of the multiple social spheres within a coherent historical bloc’ so that ‘discordant temporalities and heterogeneous rhythms can fit together in an ensemble fit to be considered as an epoch’ (Douet 2022, 206). The emergence of a new historical bloc requires political initiative, the formation of a collective will and the intervention in the terrain of social and political antagonism. Following Frosini, we can say that the Crocean ‘dialectic of the distincts’ and the Gramscian notion of the ‘historical bloc’ offer two alternative conceptions of hegemony: one that comes as the ‘occulting of conflict’ and one that instead comes as the ‘theoretical elaboration and practical development’ of conflict (Frosini 2003, 135). The reference to a ‘politico-economic’ historical bloc is also important. It makes evident that the scope of the concept of the historical bloc is not limited to the level of the superstructures but also includes the economic structure and the class strategies deployed there. It refers to the ensemble of economic, political and ideological relations. Jacques Texier has pointed to Gramsci’s novel redefinition of ‘civil society’ and how it encompasses a series of political

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and ideological practices, relations, beliefs conditioned by determinate social relations of production. In other words, what does civil society represent for Gramsci? It is the complex of practical and ideological social relations (the whole infinitely varied social fabric, the whole human content of a given society) which is established and grows up on the base of determined relations of production. It includes the types of behaviour of homo oeconomicus as well as of homo ethiico-politicus. It is therefore the object, the subject and the locality of the superstructural activities which are carried out in ways which differ according to the levels and moments by means of the ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ on the one hand and of the ‘coercive apparatuses’ on the other. (Texier 1979, 71, emphasis in original)

Civil society does not refer simply to the field of political and cultural hegemony, but also to economic activities. Although Gramsci distinguished economic structure and civil society, the Gramscian notions of ‘homo oeconomicus’ and ‘determinate market’ suggest the inclusion of aspects of economic activity and behaviour within civil society. The emergence of a new historical bloc is also the emergence of a new homo oeconomicus and a new configuration of civil society (Texier 1989, 61). Therefore, the construction of a new historical bloc, as new articulation of economics, politics and ideology, is at stake in the struggle for hegemony: [T]he winning of hegemony is a social struggle which aims to transform the relation of forces in a given situation. A historico-political bloc has to be dismantled and a new one constructed so as to permit the transformation of the relations of production. (Texier 1979, 67)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has stressed the need to avoid the error of the ‘simple identification between historical bloc and class alliances […] or even the fusion […] that embraces workers and intellectuals’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, 275). For Buci-Glucksmann, the historical bloc goes beyond social alliances since it implies both a specific form of hegemonic leadership but also the development of the superstructures, ‘an “integral state” rooted in an organic relationship between leaders and masses’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, 276). The historical bloc is for Buci-Glucksmann not simply a materialist position and anti-economistic conceptualization of the relation between the different instances of the social whole; it is an attempt to rethink a revolutionary strategy. Compared with Bukharin’s worker-peasant bloc of 1925–26, the Gramscian historical bloc demonstrates a major new feature. This bloc is cultural and political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people and intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led. The cultural revolution, as an on-going process of adequation between culture and practice, is neither luxury

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nor a simple guarantee, but rather an actual dimension of the self-government of the masses and of democracy. (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, 286)

Both Frosini (Frosini 2003, 95–97) and Thomas (Thomas 2009, 232–234) have stressed how Gramsci’s thinking on hegemony was conditioned upon his reading of Lenin’s preoccupation with the question of cultural revolution during the NEP period, namely the possibility of offering to the masses forms of political intellectuality necessary for the process of social transformation. I think that this is an important aspect of the conceptualization of the historical bloc. The strategic character of the concept of historical bloc can be found in the note on the Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing, from Notebook 4 and reproduced in Notebook 11. The emphasis is on the particular relation between intellectuals and the people-nation, but also between leaders and the led. It is also on the need for intellectuals not only to interpret the conjuncture, in an abstract way, but also to understand the ‘passions’ of the subaltern classes and dialectically transform them into a ‘superior conception of the world’. Passion is for Gramsci a crucial yet inadequate Crocean notion, one that touches upon questions of a politics of hegemony, the combination of material forces and ideological forms, which has to be superseded in new forms of political intellectuality and action. The popular element ‘feels’ but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other. Not that the pedant cannot be impassioned; far from it. Impassioned pedantry is every bit as ridiculous and dangerous as the wildest sectarianism and demagogy. The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge): in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated – i.e. knowledge. (Gramsci 1971, p. 418 [Q11, §67])5

It is exactly at this point that we can fully see the relation between the notion of the historical bloc and a condition of hegemony. If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between

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the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the ‘historical bloc’. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 418 [Q11, §67]6

This highlights the importance of the Gramscian notion of ‘catharsis’, which points to the moment of transformation and the emergence of a new historical bloc. As André Tosel has stressed: It is the passage from the necessity and structures to liberty and superstructures, from objective determinations to the subjectivity that is at the origin of new initiatives which can contribute to the emergence of a new historical bloc. (Tosel 2015, 160)

The following passage from Gramsci is very relevant. The term ‘catharsis’ can be employed to indicate the passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds of men. This also means the passage from ‘objective to subjective’ and from ‘necessity to freedom’. Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives. To establish the ‘cathartic’ moment becomes therefore, it seems to me, the starting-point for all the philosophy of praxis, and the cathartic process coincides with the chain of syntheses which have resulted from the evolution of the dialectic. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 366–367 (Q10ii, § 6)

All this points to how Gramsci envisaged revolutionary strategy as a strategy for a new historical bloc. We are no longer dealing simply with the unity of structure and superstructures, but with the condition for a profound social transformation, a transition to Gramsci’s reformulation of communism as regulated society and as absorption of political society by civil society. The historical bloc leads to a reformulation of the entire Marxist problematic of the withering away of the State as a passage to a regulated society, where political society is reabsorbed by civil society. (Buci-Glucksmann 1982, 104)

It is more than a simple reference to a social alliance that manages to capture political power, since it entails the construction of new hegemonic apparatuses, new social, political, ideological and economic forms. As Badaloni has stressed, ‘the socialisation of both the political along with that of the economic give the real content of the historical bloc’ (Badaloni 1975, 166).

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DID GRAMSCI EVENTUALLY ABANDON THE NOTION OF THE HISTORICAL BLOC? Giuseppe Cospito (2016) in his very careful reading of the evolution of the thinking of Gramsci during the writing of the Prison Notebooks and the attentive depiction of all the changes and tensions in the signification of concepts, has observed that the historical bloc is not Gramsci’s last word on the question of the relation between structure and the superstructures. Although the notion of the historical bloc has a very strong presence in the 1932 notes, the notion does not appear in the later notes from 1932–1935. Moreover, Cospito (2016, 31) has suggested that already in Q13, §17, in the note on the relation of forces we can see Gramsci moving from a theoretical to a practical-operational conception of the relation between structure and superstructures. In particular, he points to passages such as the following. But the most important observation to be made about any concrete analysis of the relations of force is the following: that such analyses cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless the intention is merely to write a chapter of past history), but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations; they indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be launched, what language will best be understood by the masses, etc. The decisive element in every situation is the permanently organised and long-prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favourable (and it can be favourable only in so far as such a force exists, and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore, the essential task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed, developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 185 [Q13, §17])

Yohann Douet has suggested that the notion of the relations of forces helps Gramsci ‘avoid the risk of a structure-superstructures dualism which would dismember the social whole, at the same time translating and conserving the theoretical contributions of this notional couple’ (Douet 2022, 126). I do believe that Cospito’s points are important and should be taken into account. However, 1932, as Peter Thomas (2009) has suggested, is exactly the ‘Gramscian moment’, the moment of the emergence of Gramsci’s thinking in all its creative force. Consequently, even as a ‘concept in progress’, part of broader ‘work in progress’, historical bloc retains its importance. Moreover, emphasis on relations of forces is not antagonistic to the logic of the historical bloc. Relation of forces points mainly towards a more relational, dynamic and non-teleological conception of social and political dynamics, whereas historical bloc is a strategic notion. In this sense, these two conceptions can also be considered complementary.

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A STRATEGIC NODE Consequently, we are dealing with a notion that points to something more than simply a social alliance that manages to attain political power, since it includes the formation of new hegemonic apparatuses, new social, political and ideological relations. In opposition to a simple ‘bloc in power’, the historical bloc ‘presupposes the historical construction of long duration of a new hegemonic system, without which classes become only a mechanical aggregate, managed by the State or a bureaucracy’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1982, 104). The historical bloc is indeed a central node in the conceptual architecture of the Prison Notebooks, despite its disappearance in the last phase of Gramsci’s elaborations. It is situated at the intersection between analysis and strategy, representing Gramsci’s attempt to theorize the possibility of hegemony in its integral form, as the dialectical unity of structure and superstructures. Therefore, it implies that the struggle for hegemony is the struggle for a new historical bloc, namely an articulation of transition programmes emanating from the collective struggle, ingenuity and experimentation of the subaltern classes along with the new organizational forms, new political practices, and new political intellectualities that can turn them into historical reality.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

See the criticism of Garaudy by Portelli (1973). On Sorel’s influence on Gramsci during the 1919–1920 period see Rapone (2011, 340–345). On the importance of the notion of the historical bloc as a part of a dialectical conception that moves beyond monism and dualism see Prestipino (2004). See also Q9, §40. See also Q4, §33. See also Q4, §33. On the importance of the historical bloc in relation to hegemony as the capacity of an ‘organic’ elaboration of a new social system see Filippini (2015, pp. 84–92).

REFERENCES Badaloni, N. (1975). Il marxismo di Gramsci. Dal mito alla ricomposizione politica. Torino: Einaudi. Berlinguer, E. (1977). Historical Compromise [In Greek]. Athens: Themelio. Bobbio, N. (1979). Gramsci and the conception of civil society. In C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State, translated by D. Fernbach. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1982). Bloc historique. In Dictionnaire critique du marxisme edited by G. Bensussan and G. Labica. Paris: PUF.

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Cospito, G. (2016). The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci. A Diachronic Interpretation of the Prison Notebooks, translated by A. Ponzini. Leiden: Brill. Douet, Y. (2022). L’Histoire et la question de la modernité chez Antonio Gramsci. Paris: Garnier. Filippini, M. (2015). Una politica di massa. Antonio Gramsci e la rivoluzione della societa. Rome: Carocci Editore. Finocchiaro, M. (1988). Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frosini, F. (2003). Gramsci e la filosofia. Saggio sui Quaderni del carcere. Rome: Carocci. Frosini, F. (2010). La religione dell’ uomo moderno. Politica e verita nei Quaderni del Carcere del Antonio Gramsci. Roma: Carroci Editore. Garaudy, R. (1969). Le grand tourant du socialisme. Paris: NRF. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni di carcere, edited by V. Gerratana, Torino: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920, edited by Q. Hoare, translated by J. Mathews. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings. 1921–1926, edited and translated by Q. Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1992–2007). Prison Notebooks. Vol. 1-3, edited by J. Buttigieg, translated by J. Buttigied and A. Callari. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (1995). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by D. Boothman. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (2011). Letters from Prison, 2 vols, edited by F. Rosengarten and translated by R. Rosenthal. New York: Columbia University Press. Liguori, G. (2009a). Mito. In G. Liguori and P. Voza (eds), Dizzionario Gramsciano. Roma: Carroci. Liguori, G. (2009b). Georges Sorel. In G. Liguori and P. Voza (eds), Dizzionario Gramsciano. Roma: Carroci. Liguori, G. (2015). Gramsci’s Pathways. Translated by D. Broder. Leiden: Brill. Napolitano, G. (1970). Il ‘nuovo blocco storico’ nell’elaborazione di Gramsci e del PCI. Rinascita 12. Portelli, H. (1973). Gramsci y el bloque storico. Mexico: Siglo ventiuno editores. Prestipino, G. (2004). Dialettica. In F. Frosini and G. Liguori (eds), Le parole di Gramsci. Per un lessico dei Quaderni del carcere. Roma: Carroci. Rapone, L. (2011). Cinque anni che paiono secoli. Antonio Gramsci dal socialismo al communism. Roma: Carocci. Sorel, G. (1999). Reflections on Violence. Edited by J. Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Texier, J. (1979). Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures. In C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge. Texier, J. (1989). Sur le sens de ‘societé civile’ chez Gramsci. Actuel Marx, 5, 50–68. Thomas, P. (2009). The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Togliatti, P. (2014). La political nel pensiero e nell’azione, edited by M. Ciliberto and G. Vacca. Milano: Bompiani. Tosel, A. (2015). Étudier Gramsci. Paris: Kimé.

8. State, capital and civil society Marco Fonseca INTRODUCTION Gramsci took very seriously the general conclusion that Marx arrived at in his famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the founding text of the structure/superstructure debate in Western Marxism. In Marx’s own words: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. (Marx 1859)

Once Marx reached this conclusion in his early 40s, it became the fundamental premise of his mature work and, eventually, a basic premise of Western Marxism. Gramsci’s initial engagement with the structure/superstructure problematic takes place as a critique of the arguments of Second International (1889–1916) Russian Marxists such as Georgi Plekhanov and Nikolai Bukharin (Q11 §22, 1932-33).1 For Gramsci, the analysis of any form of modern historical blocs ‘on the basis of the structure’ is merely the starting point, but not the conclusion of any critical analysis of modern capitalist societies. Although many followers of Marx ‘destroyed [dialectical] unity and returned to the old materialism of Feuerbach’ and, in some cases, even ‘the spiritualism of the Hegelian right’, Gramsci sets out to redialectize ‘the two moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism’ (Q4 §3, 1930-32). Rather than accepting the metaphysical idea that there is a single structural cause for cultural, political and ideological phenomena, Gramsci proposes that only historically constructed, interdependent, contradictory and overdetermined structures and superstructures exist and form a historical bloc where both ‘concept and reality’, ‘materialism and spiritualism’, as well as substance and subject constitute a historically ‘inseparable unity’ (Q10II §1, 1932-35). According 136

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to Gramsci, in fact, ‘the Hegelian idea is [resolved] both in the structure and in the superstructures’ (Q7 §25, 1930-31) and thus, ‘historical materialism is a reform and development of Hegelianism’ and, as such, a materialism of praxis (Q4 §45, 1930-32) (Q4 §11). This insight came to form the fundamental premise of Gramsci’s materialist philosophy of praxis and his particular view of the relationship between structure and superstructure as an overdetermined historical bloc (Q8 §182). In the Gramscian approach to historical blocs, therefore, there is no such thing as a noumenal reality and, therefore, there is no such thing as a purely phenomenal appearance composed of culture or ideology. For example, industrial capitalism is not the real noumenon of Fordist societies, the ‘material base’ of the integral state or ‘the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’. For Gramsci, both moments of the social totality constitute an irreducible, interdependent and contradictory historical bloc and, within this bloc, the most determinant factors change and manifest themselves, or become open to critical scrutiny and practical transformation, only when significant fault lines open or cracks widen enough in this historical construction protected by specific, but always changing combinations of coercion and consent. By closely examining the dialectical relationship between the integral state, capitalism and civil society, key components of modern historical blocs, this chapter takes up and builds on Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis as he sketched it out on his Prison Notebooks, and draws some lessons useful for understanding the contradictions of contemporary neoliberal globalization, the rise of neofascism and the global articulation of emancipatory and counter-hegemonic struggles.

THE INTEGRAL STATE Gramsci’s notion of the state cannot be understood without the dialectically opposed notion of civil society, and the contradictory unity of both constitutes what Gramsci calls the ‘integral state’ or an ‘integral society’ (Q4 §49). Although Gramsci started the development of the concept of the integral state in his analyses and critiques of Benedetto Croce, Italy’s foremost intellectual at the time, where he conceived it in terms of ‘dictatorship + hegemony’ (Q6 §155, 1930-32), he later expanded the concept with the more developed formula ‘political society + civil society’. This modern form of European state does not emerge, Gramsci writes, until the French Revolution, when the social grouping [the bourgeoisie] that after the year 1000 was the economic driving force of Europe, could present itself as an

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integral ‘state’, with all the intellectual and moral forces necessary and sufficient to organize a complete and perfect society. (Q6 §10)

The Italian experience is, of course, of particular importance to Gramsci. Here, the bourgeoisie did not start constructing their own model of the integral state and initiate the process of developing industrial capitalism until after the Italian unification of the 1870s. Before the 1870s the Italian bourgeoisie developed better under the umbrella of the ‘communal states’ that existed in Italy up to the Risorgimento, that is, locally exercising indirect power rather than having all national power to themselves (Q17 §8 1933-35). In this context, the Italian bourgeoisie retained only a subnational or municipal character and managed to develop only their own category of ‘immediate intellectuals’, but not assimilate the traditional category of ‘cosmopolitan intellectuals’ (such as the clergy) who continued to maintain and increase their international influence and power at the expense of the national state. This historical peculiarity helps Gramsci explain the monarchical character of the modern Italian bourgeoisie and the contradictory dynamics of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento, the transition to modernity and capitalism, in his own country (Q5 §31, see also Q19 §2 1934-35). Gramsci conceives the integral state as a key element of what he calls the ‘historical bloc’ that begins to emerge in Italy only after unification in the 1870s. Although historical blocs are composed of material forces (what Marx referred to as ‘the totality of relations of production’ or ‘the economic structure of society’) as the content and ideologies (‘forms of consciousness’) as the form, the reverse is also the case. In a note on the ‘validity of ideologies’ that serves as a comment on one of Marx’s ideas on the ‘solidity of popular beliefs’, Gramsci argues that the distinction between form and content is in fact ‘merely didactic, because material forces would not be historically conceivable without form and ideologies would be individual whims without material forces’ (Q7 §21). As a dynamic and contradictory unity of structures and superstructures, there is thus no ‘last instance’, a one-dimensional real foundation, in Gramsci’s conception of historical blocs. In the integral state, political power can only be exercised by a contradictory combination of fractions of the ruling elites, always with the consent of specific subaltern groups, and can never be reduced to be a mere ‘reflection’ of any particular productive activity at the level of the economic base. This is, indeed, the ‘normal exercise of hegemony’ in the context of modern democratic systems (Q1 §48). Although Gramsci himself does not use the term, it would not be a stretch to borrow and extend Poutlantzas’ notion of ‘overdetermination’ (where ‘relations which thus constitute each level are never simple, but overdetermined by the relations of the other levels’) to characterize the internal logic of historical blocs (Poutlanzas, 1975, pp. 14, 54).2 As a key part of the modern historical bloc, the integral

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state is the form of state in which, although classic liberal distinctions such as government and governed, representatives and constituents, become common sense, the content of this state-form increasingly depends precisely on the dialectical unity, with civil society understood as a system of ‘trenches and fortifications’ or an ensemble of private or civilian associations where a hegemonic process works to generate new forms of voluntary submission and consensus for both capital and state and, more broadly, the existing historical bloc. Gramsci sees the modern political party – understood broadly (Q8 §112, 1931-1932) and only in the context of modern societies (Q17 §51, 1933-35) – as fulfilling the function of constructing the integral state. The party is a sort of mediator straddling the intersection between civil and political society and performing the key function of bonding the organic intellectuals of dominant groups with those of traditional groups (e.g. bureaucracies, clergy) and, wherever possible, also subaltern groups (e.g. popular, grassroots leaders) ‘for the exercise of the subordinate functions of social hegemony and political government’ (Q12 §1, 1932). The party performs this function and raises the level of social groups ‘born and developed as merely economic or corporate’ until they develop the consciousness, practices and networks of political actors who view governance of the state as their main goal. This function is most effectively fulfilled when the party of dominant groups is capable of transforming its own intellectuals as well as traditional and subaltern ones into ‘qualified political intellectuals, managers, organizers of all activities and functions inherent to the organic development of an integral, civil and political society’, securing ‘the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the large masses of the population’ (Q12 §1, 1932; see also Q17 §51, 1933-35). If the party performs these functions successfully, then it secures the ‘organicity’ of the integral state (Q12 §1, 1932) and becomes what Gramsci designates as the ‘New Prince’. If not, then the state coercion apparatus ‘legally’ ensures the discipline of those groups that do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively, but is set up for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis in command and direction when spontaneous consent fails. (Q12 §1, 1932)

Gramsci could already see in the growing importance of corporatism and Fascism the emergence of the ‘state in general, conceived in absolute terms’ (Q9 §8, developed in Q22). In some of his later notes Gramsci in fact developed the sketches of the integral state in terms of a ‘new absolutism’ (Q14 §75-§76; Q17 §51, 1933-35). The state in ‘absolute terms’ is no climax of liberal development nor is it the ‘end of history’, but rather the crisis of liberal parliamentary democracy after the wreckage of 1919. The new absolutism now aims at the ‘moral and political unification’ of the nation, the deliber-

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ate cultivation of nationalist, xenophobic, and racist sentiments among the masses, the full regulation of ethical life, and consequently an unprecedented degree of repression against critical oppositions and unruly subaltern groups (Q19 §26, 1934-35). Gramsci was acutely aware of how Fascism was already changing societies, economies and states both in its official birthplace of Italy and beyond and accelerating the transition from the ‘black parliamentarism’ (unelected, often corrupt, but real power holders) of liberal democracies to the grim reality of open authoritarianism growing roots throughout Europe (C14 §75). The Fascist state under Mussolini already adopted the totalitarian formula: ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’ (Q8 §190). Gramsci’s sketch of the ‘new absolutism’ thus corresponds to his prefiguration of fully realized twentieth-century Fascism or, indeed, ‘statolatry’ gone rogue and brazenly reactionary and repressive (Q8 §130). Quite presciently, in fact, Gramsci wondered if Fascism would not become ‘precisely the form of ‘passive revolution’ of the twentieth century as liberalism was of the nineteenth century?’ (Q8 §236).3

CAPITALISM At the time of Gramsci’s writing, particularly in the core countries of Europe and North America, capitalism already meant industrialism (Q1 §76, 1929-30, see also Q6 §156, 1930-32). Gramsci’s conception of industrial capitalism revolves around the Fordist mode of production of commodities, but he extends it already in the interior world of capitalist production to include the production of human subjectivity. If Marx had already shown what is involved in the production of people as substance (labour) and subject (proletariat), Gramsci wants to show how modern industrial capitalism transforms this process of production and reproduction. In the context of a ‘mass economy’ such as Fordism, capitalism encompasses the production of the ‘entire economically active mass’ and, within and beyond this large category of ‘economically active’ people, the production of commonsensical forms of subjectivity and subalternity. Here the subaltern emerges as the subject and hegemony as the substance. Expanded capitalist reproduction is thus Gramsci’s designation for the production of both commodities and subjects in the age of mass capitalism or Fordism. Gramsci’s conception of Fordist capitalism can be split into two interrelated processes: an ‘external’ process or mode of Fordist production of commodities and an ‘internal’ or Fordist mode of producing human subjectivity. Any significant transformation in the former requires a corresponding ‘adaptation’ in the latter or vice versa. Let us examine these two processes one a time. Gramsci’s analyses of Fordism as a new industrial mode of commodity production are deservedly famous, but it is his critique of this model of

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capitalism as mere technological development in the productive forces or as mere progress in the material productive forces, that is foregrounded in this section. Fordism does constitute a ‘mass of variations that the leading group managed to impose on the previous reality’ and, as such, it has itself become part of a new objective reality constituting a new ‘blocco’ (Q10II §17, 1932-35). But Fordism is not merely a new material foundation and series of technical and managerial developments in the process of capital accumulation that automatically determines new forms of consciousness. It is indeed a new system of production that already contains key developments in the process of hegemony. The secret to Fordism lies thus not merely in the ‘new methods of work and the way of life’, but in the fact that both constitute an inseparable and contradictory bloc and, if the contradictions exceed the balances then the whole edifice of structures and superstructures, the new Fordist historical bloc, may well fall apart (Q4 §52). The process of transforming the structures of labour and production brought on by Fordism is closely related to both the process of managerial ‘rationalization’ as well as all the moral ‘prohibitions’ or allowances in ‘ways of life’, i.e. the superstructures of subjectivity, identity and ideology. The construction of subjects is evinced by the keen interest developed by industrialists in the private lives of workers and the plethora of social services created to ‘control the morality of the workers [as] a necessity of the new working method’. The point of all these controls is not just to generate a ‘puritan’ or Victorian inclination on the part of labour, but also to kick start the hegemonic process of constructing a whole new type of subjectivity and, indeed, subjection itself. For Fordism is best understood as ‘the greatest collective effort [that has existed so far] to create a new type of worker and man with unprecedented speed and an awareness of the goal’ (Q4 §52). Fordism is thus a new type of hegemony functioning also as a new objective reality. Gramsci would certainly agree that Fordism came to represent ‘mass production in such a way as to make a high-wage proletariat compatible with and actually functional to industrial capitalism’ (Panitch and Gindin, 2012, 30). Gramsci’s experience with the condition of the Italian working class in the industrial factories of Turin during the 1920s gave him first-hand knowledge of the new atomization of industrial tasks and the time–space compression brought on by new management of tasks and time down to their smallest feasible components and units. In short, Gramsci witnessed the alienating transformation of the industrial worker as an appendix of machines that Marx had already anticipated in Capital I (Marx, 1867, see especially Chapter 15). But Gramsci was also aware of the implications of the new system of industrial labour beyond managerial reorganization and application of new technologies. What Frederick Winslow Taylor proposed to do in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911) was not only to develop the workers’

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‘mechanical’ relationship to production processes and products as far as possible, but also to ‘sever the old psychological nexus of skilled professional work in which intelligence, initiative, and imagination were required to play some role’ and thus ‘reduce production operations to just the physical aspect’ (Q4 §52). What is unique about the rise of Fordism already in its early stages is a whole new level of organic intensity and discipline with the purpose of not just squeezing increasing surplus value out of each isolated worker, but also creating a whole ‘new psychological nexus’ between the world of work and the lifeworld, between structure and superstructure, civil society and political society. Many of the initiatives introduced by industrialists such as Ford were aimed at building this nexus with increasing efficiency and calculation. The goal of capital and power was now to eliminate altogether the old forms of humanity and spirituality left over in workers, and replace them with a new ‘psycho-physical balance outside of work, to prevent the new method leading to the physiological collapse of the worker’ (Q4 §52). For any potential ‘psycho-physical’ collapse of the worker would now represent the opening of a crack, not just within the industrial process itself, but also at the heart of the new historical bloc, a crack between structures and superstructures, and therefore a danger to the overall functioning of Fordist capitalism. Alongside the external equilibrium of Fordist production, Gramsci’s conception of capitalism proposes that another, an ‘internal equilibrium’, must also be established if the totality of the project is to succeed and the widening gap between structures and superstructures is to be practically halted and, even better, hegemonically sutured. This ‘internal equilibrium’ is not something that can simply be imposed on the worker by means of technological or managerial coercion. The idea is to turn the modern worker into a kind of ‘peasant in the village’ who ‘returns home in the evening after a long tiring day’ and wants nothing more than the relative comfort of a standard home (made possible by high wages, credit, life-long debt and the legal and moral obligation to pay it); the rewards of ‘his’ standard nuclear family; the security and stability of a heterosexual and monogamous conjugal relationship within the private space of ‘decent’ and ‘trusting’ family life free from the ‘sentimentality’ and the constant requirements of going around ‘seducing adventurous women’; the longed-for consumption of the goods and services – from cars to insurance, leisure and travel – that the system makes increasingly available to those who need to ‘renew, preserve, and possibly improve’ their ‘muscular-nervous efficiency’, but without going to the extreme of engaging in openly self-destructive behaviour such as alcoholism (‘the most dangerous agent in the work force’) or sexual incontinence (‘after alcoholism, the most dangerous enemy of nervous energies’) (Q4 §52). Therefore, the ‘internal equilibrium’ must grow from within subaltern subjects themselves.

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When the managerial techniques of the industrialists prove insufficient to foster the kind of ‘puritanical’ lifestyle that Fordism paradoxically requires even in the modern context, then these ‘puritanical’ values, preferences and inclinations must become matters of direct public intervention by the state. In fact, one of the most important roles of the Fordist phenomenon, clearly understood by industrialists themselves even when not successfully addressed by them, is the increasingly active role of the state in forging the conditions – from primary schools to public programmes – that make possible this new type of worker in such a way that the worker feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and ‘succeeded’, as measured by increasingly complex psychological, social and developmental indicators, in adjusting and creating the ‘internal equilibrium’ needed to live successfully in the modern world. This developmental and integrationist ideology is constructed then to give ‘the external form of persuasion and consent to the intrinsic brutal coercion’ going on within the subaltern subjects of Fordism. After all, Gramsci says, ‘adaptation to new working methods cannot take place only by coercion: the coercion apparatus necessary to obtain such a result would certainly cost more than high wages’. In fact, ‘American industrialists have understood this well. They understand that the “trained gorilla” is still a man and thinks more or at least has a much better chance of thinking, at least when he has overcome the crisis of adaptation’ (Q4 §52). The subject must therefore go through the assembly line of hegemony as much as work on the assembly line of industry. In the modern lifeworld of Fordism, then, coercion is combined with persuasion in mutually reinforcing and self-sustaining forms ‘suitable to the society in question’. Nothing proved more successful at pushing forward this new form of life than the eventual social compromise of rising incomes and mass consumption combined with the ideology of self-interest and personal success. In other words, a New Deal (Panitch and Gindin, 2012, pp. 54–63). There is, indeed, a deep connection between the process of hegemony and the process of capital accumulation, a connection that is blurred by the process of hegemony itself. In other words, no other version of capitalism so far has made the worker feel more like a capitalist without the rational burden of accumulation than the system of Fordist capitalism. After the failure of the German and Italian revolutions in 1920 and even after his own incarceration by Mussolini’s Fascist legal system in 1926, Gramsci did not put his hope for a final crisis of Fordist capitalism or, indeed, Fascism itself in the ‘law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall’. The idea that the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ and, with that, the essential ‘contradictions’ in capital accumulation at the heart of the economic structure or base would effectively prepare the conditions for the decisive collapse of capitalism was actually drafted by Marx, although finalized by Engels, in Capital III (Marx, 1863–1883, see especially Chapter 13). For many

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traditional Marxists these contradictions in the economic structure acted as the ultimate guarantee, the ‘last instance’, that would lead capitalism to its own mortal crisis and ‘cataclysmic change’, while in the process also producing its own gravediggers. Although adherence to the notion that the crisis of capitalism would be the result of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the general law of capitalist accumulation became almost a required ideological principle for any ‘true’ Marxist, much to the chagrin of some of his followers Gramsci follows a different strategy (Q7 §34).4 It is in the context of Fordist capitalism where Gramsci sees already operating at full steam the dynamic of passive revolution as a process helping to forestall the seemingly inevitable outcome of the ‘law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall’. As is well known, Gramsci adopted the concept of ‘passive revolution’ from Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) and proposed his own version in Notebook 4 (Q4 §57, 1930). Gramsci transforms and extends this concept to capture the specific logic of hegemony under the conditions of Fordism. Passive revolution works in the production and consumption process as well as in the relationship between civil and political society. But at its core passive revolution involves the production of human beings including their subjective drives, social predispositions and moral inclinations. It is thus the production of human desire. This rendering of the notion of passive revolution expands the classic idea that the bourgeoisie must constantly revolutionize the instruments of production into the idea that dominant elites must also constantly revolutionize the instruments of hegemony to the point of developing sophisticated forms of voluntary submission. This is the strategy behind businesses and governments investing in retraining ‘human capital’ every time the system goes through significant structural transformations as in the transition to Fordist capitalism. Indeed, Gramsci argues, ‘the concept of passive revolution seems to me correct not only for Italy, but also for the other countries that modernized the state through a series of reforms or national wars, without going through the radical Jacobin-type political revolution’ (Q4 §57). But passive revolution is not just a concept applicable to the superstructural sphere of culture or politics to help explain the ways people are brought to accept a given political order. It is also something that helps to account for why capitalism never actually reaches the point of a final organic crisis. Although Gramsci does not dismiss the theoretical validity of the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall, he nevertheless sees the crisis tendencies of actually existing capitalism as insufficient to guarantee an organic crisis, let alone revolution. Gramsci goes as far as to claim that ‘in a certain sense we can say that the philosophy of praxis equals Hegel + David Ricardo’. In other words, a critique of Fordist capitalism but without structural mechanicism or historical determinism (Q10 §9, Q11 §52).

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CIVIL SOCIETY For Gramsci, the historical stage of what he calls the ‘economic-corporatist’ mode of class rule, a kind of rule that characterized the ‘communal states’ or the city-states of Renaissance Italy until 1848 and could still dispense with an autonomous process of hegemony, was by the early twentieth century irretrievably past. After 1848, and even more so after the unification of Italy and construction of the modern Italian state and industrial capitalism after 1870, things changed more dramatically, demanding new forms of building consent (Q13 §7). After the 1870s and the rise of the massive structures of ‘modern democracies’ the open forms of domination as well as frontal resistance that characterized the Forty-Eightist formula were replaced by a new mode of struggle: ‘civil hegemony’. The new formula ‘civil society + political society’ thus came to constitute the core of modern liberal capitalist democracy (Q8 §54). One of Gramsci’s most famous passages on civil society has often been presented as the definitive statement of his conception: In the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West between the state and civil society there was a balanced relationship and in the tremor of the state you could immediately see a robust structure of civil society. The state was only an advanced trench, behind which lay a robust chain of fortresses and casemates. (Q7 §16, 1930-1931)

Gramsci’s understanding of civil society challenges the restriction of this notion to the sphere of market relations and the social relations of production. When Marx elaborated his understanding of civil society, he ‘could not have had historical experiences superior to those of Hegel’ even if he did have a distinct and forward-looking ‘sense of the masses’ because of his activity as a journalist and political agitator. However, Gramsci follows Hegel’s ideas on private associations and political parties as the ‘hidden web of the state’ reaching through the various levels and layers of political society and extending itself through the various ‘private’ spheres of ethical life (Q1 §47, 1929-30). Opposed to this, Marx’s conception continued to be tied to the model of collective action that emerged with the French Revolution, exploded in 1848 and, finally, boiled over in 1871 with the Paris Commune (Q1 §47). The key elements here were the ‘professional organization, Jacobin clubs, secret conspiracies of small groups, journalistic organization’. But rather than staying with the young Marx (1843), Gramsci offers us a twentieth-century notion of civil society as a complex of fortresses and fortifications of the integral state and sees the anatomy of this civil society in the process of hegemony. In the most industrialized states, Gramsci argues, ‘civil society has become a very complex

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structure resistant to the catastrophic “irruptions” of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.): the superstructures of civil society are like the system of trenches in modern warfare’. This means, therefore, ‘studying, in depth, which are the elements of civil society that correspond to the defence systems in the war of position’ (Q7 §10). In the context of the modern historical bloc and working in tandem with the integral state, modern ‘private associations’ (e.g., Rotary Clubs, Freemasonry, intellectual associations, legal associations, and religious and worker associations) constitute the sphere of ethical life that Gramsci now designates as civil society (Q6 §81 and §84). It is in civil society where people acquire the consciousness of ‘common sense’ without which neither the power of the state nor the power of capital by themselves would be able to relax the purely coercive and disciplinary practices of both political and economic domination. Coercion alone can never solve the bio-political and psychological challenges of adaptation to the new conditions of Fordist production and the individualist requirements of liberal democracy; coercion alone is utterly insufficient to forestall subjective effects of periodic economic and political crises as well as cultural upheaval; and coercion alone can certainly not suture the fault lines or cracks opened by the periodic organic crisis of capital or the crisis of the integral state when the relationship between political and civil society ruptures and generates a crisis of hegemony. If it is true that hegemony must certainly be ‘protected by the armour of coercion’, it is equally true that the coercive power of capital and the state must also be protected by the process of hegemony. The articulation of coercion and consent is precisely what leads Gramsci to offer his most famous and often-quoted conception of the integral state as ‘political society + civil society’ (Q6 §88, 1930-32). This is the situation that Gramsci designates as a ‘phase in which the state will be equal to the government, and the state will identify itself with civil society’. The form in which this articulation expresses itself in liberal capitalist society is as ‘government with the consent of the governed’, i.e., classical liberal, representative or parliamentary democracy. However, this is no spontaneous consent, but certainly an organized consent, not generic and vague as it is affirmed at the moment of the elections: the state has and asks for consent, but also ‘educates’ this consent with political and trade union associations, which however are private bodies, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. (Q1 §47)

Gramsci witnessed the growth of civil society at a stage when Fordism was starting to become a mass phenomenon and private associations were starting to function as ‘collective forms of will’ or, essentially, organizations that could grow into or can support the parties that participate in political society.

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Gramsci’s point is that, in the modern context of the integral state, ‘no one is unorganized and without a party, as long as organization and party are understood in a broad and non-formal sense’ (Q6 §136). Viewed from this perspective, then, every individual becomes ‘a functionary’, not because he or she is an actual employee of the state and under the ‘hierarchical’ control of the state bureaucracy, but because ‘when acting spontaneously his action is identified with the aims of the state’ (Q8 §142, 1931-32). Gramsci expands further the notion of civil society organizations as expressing both the degree of unity with the state and also freedom and ‘felt equality’ achieved within civil society: In history, real ‘equality’, that is, the degree of ‘spirituality’ reached by the historical process of ‘human nature’, is identified in the system of ‘private and public’ associations, explicit and implicit, which are tied into the ‘state’ and even into the world political system. (Q7 §35, 1930-31)

All the ‘private associations’ Gramsci examines also help disseminate what we call today ‘corporate social responsibility’, that is, ‘a new capitalist spirit’ or ‘the idea that industry and commerce, before being a business, are a social service, indeed they are and can be a business insofar as they are a “service”’ (Q5 §2). In civil society, therefore, the lines between capitalist society and political society are blurred and the relationship becomes what Gramsci calls the ‘new capitalist spirit’. Gramsci assigns great importance to the question of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ as a necessary component of the hegemonic process at the heart of civil society. The absence of one is indicative of a failure in the process of hegemony and, consequently, a great danger to the existing historical bloc. This means, therefore, that the share of ideological imposition in the life of the state and civil society increases as the share of hegemonic consent declines. The more nakedly ideological state rule becomes, the less it is capable of steering or producing consent from within civil society (Q4 §75). Without a continuing reform of this kind, without continuous passive revolution and transformism in general, or one that ‘fails to involve the popular masses’ in the construction of moral universalism, the ruling elites run the risk of exposing the fault lines between structures and superstructures, the widening gaps in equality and freedom, and thus creating the conditions for a crisis of hegemony. The kind of hegemonic process that Gramsci charts is, therefore, unlikely to develop without an active role by intellectuals involving both elites and subaltern groups alike. The kind of intellectual and moral reform Gramsci has in mind in the context of Fordism transforms the ruling elites into elites capable of exercising self-limitation in favour of a social compromise as well as moral universalism. This reform also prepares subaltern groups to see in

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transformism and, even in times of crisis, restoration the possibility of real improvements for their lives without having to change the system altogether. Any change in the nature of the state or capitalism thus requires a change in the nature of consent and this is, precisely, the task of organic intellectuals. As I have shown in this section, the process of hegemony located at the heart of civil society and defined as the process of production of subjectively desired domination experienced as a matter of ‘free choice’, is precisely what modern civil society is tasked with protecting and expanding in the context of changing forms of political and economic regime. Although Gramsci did not manage to articulate his conception of civil society as the site of hegemony in quite the same terms as those used in this section, the logic of his analysis of ‘private associations’ as well as passive revolution and, indeed, hegemony already points in this critical direction (Q6 §24, 1930-32; see also Q8 §236).

CONCLUSION For Marxists and cultural theorists accustomed to reading about Gramsci as a ‘radical democrat’ or see him pigeonholed as a theorist of ‘cultural hegemony’, it may come as a surprise to encounter in this chapter an expanded interpretation of Gramsci that presents him as a critic of both structures and superstructures, civil society, capitalism and the integral state. Gramsci does not merely call for a cultural revolution or an alternative civil society. He calls on us to engage in an emancipatory ‘war of positions’ against the process of hegemony cementing the historical bloc of state, capital and civil society. Gramsci’s emancipatory war of positions is a two-fold strategy that requires as much an ethical practice he calls ‘violence on the self’ (Q8 §213) as the development of autonomous, articulated, counter-hegemonic and refoundational politics against the economic and political groups that control the economy and the integral state.5 This is a point on which Gramsci is at his least ambiguous: the ‘so-called private initiatives and activities […] form the apparatus of political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes’ (Q8 §179). Let us remember how Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks slowly reveal the puritan culture that modern Fordist capitalism paradoxically promoted as a matter of moral principles freely chosen by workers and other subaltern groups. Gary Gerstle (2022) has recently described this modernist culture as celebrating ‘industriousness, discipline, self-reliance, and strong families that would inculcate virtue in the young’ (p. 233). The wizards of this culture ‘believed that an individual should be able to make decisions about his or her own religiosity, sexuality, and entertainment’ (Gerstle, 2022, p. 164). A culture that further instituted the traditional family as ‘heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing’ where families ‘guided by faith in God, would inculcate

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moral virtue in its members and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life’ (Gerstle, 2022, p. 13). The influence of this culture was staggering and widely disseminated by organic intellectuals such as Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, George Gilder and Charles Murray who ‘believed that nineteenth-century Britain under Queen Victoria had achieved this symbiosis of family and market, and that late twentieth-century America could achieve it again under Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party that he was fashioning’. More recently this process also includes ‘legions of evangelical Christians’ mobilized in the service of a new ‘Moral Majority’ demanding an originalist restoration of traditional values. For Gerstle (2022, p. 214), therefore, recent conservative governments in North America have mobilized ‘the two moral codes sustaining the neoliberal order – cosmopolitan diversity and neo-Victorian self-reliance’. This is the sort of development Wendy Brown calls ‘neoliberalism from below’ (Brown, 2019). A key process within the interior world of both capitalism and civil society is the construction of what Frédéric Lordon has called ‘joyful alienation’, that is, the seemingly independent ‘mobilization of individuals’ in the consensual service of domination (Lordon, 2014, p. 40). But Lordon’s reconceptualization of capitalist exploitation as the ‘capture and remolding of desire’ is precisely what Gramsci had already accomplished in his discussion of civil society. As we have seen, Gramsci makes the construction of hegemony, the willing surrender of autonomy and freedom, into a central process in the construction of consent and provides us with pathways to develop counter-hegemonic and emancipatory politics for the twenty-first century. The challenge today, in the wake of the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the rise of indignado movements throughout the world, is to side with the autonomous and rhizomatic organizations emerging from the condition of subalternity, starting to generate their own intellectuals and articulating their own autonomous movements and political parties across the world. The emancipatory goal of articulated social movements and progressive parties is certainly not to mobilize civil society and struggle for the ‘conquest of power’ only to then establish yet another form of ‘alternative’ hegemony within the constitutional framework of neoliberal states. The fight today is as much against civil society (the site of constructed consent) as against political society (the site of increasingly illegitimate coercion, black parliamentarism, and neoliberal domination), through a counter-hegemonic and refoundational strategy capable of rupturing the consensus between civil and political society, widening the gaps between increasingly globalized structures and reterritorialized superstructures and, thus, challenging the increasingly undemocratic and coopted practices of polyarchic democracies whose checks and balances are not at all designed to restrain, let alone regulate, the power of the now hegemonic transnational capitalist class.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This chapter draws on and extends arguments developed in a previous reading of Gramsci (Fonseca, 2016). Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

All references to Gramsci are given in the standard Q (notebook) and § (note number) followed, where appropriate, by the date of the notebook’s writing. All quotations have been translated by the author from the original Italian texts as published by Valentino Gerratana (Gramsci, 1977). For a more extensive exploration of the relationship between Gramsci and Poutlantzas, see Fonseca (2018). William I. Robinson (2019) offers an insightful discussion on Fascism of the twenty-first century. Recent examples of this argument include Mandel (1995) and Wallerstein et al. (2013). According to Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, the late Wallerstein went so far as to claim that ‘the current malaise goes beyond the periodic fluctuations of the business cycle, and that capitalism will be gone in twenty to forty years’ (Rasmussen, 2022, pp. 38–39). The now classic argument about Gramsci as a radical democratic theorist is Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Scholars who present Gramsci as a theorist of cultural hegemony are abundant. For a recent example, see Harcourt (2020).

REFERENCES Brown, W. (2019). In the Ruins of Neoliberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Fonseca, M. (2016). Gramsci’s Critique of Civil Society. Towards a New Concept of Hegemony. New York: Routledge. Fonseca, M. (2018). Hegemonía, ruptura y Refundación. Crisis del Estado ampliado. El Observador, 12-13 (57–58), 7–120. Gerstle, G. (2022). The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford University Press. Gramsci, A. (1977). Quaderni del carcere. Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci. Valentino Gerratana (ed). Torino: Einaudi. Harcourt, B.E. (2020). Critique and Praxis. New York: Columbia University Press. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lordon, F. (2014). Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza And Marx On Desire. London: Verso. Mandel, E. (1995). Long Waves of Capitalist Development. London: Verso. Marx, K. (1843). Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Retrieved from marxists.org Marx, K. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Retrieved from marxists.org Marx, K. (1867) Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. Retrieved from marxists.org

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Marx, K. (1863–1883). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume III. Retrieved from marxists.org Panitch, L. & Gindin, S. (2012). The Making of Global Capitalism. The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso. Poutlantzas, N. (1975). Political Power and Social Classes. London: NLB. Rasmussen, M.B. (2022). Late Capitalist Fascism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Robinson, W.I. (2019). Global capitalist crisis and twenty-first century Fascism: Beyond the Trump hype. Science & Society, 83(2), pp. 481–509. Taylor, F.W. (1911). Principles of Scientific Management. Retrieved from marxists.org Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derluguian, G., & Calhoun, C. (2013). Does Capitalism Have a Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9. Intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political Jean-Pierre Reed and Carlos L. Garrido INTRODUCTION Despite the popularity which Antonio Gramsci has received in the last few decades, he is still largely misunderstood as a thinker. This misunderstanding applies to his position on intellectuals, ideology, and the ethico-political. Yes, Gramsci is a vanguardist but his relational approach on the relationship the intellectuals have to working and subaltern1 classes, his position on ideology, and ‘the moment of hegemony’ (the ethico-political) reveals him as both a more democratic vanguardist than typically recognized as well as an astute and original theorist of social change.

INTELLECTUALS: TRADITIONAL AND ORGANIC As has been noticed by scholars before, ‘Gramsci is the Marxist theorist par excellence of the intellectuals’ (Thomas, 2009, p. 407). Gramsci takes up the question of intellectuals with more depth and systematicity compared with his theoretical predecessors. To begin with, it is important to recognize that Gramsci does not conceive of the ‘man-in-the-mass’ as senseless or unintelligent (Gramsci, 1987, p. 333). He is famously known for having stated that ‘all men are intellectuals’ and ‘“everyone” is a philosopher’ since ‘one cannot talk of nonintellectuals, because … There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens’ (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 9, 323, 330). To be human means that at a very basic level one is capable of reflection and inference. Yet not everyone plays the role of an intellectual in society (Gramsci, 1987, p. 9). Some ‘groups … specialize in the exercise of the intellect’ (Gramsci in Santucci, 2010, p. 142). Intellectuals, more importantly, are essential to politics: in fact, without ‘the existence of a group of people specialised in [the] conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas,’ there is no political organization, nor politics (Gramsci, 1987, p. 334). According to Gramsci, varied 152

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categories of intellectuals prevail in society, some aligning themselves with the status quo – consciously or by virtue of their unique function – while others do not, with significant differences existing between urban and rural intellectuals (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 9–12). Ultimately, the proper understanding of the types and functions of intellectuals in society rests on the comprehension of historical processes that facilitate their formation as groups. To understand the nature of intellectual activity, its varied forms, and intellectuals themselves, requires an understanding of the social processes – i.e., ‘the general complex of social relations’ and ‘specific social relations’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 8) – that embody and give shape to their formation under specific historical circumstances. For Gramsci, the key function of intellectuals in society is ‘the transmission of and reproduction of particular conceptions of the world’ (Crehan, 2002, p. 139). They are essentially organizers of culture. This is a vital function for the ‘proper’ functioning of society, since, as Gramsci notes, all members of society ‘participate in a particular conception of the world, ha[ve] a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contribute to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it’ by virtue of their ability to engage in intellectual activity (Gramsci, 1987, p. 9). As organizers of culture, as such, intellectuals help sustain or challenge the order of things depending on the worldview they help disseminate. Importantly, Gramsci does not conceive of intellectuals as ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ groups (Gramsci, 1987, p. 60). He notes, for example, that ‘Every social group … creates … organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 5). In this regard, Gramsci focuses his work on two main types of intellectuals: traditional and organic (Gramsci, 1987, p. 15). Organic intellectuals are linked to the major social classes in society. They are ‘the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class’ and they give direction to ‘the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong’ (Hoare and Smith, 1987, p. 3). In the modern historical context, one can speak of bourgeois organic intellectuals and proletarian organic intellectuals. Whereas a bourgeois organic intellectual is ‘the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the [organizer] of [an existent] culture [and] legal system,’ the proletarian organic intellectual is a ‘constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader”,’ and elaborator of an alternative to the accepted free-market worldview (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 5, 10). Referring to both types of organic intellectuals, David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, articulate the following: Under capitalism the organic intellectuals of the bourgeois class are not just specialists in management and industrial organization, but also economists, lawyers, publishers, doctors, publicists – indeed everyone connected with what we now call

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the ‘culture industry’ … In the instance of the proletariat under capitalism, organic intellectuals comprise all those striving to produce a new proletarian culture as well as productive functionaries in the narrower sense (shop foremen and stewards, machine technicians, trade union economists). (Lloyd and Thomas, 1998, p. 25)

Traditional intellectuals are connected to previous social formations; at one point they shared an organic link to a past dominant and fundamental social group, e.g., landed aristocracy, and have continued to play a role in contemporary settings by virtue of their traditional hold on key societal institutions such as the church, law, and universities. They retain this status despite ‘the most complicated and radical changes in political and social forms’ produced by changes in economic structure (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 6–7), and are defined by an ‘esprit de corps’ which places them in an ‘uninterrupted historical continuity’ with their predecessors (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 7–8). Among others, academics and priests are examples of traditional intellectuals. Scholars and priests today, for example, share an uninterrupted historical connection between themselves and their respective medieval scholastic and clerical counterparts. They were the organic intellectuals of the landed aristocracy, but – in contemporary settings – they became traditional intellectuals, who – despite being displaced by bourgeois organic intellectuals – continued to play a role in the societal dissemination of worldviews consonant with the existing order of things. Their ‘social prestige,’ in part connected to the historical linkage they share with their predecessors, facilitates their hegemonic function: the justification and broadcasting of the gospel of a free-market economy, along with the various ideas that support this worldview and its operationalization as a ‘ruling material force of society’ (Marx, 2000, p. 192; Gramsci, 1987, p. 165). The functions of traditional and bourgeois organic intellectuals are ‘organisational and connective’ in nature. They actively work to develop both social and political hegemony, i.e., ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 242, 453). Gramsci elaborates on this latter point, noting that their functions comprise of gaining consent from members of society and when the elicitation of consent fails disciplining them: 1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation

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of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed (Gramsci, 1987, p. 12). Traditional and organic intellectuals aligned with the existent capitalist order function, as such, as the ‘dominant group’s deputies,’ charged with the task of elaborating, making coherent, and promulgating the ideas of a free market economy (Gramsci, 1987, p. 12). If a strategy designed to gain the consent of the masses in civil society fails, they will resort to coercive institutional means to produce it. Ultimately, they help justify, legitimate, and preserve the institutional and social practices that bolster a capitalist status quo. Traditional and organic intellectuals develop as intellectuals through schooling that ‘politically overdetermine[s]’ them to function as educators of, and for, the existent order of things (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 7–8; Thomas, 2009, p. 410). Yet, while they may be predisposed to support the status quo because of their schooling, they do not necessarily always do so. They either join on their own out of self-interest or an enlightened understanding of historical and political conditions (Marx and Engels, 2000, p. 253). Or they can be persuaded to participate in the construction of an alternative worldview (Gramsci, 1987, p. 10). For this reason, one of the most significant tasks of proletarian organic intellectuals is to persuade traditional and bourgeois organic intellectuals to join them in their educational and cultural efforts to transform society. Traditional and bourgeois organic intellectuals are the pre-existing intellectual groups that proletarian organic intellectuals must ideologically confront and persuade. On this point Gramsci notes the following: One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals. (Gramsci, 1987, p. 10)

To achieve the assimilation of, or conquest over, status-quo oriented intellectuals, it is essential for proletarian organic intellectuals to ‘defeat’ them in their ‘home field,’ that is, ‘to win the battle of ideas on the [very] terrain established’ by their philosophies (Thomas, 2009, p. 420). To concretize this defeat over status-quo oriented intellectuals it is necessary, as Peter Thomas notes, To neutralise them politically, to demolish their trenches in civil society and cut their supply lines back to the terrain of intellectuality that guaranteed their continuing political efficacy. In other words, the condition of possibility of such a new popular Weltanschauung [is] … exercising hegemony on the terrain of ‘intellectuality’ over and against the already established traditional [and organic] intellectuals of the dominant class. (Thomas, 2009, p. 421)

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Gramsci argues that a ‘scientific’ alternative to the perspective of traditional and bourgeois organic intellectuals proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems…. The[ir] great philosophical syntheses … must be overcome, either negatively, by demonstrating that they are without foundation, or positively, by opposing to them philosophical syntheses of greater importance and significance. (Gramsci, 1987, p. 433)

The proletarian organic intellectual’s victory over status-quo oriented intellectuals in their ‘home field,’ however, is merely a steppingstone in the march towards winning over the hearts and minds of the masses and assuming a leadership role on their behalf. As Gramsci notes, for the working class to become the leading class (classe dirigente), one of its ‘principal conditions ... before winning governmental power’ is that it must ‘already exercise “leadership”’ in civil society (Gramsci, 1987, p. 57). The key term associated with this process of leadership constitution is the war of position, a long-term ideological strategy – and a pedagogical process itself (Holst and Brookfield, 2017, p. 213) – through which proletarian organic intellectuals in collaboration with subaltern actors ‘appropriate non-class ideological elements [bourgeois and subaltern ideologies] in order to integrate them within the[ir] ideological system [the philosophy of praxis, Marxism]’ so that they may acquire an orientation that reflects proletarian values (i.e., a proletarian hegemonic principle – elaborated below) and in the process establish an alliance across varied classes/groups in society (Mouffe, 1979, p. 198). Once this latter alliance is accomplished based on a proletarian hegemonic principle, the politics of counter-hegemony is secured (Gramsci, 1987, p. 239).2 The goal of the proletarian organic intellectual, as such, is to collaboratively create the ideological conditions for the masses to gain their ideological autonomy, mobilize, attain power, and construct socialism. We now turn to examining some of the features that make for the ideological groundwork upon which a socialist counter-hegemonic project can gain momentum.

IDEOLOGICAL ORDERS/DIMENSIONS, RE-ARTICULATION, AND COUNTER-HEGEMONY The concept of ideology is an important one in Gramsci’s work, if only because it informs a new theoretical orientation in the study of politics, including within the Marxist tradition. Ideology in the work of Marx and the early Marxists contained a negative connotation. Ideology was understood as an idea-belief system that concealed, if not distorted, the contradictory nature

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of (economic) reality. As an idea-belief system, ideology alienated people from reality. The clearest examples of this negative concept of ideology can be found in the German Ideology (with the ‘camera obscura’ analogy) and Capital, Volume III (with the assertion that ideology conceals/distorts the true character of economic relations). Gramsci contributes to the development of the concept of ideology with a positive conception, which conceives of ideology as more than distortion. As a positive concept, ideology is now understood as an idea-belief system that can facilitate the overcoming of distortion – given its potential as an instrument of consciousness transformation – and give direction to/inspire political causes aiming to transform society. Among others, György Lukács, Antonio Labriola, and Vladimir Lenin also contributed to this significant development in the understanding and theoretical use of ideology in Marxism. Gramsci’s contribution is especially significant for several reasons. First, he conceives of ideology as a worldview – a weltanschauung, revealing a Hegelian influence in his thinking, a novelty at the time he is writing – that is implicitly manifest in social practices. Second, he links it to his concept of hegemony, i.e., ‘moral and intellectual’ leadership. Third, he identifies two ideological orders – philosophy and subaltern thought – and varied dimensions associated with each. These constitute the ideological landscape that is his object of study. Fourth, he sets out to study the links between the aforementioned ideological orders and their specific dimensions, primarily focusing on the links between philosophy (in its bourgeois and proletarian dimensions) and the varied ideological dimensions of subaltern thought (identified below). Fifth, based on the aforementioned, he develops a theory of hegemony and a counter-hegemonic strategy, the latter strategy being the ‘war of position,’ which stands in contrast to the ‘war of maneuver.’3 According to Gramsci, a counter-hegemonic effort – i.e., crafting and developing an alternative moral and intellectual outlook to gain the consent of the masses in order to direct them away from capitalist hegemony – necessarily unfolds in the ‘terrain’ of ideology since it is in such terrain that ‘men move, acquire consciousness of their position, [and] struggle’ for change (Gramsci, 1987, p. 377). For a counter-hegemonic project to succeed, however, it is not enough to ‘defeat’ the hegemony of status-quo oriented intellectuals ‘on the terrain of their intellectuality,’ proletarian organic intellectuals must be able to make gains with the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought. For this to happen, the philosophy of praxis (Marxist ideology) must share a dialectical, referential, and relational relationship between itself and subaltern ways of doing, knowing, and feeling. Such an alignment is necessary out of consideration for the lived reality of subaltern actors, their subjectivity, and their sociopsychological orientations in their everyday lives. Counter-hegemony, that is, ‘presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised’ (Gramsci, 1987,

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p. 161). This means that ‘the starting point [for the philosophy of praxis and for a counter-hegemonic project] must always be the common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy [popular beliefs] of the multitude’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 421). Put more simply, ‘Gramsci argued that the pedagogical work at the heart of political struggle must begin, as educators often say, where people are at and not where [one] may want them to be’ (Holst and Brookfield, 2017, p. 214). Since the proletarian revolution ‘presupposes the forma­tion of a new set of standards, a new psychology, new ways of feeling, thinking and living’ and a counter-hegemonic effort requires taking into account popular beliefs, Gramsci sets out to theorize the necessary link between ideological dimensions of subaltern thought and the philosophy of praxis (Gramsci, 1991, p. 41). He does this in Prison Notebooks, a theoretical endeavor that marks an epistemological break in his thinking about the role of culture and popular consciousness (mass psychology) in the politics of social transformation.4 It is in Prison Notebooks, compared with his previous elaborations on culture and politics, that he intentionally sets out to formulate a counter-hegemonic strategy out of capitalist civilization. Given the important role of ideology for a politics of transformation, this requires him to identify varied ideological dimensions of subaltern thought in society and their relationship to two intellectual ideological dimensions: philosophy (bourgeois ideology) and the philosophy of praxis (Marxist ideology), modes of thinking and feeling defined by two distinct hegemonic principles (that function as the ‘articulating centre[s]’ of their respective philosophies (Mouffe, 1979, pp. 193–194)). In the Gramscian theoretical scenario, hegemonic principles consist of, respectively, capitalistic and proletarian value systems. With the latter theoretical focus, Gramsci identifies three ideological dimensions of subaltern thought: folklore, common sense, and religion. As ‘organic ideologies,’ i.e., historically necessary ideologies possessing psychological validity and organizational power, they govern and give socio-psychological orientation to the masses (Gramsci, 1987, p. 377). However, unlike philosophy – in its bourgeois or proletarian variant – the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought are the opposite of intellectual order and erudition. Hence the need for the linkage between subaltern and philosophical ideological orders. Subaltern ideological dimensions, Gramsci notes, tend to lack the critical, cohesive, integrative, and systematic features inherent in philosophy – necessary features in the case of the philosophy of praxis for the building of an ‘integral conception of the world’ and by implication the development of an ‘integral civilization’ distinct from a capitalist one (Gramsci, 1987, p. 462). While the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought do not stand for either ‘false’ or a ‘deficient’ consciousness (Allman, 2001, 2002; Larrain, 1979, 1995), they can be episodic, backward, contradictory, dogmatic as well as fragmented, incoherent, and uncritical. Their varied

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forms, incohesive structures and ways in which they are combined in everyday life, moreover, tend to give solidity in variant ways, directly or indirectly, to dominant economic, political, and social practices in society. Yet Gramsci makes the important observation that the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought – notwithstanding their incohesive structures and the logical and hermeneutic differences between them – are open to counter-hegemonic re-direction because their epistemic and social properties make it possible (Baratta, 2007; Coben, 2002; Frosini, 2010; Green and Ives, 2009; Liguori, 2006; Reed, 2012). Epistemic properties refer to how they are adaptive, elastic, fluid, and malleable cultural schemes. These properties reveal subaltern ideological dimensions as not always rigid nor as ‘single unique conception[s], identical in time and space’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 419). They show how they are historically situated, fluid, and heterogeneous cultural schemes that actors can embody in myriad practical activities as well as employ them in varied social contexts, including political ones. This is especially the case with common sense. Gramsci notes, for example, that common sense contains a good sense nucleus that is derived from practical activity and that as such, when facing the imperatives of everyday life, can be used to understand and act upon social reality in ways inconsistent with dominant ways of thinking and feeling (Gramsci, 1987, p. 328). Common sense as good sense, Gramsci notes: ‘identifies the exact cause, simple and to hand, and does not let itself be distracted by fancy quibbles and pseudo-profound, pseudo-scientific metaphysical mumbo-jumbo’; contains ‘a certain measure of “experimentalism”’ and some ‘truths’; ‘is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life’; can operate as organized culture, i.e., it can function as a heuristic mechanism for ‘the exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects’ as well as a foundation for ‘thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does’; and ultimately, given the latter properties, is susceptible to ‘interior transformation’ (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 348, 423, 326; 1991, p. 25; 1987, p. 420; emphasis added). The same may be said of the other two ideological dimensions of subaltern thought – folklore and religion – although, compared with common sense they are much more resistant to interior transformation. This is especially the case when it comes to folklore, which he describes as ‘inconsequential,’ a ‘system of superstitions,’ and as a ‘fossilized and anachronistic’ cultural scheme (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 419, 323; 1991, p. 167). Social properties refer to the inherent tension that exists between the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought and dominant conceptions of the world. These properties direct attention to the contradictory interests derived from the material contradictions inherent in a class system and how these can potentially function as a cause for political mobilization. Combined with

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a proletarian hegemonic principle, these epistemic and social properties are at the root of counter-hegemony. They make the dis-articulation (dissolving) and the socialist re-articulation (the forging anew) of meanings associated with ideology a reality and, as such, useful to a counter-hegemonic project. Disarticulation is the displacement of meaning associated with an existent link between the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought and a bourgeois hegemonic principle. Re-articulation is the (re-)alignment of ideological meanings. It is a process through which the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought (but also bourgeois ideology) are linked to a proletarian hegemonic principle in order to give them new cultural, political, or social significance. It entails accentuating, if not recombining, existent meanings (if not values and/or ideas) in unfamiliar and new ways such that they will gain new connotations, con­gruency, and lived significance for oppositional/revolutionary involvement. This is possible because ideology (in its bourgeois and / or subaltern variants) is not made up of inherent meanings (if not values and/ or ideas) but rather constructed ones provided by historically situated actors. Gramsci explains how they are given new orientation: How will this consciousness be formed? How does one go about choosing the elements that would constitute the autonomous consciousness? Does it mean that every ‘imposed’ element will have to be repudiated a priori? It will have to be repudiated only insofar as it is imposed, but not in itself; in other words, it will be necessary to give it a new form that is affiliated with the given group. (Gramsci, 2021, p. 59)

Further specifying: What matters is the criticism to which an ideological complex is subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase. This criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary—becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolves into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop socially, etc. (Gramsci, 1987, p. 195)

Both dis-articulation and re-articulation are active discursive processes and their presence in a political field implies the (potential) interior transformation of ideologies, subaltern and otherwise. However, such transformation does not imply the elimination of the differences between ideologies (in their bourgeois and subaltern variants) and a proletarian hegemonic principle, nor do these same ideologies dissolve into or become identical with a proletarian hegemonic principle (Hall, 1985). It implies, however, that there is a unity in difference and that such unity – i.e., the linkage between different ideological elements/components – must actively be worked on to be maintained. As a war of position strategy, counter-hegemony is an ongoing process that continues

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even after governmental power is assumed by counter-hegemonic actors. Ultimately, processes of dis-articulation and re-articulation create a ‘cultural opportunity’ for political actors to make sense of their historico-political circumstances (McAdam, 1994). These processes empower them to actively challenge, conceptually and otherwise, status quo conditions. The fact that the ideological dimensions of subaltern thought and the philosophies of bourgeois organic intellectuals incipiently possess socialist propensities – ‘new culture in incubation’ – similarly facilitates their dis-articulation and re-articulation at the hands of political actors invested in the transformation of society (Gramsci, 1987, p. 398). Although not an easy task, this embryonic feature of subaltern ideological dimensions and bourgeois philosophy makes the socialist re-articulation of contrasting ideological orders on the whole feasible. A counter-hegemony project, Gramsci conveys, cannot be cultivated ex-nihilo. It must emerge out of historically situated socio-cultural relations contexts: ‘What exists at any given time is a variable combination of old and new, a momentary equilibrium of cultural relations corresponding to the equilibrium of social relations’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 338). For it to be effective, however, it must be aligned to historically available subaltern ways of doing, feeling, and knowing. Once aligned to these ways of doing, feeling, and knowing, it must then subject them to dis-articulation and socialist re-articulation. Gramsci is rather explicit on this point, noting that for a counter-hegemonic effort to be fruitful ‘it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought [the philosophy of praxis] into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity,’ given its epistemic properties (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 330–331). Significantly, a counter-hegemony project must itself be shaped and unfold in a process of collective collabora­tion, one based on ‘a dialectic between the intellectuals and the masses’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 334). We now turn to this latter point on collaboration and focus our attention on the proletarian party, reciprocal learning, and subaltern passion as a way of making sense of collaboration dynamics and their connection to the ethico-political.

THE PROLETARIAN PARTY, RECIPROCAL LEARNING, AND SUBALTERN PASSION AS CONSTITUENTS OF THE ETHICO-POLITICAL ‘Every relationship of “hegemony”, Gramsci observes, ‘is necessarily an educational relationship’ (1987, p. 350). For counter-hegemony to work ‘The traditional popular conception of the world’ (from the masses) and the coherent and systematic order of ‘modern theory’ (from proletarian organic intellectuals) must dialectically come together to guide its unfolding

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(Gramsci, 1987, pp. 198, 199). This requires both the subaltern and proletarian organic intellectual to learn from each other. Such reciprocal learning – or ‘reciprocal pedagogical relationship’ (Grelle, 2016, p. 61) – not only makes a counter-hegemonic effort comprehensive in character, but it also gives it vitality and durability. Key to these developments are oppositional spaces, i.e., free spaces (Polletta, 1999) – e.g., working class institutions such as worker unions, factory councils, cultural associations, education circles, and social clubs (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 15, 133, 147–54, 27; 1985, p. 33; 1994, p. 52) – where subalterns and proletarian organic intellectuals can come together to craft, if not articulate, new ways of seeing, feeling, and being in the world. According to Gramsci, the most consequential free spaces are working-class parties and their related associations such as party schools. These settings function as ‘the network of institutions in which the revolutionary process … unfold[s]’ (Gramsci, 1990, p. 146). They are in effect the instruments of revolution and operate ‘as the organ[s] of communist education, the furnace of faith, the depository of doctrine, the supreme power harmonizing the organized and disciplined forces of the worker and [other subaltern] classes … leading them towards their goal’ – the fundamental transformation of society (Gramsci, 1994, p. 97).5 They recruit future activists, produce organic intellectuals, facilitate the continual development of leaders, and function as ‘the crucibles where the unification of theory and praxis, understood as a real historical process, takes place’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 335). They are essentially ‘historical laboratories’ tasked with the ‘elaboration and diffusion of [alternative] conceptions of the world’ as well as ‘work[ing] out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions’ in preparation for and during counter-hegemonic mobilization (Gramsci, 1987, p. 335, emphasis added). As a free space, the workers’ party provides its members – organic intellectuals and otherwise – moral and emotional resources that make it possible for them to develop and maintain radical, if not avant-garde, identities. Party life entails the cultivation and development of ‘character (resistance to the pressures of surpassed cultures), honour (fearless will in maintaining the new type of culture and life), dignity (awareness of operating for a higher end)’; essential attributes that help deprogram members from early socialization and that ultimately give vitality and critical orientation to a counter-hegemonic effort (Gramsci, 1987, p. 268). To be more precise, working-class parties and party schools operating in the contexts of civil and political society as well as the economy make it possible for proletarian organic intellectuals – often in combination with converted traditional intellectuals – to pedagogically engage subaltern actors to mutually enhance and refine their ‘capacities for struggle’ (Gramsci, 1994, 224). In these and other counter-hegemonic settings convictions are formed, participants become cognizant of their role as historical agents, and ‘a reciprocal bond of trust’ is forged between them (Gramsci,

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1994, 52). All involved learn how to collectively face, deal with, and solve the economic, political, and social problems affecting them. It is important to note that the educational relationship between the masses (‘the simple’) and the vanguard party and its proletarian organic intellectuals is not a process of forceful imposition or of ‘mechanical and authoritarian’ discipline (Gramsci, 1994, 157; 1988, p. 32). Rather, it is an ‘autonomous and spontaneous’ process whereby both actors work together to modify ‘the way of feeling of the many and consequently reality itself’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 346). Their creative collaboration, as stated, is predicated on a reciprocal learning dynamic between them: ‘every teacher [the organic intellectual] is always a pupil and every pupil [the simple] a teacher’ (Gramsci, 1995, p.156). In this formulation, a proletarian organic intellectual is a teacher-student and the simple a student-teacher. To be sure, learning requires disciplining the masses. Gramsci looks to past moments in history to illustrate this point and notes that ‘Any cultural movement which aimed to replace common sense and old conceptions of the world in general’ was required: 1. never to tire of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form): repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality; 2. to work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the amorphous mass element (Gramsci, 1987, p. 340). However, the collaboration between ‘the simple’ and proletarian organic intellectuals is essential for the development of counter-hegemony. On the one hand, proletarian organic intellectuals (teacher-students) provide a theoretical direction to the masses (student-teachers) that contributes to the development of their own will and empowers them to believe that they are the ‘creators of historical and institutional values’ (Gramsci, 1987, 198, emphasis in original). On the other hand, the masses ground the theoretical direction of proletarian organic intellectuals with their lived experience. They give real life relevance to theoretical understandings of society. In so doing, they give direction to theory. As such, their respective contributions to a counter-hegemonic movement, when dialectically combined, overcome the seemingly contradictory relationship between theory (abstract thought) and practice (subaltern ways of doing, feeling, and knowing). Dialectically combined, seemingly contrasting ideological dimensions produce the type of transformative knowledge that gives traction to counter-hegemonic action with a more accurate conceptual understanding of reality because it is rooted in concrete reality, not assumed or ideologically obscured reality. Without subaltern ways of knowing, doing and feeling, a counter-hegemonic effort is not possible. The paucity of this

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necessary subjective component would delimit the potential for consequential ‘political and historical activity’ (Fontana, 2005, p. 101). For a counter-hegemonic effort to gain traction, to be more precise, reason and emotion must come together in much the same way as theory and practice do. Gramsci notes, The popular element ‘feels’ but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel... The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge): in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated—i.e. knowledge. (Gramsci, 1987, p. 418)

Further noting, One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relationships of a purely bureaucratic and formal order; the intellectuals become a caste, or a priesthood ... If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force—with the creation of the ‘historical bloc’. (Gramsci, 1987, p. 418)

Once the links between reason and emotion and theory and practice are secured in critical and participatory pedagogy – through ‘criticizing, suggesting, mocking, correcting, modernizing’ (Gramsci, 1991 p. 420); ‘actions and reactions’ (Gramsci, 1987, p. 391); democratic centralism (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 186–190); and most importantly dis-articulating and re-articulating pertinent ideologies – ‘the moment of hegemony’ (the ethico-political) materializes and a historic bloc (a coalition of classes and factions of classes) capable of moving forward efficaciously emerges. The socialist struggle for human freedom becomes a reality once this happens since what was once incipient or unknown in conceptions of the world has now been dialectically transformed into a unity in difference and as such has become the ‘glue’ that keeps a counter-hegemonic momentum in place.

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For Gramsci, the ethical and the political are mutually constitutive and reinforcing. ‘[P]olitics flows into morality’ and morality flows into politics (Buey, 2015, p. 63). This is essentially the central task of a counter-hegemonic project, facilitating the formation of new intellectual and moral horizons so as to give rise to a new ethical orientation that aims to construct a new world where human freedom – not profits, exploitation, and/or oppressive freedom (unfreedom) – is at the center of all human activity. This passage into a new ethico-political realm marks a process of catharsis, i.e., a radical consciousness formation process that culminates into ‘full consciousness of the interrelationship between economic and political demands and power’ (Holst and Brookfield, 2017, p. 216). Catharsis, Gramsci conveys, is that passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds of men. This also means the passage from ‘objective to subjective’ and from ‘necessity to freedom.’ Structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives. To establish the ‘cathartic’ moment becomes therefore, it seems to me, the starting-point for all the philosophy of praxis, and the cathartic process coincides with the chain of syntheses which have resulted from the evolution of the dialectic [i.e., becoming, which is derived from the dialectical relationship between being and not-being]. (Gramsci, 1987, pp. 366–367)

Ultimately, this transformation in consciousness, i.e., catharsis, rests on a reciprocal pedagogical relationship between student-teachers (organic and converted traditional intellectuals) and teacher-students (from varied subaltern classes). On this point John D. Holst and Stephen D. Brookfield articulate the following: For Gramsci, the passage from the purely economic to the ethico-political [‘the moment of hegemony’] is in large part a pedagogical act because he links this passage with the elaboration of the structure into the superstructure in the minds of men [sic]. Here Gramsci is referring to the pedagogical process of making poor and working-class people understand that what are commonsensically considered merely economic (structure) demands for safe jobs, living wages, decent and affordable housing and healthcare, etc. are actually political demands as well … Coming to an understanding of the dialectical relationship between the economic and the political is a form of revolutionary critical praxis. Since … we experience the social totality of our lives in fragmented ways, we need a [reciprocal] pedagogical practice to critically understand how phenomena like economics and politics, which we generally experience as separate entities, are actually dialectically related … the dialectical understanding which comes from it, lead[s] to challenging not just the conditions produced by prevailing relations (reforms), but the very relations themselves (revolution) [i.e., it produces a necessary transformation in

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consciousness for a counter-hegemonic challenge to gain effectiveness] (Holst and Brookfield, 2017, pp. 203, 204, emphasis added).

CONCLUSION The effectiveness of a counter-hegemonic project is measured to the degree to which existent ideological orders and their respective dimensions are dis-articulated from capitalist hegemony and re-articulated in a socialist direction. That is, counter-hegemony gains traction in society to the degree to which ideological conditions are constituted for the fundamental transformation of society. Key to this development is the pedagogical role proletarian organic intellectuals play in society at large and working-class settings, especially their parties and related associations. For counter-hegemony to unfold across society, however, a dialectical relationship between proletarian organic intellectuals (and on occasion with the help of converted traditional intellectuals) and subaltern classes, representing the unity of theory and practice, must be in place. This counter-hegemonic process is similarly grounded on the unity of reason and emotion, which enlivens and gives solidity and vitality to the intellectual and moral reform efforts, i.e., hegemony, from those invested in the socialist transformation of society. The Historical Dictionary of Marxism, recognizes Gramsci as ‘One of the most important and influential Marxist thinkers,’ whose work ‘suggests imaginative innovations and revisions to orthodox Marxism’ (Johnson et al., 2014, pp. 175–176). Many of his insights have remained relevant for theoretical thinking today. Among other venues, his work is readily found in anthropology (Rapport and Overing, 2002), linguistics (Trask, 1999), critical theory (Felluga, 2015), cultural theory (Cashmore and Rojek, 1999; Payne, 2009; Edgar and Sedgwick, 2005), and cultural studies (Grossberg et al., 2015) reference books. His work is similarly connected to various book series: Among others, Routledge Library Editions: Gramsci; Reading Gramsci (Pluto Press); Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci (Einaudi); Nuova biblioteca di cultura (Editori Riuniti, Istituto Gramsci); Historical Materialism (Brill); and Marx, Engels, and Marxisms (Palgrave Macmillan). Gramsci’s versatile and radical thinking will continue to remain relevant to theorist and activist alike so long as systems of oppression exist and undermine human flourishing. To this day his insights on ideology, intellectuals, and the ethico-political (and associated terms discussed herein) remain significant for theorists of ideology (Rehmann, 2014; Ostrowski, 2022), subalternity (Del Rojo, 2022; Modonesi, 2013), and subaltern ideological orders (Crehan, 2016; Forlenza, 2021; Grelle, 2016; Kirkpatrick et al., 2022; Liguori, 2021). In addition to class, these insights similarly inform scholarship on gender (Dogan, 2022; Pusceddu and Alves de Matos, 2022), race (Carley, 2019; Gilroy, 2013;

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Habiyaremye, 2022; Omi and Winant, 2014), sexuality (Chitty, 2020), and decolonial thought (Dussel, 2013; de Soussa Santos, 2015). Scholarship on contemporary radical politics (James and Federici, 2016; Robinson, 2004; Smith, 2012), social movements (Antentas, 2023; Piva and Santella, 2022; Barker et al., 2013), and critical pedagogy (Pizzolato and Holst, 2017; Mayo, 2010) likewise continue to benefit from his insights. For good and for the inconvenience of the privileged, his work will continue to inspire those who want to understand and change the world for the better.

NOTES 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

The term ‘subaltern,’ it should be noted, has a rich and multivalent intellectual history. Such history, however, is not anathema to a materialist approach (Maltese, 2017). It should be noted that ‘counter-hegemony’ is not Gramsci’s term but rather it is a term derived from his scholarship that is conventionally used by both Gramscian and non-Gramscian scholars. Hegemony, properly understood, is moral and intellectual leadership design to gain the consent of the masses so that they may be oriented into particular politico-economic ways of life. It underscores the reality that a particular way of life is in place because people have been persuaded to consent to it. Counter-hegemony is a heuristic device to get at the idea that subaltern groups are capable of contesting the hegemony of dominant/ ruling groups through their own intellectual and moral leadership based on their own elaboration of an alternative conception of the world. In the Gramscian scenario, it refers to a process that challenges the normative view that capitalism is the only viable politico-economic arrangement available to humanity. Although distinct strategies, the ‘war of maneuver’ (coercion by or against the state) and ‘war of position’ (moral and intellectual persuasion) are not mutually exclusive. They operate in different political terrains – the former in the context of revolutionary situations; the latter in the context of robust civil societies – but both are needed, if in different measures, for the fundamental transformation of society. On these points, see Dal Maso (2021). His pre-prison writings, of course, inform it, in particular his work on Party education, but his theoretical thinking on culture, ideology, and politics on the other side of the break is far more sophisticated. For a more elaborate and sophisticated take on the Revolutionary Party, see Holst (2009).

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10. Where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin: the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity Adam David Morton INTRODUCTION It was Michael Burawoy (1989, p. 793) who stated that ‘where Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin’. My take on this illusive statement is that Gramsci delivered an approach to understanding expressions of state and class agency through the concept and condition of passive revolution, which can be internally related to the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development (see also Rosengarten, 1984–85; Hesketh, 2017b). Or, in David Harvey’s (2003, p. 101) usage, ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation operating in space and time generate passive revolutions in the geographical patterning of capital accumulation’. In what follows, then, I present the dynamics of passive revolution as capable of providing a lateral field of causality to capture spatial diversity in the making of capitalist modernity, within the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development (see also Rioux 2015; Bieler and Morton 2018a). Gramsci’s horizons involve, then, an emphasis on the internal relation of passive revolution (through its focus on the agency of social class forces) with Trotsky’s consideration of uneven and combined development (as the structuring conditions of capitalism). The import of this connection is that it eviscerates the claim that, besides Trotsky, none of the major classical social theorists systematically incorporated the fact of inter-societal coexistence and interaction into their theoretical conception of social causality—with regard either to explaining the constitution of social orders, or to theorising the dynamic process of their ongoing historical development. (Rosenberg 2006, p. 311)

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Indeed, the presence of Gramsci should be reinserted into any such register of classical social theorists, given his considerations of the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity. Gramsci consistently incorporates the presence of inter-societal coexistence into his theoretical premises (see also Morton, 2007b). As will become clear, passive revolution offers not only an analysis of the specificity of Italian historical development (as a form of appearance) but also a consideration of wider state formation conditions on the road to capitalist modernity (as an essential form). As a result, the contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s ideas in and beyond their content continues (Morton, 2003a). This argument is made by, first, focusing on Gramsci’s (1994 [1926]) essay ‘Some aspects of the southern question’ that establishes a strain of thought questioning the conditions of uneven and combined development in Italy to encompass complex relations of class stratification, racial domination, colonial rule, the social function of intellectuals, and how best to mobilize against the bourgeois state. This strain of thought was then extended in Gramsci’s carceral research through his sustained and wide-ranging historical sociological focus on passive revolution as a condition of modern state formation. Second, then, my attention turns to the passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity developed in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. My destination point here is to arrive at the horizon of passive revolution as an affinal concept to uneven and combined development to address how capitalist development unfolds and how class struggles between state and subaltern agents have produced and transformed space across time throughout variegated cycles of revolution and restoration. Scholarly interest in the geographical patterning of varieties of passive revolution, generating specific and connected state formation and capitalist accumulation processes, has skyrocketed in recent years and continues unabated (recent contributions can include Fifi, 2023; Gray, 2022; Hesketh, 2019; Hesketh, 2020; Hesketh and Morton, 2014; Maria Antentas, 2023; Morton, 2018a; Roccu, 2017; Villacañas Berlanga, 2022). This chapter cannot address such richness, but the conclusion is an appropriate juncture to reflect on the following. How does passive revolution organize our understandings of revolution and state formation rather than simply travelling along as effective description? What evidence would convince us that specific instances of revolution-restoration were not a passive revolution? By way of conclusion, these issues are raised in order to shape the future history of passive revolution studies.

THE ‘BALL AND CHAIN’ HOLDING BACK SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN ITALY In a letter most likely written in Moscow to the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Italy (PCD’I), but sent from Vienna, dated 12 September

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1923, Gramsci wrote that the ‘southern question’ is one ‘in which the problem of relations between workers and peasants is posed not simply as a problem of class relations, but also and especially as a territorial problem, i.e. as one of the aspects of the national question’ (Gramsci, 1978, p. 162). This theme was taken up in greater detail subsequently in ‘Some aspects of the southern question’ (Gramsci, 1994 [1926]). Gramsci’s essay is a major affirmation of the condition of passive revolution despite the fact that a direct link to the term awaited his full elaboration during the period of his carceral research. One witnesses here ‘the emergence of a strain of thought that will constitute the core of Gramsci’s writings on cultural politics in prison’ (Rosengarten, 2009, p. 142). In ‘Some aspects of the southern question’, the territorial, class and spatial relations of social development in Italy are elaborated in such a way as to encompass the circumstances of uneven development between North and South, complex relations of class stratification, racial domination, the question of intellectuals and the social function they perform in conditions of class struggle, and how best to mobilize subaltern classes against capitalism and the bourgeois state in order to break the ruling power bloc (see Morton, 2010a). It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated on a vast scale by bourgeois propagandists among the masses in the North: that the South is the ball and chain that is holding back the social development of Italy; that Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or complete barbarians by natural destiny; that if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or any other historical cause, but with Nature, which made Southerners lazy, inept, criminal and barbaric. (Gramsci 1994 [1926], pp. 316–317)

Amongst such historical causes within the nexus of relations between North and South in the organization of the state and economy, Gramsci highlights the specific emergence of capitalism and the dominance of an agrarian bloc that not only binds rural producers to the bourgeois landowners but also functions as an ‘overseer for Northern capitalism’. ‘Any accumulation of capital on the spot’, writes Gramsci with a deeply spatial and geographical sense, ‘... is made possible by the fiscal and custom system and by the fact that the capitalists ... do not transform their profits into new capital locally, because they are not local people’ (Gramsci, 1994 [1926], p. 332). Extending the class stratification of the agrarian bloc making up the state was also the intellectual social function performed by those propagandists, noted above, that supported ‘capillary processes taking place within the bourgeois class’ (Gramsci, 1994 [1926], pp. 324–325). Significance here is granted to figures such as Antonio Salandra (1853–1931) (conservative Prime Minister in 1914–1915 and 1915–1916) and Francesco Nitti (1868–1953) (Prime Minister 1919–1920 during the Factory Councils movement), abetted by newspapers such as Il Corriere della Sera linked to forms of national capital, as well as Benedetto Croce (1866–1952)

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(the well-known philosophical idealist) and Giustino Fortunato (1848–1932) (a liberal conservative). The latter were ‘the two major figures of Italian reaction’, which absorbed radical intellectuals into the cosmopolitanism of European and world culture to defray autonomous formations contesting state power (Gramsci, 1994 [1926], pp. 327, 333). The southern intellectual is therefore linked to the rural bourgeois who views the peasant ‘as a machine that can be bled dry’, deploying knowledge alongside a new type of intellectual, ‘the technical organiser, the specialist in applied science’, the supposedly ‘objective’ nature of which is equally used ‘to crush the abject and the exploited’ (Gramsci, 1994 [1926], pp. 317, 329). Here we have a precursor of the organic intellectual: those who give a social class ‘homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 5 Q12§1). It was subsequent to his imprisonment in 1926 that Gramsci would then further advance, in the Prison Notebooks, the themes of state formation and the territorial, class, and spatial relations of uneven development shaping modernity as passive revolution. In an early and important note penned between 1929 and 1930, across several expansive pages, entitled Political class leadership before and after assuming government power, Gramsci extended his current of thought on the importance of state formation and passive revolution. The government of the Moderates from 1861 to 1876 had created solely and diffidently the external conditions for economic development—systematisation of the state apparatus, roads, railways, telegraph—and rectified the finances overwhelmed by the debts of the Risorgimento. (Gramsci, 1992, p. 141, Q1§44)

Significantly, Italian industrial development is cast once more as a condition of underdevelopment of Southern agriculture so that the ‘hegemony of the North over the South in a city-country territorial relation’ is acknowledged (Gramsci, 1992, p. 143, Q1§44). Here, though, earlier attention to the condition of colonial relations is developed further in terms of linking Italian state formation to international circumstances. These contradictions are grasped in that ‘Capitalist Europe, rich in capital, exported it to the colonial empires it was then creating. But Italy not only had no capital to export, it also had to resort to foreign capital for its own urgent needs’ (Gramsci, 1992, p. 142, Q1§44). Specifically, the vigorous colonial expansion promoted by Francesco Crispi (1819–1901) as Prime Minister in the late nineteenth-century is recognized as crucial in offering the ‘mirage of land’ through ‘castle-in-the-air-imperialism’ to the Italian masses. In Crispi’s mind, writes Gramsci, ‘the Southern peasant wanted land ... [so] he presented him with the mirage of exploitable colonial lands’ (Gramsci, 1992, p. 142, Q1§44). At the same time, the struggle over modernity in Italy is also linked in this same note to its own foreign domi-

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nation. ‘In Italy the struggle presented itself as a struggle against old treaties and against the foreign power, Austria, which represented and supported them in Italy with the force of arms, occupying Lombardy-Veneto and exercising control over the rest of the country’ (Gramsci, 1992, p. 148, Q1§44). These factors of ‘the international’ circumscribing the specific conditions of Italian state formation – both in its own colonial relations as well as its own subjection to foreign domination – thus shaped the relative weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie in contrast to the ‘different historical atmosphere of Europe’. Drawing inspiration from the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), it is worth citing Gramsci at some length about his reflections on the difference between France, Germany and Italy in the process through which the bourgeoisie seizes power (and England). In France we have the complete phenomenon, the greatest wealth of political elements. The German phenomenon resembles the Italian in certain aspects, and the English in other aspects. In Germany, 1848 fails because of the lack of bourgeois concentration ... and because the question is intertwined with the national one; the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870 resolve the national question and the class question in an intermediate way: the bourgeoisie gains industrial-economic control, but the old feudal classes remain as the governing stratum with wide caste privileges in the army, in state administration, and on the land. But in Germany, at least, if these old classes retain so much importance and maintain so many privileges, they exercise a function, they are the “intellectuals” of the bourgeoisie, with a particular temperament conferred by their class origin and tradition. In England, where the bourgeois Revolution occurred earlier than in France, we have the same phenomenon as in Germany of a fusion between old and the new, notwithstanding the extreme energy of the English ‘Jacobins’, that is, Cromwell’s ‘roundheads’: the old aristocracy remains as a governing stratum, with certain privileges; it too becomes the intellectual stratum of the English bourgeoisie. (Gramsci, 1992, p. 150, Q1§44)

In sum, ‘these diverse manifestations of the same phenomenon in different countries must be linked to various internal as well as international relations (international factors are usually underdeveloped in these researchers)’ for ‘international factors were certainly very strong in determining the course of the Risorgimento’ (Gramsci, 1992, p. 151, Q1§44). The epoch of passive revolution is therefore a reflection of modern state formation set within territorial and geopolitical conditions. It is also linked to the wider deliberations on state and civil society evident in the Prison Notebooks and the expansion of the structures of state organization, the complexes of associations in civil society, the role of trade union and party organizational forms, and the extension of parliamentarism that are all noted as indicative of ‘the modern world’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 220, Q13§27). ‘In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change’, wrote Gramsci in 1933 and 1934, ‘the internal and international organisational relations of the state become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist

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formula of “Permanent Revolution” is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of “civil hegemony”’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 243; Q13§7). Earlier, this led him to famously comment in 1930–1931, that: In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. (Gramsci, 2007, p. 169, Q7§16)

At the heart of the discussion here is the point that Gramsci offers in his theorizations on passive revolution: a focus on the internal fragmentation of Europe in terms of an east–west division and a realization of the north–south restructuring of geography, territory, place and space that reflects the transitions to modernity and the conditions of formation within modern states (Moe, 2002, p. 297). The blocked dialectic of revolution-restoration where neither new social class forces nor the old can triumph marks the passive revolutionary route to the modern world, which will be developed in more detail in the section to follow (also see Riley and Desai, 2007). At issue is whether theorizations of passive revolution can capture the common and the distinct conditions of state formation within or across different regional processes. The challenge, then, is to appreciate ‘processes of passive revolution as specific instances of state transition that are internally related through the general world-historical conditions of uneven and combined development’ (Morton, 2007a, p. 71, emphasis in original). Envisioning capitalism as creating a form of unevenness that combines both the general and the particular is also of a piece with provincializing Europe and deprovincializing Marx as a break from Eurocentrism (Harootunian, 2015, 2020). This entails emphasizing the process of unevenness embedded in capital’s continuous expansion across heterogeneous temporalities and spaces and takes us down the road of passive revolution.

THE PASSIVE REVOLUTIONARY ROAD TO CAPITALIST MODERNITY With reference to the Italian Risorgimento – the movement for national liberation that culminated in the political unification of the country in 1860–1861 – Gramsci introduced a cluster of terms to capture the contradictory outcome of the crystallization of this state formation process (see also Bieler and Morton, 2018a, p. 99–105; Bieler and Morton, 2018b, pp. 17–22). These terms, he admitted, were difficult (sometimes impossible) to translate into a foreign language given their situatedness in Italian historico-political discourse but they, nevertheless, had entered common circulation throughout ‘Europe and the

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world’ to address a category referring to the creation of modern states that ‘was not restricted to Italy’. The Risorgimento therefore represented a fragile combination of Rinascimento–Rinascita–Rinascenza literally meaning ‘renaissance’ and ‘rebirth’ or a triptych of revival, rebirth, and reawakening. However, in the same note from the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci states that all of these terms express the concept of a return to a condition that had already existed before: that is, the concept of an aggressive ‘ripresa’ (‘riscossa’) of the nation’s energies or of a liberation from a state of servitude in order to return to pristine autonomy (riscatto). (Gramsci, 1996, p. 387, Q5§136)

All these terms express an amalgam of revolt, insurrection, or awakening (riscossa) as well as that of revival or renewal (ripresa) in relation to the state formation process of the Italian Risorgimento and its territorial, spatial and geographical patterning within wider uneven and combined developmental conditions. The Risorgimento was as much a rebirth, or revolution, as a restoration in which there was ‘the acceptance, in mitigated and camouflaged forms, of the same principles that had been combatted’ (Gramsci, 1996, p. 389, Q5§138). But, given that Gramsci (1971, p. 220, Q13§27) recognized that ‘restorations in toto do not exist’, how are the contradictions of revolution and restoration conjoined in a way that offers a lateral field of causality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development? What is the essential form that is conveyed by these contradictions of revolution and restoration impacting on state formation processes beyond the mere form of appearance in time and space in the case of the Italian Risorgimento? On the form of appearance of these contradictions in the case of Italy, it was the failure of the ‘Jacobins’ in the Partito d’Azione led by Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, among others, to establish a program reflecting the demands of the popular masses and, significantly, the peasantry that came to mark the Risorgimento. Hence the significance of the ‘southern question’ sketched in the preceding section by Gramsci and the explicit attention he granted to the racialized conditions of capitalist expansion within the Italian peninsula. In Italy’s Risorgimento, as the form of appearance of passive revolution, challenges to bourgeois state power were thwarted and changes in property relations accommodated due to the Partito Moderato, led by Vincenzo Gioberti and (Count) Camillo Benso Cavour, establishing alliances between big landowners in the Mezzogiorno and the northern bourgeoisie, while absorbing opposition in parliament through continually assimilated change (or trasformismo) within the current social formation. The Moderates do not acknowledge the agency of a collective force ... in the Risorgimento; they only recognise single individuals, who are either exalted so that

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they can be appropriated or slandered in order to rupture collective ties. (Gramsci, 1996, p. 110, Q3§125)

The essential form sustaining the form of appearance of the Risorgimento, though, was the concept and condition of passive revolution that can be defined as referring to various concrete historical instances when aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded resulting in both a ‘revolutionary’ rupture and ‘restoration’ of social relations. ‘The problem’, as Antonio Gramsci (1971, p. 219, Q13§27) states, ‘is to see whether in the dialectic of “revolution/restoration” it is revolution or restoration which predominates.’ A passive revolution therefore represents a blocked dialectic (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980, p. 315), or a condition of rupture in which socio-political processes of revolution are at once partially fulfilled and displaced (Callinicos, 2010, p. 498). According to Gramsci, after the French Revolution (1789), the emergent bourgeoisie there, ‘was able to present itself as an integral “state”, with all the intellectual and moral forces that were necessary and adequate to the task of organising a complete and perfect society’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 9, Q6§10). In contrast to the instance of revolutionary rupture in France, other European countries went through a series of passive revolutions in which the old feudal classes were not destroyed but maintained a political role through state power. As a result, such ‘restorations are universally repressive’ (Gramsci, 1996, p. 40, Q3§41). Hence: [The] birth of the modern European states [proceeded] by successive waves of reform rather than by revolutionary explosions like the original French one. The ‘successive waves’ were made up of a combination of social struggles, interventions from above of the enlightened monarchy type, and national wars ... restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror ... The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a ‘governing’ one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole ... Can this ‘model’ for the creation of the modern states be repeated in other conditions? (Gramsci, 1971, p. 115, Q10II§61)

At issue here is not the question of the historical validity of the examples deployed. After all, as Gramsci himself noted, ‘historians are by no means of one mind (and it is impossible that they should be) in fixing the limits of the group of events which constitutes the French Revolution’ (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 179–180, Q13§17). Equally, it was acknowledged that there can also be a ‘system of interpretations of the Risorgimento’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 382, Q8§243). Nevertheless, it was concluded that: The important thing is to analyse more profoundly the significance of a ‘Piedmont’-type function in passive revolutions – i.e., the fact that a state replaces

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the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal. It is one of the cases in which these groups have the function of ‘domination’ without that of ‘leadership’: dictatorship without hegemony. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 105–106, Q15§59)

The significance of the French Revolution was highlighted in terms of its geopolitical impact on the states-system, which spilled over into the rest of Europe with the republican and Napoleonic armies – giving the old régimes a powerful shove, and resulting not in the immediate collapse as in France but in the ‘reformist’ corrosion of them which lasted up to 1870. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 119, Q10§I9)

The Italian form of passive revolution in the appearance of the Risorgimento ‘was a question of stitching together a unitary state’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 77, Q6§89). ‘The concept of passive revolution, it seems to me’, Gramsci (1996, p. 232, Q4§57) accordingly stated, ‘applies not only to Italy but also to those countries that modernise the state through a series of reforms.’ There are at least two different but linked processes defining the essential form of the condition of passive revolution. It can refer to: 1. a revolution without mass participation, or a ‘revolution from above’, involving elite-engineered social and political reform that draws on foreign capital and associated ideas while lacking a national-popular base. Passive revolution here describes the ‘historical fact of the absence of popular initiative in the development of Italian history’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 252, Q8§25) and how issues such as agrarian reform were ‘a way of grafting the agrarian masses on to the national revolution’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 257, Q8§35); and 2. How a revolutionary form of political transformation is pressed into a conservative project of restoration in which popular demands of class struggle still play some role. It refers here to, ‘the fact that “progress” occurs as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses – a reaction consisting of “restorations” that agree to some part of the popular demands and are therefore “progressive restorations”, or “revolutions-restorations”, or even “passive revolutions”’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 252, Q8§25). In the latter sense, passive revolution is linked to insurrectionary mass mobilization from below while such class demands are restricted so that ‘changes in the world of production are accommodated within the current social formation’ (Sassoon, 1987, p. 207; see Femia, 1981, p. 260n.74). As Gramsci (1996, p. 360, Q5§119) notes in the case of the Risorgimento, ‘the bourgeoisie did not lead the people or seek its help to defeat feudal privileges; instead, it was the

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aristocracy that formed a strong party made up of people opposed to unbridled exploitation by the industrial bourgeoisie and to the consequences of industrialism’. In Italy, the ruling class systematically prevented the emergence of a ‘new structure from below’ and ever since ‘has made the preservation of this crystallised situation the raison d’être of its historical continuity’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 121–122, Q6§162). Perhaps for that reason, it was noted that there was a ‘congenital incapacity’ within the Partito d’Azione to exercise leadership while the Partito Moderato resorted to a form of ‘political-economic neo-Malthusianism’ to block substantive agrarian reform (Gramsci, 1996, p. 181, Q3§125). By extension, fascism in Italy was regarded as a continuation in the form of appearance of passive revolution in the twentieth century, just as liberalism was the form of appearance of passive revolution in the nineteenth-century (see Morton, 2018b). The contradictory combination of revolution-restoration that is emblematic of a passive revolution is therefore that of an insurrectionary force domesticated (Morton, 2010a, p. 330). Or, to turn to the primary source, the theory of passive revolution as revolution-restoration refers to a ‘domesticated dialectic’ within the struggle-driven process of historical development (Gramsci, 2007, p. 372, Q8§225; Gramsci, 2007, p. 253, Q8§27). This does not mean that passive revolutions are always consciously made by capitalists themselves; rather, the emphasis is shifted to the effects of transformations constituting capitalism as a mode of production and the consolidation of modern state power (Callinicos, 1989, p. 124). The forms of appearance that passive revolutions may also take do not imply inert, literally passive, processes. Everyday forms of passive revolution can be violent and brutal, the outcome neither predetermined nor inevitable. Hence, beyond the form of appearance of the Italian Risorgimento, a chain of passive revolutions called forth by capitalist modernity throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century may be identified, marking passive revolution as an essential form in the historical sociology of state-making processes. It indicates a description of capitalist modernity where there is a structural inability of the bourgeois political project to realize fully the practice of hegemony, delivering an incomplete process that becomes more the rule rather than the exception of state formation (Thomas, 2009, p. 154; Thomas, 2013, p. 25). Albeit without the direct intent of a bourgeois class, these processes of state formation have often culminated in the persistence of old regimes in the latter half of the nineteenth-century and, in the twentiethand twenty-first centuries, the failure of hegemony in peripheral capitalist modernity, notwithstanding the partial molecular absorption and redefinition of class interests from below (Endnotes, 2015, p. 86, 100; Mayer, 2010 [1981]; and, for example, Allinson and Anievas, 2010; Gray, 2010, 2014; Hesketh, 2017a; Modonesi, 2017; Munck, 2013; Roberts, 2015; Webber, 2016).

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Regardless of the form of appearance or the essential content of a passive revolution, it is crucial to appreciate the role of class struggles over the political form of the state and the relative permanency of passive revolution conditions in any history of state formation. Indeed, first raised elsewhere (Morton, 2013 [2011], pp. 237–244), is there a need to reflect on the condition of permanent passive revolution in state formation processes? After all, Gramsci reflects on this sense of permanency throughout the Prison Notebooks. For example, In the modern world, the equilibrium with catastrophic prospects occurs not between forces which could in the last analysis fuse and unite – albeit after a wearying and bloody process – but between forces whose opposition is historically incurable. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 222, Q13§27, emphasis added)

‘The thesis of the “passive revolution” as an interpretation of the Risorgimento’, Gramsci acknowledged, ‘and of every epoch characterised by complex historical upheavals ... [is in] danger of historical defeatism ... since the whole way of posing the question may induce a belief in some kind of fatalism’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 114, Q15§62). Two factors can therefore be underscored to account for social change or contradictions and conflict within the theory of passive revolution, checking the propensity of permanence. First, the concept of passive revolution ‘remains a dialectical one – in other words, presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis which can present intransigently all the potentialities for development’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 114, Q15§62). This means emphasizing the very contradictions of revolution-restoration and the role of popular masses in shaping the form and content of passive revolutions against state classes. The flow of organic and conjunctural movements within the structures of passive revolution are ultimately conditioned by the ‘relations of forces’ between contending class factions (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 177–185, Q13§17). Second, in developing the theory of passive revolution, Gramsci (2007, p. 357, Q8§210) posed himself the following question: ‘Should one regard as “revolutions” all those movements that describe themselves as “revolutions” in order to endow themselves with dignity and legitimacy?’ Hence, passive revolution is offered not only as an analysis of the specificity of Italian historical development (form of appearance) but also as a consideration of state formation conditions (essential form) through a method of historical analogy as an interpretative criterion (Gramsci, 1971, p. 54n.4, Q25§2; Gramsci, 1971, p. 114, Q15§62). Gramsci’s analysis of the specificity of Italian historical development and its form of appearance of passive revolution is thus developed ‘not as a programme ... but as a criterion of interpretation, in the absence of other active elements to a dominant extent’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 114, Q15§62). The explicative power of this method of interpreting state formation and the con-

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tradictions of class struggle therefore lies in ‘the method of historical analogy as an interpretative criterion’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 54n.4, Q25§2). As argued elsewhere (Morton 2007b, pp. 604–605), Gramsci derives certain principles of historical research linked to the circumstances of Italian state formation while comparing – through historical analogy – different historical processes and, therein, the particular configuration of class struggles over the political form of state and capitalist modernity. Within the conceptualization of passive revolution, then, there lies an alternative interpretative theory of the history of modern state formation, the making of revolutions, and the contradictions of class struggle. As a summing up of the internally related dimensions of uneven and combined development and passive revolution, Chris Hesketh (2017b, p. 403) states ‘the universal pressures generated by capitalist geopolitical competition are acknowledged but the geographical seats of class articulation remain the priority for analysis.’ The developmental unevenness of social property relations thus remains open-ended through conditions of class struggle, rather than closed or ensnared within the conditions of passive revolution and its logic of absorption. My argument, then, is that it is now possible to appreciate the concept and condition of passive revolution as a lateral field of causality to the structuring condition of uneven and combined development. This means that the concrete consideration of instances of passive revolution brings forth an engagement with state and subaltern class forces as agents that have been crucial in the making of modern states and transitions to capitalism. The concept of passive revolution offers a mode of theorizing both the inner class-driven dynamics of capitalist modernity within states across space and time and how these processes of developmental catch-up are internally related to the geopolitical pressures of the states-system. The Risorgimento is a complex and contradictory historical development that is made complete by all its antithetical elements, by its protagonists and antagonists, by their struggles and the reciprocal modifications that the struggles themselves determined, and also by the role of passive and latent forces, such as the great rural masses – in addition, of course, to the very important function of international relations. (Gramsci, 2007, p. 256. Q8§33)

Passive revolutions are therefore a working through of pre-established sovereignties that may both transform (revolution) and sustain (restoration) the change-inducing strains brought about by a transformation in social property relations. Hence, we can witness the dynamic category of passive revolution as situated in the nexus between state forms and geopolitical conditions of uneven and combined development.

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CONCLUSION: AGAINST POPPERIAN LOVERS OF FALSIFICATION Existing conceptualizations of uneven and combined development provide a static spatial countenance, which means that they are predominantly remiss in providing analysis of the causal effects of capitalist development. One consequence is that uneven and combined development approaches have been reluctant to deliver concrete accounts of the changing dynamics of developmental unevenness across space and time. For that reason, the chronotope of passive revolution – a category functioning across space and time – has been presented in this chapter as a concept and condition that has an affinity with the theory of uneven and combined development but without the erasure of agency. Said otherwise, uneven and combined development as the structuring condition and passive revolution with its emphasis on class agency are affinal and internally related concepts addressing how capitalist development unfolds and how class struggles between state and subaltern agents have produced and transformed space across time throughout variegated cycles of revolution and restoration. Passive revolution therefore provides a lateral field of causality or way of working through the internal dialectical relation between inherited processes of state formation and those ensuing class struggles that result from transformations in social property relations. How the force of capital – through its uneven and combined expansion on a world-scale – comes to change the meaning of the production of space and place through variegated passive revolutions is therefore significant in attempting to address the different functions of capitalist space across time. Instantiations of passive revolution are not part of a transhistorical universalization (or permanent passive revolution) but are, rather, part of a historically specific set of processes that exist within particular and local conditions. For that reason, this chapter has underscored the multilinear dialectic of uneven and combined development and the passive revolutionary road to modernity as internally related aspects of the same whole. The particularities of the form of appearance of passive revolution in producing and transforming space within local conditions, as part of the generalizing essential form of passive revolutions marking state formation processes within uneven and combined developmental circumstances, are therefore significant internally related aspects of capital’s entrance into modernity. As Gramsci (2007, p. 357, Q8§210) stated, writing in 1932, ‘the whole of historical materialism is a response to this question’, namely, ‘whether the processes of nature and history are invariably “evolutionary” or could also include “leaps”.’ Developmental catch-up is therefore very much about the spatial processes

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through which states and classes are ‘compelled to make leaps’ (Trotsky, 1980 [1936], p. 28). For Gramsci, writing earlier in 1930: In real history, these moments become entangled with one another, horizontally and vertically; that is through economic activity (horizontally) and territory (vertically) combining and diverging in various ways. And each of these combinations may be represented by its own organised economic and political expression. It is also necessary to bear in mind that international relations become intertwined with these internal relations of a nation-state, and this, in turn, creates peculiar and historically concrete combinations. An ideology born in a highly developed country is disseminated in a less developed country and has an effect on the local interplay of combinations. (Gramsci, 1996, p. 180, Q4§38, emphases added)

Passive revolution is therefore the essential form of this expression of historical geographical restructuring that illuminates the specific form of appearance embedded in spatial and temporal practices of state and class agents. Raised at the start of this chapter was a key question that can now be revisited as part of my conclusion. To recap, is there a danger that the concept of passive revolution loses critical purchase so that it moves along as effective description, rather than organizing it? What would have to unfold in the history of state formation so that specific instances of revolution-restoration were not a passive revolution? Lurking behind this question is, of course, Karl Popper’s (2002 [1935]) test of falsificationism: theories are best tested by attempting to falsify them, by selecting cases that are most likely to confound the theory in order to deliver hard confirmatory tests and lend it credence. My reaction to this would be aligned with Louis Althusser’s rebuttal of ‘all Popperian lovers of “falsification”’. For Althusser (1977, pp. 8–10), allotting a privileged role for error in the process of knowledge construction is paramount, thereby conferring on it a heuristic primacy over universal ‘truth’. One can also add to this point that any evidence in ‘scientific’ hypothesis testing and falsification may itself be made up of fallible premises, increasing the need to embrace the room for error acceptance in knowledge construction. The theory of passive revolution should not therefore be seen as an endeavor in the process of transhistorical knowledge creation seeking the science-envy status of positivism (e.g., Rosenberg, 2013a, 2013b). This would constitute a departure from historically specific analysis of modern capitalist political space. Following Gramsci’s methodological criteria on subaltern social groups, the goal is to produce integral history (understood relationally and intrinsically) and to reject extrinsic history (focusing on economic forces held as external to history). For Gramsci, one outcome could be analyses of state formation, ‘handled in the form of monographs and for each monograph one needs to gather an immense quantity of material that is often hard to collect’ (Gramsci, 2021, pp. 6–7, Q25§2).

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In my own work, articles have assessed changes in the form of appearance of passive revolution – from the upheaval of revolution to neoliberalism in Mexico (see Morton 2003b, 2010b) – as well as contributing to an assessment of the essential form, or the degree, of passive revolution as a world historical condition called forth by capitalist modernity. The eventual result was a focus on the political economy of uneven development and revolution and state in modern Mexico (Morton 2013 [2011]). In summing up this contribution, three guidelines can be offered against Popperian lovers of falsification and the science-envy of wannabe positivists. First, as discussed above, there are the two clear factors that Gramsci delivers as constitutive of the essential form of passive revolution. Namely, that conditions of passive revolution entail (1) a revolution without mass participation, a revolution from above; or (2) a revolutionary transformation that becomes pressed into a restoration, with popular demands through class struggle still playing a role. Second, there are the methodological criteria that Gramsci also delivers from the ‘margins of history’, on the history of subaltern groups, that assist in defining a yardstick for the form of appearance of passive revolution in the history of states and groups of states (Gramsci, 2021, pp. 6–7, Q25§2; Gramsci, 2021, pp. 10–11, §5). Third, albeit without the space to elaborate further here, passive revolutions of various hues can be linked to Philip McMichael’s (1990) methodological approach of incorporated comparison. As first outlined in detail elsewhere (see Morton, 2010a, pp. 331–335; Morton, 2010b, pp. 12–13; Morton, 2013 [2011], pp. 244–246; and Hesketh, 2010, p. 385) and subsequently picked up in other places (Anievas and Nişancioğlu, 2015, p. 55), this is an interpretive method focusing on internally related instances of state transition within the totality of world-historical processes, where the particulars of state formation (the form of appearance of passive revolution) are realized within the general totalizing features of capitalist modernity (the essential form of passive revolution) as a self-forming whole. Instances in the form of appearance (inter alia the Italian Risorgimento, the Meiji Restoration, the Mexican Revolution, or the Bolivian National Revolution) might thus be understood as comparable social phenomena or differentiated outcomes of an historically integrated process in the essential form of passive revolution. These are hopefully useful guidelines in defining new rounds of passive revolution studies outside of the pursuit of universal pretensions to science transcending historical eras. The history of passive revolution is unfinished just as much as there is an unfinished history to passive revolution studies.

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REFERENCES Allinson, J. & Anievas, A. (2010). The uneven and combined development of the Meiji restoration: A passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity. Capital & Class, 34(3): 469–490. Anievas, A. & Nişancioğlu, K. (2015). How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Althusser, L. (1977). Unfinished history. Introduction to D. Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso. Bieler, A. & Morton, A.D. (2018a). Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bieler, A. & Morton, A.D. (2018b). Interlocutions with passive revolution. Thesis Eleven, 147(1): 9–28. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State, trans. D. Fernbach. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Burawoy, M. (1989). Two methods in search of social science: Skocpol versus Trotsky. Theory and Society, 18(6): 759–805. Callinicos, A. (1989). Bourgeois revolutions and historical materialism. International Socialism, Second Series, No. 43: 113–171. Callinicos, A. (2010). The limits of passive revolution. Capital & Class, 34(3): 491–507. Endnotes. (2015). Unity in Separation (October). London: Endnotes. Femia, J.V. (1981). Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fifi, G. (2023). On Antonio Gramsci’s hidden concept: Fetishism. Capital & Class, OnlineFirst: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​030981682211458 Gramsci, A. (1994 [1926]). Some aspects of the southern question. In A. Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, ed. R. Bellamy, trans. V. Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings, 1921-1926, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1992). The Prison Notebooks, Vol. 1, ed. and intro. J.A. Buttigieg, trans. J.A. Buttigieg and A. Callari. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (1996). Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, ed. and trans. J.A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, ed. and trans. J.A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2021). Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebook 25, ed. and trans. J.A. Buttigieg and M.E. Green. New York: Columbia University Press. Gray, K. (2010). Labour and the state in China’s passive revolution. Capital & Class, 34(3): 449–467. Gray, K. (2014). Labour and Development in East Asia: Social Forces and Passive Revolution. London: Routledge. Gray, K. (2022). Revolution and restoration in post-war East Asia: A Gramscian approach to the ‘history problem. Capital & Class, OnlineFirst: https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1177/​03098168221139288

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Harootunian, H. (2015). Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Harootunian, H. (2020). Some reflections on Gramsci: The Southern Question in the deprovincializing of Marx, In R.M. Dainotto and F. Jameson (eds), Gramsci in the World. Durham: Duke University Press. Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hesketh, C. (2010). From passive revolution to silent revolution: Class forces and the production of state, space and scale in modern Mexico. Capital & Class, 34(3): 383–408. Hesketh, C. (2017a). Spaces of Capital / Spaces of Resistance: Mexico and the Global Political Economy. Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press. Hesketh, C. (2017b). Passive revolution: A universal concept with geographical seats. Review of International Studies, 43(3): 389–408. Hesketh, C. (2019). A Gramscian conjuncture in Latin America? Reflections on violence, hegemony and geographical difference? Antipode, 51(5): 1474–1494. Hesketh, C. (2020). Between Pachakuti and passive revolution: The search for post-colonial sovereignty in Bolivia. Journal of Historical Sociology, 33(4): 567–586. Hesketh, C. and Morton, A.D. (2014). Spaces of uneven development and class struggle in Bolivia: Transformation or trasformismo? Antipode, 46(1): 149–169. McMichael, P. (1990). Incorporated comparison within a world-historical perspective: An alternative comparative method. American Sociological Review, 55(3): 385–397. Maria Antentas, J. (2023). The 15M, Podemos and the long crisis in Spain: Gramscian perspectives. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 28(3): 365–380. Mayer, A.J. (2010 [1981]). The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. London: Verso. Modonesi, M. (2017). Revoluciones pasivas en América. México, D.F.: Editorial Itaca. Moe, N. (2002). The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morton, A.D. (2003a). Historicizing Gramsci: Situating ideas in and beyond their context. Review of International Political Economy, 10(1): 118–146. Morton, A.D. (2003b). Structural change and neoliberalism in Mexico: ‘Passive revolution’ in the global political economy. Third World Quarterly, 24(4): 631–653. Morton, A.D. (2007a). Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. London: Pluto Press. Morton, A.D. (2007b). Waiting for Gramsci: State formation, passive revolution and the international. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(3): 597–621. Morton, A.D. (2010a). The continuum of passive revolution. Capital & Class, 34(3): 315–342. Morton, A.D. (2010b). Reflections on uneven development: Mexican revolution, primitive accumulation, passive revolution. Latin American Perspectives, 37(1): 7–34. Morton, A.D. (2013 [2011]). Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development, Updated edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Morton, A.D. (2018a). The architecture of passive revolution: Society, state and space in modern Mexico. Journal of Latin American Studies, 50(1): 117–152. Morton, A.D. (2018b). The great trasformismo. Globalizations, 15(7): 956–976. Munck, R. (2013). Rethinking Latin America: Development, Hegemony and Social Transformation. London: Palgrave. Popper, K. (2002 [1935]). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge.

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Riley, D.J. & Desai, M. (2007). The passive revolutionary route to the modern world: Italy and India in comparative perspective. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49(4): 815–847. Rioux, S. (2015). Mind the (theoretical) gap: On the poverty of international relations theorising of uneven and combined development. Global Society, 29(4): 481–509. Roberts, P. (2015). Passive revolution in Brazil: Struggles over hegemony, religion and development. Third World Quarterly, 36(9): 1663–1681. Roccu, R. (2017). Passive revolution revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to ‘our great and terrible world’. Capital & Class, 41(3): 537–559. Rosenberg, J. (2006). Why is there no international historical sociology. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3): 307–340. Rosenberg, J. (2013a). Kenneth Waltz and Leon Trotsky: Anarchy in the mirror of uneven and combined development. International Politics, 50(2): 183–230. Rosenberg, J. (2013b). The ‘philosophical premises’ of uneven and combined development. Review of International Studies, 39(3): 569–597. Rosengarten, F. (1984–85). The Gramsci-Trotsky question (1922–1932). Social Text, 11: 65–95. Rosengarten, F. (2009). The contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s views on Italy’s ‘Southern Question’. In J. Francese (ed.), Perspectives on Gramsci: Politics, Culture and Social Theory. London: Routledge. Sassoon, A.S. (1987). Gramsci’s Politics, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thomas, P.D. (2009). The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leiden: Brill. Thomas, P.D. (2013). Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern prince. Thesis Eleven, 117(1): 20–39. Trotsky, L. (1980 [1936]). The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 Volumes. New York: Pathfinder Press. Webber, J.R. (2016). Evo Morales and the political economy of passive revolution in Bolivia, 2006-15. Third World Quarterly, 37(10): 1855–1876. Villacañas Berlanga, J.L. (2022). La revolución pasiva de Franco: Las entrañas del franquismoy de la transición desde una nueva perspectiva. Madrid: HarperCollins Ibérica.

11. War of maneuver and war of position: Gramsci and the dialectic of revolution Daniel Egan INTRODUCTION Antonio Gramsci’s principal contribution to Marxist revolutionary strategy lies in his analysis of the relationship between ‘war of maneuver’ and ‘war of position.’ While these terms are most closely associated with Gramsci’s analysis, we must begin by noting that the foundation for these concepts did not originate with Gramsci. The German military historian Hans Delbrück highlighted the distinction between a strategy of annihilation and a strategy of attrition in his four-volume History of the Art of War, first published in 1900. A strategy of annihilation, he argued, was based on the application of superior forces to ‘seek out the main force of the enemy, defeat it, and follow up the victory until the defeated side subjects itself to the will of the victor and accepts his conditions’ (Delbrück, 1990, p. 293). In contrast, a strategy of attrition was based ‘not so much … on completely defeating the enemy as on wearing him out and exhausting him by blows and destruction of all kinds to the extent that in the end he prefers to accept the conditions of the victor’ (Delbrück, 1990, p. 294). This did not preclude the use of battle to defeat the enemy’s main force, but it also included besieging enemy forces, cutting off their lines of communication and supply, engaging in a protracted series of hit-and-run attacks that undermined their will to continue fighting, isolating them from potential allies, etc. The first major application of these concepts as metaphors for revolutionary strategy came in the debate at the 1905 Congress of the German Social Democratic Party between Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg concerning the mass strike. In contrast to Luxemburg’s embrace of the mass strike as the principal form of revolutionary strategy (Luxemburg, 1970), for Kautsky the mass strike was at best a matter of tactics than one of strategy. This was reflected in the distinction he made – borrowing from Delbrück – between the ‘strategy 189

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of overthrow’ and the ‘strategy of attrition’ (Kautsky, 1983, p. 54). Kautsky defined the former as a strategy of ‘bold attack with a few decisive blows’ (Kautsky, 1983, p. 55) and argued, using Engels’ 1895 foreword to Marx’s Class Struggles in France (Marx, 1964) as his foundation, that developments in military organization and weaponry had rendered this strategy moot for the German workers’ movement. In these new conditions, a more gradual, protracted strategy was required to build the forces of the proletariat and to sufficiently weaken those of the bourgeoisie. Kautsky defined a process of ‘growing into socialism’ (Kautsky, 1996, p. 17) as consisting of two contradictory forces: (1) the growing concentration of capital, which provides the material foundation on which socialism can emerge, and (2) the growing strength, both in terms of numbers and organization, of the proletariat.1 The mass strike as an offensive weapon became relevant for Kautsky only at the point at which the decisive revolutionary struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie begins – that is, only at the end of the process of ‘growing into socialism’. Until then, the mass strike could only be a defensive weapon.2 Gramsci developed the metaphor of war of maneuver/war of position to a much greater extent than did Kautsky. In the first place, it was grounded in an understanding of class power that was much more complex and dialectical than the relatively unilinear and determinist theory of Kautsky (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). In addition, while Kautsky’s use of the metaphor was primarily descriptive, Gramsci’s use of the military metaphor assumed a much more complex, analytical function. ‘War of maneuver’ and ‘war of position’ were essential components of a theory of power and revolution in the context of monopoly capitalism.

HEGEMONY AND CLASS POWER Before we can understand the full import of Gramsci’s analysis of war of maneuver/war of position, we need to examine, if only briefly, the theory of class power on which it was based. While never doubting the principle that what was ‘essential … [was] the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 161), Gramsci was critical of the economic determinism – characteristic of both the Second and Third Internationals – in which politics and culture (the ‘superstructure’) were seen as simply reflections of the economic ‘base’, regarding it as ‘primitive infantilism’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 407). He argued that the base does not determine the specific forms taken by the superstructure in some mechanical fashion, but rather creates ‘a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions involving the entire subsequent development

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of national life’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 184). The relationship between the superstructures and the base, he argued, takes the form of a ‘historical bloc’ in which material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 377)

Within this historical bloc, there are two major superstructural levels: ‘political society,’ which he defined as the coercive apparatus of state power which the ruling class uses to enforce its rule, and ‘civil society,’ which he defined as the network of social institutions through which the ‘“spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group’ is organized (Gramsci, 1971, p. 12). Civil society received greater attention from Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, but this should not be taken as evidence that he attributed less importance to political society – the relevance of political society had already been well established, both by other Marxists as well as by the daily lived reality of fascist Italy.3 In addition to the economic compulsion resulting from its control of the means of production and the exercise of coercive state power, the ruling class, if it hopes to reproduce its class power, must also exercise intellectual and moral leadership – hegemony – and this requires that it construct and reproduce a ‘national-popular collective will’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 130) through which subordinate classes consent to the power of the ruling class. Hegemony is not imposed on the subordinate classes as an alien entity. It is instead a historically specific, unstable equilibrium in which the ruling class grants concessions ‘of an economic-corporate kind’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 161) which do not call into question fundamental social relations. The nature of the compromises the ruling class must make in order to secure its role as the leading class is specific to particular social formations at particular periods of time. Therefore, not only does hegemony not take a general form dictated by the mode of production, it is also far from complete. As a result, it is very likely that a ruling class will experience historical periods in which its leadership is called into question by the subordinate classes. These are, for Gramsci, moments of hegemonic crisis. A hegemonic crisis occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A ‘crisis of authority’ is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210)

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Hegemonic crises are not likely to be conjunctural crises, or those ‘which appear occasional, immediate, almost accidental,’ but rather are more likely to be organic or ‘relatively permanent’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 177) in nature. These moments compel the ruling class to engage in ‘passive revolution,’ or the development of ‘molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 109). These changes are meant to disorganize transformative movements of the subordinate classes and, by articulating a new structure of consent, restore the leadership of the ruling class. The success of passive revolution is a function not only of the ruling class’s ability to respond in this moment of crisis, but also of the extent to which it faces a new national-popular collective will from below. In other words, passive revolution requires that the ruling class has a coherent hegemonic project with which to renew its leadership and that it is capable of disrupting any attempt by the subordinate classes to construct a counter-hegemonic alternative. Gramsci made clear that the distinction between political society and civil society is ‘merely methodological’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 160). They are part of a ‘dual perspective’ in which ‘the levels of force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilization’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 170) are elements of a dialectical totality. The coercive power associated with political society is generally directed against those subordinate groups which have sought to remain outside of, or have been excluded from, the national-popular collective will, but the exercise of such power is based on the legitimacy that comes from hegemonic power. Likewise, in the event of a hegemonic crisis, the ruling class can make use of its command of coercive power in the hope of restoring order and providing it with the ability to forge a new hegemonic compromise.

WAR AS METAPHOR For Gramsci, war of maneuver and war of position represent the strategic expression, in metaphorical form, of his ‘dual perspective.’ His embrace of the Clausewitzian principle that war is the continuation of politics by other means – ‘[w]ar is an aspect of political life; it is the continuation, in other forms, of a given policy’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 268) – provided a general foundation upon which he could make the metaphorical connection between military strategy and revolutionary strategy. The First World War provided a more historically specific foundation for this connection. For Gramsci, the trench warfare that characterized the Western Front during First World War marked an important transition in military strategy from a war of maneuver to a war of position.4 Both the Entente and the Central Powers entered the war with strategic doctrines that emphasized taking the offensive and engaging in a war of maneuver. However, both sides soon discovered that the uneven development of military

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technology favored defensive rather than offensive war (Keegan, 1999). The failure to achieve decisive victories on the battlefield led both sides to dig in and engage in a static war of attrition. The war of position, however, represented much more than this. It was in fact a form of total war. It encompassed the entire social formation of the contending powers: A war of position in fact does not consist solely of a set of actual trenches; it comprises the entire organizational and industrial structure of the territory that lies behind the arrayed forces, and it is especially dependent on the rapid-fire capacity and concentration of cannons, machine guns, and rifles (and on the abundance of materiel that makes it possible to replace quickly any equipment lost after an enemy breakthrough) (Gramsci 2007: 162)

It requires ‘enormous masses of people to make huge sacrifices’, and as a result ‘a more ‘interventionist’ kind of government’ is necessary, one that will ‘engage more openly in the offensive against the opponents and ensure, once and for all, the ‘impossibility’ of internal disintegration’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 109). In addition to being a strategy encompassing the entire depth of a social formation, the war of position was based on its extension over long periods of time: In military war, when the strategic goal, i.e., the destruction of the enemy’s army and the occupation of its territory, is achieved, there is peace. Moreover, one should point out that in order for the war to end, it is enough that the strategic goal be only potentially achieved: in other words, it is enough that there be no doubt that an army can no longer fight and that the victorious army ‘could’ occupy the enemy’s territory. Political struggle is enormously more complex: in a certain sense it can be compared to colonial wars or to old wars of conquest when, that is, the victorious army occupies or intends to occupy permanently all or part of the conquered territory. In that case, the defeated army is disarmed and dispersed, but the struggle continues on the terrain of politics and of military ‘preparation.’ (Gramsci, 1992, pp. 218–219)

The war of position is thus a deep, protracted struggle in which the lines between ‘war’ and peace’ are blurred both in space and in time. This, however, does not mean that the tactics of assault and incursion and the war of maneuver should now be considered to be utterly erased from the study of military science; that would be a serious error. But in wars among the more industrially and socially advanced states, these methods of war must be seen to have a reduced tactical function rather than a strategic function; their place in military history is analogous to that of siege warfare in the previous period. (Gramsci, 2007, p. 162)

The war of maneuver is, in contrast to the war of position, relatively limited in terms of time (emphasizing speed) and space (emphasizing decisive

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assaults against the weakest point of the enemy’s forces). It is on this basis that Gramsci employed the war of maneuver/war of position metaphor in his discussion of revolutionary strategy. Gramsci rejected the elevation of the October Revolution as a model to be applied in all revolutionary situations. ‘In the East,’ by which Gramsci referred to the more peripheral regions of the capitalist system, Gramsci wrote, ‘the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 176). With a relatively underdeveloped civil society, revolutionary strategy in the East required a direct frontal assault against the principal form of bourgeois political power: the state. Gramsci provided a description of this strategy in the context of his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s discussion of the mass strike, which Gramsci called ‘the most significant theory of the war of maneuver applied to the study of history and to the art of politics’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 161): The immediate economic factor (crises, etc.) is seen as the field artillery employed in war to open a breach in the enemy’s defenses big enough to permit one’s troops to break through and gain a definitive strategic victory – or, at least, to achieve what is needed for a definitive victory. Naturally, in historical studies, the impact of the immediate economic factor is seen as much more complex than the impact of field artillery in a war of maneuver. The immediate economic factor was expected to have a double effect: (1) to open a breach in the enemy’s defenses, after throwing him into disarray and making him lose faith in himself, his forces, and his future; (2) to organize in a flash one’s own troops, to create cadres, or at least to place the existing cadres (formed, up to that point, by the general historical process) at lightning speed in positions from which they could direct the dispersed troops; to produce, in a flash, a concentration of ideology and of the ends to be achieved. (Gramsci, 2007, pp. 161–162).5

In contrast, Gramsci argued that ‘in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements (Gramsci, 2007, p. 169).6 With its more fully developed civil society, a direct, lightning frontal assault against the state in the West would likely fail. Such a strategy reflects an ‘inaccurate understanding of the nature of the state (in the full sense: dictatorship + hegemony) … [and] results in underestimating the adversary and his fighting organization’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 117). Strategy in the West must instead take into account the significance of hegemony: The superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare. Sometimes, it would appear that a ferocious artillery attack against enemy trenches had leveled everything, whereas in fact it had caused only superficial damage to the defenses of the adversary, so that when the assailants advanced they encountered a defensive front that was still effective. The same thing occurs in politics during great economic crises. A crisis does not enable the attacking troops to organize

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themselves at lightning speed in time and in space; much less does it infuse them with a fighting spirit. On the other side of the coin, the defenders are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their defensive positions, even in the midst of rubble; nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future. (Gramsci, 2007, pp. 162–163)

In order for victory to be ‘definitively decisive’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 109), it is not enough to win the enemy’s outer perimeter defenses. The core of the enemy’s fortifications – that is, the hegemonic power of the ruling class – must be won. In addition, there is also a temporal aspect to the war of maneuver/war of position distinction. While a strategy of war of maneuver may have been relevant in an earlier stage of history in the West, Gramsci argued that this was no longer the case. The revolutions of 1848 had, he argued, been grounded in a Jacobin ideal of a revolutionary seizure of political power by a politically conscious minority of workers. The October Revolution was an important milestone in the transition to the war of position, one in which the ‘events of 1917 were the last instance’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 163) of the political war of maneuver. For Gramsci, the 1848 concept of the war of movement is precisely the concept of permanent revolution; in politics, the war of position is the concept of hegemony that can come into existence after certain things are already in place, namely, the large popular organizations of the modern type that represent, as it were, the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the war of position. (Gramsci, 2007, p. 267)

His critique of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution saw it as ‘a reflection of the general-economic-cultural-social conditions of a country in which the structures of national life are embryonic and unsettled and cannot become “trench or fortress”’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 168). Given this, Gramsci identified Trotsky as ‘the political theorist of frontal assault, at a time when it could only lead to defeat’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 109). In contrast, Gramsci argued that Lenin recognized the necessity – following the failure to extend proletarian revolutions beyond Russia (e.g., in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland) in the aftermath of the October Revolution – to shift strategy from the war of maneuver to the war of position with the formula of the united front.7 Gramsci concluded that revolutionary strategy in the advanced capitalist societies must take the form of a protracted process of ‘siege warfare’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 109) in order to defeat the capitalist class. In addition to being a protracted form of struggle, the war of position goes beyond more traditional, narrowly defined economistic or parliamentary forms of struggle to encompass the entire breadth and depth of a social formation. It is a strategy that recognizes capitalism as a totality, the components of which can simul-

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taneously become antagonistic to varying degrees, and thereby represents a complete re-envisioning of ‘politics’ in which education, popular culture, the family, religion, mass media, etc. as well as economy and state are terrains of struggle. At the same time, an essential component of the war of position is that social transformation is not something that happens ‘after’ the revolution, but rather is an inherent component of the process of revolution itself. Subordinate classes, through their collective self-organization, must create a new civil society expressing social relations appropriate for a socialist mode of production.

THE GRAMSCIAN ANALYSIS OF WAR OF MANEUVER/WAR OF POSITION Gramsci’s analysis of class power and revolutionary strategy has had a profound impact on a variety of left forces – the New Left (Boggs, 1976; Piccone, 1976), Eurocommunism (Togliatti, 1979; Simon, 1991), post-Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) – over the past number of decades. While commentators have brought Gramsci’s dialectical analysis of hegemony to the fore, correctly identifying it as a major contribution to Marxism, they have often gone on to discuss the war of maneuver/war of position metaphor in ways that suggest an undialectical, stagist understanding, which relegates the war of maneuver to the far future, as something that is relevant only after a successful war of position. Femia, for example, states that [t]he ‘military’ aspect of the struggle becomes especially important when the proletariat has at last conquered the institutions of civil society and solidified a new counter-hegemony. At this point there remains the climactic attack on the state fortress: the ‘revolution of spirit’ now gives way to the ‘revolution in arms’. (Femia, 1987, pp. 206–207)

Buci-Glucksmann notes that there may be conditions in which a ‘frontal attack’ is necessary, but only after the successful completion of the war of position: Under different conditions, and in different modalities, it is still necessary to ‘smash the state.’ But the state that has to be smashed will already be a state that has been transformed, deprived of its historical basis, with its mechanisms and hegemonic apparatuses undermined by a balance of forces unprecedentedly favorable to the people. (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980, p. 281)

For Ransome, the war of position is a ‘phase of revolutionary practice [that] must come before the final and relatively short phase of “military” assault’ (Ransome, 1992, p. 148), while Boggs quite directly defines war of maneuver (and, by implication, the war of position) as a ‘stage’ (Boggs, 1976, p. 114).

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Conceptualizing the war of maneuver/war of position metaphor in this manner suggests that what makes the war of position ‘decisive’ is that it so fundamentally weakens the power of the state that the state falls like a house of cards in the final moment of the revolutionary process – the war of maneuver. In Simon’s words, once a ‘a decisive shift in the balance of forces in civil society … has taken place, the opportunities for violent counter-revolutionary attacks from the right will be greatly restricted and will ultimately fail even if they do take place’ (Simon, 1991, p. 76). All three cases – New Left, Eurocommunism and post-Marxism – defined a ‘Gramscian’ perspective as offering a democratic, counter-hegemonic strategy that would allow the left in various advanced capitalist social formations to leave behind the legacy of ‘Leninism’ and thus present a more palatable form of Marxism (Harman, 1983; Greaves, 2009; Mandel, 1978; Robaina, 2006; Salvadori, 1979). The war of maneuver/war of position metaphor has played a significant role in this project. Boggs, for example, argues that the distinction between war of maneuver and war of position reflects the difference between ‘the classical Leninist model of “minority revolution” [based on] the superimposition of a new order from above, which cannot help but take on a mechanistic and elitist character’ (Boggs, 1976, p. 115, emphasis in original) and a model of revolution – which he labels ‘Gramscian’ – which is ‘infinitely more complex and multi-dimensional, with more of a popular or consensual basis’ (Boggs, 1976, p. 115); he further pointed to ‘the Leninist focus on the “conjunctural”’ (Boggs, 1976, p. 53) in associating war of maneuver with a ‘passing and momentary’ (Boggs, 1976, p. 114) stage of revolution, in contrast to the more organic nature of war of position. Adamson argues that Gramsci’s war of position represents ‘a fundamentally new theory of revolution’ in which ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat loses its Leninist connotations and arrives instead only in a majoritarian form’ (Adamson, 1980, p. 225), while Femia likewise identifies Gramsci’s analysis of revolution as ‘the abandonment of the hallowed Bolshevik model’ (Femia, 1987, p. 53). For their part, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) distinction between democratic and authoritarian forms of hegemony reflects a counterposition of Gramsci and Lenin, attributing to the former a cultural and participatory form of struggle and, to the latter, a centralized, militaristic form. Distancing Gramsci from Lenin in this way accepts as given a definition of ‘Leninism’ more closely associated with Stalinist distortions of Lenin’s work, and so obscures the way that Gramsci’s work was built on a foundation provided by Lenin (Coutinho, 2012; Hoffman, 1984; Thomas, 2010). Setting up Gramsci against Lenin reproduces a one-dimensional understanding of the relationship between war of maneuver and war of position in which they are seen as distinct rather than interrelated strategies. I would argue that Gramsci’s war of maneuver/war of position metaphor has suffered from a process of reification similar to that of Marx and Engels’

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base/superstructure metaphor (Sayer, 1987; Williams, 1977); indeed, it is not a coincidence that the rejection of a deterministic understanding of the latter was a central feature of Gramsci’s Marxism. Just as the problematic nature of the base/superstructure metaphor is less a product of the logic underlying the metaphor and more the result of an uncritical acceptance of the way in which fetishized social relations appear as ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ within capitalism, the reification of the war of maneuver/war of position metaphor comes from the way in which they appear to be distinct strategies in time and space that are at best related in a stagist manner and at worst are mutually exclusive. There is another important subsidiary consequence of the counterposition of Gramsci to Lenin. The Gramscian analysis of war of position sees it as a form of ‘prefigurative’ politics, one which expresses ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977, p. 100) and thereby provides ‘a real alternative to the bureaucratic hierarchy, the power of the centralized state, and the social division of labor characteristic of bourgeois society’ (Boggs, 1977, p. 99). The idea here is that the creation of new social relations based on solidarity and cooperation cannot wait until after the seizure of power in the Leninist sense, but rather must be an organic component of the revolutionary process itself. In this context, strategy can become a fatal constraint on the diversity and creativity of forms of resistance, each one valuable in its own right, which emerge from the daily experience of exploitation and oppression (Holloway, 2002; 2010). Associating strategy with Leninism, however, comes at a cost. Specific movement organizations may identify their specific terrains of struggle as part of a war of position, and there is no end to the number or diversity of possible struggles or to the variety of organizational forms taken by such struggles. On their own, however, these struggles will have at best tactical significance. It is one thing to argue that modern revolutionary strategy is akin to siege warfare. It is another to say that the siege can and should be imposed in places and in ways without reference to the specific strengths and weaknesses of the enemy at specific moments in time and space. In the absence of strategy – that is, in the absence of some way of bringing these tactical challenges together in a coherent manner – prefigurative politics is defensive rather than offensive. If we accept the relevance of Gramsci’s military metaphor for contemporary revolutionary strategy, a war of position can take place only through the agency of some form of strategic political organization that can bring together in a coherent manner the multitude of local struggles in such a way as to achieve the goal of revolutionary social transformation. The purpose of such an organization is not to impose specific strategies, tactics, and organizational forms on popular struggles, but rather to facilitate their autonomous development and

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initiative in ways that ensure that the subordinate classes themselves, and not some entity speaking in their name, become the rulers of the new society. At the same time, this organization can provide a space in which popular struggles can learn from each other, coordinate their activities, and move beyond a partial, localist understanding of politics to a more global one. Gramsci’s critique of the Italian Socialist Party’s failure to provide appropriate strategic leadership for the movement from below to create workers’ councils during the biennio rosso of 1919–1920 (see, for example, Gramsci, 1978) was an acknowledgment of the limits of a purely spontaneous, prefigurative politics and served as the foundation for the central role played by the ‘modern prince’ – that is, the party – in the Prison Notebooks. His concept of the party expressed an organic and dialectical integration of spontaneity and organization, of collective self-activity and leadership, without which any revolutionary strategy, be it based on a war of maneuver or a war of position, is impossible. The ‘mass element’ of the party, he wrote, consists of those whose participation takes the form of discipline and loyalty, rather than any creative spirit or organizational ability. Without these the party would not exist, it is true, but it is also true that neither could the party exist with these alone. They are a force in so far as there is somebody to centralize, organize and discipline them. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 152)

It also consists of a ‘principal cohesive element, which centralizes nationally and renders effective and powerful a complex of forces which left to themselves would count for little or nothing’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 152), and Gramsci was perfectly comfortable using military language in reference to party leadership: It is also true that neither could this element form the party alone; however, it could do so more than could the first element considered. One speaks of generals without an army, but in reality it is easier to form an army than to form generals. So much is this true that an already existing army is destroyed if it loses its generals, while the existence of a united group of generals who agree among themselves and have common aims soon creates an army even where none exists. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 152–153)

Leadership and masses are related through democratic centralism, a ‘“centralism” in movement’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 188) in which ‘unity between “spontaneity” and “conscious leadership” or “discipline” is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes, in so far as this is mass politics and not merely an adventure by groups claiming to represent the masses’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 198).8 This is in contrast to what Gramsci called bureaucratic centralism, a situation in which party organization reproduces passivity among the rank-and-file membership and limits initiative to those relative few who

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occupy leadership positions. Gramsci was ‘against ‘vanguards’ without an army behind them, against commandos without infantry and artillery, but not against vanguards and commandos if they are functions of a complex and regular organism (Gramsci, 2007, p. 382).9 Those who identify ‘party’ with its Leninist permutations have been too quick to identify Gramsci’s war of position with the rejection of centralized organization. The specific form which such an organization will take – what this ‘new political instrument’ (Harnecker, 2007, p. 83) or ‘a party of a different type’ (Lebowitz, 2010, p. 161) will look like – will be a function of a specific set of material conditions and balance of forces and so cannot be mapped out in advance. There can be, however, no doubt as to the necessity of such an organization for the success of the Gramscian war of position.

CONCLUSION The war of maneuver/war of position metaphor has played a central role in Gramsci’s Marxism. The significance which Gramsci’s work has come to take in contemporary left social theory and political strategy is due in large part to the power of this metaphor. Gramsci did warn that ‘comparisons between military art and politics should always be made with a grain of salt, that is, only as stimuli for thought and as terms simplified ad absurdum’ (Gramsci, 1992, p. 217). To be fair, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks constitute a very fragmentary and non-linear foundation for his theoretical work, and so it is not surprising that his use of the war of maneuver/war of position metaphor should present some opportunities for confusion. That being said, an analysis of the metaphor that remains true to Gramsci’s non-deterministic Marxism must avoid the pitfalls associated with its reification. I would argue that we can accept Gramsci’s argument that the war of position is ‘decisive,’ but only to the extent that revolutionary forces organize the war of position in such a way that it incorporates the war of maneuver. An examination of the history of siege warfare can provide some help in understanding what this looks like (Egan, 2016). An essential feature of siege warfare throughout Western history has been the fact that the possibility of direct assault was built into the siege. In ancient and medieval siege warfare, a besieged population’s fear of what awaited them if they rejected surrender and the fortified city or castle ultimately fell to assault by the besieging army following a protracted siege was often enough for them to choose a timely surrender. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the development of modern forms of siegecraft dictated that each step in the siege – choosing where to locate lines of trenches, artillery batteries, troop concentrations, etc. – was predicated upon selecting the weakest point of the enemy’s fortification and planning a direct assault against that point. A Gramscian war of position must similarly be informed by the strategic questions more com-

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monly associated with the war of maneuver. Doing so allows us to recognize the moments of force that are inherent in a counter-hegemonic strategy, just as moments of consent are inherent in the use of revolutionary coercion. The seizure of the outer trenches is not sufficient for victory, but it is a necessary feature of any successful taking of the fortress of hegemony. If we accept the validity of Gramsci’s ‘dual perspective,’ which is the political foundation for the war of maneuver/war of position metaphor, then we must acknowledge that war of maneuver and war of position are inseparable parts of a dialectical process of revolutionary change. Capitalist class power expresses a dialectical totality of coercion and consent, and so must revolutionary challenges to that power.

NOTES 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

In contrast to the evolutionary model of the transition to socialism articulated by Eduard Bernstein, Kautsky saw this process very differently; for him, ‘growing into socialism means growing into great struggles that will convulse the entire political system, that must continually become more powerful and can end only with the defeat and expropriation of the capitalist class’ (Kautsky, 1996, p. 18). Kautsky’s critique of Luxemburg was a very one-dimensional one that failed to appreciate the complex, dialectical nature of her analysis of the mass strike. See Egan (2019). As Anderson points out, Gramsci ‘never intended to deny or rescind the classical axioms of that tradition on the inevitable role of social coercion within any great historical transformation, so long as classes subsisted. His objective was, in one of his phrases, to ‘complement’ treatment of the one with an exploration of the other’ (Anderson, 1976, p. 47). It is notable that the Eastern Front did not see the same emphasis on trench warfare found on the Western Front. In addition to more substantial differences in the military capabilities of the competing armies, the Eastern Front was much broader and more open than the tight confines of the Western Front. As a result, while geography clearly favored the defense on the Western Front, this was not so on the Eastern Front (Keegan, 1999). Gramsci’s representation of Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike, like that of Kautsky before him, appears very one-dimensional. As Egan (2019) argues, Luxemburg’s mass strike is much closer to Gramsci’s war of position than he seems to indicate. This geographic distinction should not be taken too literally. Gramsci noted that ‘East and West are arbitrary and conventional [(historical)] constructions’ (Gramsci, 2007, p. 176). The distinction is better understood as one between core and periphery within capitalism. As he did with Luxemburg, Gramsci mischaracterized Trotsky as a theorist of the offensive. In his leadership roles in both the Red Army and the Communist International, Trotsky clearly expressed his opposition to the elevation of the theory of the offensive as a revolutionary principle and was a strong advocate of the Comintern’s united front strategy (Anderson, 1976; Saccarelli, 2008).

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8.

Democratic centralism was for Gramsci was ‘a continual adaptation of the organization to the real movement, a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience’ (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 188–189). In this regard, Gramsci’s use of the vanguard metaphor is much closer to that of Lenin than those who equate Lenin with ‘Leninism’. See Egan (2022).

9.

REFERENCES Adamson, W.L. (1980). Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Anderson, P. (1976). The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review 100: 5–78. Boggs, C. (1976). Gramsci’s Marxism. London: Pluto Press. Boggs, C. (1977). Marxism, prefigurative communism, and the problem of workers’ control. Radical America 11(6): 99–122. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Coutinho, C.N. (2012). Gramsci’s Political Thought. Leiden: Brill. Delbrück, H. (1990). The Dawn of Modern Warfare: History of the Art of War, Volume IV. Translated by W.J. Renfroe, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Egan, D. (2016). Gramsci’s war of position as siege warfare: Some lessons from history. Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 44(4): 435–450. Egan, D. (2019). Rosa Luxemburg and the mass strike: Rethinking Gramsci’s critique. Socialism and Democracy 33(2): 46–66. Egan, D. (2022). Saving the vanguard: Lenin’s military metaphors today. In A. Ivanchikova and R.R. Maclean (eds), The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 125–148. Albany: State University of New York Press. Femia, J.V. (1987). Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1978). Socialist and communists. In Q. Hoare (ed. and trans.), Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, pp. 25–26. New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison Notebooks, Volume I. Translated and edited by J.A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks, Volume III. Translated and edited by J.A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Greaves, N.M. (2009). Gramsci’s Marxism: Reclaiming a Philosophy of History and Politics. Leicester: Matador. Harman, C. (1983). Gramsci Versus Reformism. London: Socialist Workers Party. Harnecker, M. (2007). Rebuilding the Left. London: Zed Books. Hoffman, J. (1984). The Gramscian Challenge: Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory. New York: Basil Blackwell. Holloway, J. (2002). Change The World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press. Holloway, J. (2010). Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Kautsky, K. (1983). The mass strike. In P. Goode (Eds. and trans.), Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings, pp. 53–73. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Kautsky, K. (1996). The Road to Power. Edited by J.H. Kautsky, translated by R. Meyer. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Keegan, J. (1999). The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. New York: Verso. Lebowitz, M.A. (2010). The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development. New York: Monthly Review Press. Luxemburg, R. (1970). The mass strike, the political party and the trade unions. In M.-A. Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. New York: Pathfinder Press. Mandel, E. (1978). From Stalinism to Eurocommunism. London: New Left Books. Marx, K. (1964). Class Struggles in France 1848-1850. New York: International Publishers. Piccone, P. (1976). Gramsci’s Marxism: Beyond Lenin and Togliatti. Theory and Society 3(4): 485–512. Ransome, P. (1992). Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Robaina, R. (2006). Gramsci and revolution: A necessary clarification. International Socialism 2(109): 109–126. Saccarelli, E. (2008). Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition. New York: Routledge. Salvadori, M. (1979). Gramsci and the PCI: Two conceptions of hegemony. In C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, pp. 237–258. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sayer, D. (1987). The Violence of Abstraction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Simon, R. (1991). Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, 2nd ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Thomas, P.D. (2010). The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Togliatti, P. (1979). On Gramsci and Other Writings. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

12. Welding the present to the future ... thinking with Gramsci about prefiguration Dorothea Elena Schoppek INTRODUCTION Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher and political activist, is often depicted as ‘the theorist and strategist of the [Italian] working class’ (Opratko 2014; my translation). Until today, Gramsci’s ‘Philosophy of Praxis’ plays an important role in critical academic circles dealing with questions of how to bring about social (ecological) transformation. The latter is a question that becomes ever more pressing in light of the deteriorating social and ecological living conditions on our planet. In that context, Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ in particular and the ways in which the struggle for an alternative hegemony could be won and consent be organized is at the center of many political discussions and scholarly debates (e.g. Brand 2016). As a ‘strategist thinker’ who emphasized the importance of a strong socialist party as ‘the modern prince’, Gramsci is less associated with another, anarchist-inspired debate of transformation that is centered on the concept of prefiguration and that has (re-)gained a lot of activist and academic attention during the last few years: In most accounts […], prefigurative politics […] [refers] to a dynamic distinguishing left-wing political projects or protest styles apart from Trotskyism and Leninism, where an organisation or vanguard is considered necessary to bring about revolution ‘from the outside’, deferring communism for an unspecified period of readjustment. In contrast, and often in implicitly critiquing the authoritarianism of past attempts at state socialism, prefiguration is said to create or ‘prefigure’ utopic alternatives, though on a limited scale, in the present. (Yates 2015, p. 2f.)

At first sight, and according to numerous scholarly diagnoses, Gramsci and prefiguration are unlikely companions. Contrary to this initial irreconcilable impression, I will, in this chapter, introduce Gramsci’s very own ‘prefigurative 204

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period’ during the 1919 factory councils movement in Turin and bring it into dialogue with contemporary debates on prefiguration. I will discuss both the potentials ascribed to a prefigurative approach to transformation as well as the critiques expressed against it. The primary concern of the chapter is to explore the ways in which a synthesis of Gramsci’s earlier journalist and later theoretical writings can help to address some of the shortcomings ascribed to prefigurative approaches. Here, my main argument is to conceptualize prefigurative politics as an integral part of a ‘war of position’ and to assess the transformative potential of prefigurative projects to become the fundaments of a post-capitalist order in interaction with further strategic interventions (Schoppek 2021).

PREFIGURATION: THEN AND TODAY As has been briefly sketched out above, Antonio Gramsci is particularly well known within the social sciences for the theoretical concepts that he developed in the so-called ‘Prison Notebooks’. During his imprisonment as a political prisoner of the fascist regime in Italy from 1926 until his death in 1937, Gramsci wrote his main work, the Prison Notebooks, under the most adverse conditions. He himself noted that the notes contained in this notebook, as in the others, are written with a flying pen to record a quick reminder. They are all to be carefully looked through and checked, because they are bound to contain inaccuracies, false approximations, anachronisms. Written without having the books referred to at hand, it is possible that, after checking, they will have to be radically corrected, because just the opposite of what is written could turn out to be true. (Gramsci, quoted in Bochmann et al., 1991ff., p. 1367; my translation)

Despite the fact that Gramsci had no secured access to books and other literature, never mind the physical and psychological safety net that is so important for the blossoming of creativity, he managed to bequeath an impressive oeuvre that is used as a theoretical treasure chest by numerous scholars up to today. His theorizing about the essence and workings of hegemonic rule as well as further associated concepts gained particular popularity – not only in left-wing circles. In contrast, his earlier journalistic and political writings are less discussed (Levy 1986; 2012). It is in these texts, in particular, that Gramsci reflected upon ideas that have recently gained a lot of academic attention under the notion of ‘prefiguration’.

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Gramsci and Prefiguration: The Turinese Factory Councils Gramsci’s thoughts on prefiguration emerged from his encounters with different left-wing currents and fierce theoretical as well as political-strategic debates between them. After the First World War, the Italian Left was rather popular but fragmented into reformist, Leninist, anarchist, syndicalist and other traditions (cf. Bellermann 2021, p. 38ff; Boggs 1977). One important point of conflict concerned the question of how to deal with the state and its institutions. While reformists advocated for using and adapting the state, Leninists strived for replacing it with a Proletarian State, whereas syndicalists and anarchists rejected the idea of the state altogether. I will here mainly focus on Gramsci’s attempt to navigate between state-centered, authoritarian forms of Marxism and decentralized, spontaneist Anarchism and how his thoughts are linked to the concept of prefiguration. Carl Boggs – who is said to have used the term ‘prefiguration’ for the first time – summarizes the debates within the left that were forming the intellectual context of Gramsci’s own thinking as follows: ‘From the Marx-Bakunin debates of the late 1860s until World War I, the relationship between Marxism and anarchism was one of polarised conflict: organisation vs. spontaneity, leadership vs. self-activity, centralism vs. localism, etc.’ (Boggs 1977, p. 105).

As a journalist, Gramsci drew not only on these theoretical debates but also on concrete experiences from his political engagement with the Turinese working class (Levy 1986, p. 38ff.). This penetration and mutual impregnation of theory and practice are particularly obvious in his writings during the so-called ‘two red years’ (bienno rosso) from 1919 to 1920, a time of workers’ uprising, strikes and experiments of self-organization in Italy, particularly Turin and Milan (Forgacs 2000, p. 76ff.). In 1919, Gramsci together with fellow communists founded the weekly newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo as an educational organ for the Turinese working class (Levy 1986, p. 36). They closely followed the developments in the factories, offered accompanying analyses as well as strategic guidance for further interventions. With regard to the question of prefiguration, Gramsci’s discussion of the factory councils and the possibility of a workers’ democracy in L’Ordine Nuovo are of particular interest. In their article ‘Workers’ Democracy’, he and Togliatti addressed the question of how to exploit the workers’ uprisings for the establishment of a socialist society: How are the immense social forces unleashed by the war to be harnessed? How are they to be disciplined and given a political form which has the potential to develop normally and continuously into the skeleton of the socialist state in which the

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dictatorship of the proletariat will be embodied? How can the present be welded to the future, so that while satisfying the urgent necessities of the one we may work effectively to create and ‘anticipate’ the other? (Gramsci and Togliatti 1919, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 79)

They saw a potential answer to their question in the development and strengthening of already existing working class institutions such as the ‘internal commissions, the socialist clubs, the peasant communities’ (Gramsci and Togliatti 1919, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 80). In what can be called a prefigurative figure of argumentation, they detected the seeds of a new society in these very institutions and therefore welcomed syndicalist and anarchist forms of organizing: The internal commissions are organs of workers’ democracy which must be freed from the limitations imposed on them by the entrepreneurs, and infused with new life and energy. Today the internal commissions limit the power of the capitalist in the factory and perform functions of arbitration and discipline. Tomorrow, developed and enriched, they must be the organs of proletarian power, replacing the capitalist in all his useful functions of management and administration. (Gramsci and Togliatti 1919, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 80)

While Gramsci emphasized the general importance of taking up local, ‘spontaneist’1 forms of upheaval and self-organizations, he also made it very clear in this and other articles that these seeds needed to be nurtured and that their ‘disorderly and chaotic energies must be given a permanent form and discipline’ (Gramsci and Togliatti 1919, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 79f.). […] the creation of the proletarian state […] is itself a process of development. It presupposes a preparatory period involving organizing and propaganda. Greater emphasis and powers must be given to the proletarian factory institutions that already exist, comparable ones must be set up in the villages, they must be composed of communists conscious of the revolutionary mission these institutions must accomplish. (Gramsci 1919, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 88)

For Gramsci it was clear that the further development and enrichment of proletarian institutions needed to go hand in hand with the attainment of a higher consciousness with regard to the real societal relations that could not be grasped ‘spontaneously’. In even earlier writings, he argued that consciousness was not a natural fact but ‘a result of intelligent reflection, at first by just a few people and later by a whole class’ (Gramsci 1916, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 58). Therefore, he did not only attach great importance to organizational

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prefiguration, such as the advancement of the factory councils, but also to intellectual or educational prefiguration: […] every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men who are at first resistant, and think only of solving their own immediate economic and political problems for themselves, who have no ties of solidarity with others in the same condition. […] The bayonets of Napoleon’s armies found their road already smoothed by an invisible army of books and pamphlets that had swarmed out of Paris from the first half of the eighteenth century and had prepared both men and institutions for the necessary renewal. (Gramsci 1916, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 58)

While Gramsci reflected the central role of the party in more depth in later writings, her ‘educational function’ (Merkens 2007, p. 168; my translation) in that regard was already mentioned in his analysis of the factory council movement when he argued that: The party must carry on its role as the organ of communist education, as the furnace of faith, the depository of doctrine, the supreme power harmonizing the organized and disciplined forces of the working class and peasantry and leading them towards the ultimate goal. (Gramsci and Togliatti 1919, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 80)

Despite – or probably because – of the fact that the factory council movement eventually failed – among other factors2 – due to a lack of decisive support on the part of the Italian Socialist Party and the reformist unions, Gramsci built upon these experiences in his later writings when theorizing about the struggle for hegemony and the need of flanking ‘a narrowly prefigurative strategy’ (Boggs 1977, p. 16). I will return to these theoretical advancements and their current relevance after introducing contemporary debates on prefiguration and their respective shortcomings. Contemporary Debates on Prefiguration and Critique The conceptual idea of what is now called ‘prefiguration’ did not only appear in Gramsci’s work roughly 100 years ago, but it has attracted a lot of academic attention over the last couple of years (Monticelli 2021, p. 107). Scholars from various social science disciplines have started to analyze ‘the attempted construction of alternative or utopian social relations in the present’ (Yates 2015, p. 1). This ‘prefigurative turn’ (Maeckelbergh 2016) in academia is closely connected to an increasing emergence of prefigurative politics on the ground in the course and aftermath of the economic crisis in 2007/2008 as well as the deteriorating ecological crisis. Examples of prefigurative interventions range from the Arab and South European square-occupations (e.g. De Smet 2020; Asara and Kallis 2022) or the Occupy Wall Street movement (e.g. Monticelli

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2021) to countless local ‘nowtopia’ (e.g. Carlsson 2014) or ‘real utopia’ (e.g. Wright 2010) projects as well as grassroots innovations (e.g. Seyfang and Longhurst 2016) such as transitions towns, solidary economy, alternative food networks, etc.3 All these projects share an interest in ‘building alternative institutions […] that are created primarily through direct action of one sort or another rather than through the state’ (Wright 2010, p. 324). Recent studies on prefiguration have rather consistently identified the following characteristics and transformative potentials of prefigurative politics. By enacting an envisioned future in the here and now, prefigurative projects are understood as ‘laboratories in which new social practices are intentionally developed, tried out, and practised’ (Burkhart et al. 2022, p. 136). In contrast to the adoption of an instrumental strategy, prefigurative actors’ ends are always already reflected in their means (Yates 2015, p. 3). Prefigurative practices therefore enable both the imagination and at least partial enactment of an alternative society (Dinerstein 2016, p. 49ff.; Schoppek 2020, p. 144f.). Hence, they can serve as ‘palpable demonstrations [..] that alternatives to capitalism […] are viable’ (Wright 2010, p. 330f.) and they can strengthen resistance to the status quo (Monticelli 2018, p. 513). The fundaments of an alternative society are thought to be built up by the expansion and horizontal diffusion of emancipatory practices: ‘Connectivity is how the network expands – by making more and more links between everyone who has a grievance and who wants their voice to be heard’ (Maeckelbergh 2011, p. 14). Despite the popularity of prefiguration as both a political practice and a theoretical concept, considerable critique has been launched against it. MacGregor illustratively summarizes a first strand of critique when writing: For another set of scholars, however, the instinct is to be sceptical of these celebratory declarations. It is not that they question claims to ‘new-ness’ (though they should), but rather to suggest it is too soon to tell if these prefigurative practices will bring about structural and environmental change because many ‘lack the political-strategic arm’ found in most social movements (Butzlaff and Deflorian, 2018). Theorists viewing these movements through the lens of post-politics suggest that they represent little more than performative coping strategies without much believable potential for being transformative. (MacGregor 2021, p. 332)

The lack of strategy is a recurring point of critique that has been raised against prefigurative politics and that in fact goes back to the debates in which also Gramsci had already been involved. Analogous to his critique of ‘spontaneist’ interventions, contemporary scholars criticize prefiguration for being ‘too localised’ and ‘as fetishising process’ (Yates 2020, p. 10). Prefigurative projects are said to underestimate structural power and hence to be ineffective with regard to reaching political goals. In this debate, prefiguration and strategy are juxtaposed to each other; occasionally prefiguration is denied any

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political property at all.4 Smuker, for example, writes with explicit reference to Gramsci in his analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement that: [t]he prefigurative politics tendency confused process, tactics and self-expressions with political content and was often ambivalent about strategic questions […]. It celebrated the ‘“act for the act’s sake”, struggle for the sake of struggle, etc.’; Gramsci may well have called it ‘apoliticism’. (Smucker 2014, p. 75)

A second, consequential strand of critique refers to the compatibility of prefigurative activities with the existing capitalist system. Deflorian, for example, shows how, due to increasingly liquified subjectivities in late-modern societies, the participation in prefigurative projects is in fact often ‘fluid’ and characterized by ‘spontaneous and non-committing engagement’ that is perfectly compatible with otherwise system reproducing behavior (Deflorian 2021, p. 351). Blühdorn even argues that we are experiencing a mere ‘symbolism of the alternative’ in which ‘germ cells of the alternative society’ transmute into ‘theme-parks for simulated alterity’ (Blühdorn 2007, p. 14f., emphasis in original). These arguments are closely connected to the finding that the participation in prefigurative projects is particularly prevalent in the middle classes whose life realities allow an engagement in abstract reflection and a value-based activism (Deflorian 2021, p. 347; Eversberg and Muraca 2019, p. 495f.). Because of the relatively homogeneous milieu from which those initiatives emerge, they tend to have an exclusionary effect on people with fewer economic and/or educational resources. Hence, they often not only remain in their local but also within their milieu-specific niches within capitalism. A third strand of critique is directed at the anti-statism inherent in many prefigurative initiatives. Van Dyk and Haubner, for example, point to connecting factors between community-oriented prefigurative alternatives and a neoliberal governmentality (van Dyk and Haubner 2021, p. 140). They warn against a ‘civil societization of the social question’ which would allow a further withdrawal of the social state and cause an increase in dependence on voluntary services instead of securitized rights (van Dyk and Haubner 2021, p. 140; my translation). Instead, they advocate for a ‘rebellious engagement’ standing up for ‘state-guaranteed, socialized, solidarity-based infrastructure and public services’ (van Dyk and Haubner 2021, p. 161; my translation). The critique of undifferentiated anti-statism leads back to Gramsci who was eager to take the self-organizing experiences of the workers seriously and at the same time wanted to overcome their scattered existence and self-centeredness.

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GRAMSCI: PREFIGURATION AND HEGEMONY What can we learn from Gramsci that might be helpful for the outlined contemporary debates on and critiques of prefiguration? As set out above, the key issue around which both the old and the new debates have been revolving is how to build a coherent alternative to the status quo without becoming either individualistic or authoritarian. As Parker so eloquently puts it: […] relying on the ‘romance’ of prefiguration could be a danger because it implicitly suggests that planning, strategy and scale are always co-opted, roads to hell paved with good intentions. Yet in order to address the global problems of climate change, ecological emergency, systematic exclusion and massive inequality it will be necessary to take on the task of organisation on a global scale. […] Yet at the same time it must always be remembered that the negotiations of powerful people in faraway rooms must connect with the local if they are to help produce actionable and meaningful responses to commonly shared issues. (Parker 2021, p. 8)

I argue that there is a lot we can learn from Gramsci in addressing this problem when we complement his earlier writings with his later considerations on hegemony, historical bloc and the integral state. During his imprisonment, Gramsci spent a lot of time thinking about the question of why the revolutionary strategy of the Russian Bolsheviks, i.e. conquering the state, could not be successful in the Western democracies. He came to the conclusion that the massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position. (Gramsci, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 233; emphasis added).

The finding that civil society in modern democracies is an integral part of the state rather than its ‘counterpart’ or ‘watchdog’ led him to the concept of an ‘integral state’ which he defined as ‘political + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’ (Gramsci, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 235; cf. Opratko 2014). He assumed that civil society safeguards the state-capitalist project through the beliefs, norms, and practices sedimented in it and therefore prevents the governed from revolting against it. Hence, modern democracies are rather resilient against a revolution in the Russian sense because they have established a type of rule, i.e. hegemony, that is mainly based upon broad popular consent rather than outright coercion. The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony […] is characterized by the combination of force and consent variously balancing one another, without force exceeding consent too much. Indeed one tries to make it appear that force is supported by the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion – newspapers

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and associations – which are therefore, in certain situations, artificially increased in numbers. (Gramsci, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 261)

As the quote indicates, consent has to be organized by ideological work and to a certain extent also by material concessions. Hegemony is never absolute and hence more or less contested. It requires the emergence of a historical bloc, i.e. an alliance of social forces that succeeds in bringing in line the economic conditions with a corresponding ideology (Forgacs 2000, p. 424). Against this theoretical background, conceptualizing the transformation to an alternative society as a ‘shift from one hegemonic order to another’ (Schoppek 2021, p. 147), allows us to analyze the role of prefigurative politics in the struggle for hegemony and as an integral part of what Gramsci called a ‘war of position’ (Carroll 2006, p. 32). The reference to hegemony embeds prefiguration in a broader and at the same time more purposive context of transformation. Let me briefly address what this contextualization has to offer with regard to the three outlined critiques expressed against prefigurative politics: (1) lack of strategy, (2) compatibility with capitalism, and (3) the shortcomings of anti-statism. Understanding prefigurative politics as an integral part of a war position in the struggle for hegemony first allows us to analyze its transformative potential with respect to specific aspects rather than others. It releases prefiguration from the burden of bringing about transformation on its own and puts it into context with other transformative strategies (Schoppek and Krams 2021). While the struggle for hegemony must be guided by a shared ‘alternative ethico-political conception of the world’ (Carroll 2006, p. 21), it requires myriad context-sensitive tactical interventions and strategic moves on the micro level, which can follow different transformative logics. Wright prominently differentiated between three strategies of transformation: ruptural, symbiotic and interstitial (Wright 2010, p. 303). The three strategies vary with regard to their relationship to existent state institutions. Ruptural strategies resist and attack them, symbiotic strategies use and gradually reform them and interstitial strategies circumvent them and build alternative institutions instead. Prefigurative interventions are manifestations of an interstitial strategy. By making alternatives tangible, by offering space for experimentation, and expanding our imagination, prefigurative projects enable both the transformation of subjectivities and the ensuing emergence of a counter-hegemonic consciousness that might develop into a coherent vision. Gramsci ascribed an important role to the political parties as spaces of ‘the elaboration and diffusion of [new] conceptions of the world’ and compared them to a ‘historical “laboratory”’ (Gramsci, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 335). He insisted on the importance of connecting to peoples’ ‘common sense’ in order to nurture ‘the healthy nucleus that exists in “common sense”, the part of it which can be

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called “good sense” and which deserves to be made more unitary and coherent’ (Gramsci, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 329). The practical experience in prefigurative projects can increase reflection on the possibility of ‘another world’ and therefore contribute to the development of a ‘post-capitalist imaginary’ (Hickel 2020, p. 243). Putting prefigurative politics into context with other strategies in a war of position secondly de-problematizes the fact that singular prefigurative projects might be perfectly compatible with an overall capitalist system. It is not the singular project that must be considered from the perspective of hegemony but the interplay of the different strategic interventions. The key question is whether it will be possible to ‘unify […] dissenting groups into a system of alliances capable of contesting bourgeois hegemony’ (Carroll and Ratner 2010, p. 8). In other words, the focus is on the emergence and strengthening of a historical bloc and the compatibility of different actors and strategies. In terms of the strategic division of labor that I have argued for in the previous paragraph, it is the interplay of different strategies that must eventually be incompatible with the system to be transformed and powerful enough to prevail in the longer term. In view of the empirical findings set out above, it is therefore necessary to strengthen alliance building and mutual understanding between middle and working class actors with regard to both their respective transformative needs and approaches (Rose 2000). Placing prefiguration in the context of hegemonic struggle, thirdly, allows us to pose the question of (anti-)statism from a slightly different perspective. While an exclusive focus on prefigurative politics outside the state entails the danger of replacing guaranteed rights and public services with ‘a voluntary gift’ by the community that might lead to new dependencies (van Dyk and Haubner 2021, p. 103; my translation), it can also contribute to building alternative (state) institutions. Gramsci considered this aspect in one of his earlier articles titled ‘The Conquest of the State’: We, on the other hand, remain convinced, in the light of the revolutionary experiences of Russia, Hungary and Germany, that the socialist state cannot be embodied in the institutions of the capitalist state. We remain convinced that with respect to these institutions, if not with respect to those of the proletariat, the socialist state must be a fundamentally new creation. […] So the formula ‘conquest of the state’ should be understood in the following sense: replacement of the democratic parliamentary state by a new type of state, one that is generated by the associative experience of the proletarian class. (Gramsci, quoted in Forgacs 2000, p. 86f.)

According to these considerations, prefigurative experiments can become the ‘building blocks’ of a new institutional setup that is to be slowly ‘replacing the rule of capital with a democratic socialist [and ecological; DS] way of life’ (Carroll 2010, p. 169). Dale introduced the notion of ‘prefigurative institution-

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alization’ by which he refers to the attempt to establish thoroughly democratic institutions external to the narrow sphere of political society (Dale 2021, p. 145ff.). However, such an approach presupposes both a shared future vision as well as strong alliances between different (prefigurative) actors (Schoppek 2021, p. 153). In that context, it is also important not to confuse prefigurative projects with constituting ‘the future society in a developed micro-form’ but to allow ‘the convergence, supersession, and objectification of prefigured practices into shared means and ends, by a process of reciprocity […] and mutual appropriation […]’ (De Smet 2014, p. 314f; emphasis in original). As Gramsci had already emphasized with regard to his experiences in the Turinese Factory Council movement, one must take into account the danger of isolation and ‘corporatism’ and therefore further develop a shared horizon that again ‘create[s] the condition for further transformations’ (Brand 2022, p. 43). Notwithstanding the possibility and the potential of ‘prefigurative institutionalization’, I argue not to neglect the transformative potential of the other two strategies, i.e. the struggle within the existent state institutions and resistance against them where necessary and legitimate. In that regard, it is rewarding to combine Gramsci with Poulantzas who wrote the following about strategy: The choice is not, as is often thought, between a struggle ‘within’ the state apparatuses (that is physically invested and inserted in their material space) and a struggle located at a certain physical distance from these apparatuses. […] It is not simply a matter of entering state institutions in order to use their characteristic levers for a good purpose. In addition, struggle must always express itself in the development of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centers of self-management. (Poulantzas 2000, p. 259f.)

CONCLUSION The primary concern of this chapter was to bring into dialogue the ‘strategist’ and the ‘prefigurative’ Gramsci in a way that makes the very opposition of these two attributions obsolete. For that purpose, it proved useful to complement the ‘standard’ Gramsci reading from his Prison Notebooks with his earlier, journalist writings. Here, Gramsci very closely commented on and analyzed the factory workers’ self-organization initiatives and their revolutionary uprisings during the two red years in Italy. What Gramsci drew from the theoretical analysis of these events was the necessity to take ‘spontaneist’ and localized forms of alternative institutional settings and self-governing seriously and at the same time to connect them with each other and to work on the strengthening of a common counter-hegemony project.5 I have argued that Gramsci’s theoretical treasure chest contains the necessary components to conceptualize prefigurative politics as an integral stra-

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tegic part of a war of position in the struggle for hegemony – among others. Conceptualizing prefiguration in this way is one possibility to address some central points of critique that have been expressed against it. In summary, I close with the plea that taking Gramsci seriously as a strategist means not to neglect his prefigurative considerations and the importance that he attached to the liberation from hegemonic ideologies and normalized everyday routines. In a similar vein, Carl Boggs, the name giver of prefiguration, argues that, More than any other Marxist of his time, Gramsci articulated a prefigurative conception of struggle that advanced a new model of public life – one that emphasized the simultaneous overturning of economic production relations, political decision-making, culture and social life, i.e., the transformation of the entire social division of labour under capitalism. Above all, a prefigurative movement meant that politics would be integrated into the everyday social existence of people struggling to change the world, so that the elitism, authoritarianism, and impersonal style typical of bureaucracy could be more effectively combated. (Boggs, 1976, p. 100)

NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4.

Spontaneist political interventions are associated with anarchist or syndicalist traditions and are defined by Gramsci as ‘not the result of any systematic educational activity on the part of an already conscious leading group, but have been formed through everyday experience illuminated by ‘common sense’, i.e. by the traditional popular conception of the world’ (Gramsci, quoted in Bochmann et al., 1991, ff., p. 372; my translation). There was a number of further influencing factors that cannot be discussed in this chapter. More detailed analyses can be found in Bellermann (2021), Forgacs (2000), Boggs (1977). The following arguments and their critiques mainly refer to prefigurative politics in reaction to multiple crisis phenomena in the Global North and may therefore not apply to contexts of the Global South. Boggs who coined the term ‘prefiguration’ made the following critical remark about the prefigurative politics of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s: This was the fate of the new left everywhere: in its fear of centralism, in its retreat into extreme subjectivism, and in its uncompromising abstentionism, it gave little strategic expression to its vision of liberation. It effectively attacked the ideological underpinnings of bourgeois society, but the means it employed – mass direct action politics on the one hand, small isolated groups on the other, were politically primitive. (Boggs 1977, p. 20)

5.

Following Buckel et al. (2014, p. 45), I distinguish between a hegemony project and a hegemonic project. While the term ‘hegemonic project’ refers to a project that was successful in establishing hegemony, the term ‘hegemony’ project describes a constellation of actors attempting to gain hegemony.

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De Smet, B. (2014). Alterglobalization and the limits of prefigurative politics. In A. Blunden (Ed.), Collaborative Projects. An Interdisciplinary Study (pp. 311–316). Brill. De Smet, B. (2020). The Prince and the Minotaur: Egypt in the labyrinth of counter-revolution. LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series, 36, June 2020. Dinerstein, A. C. (2016). Denaturalising society: Concrete utopia and the prefigurative critique of political economy. In A. C. Dinerstein (Ed.), Social Sciences for An-Other Politics: Women Theorizing without Parachutes (pp. 49–64). Palgrave Macmillan. Eversberg, D. & Muraca, B. (2019). Degrowth-Bewegungen: Welche Rolle können sie in einer sozial-ökologischen Transformation spielen? In K. Dörre et al. (Eds), Große Transformation? Zur Zukunft moderner Gesellschaften. Sonderband des Berliner Journals für Soziologie (pp. 487–503). Springer VS. Forgacs, D. (Ed.) (2000). The Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings 1916-1935. New York University Press. Hickel, J. (2020). Less is More. How Degrowth Will Save the World. Windmill Books. Levy, C. (1986), A new look at the young Gramsci. boundary 2 14(3), 31–48. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.2307/​303232 Levy, C. (2012). Antonio Gramsci, anarchism, syndicalism and sovversivismo. In A. Prichard et al. (Eds), Libertarian Socialism. Politics in Black and Red (pp. 96–115). Palgrave Macmillan. Maeckelbergh, M. (2011). Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice in the alterglobalization movement. Social Movement Studies 10(1), 1–20. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1080/​14742837​.2011​.545223 Maeckelbergh, M. (2016). The prefigurative turn: The time and place of social movement practice. In A. C. Dinerstein (Ed.), Social Sciences for An-Other Politics: Women Theorizing without Parachutes (pp. 121–134). Palgrave Macmillan. MacGregor, S. (2021). Finding transformative potential in the cracks? The ambiguities of urban environmental activism in a neoliberal city. Social Movement Studies 20(3), 329–345. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14742837​.2019​.1677224 Merkens, A. (2007). ‘Die Regierten von den Regierenden intellektuell unabhängig machen’. Gegenhegemonie, politische Bildung und Pädagogik bei Antonio Gramsci. In A. Merkens & V. R. Diaz (Eds), Mit Gramsci arbeiten. Texte zur politisch-praktischen Aneignung Antonio Gramscis (pp. 157–174). Argument Verlag. Monticelli, L. (2018). Embodying alternatives to capitalism in the 21st century. triple c 16(2), 501–517. https://​doi​.org/​10​.31269/​triplec​.v16i2​.1032 Monticelli, L. (2021). On the necessity of prefigurative politics. Thesis Eleven 167(1), 99.118. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​07255136211056992 Opratko, B. (2014). Antonio Gramsci: Das Gehirn funktioniert weiter. marx21.de. https://​www​.marx21​.de/​gramsci​-antonio​-theorie/​ Parker, M. (2021). The romance of prefiguration and the task of organization. Journal of Marketing Management. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​0267257X​.2021​.2006755 Poulantzas, N. (2000). State, Power, Socialism. Verso Rose, F. (2000). Coalitions Across the Class Divide: Lessons from the Labor, Peace, and Environmental Movements. Cornell University Press. Seyfang, G. & Longhurst, N. (2016). What influences the diffusion of grassroots innovations for sustainability? Investigating community currency niches. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 28(1), 1–23. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09537325​ .2015​.1063603

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Schoppek, D. E. (2020). How far is degrowth a really revolutionary counter movement to neoliberalism? Environmental Values 29(2), 131–151. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3197/​ 0963​27119X1557​9936382491 Schoppek, D. E. (2021). How do we research possible roads to alternative futures? Theoretical and methodological considerations. Journal of Critical Realism 20(2), 146–158. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14767430​.2021​.1894908 Schoppek, D. E. & Krams, M. (2021). Challenging change: Understanding the role of strategic selectivities in transformative dynamics. Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements 13(1), 104–128. Smucker, J. M. (2014). Can prefigurative politics replace political strategy. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 58, 74–82. Van Dyk, S. & Haubner, T. (2021). Community-Kapitalismus. Hamburger Edition. Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning Real Utopias. Verso Books. Yates, L. (2015). Rethinking prefiguration: Alternatives, micropolitics and goals in social movements. Social Movement Studies 14(1), 1–21. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14742837​.2013​.870883 Yates, L. (2020). Prefigurative politics and social movement strategy: The roles of prefiguration in the reproduction, mobilisation and coordination of movements. Political Studies 69(4). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0032321720936046

13. The Modern Prince and revolutionary strategy Alexandros Chrysis INTRODUCTION The indisputable fact that a continuously expanding bibliography on Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince (Anderson 2017, p. 1) coexists with a critical absence of noticeable communist parties throughout the world seems a historical irony indeed. From a reverse point of view, however, it proves equally defensible that in the dark ages of a multi-dimensional capitalist crisis, the Gramscian theoretical corpus constitutes a promising start to interpret and put an end to the Prince’s absence.

SETTING THE STAGE Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist thinker and a communist revolutionary whose life was inspired by the victory of the October Revolution, but also marked by the defeat of the Italian factory council movement and the accession of fascism to power. Moreover, his imprisonment in Mussolini’s jail changed dramatically his own sense of time and revolution. He was compelled to realize that the transition from capitalism to communism is a long-term and tremendously complicated social and ethico-political process, the successful outcome of which depends upon the formation of a skillfully elaborated project of revolutionary strategy and tactics. There is no doubt that during his prison years Gramsci became aware of what it really means to act not only as a ‘ploughman’, but as the ‘fertiliser of history’. Frank Rosengarten’s comment is to the point while referring to the author of the Prison Notebooks as a ‘fertilizing agent of revolution’, i.e., a militant theorist who approaches the ‘war of position’ and ‘hegemony’ in terms of ‘a long and arduous task to be carried out before the triumph of socialism, not after’ (Rosengarten 2014, p. 112). For his part, Domenico Losurdo, reaches a similar conclusion. In his view, there is a ‘biographical fact’ that we must bear in mind. Gramsci was an author and a political leader who was obliged to give up his hopes for an imminent 219

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revolution and delve into the analysis of a long-term social and political transformative process (Losurdo 1997, p. 137). Certainly, for Gramsci, dealing with time is not a mere methodological issue. Connecting the past with the present, as well as prefiguring the future of a communist polity starting from the concrete analysis of the present capitalist society, is a practical matter of revolutionary strategy. After all, it is not in the sphere of abstract methodology, but in the arena of emancipatory politics that Antonio Gramsci encounters Nicollo Machiavelli from whom he drew the inspiration for his Modern Prince. Taking notice of the historical analogy between Machiavelli’s and his own epoch, Gramsci becomes conscious of their common motives and targets (Leslie 1970, p. 442; Morton 2013, p. 132). It is not academic interest, but real concern for the people who are ‘not in the know’ that pushes the Marxist intellectual to pay so much attention to Machiavelli’s Prince (Gramsci 1971, p. 135). Above all, Gramsci shares with Machiavelli the pursuit of a strategic goal, that is the foundation of a new ‘state’ (Showstack Sassoon 1987, p. 153), and also the need for a political leader, a virtuoso on the analysis of the present social order and a competent organizer and director of the fight for liberation. Thus, it is not an arid anachronism, but a fruitful research option to take into consideration the social analogies and the dialectical connections between concrete historical periods (Femia 1981, pp. 121–134). In fact, Gramsci’s own words shed light to our methodological path: ‘Every real historical phase leaves traces of itself in succeeding phases [...] The process of historical development is a unity in time through which the present contains the whole of the past’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 416). Indeed, it would be a fatal theoretical and political error to evaluate Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and especially his study on Machiavelli’s politics and The Prince as an old-fashioned attempt to interpret and overthrow capitalism. On the contrary, it is through studying and interpreting The Prince, not as an out-of-date ‘systematic treatment’, but as ‘a “live” work’, i.e., as a ‘political manifesto’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 125, 127), that Antonio Gramsci was reassured that changing the world is impossible unless a Modern Prince arrives on the stage. Focusing on Gramsci’s theory of the political party, this chapter insists on confirming the leading role of the Modern Prince in shaping and implementing a contemporary revolutionary strategy and tactics. It is the main target of our work to prove that the Gramscian Prince is not an outdated ‘hero’ confined in the prison of the past, but the absent and still required political protagonist of a communist movement. Τhe next section of the chapter aims at drawing the intellectual and political portrait of the Modern Prince as conceived in the pages of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The subsequent section deals with modern and contemporary Marxist interpretations in comparison with Neo-Gramscian, Postmodern and post-Marxist versions of the Modern Prince. In the brief

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conclusion of this chapter, I bring out the strategic and tactical impact of the Gramscian Prince on the development of a future anti-capitalist movement that struggles for the communist transformation of capitalist societies.

THE GRAMSCIAN MODERN PRINCE: THEORETICAL CONTEXT AND POLITICAL CONTENT Any theoretical attempt to review Gramsci’s analysis of the Modern Prince requires an uninterrupted and firm connection with the highly debated question of hegemony as a key-concept of the Gramscian Prison Notebooks. No doubt the eminent Marxist intellectual, taking into account the role of ‘gegemoniya’ in the Russian revolutionary tradition, reworked and upgraded the content of hegemony. While recognizing that Lenin is ‘responsible for the philosophical importance of the concept and the fact of hegemony’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 381; and pp. 55–56, 357, 365–366), Gramsci makes further steps in extending and redefining hegemony especially in the frame of the capitalist societies of the West. In this context, it is worth mentioning that, although Russian Social-Democracy conceives hegemony in the strict sense of ‘hegemony of the proletariat’, the author of the Prison Notebooks uses the term ‘hegemony’ to denote not only the intellectual and moral leadership of the proletariat over the other subaltern classes, but also the political direction and cultural influence exerted by the bourgeoisie upon the exploited masses, winning their consent to its power (Joseph 2002, p. 28). From this point of view, it is correctly noted that ‘as a strategy, hegemony is at the same time a precondition of taking power and a permanent condition of its exercise and conservation’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, p. 537). What is the reason, however, that impels Gramsci to cast light on hegemony as the intellectual and moral direction exerted by the ruling class all over society? Surely, Gramsci’s attempt to redefine the concept of hegemony and expand its content unfolds as long as he tries to find the solution to a problem he is confronted with even before his imprisonment. It is the inertia of the masses, their reluctance to respond positively to the revolutionary demands of their times, that troubles the Italian Marxist. How is it possible to explain and counteract ‘the process of internalisation of bourgeois relations and the consequent diminution of revolutionary possibilities’ (Femia 1987, p. 35; and Bates 1975, pp. 359–360)? Dealing with this theoretical and political challenge, the Marxist theorist reflected on the structure of western societies and ended up discerning two all-important superstructural levels, that means ‘civil society’ as the group of the commonly named ‘private’ institutions and ‘political society’ or the ‘State’. Furthermore, Gramsci argued that ‘these two levels correspond on the

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one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical” government’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 12). It is not my intention to search for a definite answer as to whether the distinction between hegemony (civil society) and domination (political society) is a methodological or an organic one. Gramsci himself proved quite undecided on the issue. Developing his ‘enigmatic mosaic’ made of concepts such as ‘state’, ‘civil society’, ‘political society’, ‘hegemony’, ‘domination’ etc. (Anderson 2017, p. 58), he pointed out that it is wrong to conceive the civil/ political society distinction ‘as an organic one, while in fact it is merely methodological’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). Yet, defining and presenting his theoretical and political dualities – hegemony and domination, consent and coercion, civil and political society – the imprisoned thinker does not miss the opportunity to analyze those dualities as parts of an organic totality (Hoffman 1984, pp. 68–69). While remaining faithful to his distinction between the two major superstructural levels, Antonio Gramsci finds it rather helpful to endorse the Machiavellian symbol of a Prince-liberator who is ready to fight using, interchangeably, consent and coercion, hegemony and domination (Fontana 1993, pp. 143–145). He turns his eyes to the organism of the Machiavelli’s Centaur and writes: The dual perspective can present itself on various levels, from the most elementary to the most complex; but these can all theoretically be reduced to two fundamental levels, corresponding to the dual nature of Machiavelli’s Centaur – half-animal and half-human. They are the levels of force and of consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation, of the individual moment and of the universal moment (‘Church’ and ‘State’), of agitation and of propaganda, of tactics and of strategy, etc. (Gramsci 1971, pp. 169–170)

At this point, it is, indeed, necessary to make a critical remark. It would be a serious theoretical and political misunderstanding to believe that the Gramscian theory of politics is based on a mechanical opposition between the poles of its dualities, either methodological or organic ones. In his synthesis of revolutionary strategy and tactics, Antonio Gramsci thinks and writes as a master of dialectics: for him, it is impossible to understand the way the modern state operates, unless the two poles of the hegemony-domination distinction are conceived as interrelated parts of a single and integral unity. In this context, Gramsci’s political warning reveals its real meaning: ‘In politics the error occurs as a result of an inaccurate understanding of what the State (in its integral meaning: dictatorship + hegemony) really is’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 239). Thus, we are not taken by surprise when Gramsci insists that, ‘by State should be understood not only the apparatus of government, but also the

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“private” apparatus of “hegemony” or civil society’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 261). On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that the theorist of the Modern Prince, so much impressed by the impact of hegemony on the manipulation of the masses, especially in the West, does not hesitate to stretch his argument to, or even beyond its limits: ‘Hegemony over its historical development belongs to private forces, to civil society which is “State” too, indeed is the State itself’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 261). On the grounds of formulations as the one mentioned above, Perry Anderson seems right when arguing that in some of Gramsci’s notes there is an ‘involuntary temptation’ to defend the classical thesis of reformism that ‘the power of capital essentially or exclusively takes the form of cultural hegemony in the West’ (Anderson 2017, p. 86). Nonetheless, it would be wrong to draw the general conclusion that the author of the Prison Notebooks reduces the state to civil society, making hegemony its only ruling function. Quite the opposite, Gramsci rarely omits to mention and remind the reader that hegemony is inconceivable without coercion; in his own words, the state itself is ‘hegemony protected by the armor of coercion’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 263). In short, without ignoring or underestimating the consent–coercion variants and asymmetries of the Gramscian theory of hegemony (Anderson 2017; Joseph 2002), I argue that the moral and intellectual leadership of the ruling class as presented in the Prison Notebooks presupposes its ultimate support by the state-mechanisms of coercion. In my view, Gramsci never surrenders to an idealistic temptation. Despite the innate tensions of his theory of hegemony, the Italian revolutionary intellectual proves stable as regards his Marxist position that hegemony is ultimately based and protected by the state-mechanisms of coercion and determined by the economic structure of society (Harman 1977). ‘Though hegemony is ethical-political’, argues Gramsci, ‘it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 161; see also Gramsci 1971, p. 184). It is in opposition to the bourgeois hegemony, structurally determined by the economic basis of the capitalist society, that Gramsci recognizes the need for a proletarian hegemony, or rather a counter-hegemony, in the sense of the proletariat’s ability to ‘lead kindred and allied groups’ in the class struggle against the bourgeoisie even ‘before winning governmental power’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 57). Needless to add, the communist leader is aware of the fact that a ‘crisis of authority’, which means a crisis during which the ruling class ‘loses its consensus [and] is no longer “leading” but only “dominant”‘ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 275–276), is not automatically transformed to a revolution. In other words, turning a crisis of authority to a revolutionary crisis is impossible unless the hegemony of the bourgeoisie is efficiently opposed by the counter-hegemony of the proletariat (Simon 1977, p. 86).

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This is, indeed, the context in which the proletariat realizes the necessity to overcome its economic-corporate interests and the vital role of a historical bloc of subaltern classes and social groups. This is the moment when the need for a political organizer and educator of the masses comes to the fore. For his part, responding to this need, Gramsci takes advantage of his stimulating ‘dialogue’ with Machiavelli and proceeds to determine his own Modern Prince: ‘History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will to become universal and total’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 129). At this crucial point, as the Modern Prince, the revolutionary political subject of modern times, is ready to go on stage, let me insist on Gramsci’s approach to the phase of transition from economy to politics, from bourgeois hegemony to proletarian counter-hegemony (Gramsci 1971, p. 181). Moving in this theoretical and political direction, the Gramscian Prince, the collective ‘hero’ who has already appeared in the foreground of the class war, must think and act in terms of Marxist dialectics. To be strategically effective, this ethico-political leader of the historical bloc of subaltern classes must acknowledge the structural foundation of hegemony, while paying attention to the fact that the ‘structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”‘ (Gramsci 1971, p. 366). Obviously, it is not by chance that Gramsci uses the word ‘catharsis’ to describe the passage from the strictly economic to the ethico-political phase of the class-movement (Thomas 2009, pp. 294–297; Jouthe 1990). Placing emphasis on the ‘structural ontology’ of hegemony1 and on the dynamics of catharsis as ‘the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds of men, the transition from “objective to subjective” and from “necessity to freedom”’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 366–367), the author of the Prison Notebooks, for whom the cathartic moment constitutes ‘the starting moment of the philosophy of praxis’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 367), sheds light on the forthcoming revolutionary activity of the Modern Prince. It is exactly through this socially grounded cathartic action, says Gramsci, that ‘structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 367). Gramsci’s interest in catharsis as an emancipatory process advanced through the mediation of the political party did not come out of the blue. Although attributing the function of the vanguard to a virtuous individual and not yet to a party, it was Niccolò Machiavelli who first put forward the hypothesis of transforming volgus or multitudo to a cohesive political subject, i.e., to a determinate popolo (Fontana 1993, p. 160). Coming closer to the times of Gramsci, however, it becomes more and more evident that the collective

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Prince gets ready to take the form of a political party. Moreover, it seems historically and politically reasonable to suggest that the Marxist debate on the organizational question as developed during the first decades of the twentieth century in Europe exerted a significant influence on Gramsci’s theory of the Modern Prince (Adamson 1980, pp. 207–208). Thus, the Gramscian Prince emerges on the political horizon as the vanguard which is responsible for directing and advancing the process of social emancipation through the total transformation of the proletariat from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself. As far as the working classes, especially in the West, prove unable to reach a revolutionary consciousness and praxis by their own forces, both the overcoming of the bourgeois hegemony and the access of the proletarian counter-hegemonic bloc to power require the existence of a Modern Prince, that means of a revolutionary party (Femia 1987, p. 56). In this sense, to deal with the strategy and tactics of the Modern Prince, as well as with the formation and function of its organism, constitutes a theoretical and political challenge which Antonio Gramsci is determined to face. Moreover, the imprisoned leader of the Italian Communist Party proves convinced that this challenge should be answered not in abstracto, but in concreto, that is to say after studying in detail historical reality in the making (Gramsci 1971, p. 238). From this point of view, Gramsci looks decided to counsel his Prince to build its strategy and tactics based on the distinction between the eastern (Russian) and the western type of society. Admittedly, he is cautious enough when transferring this distinction from the ‘theater of war’ to the much more complicated political battlefield (Gramsci 1971, pp. 229, 232). After taking the necessary methodological precautions, however, he proceeds to the following, exhaustively discussed and debated, formulation: In Russia, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. (Gramsci 1971, p. 238)

In relation to this East/West typology, the distinction between war of maneuver and war of position as proposed and interpreted by Gramsci proves crucial indeed. Focusing light on the western capitalist societies and parliamentary democracies, Gramsci seems to agree with the military specialists who insist that, at least in the case of ‘industrially and socially advanced states’, the war of maneuver is being reduced to a more tactical than strategic level when compared with the war of position (Gramsci 1971, p. 235). This transition from the frontal attack to the long-term and molecular process of the war of position, asserts Gramsci, is ‘the most important question of political theory that the

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post-war period has posed, and the most difficult to solve correctly’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 235). For his part, he advises the Modern Prince, who intends to direct a proletarian movement and lead a historical bloc of subaltern groups against a western capitalist state, to give priority to the war of position and not to the war of maneuver. In constant contact with the Bolshevik tradition, the imprisoned intellectual remarks: ‘It seems to me that Ilich [Lenin] understood that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only possible form in the West’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 237). In terms of a Marxist assessment of the Gramscian politics, however, let me insist that the transition from the war of maneuver to the war of position does not signify a major change as regards the ultimate strategic goal of the Modern Prince. Translating the Machiavellian Prince into ‘modern political language’, Gramsci acknowledges that the political party’s strategic aim is to found ‘a new type of state’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 147, 252–253), a socialist state, tending to ‘the reabsorption of political society into civil society’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 253) and aiming at the formation of a ‘regulated’, that means a communist, society (Gramsci 1971, pp. 381–382). Yet, to fulfill this strategic goal, i.e., the overthrow of a capitalist state and the foundation of a socialist one, the Modern Prince, which means the revolutionary party par excellence, should intervene in the ideological institutions and ethico-political mechanisms of the concrete capitalist society and fight to alter the balance of power in favor of the proletariat and its class-allies. To this end, the educational/cultural role of the Modern Prince must be upgraded. A revolutionary ‘totalitarian’ party – ‘totalitarian’ not in the modern negative sense of the term but in the sense of an integral ‘all-inclusive’ political entity (Gramsci 1971, pp. 147–149) – being the ‘bearer of a new culture’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 265), should act as the collective educator of the working masses, preparing them not only to fight against capitalism, but also to live as the citizens of a socialist democracy and even farther as the members of a communist society (Gramsci 1971, p. 267). After all, it is the author of the Prison Notebooks who, while focusing on the freedom-necessity dialectics with emphasis on the party’s internal discipline, reaches the conclusion that ‘the parties can be considered as schools of State life’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 267–268). Definitely, as an intellectual vanguard, the Gramscian Prince, being opposed to any kind of elitism (Coutinho 2012, p. 117), aims at transforming the element of spontaneity to class consciousness. According to Gramsci, a human mass cannot obtain a ‘critical self-consciousness’ without the educative/ cultural intervention of a revolutionary political-intellectual organization (Gramsci 1971, pp. 332–334). Functioning as a collective educator, the revolutionary party provides the workers with ‘a “theoretical” consciousness of being creators of historical and institutional values, of being founders of a State’

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(Gramsci 1971, p. 198, emphasis in original). In short, according to Gramsci, political leadership must neither implement despotically a theoretical dogma nor obey and reproduce passively the spontaneous will of the proletarians. In this context, the educational relation between the Modern Prince and the working masses reveals its true ethico-political meaning. The educational relationship, insists Gramsci, is not exhausted within the strictly academic institution. In fact, every social relationship that has to do with hegemony is an educational relationship (Gramsci 1971, p. 350). In other words, to act in terms of an ethico-political leadership, i.e., in terms of hegemony, is impossible unless the political party functions as the collective teacher of the proletariat and its allied groups. At this point, I would like to focus my attention on the Gramscian concept of the ‘democratic philosopher’. The ‘master–disciple’ dialectics, argues Gramsci, reaching a maximum in societies where political freedom exists, gives rise to a new type of philosopher, the ‘democratic philosopher’, an educator who is conscious of the fact that ‘his personality is not limited to himself as a physical individual but is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 350). It is worth noting that this Gramscian figure of the ‘democratic philosopher’ proves still more stimulating if conceived not only as an individual but also as a collective subject (Thomas 2009, pp. 429–436, especially pp. 435–436). Stated plainly, the Modern Prince may be conceived as a collective democratic philosopher, i.e., as a collective intellectual who advances social transformation in relation to the cultural environment (s)he is fighting to change. Playing a (counter)hegemonic role, especially in western societies which dispose a well-developed system of superstructural institutions and mechanisms, the Gramscian Prince, this collective educator of the proletariat, comes into being as a collective ‘democratic philosopher’. From a similar point of view, it seems quite easy to understand what Gramsci exactly means when referring to political parties as ‘historical laboratories’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 335). According to the Marxist intellectual, a modern political party may be described as a historical ‘laboratory’, i.e., as an intellectual–political collectivity which elaborates on and disseminates world views and ideas during its organized attempt to dismantle the complicated ethico-political ‘trenches’ of western capitalist societies. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that Gramsci confines the revolutionary party to the role of a historical laboratory. Working out the strategy and tactics of the proletarian movement in the form of a counter-hegemony plan, the Modern Prince, following the steps of its Machiavellian ancestor, still does not hesitate to combine the power of ideas with the power of arms. Under any circumstances, however, either as an agent of hegemony, educating the working masses and elaborating pioneering theories and ideas,

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or as an agent of coercion, fighting in arms against the capitalist state, the Gramscian Prince must be organized according to the principles of democratic centralism as distinguished from and opposed to the bureaucratic type of centralism (Gramsci 1971, pp. 186–190). A bureaucratic party, Gramsci insists, is a ‘simple unthinking executor’ that exists only ‘technically’ as a political organism (Gramsci 1971, p. 155). On the contrary, a political party functions as a genuine organic entity if it is formed in terms of democratic centralism (Gramsci 1971, p. 189). As an ‘elastic formula’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 189), democratic centralism improves the Modern Prince’s strategic ability to distinguish the ‘organic’ from the ‘conjunctural’ and helps to define accurately the ‘dialectical nexus’ between these two moments of the movement (Gramsci 1971, pp. 177–180). Thus far, we met the Modern Prince in the pages of the Gramscian Prison Notebooks, reaching the conclusion that, without underestimating the importance of revolutionary violence, the Modern Prince upgrades the status of the structurally determined (counter) hegemony in the frame of its political program, as long as it operates especially in advanced industrialized societies. In this context, acting as an ethico-political leader and innovative elaborator of revolutionary ideas and practices, the Gramscian Prince is organized in accordance with the principles of democratic centralism and advances the process of catharsis transforming the economic–corporate activity of the proletariat to revolutionary politics. It’s now time to meet our Prince in the middle of a still ongoing debate among contemporary defenders and revising interpreters of Gramsci’s Marxist politics.

THE GRAMSCIAN MODERN PRINCE AND ITS STRATEGY. SUPPORTIVE AND REVISING INTERPRETATIONS In the broad bibliography concerning the Gramscian politics, it is quite often done to counterpose the democrat Gramsci to the elitist and authoritarian Lenin. Flirting with this dichotomy, Carroll and Ratner (1994, pp. 5–12), distinguish between three alternatives of counter-hegemony – the orthodox Marxist (or Leninist), the (neo-) Gramscian and the radical pluralist, both in its post-Marxist and its postmodernist version – and attempt to prove that the ‘neo-Gramscian paradigm’, in opposition to the Leninist and the radical pluralist politics, provides the most efficient response to the demands of a contemporary socialist movement. Dealing systematically with the Lenin–Gramsci theoretical and political relation is beyond the scope of this chapter; yet, I feel obliged to make myself clear as to whether Gramsci’s concept of the Modern Prince is different from Lenin’s concept of the party. From my point of view, therefore, it is the misin-

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terpretation of Lenin’s theory of politics that gives rise to an undialectical juxtaposition between Lenin’s and Gramsci’s theory of the party. Indeed, it seems to me easy to admit that, contrary to Togliatti’s interpretation of the Modern Prince, Gramsci’s political theory should not be regarded as ‘a brilliant theoretical footnote to Lenin’ (Piccone 1976, p. 489); nevertheless, I maintain that the antithetical interpretation, according to which the ‘historical Gramsci’ has a minor relation with Lenin’s own views (Piccone 1976, p. 505), is wrong as well. Actually, I consider Gramsci as a Marxist revolutionary intellectual who tried to extend and adapt Lenin’s theory of politics to the terrain of western capitalist societies (Boggs 1976, p. 103; Poulantzas 2000 [1978], p. 256). To the extent that Gramsci accepts the East/West dichotomy in terms of a civil/ political society-typology, is led to adjust – not to reject — Lenin’s political theory to a different social and cultural context and compose a correspondingly remodeled political strategy and tactics. Consequently, it is social reality itself that guides Lenin and Gramsci to defend two distinct Marxist variants of the revolutionary party. In this sense, attributing elitism and instrumentalism to Lenin’s theory of the party (Femia 1987, pp. 154–155), as opposed to Gramsci’s theory of the Modern Prince, is the outcome of neglecting or underestimating the prominent differences of the conditions under which the two Marxist revolutionaries were obliged to act. Above all, it should not be forgotten that it was Lenin’s politics that inspired Gramsci’s theoretical and political decision not to be contemptuous of spontaneity. It was the author of What is to be Done? who pointed out that the ‘“spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form’ (Lenin 1960, p. 374, emphasis in original), while insisting that ‘the greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the more widespread the movement, the more rapid, incomparably so, the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical, political and organisational work of Social-Democracy’ (Lenin 1960, p. 396). From this point of view, it proves at least problematic to argue that ‘Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and its conception of the party represents a qualitative and not merely quantitative departure from Lenin’ (Sanbonmatsu 2004, p. 173; see also Fonseca 2016, pp. 138–166); on the contrary, the following assessment proves reasonable indeed: ‘There is a very clear link between Gramsci’s formulations on “the Modern Prince” and Lenin’s theory of the party. Perhaps this is one of the concrete topics in political philosophy that, in spite of significant differences in emphasis, Gramsci’s capacity for renewal with regard to Lenin’s legacy is less evident’ (Coutinho 2012, pp. 110–111; see also Egan 2016, pp. 116–117).2

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Undoubtedly, Gramsci works on a new theory of revolution as far as his analysis of the Modern Prince and its revolutionary strategy arises from and reacts upon the new social, political and cultural conditions that characterize the advanced capitalism of the West in comparison with the Russian case. In this sense, it is aptly noticed that Gramsci laid the ground for an ‘anti-passive revolution’ (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980, p. 226) with an emphasis on the political efficiency of cultural institutions and practices. In fact, it is Gramsci himself who asserts that the modern Prince must fight for ‘the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilisation’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 132–133). Certainly, Gramsci’s cultural revolution as organized and directed by the Modern Prince constitutes a ‘dual-perspective’ process; it is not only a collective movement contributing decisively to the overthrow of capitalism, but also an educational dynamic ethically and politically prefiguring a communist society (Coutinho 2012, pp. 114–115). Yet, in Marxist terms, it is worth insisting that this Gramscian variant of revolution is a structurally determined project of counter-hegemony. In this regard, it should be admitted that, while fighting against any kind of economistic/reductionist base–superstructure outlook, the author of the Prison Notebooks does not deviate from, but elaborates on, a classical Marxist analysis of western states. At this point, however, it proves necessary to focus on the following methodological and, in the final analysis, political hypothesis: as far as the Gramscian crucial dualities are concerned – structure/superstructures, coercion/consent, civil/political society, war of maneuver/war of position, organic/conjunctural etc. – what really counts is not merely to conceive them in terms of unity/ totality. From a Marxist perspective, what matters, both theoretically and politically, is to distinguish between the determining and the decisive moment of those dualities as they are taking the form of totality in the everyday life of advanced industrialized societies. In fact, implementing or ignoring such a determining/decisive moment distinction proves an efficient criterion for drawing the dividing line between Marxist and post-Marxist (in the broadest sense of the word) interpretations of Gramsci’s theory of the Modern Prince. To argue, for example, that Gramsci’s ‘historical bloc’ as the structure– superstructures unity is ‘a strategic, not a descriptive or an analytical, concept’ (Sotiris 2018, p. 95), though important, is a theoretically and politically insufficient way to conceive Gramsci’s politics. A Marxist approach to the Gramscian concept of historical bloc, while defending the structure– superstructures unity, does not omit to distinguish between economy (structure) as the determining and the superstructures as the decisive moment especially within the class-structured totality of western capitalist societies. On the contrary, in post-Marxist interpretations of Gramsci’s politics, the determining role of economy recedes, leaving at its place either unity-in-difference without a determining instance (Sotiris 2018, pp. 99–108) or the conjunctural

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‘articulation of an alternative universalism’ (Stephen 2009, p. 493) and, in the most extreme case, a bitter complaint about ‘the inner essentialist core which continues to be present in Gramsci’s thought setting a limit to the deconstructive logic of hegemony’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 69). Following the same dialectical path, I may argue that winning consent through a war of position proves to be the decisive moment of the Modern Prince’s revolutionary strategy in the West, although exerting coercion, especially in the frame of a war of maneuver, remains the determining moment. In fact, the factor of force and war of maneuver seems determining to the extent that repressive state apparatuses, even in the West, are highly impervious to the class struggle as advanced through a war of position (contra Poulantzas 2000 [1978], p. 259; Thomas 2009, pp. 194–195). It is true that Gramsci himself notes that the war of position ‘once won is decisive definitely’, adding that ‘the war of manoeuvre subsists so long as it is a question of winning positions’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 239); but even so, the Modern Prince, being a competent student of its Machiavellian and Jacobin predecessors, knows well that to win the war of position, a successful war of maneuver, ‘even as a tactical instance within the general strategy of a war of position’ (Showstack Sassoon 1987, p. 203), is necessary as a means to seize and break the coercive mechanisms of the (bourgeois) state par excellence (Egan 2016, p. 117). In any case, as observed from a Marxist point of view, the Gramscian Prince, while aiming at a communist (‘regulated’) society, should be competent to avoid deconstructing the strategy–tactics dialectics of the revolutionary movement. Raised at the level of ‘the science and art of politics’, the Modern Prince, while opposing every type of ultra-leftist sectarianism and voluntarism, must also reject the gradualism of reformism either in its traditional social-democratic or in its multiple post-modern versions. In particular, the Marxist synthesis of a quite protracted war of position, combined with a rather brief period of dual power, should be counterposed to, and not confused with, the contemporary post-Marxist neo-reformism which supports the project of a contradictory-in-terms long lasting dual power (Sotiris 2018, pp. 108–116). Focusing our analysis on the compound role of the Modern Prince as the practical and intellectual leader of the proletarian movement, it is quite easy to realize what it really means to refute or disregard Gramsci’s dialectics of revolution. Suffice to note that overestimating the Gramscian innovative approach of the political parties as ‘historical laboratories’ and experimental collectivities leads contemporary scholars to underestimate the need for a disciplined political organization and an armed activity even in the West. In fact, this one-sided conception of the intellectual/experimental character of the party’s life cancels the Gramscian dialectics (Thomas 2009, pp. 437–439) and dissolves the revolutionary party into a loose form of an alleged ‘integral united Front’, consisting in an undifferentiated ‘plurality of processes, prac-

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tices, resistances and collectivities’ (Sotiris 2019, p. 34). In this way, the party disappears, and Gramsci’s Modern Prince goes into political liquidation.3 It is not my intention to undervalue the experimental function of the Modern Prince as a ‘party-laboratory’ and its role in forming an ‘integral united Front’ of anti-capitalist collectivities. After all, what Fonseca defines as ‘the moment of rhizomatic, autonomist and horizontal struggles’, in other words, ‘a war of position from below’ is not to be neglected (Fonseca 2016, p. 17). It is, indeed, a challenge for the Modern Prince to contribute to the upgrading of a rhizomatic revolutionary movement. Nonetheless, this challenge cannot be met successfully by a political party-executive agent of the spontaneous movements’ will. The role of a contemporary communist party, following the lines of the Gramscian cathartic politics, is not merely to ‘foster and strengthen’ autonomous, rhizomatic and horizontal politics (Fonseca 2016, p. 154), but to transform and transcend (aufheben) spontaneity at the level of revolutionary consciousness and praxis. From a neo-Gramscian point of view, it is William Carroll, among other scholars of the same current, who, while trying to keep his distance from the rhizomatic politics of the postmodern left, admits that ‘organizationally a certain degree of centrality is needed’ (Carroll 2010, p. 185). Yet, I wonder how it is possible, for example, to combine anti-hegemony, which, according to Carroll, ‘is not so much wrongheaded as it is incomplete’ (Carroll 2006, p. 32) with the counter-hegemony project of a Modern Prince, i.e., the politics of a party struggling to seize power, while being organized in terms of democratic centralism. It is worth stressing that Carroll recognizes the need for a coherent strategy inspired by Gramsci’s theory of hegemony; nevertheless, he thinks it necessary to complete this strategy with elements detached from the anti-hegemony theory. It seems to me that such a theoretical attempt, despite radical intentions, remains open to eclecticism. Indeed, there is no way to match even a minimal degree of a Gramscian (counter)hegemonic centrality to aspects of the anti-hegemony project of Richard Day, who declares the death of Gramsci (Day 2005) or to the centrifugal project of John Holloway, who, being fond of the Zapatistas’ autonomist movement, argues in favor of changing the world without taking power (Holloway 2002). Finally, it is worth referring to Sanbonmatsu who acknowledges the need for translating the Gramscian theory of the Modern Prince into the language of a ‘postmodern prince’, i.e., a collective leader who does not surrender to but reconstructs spontaneity to anticapitalistic consciousness. Curiously enough, while mentioning no affinity of his Prince with postmodernism and poststructuralism, Sanbonmatsu opts to use the term ‘postmodern’ just to describe the transitional nature of our times (Sanbonmatsu 2004, p. 17). Although it seems contradictory to apply the name ‘postmodern prince’ in order to state that the condition of postmodernity does not require an abandonment of the struggle

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for a unified identity, it must be admitted that, at least, Sanbonmatsu recognizes how serious a mistake it is for the left ‘to refuse leadership and to neglect strategic orientation’ (Sanbonmatsu 2004, p. 154). Contrary to Gill, who suggests a ‘transnational political party’, with no concrete leadership structure, that means ‘a party of movement that cannot be easily decapitated’ (Gill 2000, p. 138), Sanbonmatsu argues in favor of a postmodern prince, who will act as a collective intellectual and an artist, advancing ‘the vision of a unified movement in which diverse movements come together to form the nucleus of a new civilizational order’ (Sanbonmatsu 2004, p. 160). In this sense, it proves important, indeed, to note that ‘the atrophy of alter-globalism as an organised movement […] can partly be explained by the failure of the movement to articulate and cohere around what Gramsci referred to as a collective will’ (Stephen 2009, p. 491). Nevertheless, let me insist: the (counter)hegemonic project must be grounded, both theoretically and politically, in the economic basis of advanced capitalist societies. It is equally important to point out and defend the structural priority of the working class’s movement and party within the historical bloc of the subaltern classes. Otherwise, the postmodern prince turns out to be a replica of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist/populist paradigm.

CONCLUSION Assessing the significance and considering the consequences of the absence of a Modern Prince is a promising start for pursuing the formation of a dynamic and effective anti-capitalist movement, especially in times of crisis like ours, when ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 276). Besides, as I have already argued, opting for a Leninist Gramsci, which means defending Gramsci’s creative reading of Lenin’s theory of the political party in the context of western capitalist societies, should not mean underestimating the importance of spontaneous social movements. Thus, while concluding this chapter about the Modern Prince and its revolutionary strategy, the following Gramscian reminder proves worth bringing out indeed: Neglecting, or worse still despising, so-called ‘spontaneous’ movements, i.e., failing to give them a conscious leadership or to raise them to a higher plane by inserting them into politics, may often have extremely serious consequences. It is almost always the case that a ‘spontaneous’ movement of the subaltern classes is accompanied by a reactionary movement of the right-wing of the dominant class, for concomitant reasons. (Gramsci 1971, p. 199)

Yet, according to the line of reasoning that I followed and defended in this chapter, Gramsci’s acknowledgment of the spontaneous movements’ significance must not be rigidly opposed but dialectically linked to the Modern

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Prince’s vanguard activity without which there is no catharsis, which means spontaneity cannot be transformed to revolutionary consciousness and praxis. In this dialectical context, Gramsci’s theory of the Modern Prince constitutes a valuable contribution to the formation of a Marxist political party that fights for the foundation of a socialist/communist polity in full opposition to any kind of social-democratic incrementalism and post-Marxist sterile activism. Furthermore, moving against any sort of academic and political institutionalization, the Gramscian Prince avoids becoming a mere object of cultural studies or a political subject of twenty-first century reformism (Egan 2016, p. 116), a reformism that draws inspiration from a Eurocommunist past, either in its right or in its left version (Harman 1977; Pontusson 1980). It was not my intention to ignore or to undervalue asymmetries or even ambiguities as regards Gramsci’s conception of the Modern Prince. Nevertheless, I insist that, despite these aptly debated aspects of the Gramscian Prince, its role as a political party that aims at the revolutionary transformation of the bourgeois society and the state cannot be denied and should not be revised. The absence of the Modern Prince is dramatically realized nowadays through the long-lasting incompetence of social movements in meeting their self-declared anticapitalistic ends.4 Following step by step the twenty-first century anti-capitalist struggles from Plaza del Sol to Syntagma Square and taking into serious account the multiform action of movements such as ‘Occupy Wall Street’, ‘Nuit Debout’ and the ‘Gilets Jaunes’, no doubt remains as regards the political aridity of the post-modern social activism. In fact, even thinkers such as Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, so attached to and supportive of the ‘most inspiring movements of the past decades’, realize that ‘something more is needed’ since ‘multiplicity’, though necessary, is not sufficient ‘to bring about real social transformation’ (Hardt and Negri 2019, pp. 83–84). It is not by accident that a post-Marxist philosopher such as Alain Badiou openly admits that in the last ten years, there have been numerous, and sometimes vigorous, movements of revolt against this or that aspect of the hegemony of liberal capitalism. But they have also been resolved without posing any major problem to the dominant capitalism. (Badiou 2022)

As a result, though insisting that ‘the classical party is defunct today’, Badiou does not hesitate to underscore the need for a new type-political organization (Badiou 2022). Indeed, there has been and still exists an excess of a quasi-metaphysical faith in the anti-capitalistic movements’ ability to be self-organized and successfully fight capitalism. Time has come, however, to give the missing political link its name: it is the Modern Prince, which means an updated Marxist revolutionary

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party, ready to transform social multiplicity to political unity and able to lead an international socialist/communist movement according to Gramscian principles. Post-Marxist political and, ultimately, electoral collectivities, such as Podemos and Syriza, prove to be not an answer to, but a morbid symptom of, the anti-capitalist movements’ political sterility. I think it’s time to seek and reach the critical balance between the movement, especially the working-class movement, and the party. After all, translating the Gramscian Prince into a contemporary political language does not require rejection but the support of the Marxist party as the vanguard agent of the catharsis, that means as the collective organizer and intellectual, directing, albeit not manipulating, the anti-capitalist movement in the transition from necessity to freedom.

NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4.

I use the term ‘structural ontology of hegemony’ according to Joseph’s analysis of the concept (Joseph 2002, pp. 35–39). In this context, Lenin’s theory of politics should not be confused with (Marxism-) Leninism and must be clearly opposed to Stalinism. I am afraid Carroll and Ratner (1994, p. 23) do not avoid such a confusion, while using the term ‘Leninism’, to refer ‘to Lenin’s own formulations but also to a doctrine, based in a certain interested reading of Lenin (and of Marx and Engels), whose foundations were enunciated after Lenin’s death’, especially by Stalin in his ‘Foundations of Leninism’. On this issue, my argument falls into line with Martin Thomas’s critique to Peter Thomas’ The Gramscian Moment (M. Thomas 2014, p. 159). I had the opportunity to present my view (Chrysis, 2018) on the absence of the Modern Prince in the chapter entitled ‘In search of the Modern Prince: A critical absence reconfirmed through the Greek experience’ in Sotiris (2018, pp. 244–266).

REFERENCES Adamson, W.L. (1980). Hegemony and Revolution. A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Anderson, P. (2017). The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. London and New York: Verso. Badiou, A. (2023). Thirteen Theses and some comments on politics today. https://​www​ .versobooks​.com/​blogs/​5526​-thirteen​-theses​-and​-some​-comments​-on​-politics​-today Bates, T.R. (1975). Gramsci and the theory of hegemony. Journal of the History of Ideas, 36(2): 351–366. Boggs, C. (1976). Gramsci’s Marxism. London: Pluto Press. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Carroll, W.K. (2006). Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony. Socialist Studies 2(2): 9–43. http://​phaenex​.uwindsor​.ca/​ojs/​leddy/​index​.php/​SSJ/​article/​viewFile/​ 193/​184

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Carroll, W.K. (2010). Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new. Interface 2(2): 168–198. http://​interfacejournal​.nuim​.ie/​2010/​11/​interface​-issue​-2​ -volume​-2​-voices​-of​-dissent/​ Carroll, W.K. and Ratner R.S. (1994). Between Leninism and Radical pluralism: Gramscian reflections on counter-hegemony and the New Social Movements. Critical Sociology, 20(2): 3–26. Chrysis, A. (2018). In search of the Modern Prince: A critical absence reconfirmed through the Greek experience. In P. Sotiris (ed.), Crisis, Movement, Strategy. The Greek Experience. Leiden: Brill, pp. 244–266. Coutinho, C.N. (2012). Gramsci’s Political Thought. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Day, R.F. (2005). Gramsci is Dead. Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press. Egan, D. (2016). The Dialectic of Position and Maneuver. Leiden: Brill. Femia, J.V. (1981). An historicist critique of ‘revisionist’ methods for studying the history of ideas. History and Theory, 20(2): 113–134. Femia, J.V. (1987). Gramsci’s Political Thought. Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fonseca, M. (2016). Gramsci’s Critique of Civil Society: Towards a New Concept of Hegemony. London: Routledge. Fontana, B. (1993). Hegemony & Power. On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gill, S. (2000). Toward a postmodern Prince? The battle in Seattle as a moment in the new politics of globalisation. Millenium: Journal of International Studies, 29(1): 131–140. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2019). Empire, twenty years on. New Left Review, 120 (November–December), 67–92. Harman, C. (1977). Gramsci versus Eurocommunism. International Socialism, https://​ www​.marxists​.org/​history/​etol/​newspape/​isj/​index3​.html​#isj098 Hoffman, J. (1984). The Gramscian Challenge. Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Holloway, J. (2002). Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press. Joseph, J. (2002). Hegemony. A Realist Analysis. London and New York: Routledge. Jouthe, E. (1990). Catharsis et transformation sociale dans la théorie politique de Gramsci. Québec: Presses Universitaires du Québec. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Lenin, V. (1960). What Is to Be Done? In Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 5: pp. 347–529. Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1902). Leslie, M. (1970). In defence of anachronism. Political Studies, XVIII(4): 433–447. Losurdo, D. (1997). Antonio Gramsci dal liberalismo al ‘communismo critico’. Roma: Gamberetti Editrice. Morton, A.D. (2013). Historicizing Gramsci: Situating ideas in and beyond their context. Review of International Political Economy, 10(1): 118–146. Piccone, P. (1976). Gramsci’s Marxism: Beyond Lenin and Togliatti. Theory and Society, 3: 485–512. Pontusson, J. (1980). Gramsci and Eurocommunism: A comparative analysis of conceptions of class rule and socialist transition. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 24/25: 185–248. Poulantzas, N. (2000 [1978]). State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.

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Rosengarten, F. (2014). The Revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Sanbonmatsu, J. (2004). The Postmodern Prince. New York: Monthly Review Press. Showstack Sassoon, A. (1987). Gramsci’s Politics. London: Hutchinson. Simon, R. (1977). Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Marxism Today (March), 78–86. Sotiris, P. (2018). Gramsci and the challenges for the Left: The historical bloc as a strategic concept. Science & Society, 82(1): 94–119. Sotiris, P. (2019). The Modern Prince as laboratory of political intellectuality. International Gramsci Journal, 3(2): 2–38. Stephen, M.D. (2009). Alter-globalism as counter-hegemony: Evaluating the ‘postmodern Prince’. Globalizations, 6: 483–498. Thomas, M. (2014). Gramsci without the Prince. Historical Materialism, 22(2): 158–173. Thomas, P.D. (2009). The Gramscian Moment. Leiden: Brill.

PART III GRAMSCI FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Section A

Philosophical and political-economic issues

14. Gramsci, post-Marxism and critical realism Jonathan Joseph INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at two radical but significantly different approaches to Marxism and philosophy – post-Marxism and critical realism. Both are highly influential schools of thought, with great relevance to such Gramscian themes as hegemony, class, subject positions and interests, ideology and discourse. Post-Marxism, as articulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, has inspired a broader school of discourse analysis, institutionally associated with the University of Essex, producing work that combines linguistic, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist approaches to contemporary society. Starting with Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, the approach severs the connection with a real world referent. In place of structural determination, Derrida’s notion of undecidability is crucial. From Lacanian theory is taken the idea of nodal points of articulation in the discursive field (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xi). Meanwhile, critical realism, originating in the work of Roy Bhaskar, has become an influential approach across the social sciences, often in opposition to poststructuralism. It develops a metatheory of social science, supporting notions that are explicitly rejected by post-Marxism such as social structure and underlying causes. Of the two approaches, post-Marxism is a lot more directly engaged with Gramsci, developing a new understanding of hegemony that claims to extend, while also critiquing, Gramsci’s own formulations. It develops the concept of hegemony in order to emphasize plurality, contingency and the discursive articulation of complex elements. By contrast, critical realism has not been so directly engaged with Gramsci’s work, but it does offer a significant critique of post-Marxism and thereby suggests the basis of an alternative reading of Gramsci that recognizes diversity and plurality while not embracing the radical contingency of the post-Marxist view. It also offers an alternative way of conceptualizing the relationship between discursive and extra-discursive, something that forms the basis for 240

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the cultural political economy approach associated with Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum (see Chapter 15) and others such as Joseph (2002), Davies (2011), and Williams (2020) who engage with Gramsci while also recognizing the importance of Foucault and the underpinning role of critical realism. These approaches can be applied to the current crises of capitalism, rise of new social movements, questions around the future of the working class, the nature of the state, the role of civil society, global dynamics and changes in governance. In an age often understood in terms of complexity and uncertainty, we look at how some recent work combines poststructuralism, post-Marxism and critical realism despite the tensions that exist between them.

HEGEMONY, POST-MARXISM AND SOCIALIST STRATEGY The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – also referred to as post-Marxism and discourse theory – provides one of the most significant re-readings of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and forms the basis for a new body of political theory that places strong emphasis on the role of discourse. Their work begins separately with Mouffe editing a significant volume on Gramsci’s political thought where some of her key arguments are in evidence. These include a critique of economism, emphasis on the role of political struggle while rejecting class determinism, and a focus on superstructure and, particularly, on the role of ideology. Mouffe considers the main issue for Marxist theory to develop a non-reductionist theory of ideology and politics. Using Althusser, ideology is understood as a practice producing subjects where the subject is not the original source of consciousness but the result of ideological interpellation (Mouffe, 1979, p. 171). Hegemony enters the picture as the site of production for this non-reductionist problematic of ideology (Mouffe, 1979, p. 172). This Althusserian-influenced reading of Gramsci places focus on the conjuncture as an ‘overdetermination of contradictions’ (Mouffe, 1979, p. 170). Gramsci’s emphasis on moral and intellectual reform is understood not as the creation of new ideologies, but as the means for the rearticulation of existing ideological elements (Mouffe, 1979, p. 192). Hence, ideology is not reducible to a class position but is regarded as a general process of creating social unity. Hegemony is understood as the articulating principle of an ideological system and any class character of an ideology is said to come from this hegemonic principle (Mouffe, 1979, p. 194). This is important because it separates the determination of class from the Marxist concept of mode of production and allows for the removal of any class relation from later formulations of hegemony in post-Marxism. What is most notable in Mouffe’s argument is the primary role given to ideology as a practice producing subjects. In later

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work, the notion of discourse is substituted for ideology. A similar development takes place in the work of Ernesto Laclau who at this time is engaged with Gramsci mainly indirectly through the work of Nicos Poulantzas and his writings on fascism and dictatorship. As with Mouffe, he writes that ‘classes exist at the ideological and political level in a process of articulation and not of reduction’ (Laclau, 1977, p. 161). Similarly, he separates the economic from the ideological and political, and reconceptualizes class as determined by the hegemonic interpellation of politics and ideology so that while class may still be ‘the dominant contradiction at the abstract level of the mode of production, the people/power bloc contradiction is dominant at the level of the social formation’ (Laclau, 1977, p. 108). This formulation later allows Laclau and Mouffe to drop the notions of class, economy and mode of production altogether. Laclau has already noted the ‘specific autonomy of democratic interpellations’ that is ‘implicit in the concept of “hegemony”’, allowing us to overcome class reductionism by seeing hegemony as an alternative way of seeing the determination of subject positions (Laclau, 1977, p. 141, n. 56). Hegemony therefore becomes the focus of an approach that is opposed to ‘reductionist’ class politics, and which is outlined in their joint work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In the body of work that forms the basis of post-Marxism, discourse becomes the primary terrain of social struggle, identity and politics. Hegemony is given a central role as an articulator of discourse and formation of subjects. We have noted already that a critique of some of the main features of Marxism forms the starting point for this approach – a sharp critique of Marxism’s support for a materialist theory of history and society – now seen as dualistic and deterministic, giving a false importance to the economic mode of production and exhibiting class reductionism with its notion of a privileged subject. Instead, post-Marxism seeks to blend some elements of Marxism – especially those drawn from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony – with poststructuralist notions of discourse and power, overdetermination, surplus, multiplicity, contingency and indeterminacy. These are clearly in opposition to a Marxism that is criticized for holding with some belief in an underlying logic, telos or determinacy as well as class-determinism. As they write: At this point we should state quite plainly that we are now situated in a post-Marxist terrain. It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 4)

This critique of Marxist theory is linked to a prevailing crisis of socialist ideas and practice. The perceived crisis of socialism – the book was written in the

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1980s – rests on ‘the ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of Revolution, with a capital “r”, [and] …the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 2). Their critique of ‘universal subjects’ is linked to a critique of a view of ‘History in the singular’ and ‘society’ as an intelligible structure that could be intellectually mastered on the basis of certain class positions and reconstituted, as a rational, transparent order, through a founding act of a political character. Today, the Left is witnessing the final act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 2)

Drawing on Althusser, Lacan and Foucault, society and social agents are said to lack any essence. Their regularities merely consist of the relative and precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 98). This order is ‘overdetermined’ – something that has its roots not just in Althusser but in psychoanalysis and the idea of the social as a symbolic order’ (Simm, 2000, p. 18). This also helps reinforce the idea that there is no underlying principle of organization or deep structure, only articulatory practice and a ‘field of differences’. Removing Althusser’s claim to ‘determination in the last instance’, this is now more akin to Foucauldian ‘regularity in dispersion’ and ‘ensemble of differential positions’ (Simm, 2000, p. 19). There is no fixed sense of ‘society’, only the constant interplay of the social. There are no fixed subjects or interests, only the contingent nature of social forces operating in an ‘indeterminate space’. We are left with a ‘conception which denies any essentialist approach to social relations’, and which states the ‘precarious character of every identity and the impossibility of fixing the sense of the “elements” in any ultimate literality’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 96). This, then, is the starting point for a new politics of the left that rejects traditional class politics in favour of the project of a radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 3). These radical forces are the new social movements. Rather than being based on class politics of fixed identity, this is about those who operate through a politics of difference. We can see that this also coincides with movements in feminism developing at this time, notably the arguments of Judith Butler who would co-author with Laclau on the themes of contingency and hegemony (Butler, Laclau, and Zizek, 2000). Identity is something that is not given but is constantly being reworked. These identities are relational – in relation to other elements – or in the case of Butler, performative (Butler, 2006). We are now at the point where we can talk about what hegemony means for post-Marxism. In place of Marxist notions of ‘rationalism’ and ‘intelligibility’,

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hegemony brings in complementary and contingent relations. Summarizing this position, Laclau and Mouffe write: We have demonstrated that there is no logical and necessary relation between socialist objectives and the positions of social agents in the relations of production; and that the articulation between them is external and does not proceed from any natural movement of each to unite with the other. In other words, their articulation must be regarded as a hegemonic relation. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 86)

Hegemony therefore relates to an ‘absent totality’, and to the attempts at articulation in order to overcome this absence and give meaning to the struggles of historical forces, endowing them with positivity.

HEGEMONY Laclau and Mouffe argue that it is the open and incomplete character of social identity that allows it to be articulated into different ‘historico-discursive formations’ or what Gramsci called ‘blocs’. There is no transcendental or original subject, only that which is produced through articulatory practices on the ‘field of discursivity’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 114). In line with their concern with what is the most appropriate socialist strategy they write that with Gramsci, this hegemonic dimension was made constitutive of the subjectivity of historical actors (who thus cease to be merely class actors). We could add that this dimension of contingency, and the concomitant autonomization of the political, are even more visible in the contemporary world, in the conditions of advanced capitalism, where hegemonic rearticulations are far more generalized than they were in Gramsci’s time. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. xii)

That it is possible to use Gramsci in this way is due to his efforts to criticize and overcome the essentialism, economism and class reductionism of classical Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 196). In making their point that political subjects are not so much classes as ‘collective wills’ that are the result of the ‘politico-ideological articulation of dispersed and fragmented historical forces’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 67), Laclau and Mouffe draw on Gramsci’s comment in the Prison Notebooks that An historical act can only be performed by ‘collective man’, and this presupposes the attainment of a ‘cultural-social’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 349)

As Howarth (2015, p. 198) notes, politics is no longer a zero–sum game between clearly identifiable classes with fixed interests and identities but

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is a process of constructing relationships and agreements between multiple groups, forging this into a ‘collective will’. For Laclau and Mouffe this means we must recognize the importance of the ‘cultural aspect’ whereby the heterogenous and dispersed aims are welded together into what Gramsci has called a cultural-social unity based on a common conception of the world (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 67). This welding together of disparate elements is what post-Marxists understand by Gramsci’s historical bloc. Admittedly, they recognize the need to dispatch with some fundamental aspects of Gramsci’s approach – commitment to idea of a fundamental social class, the centrality of an ‘economic nucleus’ as both determining struggles and as the object of struggle, and the clear distinction between coercion and constraint in maintaining class hegemony (Howarth, 2015, p. 200). Removed of these ‘underlying ontological tensions’, Laclau and Mouffe’s terrain of hegemony is characterized by the concepts of ‘articulation’, ‘chains of equivalence’ and ‘difference’, a site of contingent struggles and articulatory practices ‘that conjoined polyvalent symbolic elements into a relatively stable, but essentially unfixed, relational whole’ (Martin, 2019, p. 313). In Laclau and Mouffe’s words: Every historical bloc – or hegemonic formation – is constructed through regularity in dispersion, and this dispersion includes a proliferation of very diverse elements: systems of differences which partially define relational identities; chains of equivalences which subvert the latter but which can be transformistically recovered insofar as the place of opposition itself becomes regular and, in that way, constitutes a new difference; forms of overdetermination which concentrate either power, or the different forms of resistance to it; and so forth. The important point is that every form of power is constructed in a pragmatic way and internally to the social, through the opposed logics of equivalence and difference; power is never foundational. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 142) A social and political space relatively unified through the instituting of nodal points and the constitution of tendentially relational identities, is what Gramsci called a historical bloc. The type of link joining the different elements of the historical bloc – not unity in any form of historical a priori, but regularity in dispersion – coincides with our concept of discursive formation. Insofar as we consider the historical bloc from the point of view of the antagonistic terrain in which it is constituted, we will call it hegemonic formation. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 136)

In rejecting the idea of pre-existing class interests and identities, the notion of antagonism emerges as a way of explaining hegemonic articulation and contestation. This new version of hegemony, as Simm notes, operates across a fragmented political scene with contesting articulatory practices and unstable and constantly displaced ‘frontiers’. Post-Marxist hegemony ‘requires there to be antagonistic forces, equivalence, and fluid frontiers; conditions which Laclau and Mouffe claim take them beyond Gramscian hegemony, with its

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residual commitment to unity’ (Simm, 2000, p. 23). Nor is there any single type of hegemony. There are multiple, coexistent and intertwined hegemonies, bringing in new antagonists such as around race, ethnicity and gender, with varying degrees of inclusion and exclusion (Martin, 2019: 314). This new ‘Radical’ politics is irreducible to the kind of unitary foundational principles found in Marxist analysis of class. This is a ‘democratic’ politics generated by the expansion of the egalitarian imaginary (Simm, 2000, p. 27). However, even sympathetic commentaries are concerned that this comes at a certain cost. Martin’s excellent analysis of the post-Marxist approach makes a favourable point that comes with a warning: Much of Laclau and Mouffe’s important innovations to radical political theory, I believe, hang fundamentally on this emptying of hegemony of any privileged social content or normative commitments in favour of an admittedly formalistic frame quite at odds with the melodramatic flavour of ‘victims’ versus ‘villains’, oppression versus freedom, which so often underscores the moral certitude of left thinking and divides society along a single antagonistic frontier. This position, of course, creates problems of its own, which I will not explore here, about how far one can go with an abstract framework of this kind to understand and positively unify specific political struggles. For it may be that in mourning Gramsci, we bid farewell to a stable or consistent idea of emancipation that makes radical left politics appealing. (Martin, 2019, p. 318)

And Simm’s more critical tone likewise warns that a democratic politics, or politics of antagonism could empty socialist strategy of much of its content There is never a final outcome, just a position of greater or lesser success at keeping ‘unprogressive’ articulations at bay at any one moment. For all that Laclau and Mouffe strive to put an optimistic gloss on things, there is more than a hint of the nihilistic implications of ‘eternal recurrence’ in their analysis. ‘All to play for’ can also mean ‘no possibility of winning no matter how long you play’ … A lack of centre may appeal greatly to deconstructionists, but many more will find it disorienting and productive of insecurity. The message is largely negative in tone: we know what we are up against, but also know that it is unlikely to go away and that it is at least as resourceful as we are. The calls for a new social order at the close of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy seem to clash with that omnipresent spectre of eternal recurrence. (Simm, 2000, p. 31)

Ironically, this ends up close to the criticisms made of a certain type of realism associated with Hobbes, Machiavelli and the ancient Greeks and taken up more recently in International Relations theory whose realists present a pessimistic view of a timeless world of repetition and recurrence where fundamental antagonism (such as Mouffe, taken from Carl Schmitt) and relations of self-and-other replace any hope of progress or improvement (Carr, 1974, p. 11). However, we will turn to a different type of (philosophical) realist

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response in the next section to see whether a more positive picture can be painted.

DISCOURSE THEORY AND THE REALIST RESPONSE Having defined articulation as any practice that establishes relations between elements that modifies their identity, Laclau and Mouffe (2001, p. 105) go on to say that the structured totality that results from these articulatory practices is what they will call discourse. All social objects are constituted according to these processes of discursive articulation and such entities have no significance or meaning outside of discourse. The social has no single or underlying constitutive principle other than discursive articulation. This has led to much criticism of discourse theory as we will see in this section. In particular, discourse theory attracts attention for its attempts to overcome the traditional separations between material/real and discursive/symbolic. As Howarth notes, the tendency is to see the latter as representing the former (we might add, particularly within Marxism) whereas discourse theory seeks to develop a constitutive conception of discourse which would include within it material objects, human subjects and social practices (Howarth, 2015, p. 201). This is not, therefore, a purely linguistic or cognitive approach since, as we have already seen, discourse is understood as an articulatory practice that constitutes social relations by linking together contingent elements of various types – linguistic and non-linguistic, such that the identity of these elements is modified as a result (Howarth, 2015, p. 201). Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe try to break from such distinctions, arguing that: Our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practice. It affirms: a) that every object is constituted as an object of discourse, insofar as no object is given outside every discursive condition of emergence; and b) that any distinction between what are usually called the linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice, is either an incorrect distinction or ought to find its place as a differentiation within the social production of meaning, which is structured under the form of discursive totalities. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 107)

This argument has come under attack from several Marxist and realist critics (Geras, 1987; Wood, 1998; Joseph, 2002; Jessop, 2019) who claim it is a denial of an independently existing reality. Laclau and Mouffe’s response is to argue that what they deny ‘is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001, p. 108). The critical realist position that we will develop later in this chapter would argue against this claim. For critical realism, the claim that objects can only constitute themselves as objects through discourse is a clear example

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of the epistemic fallacy that conflates the real existence of entities with the transitive knowledge we have of them. To say that the object is meaningless outside discourse is to say that its natural properties are insignificant until discursively articulated and that a physical entity cannot be constituted except through discourse (Joseph, 2002, p. 112). Such a philosophical debate can run back and forth for some time, so we will move quickly to how this might affect a discussion of interests. On interests, Laclau and Mouffe write, criticizing Marxism, that: Ours is a criticism not of the notion of ‘interests’ but of their supposedly objective character: that is to say, of the idea that social agents have interests of which they are not conscious. To construct an ‘interest’ is a slow historical process, which takes place through complex ideological, discursive and institutional practices … ‘Interests’, then, are a social product, and do not exist independently of the consciousness of the agents who are their bearers. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987, p. 118)

Ellen Meiksins Wood takes this to mean that for Laclau and Mouffe there is no such thing as material interests, only discursively constructed ideas about them (Wood, 1998, p. 61). This can be taken as a Marxist point about the primacy of materiality, but it is close to a wider realist point that Laclau and Mouffe reduce the real world to the ideas we have of it. By contrast, for an interest to be a ‘real’ interest, it must represent a relation of some sort to a wider world or reality. The meaningfulness of an interest might be related to discourse as Laclau and Mouffe suggest, but this cannot be exclusively so, or we have no basis for understanding what an interest might be about, what might be at stake, or why it might be so. For a realist, an interest represents a relation with the world. For an interest to be meaningful, we must say that people have an interest in something. Interests cannot be reduced to subjective wants, needs or desires. They must correspond to something real which is an issue for them (Joseph, 2002, p. 115). Post-Marxism argues that we must reject the claim that class is a fundamental social antagonism from which stems fundamental political divisions and interests. As Wood (1998, p. 65) notes, in abandoning these ideas, Laclau and Mouffe embrace the ‘plurality and indeterminacy of the social’ whereby the creation of political struggles is a matter of discursive construction. This necessarily means that a focus on interests is a focus on how they are discursively constituted, which means, in the words of Wood, that the emancipatory impulses of socialism do not arise out of the interests of the working class as ‘agents constituted at the level of relations of production’; instead, that impulse is created by liberal democratic discourse which ‘constructs’ various relations of subordination as oppressive. (Wood, 1998, p. 70)

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This democratic struggle involves a multiplicity of agents, something akin to the politics of the new social movements. Laclau and Mouffe write: By locating socialism in the wider field of the democratic revolution, we have indicated that the political transformations which will eventually enable us to transcend capitalist society are founded on the plurality of social agents and of their struggles. Thus the field of social conflict is extended, rather than being concentrated in a ‘privileged agent’ of socialist change. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987, p. 106)

What this actually means has been subject to much discussion. The ‘privileged agent’ has been removed, but what does this leave us with? In one such response David Forgacs (1985, p. 43) writes that by replacing the privileged agent with ‘a “polyphony of voices” of equal intensity’ leaves a big question mark over how socialism can actually be achieved. By removing the class element from Gramscian hegemony, it is difficult to tell how a diverse set of struggles can be held together. Even if Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is intended as a book for the emergence of new social movements, we might say that this itself depends upon Laclau and Mouffe constructing a binary opposition that, as Carroll and Ratner (1994, p. 19) suggest, treats an actually diverse working class as an homogeneous ‘old social movement’, and new social movements as somehow separate from the resistance to the power of capital and the struggles of organized labour when in fact this might be a chief concern not least because a diverse range of groups might have an ‘interest’ in confronting the power of capital. Such struggles against the power of capital are probably not what Laclau and Mouffe envisage in their new socialist strategy. It would count as an example of reductionism by giving primacy to something extra-discursive or prior to the process of discursive articulation. Yet, it could be argued the other way round that it is reductionist to give primacy to the discursive over the extra-discursive. This is a common critique of discourse theory, well noted in Carroll and Ratner’s (1994, p. 14) comment that ‘this has the ironic effect of replacing one form of reductionism (namely, economic) with a “discourse reductionism” whereby ‘language becomes a world unto itself, constituting the essence of postmodern reality’. David Howarth, another prominent figure from the University of Essex and a sympathetic advocate of discourse analysis who has also engaged with critical realism provides a neat summary of the critics’ position: Critics have alleged that this tradition of theory reduces reality to linguistic and textual structures; subscribes to a self defeating relativism which abandons truth and knowledge in the name of ‘anything goes’; dissolves the impact of social structures on political life, on the one hand, or reduces social agents to the abstract logics of discourse on the other; and exhibits a crippling ‘normative deficit’ which is com-

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plicit with the most powerful relations of domination and oppression in existing capitalist systems. (Howarth, 2015, p. 208)

Among these concerns, we will now focus on the issue of the impact of social structures since this relates to the above point about the power of capital (as what Marx, 1981, p. 953, called a social relation). Critical realists, who we now go on to discuss as an alternative to post-Marxism, would continue to defend this notion of the extra-discursive, structural element present in Gramsci’s conception of hegemony. For example, Carroll and Ratner accept the argument made for an element of creative, pluralist and discursive politics as highlighted by Laclau and Mouffe. But where a Gramscian model of counter-hegemony differs from post-Marxism is in emphasizing the extra-discursive conditions that make such rearticulation of discursive elements possible (Carroll and Ratner, 1994, p. 20). The point about what makes such discursive rearticulation possible is a realist point about conditions of possibility, seen by critical realists in social structural terms. This refers to ‘Laclau and Mouffe’s neglect of the extra-discursive elements that constrain and enable agency’ (Carroll and Ratner, 1994, p. 14). Critical realists argue that in Laclau and Mouffe’s work, all notions of relatively enduring structures, relations, mechanisms, interests, identities and needs are denied, thus leading to the question of what it is that constrains and enables agency or, indeed, on what basis discursive and hegemonic practices might be said to exist? If there are no conditions of possibility, then hegemony does indeed become the endless play of agonistic politics as represented by Mouffe’s later work or the play of ‘empty signifiers’ as represented by Laclau’s return to the subject of populism in his later work (Laclau, 2005). Thus, critical realists conceive of hegemony in relation to those social structures and generative mechanisms that represent its conditions of possibility. It may be distinctive in its way of articulating or representing different elements, but for this to be a meaningful process requires it to be set in some sort of social context that shows how and why these articulations and representations occur. Gramsci’s interest in linguistics and language is related to his concern with how representations of the world and indeed, of everyday practices, are central to the construction and maintenance of hegemony (Ives, 2004). Critical realists relate hegemony, representation and articulation to social structures. But they also relate it to social agency. Indeed, to combine the two, critical realists would say that hegemony’s very possibility is due to agents playing an active and fundamental role in the reproduction of social structures. As we shall see in the next section, it can be argued that hegemony acquires its fullest significance under conditions of structural tension and heightened human awareness where the transformation of these structures becomes a possibility. Such a process requires a hegemonic project to unite agents around a programme or

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a set of interests and collective subject that is structurally located such that it is in a position to effect a transformation and to counter those forces hostile to such a project (Joseph, 2002, p. 120). How hegemony relates to critical realism’s understanding of the structure– agency question will be addressed in the next section. Suffice to say that critical realism opposes post-Marxism’s rejection of structural explanations in favour of a purely contingent account of the social. Indeed, avoiding structural accounts is extremely difficult when trying to provide a clear explanation of something. It is hugely ironic, therefore, that in arguing for their new version of political struggle, Laclau and Mouffe themselves provide a very clear example of a structural explanation: structural transformations of capitalism that have led to the decline of the classical working class in the post-industrial countries; the increasingly profound penetration of capitalist relations of production in areas of social life, whose dislocatory effects—concurrent with those deriving from the forms of bureaucratization which have characterized the Welfare State—have generated new forms of social protest; the emergence of mass mobilizations in Third World countries which do not follow the classical pattern of class struggle. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987, p. 80)

Arguably, critical realism is not best placed to pass judgement on the claims of such a statement. If it is true to its (at least early) claims to be a meta theory or philosophy of science, then its job is not to provide direct explanations of what kinds of structural transformations might be taking place, but only to argue for the importance of such explanations. That Laclau and Mouffe resort to such an explanation proves a point in and of itself. However, in the next section we will piece together something of a critical realist account of hegemony with the caveat that this is only a partial attempt at providing a theoretical explanation.

A CRITICAL REALIST UNDERSTANDING OF HEGEMONY In its early days, critical realism conceived of its role as that of ‘underlabourer’ for the social sciences, making the case for how social scientific explanation is possible and evaluating the status of some of its claims. It especially stressed the importance of recognizing specific ontological and epistemological assumptions behind social scientific accounts of the world and made the case for the benefits of being explicit about these assumptions (Bhaskar, 1989). In the spirit of such an approach, it should be acknowledged here (if this is not already evident to the reader by now) that this chapter is written from a position that is favourable to critical realism and that its own ontological and epistemological assumptions have been present in attempting to provide an account of post-Marxism. Recognizing this, and the impossibility of providing

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a neutral account of either approach ought to be in the best interests of both sides in the debate. In The Possibility of Naturalism (1989) Bhaskar made early claims about the nature of social scientific investigation that pointed in the direction of the sort of structural accounts mentioned above. Two of these approaches are of particular significance here. The first is the argument that the social world has a structured character. This relies on the kind of transcendental argument used in the previous section and asks the question, what must the social world be like in order for scientific practice to be intelligible? It answers that given that (social and natural) scientific practices produce intelligible knowledge, this presupposes that the world itself is structured in such a way that renders it intelligible and open to investigation. This can now be related to the argument about conditions of possibility. Just as Bhaskar asks what are the conditions of possibility that make scientific practice intelligible, so we asked above, what are the conditions of possibility that make hegemonic practice intelligible? The second argument relates to claims such as Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach. Having argued that the social world is structured and stratified in a certain way, they develop an account of the nature of this social structuring and its relationship to social agency. Bhaskar’s argument is the more straightforward of the two. The transformational model of social activity argues that society is the ever-present condition and continually reproduced outcome of social activity (Bhaskar, 1989, pp. 34–35). Agents reproduce social structure, largely unconsciously, through their routinized social activity. This may, on occasion, however, provide opportunities for more conscious acts of social transformation. This model favours a structuralist explanation in arguing that human agency is necessarily dependent on the various forms of social structure. These structures pre-exist particular agents and they enable and constrain their activities. In this sense they condition social agency and shape social actions, but they do not determine agency in the sense understood by critics (including post-Marxist critics) of Althusserian structuralism (that agents are mere bearers of structures). The fact that structural reproduction is necessary but not guaranteed provides a space for agency that is missing in some structuralist and functionalist accounts of the structure–agency relationship. Archer’s argument is more directed at the structuration theory of Giddens and others, which is accused of conflating structures and agents rather than seeing them as having distinct qualities and conditions. Rather than accepting the constructivist argument that structures and agency are ‘mutually constitutive’, she argues that the cultural system logically pre-dates the socio-cultural actions that transform it, while cultural elaboration (development) post-dates interaction (Archer, 1996, p. xxv). Archer’s morphogenetic approach, which has the advantage over Bhaskar of greater temporality, runs: cultural condi-

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tioning → cultural interaction → cultural elaboration (Archer, 1996, p. 144). A critical realist understanding of hegemony might likewise run: hegemonic conditioning → hegemonic interaction → hegemonic elaboration, moving from socio-cultural conditions of hegemony through to hegemonic projects and outcomes (Joseph, 2000). The work of Bhaskar and Archer does not show a great deal of interest in Gramsci. Archer tends to steer clear of Marxist work while Bhaskar criticizes Gramsci for reducing science to a philosophy of praxis and the expression of the collective class subject (Bhaskar, 1991, pp. 172–174; Gramsci, 1971, p. 445). However, Gramsci has been engaged with in the work of critical realists such as Joseph, Jessop and Davies). One approach is to see hegemony as a mediating point in the relationship between structure and agency, fitting it into the models of Bhaskar and Archer presented above (Joseph, 2002). In Bhaskar, it is the idea of social practices that plays the role of explaining this process of mediation, the means by which agents in their conscious but routinized activity unconsciously reproduce deeper social structures – for example the conscious practices surrounding work reproduce the underlying capitalist wage-labour relation as an unintended structural consequence. Hegemony represents a more active intervention into this process by which social structures and their associated practices are preserved, maintained or transformed. The transformation model of social activity can therefore be recast as involving hegemonic struggles over reproduction and transformation (Joseph, 2000; 2002). In Gramsci, this issue can be found in his discussion of the relationship between what he calls structure and superstructure. When hegemony is able to find some unity between them, we find that ‘Structures and superstructures form a “historical bloc”. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). Using an example from his time, Gramsci discusses the emergence of Fordism which relates to the organization of production but also the emergence of a new historical bloc based on these developments. As Gramsci writes, ‘what is involved is the reorganisation of the structure and the real relations between men on the one hand and the world of the economy or of production on the other’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 263). Fordism is an example of how the ruling group should relate to changes in patterns of production and intervene into this process in order to strengthen its own position. In relating to changes in production, the leading fraction can better organize those groups affected by such developments and appeal to their developing interests. This means that Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony does contain this structural element so that the organization of hegemony in relation to social groups is connected to the organization of society at the level of production. In

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contrast to the post-Marxist view that this process is a contingent one, Gramsci argues that although hegemony is ethical-political, ‘it must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 161). These are the conditions that favour certain social groups and allow them to provide hegemonic leadership through their relationship to the most prominent socio-economic relations. Interventions such as Jessop (2019) have therefore criticized post-Marxism for its weak account of Gramsci’s work, with its emphasis on contingency rather than Gramsci’s residual historical materialism. As Gramsci himself says of ideology and contingency: Ideologies are anything but arbitrary; they are the result of historical facts which must be combated and their nature as instruments of domination revealed, not for reasons of morality etc.; but for reasons of political struggle: in order to make the governed intellectually independent of the governing, in order to destroy one hegemony and create another one. (Gramsci, 1999, p. 196)

The theory of hegemony represents a recognition by Gramsci and others that class is not the homogeneous relation envisioned by critics of Marxism, but a complex and stratified set of relationships that requires hegemony to provide leadership and organization. Hegemonic projects seek to construct alliances out of a diverse range of social groups and agents, each with different aims and interests. From a critical realist point of view, this makes it even more necessary to look at the underlying social structures and generative mechanisms that give rise to these divergent groups and interests and which allow certain groups to come forward as leading. Hegemonic projects articulate these differences in various ways, but they are not the primary origin of these differences between these social groups and their interests – which instead reside in the already-existing, underlying social relations and class determinations (Joseph, 2002, p. 32). Bringing together these structural and agential elements of hegemony leaves us with the view that it provides the political or class struggle moment in the interaction between structures and agents (Joseph, 2002, p. 39). Gramsci makes the telling comment that ‘incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 178). This is very close to a critical realist conception of the structure–agency relationship. Indeed, in the worlds of Andrew Collier

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who was one of the critical realists most sympathetic to Marxism, we find an argument about practice tending to take over or destroy certain institutions (politics of change) or to defend them from such attacks (politics of conserving). The transformation of social structure is necessarily a political act, but their reproduction is not; the task of politicians who defend the existing order is not to cause its reproduction, since the system in a sense reproduces itself; it is rather to ward off threats to that reproduction. (Collier, 1989, pp. 152–163)

At this point, we can present two aspects of hegemony relating to the structure–agency question. There is hegemony in a more structural sense of the reproduction of social structures which, according to critical realism, exist in layered or stratified combinations, raising the question of the unity or cohesion of these structural ensembles. This relates to Gramsci’s formulations on the relations between economy, state and civil society or the economic, political and cultural domains. Then, there is a second and more commonly understood sense of hegemony emerging from the more societal understanding of hegemony, which is hegemony in the strategic sense of hegemonic projects. These are emergent from underlying structural relations, have a more concrete and manifold expression, and are articulated in relation to the identities and interests of particular social groups, their practices, common sense and worldviews (Joseph, 2002, p. 128). There is finally the question of appropriate socialist strategy. For critical realism this would mean the identification of social agents who have the potential for transformation. This is not given to agents through a process of discursive articulation of subject identities, but through a relationship to the most influential social structures and mechanisms. Of course, by this stage it is not critical realism that is providing the answers to these questions, but it supports our efforts in raising these questions and acts as an underlabourer for those theoretical approaches that seek to develop such analysis.

CRITICAL REALISM, GOVERNANCE AND COMPLEXITY A critical realist reading of Gramsci and the two types of hegemony model has been taken up in a variety of recent studies, but has also been criticized, notably by Bob Jessop (2003), for being too structural-functionalist (that hegemony is defined by its social function rather than the social relations and conflicts between the agents that it represents). Jessop in turn has been criticized by Davies for his ‘greater contingency in the couplings between social structures and between structures and agents than classical Marxism’

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(Davies, 2011, pp. 80–81). The debate is essentially about the balance between structure and strategy. One recent example by Amna Kaleem uses the structural and surface distinction to examine the UK’s anti-terrorism strategy, but interestingly extends the notion of structural hegemony to include ideas and truisms that facilitate the introduction of new norms and practices around anti-terrorism (Kaleem, 2021, p. 7). Structural hegemony can be found in the ‘mundanity of everyday life’ that is open for hegemonic projects to co-opt structures of lived reality (Kaleem, 2021, p. 5). In other words, Gramscian common sense is deep-rooted. Another supportive engagement with the two-types model has been Jonathan Pass’s work on US hegemony. Here he reads Gramsci through a critical realist lens in order to emphasize the structural element to hegemony. He also takes up Joseph’s distinction between structural and surface hegemony to critique the influential work of neo-Gramscians in International Relations theory. Notably, Robert Cox is criticized for not adequately relating hegemony to underlying structural conditions: neo-Gramscian theory, especially in its Coxian version, is guilty of ontological (and hence epistemological) inconsistencies. Their absolute aversion to any underlying ‘logic’ (e.g. a mode of production) results in them historicising structure, effectively reducing it to inter-subjective relations… coupled with a tendency to depict hegemony in ideological/consensual terms (not unlike the liberals) and down-grade coercion. (Pass, 2019, p. 5)

Pass criticizes Cox’s definition of historical structures as intersubjective relations, making it impossible to properly investigate the interaction of structure: ‘by abandoning “deep structure” (Joseph’s structural hegemony) [neo-Gramscians] implicitly relinquished any possibility of theorising on the dynamics of global capitalism or class reproduction/formation’ (Pass, 2019, p. 34). This lack of ontological depth is said to result in an inadequate theorisation of the state as an inter-subjective social relation, located externally to the economy and reduced to a ‘transmission belt’ between the national and international sphere (Pass, 2019, pp. 35–36). One person who cannot be accused of inadequate theorisation of the state is Bob Jessop. His early engagement with Gramsci in The Capitalist State praises him for rejecting economism but maintaining a focus on how the economy plays a crucial role in how we understand society and social transformation, particularly through the growing concentration and centralisation of industrial capital, growth of monopolies and trusts and increasing weight of financial capital (Jessop, 1982, p. 144). Above all else though, Gramsci’s originality lies in his radical reappraisal of the state apparatus and state power and for the importance of forming historical blocs (Jessop, 1982, p. 151). Jessop returns to this issue in more recent work to argue that Gramsci’s crucial contribution is to

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see the state as a social relation and that he is less concerned with the state as an apparatus than with the modalities of how state power is exercised and the relations between state and the forces of wider society (Jessop, 2016, p. 73). Here is not the place to do full justice to Jessop’s position, which deserves at least a chapter in its own right. To briefly summarize, his strategic-relational approach is a major intervention that is influenced by Gramsci’s work alongside that of Poulantzas and, in a less direct way, some critical realist arguments. In Jessop’s view, the strategic-relational approach goes beyond critical realist models of structure and agency through its greater attention to the way that structures are strategically-selective in their form, content and operation while agency is structurally constrained and context-sensitive. The task is to examine how structures might privilege certain actors and strategies and how actors might take account of this differential privileging in their structurally-oriented strategic calculation (Jessop, 2005, p. 48). Chapter 15 of this volume presents Sum and Jessop’s developing research agenda around cultural political economy. It is important to note how they combine political economy with the semiotic in such a way as to avoid the issues in post-Marxism which, in critical realist terms, they believe, represents a form of actualism that focuses on the level of meaning but forsakes causality. Laclau and Mouffe are said to collapse the social into discourse while ignoring the emergent, path-dependent specificities of different institutional orders (Sum and Jessop, 2013, p. 132). One way that they develop their cultural political economy approach is to draw together both Gramsci and Foucault, rather than accepting the common view of their incompatibility. Both theorists reflect the diffuse and contingent nature of power with Foucault analysing micro-powers and technologies and Gramsci examining how this permeates through social formations of systems of values, attitudes and beliefs (Sum and Jessop, 2013, p. 208). Jessop and Sum are joined by a few others who, going against the prevailing emphasis on absolute contingency in post-Marxism and Foucauldian analysis as well as reductionism in Marxism and neo-Gramscianism, emphasize the compatibility of Marx, Gramsci and Foucault (and often Poulantzas and regulation theory), underpinned by a critical realist framework (Joseph, 2012; Davies, 2011; Williams, 2020). This is in keeping with Richard Marsden’s (2014) important work which suggests that Foucault provides the ‘how’ and Marx and Gramsci the ‘why’, particularly in relation to the strategic element (Sum and Jessop, 2013, p. 209). The engagement with Foucault alongside Gramsci can be explained by the interest these writers have in evolving forms of governance. Jonathan Davies uses critical realism to argue that developing networked forms of governance are not dissolving causal power but represent changing forms. He uses Foucault to look at ‘how’ these processes disperse power and Gramsci

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to show ‘why’ the promotion of governance networks can be understood as a dimension of neoliberal hegemonic strategy (Davies, 2011, p. 101). Davies uses Gramsci’s idea of the integral state to demonstrate how the state and civil society distinction is increasingly blurred by ‘roll out governmentalisation’ through the hegemonic regulative ideal of governance networks with administrative compulsion pervading everyday state–civil society interactions (Davies, 2011, p. 123). A recent work by Alex Williams performs the useful task of relating hegemony to theories of complexity. It draws on Joseph’s critical realist view of hegemony as an emergent feature of the interactions between structure and agency or the intersection of hegemonic projects and structural determinations (Williams, 2020, pp. 5, 108), but ties this to the social complexity of the real world. This provides a better approach than post-Marxism which, while adept at describing how ideological contestation and transformation operate, loses sight of the complexities of the particular (Williams, 2020, p. 129). Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of discourse flattens their conception of complexity. By contrast, an emergentist approach to complexity sees hegemony as ‘the logic of guiding emergent self-organisation, working with existing social tendencies to bring about intended dynamics’ (Williams, 2020, p. 143, emphasis in original). This conception draws on both Laclau and Mouffe in its understanding of the configuration of elements within a social system, and Joseph and critical realists to emphasize the already occurring, structural and emergent character of these dynamics (Williams, 2020, p. 146). Complex hegemony is emergent out of the interactions of diverse component parts.

CONCLUSION Peter Ives argues that in the age of so-called globalization, we see increasing importance given to language, linguistic commodities and linguistic dimensions, particularly the intersection of linguistic practices with capitalist commodity production (Ives, 2005, p. 456). This seems a useful way of seeing the value of both approaches presented here, regardless of what flaws they might have. However, there is a lot at stake. A cynical realist might even say that too much focus on the linguistic might play to the logic of capitalist commodity production and associated neoliberal hegemonic projects. Returning to Williams, there are two sides to global complexity – actual complexity in the world, and the creation of complexity in relation to modes of discourse, governance and hegemonic strategies. This particularly relates to neoliberalism and the creation of complex political, technical and financial systems. There is though, on the one hand, hegemonic complexity production and associated modes of subjectivation such as competitive individualism, and, on the other hand, the proliferation of ‘ideological heuristics’ that mis-

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represent the social world. This ‘double movement’ creates social complexity while disabling the tools that might make sense of it (Williams, 2020, p. 221). A very harsh judgement of Laclau and Mouffe might put them in this latter category. Recent approaches to hegemony, particularly those drawing on critical realism, make the case that a structural approach is as important as ever and that real world changes such as those described by Williams, Jessop, Davies as well as Laclau and Mouffe themselves do not invalidate an analysis of structures, but make it essential in order to understand these changes and to develop a corresponding strategy akin to a hegemonic project. A structural approach need not be of the crude, reductionist type that Laclau and Mouffe consider representative of classical Marxism. Recent work shows how social structures exist in complex and contradictory combinations that coincide, conflict and produce emergent outcomes. Optimism of the intellect suggests that we can acquire meaningful knowledge of these processes and that even if these are characterized by complexity, this does not mean that they are characterized by indeterminacy or radical contingency. Indeed, the fact that people read books like this suggests that there are still people who believe that there is more to hegemony that just acts of random articulation.

REFERENCES Archer, M. (1996). Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1989). The Possibility of Naturalism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Bhaskar, R. (1991). Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom. Oxford: Blackwell. Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Gender and the Subversion of Identity. Abingdon: Routledge. Butler, J., Laclau, E., & Zizek, S. (2000). Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London: Verso. Carr, E.H. (1974). The Twenty Years Crisis. London: Macmillan. Carroll, W. & Ratner, R.S. (1994). Between Leninism and radical pluralism: Gramscian reflections on counter-hegemony and the new social movements. Critical Sociology. 20(2), 3–26. Collier, Andrew. 1989. Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf Davies, J. (2011). Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. Bristol: Policy Press. Forgacs, D. (1985). Dethroning the working class? Marxism Today, May, 43. Geras, N. (1987). Post-Marxism? New Left Review, 1/163, 40–82. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart: London. Gramsci, A. (1999). The Antonio Gramsci Reader. Ed. D. Forgacs. Lawrence and Wishart: London. Howarth, D. (2015). Gramsci, hegemony and post-Marxism. In M. McNally (ed.), Antonio Gramsci. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 195–213.

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Ives, P. (2004). Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. London: Pluto. Ives, P. (2005). Language, agency and hegemony: A Gramscian response to post-Marxism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8(4), 455–468. Jessop, B. (1982). The Capitalist State. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Jessop, B. (2003). Critical realism and hegemony: Hic Rhodos, Hic Saltus. Journal of Critical Realism, 1(2), 1830194. Jessop, B. (2005). Critical realism and the strategic-relational approach. New Formations, 56, 40–53. Jessop, B. (2016). The State: Past, Present, Future. Cambridge: Polity. Jessop, B. (2019). Critical discourse analysis in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism. Simbiótica. Revista Eletrônica, 6(2), 8–33. Joseph, J. (2000). A realist theory of hegemony. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 30(2), 179–202. Joseph, J. (2002). Hegemony: A Realist Analysis. London: Routledge. Joseph, J. (2012). The Social in the Global: Social Theory, Governmentality and Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaleem, A. (2021). The hegemony of prevent: Turning counter-terrorism policing into common sense. Critical Studies on Terrorism. Online first. Laclau, E. (1977). Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1987). Post-Marxism without apologies. New Left Review, 1/166, 79–106. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2nd ed.). London: Verso. Marsden, R. (2014). The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault. Abingdon: Routledge. Martin, J. (2019). The post-Marxist Gramsci. Global Discourse, 9(2), 305–321. Marx, K. (1981). Capital, Volume 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mouffe, C. (1979). Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci. In C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 168–204. Pass, J. (2019). American Hegemony in the 21st Century: A Neo-Gramscian Perspective. New York: Routledge. Simm, S. (2000). Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History. Abingdon: Routledge. Sum, N-L. & Jessop, B. (2013). Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Williams, A. (2020). Political Hegemony and Social Complexity: Mechanisms of Power After Gramsci. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, E.M. (1998). The Retreat From Class. London: Verso.

15. Hegemonic projects and cultural political economy Bob Jessop INTRODUCTION Antonio Gramsci sought to navigate a path between the equally inadequate, but then prevailing, alternatives of speculative idealism and mechanical materialism. His approach is a significant innovation in Marxist approaches to the relations among the so-called economic base and the different layers of the superstructure, notably the juridico-political ensemble formed by what Gramsci called ‘the state in its inclusive sense’ and struggles over state power. He also revised Marx by engaging in second- and higher order reflections on the natural and social world. This approach was not directly motivated, however, by the desire to resolve the hoary base-superstructure problem. Rather, it is rooted in his university studies in philology (especially historical and spatial linguistics), which were important substantively and methodologically. Gramsci studied philology as a historical and geographical science concerned with the social regularities of language (Gramsci, 1985, pp. 173–165; Q3, §74: pp. 351–352; cf. Lo Piparo, 1979; Ives, 2004; Carlucci, 2013). Indeed, he even described his method as philological. These linguistic studies were also the initial source of his interest in hegemony before he met it in Lenin’s work on class and party alliances. Thus, in contrast to its conventional meaning in Marxist-Leninist political theory, Gramsci redefined hegemony to denote the formation and organization of consent subject to negotiation and hegemonic leadership.

GRAMSCI’S ANTICIPATION OF CPE Gramsci aimed to avoid the twin errors of idealist and positivist approaches to language and social order more generally. He emphasized that language permeates all social relations and that it secretes a particular view of the world into everyday life and special social fields. In other words, language is a foun261

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dational feature of social formations and must be studied in these terms. In this context, he argued that: All men are philosophers. Their philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just words grammatically devoid of content; 2. ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of belief, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore’. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 323; Q11, §12: 1375, emphasis in original)1

Likewise, Gramsci (1971, p. 9; Q12, §1: 1516) argued that everyone is an intellectual, but not everyone has the function of an intellectual. He paid particular attention to the role of intellectuals in mediating the relations between ‘ideas’ and social structure. These claims can be illustrated from Gramsci’s analyses of the articulation of base and superstructure, relations between political and civil society, and intellectuals’ vital role in establishing and reproducing these mediations in capitalist social order. For example, he distinguished between the social functions of northern (industrial, technical) and southern (rural, organic) intellectuals in building different types of hegemony (Gramsci, 1978, pp. 454–455; Q12, §1: 93–94, Q19, §26). Whereas organic intellectuals identify with the dominant classes or, at least, have roles coeval with the historically specific forms of their economic, political, and ideological domination, traditional intellectuals have roles inherited from earlier modes of production or ways of life (e.g., priests) and appear to be less closely tied to the currently dominant classes. Indeed, these traditional intellectuals as well as associated political parties could be the relays of ideas ‘borrowed [from] other national complexes or even with a content that is abstract and cosmopolitan’ rather than developing an authentic and inclusive national-popular culture (Gramsci, 1985, pp. 117–119; Q15, §20). The question of social bases also pervades his analysis of the Southern Question with its emphasis on the rootedness (or otherwise) of social classes and political and intellectual forces in specific places, spaces and scales of economic and social life. We can explore how Gramsci anticipated the development of cultural political economy in several respects. First, in place of the base–superstructure distinction, Gramsci redefined David Ricardo’s notion of mercato determinato (determinate market) as ‘equivalent to [a] determined relation of social forces in a determined structure of the productive apparatus, this relationship being guaranteed (that is, rendered permanent) by a determined political, moral and juridical superstructure’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 410; Q11, §52: 1477). This pointed to the need for an integral analysis of historically specific economic regimes, their modes of social regulation, and their contingent, tendential laws of motion. For example, in his famous notes on Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci showed the importance of new economic imaginaries and organic

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intellectuals in promoting ‘Americanism’ as a mode of growth in response to the crisis of liberal capitalism; and he also identified how new social and cultural practices helped to consolidate Fordism as a new mode of regulation and societal organization (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 310–313; Q22, §13: 2171–2175). His notes on Americanism and Fordism explored how the centre of economic dynamism was moving from old Europe to the United States and was prompting Europe to adapt. Thus, he examined the specific historical and material conditions that had enabled a new techno-economic paradigm to develop there, including the establishment of an economia programmatica at the level of the enterprise, the factory town, and the wider society. The originality and significance of Fordism as accumulation regime, mode of regulation, and way of life hindered its diffusion to Europe because this required more than the export of technical means of production and a technical division of labour. This is because of the deadweight of tradition, the incrustations of the past that must be swept away, and the presence of parasitic classes and strata (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 281, 285, 317; Q22, §2: 214–247, §15: 2179). Such structural, discursive, and agential factors put the struggle for political, intellectual, and moral leadership at the heart of efforts to establish new economic regimes and embed them in capitalist societies. A second concept that Gramsci used to explore the imbrication of economic and non-economic relations was ‘historical bloc’. He asked in what sense ‘the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production’. He answered that the historical bloc reflects ‘the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366; Q8, §182: 1051–1052). This reciprocity is realized through specific intellectual, moral, and political practices. These translate narrow sectoral, professional, or local (in his terms, ‘economic-corporate’) interests into wider ‘ethico-political’ ones. Agreement on the latter not only helps co-constitute economic structures (by providing a shared orientation) but also gives them their rationale and legitimacy. Analysing the historical bloc in this way also shows how ‘material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 377; Q7, §21: 869). Third, in his best-known concept, Gramsci related hegemony to the capacity of dominant groups to establish and maintain political, intellectual and moral leadership and secure the ‘broad-based consent’ of allied and subordinate groups to the prevailing relations of economic and political domination. This relates closely to Gramsci’s analysis of lo stato integrale (the integral state). Just as he studied the economy in its integral sense as a determined market, Gramsci studied the state in its integral sense regarded as economic and political spheres. He defined it as ‘political society + civil society’ and examined

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state power, in liberal democracies based on mass politics, as ‘hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 263; Q6, §88: 763–765). While it would be wrong to conflate Gramsci’s account of lo stato integrale with the idea of lo stato allargato (the expanded state) (as done by Buci-Glucksmann, 1980), the latter is useful in understanding the historical specificity of the state in a particular period. In other words, while the concept of stato integrale has a general methodological value in treating the state as an ensemble of social relations that is always, albeit differentially, embedded within a wider set of social relations, the concept of stato allargato has a specific historical value linked to specific stages of capitalist development and/ or varieties of capitalism. This can be seen in the development of the state in the interwar period, especially in the case of Fordism, and the development of the fascist state in Italy. We might describe this as the period when the integral state began to be enlarged, becoming thereby an expanded state. In any case, from 1924 onwards, Gramsci is said to have devoted all his political reflections to the concept of hegemony and its theoretical and political implications. He related hegemony to the capacity of dominant groups to establish and maintain political, intellectual and moral leadership and secure the ‘broad-based consent’ of allied and subordinate groups to the prevailing relations of economic and political domination. His analysis of hegemony– consent–persuasion is not restricted to civil society but extends into what are conventionally regarded as economic and political spheres. Paraphrasing, effective hegemony depends on the capacity of dominant groups to suture the identities, interests, emotions, and values of key sectors of subordinate classes and other subaltern groups into a hegemonic vision and embed this in institutions and policies – leading in turn to their translation into ‘good’ common sense. At the same time, reflecting the ‘material’ as well as discursive moment of social practice, hegemony depends on material concessions to subaltern groups and this means that it must be based on ‘the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 158–167, at 161; Q13, §18: 1591). For Gramsci, just as the moment of force is institutionalized in a system of coercive apparatuses (that may not coincide with the state’s formal juridico-political apparatuses), hegemony is crystallized and mediated through a complex system of ideological (or hegemonic) apparatuses located throughout the social formation. While present in the juridico-political apparatuses, hegemonic practices are largely concentrated in civil society (i.e., the ‘ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 12; Q8, §182: 1518). Relevant ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ include the Church, trade unions, schools, the mass media, or political parties (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 10–14, 155, 210, 243, 261, 267; Q12, §1: 1518–1524; Q13, §23: 1602–1603; Q13, §27: 1619–1620; Q26, §6; 2302–233; Q17, §51: 1947–1948). Gramsci also stresses

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how common sense, popular culture, and everyday practices are shaped by life in different types of cities and the countryside, the design of locales (schools, churches, architecture) or built forms (street layout, street names) (Q12, §1: 40; Q12, §2: 90–92; Q19, §26: 282–283; Q22, §2; Q3§49). He also discussed struggles for control over places (factories, public buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, etc.) (Gramsci, 1977; 1978). For example, he contrasted the secure meeting places of the industrial and landowning bourgeoisie with the vulnerability of working-class premises and the problems of protecting the streets (‘the natural place where the proletariat can assemble without cost’) (Gramsci, 1978, pp. 35, 268–269). Moreover, in another context, he famously noted that hegemony in the USA is born in the factory (Gramsci, 1971, p. 285; Q22, §2: 2146). Gramsci’s interest in the determined market, historical blocs, and state power was closely related to his studies of intellectuals (also very broadly defined). He regarded them as the creators and mediators of hegemony, as crucial bridges between economic, political, and ideological domination, and as active agents in linking culture (especially common sense or everyday knowledge, passions, feelings, and customs) and subjectivity in the production of hegemony. Gramsci rejected an elitist or vanguard role for intellectuals, stressing the need for hegemony to be rooted in everyday practices and interests. Specifically, he saw hegemony as anchored in the activities of intellectuals whose specialized function in the division of labour is to elaborate ideologies, educate the people, organize and unify social forces, and secure the hegemony of the dominant group (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 5–23; Q12, §1–3: 1511–1552; for an excellent review of intellectuals’ role in this regard, see Portelli, 1972). Thus, organic intellectuals’ task is to promote and consolidate a conception of the world that gives homogeneity and awareness to a fundamental class in the economic, political, and social fields; and this, in turn, becomes the basis for efforts to create hegemony within the wider society (Gramsci, 1971, p. 5; Q12, §1: 1513).

WITH GRAMSCI BEYOND MARX’S FORM ANALYSIS When developing the above concepts, Gramsci built on Marx’s analysis of capital in Capital but extended Marx’s account by going beyond Capital’s concern with form analysis. In this regard, his work reflects Marx’s more specific conjunctural analyses, which also went beyond form analysis. We could argue here that the value form and state form are indeterminate social relations and must be complemented by strategies that impart some substantive coherence to what would otherwise remain formal unities. Hence, there is no necessary substantive unity to the circuit of capital nor any predetermined pattern of accumulation. In this sense the value form constitutes a terrain for

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various attempts to reproduce the capital relation in its material as well as ethico-political form and the nature of accumulation depends on the success or failure of these attempts. In examining these attempts, we need to develop notions for the analysis of economic strategies. To fully comprehend this variation in accumulation patterns we need ‘strategic-theoretical’ concepts that can establish meaningful links between the abstract, ‘capital-theoretical’ laws of motion of the value form and the concrete modalities of social-economic struggles analysed by a ‘class-theoretical’ approach that neglects form in favour of content. In this context I have elaborated the concepts of ‘accumulation strategy’ and ‘hegemonic project’ building on Gramsci’s theoretical work (see Jessop, 1983). First, an ‘accumulation strategy’ defines a specific economic ‘growth model’ complete with its various extra-economic preconditions and outlines the general strategy appropriate to its realization. To be successful, such a model must unify the different moments in the circuit of capital (money or banking capital, industrial capital, commercial capital) under the hegemony of one fraction (whose composition will vary inter alia with the stage of capitalist development). The exercise of economic hegemony through the successful elaboration of such a strategy should be distinguished from simple economic domination and from economic determination in the last instance by the circuit of industrial capital. The heart of the circuit of capital is the production process itself (in popular parlance, wealth must first be created before it can be distributed). This means that the performance of productive (or industrial) capital is the ultimate economic determinant of the accumulation process and that the real rates of return on money capital (including credit) and commercial capital taken as a whole (and thus abstracted from competition) depend in the long term on the continued valorization of productive (or industrial) capital. Economic domination can be enjoyed by various fractions of capital and occurs when one fraction is able to impose its own particular ‘economic-corporate’ interests on the other fractions regardless of their wishes and/or at their expense. Such domination can derive directly from the position of the relevant fraction in the overall circuit of capital in a specific economic conjuncture and/or indirectly from the use of some form of extra-economic coercion (including the exercise of state power). In contrast, economic hegemony derives from economic leadership through general acceptance of an accumulation strategy. Such a strategy must advance the immediate interests of other fractions by integrating the circuit of capital in which they are implicated at the same time as it secures the long-term interests of the hegemonic fraction in controlling the allocation of money capital to different areas of investment advantageous to itself. In general terms, we can say that an accumulation strategy that is not to be merely ‘arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 377; Q7, §21: 869) must take account of the dominant form of the circuit of capital; of the

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dominant form of the internationalization of capital; of the specific international conjuncture confronting particular national capitals; of the balance of social, economic, and political forces at home and abroad; and of the margin of maneuver entailed in the productive potential of the domestic economy and its foreign subsidiaries. Within these constraints there will typically be several economic strategies that could be pursued (especially if we abstract from more general political and ideological considerations) with contrasting implications for different capital fractions and dominated classes. This sort of space for conflicts over economic hegemony and/or domination exists not only for national economies (even supposing these could be completely isolated from the world economy), but also for the integration of the global circuit of capital under the leadership of one (or more) national capitals. Where various national strategies are compatible with the global hegemonic strategy, the conditions will have been secured for accumulation on a world scale. This is illustrated in Gramsci’s analysis of Americanism and Fordism, with the former referring to the labour process and the latter to an overall pattern of regulation. Both involve economic imaginaries that reinforce the underlying social relations in an organic way. Second, inspired in part by Machiavelli, Gramsci sought to develop an autonomous science of the political (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 136–138; Q13, §10: 1568; Q13, §18). He aimed thereby to avoid reducing the logic of politics and the content of policies to a crude reflection of the ‘economic structure’ and/ or interpreting them simply as means to advance narrow economic-corporate interests. One aspect of the latter was to adopt a broader account of class interests linked to the struggle for building hegemony as political, intellectual, and moral leadership. In this sense, he moved beyond form analysis economically and politically. Within this wide-ranging and conjuncturally sophisticated analytical (but also, for Gramsci, always deeply class-sensitive) framework, he compared different political arrangements (never just at the formal, constitutional level), political strategies across political regimes and conjunctures, the articulation of politics and policies within and across different fields, ranging from technology, agrarian, colonial, labour, economic, financial, public works, social and trade policies through issues of juridico-political and police– military policy to spheres such as education, culture, nationalities, science, religion, and philosophy (see Gramsci, 1971 and 1995, passim). Politics and policies were rarely considered in narrow organizational, administrative, or legal-juridical terms – they were almost always related to the social forces that promoted or benefited from them (or resisted them), how these advanced specific interests, a general strategic line, or overall hegemonic project, the conceptions of the world that they embodied or articulated, their theoretical, ideological, and practical limits, and their modification in and through the normal play of politics.

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Securing political unity also requires the institutional integration of the state through appropriate state forms, its embedding in the wider ensemble of societal relations, and its capacity to engage in relatively unified action through appropriate state and national-popular projects. As symptoms of a failed national unification project in Italy, he regularly cited the Vatican and Southern Questions and the passive revolution that occurred under the domination of Piedmont and the Moderate Party. And, in one of his most famous comparisons in state theory, he claims that: In the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 238; Q7, §16: 866)

In this context it is worth noting that economic hegemony may best be secured where it is backed up by a position of economic domination. Just as Gramsci considers that state power is best interpreted as ‘hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’ the expanded reproduction of capital is best viewed as ‘economic hegemony armoured by economic domination’. The skilful use of a position of economic domination through the allocation of money capital can bring recalcitrant capitals into line and/or encourage activities beneficial to the overall integration and expansion of the circuit of capital. The state comes to play an important role in this respect through the expansion of the public sector, the increasing role of taxation as a mechanism of appropriation, and the crucial role of state credit in the allocation of money capital. Third, there are two more general determinations of economic hegemony: the social bases of support for and resistance to the state, and the nature of the ‘hegemonic project’ (if any) around which the exercise of state power is centred. The social basis of the state refers to the specific configuration of social forces, however identified as subjects and (dis-)organized as political actors, that supports the basic structure of the state system, its mode of operation, and its objectives. Such political support involves more than ‘consensus’; it depends on specific modes of mass integration that channel, transform and prioritize demands, and manage the flow of material concessions necessary to maintain the ‘unstable equilibrium of compromise’ which underpins such support (Hirsch, 1978). There will also be great variation in the mix of material concessions, symbolic rewards, and repression directed through the state to different social forces. These variations in support and benefit are typically related to the prevailing hegemonic project (if any) and its implications for the form and content of politics. In broad terms, hegemony, as stated above, involves the interpellation and organization of different ‘class-relevant’ (but not necessarily class-conscious)

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forces under the political, intellectual, and moral leadership’ of a particular class (or class fraction) or, more precisely, its political, intellectual, and moral spokespeople. The key to the exercise of such leadership is the development of a specific ‘hegemonic project’ that can resolve the abstract problem of conflicts between particular interests and the general interest. In abstract terms, this conflict is probably insoluble because of the potentially infinite range of particular interests that could be posited in opposition to any definition of the general interest (see Jessop, 1983, pp. 102–103). Nonetheless, it is the task of hegemonic leadership to resolve this conflict on a less abstract plane through specific political, intellectual, and moral practices with specific discursive and strategic elements. This involves the mobilization of support behind a concrete, national-popular programme of action that asserts a general interest in the pursuit of objectives that explicitly or implicitly advance the long-term interests of the hegemonic class (fraction) and which also privileges particular ‘economic-corporate’ interests compatible with this programme. Conversely, those particular interests that are inconsistent with the project are deemed immoral and/or irrational and, insofar as they are still pursued by groups outside the consensus, they are also liable to sanction. Normally, hegemony also involves the sacrifice of certain short-term interests of the hegemonic class (fraction), and a flow of material concessions for other social forces mobilized behind the project. It is thereby conditioned and limited by the accumulation process. Moreover, while accumulation strategies are oriented primarily to the relations of production and thus to the balance of class forces, hegemonic projects are typically oriented to broader issues grounded not only in economic relations but also in the field of civil society and the state. Thus, hegemonic projects should take account of the balance among all relevant social forces, however organized and identified. Indeed, we can view hegemonic projects as concerned with the ‘national-popular’ and not simply with class relations (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 130–133, 204; Q13, §1: 1559–1560; Q13, §29: 1623–1624). In general, it would seem obvious that accumulation and hegemony will be most secure where there is a close congruence between particular strategies and projects. But this is not the same as saying that accumulation needs to be the overriding objective of a hegemonic project or that class relations will be the primary reference point. Fourth, what exactly is involved in a successful hegemonic project? I suggest that the realization of a hegemonic project ultimately depends on three key factors: its structural determination, its discursive-strategic orientation, and its relation to accumulation. The structural determination of hegemony involves the structural privileges inscribed in a given state form (including its forms of representation, intervention and internal articulation) for some forces and their interests at the expense of other forces and interests.

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At stake here is the form of political struggles and the implications of form for the strategic relations among different political forces. Within these objective limits there is nonetheless some scope for short-term variations in hegemony at the level of political practices. These could include periods of unstable hegemony, dissociation between hegemony over the power bloc and that over the popular masses, crises of hegemony, and even short-term shifts of hegemony in favour of subordinate classes such as the petty bourgeoisie or the working class (or social categories such as the military, bureaucrats, or intellectuals). But the structural selectivity of the state form means that these variations are essentially short-term and that hegemony will return in the long term to the structurally privileged class (or class fraction), provided that its strategic orientation and relation to accumulation prove adequate. This proviso is crucial. For, although a stable hegemonic position depends on the form-determination of the state, it is not reducible to structural determination. In addition to the aspect of structural determination, attention must also be paid to the development of a hegemonic project that successfully links the realization of certain particular interests of subordinate social forces to the pursuit of a ‘national-popular’ programme that favours the long-term interests of the hegemonic force (cf. Gramsci, 1971, 56n, 131–132; Q13, §1; 1559–1561; 1985: 247–249; Q17, §9: 1914–1915). On the one hand, it involves the integration of various strategically significant forces as subjects with specific ‘interests’ and the repudiation of alternative subject positions and interests. On the other hand, it involves the formulation of a general, ‘national-popular’ project whose realization will also advance the particular ‘economic-corporate’ interests perceived by subordinate social forces. Finally, it involves the construction and specification of a ‘policy paradigm’ within which conflicts over competing interests and demands can be negotiated without threatening the overall project. In short, winning hegemony involves the areas of political, intellectual, and moral leadership. In this context, an important question is what distinguishes ‘one’ or ‘two nations’ projects from political, intellectual, and moral programmes that are non-hegemonic in character. Gramsci is, again, particularly useful here. His work suggests a continuum between an expansive hegemony (or ‘one nation’ project) through various forms of ‘passive revolution’ to an open ‘war of maneuver’ against the popular masses (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 232–236; Q13, §24: 1613–1616). An expansive project extends or expands the active support of a substantial majority (if not all) of the popular masses, including the working class (whether or not identified as such). This is achieved through a mix of material and symbolic rewards whose flow depends on the successful pursuit of a ‘national-popular’ programme that aims to advance the interest of the nation as a whole.

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Where such expansive hegemony does not exit, various forms of ‘passive revolution’ can develop. This involves the reorganization of social relations (‘revolution’) while neutralizing and channelling popular initiatives in favour of the continued domination of the political leadership (‘passive’). For Gramsci the crucial element in ‘passive revolutions’ is the statization of societal reorganization so that popular initiatives from below are contained or destroyed and the relationship of rulers-ruled is maintained or reimposed. What is missing in ‘passive revolution’ as compared with a full-blown ‘expansive hegemony’ is a consensual programme that provides the motive and opportunity for popular participation in the pursuit of ‘national-popular’ goals that benefit the masses as well as dominant class forces. Instead, ‘passive revolution’ imposes the interests of the dominant forces on the popular masses through a war of position which advances particular popular interests (if at all) through a mechanical game of compromise rather than their organic integration into a ‘national-popular’ project (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 106–108; Q15, §17: 17774–17775). It must be admitted that Gramsci’s analyses are indicative rather than definitive of this mode of leadership. They could be extended through more detailed consideration of different forms of ‘passive revolution’ ranging from the transitional case of ‘two nations’ projects (which combine features of an expansive hegemony and ‘passive revolution’ but direct them differentially towards each of the ‘nations’) through normal forms of ‘passive revolution’ (as defined above) to the use of ‘force, fraud, and corruption’ as a means of social control (which can be considered as a transitional form between ‘passive revolution’ and ‘war of maneuver’) (Gramsci, 1971: 80n; Q13, §37: 1638).

CULTURAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Gramsci’s focus on hegemony and hegemonic projects can be explored further with the aid of cultural political economy (CPE). It is a distinctive post-disciplinary approach in evolutionary and institutional political economy that takes the ‘cultural turn’ seriously. The approach was pioneered by Ngai-Ling Sum and elaborated with the present author (see, for example, Sum, 1995, 2009, 2010; Sum and Jessop, 2013). Taking the cultural turn seriously means that CPE is not just concerned with the political economy of culture (the economics of art, theatre, intellectual property rights) or with taking discourse as a methodological entry-point. Instead, CPE builds on Gramsci’s view that language (broadly interpreted to include sense- and meaning-making) is co-foundational to political economy as in other social sciences. In other words, CPE takes an ontological cultural turn in political economy. It draws on Marx, Gramsci and Foucault among other sources to reveal how sense- and meaning-making are useful in describing, critiquing and explaining political

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economy without neglecting its historically specific properties, dynamic and crisis-tendencies. It uses Gramsci to update and revise Marx, Foucault to governmentalize Marxian and Gramscian analyses, and Marxism to address the problem that Foucault can explain how but not why the capital relation is organized and effective (cf. Marsden, 1999, p. 135; cf. 24, 129, 131–132). Indeed, Marsden adds that, ‘to marry “why” and “how” it is necessary to explicate “what”: to synthesize Marx’s description of relations of production and Foucault’s description of the mechanisms of disciplinary power’ (Marsden, 1999, p. 135). Semiosis is one of the two main ways in which agents reduce complexity to ‘go on’ in the world and is practised by all social agents. Its complement is structuration (see Sum and Jessop, 2013). CPE examines the structural, agential, discursive, and technological mechanisms that select, retain, and institutionalize economic, political and social imaginaries, leading to some becoming hegemonic or sub-hegemonic and advancing counter-hegemonic imaginaries. CPE also affirms the crisis-tendencies of capitalism. Given that objectively overdetermined crises are subjectively indeterminate, certain construals of crisis must prevail for crisis-management to occur. The distinctive feature of CPE is its approach to semiosis. Like Gramsci, it highlights the constitutive role of language in sense- and meaning-making. Everyone engages in social construal because meaning-making is the basis of lived experience. But not everyone makes an equal contribution to the social construction of social relations. Some individuals and/or collective intellectuals (such as political parties and old and new social movements) are particularly active in bridging different systems and spheres of life, attempting to create hegemonic meaning systems or to develop sub- or counter-hegemonic imaginaries. When analysing meaning systems, the three main analytical steps required to avoid simplistic critiques of semiosis as always-already ideological are: (1) recognize the role of semiosis as a meaning pool in complexity reduction, that is, regard signs and symbols as elements from which ideation and communication draw; (2) identify social imaginaries, that is, specific clusters of meaning (or semiotic) systems, and describe their form and content – recognizing that they are never fully closed and are frequently re-articulated; and (3) analyse their contingent articulation and contribution to processes of structuration that secure specific patterns of exploitation, oppression, and domination that serve the particular interests of specific individual agents. CPE can be combined with different kinds of political economy. The version developed by Jessop and Sum is inspired by the Parisian regulation approach and transnational historical materialism (Boyer, 1990; Overbeek, 2000) as significant developments of Marx’s claim that ‘capital is not a thing but a social relation between people, established by the instrumentality of things’

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(Marx, 1996, p. 753). In developing this approach our CPE analysis integrates ideas drawn from Gramsci in moving beyond form analysis to integrate how social imaginaries shape the substantive form of the economy and state. We analyse both the economy and the state in their integral senses and how they are included in the hegemonization processes. There are four types of selectivity in the evolution, selection, and retention in the re-making of social relations (Sum and Jessop, 2013, pp. 214–224). Structural selectivity denotes the asymmetrical configuration of constraints and opportunities on social forces as they pursue specific projects. The primary aspect and principal stake of discursive selectivity are the asymmetrical constraints and opportunities inscribed in specific forms of discourse in terms of what can be enunciated, who is authorized to enunciate, and how enunciations enter intertextual, interdiscursive and contextual fields. In other words, it concerns how different discourses enable some rather than other enunciations to be made within the limits of distinctive languages and the forms of discourse that exist within them. Semiotic constructions are neither independent nor neutral, they derive meanings as a part of a network of statements and social practices in the inter-discursive fields. Foucauldian discourse analysis offers much here in terms of conceptual architectures and semantic fields; and critical discourse analysis clarifies how discursive selectivity operates in terms of its lexical, semantic and pragmatic features and their relation to modes of expression, forms of discourse, genre chains, framing, and so forth. Technological selectivities can be considered, paradoxically, in two ways. Broadly, they typically include the full range of forces of production and technical and social relations of production involved in the social division of labour. Although this is the aspect considered by Marx, the forces and relations of production are often studied by orthodox Marxists in narrowly technological terms. Conversely, Michel Foucault was more concerned to examine the social technologies involved in constituting objects, creating subject positions and recruiting subjects, and, in this context, in creating relations of power/ knowledge and the possibilities of governmentalization (e.g., Foucault, 1991, 2008). Asymmetries here concern how technologies produce objects and subject positions and how apparatuses and strategic logics may selectively limit choice and regulate bodies, thoughts and conduct. These limit the scope for developing alternatives and opposition to possibilities imaginable within the logic. This is where Foucault can be used to supplement neo-Gramscian analyses by governmentalizing the strategic relational analyses of accumulation strategies and hegemonic projects. Agential selectivity denotes the differential capacity of agents to engage in strategic calculation not only in abstract terms but also in relation to specific conjunctures. Agents can make a difference thanks to their different capacities to persuade, read conjunctures, displace opponents and re-articulate in

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timely fashion discourses and imaginaries. This is always overdetermined by discursive and technological selectivities. Ultimately, agential selectivity depends on the difference that specific actors (or social forces) make in given conjunctures.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF CPE AS RELATED TO CRISES CPE can be further developed by showing its relevance to crises, crisis construals, and crisis resolution. It is useful to classify crises on two dimensions. The first concerns their causality. Some crises appear ‘accidental’, that is, are readily (if sometimes inappropriately) attributable to natural or ‘external’ forces (for example, a volcanic eruption, tsunami, crop failure, invasion). But there are also crises that are rooted in crisis-tendencies or antagonisms grounded in specific structural forms (for example, profit-oriented, market-mediated capitalism). This distinction does not imply that accidental crises lack causes – it is just that these are so varied, individually or in their interaction, that they are hard to show in a systematic manner. They have a primary causal mechanism that is expressed in very diverse ways. The other dimension concerns whether they are ‘normal’ crises that can be resolved through normal forms of crisis management or exceptional crises, leading to a crisis of crisis management (cf. Offe, 1984). Crises are not self-interpreting. As Gramsci remarks on the Great Depression: 1)

2)

Whoever wants to give one sole definition of these events or, what is the same thing, find a single cause or origin, must be rebutted. We are dealing with a process that shows itself in many ways, and in which causes and effects become intertwined and mutually entangled. To simplify means to misrepresent and falsify. Thus, a complex process, as in many other phenomena, and not a unique ‘fact’ repeated in various forms through a cause having one single origin. When did the crisis begin? This question is bound up with the first one. Since we are dealing with a process and not an event, this is an important question. We may say that there is no starting date as such to the crisis, but simply the date of certain of the more striking ‘manifestations’ that have erroneously and tendentiously become identified with the crisis. (Gramsci, 1995, p. 219: Q15, §5: 1755)

Crises are a complex process, whose complexities need explaining and interpreting. They also need to be construed in order to be acted upon. Getting consensus on an interpretation about which aspects of a crisis or, alternatively, which of several interlocking crises matters is to have framed the problem. Nonetheless this consensus must be translated into a coherent, coordinated policy approach and solutions that match objective dimensions of the crisis.

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Effective policies adapt crisis-management routines and/or discover new routines through trial-and-error experimentation and can be consolidated as the basis of new forms of governance, meta-governance, and institutionalized compromise. Only crisis construals that grasp key emergent extra-semiotic features of the social world as well as mind-independent features of the natural world are likely to be selected and retained. In this sense, organic crisis construals cannot be ‘arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 377; Q 7, §19: 868), that is, based on random interpretations, a belief in reason as the basis of action, and the assumption that decisive action depends on wilful action rather than the mobilization of social forces relevant to a given conjuncture and strategic objective. Effective construals therefore also have constructive force and produce changes in the extra-semiotic features of the world and in related (always) tendential real mechanisms and social logics. Crisis resolution depends, then, on seeking effective accumulation strategies and hegemonic projects that are organic. In doing so, they depend not only on narrative plausibility but also pragmatic correctness, that is, the ability to discern what exists in potentia and to identify and mobilize the social forces that can act to realize this potential (cf. Lecercle, 2006). In this sense, construals are not simple linguistic (re)descriptions of a conjuncture but, when backed by powerful social forces, they lead to strategic interventions into that conjuncture. In this regard, the interaction of semiotic, structural, technological and agential selectivities and their mediation through the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection and retention produce particular ‘modes of crisis management’ that are not dictated solely by the objective overdetermination of the crisis, nor by ‘arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”’ construals of this, that, or another social force (cf. Sum and Jessop, 2013, p. 437). They are potentially organic interventions with path-shaping effects. Gramsci was writing in the interwar years, when the fascist party was more effective in this regard than the communist party and he devoted his prison years to exploring what could be done to overcome this impasse.

CONCLUSIONS Let me conclude this chapter with some remarks on Gramsci, hegemonic projects, and cultural political economy. First, I have argued that Gramsci can be seen as a theorist and political activist whose work anticipates many themes of cultural political economy. But his work is only one key element of the CPE framework. His central contribution is a philological turn in political economy, that is, he regarded language as a foundational moment rather than just an optional methodological starting point or specific thematic interest. This led him to rethink base–superstructure relations, the decisive economic nucleus that was crucial to maintaining hegemony, the historical bloc, the integral

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state, the nature of hegemony protected by coercion, and the role of intellectuals in creating hegemony. Second, Gramsci lived in a conjuncture when, in the well-known aphorism from the 1870s, Italia fatta, bisogna fare gli Italiani (loosely translated, now we’ve made Italy, we must make the Italians). This meant that he could not take the form of the Italian national economy or state for granted but needed to investigate the conditions for their formation during a prolonged period of multiple crises. In this regard, he integrated his analysis of base and superstructure with concrete political analyses. This was a key element in his concept of historical bloc and his systematic concern with the role of intellectuals in mediating these relations. This analysis extended beyond the national scale to the international (e.g., his analyses of Italian intellectuals, Americanism and Fordism and its halting diffusion in Europe, and the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’). In this context, he also moved beyond Marx’s form analysis, which regarded form as the framework to interpret the nature of social formations. Indeed, whereas Marx mainly developed an abstract-simple analysis of the capitalist mode of production, Gramsci took this analysis for granted and focused instead on concrete conjunctures in emerging and developed capitalist social formations in a world shaped by imperialism and the Bolshevik Revolution. Third, in opposing economism both theoretically and politically, Gramsci showed the role of political and civil society in constituting and reproducing economic relations on diverse scales up to and including the international. By treating hegemony in terms of specific ‘hegemonic projects’ I have tried to overcome the tendency inherent in many uses of Gramsci to reduce hegemony to a rather static consensus and/or a broadly defined common sense. Instead, I have emphasized the dynamic movement of leadership towards definite aims in specific conjunctures. This approach is more useful in capturing the nature of hegemonic crises and enables us to distinguish them more clearly from ideological crises. The successful propagation of a hegemonic project secures an adequate social basis for the exercise of state power and imposes a degree of substantive unity on the state apparatus to complement its formal unity. Finally, in locating the concept of hegemonic projects at the level of the social formation and linking it to the ‘national-popular,’ I have tried to indicate the importance of non-class forces in securing the hegemony of the dominant class. The class character of a given hegemonic project does not depend on the a priori class belonging of its elements, nor any soi-disant class identity professed by its proponents; it depends, instead, on the effects of pursuing that project in a definite conjuncture. In many cases, a bourgeois hegemonic project involves the denial of class antagonism (and sometimes even the existence of classes) and/or emphasizes the pursuit of non-economic or non-class objectives, but such objectives still depend on the accumulation process (among other things) and are thus still economically conditioned as well as economi-

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cally relevant. In addition, it should be noted that the interpellation of classes in non-class terms means that provision must be made for the representation of such non-class interests and the satisfaction of their demands. It is in this respect that the growth of new social movements causes problems for existing hegemonic projects insofar as neither parliamentary nor corporatist forms can provide the means to integrate them into the social basis of the capitalist state. But referring to such problems is already to pose issues that demand much more detailed treatment. Hopefully enough has been said to provoke others to work along similar lines.

NOTE 1.

My text uses the 1975 edition of Gramsci as the Italian source; Q refers to the notebook, and § to the section.

REFERENCES Boyer, R. (1990). Regulation Theory: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press. Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1980). Gramsci and the State. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Carlucci, A. (2013). Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony. Brill, Leiden. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 87–104. Foucault, M. (2008). Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere, edizione critica del’Istituto Antonio Gramsci, ed. V. Gerratano. Rome: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from Political Writings 1910–1921. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings 1921-26. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1985). Selections from Cultural Writings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gramsci, A. (1995). Further Selections from Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hirsch, J. (1978). The crisis of mass integration: On the development of political repression in Federal Germany. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2(2), 222–232. Ives, P. (2004). Language and hegemony in Gramsci. London: Pluto. Jessop, B. (1983). Accumulation strategies, state forms, and hegemonic projects. Kapitalistate, 10, 89–111. Lecercle, J-J. (2006). A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Lo Piparo, F. (1979). Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci. Rome/Bari: Laterza.

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Marsden, R. (1999) The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault. London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1996). Capital, vol. 1, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 35. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Offe, C. (1984). Contradictions of the Welfare State. London: Hutchinson. Overbeek, H. (2000). Transnational historical materialism: Theories of transnational class formation and world order. In R. Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories. London: Routledge, 168–183. Portelli, H. (1972). Gramsci et le bloque historique. Paris: Maspero. Sum, N-L. (1995). More than a ‘War of Words’: Identity politics and the struggle for dominance during the recent political reform period in Hong Kong. Economy & Society, 24(1), 68–99. Sum, N-L. (2009). The production of hegemonic policy discourses: ‘Competitiveness’ as a knowledge brand and its (re-)contextualization. Critical Policy Studies, 3(2), 184–203. Sum, N-L. (2010). The cultural political economy of transnational knowledge brands: Porterian competitiveness discourse and its recontextualization to Hong Kong/Pearl River Delta. Journal of Language and Politics, 9(4), 184–203. Sum, N-L. & Jessop, B. (2013). Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, US: Edward Elgar.

16. Fordism, post-Fordism and the imperial mode of living Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen INTRODUCTION Antonio Gramsci’s central epistemological interest lies in understanding bourgeois societies’ dynamic reproduction mechanisms, which neither permanently resort to open, state-organized violence, nor can be explained by reference to economic relations alone. Among other things, he wants to understand at both a theoretical and an empirical level why the subaltern acquiesce to existing relations of domination, why the state apparatus is relatively resistant to the demands of the working class, and why capitalist class domination continues to persist even through phases of deep economic or political crises. Gramsci wanted to fathom the complex mechanisms of the ‘agreement of associated wills’ (Prison Notebooks, 13, p. 1536).1 His concept of hegemony is a ‘new category for the interpretation of history, the state and the bourgeoisie’ (Buci-Glucksmann, 1985, p. 478). The fundamental idea is that the ruling classes can only exercise political leadership and authority if their projects are hegemonic (Prison Notebooks, 1, p. 101f). This hegemony does not remain external to the actors involved in it (including the hegemonic ones), but transforms them and constitutes them as hegemonic or subaltern. Hegemony generates and distributes subjects and thus power, it means the empowerment of specific groups and disempowerment of others, generally and in particular contexts. If we understand hegemony as the ability of the ruling classes to enforce their interests in such a way that they are seen as the general interest by the subaltern classes, and that there exist widely shared societal notions about the state of affairs and its likely progression, then the decisive element is the active consent of the governed, which does not only concern official politics but orders everyday life and a society’s common sense. The latter is by no means understood as false consciousness, but constitutes a practical orientation for the members of society in their specific realities. Hegemony therefore refers to 279

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not only the specific forms of organization of the rulers and of authority, but also of the ruled. For Gramsci, the concept of hegemony has an explicitly material and economic dimension in addition to an ideological and a political one. This consists first and foremost of the ability of the ruling forces to dynamically organize the process of economic reproduction, ‘for if hegemony is political-ethical, then it cannot but be economic as well, cannot fail to have its material basis in the decisive function which the leading group exercises in the decisive core area of economic activity’ (Prison Notebooks, 13, p. 1567). This occurs under the difficult conditions of antagonistic interests, i.e. there must be a certain willingness and ability to compromise on the part of the ruling classes, who after all are in economic competition with each other, as well as under the conditions of integration into the competitively mediated world market. An important insight of Gramsci is thus to understand authority not only as successful strategies and consensus production ‘from above’, but as a comprehensive social relationship and thus also as a relationship of forces. André Drainville (1994, p. 125) accordingly criticizes many neo-Gramscian analyses for tending to assume a coherent, pervasive hegemony free from contradictions, while Christoph Scherrer (1998) challenges the elite-fixation of many Gramscian analyses. Instead, argues Alex Demirović (1997, p. 97), the process of hegemony is about establishing the long-term viability of a particular constellation of forces that enables the regulated resolution of ‘conflicts’ of parties to a compromise, determines the conditions of possible polarisations, and monopolises the power of definition over what can emerge as opposition and hostility to the equilibrium constituted by the societal compromise.

In addition, in a hegemonic constellation, social changes are made and correspondingly occurring problems are dealt with in a regulated way, i.e. they do not call into question the fundamental relations of domination. To be sure: hegemony is no given, it does not necessarily have to be established for society to function, a persistence of crisis processes and non-hegemonic relations of domination with clearly repressive components are also conceivable. In hegemonic constellations, however, the accumulation process and thus bourgeois-capitalist society can develop most dynamically and at the same time the exclusion of parts of the population can either be restricted or take place silently. Political, economic, cultural, everyday and subjective constellations are widely accepted in such a situation and enable permanent processes of adaptation. These theoretical perspectives are of great importance for our proposed concept of the imperial mode of living, which also includes the mode of

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production. This is to provide a broader view of the history of capitalist development.

ON THE CONCEPT OF THE ‘IMPERIAL MODE OF LIVING’ To examine the reproduction and crises of the capitalist mode of production through the concept of the imperial mode of living (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 2022) means attributing central importance to the connection between everyday practices and common sense on the one hand, and a social and international order shaped by power and domination on the other: structurally unequal social relations between classes, genders, race, and the global South and the global North achieve stability and permanence precisely because they are normalized in everyday relations or legitimized in hegemonic narratives. Exploitation in the capitalist production process appears as a voluntary contractual relationship or at least as a legitimate relationship of subordination between ‘employer’ and ‘employee’, appropriation of unpaid reproductive labour as being based on biological or societal differences between the sexes, which in any case are highly functional for the capital relationship, while neocolonial inequality in the North–South relationship appears as the necessary result of cultural differences. The concept of the imperial mode of living thus explains the reproduction of capitalist structures with reference to the normalization of social and international power and domination in people’s everyday relations – these are highly political and contested processes. Since the beginning of colonialism and especially since the Second World War it has become clear that an ever-globalizing capitalism and the economic, political, social and ecological dislocations that this process brings with it are first and foremost a strategy deployed by capital and by imperial states. But these processes are also based on the regular everyday lives of many people in the global North. The imperial mode of living is made possible by the fact that the global North and some people in the global South have access to relatively cheap resources and cheap labour elsewhere. For some, this generates both agency and material prosperity, but also – if backed up by political will and force – a functioning infrastructure and decent public services. For others, it means the progressive destruction of their livelihoods and the consolidation of relationships of dependency. This elsewhere exists not only in the North–South relationship, but also, for example, when it comes to the meat packing plants or frequently catastrophic conditions of farm labour in the global North itself. This mode of living, so unequal in its concrete manifestations, has become deeply embedded in the global North through the last decades of capitalist globalization, and especially through digitalization with its high resource consumption. Profit-orientation of the wealthy and of capital owners is the main

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driving force of an escalating economy with all its implications for resource use. People are increasingly systematically accessing resources, high-tech devices, but also T-shirts, cars, food and other things that underpaid workers produce under frequently problematic, even catastrophic ecological and social conditions. Subjectively, many people in the North experience this as prosperity. But the imperial mode of living does not mean that all people in the North live equally. In fact, studies show that the size of one’s ecological footprint depends less on one’s beliefs than on one’s income. Those who have a higher income can make greater use of products and services. Moreover: the imperial mode of living as it is lived in the global North does not only destroy the environment, but is based on and exacerbates social inequality. The middle classes consciously set themselves apart from the lower classes by showing that they can afford a car and high levels of consumption because of their higher income. The exploitation of the subaltern classes in the production process is thus mirrored by the experience of exclusion in the sphere of everyday life.

GRAMSCI’S AMERICANISM AND FORDISM In his analysis of ‘Americanism and Fordism’ (Prison Notebooks, 22), Gramsci points out that the social organization of labour is a central terrain of the constitution and reproduction of hegemony. In this respect, Gramsci is not a cultural theorist, but firmly anchored in the historical-materialist tradition (which, to be sure, he opened up to cultural questions). In the new epoch he analysed early on, the conflicts over hegemony are to a significant extent played out on the terrain of the mass worker (‘Fordism’) and the formation of a new collective human being (‘Americanism’). Due to social rationalization, this is a ‘new type of’ subject, a ‘psycho-physical adaptation to the new industrial structure’ (Prison Notebooks, 22, p. 2069), extending even into the sexual sphere as a prerequisite for intensive work. Gramsci described this vividly: It seems clear that the new industrialism wants monogamy, that it wants the working man not to waste his nervous forces in the disorderly and exciting search for opportunistic sexual gratification: the worker who goes to work after a ‘debauched’ night is not a good worker, the exuberance of passion is incompatible with the time-measured movements of human gestures of production bound to the most perfect automatisms. (Notebooks, 22, pp. 2088 f.)

This is equally true of excessive alcohol consumption. In this respect, it is no coincidence that the Fordist rationalization of labour organization coincides with Prohibition: the prohibition of the manufacture, transport and sale of alcohol, which was enshrined in the US Constitution by an amendment between 1920 and 1933. The aim, according to Gramsci, was to elaborate a

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‘new type of subject’, ‘conforming to the new type of labour and the process of production’ (Notebooks, 22, p. 2069). The crux of his arguments is that he does not treat these questions in economic terms, but as part of a constellation of forces, everyday and intellectual practices as well as state interventions. Culture means a worldview, the ascription of meaning, the (non-)plausibility of existing conditions and thus the debate about education and paths of social change that people consider meaningful and feasible. This is connected to language and other modes of expression and interaction, identity, religion, etc. – but also with people’s position in the social division of labour, the material reproduction of society and much more. In what follows, we outline central features of Fordism and post-Fordism from the perspective of the Imperial Mode of Living, and inspired by Gramsci’s reflections outlined above.2 Fordism: Generalizing the Imperial Mode of Living in the Global North The Fordist epoch in capitalism, which took shape in the US beginning in the 1930s and in Europe after the Second World War, and is named after the US automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, marked a decisive rupture. While the working day remained a central point of contention between labour and capital, the struggle for a share in the abundance of commodities produced under capitalism moved into the foreground. In contrast to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Juliet Schor writes, rising productivity after the Second World War ceased to be used as a reason to shorten the working day. Instead, growth in productivity was turned into higher income and used towards the expansion of output. Wages and profits rose. Productivity and increases in real wages were even explicitly tied together. This raised the demand for consumption, because money was flowing into people’s pockets. (Schor, 2015, p. 61)

People surrendered a potential increase in available disposable time for the opportunity to consume more. That is the essence of the Fordist class compromise which became the basis of the comparatively stable development of the capitalist centres after the Second World War. Against the background of this compromise, reproduction of labour power was coupled with the capitalist cycle. Working-class consumption – herein lies one of the central shifts brought on by Fordism – was now concentrated on the possession and consumption of commodities; that is, products that satisfied daily needs were no longer goods that the wage labourers produced themselves but goods that they had to purchase (Aglietta, 2000, p. 158). Wage labourers’ rationalized, disciplined and consumerist mode of living was tied to

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the tremendous dynamics in production. The mobility of an ever-larger share of the population was ensured through the individual possession of a car; nutrition through the consumption of meat from agro-industrial production (which became a primary indicator of prosperity) or other industrially produced food; housing through the single-family home with central heating, refrigerator, television, and flower gardens instead of fruit and vegetable gardens. Subsistent and semi-subsistent economic forms (small-time and part-time farming, vegetable growing) were pushed back. ‘Disposable’ income grew. Burkhart Lutz has called this commodification of wage labourers’ reproduction an ‘inner appropriation’ (Lutz, 1989). Thanks to this, the generalization of wage relations found its equivalent in the norm of consumption. The United States formed the starting point for the establishment of Fordism. After the First World War, not only was it the largest creditor in the world, but also its share in worldwide industrial production grew from one-third in 1913 to 42 per cent immediately before the 1929 economic crisis. The end of the Second World War brought a reorientation from arms production to industrially produced consumer goods, despite the beginning of the Cold War and the omnipresence of the military. The United States was not only the most productive economy in the industrial sector, but, beginning in the 1940s, it also had the highest-yielding agricultural economy. The consumption standards resulting from these developments not only encouraged uniformity but – owing to the strong bent towards animal products – also transformed the global agricultural system by requiring expansive pastures and immense amounts of animal feed. The industrial production and processing of meat in Chicago’s stockyards also contributed to the original development of Fordist organization, as Henry Ford himself copied the idea of the conveyor belt from the stockyards’ method of slaughter by assembly line. The emergence of ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ consumption norms was accompanied by shortened product longevity, not only in terms of the material itself but also in the value of goods that were designed to match the tempo of fast-paced ‘fashions’. Advertising and marketing were professionalized and became topics for scientific study. Costs for consumer goods were lowered through rising productivity, and the reproduction of labour power was also cheapened accordingly. Workers were able to participate in the ever-rising surplus product through increases in real wages. At a general level and despite differences at the country level, Fordism’s class compromise was institutionalized via corporatism, which harmonized the forms of settling class conflict with the requirements for accumulating capital. Thus, the social-democratic paradigm came to dominate Western Europe. Pivotal conflicts were organized around the distribution of wealth within society but were not directed against the forms of production, or ownership or control of the means of production. Demands for redistribution were increas-

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ingly aimed at the state, which became an ever more important actor. In addition, the state began to intervene as a regulator in areas such as work safety, food hygiene and health standards, all of which achieved greater significance in an ever more industrialized environment. As production was rationalized according to the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor – rigidly separating planning and performing tasks, and segmenting the labour process into minute, repetitive steps – productivity rose accordingly, and these changes formed the foundation of Fordism’s mode of development. The state made this shift possible by building the infrastructure required for the transport of energy sources and other raw materials, products and people. Fordism was also based on constant, unlimited access to an outside and an elsewhere, particularly the ‘elsewhere’ of uncompensated reproductive labour and the global South’s labour force and raw materials. The global South was the object of aggressive appropriation and externalization. The automobile – along with privately owned homes and electric appliances – functioned as the emblematic vehicle of the mode of living under Fordism and its corresponding form of subjectivity. The standardized production it fostered in large vertically integrated corporations necessitated a high degree of discipline from workers, not only at work but also at home: the model of a white, male breadwinner and patriarchal-familial relations between genders was established in most of the countries of the global North in concert with Fordist standards of production and consumption. Inner appropriation did not only mean that the capitalist mode of production entered the pores, so to speak, of workers’ everyday lives and the institutions of state and society; it also meant that the middle and upper classes’ imperial mode of living was generalized across society. It became hegemonic – that is, widely accepted – a component of what made social (re)production attractive and liveable. Society’s prevailing self-perception was expressed by concepts such as ‘consumer society’ or ‘levelled middle-class society’ (as sociologist Helmut Schelsky termed it in the mid-1950s), the new figure of the ‘consumer’ or the promise of ‘prosperity for all’, as Ludwig Erhard, the first West German minister of economic affairs, called it. Therefore, the imperial mode of living became the ground on which compromises between capital and labour were forged in the imperial and capitalist centres. Fordism’s production and consumption norms are enormously costly in terms of resources and emissions. They place demands on global resources and sinks on a historically unprecedented scale. This is particular due to the intensification of the use of fossil fuels – oil first and foremost, but also still coal – for both energy and non-energy purposes: Petroleum not only was the material basis for countless products themselves (e.g., plastics, clothing, and medicine), but also its centrality as transportation fuel ensured

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that even if products were not made with petroleum, they were distributed and consumed via petroleum-based modes of mobility. (Huber, 2013, pp. 180–181)

Further technological innovations in the areas of chemistry, agriculture, telecommunications, engineering, electronics and transport also secured the dynamics of Fordism. And these, too, were extremely costly in their use of energy and raw materials. Automobility – i.e. the widespread use of automobiles that was enabled by corresponding production processes, technologies, infrastructures and state policies – in particular entailed magnified resource extraction and, with it, the transformation of the natural landscape. For every kilometre of the autobahn, 40,000 tonnes of cement, steel, sand and gravel are needed, and streets need ten to fifteen times as much surface area as railways. At this stage, the transport sector is replacing industry as the largest direct consumer of energy. (Krausmann and Fischer-Kowalski, 2010, p. 52)

Between 1950 and 1970, the use of domestic resources doubled on average in the highly industrialized states (Western Europe, North America, New Zealand, Australia and Japan). Furthermore, about half of the materials used globally were expended in these countries. Just between 1960 and 1970, the net import of fossil fuels tripled in the industrial West (Schaffartzik et al., 2014, pp. 90–92). Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the Fordist mode of living was politically anchored in the world order of Pax Americana. It rested on the economic power of the United States over the regions of the world that it directly influenced. For a substantial area of the world, a Pax Sovietica, which also maintained an unambiguous economic and political centre, stood in opposition to the US’s influence. The structural features of a (peripheral) Fordist mode of living could also be discerned there. We, however, will concentrate on the way the imperial mode of living unfolded in the capitalist world. The military and political dominance of the United States in the West and the rivalry between the competing Eastern and Western systems resulted in – from the perspective of the global North – relatively stable global relations, a fact also reflected in controlled access to cheap resources such as oil. The externalization of the consequences of extremely destructive society– nature relations became an essential precondition for the functioning of Fordist production and consumption norms. The more these resource- and emission-intensive practices were generalized socially in the global North, the greater the need became for an outside where the resources come from and to which the socio-ecological costs can be shifted. The not-in-my-backyard (or Nimby) attitude dominated as a crucial element of externalization. Nimbyism could also be seen in the normalized, everyday attitude of the imperial mode

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of living. In production, the 1960s saw the emergence of a tendency to relocate many ‘dirty industries’ – that is, especially labour-intensive and/or ecologically harmful ones – to the countries of the global South. This refers for example to the production of steel, textiles, chemical products and electronic appliances, or individual links in the supply chains of these products respectively. Many Western-oriented societies of the global South cultivated a ‘peripheral Fordist’ mode of production and living. The Great Depression showed the dependency of the countries of the global North and led, as a consequence, to intensified industrialization and urbanization in some countries and regions of the global South, and to an associated increase in the working and middle classes there: this especially was the case in the already decolonized countries of Latin America, who could direct their own economic policies. The state expanded its scope (Halperín Donghi and Chasteen, 1993, p. 247): it introduced protective tariffs, transferred income from exports to the domestic market, and integrated the interests of the urban middle and upper classes and those of the working class (or at least took the first steps towards this goal). To some extent the state also acted against the interests of the agro-oligarchy, e.g. by taking up the struggle for land reform that had been led by farmers’ movements. Along with these trends emerged a form of ‘consumption nationalism’ (Schramm, 2010, p. 376) that, due to expensive imports and an awareness of regional traditions (for example, tortillas in Mexico linked to corn production in the country), was quite significant and was maintained into the 1970s. In some countries, it even led to the nationalization of mineral resources and raw materials – the oil sector in Mexico in 1938, for example. The consumption habits of the middle classes in Latin America and other parts of the global South came to resemble those of their counterparts in the global North. From the middle of the twentieth century, the mode of living of the working class also depended increasingly on the capitalist economy. In this sense, indications of an expansion of the imperial mode of living in the (semi-)peripheral countries could be observed as soon as Fordism developed. This became even more true as the nations of the global South began more intensely to organize jointly, starting in the 1960s (e.g. in the context of the UN Conference on Trade and Development – UNCTAD) in order to reinforce their claim to a share of the global wealth, which was derived significantly from the resources and labour power of the global South. The demand for a New International Economic Order, first raised at the 1973 UNCTAD III meeting in Santiago de Chile and then adopted the following year at the UN General Assembly, exemplifies these shifts. The imperial mode of living had become the material core of the promise of development and progress that would go unredeemed in the global South for a long time – and indeed, for most of humankind, remains unfulfilled today.

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The increasingly costly resource needs of the Fordist mode of living tended to require undemocratic relations between the North and the South. This is especially obvious in the case of crude oil, for instance, in the process of its extraction (as a resource) as well as in the ecological consequences of its combustion (global warming and the use of sinks). On the extraction end, the cooperation of capitalist states and corporations of the global North with conservative movements and governments in the global South can be observed; these work together to assure access to oil deposits and supress the democratic efforts opposing them (Mitchell, 2011). On the ecology end, sinks such as forests that absorb the CO2 resulting from the combustion of oil and other fossil fuels are predominantly claimed or overstrained – cf. climate change – by the global North, even though most of the sinks are located in countries of the global South.3 Because of these relations, Fordist production and consumption norms cannot be maintained democratically, and instead require military force, unequal economic relations and/or institutionalized political coercion in the form of trade agreements. It became apparent at the end of the 1960s that the ability of the Fordist mode of development to raise productivity was exhausted, leading to difficulties in capital valorization and therefore to crisis phenomena. Moreover, the US lost its position of economic predominance, a loss that is due largely to its successful export of the expansive Fordist production and consumption model – particularly to Western Europe. In other words, it is a result of the generalization of the imperial mode of living in the global North. Post-Fordism: Deepening and Universalizing the Imperial Mode of Living From today’s point of view, the 1970s seem to have been a historic window of opportunity during which the imperial mode of living was challenged. This was so for a variety of reasons. A forerunner of growing discontent was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which looked at the negative effects of pesticides on the food chain, and the books that followed in its wake (Carson, 1962). A crop failure in US corn production in 1970 drew attention to the hidden dangers of the Fordist model of agriculture based on high-yielding varieties and monoculture. Publications such as the report, The Limits to Growth for the Club of Rome initiated wide-ranging social debates. An initial United Nations Conference on the Human Environment took place in Stockholm in 1972, after which the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was founded. In October 1973, in the wake of the Arab–Israeli Yom Kippur War, the OPEC raised the price of oil from three to five US$ per barrel (159 litres) – which today looks inconceivably low. This increase jeopardized one of the foundations of the imperial mode of living, especially in the capitalist

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metropolises and peripheral countries without their own oil reserves. Beyond this increase, the unequal appropriation of natural resources was increasingly politicized by the governments and liberation movements of the global South. Discussions took place around a New International Economic Order led by the newly decolonized countries at the beginning of the 1970s – especially in the context of the UNCTAD – demanding that the old dependencies be overcome. This demand was democratic in its essence: it was about the control over natural resources and the distribution of the benefits from their use. The problems of the imperial mode of living were also highlighted by US oil drilling, which reached its peak of 3.8 billion barrels in 1970. By 2008, extraction in the US fell to 2.1 billion per year barrels owing to dwindling sources. With increasing oil consumption – by about one-third over the course of that period – the US came to rely more heavily on imports. In some countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands or West Germany, the expectation of increasing oil scarcity led to ‘car-free Sundays’. Austria attempted to halve daily automobile transport by alternately limiting driving to even- or odd-numbered license plates. The dominant, linear and environmentally destructive belief in progress was challenged in some societies by environmental and other social movements of varying strengths. The environmental movement initially emerged independently of other protest movements such as the student, solidarity and feminist ones. During the course of the 1970s, however, it became an important part of the new social movements. The 1970s thus witnessed challenges on multiple fronts to Fordist orientations, forms of action and institutions; people experimented with alternative modes of living; and the value of cooperation and communication was emphasized. New ways of living, as well as forms of flexibility and social mobility, emerged through alternative experiments and the rejection of the Fordist regime of discipline. But this historic window of opportunity closed with the enforcement of a neoliberal response to the crisis. On the one hand, the response turned many alternatives into a force of capitalist restructuring and modernization. The critique of the Fordist model of disciplined work and living, particularly by subcultural movements, led to the demand for a freer form of everyday life and to a pluralization of living practices. These, in turn, were integrated into neoliberal capitalism as the boundaries between work and life were blurred and ideas such as ‘self-discipline’ and ‘self-optimization’ increasingly shaped people’s everyday life and work. ‘The movements anticipated the capitalist awareness of a need for a paradigm shift and dictated its form and nature’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Penz and Sauer, 2016). In Gramscian terms, the crisis of Fordism finally resulted in a ‘passive revolution’, in a stabilization of the capitalist mode of production through its

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transformation and the translation of a fundamental critique into a moment of modernization (we elaborate this point more comprehensively in Brand and Wissen, 2021). On the other hand, the stabilizing role of the imperial mode of living in the global North became obvious during the crisis: in a period of increasing insecurity and unemployment – and, later, of growing competition among workers, greater cuts to social services and social disruptions – the imperial mode of living ensured the integration of more or less broad strata of the population into social compromises. The reproduction costs of the working class could then be maintained at a relatively low level. In retrospect, we can see that the response to the crisis of Fordism, which grew out of the 1980s, was what would later be termed neoliberal globalization. It led to enormous capitalist expansion and appropriation and to an increasing competition both within society and on the global economic and geopolitical levels (Altvater and Mahnkopf, 1996). These trends received a second boost after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. A third boost followed: the spectacular rise of countries such as China starting at the end of the 1990s and the dynamic growth of countries in the global South who largely financed their economic expansion with exports of natural resources. For a good ten years after about 2003, these countries benefited from historically unprecedented high demand and booming prices. In the countries that industrialized early, fossil-fuel-based production and consumption norms not only survived the economic crisis of the 1970s unscathed, they even intensified. The production, distribution and consumption of cheap industrial products has grown through globalization, important technological shifts such as the introduction of new information technologies and containerization occurred, and industrialized agriculture has expanded. Although the total resource expenditure of the European Union, for example, has remained stagnant at a high level since the mid-1980s, the proportion of imports in these expenditures has risen. Furthermore, the ‘ecological backpack’ of the imported products, i.e. the resources used in the exporting countries of the global South, has grown (Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie, 2005, pp. 68–70). The ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ is demonstrated by the fact that the economies of the global North are provided with cheap raw materials and are therefore able to keep the cost of their labour force’s reproduction at a relatively low level. However, the run on natural resources is also taking place in the global North, e.g. in Appalachia in the US where ‘surface mining’, an ecologically problematic practice in its own right, has been replaced by ‘mountaintop removal’ mining, which is exactly what it sounds like: mountaintops are

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blasted with explosives and simply removed to access the coal seam underneath more easily. An essential component of the imperial mode of living is the expansion of industrial agriculture, which has gone hand in hand with land grabs and dispossession, expands the power of agricultural and food corporations, and requires ever greater energy input. As a part of a norm that ties increasing meat consumption to rising prosperity, expansion is accompanied by a ballooning system of industrial animal farming and the massive ethical and ecological problems that are part and parcel of this practice. Producing one calorie of poultry meat requires four times that amount in energy input; pork and milk require 14 times the final amount of caloric energy; eggs 39 times; and beef, depending on the type of feed, 20 to 40 times. ‘Today, more energy is invested in agricultural production than is gained in its form as food. The large quantity of high-quality agricultural products fed to livestock is partially responsible for this’ (Krausmann and Fischer-Kowalski, 2010, p. 56). Corporations in the agricultural, seed, pharmacological, chemical, engineering and food sectors drive this dynamic forward, and the dynamic is culturally symbolized, especially in fast-food chains and ever-expanding supermarket chains. State and international policies ensure the continued existence of this model. The specific social, economic, political and ecological conditions of production simply are not a consideration for the corporate food regime. McMichael (2009) thus speaks of ‘food from nowhere’. ‘Nowhere’ does not only indicate the indeterminacy of origin; it is also, first and foremost, a sign of the imposed invisibility of the social and ecological devastation that follows from the limitless availability of all possible food items in all places at all times. This system only works because the consequences of that devastation are externalized spatially and temporally, and thus not brought to bear on those who enjoy the benefits of the corporate food regime. The environmental consequences ‘are hardly noticeable in Europe, nor do we notice the price fluctuations owing to droughts, floods or increased demand for feed – but many Southern countries do’ (Hilal, 2015, p. 26; see the vivid examples in Hartmann, 2015). Ranging from social destabilization to bloody conflicts, these consequences are simply the downside of the stabilizing and legitimizing effect that the availability of cheap food products has in the global North. That this fact is so widely accepted is an expression of the structural racism and neocolonialism that shapes relations between North and South. Finally, the powerful character of the imperial mode of living is also reflected in the CO2 emissions caused by aviation and associated intensive,

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unequal use of sinks. It reflects the structure of the global economy in its ecological dimensions, with a rich North that can afford to pollute the overwhelming part of the environment and climate with flight emissions, and a poor South, for whom the material conditions of life act as a barrier to the development of air travel and, accordingly, to pollution. (Wolf, 2009, p. 293)

The last two decades have witnessed a dynamic with a breathtaking result: while the use of domestic resources declined slightly, on average, between 2000 and 2010 in Western industrialized countries (Western Europe, North America, New Zealand and Australia, but also Japan), 28 Asian countries (excluding Japan) have more than doubled their domestic resource extraction overall and per capita over the same period. Furthermore, imports of raw materials, especially fossil fuels, increased sharply (Schaffartzik et al., 2014, pp. 90–92). A more specific indicator for this development is the use of energy, especially the consumption of fossil fuels. The energy-intensive, largely oil-dependent mode of living that for a long time has been a normality in the global North – anchored in everyday practices, infrastructure, institutions and relationships of social forces – is vigorously spreading among the middle and upper classes of economically fast-growing countries of the global South as a result of various strategies of valorization and capital accumulation. In these countries, it is becoming the dominant model of prosperity, even for those who have not yet been integrated into the imperial mode of living. The growth in oil demand is driven by the transport and petrochemical sectors. The latter is the largest industrial consumer of oil. It serves, above all, the rapidly growing demand for plastics. The transport sector’s growing demand for oil reflects the expansion of automobility, especially that of personal vehicle ownership in many countries of the global South. According to BP’s projections, the ‘global car fleet doubles from 0.9 billion cars in 2015 to 1.8 billion by 2035 … The number of electric cars also rises significantly, from 1.2 million in 2015 to around 100 million by 2035 (6% of the global fleet)’. The assumed growth occurs almost exclusively in the so-called emerging economies of non-OECD countries whose vehicle fleets could triple from half a billion to 1.5 billion. Increased energy efficiency cannot keep pace with this development. BP says cars will consume 40 per cent less fuel on average in 2050 than they did in 2015 (British Petroleum, 2016, pp. 23–25). The resulting energy savings, however, will be entirely swept away by the growth of the total number of cars. Furthermore, the number of ‘gas-guzzlers’, such as SUVs, has grown especially strongly of late. This is the reason for the rise in the average

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energy consumption of vehicles sold in China since 2013, after years of decline (IEA, 2015). This will not only have important geopolitical but also socio-ecological implications: if we assume that by 2050 a world population of 8.5 billion people will use as much energy per capita as it does in the industrialized countries today, global energy use will triple by the middle of the century (Haberl et al., 2011). However, the strain on resources and sinks of today’s levels is already too high to manage phenomena such as climate change or the loss of biodiversity. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that the global middle class will rise from over 1.8 billion people in 2009 to over 3.2 billion in 2020 and nearly 4.9 billion by 2030. The vast majority of people – over 3.2 billion – will live in Asia, according to this forecast. Whether growth rates will be larger in China or in India is also a matter of controversy (UNDP, 2013). Nevertheless, the new middle classes of those countries are more akin to those of the capitalist centres before Fordism and the formation of the welfare state. They are vulnerable to risks such as illness or unemployment. They could easily fall into poverty as a result of financial shocks owing to the lack of social welfare systems. A large section of the people who belong to the new middle class are the very same people who, while they may be able to increase their income, are nevertheless not far above the poverty level. (Popp, 2014, p. 32)

Owing to a minimal welfare state in their countries and their economic uncertainty, they belong to the ‘floating group’, i.e. those who live just above the poverty line and are constantly under threat of slipping into poverty. The International Labour Organization (ILO) – which has a much broader interpretation of what constitutes the middle class than do the OECD or the UNDP – put their number at approximately 1.9 billion people in 2010 (ILO 2013, p. 36). A commonly overlooked feature of the middle classes in economically fast-growing countries of the global South is that they do not only consume more and thereby consume more resources. Under certain circumstances, they are also able to articulate their needs and those of the lower classes more powerfully: for education, social security, physical security and political and cultural participation (Popp, 2014, pp. 36–37). In the medium term, these aspects could provide an important basis for politicizing the imperial mode of living, which, in addition to ecological problems, also leaves many people in existential insecurity (of course, this politicization could also come from the lower classes). The contradiction that the late industrialized countries are especially affected by the consequences of the ecological crisis is pervasive in the new middle classes. In addition to immediate effects, such as air and water

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pollution appearing as the ‘collateral damage’ of ‘catch-up’ development, factors such as lack of funding also contribute to the unequal ability to adapt to global warming (Dietz and Brunnengräber, 2008).

OUTLOOK: TOWARDS A GREEN CAPITALISM? We live in a situation of an interregnum as Gramsci called it in his time (Prison Notebooks, 3, p. 354). The old formation of fossil fuel capitalism cannot die and the new one, a decarbonized or green capitalism, has not unfolded its full potential yet. If it will do so or how it will articulate with other projects and strategies is hard to predict. Different politico-ethical projects compete with each other. A first one can be called an authoritarian stabilization of the imperial mode of production and living. The dominant forces more or less openly accept the humanitarian consequences of climate change as given (e.g. through climate denialism or fatalism) and now focus on defending the current mode of living of at least some defined in-group – if necessary by force. This is the project not only of the extreme right that has been gaining strength in many countries worldwide, but also of conservative forces that seek to seal off their societies from economic competitors as well as from migrants and refugees. A second project is pursued by other actors and alliances that try to cope with the multiple crises of capitalism through a passive revolution in the form of an ecological modernization. Many of them are in favour of green growth, competitiveness and the leading role of private capital to deal with the socio-ecological crisis. In fact, it’s an attempt of a domination-shaped greening of capitalism which focuses mainly on the replacement of the energy basis of capitalism, thus fixing the aggravating contradictions of its political economy (Kaufmann and Müller, 2009; Smith, 2016; Brand and Wissen 2021, chapter 7). Thus, whereas the protagonists of the first project aim at exclusively defending the imperial mode of living, the ones of the second project try to modernize the latter through green investment and consumption, globalized markets and technological competition and the replacement of fossil fuels. Against this background, the third and rather weak project is one of an emancipatory socio-ecological transformation which also practically questions and attempts to overcome the capitalist social forms, i.e. the imperial mode of production and living. Alternatives, or experiences of, potentials for and orientations at a solidary mode of living are manifold in different spheres such as food and agriculture, mobility, housing, clothing, etc. Key elements of such alternatives are a focus on the production of use values instead of exchange values, the provision of social and material infrastructures for the very basic fulfilment of basic needs via a strong public sector, a solidary economy or socio-ecologically highly regulated private enterprises. And there is a need

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for a severe reduction not only of the material input to production processes but in many respects – e.g. the automotive sector – also of the very quantity of production. An emancipatory socio-ecological transformation in this strong sense would not result in a new capitalist formation, it would rather push the processes of an ecological modernization beyond the limits that are hitherto set by their capitalist form. Without doubt, the multiple and intensifying crises make it hard to imagine such an alternative future, centred on care and a use-value oriented production. However, this kind of imagination is as important for opening progressive horizons as the concrete analysis of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions and of the potentials and obstacles of their emancipatory politicization. To end with Gramsci, we need both: ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ (Prison Notebooks, 28, p. 2232).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are indebted to Bill Carroll and particularly to Sourayan Mookerjea for their excellent comments and suggestions to improve this chapter, and we would like to thank Segal Hussein and Tadzio Mueller for supporting us technically to finalize the manuscript and for translating parts of the chapter from German into English.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

Passages from the Prison Notebooks are authors’ translation from the 1991 German edition (Gramsci, 1991). The following sections are condensed parts of Chapters 4 and 5 in Brand and Wissen (2021). The measures here are per capita emissions of CO2, which remain significantly higher in the countries of the global North than in those of the global South (although both are trending towards convergence). See IEA (2014, pp. 84–86).

REFERENCES Aglietta, A. (2000). Theory of Capitalist Regulation. Verso. Altvater, E. & Mahnkopf, B. (1996). Grenzen der Globalisierung. Ökonomie, Ökologie und Politik in der Weltgesellschaft. Westfälisches Dampfboot. Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, E. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. (Original work published 1999). Brand, U. & Wissen, M. (2021). The Imperial Mode of Living. Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism. Verso. (Original work published 2017). Brand, U. & Wissen, M. (2022). Spatialising the imperial mode of living – rethinking a concept. Erde, 153(2), 75–83. https://​doi​.org/​10​.12854/​erde​-2022​-613

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British Petroleum. (2016). BP Energy Outlook. 2016 Edition. BP p.l.c. https://​www​ .bp​.com/​content/​dam/​bp/​business​-sites/​en/​global/​corporate/​pdfs/​energy​-economics/​ energy​-outlook/​bp​-energy​-outlook​-2016​.pdf Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1985). Gramsci und der Staat: für eine materialistische Theorie der Philosophie. Pahl-Rugenstein. Burkart, L. (1989). Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität: Eine Neuinterpretation der industriell-kapitalistischen Entwicklung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Campus Verlag. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment. Houghton Mifflin. Demirović, A. (1997). Demokratie und Herrschaft. Aspekte kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie. Westfälisches Dampfboot. Dietz, K. & Brunnengräber, A. (2008). Das Klima in den Nord-Süd-Beziehungen. Peripherie, 28(112), 400–428. Drainville, A.C. (1994). International political economy in the age of open Marxism. Review of International Political Economy, 1(1), 105–132. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 09692299408434270 Gramsci, A. (1991). Prison Notebooks. Quoted from the German edition (K. Bochmann & W.F. Haug, eds). Argument-Verlag. Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Martinez-Alier, J., & Winiwarter, V. (2011). A socio-metabolic transition towards sustainability? Challenges for another Great Transformation. Sustainable Development, 19(1), 1–14. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1002/​sd​.410 Halperín Donghi, T. & Chasteen, J. (1993). The Contemporary History of Latin America. Duke University Press. https://​doi​-org​.uaccess​.univie​.ac​.at/​10​.1515/​ 9780822398318 Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press. Hartmann, K. (2015). Aus kontrolliertem Raubbau: Wie Politik und Wirtschaft das Klima anheizen, Natur vernichten und Armut produzieren. Karl Blessing Verlag. Hilal, S. (2015). Tiere nutzen. In Le Monde diplomatique, B. Bauer, D. D’Aprile, S. Jainski, N. Kadritzke, S. Liebig, P. Thorbrietz & A. Buitenhuis (eds), Atlas der Globalisierung: Weniger wird mehr (pp. 22–27). Le Monde diplomatique /taz Verl.und Vertriebs-GmbH. Huber, M. (2013). Fueling capitalism: Oil, the regulation approach, and the ecology of capital. Economic Geography, 89(2), 171–194. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​ecge​.12006 International Energy Agency. (2014). IEA statistics: CO2 Emissions from fuel combustion. Highlights. International Energy Agency. pp. 84–86. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1787/​ co2​_fuel​-2014​-en International Energy Agency. (2015). World Energy Outlook 2015. International Energy Agency. https://​iea​.blob​.core​.windows​.net/​assets/​5a314029​-69c2​-42a9​-98ac​ -d1c5deeb59b3/​WEO2015​.pdf International Labour Organization. (2013). World of Work Report. Repairing the Economic and Social Fabric. (Meeting Document 20 November 2013). International Institute for Labour Studies. http://​www​.ilo​.org/​actrav/​WCMS​_230178/​lang​-​-en/​ index​.html Kaufmann, S. & Müller, T. (2009). Grüner Kapitalismus. Krise, Klimawandel und kein Ende des Wachstums. Dietz Verlag. Krausmann, F. & Fischer-Kowalski, M. (2010). Gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse: Energiequellen und die globale Transformation des gesellschaftlichen Stoffwechsels.

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(Social Ecology Working Paper No.117). https://​www​.aau​.at/​wp​-content/​uploads/​ 2016/​11/​working​-paper​-117​-web​.pdf McMichael, P (2009). The world food crisis in historical perspective. Monthly Review, 61(3). Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso. Penz, O. & Sauer, B. (2016). Affektives Kapital: Die Ökonomisierung der Gefühle im Alltagsleben. Campus Verlag. Popp, S. (2014). Die neue globale Mittelschicht. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 64(49), 30–37. https://​www​.bpb​.de/​system/​files/​dokument​_pdf/​APuZ​_2014​-49​_online​.pdf Schaffartzik, A., Mayer, A., Gingrich, S., Eisenmenger, N., Loy, C., & Krausmann, F. (2014). The global metabolic transition: Regional patterns and trends of global material flows, 1950–2010. Global Environmental Change, 26(1), 87–97. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1016/​j​.gloenvcha​.2014​.03​.013 Scherrer, C. (1998). Neo-gramscianische Interpretationen internationaler Beziehungen. In U. Hirschfeld (ed.), Gramsci-Perspektiven (pp. 160–174). Argument-Verl. Schor, J.B. (2015). Überarbeitet und überschuldet: Die Zukunft von Arbeit, Freizeit und Konsum. LuXemburg. https://​zeitschrift​-luxemburg​.de/​artikel/​ueberarbeitet​-und​ -ueberschuldet/​ Schramm, M. (2010). Die Entstehung der Konsumgesellschaft. In Sieder, R. (ed.), Globalgeschichte 1800-2010 (pp. 367–388). Böhlau Verlag. https://​doi​.org/​10​.7767/​ boehlau​.9783205790846​.367 Smith, R. (2016). Green Capitalism. College Publications. United Nations Development Programme. (2013). Human Development Report: Human Progress and the Rising South. United Nations Development Programme. https://​hdr​.undp​.org/​system/​files/​documents//​human​-development​-report​-2013​ -summary​-english​.human​-development​-report​-2013​-summary​-english Wolf, W. (2009). Verkehr, Umwelt, Klima: die Globalisierung des Tempowahns. Promedia. Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie (eds). (2005). Fair Future: Begrenzte Ressourcen und globale Gerechtigkeit. C. H. Beck.

Section B

Social and cultural reproduction

17. Hegemony, gender and social reproduction Anna Sturman INTRODUCTION Writing at the time of the USA’s ascendance to global hegemon, Gramsci developed a rich analysis of how the changing forces and relations of production driven by the organization and scale of hegemonic production would meet existing social forces, domestically and at the world-scale. His attention to the construction of consent alongside coercion was central to this account. Gramsci’s insights about the reproduction of capitalist social formations have formed a critical starting point for examining gender and social reproduction across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Socialist feminist theorists, writing during the wane of capitalism’s ‘golden age’ in the imperial core and the turn from economic determinism in historical materialist theory, grappled with the ‘woman question’ and how consent and coercion structured not only the relation between labour and capital, but the axes of domination splintering the working-class. Despite the critical developments in socialist feminist scholarship across the twentieth century, these were ultimately casualties of the neoliberal turn along with other historical materialisms in the academy and beyond. In the contemporary era of resurgent class politics, we can once more look to Gramsci’s insights, including analysis of Americanism and Fordism for guidance. The rise of reactionary feminisms speaks to the need for contemporary socialist feminist theory alive to the social forces and political fault lines of our time, and the need to revisit old questions of strategy. Finally, climate change and other indicators of social and environmental (socio-ecological) collapse point to the importance of an internationalist socialist feminism that looks across borders while taking seriously domestic wars of position and maneuver.

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GRAMSCI ON AMERICANISM AND FORDISM The translation of selections from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks into English in the 1970s occurred during the turn away from schematic economic determinism (orthodox Marxism), toward considering the complexities of expansive industrial capitalist economies and their layers of protective social, cultural and political institutions. Gramsci’s focus on the historically specific articulation of social forces provided an opening for considering how class relationships might become stabilized and contested over time. Here we can look in particular to his analysis of ‘Americanism’ and Fordism to see how: the concept ‘mode of production’ gains life and contemporary relevance through analysis of the relationship between its then newly powerful ‘Fordist’ formation and the political and cultural spheres (analyses of the changing mode of production and its consequence for everyday life, psychology, sexuality, political ideology, religion and literature; economic considerations on the current relevance of Marx’s law of the tendential fall of the average profit rate as well as the Fordist answer to this fall on the side of the innovative industrialists; the relationship between finance and industrial capital; the Fordist state interventionism; fascism and bolshevism as diametrical projects of catching up to Fordism in the shadow of American competition). (Haug, 2001, p. 77)

For the purposes of setting up a discussion of Gramsci’s contemporary relevance for social reproduction, we can divide these insights into two broad categories, namely the ‘rationalization of production’ in the USA and how this inflected the social reproduction of the working class in that country; and how social transformation to, through and perhaps beyond capitalism dislocates and aggravates particular social forces. These are mutually informing processes. Turning to the first, Gramsci was concerned here with the impacts of the USA’s industrialization and the ‘perfecting’ of the labour force through standardization and massification of both the worker and the products of his labour, leading to enormous increases in productivity and the simultaneous deskilling of the worker through increased specialization and alienation from said products (Gramsci, 2011: 215–216, Q4, §52). Among the aspects of workers’ lives – those strictly beyond but impacting performance on the factory floor – that Gramsci discussed were the consumption of alcohol and probable articulation of sexual relationships (‘the sexual question’) – factors which he considered pertinent to the ways in which workers were being fine-tuned as productive instruments and members of a more or less ‘stable, skilled workforce, a permanently attuned industrial ensemble’ (Gramsci, 2011: 216, Q4, §52). The disciplining of the worker through an all-encompassing structure of work and discipline is an idea that may be grasped almost intuitively in our present time, with training of the future labour force into task-focused individuals begin-

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ning in our mandatory primary and secondary schools, all the way through to optional training for highly specialized professions and trades, alongside the ways ‘optimization’ of our bodies and minds for maximum and consistent productivity are configured in day-to-day living. With the second category, Gramsci turned to consider how the composition of social forces in a society enables or constrains such standardization and massification of social reproduction. When he contrasted ‘young’ America to ‘old’ Europe, Gramsci was pointing to the development of the productive forces occurring in the USA, which was not ‘held back’ by the sedimented rentier classes of Europe,1 Americanism, then, represented the massively accelerated ‘progress’ of capitalism through the development of the workers/ perfection of the forces of production in the absence of the ‘lead weight’ of the ‘viscous sedimentations from past historical phases’ (Gramsci, 2011: 169, Q3, §9), and gestured to the impacts this explosion of productivity was having on the existing ‘sediments’ of Europe. Gramsci’s analysis of reactionary tendencies in response to the expansion of capital’s compulsions will be discussed in greater detail below, in relation to aspects of contemporary social reproduction in the imperial core. This will situate reactionary feminisms within a theorization of capital’s degradation of the conditions of (re)production before parsing opportunities to counter them, with particular reference to the integral, capitalist state.

FEMINISMS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION THEORY Gramsci’s insights about the comprehensive transformation of the relations and forces of production provide a clear opening for feminist critique of both capital and the gendered working class. Writing on the production of consent involved in constructing the regimented labour force required for rationalization of production, Gramsci had noted: Adaptation to the new methods of work cannot come about solely through coercion: the apparatus of coercion needed to obtain such a result would certainly be more costly than high wages. Coercion is combined with persuasion in forms that are suitable to the society in question: money. (Gramsci, 2011: 219, Q4, §52)

The missing link in the production of consent here, of course, is the ‘hidden abode’ of socially reproductive labour required to create and then sustain the worker and the labour force (Fraser, 2014). A heady mix of consent and coercion structured the ‘golden age’ of capitalism in the imperial core. On one hand, an explosion of consumer goods and a working class with wages to spend on them established new ‘standards of living’, buoyed by the rise

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of advertising and mass media. On the other, this era of seemingly boundless prosperity for some relied upon overt forms of domination internal to the working-class, including the structural subordination of women through the appropriation of socially reproductive labour in the home and community, and through low-paid feminized labour in the productive economy.2 Socialist feminists of the 1960s and beyond have attended to the myriad ways women’s lives were determined by compromises made between workers and capital, and enshrined in the articulation of the state. Over time this has developed from singular concern with ‘the reproduction of the labour force on a daily basis’ to consider the expansive sites of care (as forms of relationality) required to reproduce capitalist society in its totality, including for example elder care and healthcare (Armstrong and Armstrong, 2002). Early feminist strategies for liberation depended on how patriarchy and capital were theorized in relation to one another. At least three broad groupings evolved: dual and triple systems theory; ‘indifferent’ capitalism; and unitary theory (Arruzza, 2014). Dual and triple systems feminists privileged patriarchy (and racism) as the key(s) to understanding the endurance of women’s subordination to men, prior to and into the capitalist era. These theorists analysed the capitalist and patriarchal systems as separate but interlocked (formally autonomous), so that capitalism could and would not be defeated without also undoing patriarchy and, in the case of triple systems theory, racism. Meanwhile, an early version of the ‘indifferent capitalism’ approach, directly related to the orthodox Marxist tradition could be seen in claims from male counterparts that with the perfection of the forces of production the transformation to socialism would free all people; and that women should therefore focus not on a critique of social reproduction but, instead, on supporting working class struggle in the productive economy (Hartmann, 1979).3 Of the three orientations, unitary system theory is the arm of socialist feminist scholarship and activism that has developed a distinctly Gramscian understanding of social reproduction and capitalism. The key here is understanding the operation of capitalist production to be nested within the totality of social reproduction of human life: an indivisible unity of production and reproduction incompletely or imperfectly dominated by the logic of capital. By conceiving the material foundation of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life, social reproductionists offer a materialist understanding of social relations that is better able to take account of contradictions and complexity than one based on the market alone and, in so doing, they open the door to an anti-capitalist feminist coalition politics. (Ferguson, 1999, p. 2)

In Lise Vogel’s (1983) Unitary Theory she developed the argument that the source of women’s impossible position in capitalism is the simultaneous

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imperatives of being drawn into the formal labour force to continue lowering labour’s bargaining power through increases in the reserve army of labour, and as the people with the biological monopoly on gestating (the necessary act commencing the reproduction of) the future labour force. This contradiction means that people who can get pregnant are forever stuck between the twain; and without solidarity between those who perform this gestational work and those who are not physically implicated in the contradiction, an enduring conflict exists. The (male) working class benefits from an induced limit on the reserve army of labour, thus increasing its bargaining power vis-à-vis capital; and individual men also benefit from the assignment to others of the work of social reproduction. The naturalization of capitalist categories of gender and gendered labour is a powerful aid to this structural subordination. It follows, Vogel cautioned, that beyond gestating and birthing human life, social reproduction of the labour force might be accomplished in various ways and that this is a radical opportunity for labour but also for capital: While some have argued that reproduction of labor power is a production process taking place in family households, in fact such activities represent only one possible mode of renewing the bearers of labor power. Labor camps or dormitory facilities can also be used to maintain workers, and the work force can be replenished through immigration or enslavement as well as by generational replacement of existing workers. (Vogel, 1983, p. 139)

Vogel points repeatedly to the importance of not fetishizing the family as the sole or even most important site of social reproduction. Acknowledging the nuclear family as a key site of inquiry without fetishizing it as the site allows us to both anticipate the shifts in capital’s appropriation of future forms of social reproduction; and to consider the possibilities for challenging these in transformative ways. This focus on the possible configurations of social reproduction at the level of the individual and of the collective labour force is, in part, a response to the tendency within some currents of socialist feminist work to theorize the household and household labour as the key site of struggle.4 We can turn to the work of black socialist feminists to unpack this further. With and against the white socialist feminisms and black radicals of the 1970s and beyond, black socialist feminist theorists including Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier of the Combahee River Collective (1979 [1977]), argued that understanding the multiple oppressions constituted under capitalism was necessary to build a united movement for liberation. These theorists revealed the layers of domination required to achieve the social formations Gramsci was discussing with his reflections on Americanism and Fordism; that is, the layers of domination internal to the Left which enable(d) compromise between the white working class and capital. Critiquing white socialist feminism’s focus on the household and appropriated labour, they

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pointed to the histories of both slavery – including the forced social reproduction of unfree labour – and of black women performing (poorly) paid labour in white women’s households, demonstrating that exploitation was not alien to feminized work. The solidarity required to organize across the formally productive and socially reproductive terrains would have to begin with commitment to the emancipation of the entire, internally differentiated unity of the global working class. The next part of this story is well known. The implications of these arguments were not brought to bear in transformative labour movements, and the hard-won, yet inadequate compromises of the imperial core’s ‘golden age’, began to unravel from the 1970s. Much has been written about the rearticulations of social, political, economic and cultural power which occurred across the 1980s and 1990s. The overwhelming (though not complete – socialist feminist theory has persevered, as we shall see) turn from ‘metanarratives’, including the historical materialist critiques of capitalism at the core of socialist feminist theory, towards the individualization and fragmentation of poststructuralist theories has inflected counter-hegemonic projects considering gender. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the depth and breadth of work that has been done in the realm of poststructuralist theories and how these relate to the reproduction of capital. Instead, we turn to the present conjuncture and trace the morbid phenomena of reactionary feminisms which have emerged, before turning to consider current questions of strategy and prospects for contemporary socialist feminist theory.

THE PRESENT CONJUNCTURE AND REACTIONARY FEMINISMS Describing the social forces of ‘old’ Europe, reacting to the sheer force of the American mode of production driving transformation of the global economy, Gramsci opined: What is called Americanism nowadays is for the most part a phenomenon of social panic, disintegration, despair among the old strata that will in fact be crushed by the new order: to a large extent these are an unconscious ‘reaction’ and not a reconstruction. Reconstruction cannot be expected from the strata ‘condemned’ by the new order and has to discover the way of life that turns into ‘freedom’ what today is ‘necessity’. This principle, it seems to me, is extremely important: that the first intellectual and moral reactions to the establishment of a new mode of production are due more to the debris of the old disintegrating classes than to the new classes whose destiny is tied to the new methods. (Gramsci, 2011, 17–18, Q3, §11)

While Gramsci was writing about the impacts of Americanism on the decaying social forces of Europe, in our own time we are witnessing the rise of a global

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reactionary right-wing, as de-industrialization and challenges to twentieth century hegemonic forms of social reproduction have simultaneously revoked (materially in the former and at least ideologically in the latter) decades of assumed domination, including along the lines of gender and ‘race’. Reactionary feminisms mobilized around gender are one aspect of the response to the ongoing decimation of previously hegemonic forms of social reproduction. Indeed, gender has proven to be perhaps the battleground upon which socio-cultural hegemony in the imperial core is contested; with conservative articulations of social reproduction reacting explosively to both the rejection of gender binaries and to expansive forms of care and solidarity (the response, simply: ‘gender panic’ – Del Campo, 2022). The material conditions of our individual and collective social reproduction have been changing, but the ‘intellectual and moral reactions’ of certain feminisms, nested within broader reactionary projects, have tended to save outrage and fear not for the destabilizing dynamics of unrestrained capital on hegemonic forms of social reproduction, but for the people attempting to exist in-against-and beyond these forms. How do reactionary feminisms square the material demands of socially reproductive labour, articulated through women’s subordination via un- and under-paid feminized labour as the basis of accumulation, with the various counter-hegemonic projects associated with the expansion of accumulation strategies open to capital in a world with multiple avenues of social reproduction?5 The full spectrum of emergent reactionary feminisms cannot be covered here but we can briefly discuss some central (and related) strains, including ‘TradWives’, the financialization–self-care nexus and ‘gender-critical’ feminists, specifically trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). ‘TradWives’ is the moniker for the fetishization of the wife of the twentieth-century white, working-class nuclear family; predicated on rejecting entry into the formal economy to embrace ‘traditional’ gender/sex roles and values as part of a broader project of white nationalist, far-right counter-hegemony. The elaboration and performance of this approach by ‘mummy vloggers’ has taken place on social media platforms (Love, 2020). This particular strand of reactionary impulse (indeed, it is a stretch to call it a feminism) is geared at reclaiming the things ‘stolen’ by the women’s liberation movement, namely ‘opportunity to have a male provider, a happy family, and a nice home’ (Love, 2020, p. 2), and thus appears as a reaction to the extended death of the hegemonic social reproduction of the twentieth century and the increasing openness to alternative articulations of social reproduction. The rising tide of ecofascist sentiment, premised on the imagined ‘purity’ of non-human nature and its complement, the ‘pure white woman’ as bearer of the renewed white race, is internally related to this construction of an idealized past and the dream of return (Campion, 2021).

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A related trend of the contemporary period is the extension of the white, liberal feminisms which triumphed over materialist feminist theories in the neoliberal turn; which take the ‘corporate warrior’ as the evolutionary next-of-kin to the stay-at-home mum. Women can ‘have it all’ by championing the choice of women to either go to the office and outsource social reproductive labour to other (lower paid) workers (a redistribution of labour might also occur within the existing unit of social reproduction), or by staying at home and finding ways to ‘side hustle’ (perhaps by monetizing TradWife content). These choices are premised on the celebration of ‘choice’ available to the very few, and the endurance of social reproduction being ‘free’ or low-paid enough that it makes financial sense for both parents to work in the productive economy. One way of consolidating this brand of ‘choice’ feminism has been the rapid rise of the financialization–self-care nexus in the 2020s. This includes the rise of apps and consultants hawking ‘financial prowess’ (meaning management of financial portfolios, an interesting twist on the management of the household budget) as the ‘ultimate form of self-care’. Beyond this use of feminized wellness language to bring women into the hyper-masculine space of financial services, the material implications of this are clear: more of the material security of women needs to be bound up in the present world of financialized, debt-mediated social reproduction and accumulation in order to prevent any serious challenges to capital. Finally, the so-called ‘Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist’ (TERF) branch of ‘gender critical’ feminism has demonstrated the dangers of leaving uninterrogated biological essentialisms or the assertion of formally autonomous patriarchal domination at the core of ‘feminism’, rather than attending to the material structures of power which mobilise sex and gender in capitalism. Offshoots of dual systems feminism, TERF arguments tend to mobilize appeals to ‘safety’ against perceived threats to ‘biological women’, including the idea that predatory, cisgender men will take advantage of the increasing visibility of transgender women to harm said ‘biological women’ (Peace et al., 2020). Rather than focus on how gender is weaponized as a tool of domination and oppression for all, TERF arguments often appear as assertions of an essential femininity against all ‘others’ (and claiming the world would be better if these essentialized feminine subjects were in charge of existing capitalist industries and governments). Some TERFs appear to have found themselves surprised to be ‘on the side of’ far-right figures in their pursuit of this agenda, although the biologically stable figure of the female represents a key piece of the (eco) fascist strategy (Bassi and LeFleur, 2022). Together, the ‘TradWives’ and corporate self-care warriors form a coterminous terrain of feminized gender relations in support of accumulation, articulating different contingent compromises between the diametric poles

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Vogel set out (time spent reproducing labour and time spent directly creating exchange-value). They differ in the particularities of their relationship to accumulation strategies, although this does not necessarily make them fundamentally irreconcilable. The liberal feminisms which correspond to the financialization–wellness nexus, for example, may embrace the destabilization of the gender binary insofar as this opens new frontiers of accumulation and solidifies their own position in the productive sector; however, the lens of ‘choice’, at least in theory, also aligns them to some extent with the demands of TradWives and other reactionary groups. It is only when the terms of far-right projects threaten the ongoing viability of accumulation (for example, through anti-vax sentiment or other destabilizing of the conditions of production) that outright conflicts may emerge. TERFs appear to find more-and-less uneasy alliances across the reactionary feminisms insofar as an essentialized feminine subject is elevated. The systemic, contradictory demands between social reproduction and accumulation set out in socialist feminist unitary theory have intensified through the neoliberal period, as the hegemonic forms of social reproduction of the twentieth century have been placed under increasing stress without an expansive welfare state to support them through redistributed costs. The reality that social reproduction of the labour force is achievable outside of the hegemonic nuclear, white, single-income family has been borne out by the allowance of different articulations of the nuclear family and other forms of social reproduction which exist in the imperial core, enabled by our present era’s ongoing structural reliance on reserve armies of labour, including immigrant and distant, unprotected labour. Contrary to the expectation of linear ‘progress’, reactionary ‘feminisms’ have developed in-and-against these articulations and should continue to be warily perceived.

QUESTIONS OF STRATEGY We can also see a resurgence of materialist analyses and movements critiquing capital, some of the most exciting of which are operating on and through the terrain of social reproduction theory (SRT). There are two key themes in SRT which we shall focus on here: the elaboration of spaces of social reproduction as central to building solidarity and collective power in the present conjuncture; and the expansion of the ‘social’ to the ‘socio-ecological’. The SRT position, building on the unitary theory approach, has been set out at length by theorists including Arruzza et al. (2019), Bhattacharya (2017), Fraser (2017, 2021), and Ferguson (2020). SRT asserts that, while appropriated socially reproductive labour is not productive of ‘value’ in the formal

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sense, it nonetheless remains a, if not the, key terrain of struggle in our present world for building coalitions against capital:6 The working class, for the revolutionary Marxist, must be perceived as everyone in the producing class who has in their lifetime participated in the totality of reproduction of society—irrespective of whether that labor has been paid for by capital or remained unpaid. (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 89) […] When we restore a sense of the social totality to class, we immediately begin to reframe the arena for class struggle (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 90).

SRT points to the transformative effects of organizing social reproduction in more collective ways; rejecting the fetishization of both the nuclear home (however configured in terms of gender) and the point of production as isolated elements in the social reproduction of the worker and the working class. In particular, through participating in expansive acts of care and solidarity which fall beyond the formal workplace, and in the uneasy interstices between productive and reproductive labour, we might build the social relations capable of acting as revolutionary movements.7 Struggle might be waged through the rearticulation of social reproduction across households; or it might be waged across levels of abstraction including forms of direct action aimed at other pieces of the social reproduction puzzle, for example the pursuit of climate justice, public education and childcare, and access to free, expansive healthcare. A key concern for critics of this approach is the tension between prefiguration and stabilization; a tension that cannot be resolved at the level of theory but unfolds through history. Over time, SRT has taken on further breadth and depth in conversation with insights from the materialist ecofeminist and ecosocialist traditions, drawing in particular on James O’Connor’s (1998) second contradiction thesis (see for example, Fraser 2021). As set out by Heenan (2018) and Rudy (2019), if we read O’Connor through Neil Smith’s (1984) production of nature thesis and consider human labour in-and-against capital to be constantly reproducing our own and capital’s conditions of reproduction, then we can grasp the totality of these human labours in and through the rest of nature as a complex process of our own extended and expansive, creative destruction, stabilized in institutional forms over time. ‘Social reproduction’ is then expanded across co-constitutive spatial and temporal scales, linking the reproduction of labour power to that of the external-physical conditions of reproduction, such as a stable climate and fertile soils, and general-communal conditions, such as urban infrastructure, communication and socialized healthcare. It is properly ‘socio-ecological’ reproduction. O’Connor’s (1998) insights align with the Gramscian understanding of crises as moments of reconstruction, noting that such moments present opportunities to rearticulate social relations and these might be more or less advantageous to

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capital or its foes (Hall, 2017). A central piece of this puzzle is the formation of counter-hegemonic projects and historical blocs across the generative intersections of socio-ecological reproduction (indeed, such forms of coordination are properly considered as elements within the general-communal conditions of (re)production). Reconfigurations of care against hegemonic formations of gender are central to this agenda. The openness of SRT also sheds the latent developmentalism buried in some historical materialisms, by acknowledging the expansive social reproductions of peasant cultures and Indigenous nations (in-against-and beyond capital); SRT is implicated in contemporary discussions of the agrarian and the national questions. Further, it is open to the agenda of multispecies justice through recognition of human labour as central but not total in the production of natures (see Wadiwel, 2022, and Battistoni, 2017 for elaboration of these discussions). Let us turn briefly to the concrete with some sketches of struggle. Certainly, since the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in 2016, progressive contestation of social reproduction (read in the expansive sense outlined above) has risen globally. Sites of struggle range from re-emergent labour movements fighting for better working conditions and pay, to abolitionist movements fighting the use of prisons as ‘dumping grounds’ for vast numbers of people including the structurally impoverished and the mentally unwell (Gilmore, 2007), to movements for reproductive justice, including access to abortion and gender-affirming care for all, and those for climate justice, including the #SchoolStrikesforClimate protest actions coordinated by young people the world over. While we should be careful not to overstate the degree to which these movements have succeeded in their various aims (or even how radical those aims truly are), we can see them as co-constitutive mobilizations of more-and-less counter-hegemonic projects, aimed at disrupting the reproduction of labour on terms favourable to capital and building collective strength. There are signs of some shifts in ‘mainstream’ critical consciousness linking the daily minutiae of social reproduction to these larger struggles, with increasing interventions observable across public discussions on topics such as food, mental health, art, gardening, ‘wellness’, and parenting.8 This turn has no doubt been hastened by the global Covid-19 pandemic’s cataclysmic disruption of social reproduction, a sure-fire trigger for people to consider the ways we live. Again, the impact of this should not be overstated but feels important to document, as a response to the reactionary feminisms set out above. Flourishing tendrils of radical socio-ecological reproduction nest in the midst of our either crumbling or openly hostile community spaces, with cultural and political implications for progressive change that transcend the limited horizons available even a few years ago.

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These elements will need to come together to form a historical bloc and hegemonic project capable of defeating the reactionary feminisms outlined earlier. The following section considers what might enable or constrain this development.

CONCLUSION: HORIZONS OF CHANGE AND IMMEDIATE QUESTIONS While the SRT framework outlined here provides at least a theoretical way to bring together struggles across the conditions of (re)production, achieving this in practice with the concretization of a historical bloc is the real challenge. In this concluding section I gesture to some of the most obvious lines of division that must be navigated in doing so. While not an exhaustive list of the compromises to be worked through, the articulation of ‘green’ jobs, the future of immigration and borders, building internationalist coalitions, and the question of the capitalist state are all central and immediate issues. First, a key terrain for building socialist feminist coalitions is the articulation of socially necessary labour,9 as stabilized in forms of the state, primarily the expansion of ‘green jobs’ (repairing and building the physical infrastructure for a non-fossil fuel dependent world). While ‘green jobs’ discourse tends to focus on energy sector transitions, the expansion of labour dedicated to caring for people (including the elderly, the young, and everyone in between) and the rest of nature will be central to repairing our conditions of (re)production. Care and social workers, nurses, doctors, and teachers must stand alongside vets, wildlife carers, ecologists, rangers, builders, bus and train drivers, and a multitude of other essential workers to do the work of repairing our burnt-out socio-ecologies. The same divisions that troubled socialist feminist coalition building in the twentieth century will animate the struggle for this work to be visible and valued. The struggle for refugee and migrant rights is bound up in this, too. A key piece of the story of social reproduction in our climate changing era is the tale of migration between different sites of socio-ecological collapse and repair. How the working class allows itself to be split along questions of borders, for example as demonstrated by the basic acceptance of Australia’s perpetual ‘off-shore processing’ centres in the twenty-first century or its continuing reliance on migrant labour in industrial farming (Rosewarne, 2019), must remain a key point of struggle for any progressive historical bloc. Questions of how to build international solidarity loom large. We know that the socio-ecological bases of ‘green jobs’ in the core rely upon legacies of imperialism, and that feminist socialist coalition-building across historic fault lines in the core nation-states must be wrapped into coalition-building with movements beyond state borders. There are no clear or easy answers to how to

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achieve these coalitions, as borne out in the ongoing debates between proponents of ecological modernization and those of agroecological and degrowth perspectives (cf. Huber, 2019; Ajl, 2021). Reconciling the political projects of repairing deep inequalities and declines in standards of living in the imperial core from across the neoliberal period with calls for complete reorientations and rescaling of socio-ecological flows will require a vast amount of work. Finally, in this partial list, is the need for ongoing attention to the theorization of the capitalist state. While there is not the space here to engage this task in a systematic fashion, doing so is a necessary but insufficient task for building any historical bloc going forward.10 We might begin, however, by reading the O’Connor–Smith synthesis, outlined above, through the expansionary framework of Gramsci’s integral state and the logics of accumulation strategies and hegemonic projects. This opens up the strategic terrain of the state, in a Poulantzean (Poulantzas, 1978) sense, to consider the ways the more and less formal (or more and less fetishized) ‘political’ structures of our collective socio-ecological reproduction are supported and contested by historical agents through diffuse structures and processes. How, for example, might the alternative ‘moral centres’ of the reactionary feminisms discussed in this chapter be woven into an account of stabilizing mechanisms for emerging accumulation strategies and hegemonic projects? Any attempt to build and wield power in the pursuit of our collective survival (and liberation) will eventually require an encounter, whether defensive or offensive, with the capitalist state. If we take the capitalist state’s materiality as an integral formation seriously, then engagement on its terrain is strictly unavoidable. In strategically navigating the state, however, the standard warnings and admonitions apply, whether from the Open Marxism tradition regarding the limits to rearticulation of the state within global capitalism (Holloway, 1991); the detailed analysis of how compromises embedded in the welfare state contributed to the eventual ruptures of neoliberalism (Dalla Costa, 2015); or the need to confront questions of ongoing colonization and colonial states in relation to social reproduction (Scobie et al., 2021). After all, a kinder, gentler, even socialist colonialism is still violent theft. Reactionary feminisms and the unsteady (yet undeniable) rise of a far-right counter-hegemonic bloc form the background conditions in which socialist feminist coalition politics must wage its war of position toward expansive socio-ecological reproduction. As Gramsci witnessed during the era of the USA’s ascension to global hegemon, there can be no linear or ‘natural’ resolution of competing counter-hegemonies and accumulation strategies, but rather hard-won struggles to break through morbid phenomena and assert progressive visions for future worlds. The brief outline of generative divisions to be navigated that have been presented here is only the beginning for real social forces attempting to assert just such visions.

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NOTES 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

Gramsci was also concerned with the differences between the bourgeois in the USA versus Europe; and the effects of the commitment to do work despite no material need in this class on the broader hegemony. He noted that the wives and daughters of the rich were increasingly displaying no such commitment, and that this might have detrimental effects on the production of consent, although this is a less thoroughly developed line of argument. As will be discussed later, all of these ‘advances’ relied upon deepening capital’s unsustainable relations with ecological reproduction. More recently, this approach has been theorized by Wood (2016), who suggests that capitalism is indifferent to articulations of social reproduction in support of accumulation; an approach questioned by Bieler and Morton (2021). This refers in particular to the Wages-for-Housework campaign and the work of autonomist Marxist theorists. Here we should take heed of Stuart Hall’s (2017) reflections on Thatcherism and the contradictory unity of hegemony, to avoid the assumption that internal incoherence in the factions comprising a historic bloc will simply result in the collapse of the project. Not so, argued Hall, and we should seek to understand how these divisions are sustained yet overcome in any successful hegemonic project. This assertion is at odds with social reproduction scholarship which has taken its point of departure from the Frankfurt school and the ‘negative totality’ view of capitalist society, see for example De’Ath (2018) and Munro (2019). Munro (2019), working broadly within the negative totality framework, has drawn upon the work of materialist feminists from the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate the ways the household (however configured) as a unit of consumption performs certain kinds of free labour for capital, now often geared towards forms of consumer environmentalism. There is no privileged site of struggle nor agent(s) of history here, rather ‘socially reproductive’ labour is considered subsumed within the capitalist negative totality. As Ferguson (2020) has argued, the negative totality school’s focus on real abstractions and the value form differs from SRT’s focus on labour and human agency in-and-against the capital relation, a form which is incapable of determining but not totalizing. Care does not need to be warm and gooey: see Lewis (2018) on the intrinsic harms or destructiveness of care, as discussed in relation to gestational labour. As an indication of what I mean by this I offer Rebecca May Johnson’s (2022) work on the radical openness of recipes and the labour of preparing food; Jia Tolentino’s (2022) consideration of motherhood as a mode of rebellion; the work of Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes on the podcast Maintenance Phase, critically discussing the evolution of the wellness industry; and Jessica DeFino’s (2022) Substack, The Unpublishable, on the beauty industry. This is a gesture towards the anti-work position outlined by Kathi Weeks (2011), and the need to consider socially necessary labour as the forms of labour that are required to reproduce life outside of the determinations of capital. A more detailed sketch of what a materialist ecofeminist approach to the capitalist state could look like is set out in Sturman (2021).

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REFERENCES Ajl, M. (2021). A People’s Green New Deal. Pluto Press. Armstrong, P. & Armstrong, H. (2002). Thinking it through: Women, work and caring in the new millennium. Canadian Woman Studies, Spring/Summer, 44–50. Arruzza, C. (2014). Notes on gender. Viewpoint Magazine. Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T. and Fraser, N. (2019). Manifesto for the 99%. Verso. Bassi, S. and LaFleur, G. (2022). Introduction: TERFs, gender-critical movements, and postfascist feminisms. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 9(3), 311–333. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1215/​23289252​-9836008 Battistoni, A. (2017). Bringing in the work of nature: From natural capital to hybrid labor. Political Theory, 45(1), 5–31. Bhattacharya, T. (Ed). (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press. Bieler, A. & Morton, A. D. (2021). Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender? Routes to a value theory of reproductive labour. Economy and Space A, 53(7), 1749–1769. Campion, K. (2021). Defining ecofascism: Historical foundations and contemporary interpretations in the extreme right. Terrorism and Political Violence, 0(0), 1–19. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09546553​.2021​.1987895 Combahee River Collective, (1979 [1977]). A black feminist statement. In Z. R. Eisenstein (Ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. Monthly Review Press. Dalla Costa, M. (2015). Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal. Trans. R. Capanna. Common Notions. De’Ath, A. (2018). Gender and social reproduction. In B. Best, W. Bonefeld & C. O’Kane (Eds), The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Sage. Del Campo, F. (2022). New culture wars: Tradwives, bodybuilders and the neoliberalism of the far-right. Critical Sociology, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​08969205221109169 DeFino, J. (2022). The unpublishable. Substack. https://​jessicadefino​.substack​.com/​ Ferguson, S. (1999). Building on the strengths of the socialist feminist tradition. Critical Sociology, 25(1), 1–15. Ferguson, S. (2020). Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction. Pluto Press. Fraser, N. (2014). Beyond Marx’s hidden abode. New Left Review, 86, 55–72. Fraser, N. (2017). Crisis of care? On the social-reproductive contradictions of contemporary capitalism. In T. Bhattacharya (Ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, pp. 21–36. Pluto Press. Fraser, N. (2021). Climates of capital: For a trans-environmental eco-socialism. NLR, 127, 94–127. Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press. Gordon, A. and Hobbes, M. (2020–22) Maintenance Phase. Podcast. Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2. J. A. Buttigieg (Ed., Trans.). Columbia University Press. Hall, S. (2017, 10 February). Stuart Hall: Gramsci and us. Verso blog. https://​www​ .versobooks​.com/​blogs/​2448​-stuart​-hall​-gramsci​-and​-us Hartmann, H. (1979). The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: Towards a more progressive union. Capital & Class, 3(2), 1–33.

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Haug, W. F. (2001). From Marx to Gramsci, from Gramsci to Marx: Historical materialism and the philosophy of praxis. Rethinking Marxism, 13(1), 69–82. Heenan, N. (2018). The Limits of Ecotourism as a Sustainable Development Strategy. MA thesis, The University of Sydney. https://​ses​.library​.usyd​.edu​.au/​handle/​2123/​ 18827​# Holloway, J. (1991). The state and everyday struggle. In S. Clarke (Ed.), The State Debate, pp. 225–229. Palgrave Macmillan. Huber, M. (2019). An ecological politics for the working class. Catalyst, 3(1), 1–17. Johnson, R. M. (2022). Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen. Faber Factory. Lewis, S. (2018). Cyborg uterine geography: Complicating ‘care’ and social reproduction’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 8(3), 300–316. Love, N. S. (2020). Shield Maidens, Fashy Femmes, and TradWives: Feminism, patriarchy, and right-wing populism. Frontiers in Sociology, 5, 1–3. Munro, K. (2019). ‘Social Reproduction Theory’, social reproduction, and household production. Science & Society, 83(4), 451–468. O’Connor, J. (1998). Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. Guilford Press. Pearce, R., Erikainen, S. and Vincent, B. (2020). TERF wars: An introduction. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 677—698. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0038026120934713 Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, Power, Socialism. Verso. Rosewarne, S. (2019). The structural transformation of Australian agriculture: Globalisation, corporatisation and the devalorisation of labour. The Journal of Australian Political Economy, 84, 175–218. Rudy, A. (2019). On misunderstanding the second contradiction thesis. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 30(4), 17–35. Scobie, M., Finau, G. & Hallenbeck, J. (2021). Land, land banks and land back: Accounting, social reproduction and Indigenous resurgence. Economy and Space A, 0(0), 1–18. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Georgia University Press. Sturman, A. (2021). Capital, the State and Climate Change in Aotearoa New Zealand. PhD thesis, The University of Sydney. https://​ses​.library​.usyd​.edu​.au/​handle/​2123/​ 26881​# Tolentino, J. (2022). Can motherhood be a mode of rebellion?. The New Yorker. https://​ www​.newyorker​.com/​books/​under​-review/​can​-motherhood​-be​-a​-mode​-of​-rebellion Vogel, L. (1983). Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Pluto Press. Wadiwel, D. J. (2023). Marx and Animals. Edinburgh University Press. Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem With Work. Duke University Press. Wood, E. M. (2016). Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Verso.

18. Cultural studies: the Gramscian current Marco Briziarelli and Didarul Islam A ‘FÜR EWIG’ PROJECT In 1928, during the trial that followed Antonio Gramsci’s arrest, the prosecutor famously declared: ‘We must stop this brain from working for 20 years.’ In a narrow sense, Mussolini’s regime indeed succeeded, as Gramsci was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment and, in doing so, Fascism effectively removed his powerful voice. However, ironically, it was indeed during those years of imprisonment and reclusion from public life that Gramsci laid the foundation for his own legacy, his ‘für ewig’ work. In fact, the imprisonment led Gramsci to a considerable change of posture as a militant intellectual, which brings us back to the expression ‘für ewig’ he used in a letter to his sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, dated March 1927. In this letter, Gramsci announced his intention to start a ‘disinterested’ project: I am tormented (this is, I think, a is a phenomenon proper of prisoners) by this idea: that I should do something ‘für ewig’, according to the complex conception of Goethe, that I remember tormented our Pascoli very much. Ultimately, I would like, according to a pre-established plan, to occupy myself intensely and systematically with some topic that absorbs me and centralizes my interior life. (Gramsci, 1995, p. 55)

Für ewig is generally translated from Goethe’s German expression ‘forever’. As Francese (2009a) notes, in Gramsci’s case, it should be understood as a more specific change of pace, register, and set of goals. On the one hand, the expression signals a significant change in the method of inquiry and presentation, exemplified by the transition from short articles and individual essays of the pre-prison publications to a long open-ended stream of notes, which were transcribing equally incomplete reflections. On the other hand, für ewig also meant a fundamental shift in the strategy of intellectual and political

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mobilization. It was a painful process of adaptation and determination to resist conditions designed to silence Gramsci: This process culminated in the desire to write something ‘für ewig’ which translates literally as ‘forever’ but, as we shall see, to Gramsci also signifies for posterity. In other words, the desire to write something für ewig casts into full relief of the change in Gramsci’s forma mentis from that of a political activist in a ‘war of maneuver,’ whose newspaper articles were ‘written for the day’ (articles he had willfully allowed to ‘die after the day’ by refusing offers to have selections of his journalistic efforts collected in volume form [1971, 480]), to that of the composer of a project excogitated by a ‘prisoner of war,’ ‘a combatant who did not have luck in the immediate struggle’ (469, 176). Gramsci’s condition as a prisoner prevented him from engaging the present dialectically, or dialogically, because his isolation deprived him of real, living interlocutors. While incarcerated he drew stimulus from daily newspapers and current periodicals which supplemented his voracious reading of fiction and scholarly works for the long-term thinking and planning that took shape in his Notebooks in what was essentially a monological form. (Francese, 2009b, p. 55)

As Francese suggests, Für ewig must also be understood in relation to the other term he mentions in the same letter, ‘disinterested’, which consists of the strategy to produce a kind of analysis removed from the pressure of daily immediate and contingent. In our view, the combination of für ewig+disinterested synthetically discloses the reason why Gramsci has been so well received outside his own immediate social and historical context: it has to do with his capability to move from the pressure exerted by immediate social and political interests to broader abstractions. It exemplifies a general critical method to dialectically combine strategy and tactics, feeling and understanding, and abstract and concrete. This is the lens we employ to make sense of his literary fortune in Cultural Studies, both in his British original form and its later international expansion.

GRAMSCI AND CULTURAL STUDIES Gramsci’s style was rich, dense, and frequently obscure. In his constant cutting across scales of abstraction, his engagement with social reality was, to say the least, vertiginous: he would go back and forth between highly specific social, cultural and historical references and the assessment of their significance against a large, very large, scheme of things. It represented in our view one of the most powerful embodiments of dialectical thinking, which made his

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Marxist framework astonishingly open. As Hall expressed in one of his exercises of self-reflection about Cultural Studies: What was undoubtedly a limitation from a textual point of view – namely, the fragmentary nature of his writings – was … a positive advantage for subsequent theory. That said, Gramsci’s work did seem to suggest the possibility of a mid-way position, somewhere between the ‘culturalist’ stress on agency and experience, and the structuralist on determination and ideology, where working-class consciousness could be analyzed as neither necessarily virtuously heroic nor necessarily hopelessly duped. (In Milner, 2018, p. 306)

In this sense, drawing and building on Hall’s insight, while the chapter mostly focuses on the reciprocally productive relationship between Gramscian and Cultural Studies, we also intend to develop a secondary reflection on the production, circulation, and reproduction of ideas and their alternative lives across different times and spaces. As a matter of fact, the version of Gramsci that landed in the United Kingdom was already one irremediably mediated by its already-established international legacy, as his words traversed a fairly large breach that divided 1930s Fascist Italy from 1970s post-war UK, and ‘in making the crossing some parts of his work fell away while others were creatively readapted’ (Forgacs, 1989, p. 176). While without any doubt Cultural Studies has the merit to have popularized Gramsci outside of Italy, the seeds for its internationalization are to be found in the two earlier Western Marxist responses to Stalinism, the so-called Euro-Communism and the New Left, and how Perry Anderson, arguably one of the most influential early interpreters of Gramsci in the Anglophone world, made sense of them. The Eurocommunist version of Gramsci was meant to legitimize Western Communism and its increasingly strong rejection of Stalinism and the occupation of Hungary by Soviet Tanks during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. It tended to replace the democratic centralism modeled by the Soviet party leadership with a decentered, polycentric structure, ergo more articulated networks of political actors and agencies such as clubs and associations in the civil society factory councils, newspapers, and organic intellectuals. For instance, the Gramsci read by the Italian Communist Party reduced the Gramscian well-known combination of war of position and war of movement, to just war of position, and, possibly even more significantly, aspired to form a parliamentary and institutional historic bloc rather than recollecting and organizing the non-institutional and subterraneous social energies that since the mid-1950s were already transforming the Italian radical political scenario. The Euro-Communist Gramsci indirectly affected Cultural Studies via Perry

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Anderson. Indeed, during a period of study in Italy Anderson was exposed to this specific reading. The other international Gramscian route, i.e. the New Left, more directly paved the way for the Gramsci-informed elaboration that Cultural Studies was going to provide. Internationally, since the 1960s, Gramsci’s ideas became foundational of the so-called New Left. Globally, the New Left has its roots in Critical theorists such as Marcuse, and Bloch, who enjoyed important contributions from the Nouvelle Gouche in France, and Latin American radical landless rural movements, guerrilla organization in Nicaragua and Cuba. The polymorphous political and cultural movement that goes under the umbrella term New Left in many ways shares a fundamental aspect of the just-mentioned Eurocommunism: the critique and disillusion with the authoritarian and party-centered political organization and the need to find more context-specific roads to Communism. This was certainly the case of the British left. In fact, the incorporation of Gramsci into the British Cultural Studies tradition took place in the broader context of the British New Left’s process of familiarizing with continental Western Marxism, which was exemplified by the now seminal work of Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (Anderson, 1976). E.P. Thompson, one of the most prominent representatives of the British New Left, in 1959 describes the New Left as a political force that aspired to replace the increasingly irrelevant Labour Party and the untenable Soviet role model: [A] generation which never looked upon the Soviet Union as a weak but heroic Workers’ State; but rather as the nation of the Great Purges and Stalingrad, of Stalin’s Byzantine Birthday and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech; as the vast military and industrial power which repressed the Hungarian rising and threw the first sputniks into space. ... A generation nourished on 1984 and Animal Farm, which enters politics at the extreme point of disillusion where the middle-aged begin to get out. The young people ... are enthusiastic enough. But their enthusiasm is not for the Party, or the Movement, or the established Political Leaders. They do not mean to give their enthusiasm cheaply away to any routine machine. They expect the politicians to do their best to trick or betray them. ... They prefer the amateur organization and amateurish platforms of the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign to the method and manner of the left-wing professional. ... They judge with the critical eyes of the first generation of the Nuclear Age. (Thompson, 1959, p. 2)

Among the people gravitating around this novel vision of the left, Stuart Hall (1960–1962) and then Perry Anderson (1962–1982) became the founding editors of New Left Review, the academic journal that combined the pre-existing university periodicals, the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review, and that became the fundamental publishing venue for Cultural Studies. When, in 1964, Richard Hoggart was appointed as the first director of the Centre for

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Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, the Centre became a laboratory of New Left ideas, a pole of attraction for intellectuals both profoundly committed to the British working class and very receptive of alternative views that could have revived the Labourist tradition of the British Left through a process of de-provincialization. In fact, especially with Stuart Hall’s appointment (1968–1979), the Centre became the fertile ground where Western Marxist, and more specifically, Gramscian ideas could thrive. In this sense, the passage from the potential affinity and receptiveness of the New Left periodicals to Gramsci’s programmatic incorporation inside an academic program such as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was rather significant. That is because the Italian thinker systematically entered the syllabi and assignments of university courses and dissertations, thus effectively creating a steady laboratory to play with his ideas. Moreover, as Gramsci would have put it, incorporating his thought in the program of studies required significant work in terms of translatability. We are not simply referring to translation across national languages as in the case of Italian to English, but rather the remarkable effort to historicize Gramsci’s thoughts: establishing the criteria to assess the employability of his analytical categories outside their original historic context; finding the appropriate homological relations grounded in the British context where Gramsci’s relational thought could be employed. Along with the remarkable work of great interpreters such as Williams and Hall, it was this work of operationalization that allowed Cultural Studies to make Gramsci so popular internationally. While incorporating new and foreign literature would always require such a translating operation, Gramsci’s literary style and mode of thought seemed particularly conducive to that. At the root of the elective affinity between Gramsci and Cultural Studies was the common uneasiness and rejection of a recurrent Cartesian fissure that has affected much of the social and philosophical basis of radical leftist thought: a rift line cutting across the entirety of human experience separating the material and the symbolic, manual and intellectual labor, ideas and action, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, signifier and signified, langue and, scholarly and lay discourse, common sense and philosophy, structure and struggle, consent and coercion. It was the same logic that relegated cultural life to restricted and unproductive categories, such as high and low culture. In this sense, as Adamson puts it: Gramsci hoped to overcome the sterile mechanicity of bourgeois-dominated life not simply by injecting a little ‘culture’ into it from the outside, but by stimulating the worker himself to integrate cultural experience within his daily life. (Adamson, 1983, pp. 39–40)

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This was almost directly translatable to Hoggart’s (1957) determination of re-considering working-class’s cultural and symbolic life and Williams’ (1977) theorization of culture as a whole way of life. Both moves imply re-integrating culture into the Marxian sense of totality, as well as treating culture as its active (and not-reflective) mode of expression. Rather than purely academic, this theoretical approach reflected a political project of showing how culture functioned as a terrain of struggle: Cultural Studies postulates that culture to be the sphere in which class, gender, race, and other inequalities were made meaningful or conscious, and lived through either by resistance (subcultures) or some sort of ‘negotiated’ accommodation (audiences). Culture understood in this way was the terrain on which hegemony was fought for and established […] Cultural studies has developed a body of work which attempts to recover and place the cultures of hitherto neglected groups. Initially, this entailed attention to the historical development and forms of working-class culture and analysis of contemporary forms of popular culture and media. (Hartley, 2012, pp. 49–50)

Cultural Studies wanted to understand a class-specific lived experience, going beyond a formalist approach and toward a social practices-based understanding of social life. Hence, a renewed attention at the empirical level, which was focused on both ethnographic and textual studies of those cultural practices and forms that seemed to show how people exploit the available cultural discourses to resist or rework the authority of dominant ideology. The Centre and the intellectuals gravitating around it represented a powerful irradiation point of Gramsci’s ideas outside of Italy and even outside of Europe. That, again, was indeed thanks to the twofold work of translatability the Centre performed, i.e. disseminating in the Anglophonic academia and operationalizing those concepts outside Gramsci’s specific historic concepts. Outside the direct academic production of CCCS, Cultural Studies became a global academic phenomenon. Particularly outstanding are the cases of Latin America, Australia and United States. While, in Latin America, the field was pushed by leading intellectuals such as Garcia Canclini, Martin-Barbero and Sarlo, in Australia the debates gravitated around three important journals: International Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, and Cultural Studies Review. In the United States, cultural studies combined with a very diverse pre-existing liberal pluralist tradition, especially in the field of media, communication studies, American studies, and some culturally oriented sociology programs.

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As Landy (2009) observes, internationally Gramsci became extremely influential in what, in general terms, can be defined as the interregnum between Cultural Studies and Post-colonial studies: The center’s studies were to animate international media critics in their attempts to find a language to account for the production of consent and coercion in the social and political arenas. Furthermore, the writings of Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, and Gayatri Spivak in a postcolonial context have demonstrated how Gramsci’s work on culture and politics continues to resonate. (Landy, 2009, p. 110)

Particularly exemplary is Said’s (2003) notion of Orientalism, which describes how Western hegemonic regimes tend to construct an instrumental sense of otherness such as Orientalism to internally and externally provide legitimization for a given hegemonic social order. Orientalism is both reproduced by media and by intellectuals organic to the hegemonic order. In addition, Guha (1982), studying public health campaigns in India, found very similar dynamics legitimizing the imperialist discourse in ex-British colonies such as India. With the same logic, Creehan (2002) claims that globalization can be deconstructed in its basic hegemonic assumptions.

CULTURE AND PRAXIS ARE ORDINARY We return to the basic Cartesian-like principle mentioned before, the arbitrary but still paradigmatic separation between spheres of lived experiences developed across allegedly distinct ontologies and epistemologies. And we return to it with a concrete and powerful verbalization coined and frequently utilized by Cultural Studies scholars: ‘ordinary.’ In our view, ‘ordinary’ is perfectly in line with Gramsci’s astonishing capability to appropriate a word, re-signify it and make it a key for a radically new perspective, almost magically, like a spell – e.g. historic bloc, passive revolution, national popular, common and good sense. Indeed, with (culture as) ‘ordinary’, Williams (1989a) certainly reached that Gramscian capacity. The key, we think, is the dialectical unity conveyed by ‘ordinary,’ the same ‘kernel of truth’ inside Hegel and even more inside Marx. In our view, ordinary represents the critical thread that more clearly links Gramsci and the first generation of Cultural Studies scholars by the means of a historical materialist perspective. Both Williams and Hall indeed read Marx extensively and especially the most insightful passages of Grundrisse. In this respect, while Gramsci never had the chance to read The Grundrisse’s seminal introduction on the method of political economy, he definitely was very familiar with the Marxian-Hegelian take of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ and the movement from simple abstract to the complex concrete.

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We argue that ‘ordinary’ needs to be understood as a mediation between abstract and concrete. In The Grundrisse (Marx, 1973), Marx asserts that abstraction is always material and historically specific production: [E]ven the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of the abstractions, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations. (Marx, 1973, p. 105)

Here, Marx makes an important argument by claiming that abstractions do not transcend social time and space, and when they aspire (or are perceived) to do so they provide an irremediably impoverished understanding of reality. Conversely, concrete, as per its etymology, consists of the compound of many determinations that form the totality. In this sense, Cultural Studies’ notion of ‘ordinary’ represents a way to grasp a social totality as mediated by both concrete and abstract. Ordinariness is total immanence, but not simply in the phenomenological aspect, because Cultural Studies clearly incorporates in its inquiry rational abstractions such as ‘power’ and ‘value,’ that is social domains not directly visible or tangible. So, how does ‘ordinary’ relate to Gramsci’s theoretical environment? The link can be found in Gramsci’s absolute historicism. On the one hand, Gramsci, by absolute historicism, rejects all social thoughts functioning through abstractions, i.e. extrapolating elements from their social and historic-specific events and reverting that process to its extreme: he instead considers culture and the superstructures as the only way to understand history; social phenomena tend to be interpreted through the systematic study of cultural history and its dialectic development. Such an ontology is then more practically translated into Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis, which consists of how to distinguish ‘convergent and divergent tendencies shaping the totality of power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time’ (Gilbert, 2019, p. 6). This is how Gramsci discusses his view: It might seem that there can exist an extra-historical and extra-human objectivity. But who is the judge of such objectivity? Who is able to put himself in this kind of ‘standpoint of the cosmos in itself’ and what could such a standpoint mean? It can indeed be maintained that here we are dealing with a hangover of the concept of God....We know reality only in relation to man, and since man is historical becoming, knowledge and reality are also becoming and so is objectivity. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 445–446)

Absolute historicism and ‘ordinary’ represent a clear push for a historical materialist conception of the world. centered on human organized activity:

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while consciousness and meanings materialize into social relations, physical ‘matter,’ technology and commodities ‘dematerialize into social relations’: Matter as such therefore is not our subject but how it is socially and historically organized for production, and natural science should be seen correspondingly as essentially a historical category, a human relation. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 466)

On the other hand, ordinary is also the result of praxis organized throughout time, common sense+hegemony: we can see how, in the notion of the ordinary, the dialectical composition of two realms is at work: ordinary as every day and commonsensical on the one hand, and ordinary as an ensemble of fairly stable phenomena and practices that are rendered customary by a power-based order of things, on the other. Ordinariness is sedimented through time and regimented by variably enforcing disciplinary apparati (e.g. the state, law, police, religion, politeness, production of social space). It is the combination of multilayered Marxian meaning of concrete subjected to ordering processes implemented and subsumed by capitalist forms such as money, wage, and labor. Ordinariness is not simply a micro-sociological perspective, synthesis of scales of analysis (and their abstractions). This is why, as Hall puts it, following the Gramscian path for Cultural Studies meant ‘to think both the specificity of different practices and the forms of the articulated unity they constitute’ (Hall, 1980, p. 72). The first generation of Cultural Studies scholars, such as Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson, were indeed suspicious of any abstraction that would diverge the inquiry from ordinary. As Morrow (1991) articulates: A crucial aspect of the Gramscian turn in cultural studies has been a move away from the abstract, functionalist theorizations of the theory of state ideological apparatuses toward a rethinking of popular culture. This does not reflect an abandonment of the importance of the analysis of dominant cultural institutions, but it does acknowledge that their functioning cannot be separated from their capacity to incorporate popular culture. (Morrow, 1991, pp. 38–39)

As we will explore more in detail in the next section, the link between ordinary and hegemony served as a representation of the complex concrete understanding of an unstable complex social formation subject to continuous historical change. It represented the answer to their quest for compromise between contingency and a generalizable (but not universalizing) dynamic of power. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating, eating it every day: people’s praxis encapsulates such a principle, always creating novelty and transforming, but also producing fairly stable sets of patterns, therefore reproductive of an established social order such as institutions.

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Importantly enough for their aspirations of political activism, ordinariness constituted for the Cultural Studies scholars the field of study as well as the field of the struggle of intellectuals as militant agents. Gramsci provided an understanding of the social field where academicians could alternatively function as traditional or organic intellectuals. Ordinariness represented their way to fill the lacuna that Gramsci consistently noticed between masses and the intelligentsia: In all countries, though in differing degrees, there is a great gap between the popular masses and the intellectual groups, even the largest ones, and those nearest to the peripheries of national life, like priests and school teachers. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 342)

In this sense, Williams and Hall, among the first generation of the most explicitly Gramscian thinkers, wanted to be organic intellectuals in a context, institutional academia, where the established principles of forming and shaping minds overwhelming tended towards the production of traditional intellectuals. For instance, adult education was for Williams a way to implement such an organicity: People who had been deprived of wanted to discuss what they were reading; and even more specifically among women who, blocked from the process of higher education, educated themselves repeatedly through reading . . . both groups wanted to discuss what they’d read, and to discuss it in a context to which they brought their situation, their own experience – a demand which was not to be satisfied, it was soon very clear, by what the universities . . . were prepared to offer. (Williams, 1989b, p. 152)

Education could convert ordinariness into a socially transformative tool, in the context of a radical rather than bourgeois public sphere, a fundamental trench in the war of position.

A WESTERN ROUTE TO SOCIAL DETERMINATION: HEGEMONY As we have already mentioned, Cultural Studies saw in Gramsci’s elaborations a militant type of theory, capable of both addressing the social totality, its specific historic manifestations, and the possibility to act upon it. This is what they synthetically found in Gramscian hegemony, a tenable thesis on social determination that could account for the level of complexity of Western capitalist societies: A historically specific sociocultural analysis of particular contexts and forces requires a dissection of how culture and a variety of social institutions from the media to the university facilitate broader social and political ends. Analyses of

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hegemony emphasize that a wide array of cultural institutions function within social reproduction including the church, schools, traditional and elite culture, sports, and the entertainment media. (Durham and Kellner, 2006, p. xvi)

Hegemony for Cultural Studies allows us to identify and locate both cultural forces of domination as well as ‘counterhegemonic’ forces of resistance. Hegemony pointed to a project of totalization carried on by a dominant class alliance, i.e. a historical bloc, that expressed complexity in main ways: it was dynamic and very unstable, and it was comprised of different implementing means: It is sometimes through coercive measures, sometimes through educative and regulative measures, and most frequently through a combination of these, that the State attempts to mobilize cultural and ideological consent. (Hall, 2016, p. 164)

Thus, for instance, Williams – possibly the scholar who produced the most interesting elaboration on Gramscian hegemony in publications such as ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory’ (Williams, 1973) and his book Marxism and Literature (1977) – acquires through the Sardinian thinker, a particular kind of Marxist vision, which opened up the possibility of introducing the ideas of ‘alternative’ and ‘opposition’ to the ‘dominant’ culture. Hegemony provided a framework of the non-necessary link between class conflict – systematic in capitalist relations – and class struggle – more contingent and not automatic, requiring a more self-aware and active mobilization. As exemplified in Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis (1978), the historical sounding board to employ the notion of hegemony was Thatcherism, which was viewed as an ongoing and incomplete hegemonic project of disciplining the British working class by lumping together various aspects: nationalism, liberalism, and an emerging neoliberal individualism waging a war against public welfare.

FORDISM… AND THE MEDIA Thatcher’s class-based neoliberal project represented, first of all, the construction of a social and political imaginary completely reliant on its control of public discourse via media. Even in this case, thinking at the Gramscian-Cultural studies compound perspective, the meaning of media needs to be expanded and incorporated in the total social process. Thus, accordingly, their capability to shape social life is not simply about conveying messages but to organize social life around it. To this purpose, in this section, we propose to explore the link between Gramsci and Cultural Studies, and Gramsci and Cultural Studies’ attention to media through a specific and possibly counterintuitive

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lens, through his discussion in the Prison Notebook of Fordism as a unitary materialist perspective capable, we think, of synthetizing the many facets Gramsci sees in mediation processes. In fact, consistent with his fluid vision and equally fluid and relational usage of categories, Gramsci’s very definition of media cuts across the fetish boundaries of technology. Media is a social organization comprising: 1) the school; 2) newspapers; 3) popular and artistic writers; 4) theater and sound cinema; 5) radio; 6) public and religious congregations of every type; 7) connections in ‘conversation’ among the most and least cultivated of the population (a question which perhaps is not accorded the importance it deserves in relation to the ‘word’ as verse that is learned through memory in the form of songs, fragments of lyric opera, etc.)’ (Gramsci, 1971, Q29 §3)

For Gramsci, media then constituted social and cultural organizations that provided both momentum and stasis to the ideological world: The school, at all levels, and the Church, are the biggest cultural organizations in every country, in terms of the number of people they employ. Then there are newspapers, magazines and the book trade and private educational institutions, either those which are complementary to the state system, or cultural institutions like the Popular Universities. Other professions include among their specialized activities a fair proportion of cultural activity. For example, doctors, army officers, the legal profession. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 342)

Gramsci considered media to be powerful socializing tools that could shape people’s minds, and praxis, and more importantly, make those praxes fairly homogeneous in order to implement a hegemonic project. The crucial matter, we think, is to never disjoint the ‘ideological moment’ – typically associated with media and the process of practical significations – with the social organization of production of value. For Gramsci, the notion of Fordism signals a political-economic and cultural reflection of a particular development of productive forces that was taking place in the United States, and which was based on the separation of execution and management, thus the fragmentation of both labor and consciousness into single microtasks. It was, in many ways, a manifestation of large-scale industry’s particular ways of extracting relative surplus value with organizational technology and machinery. Fordism for Gramsci reflected an entire social order established to discipline the working class through consensual (e.g. higher wages, benefits, and particular ideologies) and coercive strategies (e.g. labor control, higher rate of exploitation). In this sense, we could talk about Fordist media as contributing to shape those standardized Fordist subjectivities made homogeneous by their particular saving and consumption propensity, by their way of approaching

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sexuality and family, and by the way workers were socializing and entertaining out of work via associations such as the YMCA and YWCA. It was then an anthropological project comprising both movements of production and consumption: It was relatively easy to rationalise production and labour by a skilful combination of force (destruction of working-class trade unionism on a territorial basis) and persuasion (high wages, various social benefits, extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda) and thus succeed in making the whole life of the nation revolve around production. Hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries. The phenomenon of the ‘masses’ which so struck Romier 10 is nothing but the form taken by this ‘rationalised’ society in which the ‘structure’ dominates the superstructures more immediately and in which the latter are also ‘rationalised’ (simplified and reduced in number) […] In America rationalisation has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process. (Gramsci, 1971, Q22§2)

If we follow this particular perspective to understand the specific role media played in capitalist societies, we do not only see a clear correspondence between how Williams and Hall saw media as material means of production (Williams, 1977) and as vectors in the circuit of capital (Hall, 1973) but also how both Gramsci and those Cultural Studies thinkers regarded their audience. We should point out two important principles here: first, the audience consists of people that, among many aspects, may operate as both ‘intended’ and ‘accidental’ message readers; second, the act of interpreting media messages take place within a pre-existing social and cultural context that mediates the mediation. Thus, as Hall insisted, the chances of a perfect match between the original intentions of an encoded message and how it is decoded are not ‘guaranteed’ (Hall, 1973, p. 21). Just like the Fordist worker, the Fordist audience had to be won by a combination of consent and coercion and could never be completely reduced to a passive producer and passive consumer. Accordingly, mediated communication became yet another terrain of confrontation between not just the encoder and decoder, the producer and consumer, but between classes and class factions, and the confrontation was not simply between competing ideologies built between competing grounds for consciousness, and mobilization. Media texts were fragments primed by a structure in dominance (a hegemonic bloc) that also consistently betrays the failure of such hegemony to bring about cultural, political, and social ‘unison’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 182).

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DIGITAL MEDIA… When it comes to digital media, the productive synergy of Gramsci and Cultural Studies can be appreciated at different levels. First of all, following the line suggested before, digital and social media could be interpreted in a post-Fordist context (Antonio and Bonanno, 2000). Corresponding to a profoundly mutated labor process and form of capitalist accumulation (Harvey, 1989), the media-Fordism of mass audience, mass-producer and mass consumer of cultural content gets all fragmented in multiple social and temporal spheres. Homological to Gramsci’s view of unstable and consistently disputed power relations, we find an understanding of the audience’s agency as rich and full of nuances, which, in the case of the digital and social media user, is well represented by the ambivalences of the producer-consumer – i.e. prosumer – the contradictory neoliberal subjectivity of the gig-economy and platform capitalism (Kumar, 2011). The so-called prosumer represents a new kind of active audience, the unfinished but avenging hero of cultural dupes and the Frankfurt School narrative of mass deception by the means of a mediated form of empowerment (Shirky, 2008). In this sense, if production processes always imply the shaping of the subject producing, the self-activation tied to digital practices seems to fundamentally shape the prosumer’s subjectivity (McRobbie, 2005) along an ambivalent axis made of pain and pleasure, work and leisure and self-expression and alienation. As Andrews (2016, p. 46) remarks, digital and social media practices display the ambivalent connection in media studies of ‘uses and gratifications’, hegemony and value creation, which links three main understandings of hegemony: cultural studies, political science, and political economy. Second, only the culturally materialist combination of Gramsci and (mostly the first generation and the ones more towards political economy) Cultural Studies scholars could provide that qualitative and cultural sociology of media to counteract the fetish of technological utopianism so strongly attached to current Information and Communication Technologies. In this sense, while at the time of Thompson, Williams, and Hall, the fight for a framework of ‘a non-reductive determinacy’ (Wood, 1998, p. 401) was aimed at complicating the orthodox Marxist view of media as superstructures, more recently, influenced by the so-called California ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996) the grand narrative to be antagonized is more about technological determinism. While we do not want to digress from the main topic of this chapter, it is also interesting to appreciate how in the neoliberal and post-Fordist universe of digital platform capitalism, Cultural Studies’ version of Gramsci meets another mediated Gramsci, the one timidly but still significantly transpiring from the

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autonomist Marxist tradition. As Bologna (2018) made very explicit, Gramsci provided a proto-reading of the so-called social factory. When he wrote that ‘hegemony finds its origins in the factory and the political and ideological factors in such a scenario were minimal’ (Gramsci, 1971, Q22§2). He pointed to Fordism as an explorative and disciplinary system that was managing the worker as both effective producer and consumer of commodities, as a worker that became an asocial worker, bringing outside the factory a particular vision of the word implemented by Fordism, which was particularly effective in creating a consent towards a lifestyle spanning from work to leisure time, from the factory to the workers’ house. The Gramscian take on Fordism, and then the post-Fordism perspective on hegemony, undeniably influenced, for instance, Hardt and Negri’s holistic concept of ‘social subsumption’, of all life under capitalist forms as well as the seminal notion of free labor coined by Terranova (2000). In other words, along the same lines suggested here, they reflect an expansive understanding of media, which is better understood as a social process rather than technological appliances or a mechanical relay of information.

CONCLUSIONS: GRAMSCI BEYOND GRAMSCI? In the same letter addressed to Tatiana Schucht where Gramsci mentions his für ewig project, he also reflects on authors’ intellectual/literary legacy: It is clear that the content of posthumous works has to be taken with great discretion and caution, because it cannot be considered definitive but only as material still being elaborated and still provisional. One should not exclude the possibility that these works, particularly if they have been long in the making … might have been deemed unsatisfactory in whole or in part by the author. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 384)

Gramsci talks about the distance between a given author’s’ original intentions about his work and how such work may be posthumously interpreted. Drawing on this same reasoning, Cultural Studies did not simply want to interpret and describe Gramsci’s 100 years old perspective but wanted to make it relevant for its present context and to even operationalize it. That project entailed dealing with a mediated and received Gramsci, thus dealing with extra layers of signification that indeed would systematically produce a Gramsci beyond Gramsci. But how far can one go before moving entirely into a different author/ theoretical environment? Can ‘small’ quantitative variations end up producing a significant qualitative shift that moves Gramsci beyond its original ontological and axiological environment?

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In this sense, there is a small but rather convincing body of literature (e.g. Harris, 2013; Peck, 2001; Wood, 1998) that has already elaborated on this point: while the process of applying Gramsci’s ideas to different contexts leads to his necessary historicization, they point to an interpretation of Gramsci instrumentally used to provide a safe passage for some versions of cultural studies (Lash, 2007; Thoburn, 2007) towards post-Marxist or even liberal positions. Would for instance Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) reading, arguably the most influential interpretation nowadays in discourse and cultural studies, be defined as Gramscian? Let us briefly compare two competing logics underlying two interpretations of hegemony. In our view, on the one hand, Gramscian hegemony operates by the logic expounded in the well-known section of Notebook 13, Analysis of Situations: Relations of Force. In this passage, Gramsci embraces a still relatively strong sense of determination exemplified by the mentioned principle that ‘no society sets itself tasks for whose accomplishment the necessary and sufficient conditions do not either already exist or are not at least beginning to emerge and develop’ (Gramsci, 1971, Q13§17) and the dialectical nexus between organic and conjunctural movements. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation of hegemony functions by the logic of articulation. This quasi-paradigmatic shift is clear in Laclau’s definition of articulation: An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, or absolute for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be made? (In Chen and Morley, 1996, p.141)

Noticeably, the theory of articulation radicalizes ‘relative independence or relative autonomy’ (Hall, 1982, p. 82) because of the capability of making a unity of elements determined by different dynamics (this how we interpret ‘different elements’ above) means granting them, under certain conditions, absolute not relative autonomy, from a level of instability to unpredictability and undecidability: ‘the political and ideological articulations of cultural practices are movable—that a practice which is articulated to bourgeois values today may be disconnected from those values and connected to socialist ones tomorrow’ (Bennett, in Dworkin, 1997, p. 248, emphasis added). Thus, the semiotic war over representation passes from epistemological signification to ontological re-constitution via discourse. This approach turns instability and incompleteness into a constant and present possibility for ‘difference’ and particularism, thus rather oblivious to Gramsci’s foundational principle of determining relations of forces.

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However, despite the apparent reproaching tone of this conclusion, we do not actually try to argue for a truer or more faithful Gramsci. We thus would like to conclude this chapter with a more positive and wiser message from Stuart Hall: I do not claim that, in any simple way, Gramsci ‘has the answers’ or ‘holds the key’ to our present troubles. I do believe that we must ‘think’ our problems in a Gramscian way – which is different. We mustn’t use Gramsci (as we have for so long abused Marx) like an Old Testament prophet who, at the correct moment, will offer us the consoling and appropriate quotation. We can’t pluck up this ‘Sardinian’ from his specific and unique political formation, beam him down at the end of the 20th century, and ask him to solve our problems for us: especially since the whole thrust of his thinking was to refuse this easy transfer of generalisations from one conjuncture, nation or epoch to another. (Hall, 1988, p. 161)

REFERENCES Adamson, W. L. (1983). Hegemony and revolution: A study of Antonio Gramsci’s political and cultural theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anderson, P. (1976). The antinomies of Antonio Grasmci. London: Verso. Andrews, S. J. (2016). Hegemony, mass media and cultural studies. Properties of meaning, power, and value in cultural production. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Antonio, R. J., & Bonanno, A. (2000). A new global capitalism? From ‘Americanism and Fordism’ to ‘Americanization-Globalization’. American Studies, 41(2/3), 33–77. Barbrook, R. & Cameron, A. (1996). The Californian ideology. Science as Culture, 6(1), 44–72. Bologna, S (2018). Per un breve panorama della logistica dal 1070 a oggi. Intervista. http://​www​.intotheblackbox​.com/​author/​sergio​-bologna/​ Chen, K. & Morley, D. (1996). Stuart Hall. Critical dialogues in cultural studies. London: Routledge. Creehan, K. (2002). Gramsci, culture and anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Durham, M. G., & Kellner, D. M. (Eds). (2006). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Dworkin, D. L. (1997). Cultural Marxism in postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the origins of cultural studies. Duke University Press. Forgacs, D. (1989). Gramsci and Marxism in Britain. New Left Review, 1–176. Francese, J. (Ed.). (2009a). Perspectives on Gramsci. Routledge. Francese, J. (2009b). Thoughts on Gramsci’s need ‘to do something “Für ewig”’. Rethinking Marxism, 21(1), 54–66. Gilbert, J. (2019) This conjuncture: For Stuart Hall. New Formations, 96, 5–37. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (eds/trans), London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1995). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, D. Boothman (ed./ tran.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guha, R. (1982). On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India. In R. Guha (ed),  Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Discussion Paper. University of Birmingham, Birmingham. Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture & Society,  2(1), 57–72. Hall, S. (1982). The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: Return of the repressed in media studies. In T. Gurevitch, M. Bennet, J. Currna and J. Woollacott (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (pp. 56–90). London: Methuen. Hall, S. (1988). The hard road to renewal. London: Verso. Hall, S. (2016). Cultural studies 1983. In Cultural Studies 1983. Duke University Press. Hall, S. C., Jefferson, C., Clarke, T. &. Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. London: Macmillan Press. Harris, D. (2013). From class struggle to the politics of pleasure: The effects of Gramscianism on cultural studies. Oxford: Routledge. Hartley, J. (2012). Communication, cultural and media studies: The key concepts. Oxford: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hoggart, R. (1957). The uses of literacy. Aspects of working-class life. London: Chatto & Windus. Kumar, S. (2011). The exercise of hegemony in contemporary culture and media, and the need for a counter-hegemony initiative. Social Scientist, 39(11/12), 33–40. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Landy, M. (2009). Gramsci, in and on media. In Perspectives on Gramsci (pp. 124–135). Routledge. Lash, S. (2007). Power after hegemony: Cultural studies in mutation? Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 55–78. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0263276407075956 Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. New York: Penguin. McRobbie, A. (2005). The uses of cultural studies. London: Sage. Milner, A. (2018). Again, dangerous visions: Essays in cultural materialism. Brill. Morrow, R. A. (1991). Critical theory, Gramsci and cultural studies: From structuralism to poststructuralism. In Critical theory now (pp. 27–69). Routledge. Peck, J. (2001). Itinerary of a thought: Stuart Hall, cultural studies, and the unresolved problem of the relation of culture to ‘not culture’. Cultural Critique, 48, 200–249. Said, E. (2003). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin. Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social text, 18(2), 33–58. Thoburn, N. (2007). Patterns of production: Cultural studies after hegemony. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 79–94. Thompson, E.P. (1959). The new left. The New Reasoner, 9(1–2). Williams, R. (1973). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. New Left Review, I(82). Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. London: Verso. Williams, R. (1989a). Resources of hope: Culture, democracy, socialism. London: Verso. Williams, R. (1989b). The politics of modernism: Against the new conformists. London: Verso.

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Wood, B. (1998). Stuart Hall’s cultural studies and the problem of hegemony. British Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 399–414.

19. Antonio Gramsci and education Peter Mayo INTRODUCTION The radical debate on education frequently features references to Antonio Gramsci, the first General Secretary of the then newly formed Italian Communist Party. Some of his conceptualizations are regarded as de rigueur for debates centering on the education–power nexus. He certainly had a significant influence on the work of arguably the most heralded left wing radical popular educator, Paulo Freire (Mayo, 1999, 2019) or contemporary luminaries such as Michael Apple and Henry Giroux.

INEVITABLE MARXIAN UNDERPINNINGS Karl Marx’s influence on Gramsci and provision of theoretical underpinnings to Gramsci’s body of work was inevitable and understandable given the latter’s commitment to revolutionary socialism since he joined and rose to prominence within the Italian Socialist Party, Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). This was then a ‘catch all’ socialist party with different currents. In his four volume edition of the Quaderni del Carcere (The Prison Notebooks, henceforth the Quaderni) (Gramsci, 1975), Valentino Gerratana highlights Karl Marx’s works engaged by Gramsci. Needless to say, Il Capitale (Das Kapital) or Capital featured prominently. Gramsci stressed throughout his written work the cultural underpinnings of revolutionary practice. Indeed, this is widely regarded as his major contribution to Marxist theory. It, of course, should not render us oblivious to his political economic contributions, most relevant being those contained in Notebook 22 on Americanism and Fordism. Here, he highlights what he regards as key differences in context between his own Italy, other European countries and the United States. In Gramsci’s view, the economic and social fabric in the USA had less residual stifling forces than say Italy with its ‘parasitic’ rentier ceto (social stratum). Certain texts by Marx and Engels, such as the Paris Manuscripts or Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) (Marx and Engels, 1970), were 334

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published too late in Gramsci’s life (when in prison), or after his death, for him to have been influenced by them. I suspect, however, that some of the ideas contained within them, certainly the most prominent, would have been circulating through Socialist and Marxist circles to have reached him. One major concept, at the basis of Gramsci’s work, certainly around his overarching master concept, hegemony, is that of ideology.

IDEOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES Marx and Engels’ (1970) writings posit that every social class striving to replace another seeks to promote its specific interests and view of the world as that of society at large. It seeks to set the parameters around what kind of society is permissible and promote its ideas as ‘universal’ and ‘taken for granted’ (pp. 65–66). This view resonates strongly with Gramsci’s unsystematic exposition of hegemony. Gramsci regards that complex of ideas that reflect what he considers a contradictory consciousness as ‘common sense’. There is enough in this ‘common sense’ to appeal to a people’s framework of relevance, to connect with their everyday experience and preoccupations. This however is distorted to such an extent that it denies one’s seeing the greater picture. Consequently, it prevents one from obtaining coherence. This coherence he calls, adopting a phrase from Alessandro Manzoni, ‘good sense’. It is a conception of the world shorn of its contradictory and wayward elements. ‘Common sense’ serves to support rather than oppose dominant hegemonic interests. Gramsci considers ‘common sense’ part and parcel of what he often expresses as ‘folklore’. Used by Gramsci in a certain way, ‘folklore’ can be seen to have pejorative connotations. It can refer to an uncritical adoption and accommodation of assumptions and partial ‘truths’ (Gramsci, 1975, p. 1396). Common sense can be transcended by a systematic study of ‘philosophy’, regarded not in its strictly academic disciplinary sense but more broadly. It is, in this Gramscian conceptualization, the systematic development of a coherent process of consciousness.

WORKERS’ AND ADULT EDUCATION IN GENERAL The development of this level of consciousness is the goal of workers’ education and other adult education advocated by Gramsci. He was involved in various initiatives to this end. One major source of education, both in the productive and administrative aspects, were the Factory Councils, conceived by Gramsci as sources of genuine industrial democracy that would enable workers to transcend the capitalist wage relation. They would promote a vision of industrial relations that transcends the existing Capitalist framework.

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Following the end of the occupation of the factories, where workers demonstrated the ability to take over production without the designated managers of capital, and kept everything intact, the Council Director, Giovanni Parodi is on record as having said: ‘We return the Factory, not a single nail is missing’ (‘Vi restituiamo la fabbrica, non manca un chiodo’) (Amendola, 1978, p. 17). The Factory Councils were conceived by Gramsci no longer as an alternative to the trade unions but as guiding complementary agents keeping the vision of transcending capitalist relations alive. He felt unions needed these educational agencies, given their tendency to bargain within the given framework and not go beyond reformism. In the majority of cases, his engagement in adult education proved to be of a short duration (e.g., education on the island of Ustica while awaiting trial or the short-lived Institute of Proletarian Culture). The many significant features of these initiatives include the capability of formally educated and informally educated or formally ‘uneducated’ persons learning together and organizing their own non-formal education. They would be bound together by the spirit of a collective class project, as opposed to the conventional individualistic, personal accumulation bourgeois aspiration. This has been a feature of Gramsci’s writings throughout his oeuvre. It harkens back to his writings about the organization of workers’ education circles. He wrote glowingly of workers attending non-formal education circles after a day’s work inside, say, the automobile FIAT factories in and around Turin (they have recently moved elsewhere, as FIAT-Chrysler, throughout the globe as a result of hegemonic globalization). He writes that they did so not as a result of individual upwardly mobile aspirations but as a collective class process of political emancipation. The whole issue of transforming common to good sense has inevitably led to the accusation, leveled at Gramsci, of pathologizing people in terms of acquisition of consciousness and, from a postmodernist perspective, to which I do not subscribe, of furthering an ‘essentialist’ Enlightenment project. I see him at best anchored in an unfinished project of modernity.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL Gramsci refuted economic-determinist theories of change that are evolutionary and that conveyed the sense of a fatalist and historical predestination, as if history were a moving force, in the Hegelian sense, having a life of its own. There is, of course, an element of voluntarism in the writings of the young Gramsci deriving from his initial influence by Italian Idealist philosophy, specifically that of Benedetto Croce. Idealism has often been decried in Italy for keeping the country’s philosophy provincial. It is however accorded the merit of steering Italian humanist thinking away from positivism, the sort of positivism that Gramsci confronted in his linguistics studies (Ives, 2004). This

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confrontation occurred even in his student work at the University of Turin, located in a city which, apart from a strong proletarian consciousness, exuded a vibrant cultural and intellectual atmosphere. This is the Turin of the famous Liceo Classico Massimo d’ Azeglio, which produced such great personalities, in the Italian intellectual firmament, as Giulio Einaudi, Giancarlo Pajetta, Cesare Pavese and Norberto Bobbio, to name a few. Gramsci, who attended his Liceo Classico at Cagliari, connected with other great intellectuals and radical humanists of the period, such as Piero Gobetti, with whom he later reviewed plays at such vibrant cultural venues as the Teatro Carignano in the heart of Turin or the Alfieri close by, and Ada Prospero Gobetti (later Gobetti Marchesini), who wrote literary studies and later extensively on education. The stimulus for such humanist thinking flowed through Gramsci’s habitus in Turin, the Petit Paris in its architectural layout and where French features prominently in its Piedmontese provincial dialect, and Italy’s Petrograd in its visible class struggle. This background serves to enhance one’s understanding of Gramsci’s intellectual development following his move from the ‘colonized’ island of Sardinia to the ‘continente’ (the Italian mainland) and specifically to the former Kingdom of Sardinia’s colonial metropolitan center – Torino (Turin in English). Add to this his early philosophical influence by the Neapolitan, Benedetto Croce, a grand intellectual in Italy at the time, and one can understand the propensity towards anti-positivism in his work and his being hailed by his internationally renowned professor of philology, Matteo Bartoli, as the ‘Archangel’ set to defeat ‘the grammarians’. Later, any idealist position is eschewed by Gramsci as more emphasis is placed on the social relations of production. It is fair to say that Gramsci saw history as not predetermined but as offering space and scope for human agency and possibility. He closely and meticulously observed and wrote about Capitalism, Fordism in particular. In Notebook 22, dealing with Taylorized Fordist production, Gramsci writes about profit’s ‘falling rate’. Taylorization served as a means to redress this process.1

EDUCATION IN ITS BROADEST CONTEXTS Gramsci’s view of education was expansive, incorporating ‘altre vie’ (other ways) beyond schooling and other formal institutional learning. The already demonstrated belief of his in the working class’s ability to create and administer its own learning settings connects his adult education work, in many ways, to ‘independent working class education’ (see Waugh, 2009). These alternative educational paths can be carved out throughout ‘civil society’. Gramsci uses the term very differently from the way it is currently employed. The term ‘civil society’ has been attributed different nuanced meanings, especially from the time of the Scottish Enlightenment onward. For Gramsci, it is

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used as a site of struggle wherein certain agencies or institutes consolidate the existing hegemonic relations. Others renegotiate them. Civil society is located at the interstices of hegemony. A long revolution (Williams, 1960) takes place consisting of contesting, renegotiating, and finally transcending or replacing the present hegemony (reflected through burgerliche gesellschaft) which is always in flux. Gramsci advocated forging alliances with popular forces, including the Catholic masses. These also included alliances forged with intellectuals disseminating and propounding progressive ideas which can have broad social resonance. Well documented, in this regard, is his friendship and cooperation (Gramsci, 1995) with the intellectual prodigy, Piero Gobetti (pp. 44–45), one of the finest young Italian thinkers at the time, editor of La Rivoluzione Liberale (The Liberal Revolution), an ostensibly non-Marxist who expressed convergent views with those of Gramsci. Piero and Ada Gobetti (husband and wife) participated in actions, coordinated by the Ordine Nuovo movement, in the biennio rosso (the red two years) and Ada was, after the Second World War and the fall of Nazi-fascism, a key figure in Italy ‘s Communist Party, after having fought as a partisan. In Gramsci’s thinking, the Party, with the PCd’I (Partito Comunista d‘Italia) in mind, was to have a pivotal role in the much augured and long process of intellectual and moral reform. It was meant to be the coordinating force, the collective equivalent of Machiavelli’s Prince, in this case, the Modern Prince, striving to bring about national unity. Gramsci advocated a ‘national popular’ unity. From a Gramscian perspective, this was the overarching context in which a particular kind of general and widely diffused education, involving the entire complex of civil society, again viewed in Gramsci’s sense, would take place. It would be an education intended to enable one to transcend the system. This would be the sort of transcendence that can, in the long run, usher in a reformation on the scale of the Protestant one. It would consist of not a passive revolution (top down) but one anchored in popular consciousness and that reflects the ‘collective will’. Gramsci believed that the system contains its own contradictions that can be explored and of which one can avail oneself. Once again, hegemonic structures are not monolithic, as they are incomplete. They allow spaces to be exploited through subversive or transformative action, acting ‘in and against’, or as Paulo Freire and other Brazilians would put it, ‘being tactically inside and strategically outside’, the system. This echoes Gramsci’s ‘guerra di posizione’ (war of position), in contrast to a ‘guerra manovrata’ (war of maneuver) or frontal attack. Hegemonic structures of relations contain, within their own interstices, spaces for change.

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The Philosophy and Pedagogy of Praxis Praxis is the central notion in the thinking of Gramsci. Use of this term was no mere ploy to circumvent the prison censor but an attestation to the key overriding concept for his body of writings. The ‘Philosophy of Praxis’ was the core concept of Gramsci’s political thought, juxtaposed against ‘common sense’. Benedetto Croce distinguished philosophy from religion. Philosophy was the preserve of intellectuals, the term used in the conventional sense. Religion was for common people, their philosophy of life. To the contrary, Gramsci formulated the idea of a philosophy that would tie intellectuals and masses2 together in what he calls a historical bloc (Borg and Mayo, 2002, p. 89). A historical bloc is more than a simple alliance that might be of short duration. It would be something deep-seated, holding together sturdily over a long period of time. The classic example here would be the bloc involving the Northern industrial bourgeoisie and the landowning class in the south of Italy, well explained by Gramsci in the tract on ‘The Southern Question’ (Gramsci, 1995). Praxis (Mayo, 2020) is the means whereby one stands back from what one lives through to obtain critical distance, thus engaging in reflection for collective action geared towards transforming the ‘reality’ at hand. People in conversation with Brazilian pedagogue, Paulo Freire, regarded moments in their life, such as periods of exile and imprisonment (Freire and Faundez, 1989) as providing possibilities for praxis. This seems to have been true of the latter period of Gramsci’s life, the period of imprisonment as a political detainee or what would nowadays be termed a ‘prisoner of conscience’. Isolation provided the opportunity to embark on producing a substantial body of critical reflection, and sophisticated written ruminations on political action as political discussions around thought and action proceeded inside the various prisons where Gramsci was an inmate (Mayo, 1999). Researched re-enactments in films and documentaries reveal the, at times, heated interaction among imprisoned members of different Left factions in Italy. Some were supportive of Gramsci, others revealed hostility to Gramsci and those of similar persuasion. The latter would brook no straying from Lenin’s dictum of the ‘united front’.

AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM The discussion around Gramsci I have proposed thus far has focused on macro theoretical issues. What about the generally micro context of pedagogical action? To what extent did Gramsci favor, as Harold Entwistle (1979) claimed, what Paulo Freire calls ‘banking education’ (Freire, 2018) and John Dewey had earlier called ‘pouring in’? Gramsci regarded dialogue as a key feature of the intellectuals and masses relationship. It was also a prominent feature of hegemony. The latter was characterized by a set of wide reciprocal relations

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in society in which every pupil is a teacher and every teacher a pupil. The implication is that dialogue had its place throughout society. One constant feature of his writings on education, especially his writings on the ‘Unitarian School’ and his critique of La riforma Gentile (the Gentile Reform), is that any progressive educational approach must rest on substance. The teacher who simply provides a baggage of facts is referred to by Gramsci as mediocre. This is rather indicative of his view of ‘banking education’. Those who promote Gramsci’s purported advocacy of a conservative schooling for radical politics would do well to note this point. ‘Popular universities’ he denounced for giving more importance to pomp and impressing than effective learning (si bada più alla lustra che alla efficacia) (Gramsci, 1967, p. 36). He certainly underlines the rigor characterizing the teaching of Latin. People tend to take this naively on board without apparently observing the rider that, in Gramsci’s view, the subject will have to be replaced. This is then qualified by the statement that it will take quite a subject to replace it, a subject which can be learnt in a manner entailing similar standards of intellectual discipline (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 39–40). He felt that the reforms introduced by Fascist Minister, Giovanni Gentile, can fall well short of these standards, thus selling working class children short as, unlike their middle-class counterparts, they would have no alternative sources of reaching them. Gramsci (1971) gives prominence to the instruction–education nexus (p. 36). He was against not dialogue per se but that ‘dialogical’ posturing which constitutes ‘mere educativity’. This would be an education devoid of knowledge, insights and skills, a situation that would leave pupils in a marginalized state. Gramsci’s proposed Unitarian schooling involved a ‘creative school’ in its second phase where the teacher is limited to being a ‘friendly guide’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 33). This is an ‘active school’ full of creativity resting on the foundation of a rigorous education in the first phase. When writing on the Unitarian School, Gramsci sought to strike a delicate balance between the authority of the classical school and the freedom of romantic education, proponents of the latter drawing inspiration from works such as Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Gramsci (1971) argued that the latter type of school had to move from romanticism, characterized by unshackled freedom when learning, to classicism (pp. 32–33). I take classicism to refer to the balance between rigor and freedom – authority and freedom. Quaderni 4 and 12 on the Unitarian School underline what Gramsci sees as the merits of the classical school. He tackles the issue of what Michael Young calls ‘powerful knowledge’. The type of powerful knowledge that needs to be mastered varies from context to context. Michael Young (2013) mentions Math and Science and of course one would add language issues where even the colonial language, in certain former colonies, serves as a powerful form of knowledge providing access to power corridors denied to those not in posses-

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sion of it. The challenge, deriving from Gramsci, is to be careful not to throw out the knowledge baby with the ideological bath water. Critical appropriation remains a key notion in this context. The leading Italian writer on Gramsci and education, Mario Alighiero Manacorda (1972) interprets these writings as an epitaph for a school that was, but that cannot continue to exist in his time because the society then had already changed significantly since the days when the classical school was in its prime (p. xxix; see also Borg and Mayo, 2002, pp. 102–103; Mayo, 2015, p. 91). One necessitated a new school for new times. The Riforma Gentile pegged the educational system backwards, carving out two separate and hardly ever converging pathways, academic and vocational (professionale in Italian). Meritocracy, in its flawed bourgeois conception, was the name of the game, the euphemism for what, as countless research in critical Sociology of Education, from Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, has demonstrated, is a camouflaged process of social selection. Exposing the finer features of the classical school, living on borrowed time, is in sync with his recurring problematique: How can all students/pupils, including those from the popular classes, acquire that knowledge that is a key to power, to avoid marginalization? I have argued (Mayo, 2019) that these Gramscian writings on the ‘Unitarian School’, or what Quentin Hoare and Nowell Smith call ‘the common school’, can also have implications for universities today. The neoliberal functional and market-driven university (Callinicos, 2006) of present times can prove detrimental to the many that have gained access to it in the post-1968 university massification period. This development in university access was, as is often the case with other institutions, not supported by any qualitative adjustments, for instance better educator–student ratios. There is a frequent lamentation of a general ‘drop in standards’ – this begs the question: whose standards? Some have invoked, by way of contrast, the problematic Humboldtian ideal, regarded by others as ‘elitist’ and tied to bildung. Following Manacorda, I would argue that any writing in this direction can serve as an epitaph for a university that ‘was’ or is claimed to have been but cannot be any longer. This would not have been an institution for the majority. Society, in its democratic imaginary, has changed substantially since Humboldt promoted that ideal for the then Prussian/German University. The modern university can appear to stand at a crossroads. It can choose between different pathways. The choice can be for a more community-oriented university. Alas, the one it chose lies in the opposite direction. I would submit that it is far removed from the Gramscian view; it serves the requirements of industry. It perhaps does so in a more sophisticated manner than is the case with other educational settings. It is perhaps more refined than other learning settings meant to produce the Fordist ‘trained gorilla’ (Gorilla ammaestrato)

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that Dario Fo parodied. Many have argued that universities, especially the mass universities, have morphed into glorified training agencies. The minority, by stark contrast, remained ensconced in elite universities, the proverbial ‘cities of light’. There they can hone their skills, develop insights and deepen the knowledge that can empower them as the ‘ruling class’, the class that directs society, la classe dirigente in Gramsci’s Italian. It ought to be said that these elite campuses have avoided some of the Bologna process reforms, meant to bring them in line with the rest. These institutions include the Grandes Écoles of Napoleonic conception, transferred also to Gramsci’s Italy with its Scuola Normale di Pisa. You can add these to the ‘Cambridges’ and ‘Oxfords’ of this world. They, however, provide – also through a number of foundations, such as the Bill Gates Foundation – funding mechanisms. This is to attract and possibly co-opt the best crop (in terms of academic achievement) from among the subaltern. Raymond Williams, son of a railway signalman from a village on the Anglo-Welsh border, was a scholarship boy at Cambridge (Inglis, 1995, p. 65). In Politics and Letters, Williams wrote about this turning point in his life as a kid growing up in a border country. I have argued that Gramsci’s argument (he too attended the University of Turin on a scholarship for ‘poor’ Sardinian students) would have been that, through such scholarship mechanisms, these institutions can remove potential ‘organic intellectuals’ from their communities (Mayo, 2015, p. 55). I base this on his views regarding language (Ives, 2004, Ch. 3). He also holds influential academics and philosophers such as Benedetto Croce, who ironically dropped out (he was not impressed) of his university law studies in Rome, partly responsible for this. They helped cultivate a language which detached potential organic intellectuals of the subaltern from their context of origin/their ‘social moorings’. They would thus undermine their potential to serve as ‘organic intellectuals’ for their class and community struggles. These processes would, to the contrary, induct them into becoming traditional intellectuals. They can easily become intellectuals who absolutize their activity (Thomas, 2009). They thus conceal or do not recognize their social function. As a consequence, they could well consolidate the present hegemony. Of course, universities, polytechnics and other HE institutions have often served as counterculture centers. I would point here to Paris and Rome 1968, and also Vienna at the turn of the century with its Unnibrent (University burns). Recall the demonstrations in London, Chile, Gezi Park-Istanbul and Quebec (Giroux, 2014; Mayo, 2012). We have seen the emergence of intellectuals from student movements such as Frei Betto in Brazil or Sergio Capanna, later of Democrazia Proletaria, who challenged existing relations of hegemony. Relations of hegemony are messy, never straightforward. Therein lie certain resources of hope.

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Parallels between diversification in higher education and the Gentile Reforms can be drawn and one finds much grist for the mill in Gramsci’s notes on the Unitarian School, as I attempted to show. Gramsci is very instructive when it comes to discussing education and the learning dimension of high-status artistic expression and culture, as is Raymond Williams, one of Britain’s major cultural theorists and researchers, also influenced by Gramsci. They extend their critical analysis into the realm of popular culture with ramifications for education and learning. Gramsci (1971) accorded importance to popular culture as a domain and vehicle for hegemony. Manifestations of this culture, including sport and regional contests inside the prisons featuring inmates, reflected the ‘popular creative spirit’, many examples of which, at the time he wrote, escaped the clutches of Capitalism and, in the case of jazz, in the United States, served as a form of release from the rigors and tedium of mechanized Fordist labor. How true this is today remains a bone of contention, as Capitalism and its corporate sector have extended their reach to commodify different aspects of human subjectivities and draw them into Capital’s ever expanding ‘universe’. Gramsci however saw the potential of popular culture, at his time, for emancipatory ends. Despite the onset of corporate encroachment and commodification, forms of popular culture remain, I would submit, sites of struggle, open to different political takes and interpretations. There is much in Gramsci’s analyses that can help provide grist for an educational project spanning vast swathes of cultural production and dissemination. This explains his great influence on cultural studies comprising the study of popular culture in its various forms.

INFLUENCE ON EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT Gramsci exerted a tremendous influence on educational thought and practice. Among the most influential texts in Italian one finds works by Manacorda (1970, 1972) and Angelo Broccoli (1972). Recall that the former highlighted the fact that the piece on the Unitarian school is to be read as an epitaph to a school that was, but cannot be any longer, while Broccoli highlighted among others the psycho-physical habits that the kind of education which furnished the bourgeoisie with its caste of intellectuals is that which needs to be emulated by one and all, a sort of ‘Taylorization of education’, not for capitalist Fordist production of course but to inculcate that much-coveted sense of self-discipline. This is what a class aspiring to become a ruling class needs to imbibe within its constitution and develop further. Other various discussions of these and the above themes are developed by the likes of Italia de Robbio Anziano (1987) who highlights the pedagogy of engagement (impegno), Atillio Monasta (1993) and the edited compendium, based on conference proceedings, put together by Capitani and Villa (1999).

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As far as literature in the English speaking world is concerned, the one book that raised much interest and provoked reaction is undoubtedly that by the Canada-based English scholar, Harold Entwistle (1979). This book is renowned for its advocacy of a conservative schooling for radical politics as purportedly articulated by Gramsci in his oeuvre. Entwistle (1979) carried out rigorous research providing a detailed excellent chapter on adult education. It is however his writings on the school which aroused much controversy, praised by Thomas Clayton (2010) but criticized by critical pedagogues in North America such as Michael Apple (1981) and Henry Giroux (1980a, 1980b), the Gramscian scholar Joseph Buttigieg (2002) and the undersigned. Entwistle’s position stands diametrically opposed to Manacorda’s (1972) – the latter’s reference to the epitaph that Gramsci provided. Entwistle’s position on the learning of Latin and Greek, hence the languages of classical antiquity, stand in contrast to Erminio Fonzo’s (2019) debunking of views that attribute to Gramsci an exaltation of classical antiquity. Gramsci, according to Fonzo, argues that this kind of world lies at the heart of the classical school and of Fascist propaganda but is not sufficiently adequate for a much changed world or ‘La Città Futura’ (the Future City). This world requires new forms of knowledge which transcend any need to harken back to classical civilization. The world has moved on as the old is dying and the new is struggling to emerge in an interregnum, a statement by Gramsci repeated by prominent writer on education, Henry Giroux and adopted as a book title by Nancy Fraser. The search for more up-to-date forms of knowledge is part of this struggle. This position is in line with Manacorda’s (1970, 1972). In my piece with Carmel Borg (Borg and Mayo, 2002), we highlighted key sentences and phrases by Gramsci on the Unitarian School which are overlooked by Entwistle (1979). Foremost is the anticipation by Gramsci that the teaching of Greek and Latin needs to be replaced and will be replaced, but that it will take quite an area to serve as a worthy substitute, as pointed out earlier. Recall that, according to Gramsci, what Freire would call Banking education, seen by Entwistle, as having its merits, is in its most straightforward sense, the mark of pedagogical mediocrity. We underline Gramsci’s choice of adjective with regard to the kind of teacher who teaches this way, while considering this approach as having more merit than dialogue in a vacuum, devoid of substance. There are nuances in Gramsci’s sentences which are not picked up by those who see him as advocating a classical education for an empowering politics. Those such as Michael Apple, Henry Giroux and I who take a more critical position with regard to conservative readings of Gramsci, including those that emphasize cultural literacy and the Great Books, as propounded by Alan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch (Giroux, 2002; Buttigieg, 2002), belong to a corpus of writings broadly defined as critical education (Mayo, 2021). Giroux, McLaren and I subscribe, more specifically, to an area called Critical Pedagogy, a term

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coined by Henry Giroux and Roger I. Simon in 1978, precisely at an AERA meeting that year, and pushed forward in subsequent meetings (Mayo, forthcoming). Critical Pedagogy refers to a critical engagement with the politics of education that, as Giroux (2022) is at pains to argue, dates back to time immemorial and which transcends the North American context where the term had been coined. My work (Mayo, forthcoming) and McLaren’s (2015) mention people of different ethnicity, race, gender and geographical context as being fine exemplars in the field. Paulo Freire is a key figure and so are don Lorenzo Milani, exponents of Independent Working Class Education, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Raymond Williams, Vandana Shiva, W.E.B. Dubois and of course, noblesse oblige, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. There are many others. Gramsci’s influence is tremendous also given his affinities, and contrasts with the work of Paulo Freire (Mayo, 1999) and, to reiterate, his impact on cultural studies, an important feature of critical pedagogy as carried forward by Henry Giroux (2018). Key mediating influences here are the heavily Gramscian inspired, Stuart Hall and Edward Said who in turn influenced Henry Giroux and others, me included. Giroux highlights Gramsci’s notion of the cultural politics of education and social transformation, in short the cultural, as well as the political economic, as lying at the basis of hegemony. Gramsci helped bring the cultural into politics and politics into the cultural. Education in this regard lies at the heart of power and hegemony (Broccoli, 1972) and involves a broad range of institutions not just formal education. This is reflected in Giroux’s scouring a broad terrain, as did Gramsci. Apple, for his part, calling himself a neo-Gramscian, emphasizes the areas of curriculum and textbook publishing as, involving, echoing and slightly rephrasing Raymond Williams, selections from the cultures of society (Williams uses the singular in his exploration of a common culture) (Apple, 2000, 2003). The choices involved are indeed political, as are the choices of school and university codes. Apple, Giroux and McLaren all emphasize, following Gramsci and Said, the role of intellectuals as public educators in the workings of power. Others, such as Raymond Morrow and Carlos Torres (1995) draw on Gramsci when analyzing popular education in Latin America where Gramsci is a major influence (Ireland, 1987; La Belle, 1986). This position is echoed by Rebecca Tarlau (2019) with regard to her work concerning social movements, specifically the Movimento Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra, the Landless Peasant Movement, in Brazil. This somehow echoes the discussion of the State and such movements, with Gramscian overtones, and with specific regard to education in O’Cadiz et al. (1998).

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CONCLUSION Finally, the ideas of any writer are conditioned by the contexts from where she, he or they emerged. Some easily posit limits to their relevance to a number of contexts. Education is after all context conditioned. For all his writings about different societies, especially the Arab world and its influence on Western civilization (Boothman, 2007, p. 65), Gramsci provides views on education that can be regarded as Eurocentric, as is the case with most Western Marxist views. As a European writing on Gramsci, I would consider it difficult not to be Eurocentric, despite all my efforts to minimize this aspect of my social location, vision and work. The best one can hope for is to be ‘less Eurocentric’, ‘less incoherent’. The same can apply to Gramsci, like me hailing from a Southern European and Mediterranean island. In view of this struggle to become less Eurocentric, and Gramsci’s expansive glocal view of things, always attentive to the particular in a global context, a set of questions come to mind. How can a ‘Unitarian School’ embrace and create the conditions for investigating knowledge that extends beyond the Eurocentric framework? This arises in light of the ever-changing demographic ethnic composition of societies, including Italian society nowadays, as a result of mass migration flows across the globe, occurring at a hitherto unprecedented rate. How would a Unitarian School reflect the portability of cultures and knowledge and learning traditions involved? How would all this affect schooling and other forms of education, including popular and community education? Gramsci’s writings on the different sources of knowledge, we often call ‘global knowledge’, from non-Western societies, accord ‘cognitive justice’ (Santos, 2017) to these societies. Paradoxically, they are the societies from where migrants hail and are those to whom Western institutions are indebted in many ways. Gramsci demonstrates this in great detail and should provide material and insights for a ‘less Eurocentric’ curriculum. In this, Gramsci’s views accompany those of many others, such as Miguel Asin Palacios, Edward Said and Mahmoud Salem-Elsheikh. They all refer to traditions and knowledge ‘transported’ to different societies from outside the western framework. Greater effort should be expended on seeking the right pedagogical approach that does not reproduce the same level of domination one associates with Eurocentric knowledge and modes of imparting it. For this I sought complementary pedagogical views from a Southern educator who engages in a pedagogical approach through praxis, the subject of other published pieces of mine (Mayo, 2020). I sought comparative analyses between Antonio Gramsci’s work and that of Paulo Freire (Mayo, 1999, 2019). There is great mileage in Paulo Freire’s work for a Pedagogy of Praxis which would complement the political ideas of Gramsci. This comparative analysis lies outside the specific scope of this chapter. As

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I have shown, a number of basic insights, from Gramsci, have wide resonance, such as that of mastering the powerful knowledge of a given society not to remain politically marginalized and the key insight that every relationship of hegemony is an educational one.

NOTES 1. 2.

Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith in Antonio Gramsci (1971, p. 280). In the English language, in Britain, ‘masses’ has pejorative connotations in conservative thought but positive ones in socialist rhetoric and discourse (Williams, 1983 [1976], p. 192; 1982 [1958]).

REFERENCES Amendola, G. (1978). Antonio Gramsci Nella Vita Culturale e Politica Italiana (Antonio Gramsci in Italian Cultural and Public Life). Naples: Guida Editori. Apple, M.W. (1981). Review of Antonio Gramsci. Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics by Harold Entwistle. Comparative Education Review, 34(3), 436–438. Apple, M.W. (2000). Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Apple M.W. (2003). The State and the Politics of Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Boothman, D. (2007). L-Islam negli articoli giornalistici gramsciani e nei Quaderni del Carcere (Islam in Gramsci’s journalistic writings and in the Prison Notebooks). NAE, 18, 65–69. Borg, C. & Mayo, P. (2002). Gramsci and the unitarian school. Paradoxes and possibilities. In C. Borg, J.A. Buttigieg and P. Mayo (Eds), Gramsci and Education. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 87–108. Broccoli, A. (1972). Antonio Gramsci e l’educazione come egemonia (Antonio Gramsci and Education as Hegemony). Florence: La Nuova Italia. Buttigieg, J.A. (2002). Education, the role of intellectuals, and democracy: A Gramscian reflection. In In C. Borg, J.A. Buttigieg and P. Mayo (Eds), Gramsci and Education. Lanham, Boulder, New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 121–132. Callinicos, A. (2006). Universities in a Neoliberal World. London: Bookmarks. Capitani, L. & Villa, R. (Eds) (1999). Scuola, Intelletuali e Identità Nazionale nel Pensiero di Antonio Gramsci (School, Intellectuals and National Identity in Antonio Gramsci’s Thought). Rome: Gamberettti Editore. Clayton, T. (2010). Introducing Giovanni Gentile. The ‘Philosopher of Fascism’. In P. Mayo (Ed.), Gramsci and Educational Thought. Malden MA, Oxford (UK), Chichester (UK): Wiley-Blackwell, 56–77. De Robbio Anziano, I. (1987). Antonio Gramsci e la pedagogia del impedgno (Antonio Gramsci and the Pedagogy of Commitment). Naples: Ferraro. Entwistle, H. (1979). Antonio Gramsci. Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fonzo, E. (2019). Il Mondo Antico negli Scritti di Antonio Gramsci (The Ancient World in Antonio Gramsci’s Writings). Fisciano: Paguro. Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Freire, P. & Faundez, A. (1989). Learning to Question. A Pedagogy of Liberation. Geneva: World Council of Churches. Giroux, H.A. (1980a). Essay review of Antonio Gramsci: Conservative schooling for radical politics by Harold Entwistle. Telos, 45, 215–225. http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.3817/​ 0980045215 Giroux, H.A. (1980b). Gramsci, hegemony, and schooling (review symposium). British Journal of Sociology of Education, 13(3), 215–225. Giroux, H.A. (2002). Rethinking cultural politics and radical pedagogy in the work of Antonio Gramsci. In C. Borg, J.A. Buttigieg and P. Mayo (Eds), Gramsci and Education. Lanham, Boulder, New York & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 41–65. Giroux, H.A. (2014). Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago IL: Haymarket Books. Giroux, H.A. (2018). The New Henry Giroux Reader. The Role of Public Intellectual in a Time of Tyranny, J.A. Sandin and J. Burdick (Eds). Gorham, Maine: Myers Education Press. Giroux, H.A. (2022). An interview with Henry Giroux. Cultural studies and pandemic pedagogy. In F. Mizikaci and A. Eda (Eds), Critical Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Pandemic. Keeping Communities Together in Times of Crisis. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gramsci, A. (1967). Scritti Politici (Political Writings). Rome: Editori Riuniti. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks. Critical Edition), ed. V. Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1995). Le Opere. L’ Antologia di tutti gli Scritti, A. Santucci (Ed.). Rome: Editore Riuniti. Inglis, F. (1995). Raymond Williams. London and New York: Routledge. Ireland, T. (1987). Antonio Gramsci and Adult Education in Brazil. Reflections on the Brazilian Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ives, P. (2004). Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. London and New York: Pluto Press. La Belle, T.J. (1986). Nonformal Education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Stability, Reform or Revolution? Westport, CT: Praeger. McLaren, P. (2015). Life in Schools. Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (6th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Manacorda, M.A (1970). Il Principio Educativo in Antonio Gramsci. Rome: Armando Editore. Manacorda, M.A. (1972). Introduzione (Introduction). In Gramsci, A L’Alternativa Pedagogica (The pedagogical alternative), ed. M.A. Manacorda. Florence: La Nuova Italia, ix–xxxix. Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1970). The German Ideology, ed. C.J Arthur. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. Possibilities for Transformative Action. London and New York: Zed Books. Mayo, P. (2012). Politics of Indignation. Imperialism, Postcolonial Disruptions and Social Change, Hants, UK: Zer0 Books. Mayo, P. (2015). Hegemony and Education under Neoliberalism. Insights from Gramsci. New York and London: Routledge.

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Mayo, P. (2019). Praxis, hegemony and consciousness in the work of Gramsci and Freire. In The Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire, ed. C.A. Torres. New York and London: Wiley Blackwell, 305–319. Mayo, P. (2020). Praxis in Paulo Freire’s emancipatory politics. International Critical Thought, 10(3), 454–472. Mayo, P. (2021). The turn to Gramsci in critical studies in education in North America. International Gramsci Journal, 4(2), 43–68. Mayo, P. (forthcoming). Critical pedagogy. In Research Handbook on Critical Theory, eds D. Kellner and R. Winter. New York and London: Elgar Publishers. Monasta, A. (1993). L’Educazione Tradita. Criteri per una valutazione complessiva dei Quaderni del Carcere di Antonio Gramsci (Education Betrayed. Criteria for a Complex Evaluation of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks). Florence: McColl. Morrow, R. A. and Torres, C. A. (1995). Social Theory and Education, A Critique of Theories of Social and Cultural Reproduction. Albany: SUNY Press. O’Cadiz, M. del P., Wong, P. & Torres, C.A. (1998). Education and Democracy. Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Santos, B. de S. (2017). Decolonizing the University. The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press. Tarlau, R. (2019). Occupying Schools, Occupying Land. How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education. New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, P. D. (2009). The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Leyden: Brill. Waugh, C. (2009). Plebs. The Lost Legacy of Independent Working Class Education. Sheffield: Post 16 Educator. Williams, R. (1960). The Long Revolution. Middlesex: Penguin. Williams, R. (1982 [1958]). Culture & Society. London: The Hogarth Press. Williams, R. (1983 [1976]). Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press. Young, M. (2013). Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: A knowledge-based approach. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(2), 101–118.

20. Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western Marxism Sourayan Mookerjea INTRODUCTION Enigmatically provocative of a radically insurgent historicist imagination, Antonio Gramsci’s writings rebuff hagiographical monumentalization as our textual legacy is both some fragmentary wreckage we inherit from the colonizers’ model of the world (Blaut, 1993) and a singular theoretical revolt against that model. As Fredric Jameson (2020) observes, Gramsci’s texts, written in prison, bequeath us a profoundly indeterminate corpus since the notebooks depart so radically from the colonizers’ privileged models of authoritative thought and scholarly expression that traditional disciplinary procedures for rendering them meaningful hit their limit. I am here building upon James H. Blaut’s thesis in his book, The Colonizers’ Model of the World (1993), because of its cogent critique of the colonizers’ historicism. Blaut argues that diffusionism serves as a meta-historical axiom in this model resulting in what he terms the ‘Eurocentric tunnel of time’ where most of the world is erased as terra nullius or as a-historical and irrelevant. In this model, racism now works not just through ideas and their reifications but through many other scientific, economic, informatic, aesthetic, communicative models comprising an intermedia ecology operative throughout the world. Indeed, the proliferation of such models for patching, adjusting or mutating our crisis-prone regime of accumulation is one dimension of the radical difference of Gramsci’s conjuncture from our own. Despite any apparent similarities in the unfolding of organic crises then and now, conjunctural difference here cannot be erased so that the task of this chapter is not to enact a return to Gramsci but rather to articulate those points of no return through which Gramsci’s writings might still be helpful for us. While some of these points of no return have been elaborated with compelling force by subsistence perspective ecofeminist degrowth critiques (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2000; Federici 2004; Salleh 2017; 350

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Barca 2020) of the Western Marxian tradition and by the critique of political economy offered by world-ecology (Moore, 2015), my brief in this chapter is specifically Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the question of what meaning and value this theory of power and politics may hold for us today. To this end, the argument of this chapter unfolds what might be called a post-Western Marxist constellation1 for navigating our way from Gramsci’s conjuncture to our own. As Jameson suggests, the fragmentary form of Gramsci’s ‘theory’ as well as its global travelling, renders ‘the productive uncertainty’ of Gramsci’s legacy uniquely urgent and relevant for critical-theorization of praxes seeking to intervene in what is still a fossil, racial capitalist regime of accumulation now completely intermediated by information-communication capitalism (Jameson, 2020, pp. xi–xii). Reading Ranajit Guha’s masterwork, Dominance without Hegemony (1997), in relation to Jacques Rancière’s historiographical theorization in The Names of History (1994), this chapter articulates the constellation of a historiographical narrative poetics of contradiction in Guha’s engagement with Gramsci’s problematic in order to historicize the concept of hegemony for our present. I argue here, admittedly against the grain of an established consensus, for the continued relevance of Guha’s argument regarding an ‘autonomous domain of subaltern politics’ for post-Western Marxist critical, historiographical-theorization. Guha’s theorization not only engages critically with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony but also negotiates a way through the wreckage of the colonizers’ model of the world. In the final part of this chapter, drawing on the work of subsistence perspective and social reproduction ecofeminists, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies and Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen, I argue that the domain of the social reproduction of means of subsistence, in its separation from the formal domain of capitalist commodity production, constitutes an autonomous domain of subaltern class politics, global in scale. The chapter begins with an introduction to Guha’s project and its relationship to Gramsci’s problematic.

PART 1: HEGEMONY AND SUBALTERNITY Spurred by the Naxalbari insurrection of landless and small-holding peasants spreading throughout West Bengal (1968–1975) to study the history of peasant insurgency in the subcontinent, Ranajit Guha (b. 1923) served as the senior editor of Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, from 1982 to 1989. Guha’s historiographical theorization and practice can be best situated, I argue here, in relation to the watershed rupture in historiography and its relation to the colonizers’ model of the world which unfolds primarily (but not exclusively) over the twentieth century and in which Gramsci’s prison writings have certainly played a significant role. The philosopher Jacques Rancière

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characterizes this rupture as the opposition, between ‘royal-empiricism’ and critical social-scientific history (more on this below) (Rancière, 1994, p. 21). This rupture deepens with the emergence of the global collective project of writing ‘histories from below’ breaking with the historiography of Great Men and their thoughts and deeds. The central place accorded to the binary opposition between elite and subaltern in Guha’s writings suggests its importance in Guha’s thought. But Gramsci’s contribution to elaborating this rupture deserves consideration first, as the term ‘subaltern’ arrives in Guha’s writings over-coded by Gramsci’s usage. The term ‘subaltern’ appears in Gramsci’s prison notebooks in the section presented as ‘Notes on Italian History’. Gramsci’s main preoccupations here are his concept of hegemony, the history of Italian (nation-) state formation, his concept of ‘passive revolution’ and its relationship to his concept of ‘war of position’. His notes explore the proposition that Italian nation-state formation, if not that of all European nation-states other than revolutionary France and England, was a reformist reaction to these revolutions. He theorizes this historical trajectory as a process of passive revolution (and especially the role played by the Piedmont monarchy in the Italian Risorgimento). In this context, Gramsci refers to ‘subaltern classes’ in contradistinction to the historical unity of ruling classes achieved through the foundation of a state. ‘The subaltern classes’, he writes, ‘by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘State’: their history, therefore is entwined with that of civil society; and thereby with the history of States and groups of States’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 52). For Gramsci, then, the expression ‘subaltern classes’ includes a broad heterogeneity of social classes excluded from command over state power. Consequently, the history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic ... Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only ‘permanent’ victory breaks their subordination, and that not immediately. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 55)

In relation to the ‘interruption’ of the political activities of subaltern groups by ruling classes, Gramsci furthermore observes that ‘[e]very trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should be of incalculable value for the integral historian’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 55). The importance of the Naxal insurrection as a spur to Guha’s project is crucially relevant in this context, for this uprising was brutally suppressed by the Indian state. Guha formulates the Subaltern Studies historians’ interrogation of these conjunctural events squarely in Gramscian terms. Decolonization, in India, had transferred the colonial state ‘intact to the successor regime’ so that the ‘predicament of the present referred directly back to the immediate past.’

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As such, Guha writes, ‘a vast space was opened up to allow our questions and concerns to crystallize around the overlapping themes of state and civil society. In both, Gramsci’s lessons were of invaluable help to us’ (Guha, 2011, p. 291). However, Guha also underscores the difference of the Indian situation from that which Gramsci sought to understand. As he notes, long before the advent of colonialism and nationalism, the social formation of the subcontinent had been riven, historically by ‘many-sided divisions between subaltern and elite in civil society’ involving the oppressions of caste, class, gender and generation which had survived ‘sporadic efforts at reform within indigenous society itself’ and which the colonial transformation of the state also left intact. ‘The Piedmont analogy used by Gramsci for reforms introduced by conquerors in parts of Europe’ Guha observes ‘had no South Asian parallel. There, the unity achieved in the common front of national struggle against imperialism fell apart as soon as foreign occupation ended and the nationalist elite acceded to rulership’ (Guha, 2011, p. 291). The historiographical project that Guha assembles from here then involves several theoretical and methodological innovations. The first of these involves attending to the singularity and novelty of the colonial state as it is forged and reformed throughout British Rule. Guha’s first book, A Rule of Property in Bengal (1996), dealt with one early but crucial aspect of this question, the British policy of Permanent Settlement by which the East India Company sought to both graft itself into the existing Mughal system of agrarian revenue extraction and to reshape it to secure the collaboration of indigenous landowners, while establishing a regime of accumulation linked to the world-economy. This study examines a singular historical contradiction: Guha traces the intellectual history of the Permanent Settlement back to the emergence of political economy in its precursor physiocratic critiques of feudalism. The anti-feudal episteme of the ‘most advanced capitalist power of the age’ underpinning the measures of the Permanent Settlement, Guha’s book demonstrates, becomes in its deployment ‘instrumental in building a neo-feudal organization of landed property’ (Guha, 1996, p. xiii). As such, ‘a typically bourgeois form of knowledge’ Guha writes ‘was bent backwards to adjust itself to relations of power in a semi-feudal society’ so that collaboration between the agents of the East India Company and the indigenous landed elite could be secured and imposed. A second innovation is methodological but follows from Guha’s ‘Naxal’ turn to the study of the history of subaltern insurgency. Presented in full elaboration in his second major book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Guha, 1983), this aspect of Guha’s work attends not only to the novelty of British Rule but also to the persistence of the past in the novelty of British Rule. As noted above, Guha never forgets that systems of oppression (and therefore subaltern/elite relations) have histories in the subcontinent that predate the British colonial state. A crucial aspect of the early Subaltern Studies

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research agenda was to ‘discover, in detail, the braiding of two categorically different types of mobilization in the nationalist movement led by Gandhi and his party, the Indian National Congress’ (Guha, 2011, p. 294). One elite layer was ‘organized meticulously by Gandhi and institutionalized in a modern parliamentary fashion’ (p. 294). But this depended upon what Guha formulates as an ‘autonomous domain of subaltern politics’ that belongs to the longue durée of subaltern insurgency. ‘The idioms that characterized it even in urban gatherings and marches’ Guha writes, ‘were those of country fairs and harvest festivals, of communal fishing and hunting, of collective labour undertaken by peasants on each other’s fields as neighbours and kinsfolk. This stream was thus unmistakably subaltern in articulation and organization.’ This ‘stream’ gave the nationalist movement’s political campaigns its mass character and its ‘volume and energy’ but, Guha notes, this aspect of the nationalist movement drew on subsistence-rooted popular cultural political traditions ‘going back to the time before the advent of modernity’ (Guha, 2011, p. 294). The specific historiographical problem that subaltern insurgency then poses is that this oral and multi-media popular cultural tradition leaves no direct documentary evidence of its existence in the Gutenberg prose, print- and information-dominant communication system of racial capitalist colonialism. Elementary Aspects addresses the resulting methodological challenges and proposes a set of rhetorical figures (negation, ambiguity, modality, solidarity, transmission, and, territoriality), through which the colonial archive can be read symptomatically, against the grain, to disclose the enduring historical facticity of subaltern insurgency. Guha’s famous formulation of the concept of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics is inseparable from this intermedia historiographical problematic and its relevance for theorizing hegemony in relation to the multiple colonialisms of racial capitalism.2

PART 2: AUTONOMOUS DOMAIN OF SUBALTERN POLITICS As an inaugural formulation for the Subaltern Studies historiographical project, Guha argues that in spite of the differences between [liberal-imperialist and liberal-nationalist historiographical camps] in other respects, these tendencies have been unanimous in the assumption that the power relations of colonial rule were contained in an integrated and unified field with all the ideological and political practices of the period articulated within a single domain. (Guha, 1997, ix)

In contrast, Guha argues that ‘there was no unified and singular domain of politics and the latter was, to the contrary, structurally split between an elite and

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subaltern part, each of which was autonomous in its own way’ (Guha, 1997, ix). But this thesis of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics has met with strenuous critical objection of two kinds. One criticism denies the ‘structural split’ and argues, in quasi-Foucauldian fashion, that ‘power is everywhere.’ Consequently, subaltern political resistance is entangled in the field of colonial power, rather than autonomous from it (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Haynes and Prakash, 1992; Ortner, 1995). The second criticism argues that while there may have been an autonomous domain of subaltern politics during the Raj, this is no longer the case in postcolonial India, especially after the so-called ‘silent revolution’ (Jaffrelot, 2003) of subaltern political assertion from the 1980s on. As Chatterjee argues, ‘[t]he deepening and widening of the apparatus of governmentality has ... transformed the quality of mass politics in the last two decades’ (Chatterjee, 2012, pp. 45–47). Consequently, David Arnold concedes both lines of critique: Situating subalternity primarily in the historical and social specificity of the colonial era also arguably made the idea of there being two separate and autonomous domains of politics—elite and subaltern—all too easy to construct, and critics then and now have understandably seen in this an extreme over-simplification and an excessive commitment to ideas of bifurcation. (Arnold, 2015, p. 263)

While each of these counter claims may be true in its own way, they miss the significance of Guha’s argument (which is hardly just an empirical claim regarding the structure of a spatial object – whether one calls it ‘power’, or ‘society’, or ‘the state’ – as the colonizers’ model of the world leads one to think). As Guha notes, the ‘unified field’ is that of the representation of politics posited by both the liberal-imperialist historiography of the colonizers and by the historiography of the liberal nationalists. At issue in Guha’s critical intervention is the ideological work historiography performs: ‘The importance of [historiography] for our problematic is hard to exaggerate’ (Guha, 1997, p. xiii), he writes, ‘[for] at a certain level the question of power in colonial South Asia or anywhere else in a land under foreign occupation can be phrased succinctly as “Who writes the history of the subjugated people?”’ (Guha, 1997, p. xiii, emphasis added). The right to write such history, of course, is no right, as it ‘flows from the sword’ and confers its ‘“right” on the pen as well’ (Guha, 1997, p. xiv). In this regard, the problematic Guha is constructing has to do with the nature of the colonial state, to be sure, but this always includes its means of legitimation or, at least, its rationalization. The colonizer’s version asserted that colonialism brought to India not only British institutions but their alleged Enlightened, liberal legitimacy as well, and, in this way brought to

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India the gift of modern politics (via education, or, via administrative opportunities in colonial institutions). Guha insists, however, that the nationalist standpoint shares the same assumption, but turns it to its own advantage by defining the content and character of politics simply in terms of the indigenous elite’s response to colonial rule and the sum of all the ideas and activities by which it dealt with the government of the day. (Guha, 1997, p. x)

In this regard, Guha’s theorization recognizes that depoliticizing what is political, erasing the collective existence of whole classes of people and their political demands, is one standard way of exercising patriarchal, colonial capitalist class power. The mirror symmetry between liberal imperialist celebrations of British rule and nationalist aspirations for inheriting the institutions of this rule makes this an autonomous domain of elite politics. Thus, we have a structural split: What is clearly left out of this unhistorical historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated in elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter (Guha, 1997, pp x–xi)

Indeed, it is precisely because subalternity constitutes an autonomous domain of politics that elite politics and the reach of state power becomes necessary: ‘Much of what we have to say has indeed been concerned with documenting the existence of these two distinct but interacting parts as well as with arguing why such a structural split between them was necessary’ (Guha, 1997, p. ix, emphasis added). Guha’s formalization of this theorization of this structural split between two distinct and interacting parts in the field of power makes clear that the ‘necessity’ of this split is also a logical necessity because of the historical character of capitalist class power of colonizers where ‘the authority of the state was structured as an autocracy that did not recognize any citizenship or rule of law.’ As he famously formulates it, dominance and subordination (in Guha’s notation, D and S) ‘imply each other’ as it is ‘not possible to think’ dominance without subordination and vice versa. This argument is about the semantic structure of his concept of power. Guha, a careful historian, keeps his discussion limited

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to the subcontinent and yet notes that the ‘mutual implication’ of dominance and subalternity is logical and universal in the sense that, considered at the level of abstraction, it may be said to obtain wherever there is power, that is, under all historical and social formations irrespective of the modalities in which authority is exercised there. (Guha, 1997, p. 21)

But the second step in Guha’s theoretical formulation then proposes a second tier of binary oppositions wherein the contingencies of historical situations, events and conjunctures impose themselves on theoretical construction. Thus, Guha resolves dominance into a binary opposition between coercion and persuasion (notated by Guha as C and P) and subordination into a binary opposition between collaboration and resistance (notated as C* and R). This constitutes the ‘interplay of the universal and the contingent, the logical and the empirical aspects of D/S, that makes up “the warp and weft in the fabric of world history”’ (Guha, 1997, p. 21). Nonetheless, since the opposition’s coercion/persuasion and collaboration/resistance in Guha’s scheme are said to inscribe contingencies, it is worth asking whether these are the only possible alternatives, or whether empirical research might describe other possibilities? Any answer to this question turns, first, on our understanding that Guha’s scheme generates the form for an (infinite) multiplicity of (socio-historical) contradictions. Second, these second tier oppositions are hardly contingent empirical facts that oppose each other but are rather descriptions based on interpretations that call for further interpretation. While Guha presents this second tier of oppositions as a tier of contingencies, we need to be mindful of Frege’s (1892) distinction between sense and reference (or, the corresponding post-Saussurean distinction between the signified and the referent) as this applies to this scheme, as this second tier is one of sense (signifieds) and not referents. The question of what might then be the referents of ‘coercion/persuasion’ and ‘collaboration/resistance’ returns us to Guha’s larger historical argument about class politics, hegemony and colonialism. Moreover, the guiding metaphor in his famous formulation of this question of empirical contingencies in his theorization of power is not an idle one, as we will see: It can be said, borrowing a concept from political economy, that the power relation D/S differs from society to society and from event to event according to the organic composition of D and S. Just as the character of any fund of capital – its capacity to reproduce and expand itself – and its difference from any fund in these respects depend upon its organic composition, that is, on the weight of its constant part relative to that of its variable part, so does the character of D/S in any particular instance, depend on the relative weightage of the elements C and P in D and of

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C* and R in S – on the organic composition of that power relation in short. (Guha, 1997, p. 22)

In formulating the question of empirical contingencies in theorizing power this way, Guha draws the key conclusion that ‘the contingent and the empirical stand for a zero sign even in those discourses that make the concept of power coincide ideally with its history. It is a shadow which no body politic, however authoritarian, can manage to shake off’ (Guha, 1997, p. 21). This insight regarding the historical impossibility of absolute power underpins Guha’s critique of the Gramscian juxtaposition of domination and hegemony ... as antinomies ... [which serves] too often a theoretical pretext for the fabrication of a liberal absurdity ... the idea of an uncoercive state – in spite of the basic drive of Gramsci’s own work to the contrary. (Guha, 1997, p 23)

While many of Guha’s critics invoke the empirical and the contingent against Guha’s formalism as actual, on the ground, ‘ambiguities’ and ‘ambivalences’ in the subaltern’s relationship to power, the aporia in Guha’s problematic of ‘dominance without hegemony’, rather, invites us to understand collective political agency as it is caught in the practico-inert of the specific historical-social contradiction embedded in the Gramscian problematic of hegemony. As there is no hegemony without the armour of force and coercion, in that sense, there is no hegemony in itself, Guha reminds us, but only as specifically various contradictory forms of domination.3 As Guha’s insistence on the centrality of historiography in his theorization suggests, this schema of nested oppositions, properly located as an analytic in the domain of sense, not reference, thereby presents a set of genre rules for generating narrative interpretations. Coercion, persuasion, collaboration, resistance are possible stories we can tell about history,4 and, the subaltern is, first of all, a character in those stories (though attention to this implication of the theory does not necessarily commit one to some cultural discursivist claim that history is merely narratives). The subaltern does not speak because the subaltern is a character who speaks only as emplotted to do so by the historiographer. While the necessarily narrative dimension of Guha’s theorization has eluded much of the reception of Guha’s work, it’s significance goes beyond both the logical necessity of Frege’s distinction and the further implication that the narrative character of the subaltern names the non-identity of subalternized collectives from ruling class nomenclatures and strategies of identification (given that no collective social group ever identify themselves as subaltern, however conscious of this condition they may be). Given the consistency with which Guha’s writes of subalternity as a class relation, the theorization of the

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subaltern as both a narrative character and a characterization of subalternity plays a crucial and necessary role in Guha’s larger project of both inventing a historiography from below and, in doing so, finding a path through the wreckage of the colonizers’ model of the world through a critical interrogation of its ‘bourgeois universalism’. ‘The critique of historiography should begin,’ Guha writes ‘by questioning the universalist assumptions of liberal ideology and the attribution of hegemony taken for granted in colonialist and nationalist interpretations of the Indian past’ (Guha, 1997, p. 20) and he cites two connected conditions for how such questioning becomes possible. One condition is that critique must situate itself ‘outside the universe of liberal discourse’ (Guha, 1997, p. 20). But this outside situation is a peculiar exteriority as it must have specific formal properties, the second condition, or it will speak past liberal discourse without articulating any critique. Guha arrives at his conclusions through a close consideration of Marx’s discussion, in the Grundrisse, of the ‘universalizing tendency of capital’ and its historical failures at realizing this drive, in order to argue that a ‘problematic based on the recognition of ... [contradictions and] anomalies, which are after all nothing but an unmistakable evidence of the frustration of the universalizing tendency of capital, would be to challenge the liberal paradigm itself’ (Guha, 1997, p. 19). We can elucidate the formal peculiarity of this exterior situation of historical contradiction in relation to ideological bourgeois universalism via Jacques Rancière’s discussion of the role of narrative running from the elite historiography of ‘Great Men’ through into the break initiated by the social scientific historiography of the Annales school. For Rancière’s demonstration of the persistence of narrative form across this break enables us to discern the role of a narrative poetics of contradiction in Guha’s theorization of power in its contradictory forms of hegemony. Rancière reminds us that the very concept of history, as ‘a regime of truth’, whether as elite literature or democratic social science, is ‘susceptible to only one type of architecture, always the same one – a series of events happens to such and such a subject.’ Second, historical knowledge is tied, for Rancière, irreducibly to the communicable word,5 whether of specific historical actors or of historians themselves, despite any and all artefacts, statistical data and measurements that may be mobilized in constructing an argument. Third, he notes that critical social history, in breaking with elitist historical literature, is able to nevertheless remain historical knowledge through three ‘contracts’, or, as I have called them, genre conventions, between historians and their reading/ media publics: the first is a scientific contract which authorizes the discovery of latent order behind appearances. The second is a narrative contract through

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which the latent order of historical discovery and explanation is still communicated and told as a story. The third is a political contract which ties what is invisible in science and what is readable in narration to the contradictory constraints of the ages of masses – of the great regularities of common law and the great tumults of democracy, of revolutions and counterrevolutions, of the hidden secret of the multitudes and the narration of a common history readable and teachable to all.

These three genre conventions, Rancière observes, result in a poetics of knowledge with a critical and political sharp edge since the first two conventions seem to contradict each other while the third convention does not resolve this contradiction ideologically but rather intensifies it through its entanglement with the contradictions of mass politics (Rancière, 1994, p. 9). Rancière distinguishes critical historiography from below from that founded upon a theoretical tradition he calls royal-empiricism, which he traces down from Hobbes and Burke. In marginalizing the popular voices of the poor as a source of knowledge in its campaign against illegitimacy and sedition, royal-empiricism silences them altogether. Guha’s critique of liberal-imperialist historiography and liberal nationalist historiography argues, we have seen, along similar lines. Rancière traces the persistence of narrative form in the poetics of historical knowledge from the elite literature of colonizers to critical historical social science down from Tacitus’ staging of the soldier Percennius’ voice in his account of the mutiny of the legions of Pannonia. Percennius’ voice is excluded from this account since Tacitus speaks for him but in doing so, Rancière argues, includes subaltern voice and agency in the rules of the genre (1994, pp. 29–30). On these grounds, I argue here that the possibility for any historiography to break from royal-empiricism or bourgeois universalism, the possibility for there to be historiography from below (as modelled by the philosophy of praxis) turns precisely on the genre rules of narrative as formulated in Guha’s schema of nested binary oppositions. Since subaltern politics will continue to unfold in history whether radical critical historians continue to exist or not, the thesis of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics is axiomatic for any historiography from below. Moreover, without this narrative character (and its specific local, allegorical6 avatars) nor would such historiography be communicable, whether to historians, or to publics, and to movements. Without positing the presupposition of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics, there is no way to prevent the institutional space of critical historiographies from below from being taken back into the colonizers’ model of the world. Historiography then becomes once more merely the glorification

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of the great deeds of oligarchs and plutocrats cast in the golden abstractions of bourgeois scientism. But the narrative character of the subaltern, we need to recall and emphasize, is also a characterization of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of the social relations of class power. In this regard, as the outside limit of the bourgeois universality of the colonizers’ model of the world, the narrative character of the subaltern names the non-identity of ruling capitalist-colonial class power. The narrative character of the subaltern names, in other words, the inescapable historical contradictions such power embodies as a result of its interdependence with this or that regime of accumulation. Consequently, the narrative character of the subaltern, in Guha’s reworking of Gramsci’s inauguration of this problematic, also names the non-identity of the narrative character of the multitude with itself which thereby names the non-identity of the character of the subaltern with itself.

PART 3: CIVIL SOCIETY AND ITS HISTORICAL CONTRADICTIONS As Guha observes, Gramsci’s theorization of the state generally refuses any stark binary opposition between civil society and political society. Such a binary opposition is the hallmark of liberal ideology in the colonizers’ model of the world. But as the editors of Selections from the Prison Notebooks note, on occasion Gramsci seems to take liberal-imperialism’s self-description of their class rule in the metropolis at face value as do other currents in Western Marxism.7 At issue is an ideology of civil society that derives from royal-empiricist historiography. For example, Hegel’s theorization of civil society as the dissolution of ‘the natural ethical spirit’ (kinship) now allows no quick and heroic sublation as the emergence of self-sufficient individuals ready to sign contracts after the interventions of feminist historiography from below have unmasked this history – of ‘capitalist transition’ and of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ – as little more than a patriarchal, white supremacist, proprietorial fantasy. Indeed, the violent ‘separation’ of social production from social reproduction, as theorized by Silvia Federici (2004), suggests a radically different genealogy of our contemporary inter-state system, which I examine below, arguing that not only is this separation also the subalternization of social reproduction but that we find in this the clue to histories of multiple colonialism, to their many wars against subsistence, and, to their accumulated violence of interlocking oppressions on which contemporary racial capitalist class power and the racial capitalist interstate system still depend. Ranajit Guha’s thesis regarding the autonomous domain of subaltern politics has continued relevance not only in the subcontinent but everywhere else insofar as this autono-

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mous domain is the subalternized domain of social reproduction and its politics of subsistence. This suggests a model of class politics from below – hydra politics, I will call it – radically different from Western Marxist theorizations of class or the multitude since its agents must remember history without the colonizers’ monuments if it is to activate into praxis. The importance of Federici’s critique for our re-evaluation of the concepts of hegemony and civil society lies in her attention to the processes through which the enclosure of the commons and the formation of a colonizing capitalist state results in ‘the accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies based on gender, race and age, become constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat’ (Federici, 2004, p. 63, emphasis added). Differences among the proletariat are intermediated by the separation of the domain of commodity production from the domain of social reproduction in the emerging gendered social division of labour. Moreover, these differences now continue to be intermediated by the accumulated violence of interlocking oppressions and multiple ongoing colonialisms. For Federici, class oppression and exploitation is predicated upon and has its historical conditions of possibility in the separation of the domain of formal waged commodity production from the domain of social reproduction. This historical insight, I argue here, requires us to scrap the traditional concept of ‘civil society’ as we receive it from the colonizers’ model of the world and re-theorize it anew (as a world-ecological labyrinth of colonizing institutions). In Federici’s re-interpretation of the canonical narrative of the transition to capitalism, the new colonizing, capitalist-patriarchal state emerging from this historical process of separation entails the restructuring of feudal warlord patriarchy through a new set of social relationships between landed warlords, royal sovereignty, civic, guild and church authority legitimizing and organizing violence against women. State power now alienates feminist commoners’ self-government over women’s sexuality, fertility, kinship reproduction and subsistence production, enforces heteronormative ‘housewifization’, relegating women to the emergent informal sector through laws enclosing and controlling female fertility, criminalizing ‘non-productive’ sexuality, devaluing women’s labour-power through the witch-hunts and other campaigns of terror, as well as through misogynist cultural production. One key aspect of this new form of patriarchical power is what Federici terms the patriarchy of the wage, which normalizes the husband as wage earner and renders women’s labour both invisible and undervalued (by both legal prescription and custom that wages be paid out to husbands/fathers for labour services performed by women) (Federici, 2004, pp. 97–100). The patriarchy of the wage thereby affirms and communicates a new form of popular masculinity based on a symbolic alliance between proletarianized men, the class of proprietors and the patriarchal state comprising the herculean power of nation-

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alist, white-supremacist ruling classes of the newly integrated trans-Atlantic centred world-economy (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000; Robinson, 2020). In this new world civilization of the wage, husbands, dispossessed of subsistence commons, objectively stand as phallic warlord signifiers of herculean power through the normalization of the husband as the ultimate bread-winner in the now wage-dependent household. In this way, the patriarchal wage is the medium for the subalternization of the proletarian household by the colonizing capitalist state through the labour market. The patriarchy of the wage intermediates subalternization and the accumulated violence of history. Federici’s account of wage patriarchy, moreover, enables us to understand how this new kind of systemic sexist oppression also serves as a communicative medium for the new anti-Black racism that Allen and Perry (2021), Cedric Robinson (2020), Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) argue is re-constructed out of feudal warlord racism and mobilized in response to the many-headed hydra of revolt and revolution throughout the trans-Atlantic racial capitalist economy over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. European feudal warlord racism, as a language of commanding labour, was a form of elite cultural discourse as foreign as the languages of European warlords were to those of their subject commoners. Now communicated through the patriarchy of the wage (as well as through differential punishment, work discipline brutality, anti-miscegenation laws, racist cultural production etc.), racism will from this period onward involve forms of racist pedagogy and the common sense resonance of ‘passing for white’ circulating between elite and popular culture. Over the subsequent centuries, European empires (with late nineteenth century sociology at their service) will multiply anti-Black racism as a model for inventing and adapting local elite racisms into interlocking systems of oppression and labour control throughout the racial-capitalist world-system while waging what Maria Mies and Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen term ‘wars against subsistence’ in order to enclose commons, extract natural resources, establish capitalist agriculture and commodity production (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2000, p. 17). The mystification of the systemic and qualitative difference of power between capital and wages (in their money form) will then also be communicated through racism, now serving as a medium of commodity fetishism, making it seem that wealth in the form of capital is the only possible form of wealth and that this springs from the interaction between technological innovation and the wizardry of finance, rather from the invisibilized and super-exploited domain of social reproduction under the waterline in Maria Mies and Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen’s (2000, p. 31) famous ‘iceberg model’ of the racial capitalist world-system which they argue underpins the alienation of social cooperation in capitalist production.

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It would be helpful then to recall here Federici’s account of what it is that makes interlocking oppressions historical systems of oppression. The differences among the proletariat are differences of both modes and methods of labour coercion, the differences in the histories of alienation from cooperation in belonging to different commons and the difference between waged and unwaged labour in the context of separation from the commons and so from means of subsistence. All these qualitative differences are systemic differences, Federici observes, insofar as the capital invested in the slave plantations and other unwaged and low-waged sites of commodity production throughout the trans-Atlantic economy required a relatively smaller number of relatively higher waged households to consume commodities if that capital is to be able to realize a profit and accumulate. Conversely, the super-exploitation of coerced labour in plantations, mines, ships, workshops and the super-exploitation of chattel slave housewife labour in social reproduction also cheapens and reduces the wages needing to be paid in the formal sector of commodity production (Federici, 2004, pp. 104–106). As Maria Mies and Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen and other ecofeminists (Shiva, 2013; Salleh, 2017; Barca, 2020; Dengler and Seebacher, 2019; Perkins, 2019; Paulson, 2020; FaDA Writing Collective, 2023) have argued ever since, this ‘iceberg model’ of the global economy persists to this day through several intervening regimes of accumulation, whereby the absolute common wealth of life and subsistence produced through waged and unwaged work is appropriated by the formal commodity producing economy through the diverse violences of cost externalization, of ecologically unequal exchange, of interlocking oppression and of state repression in uncertain, politically contested class projects seeking to secure conditions for some stable historical bloc or regime of quasi-monopolistic accumulation. Such historical, accumulated violence mediates possibilities for belonging, exclusion, subalternization and exploitation in the present. My use of the term subsistence in our present context draws directly from the dialectical revalorization of the concept of subsistence in the arguments of Maria Mies and Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen. For them ‘subsistence’ is a contradiction they embrace and affirm given that for those who wage wars against subsistence, the term ‘subsistence’ itself is a racist epithet of denigration, vilification and dehumanization (the ‘savage’, the ‘uncivilized’, the ‘premodern’, the ‘undeveloped’, etc.) whereas for those engaged in subsistence provisioning ‘subsistence’ means ‘freedom, autonomy, self-determination, preservation of the ecological and economic base, cultural and biological diversity’ (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2000, p. 20). This concept then marks an implacable conflict of evaluation and contradiction of meaning regarding which there are no colonizers’ fences to sit on. In reclaiming this term from the colonizers’ discourse then, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen

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repoliticize a concept of ‘neutral’ empirical analytic description. In doing so, they also illuminate the vast untold mass and volume of the ‘iceberg’ with its radically different ecology of value and wealth ‘under the water line’ which pervades the racial-capitalist world-ecology as both its formal social economy and informalized precarious, waged and unwaged, coerced subsistence and care sectors. Understood as a subalternized domain of social reproduction in which work ‘directly sustains life’ subsistence production constitutes an autonomous domain of subaltern politics. However, the accumulated violence of interlocking oppression then mediates in two deeply connected, or, intermediated, ways. This violence mediates the conditions for socio-ecological reproduction and the possibilities for participating in it. But this violence is then also the medium through which herculean class power is exercised to manage crises generated by contradictions in the domain of production. This is done by both ‘issuing permits’ for oppression and by exporting or externalizing crises to the domain of socio-ecological reproduction (i.e. turning social problems such as unemployment, public health, environmental toxicity etc. into private, personal problems by legal and extra-legal class force). Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen’s image of the iceberg is an enigmatic image after all, since what it models is in deep crisis (like icebergs) and the racial capitalist world-ecology is a system, precisely, of accumulated violence. Intermedia theory in this regard underscores how interlocking oppressions are media for passive revolutionary strategies responding to crises generated by the exercise of herculean ruling class power in the pursuit of growth as well as media through which social reproduction and subsistence provisioning takes place. A post-Western Marxist reconstruction of Gramsci’s problematic of hegemony, then, would underscore the contradictions characterizing it as a concept. Force equals consent insofar as force is redirected toward some other autonomous domain of subaltern politics in an ongoing war against subsistence. This war, of course, includes the items on Marx’s famous list with which he debunks the bourgeois hagiography of civil society, but it continues to this day so that the war of maneuver and the war of position intermediate each other rather than comprising the bourgeois ‘alternatives’ of opposing the system and working with it, of revolution and reform. The world has long been at war in one way or another and the accumulated violence of the ongoing war against subsistence means that social movements seeking to achieve ‘non-reformist reforms’ will be intervening in contexts of war. If world-ecology (Walker & Moore, 2018) uniquely makes intelligible why accelerating socio-ecological metabolism is our conjunctural fate and how this derives from the histories of the construction and exhaustion of commodity frontiers characterizing racial capitalism’s multiple colonialisms, and subsistence perspective eco-feminist critiques of growth and development enable us to understand this history as an

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ongoing war against subsistence, foregrounding for our politics the question of the meaning of the history of meaningless biodiversity (Shiva, 2013), then intermedia theory’s engagement with this Gramsci-Guha problematic enables an emerging post-Western Marxism to contribute to the contemporary and urgent pluriversal turn in the critical social sciences and humanities. This is because the crucial challenge posed by the pluriversal imperative involves engaging its knowledge politics without relapse into the cultural relativism/ bourgeois universalism reflex built into the colonizers’ model of the world. Hegemony, understood as specific socio-historical contradictions of herculean racial capitalist class power and its accumulated violence of interlocking oppressions, entails pluriversally autonomous domains of subaltern politics opposing the multiple colonialisms of contemporary racial capitalism.

NOTES 1.

2.

3 4.

5.

I am drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theoretical image of constellations in order to invoke the rhetorical, syntagmatic, narrative and figural mediations of conceptual clusters through which any concept emerges into intelligibility. (Benjamin, 2003) Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) intervention in the Subaltern Studies project ignores this specific intermedia problematic outlined above. While Spivak observes that the group overlooked the specifically feminist dimensions of subaltern insurgency, her efforts to conscript these historians to the cause of anti-humanism over-hastily assimilates the formal residue of 'royal empiricism’ (i.e. the subject– object binary split) to ‘positivism’. Ambitiously reading the entire corpus of the collective in one essay, she overlooks Guha’s discussion of his keyword 'subaltern consciousness’ in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (Guha, 1983). For Guha, this term is not a figure for cognitive-sensory immediacy but, rather, an appropriated, methodologically constructed, polemical keyword aimed critically at the racist-colonialist ideology of ‘mob spontaneity’ endemic in the colonizers’ model of the world. Guha uses the term ‘consciousness’ in relation to the word ‘insurgency’ in order to criticize ‘the idea’ that revolts and uprisings of the rural masses are ‘purely spontaneous – an idea that is elitist as well as erroneous’ (p. 4). Guha invokes Gramsci’s assertion, ‘there is no room for pure spontaneity in history’ when observing that elitist historiography malign the revolts of commoners as ‘pre-political’. Guha’s concerns are therefore very distant from the mid-twentieth century structure-agency debates which Spivak reads into the text ‘against its grain’. Chibber's (2013) critique of Guha turns on an obfuscation of this aspect of Guha's thought, for instance: "The reliance on consent, as against coercion or discipline, is what Guha takes to be the defining characteristic of political hegemony." p.41. Since Guha’s metaphor of the ‘relative weights’ in organic composition is literally non-sensical, we remain here within the horizon of the problematic of historical contradiction in interpreting the situated meaning of historically and ontologically meaningless violence. Rancière connects historical knowledge inextricably with the word; whether in speech, in the archives, or in the retelling. Why limit ourselves to speech and

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writing, though, when it is a question of the communicability of historical knowledge that is at stake here? As Harold A. Innis (2008) asks, why not the whole intermedia ecology? Since film, video, photography, artefacts of all kinds, music, poetry, song, architecture are all sources and belong to the contingently limited archive of factual evidence and since historical knowledge becomes popular culture and public memory and political ideology through all these media? I draw here on Fredric Jameson’s (2007) theorization of the signifying chain as a ‘horizontal allegory’ in contrast with the fixed correspondences of ‘vertical allegory’ of European medieval narrative poetry. Hoare and Smith note: that the term ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci itself has two faces. On the one hand it is contrasted with ‘domination’ (and such bound up with the opposition State/Civil Society) and on the other hand ‘hegemonic’ is sometimes used as an opposite of ‘corporate’ or ‘economic-corporate’ to designate an historical phase in which a group moves beyond a position of corporate existence and defence of its economic position and aspires to a position of leadership in the political and social arena. (Hoare and Smith, 1971, xiv)

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41–55. Allen, T., & Perry, J. B. (2021). The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression (One-volume edition.). Verso. Arnold, D. (2015). Subaltern studies: Then and NOW. In A.G. Nilsen & S. Roy (Eds), New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India, pp. 257–269. Oxford University Press. Barca, S. (2020). Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-hegemonic Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, W. (2003). The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Verso. Blaut, J. M. (1993). The Colonizer’s Model of the World  Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. Guilford Press. Chatterjee, P. (2012). After subaltern studies. Economic and Political Weekly, xlvii, 35, 44–48. Chibber, V. (2013). Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital. Verso. Dengler, C. & Seebacher, L.M. (2019). What about the Global South? Towards a feminist decolonial degrowth approach. Ecological Economics, 157, 246–252. FaDA Writing Collective. (2023). Why are feminist perspectives, analyses, and actions vital to degrowth? Degrowth Journal, 1, 00046. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch (1st ed.). Autonomedia. Frege, G. (1892). On sense and reference [Über Sinn und Bedeutung], Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100, 25–50. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers. Guha, R. (1983). Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. New Delhi. Oxford University Press. Guha, R. (1996). A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. Duke University Press. Guha, R. (1997). Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Harvard University Press.

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Guha, R. (2011). Gramsci in India: Homage to a teacher. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16(2), 288–295. Haynes, D. & G. Prakash. (1992). Introduction: The entanglement of power and resistance. In D. Haynes & G. Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, 1–22. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoare, Q. & G. Smith (1971). Preface. In Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (eds), A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, p. 20. Innis, H. A. (2008). The Bias of Communication (2nd ed.). University of Toronto Press Jaffrelot, C. (2003). India’s Silent Revolution. The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. Permanent Black. Jameson, F. (2007). Signatures of the Visible. Routledge. Jameson, F. (2020). Gramsci in the world. In R. M. Dainotto and F. Jameson (eds), Gramsci in the World. Duke University Press. Linebaugh, P., & Rediker, M. (2000). The Many-headed hydra [electronic resource]. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon Press. Mies, M., & Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. (2000). The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy. Zed Books. Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso. Ortner, S. (1995). Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(1), 173–193. Perkins, P. E. (2019). Climate Justice, Commons, and Degrowth. Ecological Economics. 160: 183–190 Paulson, S. (2020). Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic. Interface, A Journal for and about Social Movements, 12(1): 232–246. Rancière, J. (1994). The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, C. J. (2020). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Revised and updated 3rd ed.). The University of North Carolina Press. Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (2nd ed.). Zed Books. Shiva, V. (2013). Making Peace with the Earth. Pluto Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Deconstructing historiography. In R. Guha & G. Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford University Press. Walker, R. & Moore, J. (2018). Value, nature and the vortex of accumulation. In H. Ernston and E. Swyngedouw (eds), Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene. Routledge.

Section C

Hegemonic struggle

21. Social movements and hegemonic struggle Laurence Cox WHY DOES GRAMSCI MATTER FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS? The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (D’Orsi, 2017; Fiori, 1966) played an important role in early twentieth-century social movements, notably the ‘two red years’ 1919–1920. Poor, disabled and racialized, his understanding of the complexities of everyday struggle within capitalism is thought-provoking. The movements of the red years were defeated by the rise of history’s first fascism; much of Gramsci’s thought considers how movements could understand, resist and overcome this situation, a legacy which played a role in the anti-fascist Resistance and beyond. The concept of hegemony, which he adopted and reworked in the run-up to his imprisonment in 1926, is key to a particular understanding of movement politics. Simply stated, it recognizes that power structures go deeper in society than the most obvious levels of political offices and state violence, and that movements aiming at systemic transformation need to develop broad alliances around a different social project. This chapter unpacks hegemony from the perspective of praxis, ‘the unity of theory and practice’. The past century has seen many contested readings of Gramsci (Liguori, 1996), from different social positions and for different purposes. He was always known to activists: those who treated him as an anti-fascist martyr, those for whom he was a major but not infallible figure in the first struggle against fascism and those who rejected the Gramsci used to legitimate postwar Italian communist politics. In recent decades, this political Italian and Latin American reception has been overshadowed by Anglophone responses to the theoretical concepts of his Prison Notebooks, first translated (in abridged form) in 1971. In 1984, Geoff Eley noted how this shift led to an ahistorical and abstract interpretation. The underground Party saw its imprisoned members as politically deactivated (Spriano, 1979); this and prison censorship led to the Notebooks being written 370

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‘für ewig’, divorced from immediate political practice. This also avoided an open break with Stalinism (cf. Daniele, 1999) and ensured the transmission of his ideas via the postwar PCI far more widely than would otherwise have happened. The prosecutor did not stop Gramsci’s brain from working, but the prison apparatus did prevent him from acting, except for a brief period of adult education work. His frustration at this passive role pervades his prison letters (Gramsci, 1965). The Notebooks’ hermetic language and contemplative situation, however, made them attractive to Anglophone academics. The UK saw far weaker movements in 1968 than many countries (except for the North of Ireland, oddly absent from British discussions of hegemony). The US reception of this cultural studies reading was further depoliticized, very distant from Black struggles (Grossberg et al., 1992). As Thatcher and Reagan kept winning, large-scale radical popular movements became less and less a practical point of reference for Anglophone reflections on hegemony. The continuing power of this specific reception history in globalizing academia contrasts with the weakness of US and UK popular movements in recent decades, vis-à-vis the global South or even other Northern countries. This has not prevented US and UK academics from generalizing their local experiences of strategic defeat,1 and developing purely top-down accounts of hegemony which write off popular agency. In his prison writings on intellectuals, Gramsci (1991) distinguishes both between organic and traditional intellectual positions and between ‘directive’ (organizing) and ‘contemplative’ (purely explanatory) intellectual activity. As a Marxist he not only elaborates a conceptual architecture but also explores how people use ideas and language in social and political practice. This chapter thus approaches the relationship between social movements and hegemony not as timeless political philosophy but from a Marxist perspective, using history of ideas and movement research tools. For English-speaking newcomers, the key sources are his ‘Notes on the Southern Question’, the ‘Lyons Theses’ and the Prison Notebooks, all available in many formats in Italian and English. Davidson’s 1977 biography and Gramsci’s prison letters give useful context. Authors who have used Gramsci to think about social movements include Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Mayo (1999), Carroll (2010), Cox and Nilsen (2014), de Smet (2015), Chalcraft (2021) and Nielsen et al. (2022). For pure theory, Thomas (2009) is widely used.

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THE SOUTHERN QUESTION AND CONTESTED READINGS OF GRAMSCI Gramsci’s last writings directly for political praxis were written in 1926 as the above-ground (elected) leader of a semi-clandestine party in a country heading for full-blown dictatorship. They are the Lyons Theses of the party congress in exile, and the Southern Question essay he was working on at the time of his arrest. The essay includes remarkable organizing stories from his time as a migrant political organizer in Turin, connecting Sardinian migrant and working-class radical trends – in effect, given northern racism against migrant workers from the ‘South and islands’, a race-and-class analysis focused on alliance-formation and collective agency (Gramsci, 1935). These texts introduce Gramsci’s use of hegemony within an argument which defined his party faction, around alliance-formation from below and unpicking existing social alliances which supported fascism. This would shape the party’s contribution to anti-fascist resistance (Pavone, 1991), positioning itself as central to a broad alliance. Gramsci’s prison notebooks show him developing the concept and way of thinking in extraordinarily powerful ways. However, it has another, equally important history, of contested praxis in Italy’s remarkable postwar lefts, through popular struggles in the 1950s and early 1960s; the party’s slow breach with Moscow in pursuit of electoral majorities – but also the development of an extra-parliamentary left outside the party, which equally pursued extensive alliances (workers and students, feminists and Marxists, popular struggles against the chemical industry etc). Here too there are multiple, contested ‘readings’ of hegemony: when the PCI supported using armoured cars against the movements of 1977 in Bologna, would Gramsci have supported ‘historic compromise’ or the movement alliance on the streets? (Balestrini and Moroni, 2003).

THE SOUTHERN QUESTION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HEGEMONY The word hegemony appears only once in the Southern Question, but the figure of thought is everywhere – as an active process of alliance construction, ‘theirs and ours’. Echoing Marx’s 18th Brumaire (1972), Gramsci writes that the peasant South is ‘one vast social disaggregation’, where peasants in crisis operate through the village priest appealing to the landlord, thus reinforcing the local power structure. The Notebooks develop this, analysing the southern intellectual (doctor, priest, lawyer) as organizing force, paralleling Foucault’s later analysis of disciplinary religion, medicine, law and so on.

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Less central to the essay, but ubiquitous in Gramsci’s and his brothers’ Turin experience, was northern working-class racism: the alliance, analysed in the Notebooks around Italian state-formation, between the northern industrial bourgeoisie and northern working-class against the ‘backward’ south and its migrants (Cox, 2016). If Gramsci had left it there, we would have hegemony as structure alone, a familiar reading that positions those articulating as radical-because-pessimistic, reaffirming their academic status through the complexity of the analysis – a reading that suits a ‘traditional’ intellectual position deploying ‘contemplative’ roles. While the Lyons Theses present general lines for the party’s hegemonic strategy, the manuscript discusses three practical organizing stories, interrelated discussions of how Sardinian communists disrupted Southern forms of dependency. We have the story of Sardinian strikers inducing a Sardinian brigade to fraternize, using shared ethnicity to disrupt soldiers’ certainty that (urban, northern) strikers were ‘gentry’. We have communists convincing migrant workers to break with the cultural nationalism of the emigré Sardinian middle class and to join a reading group instead(!). And we have the Turin communists offering a safe seat to the anti-communist Salvemini, the voice of southern peasants prevented by corruption from being electable there, as a means of supporting the development of organic peasant leadership. Approaching movements and hegemony through these texts grounds them in political practice, rather than elevating the theorist by emphasizing the deep structures that make resistance hard to imagine. ‘Hard’ is not ‘impossible’ – and Gramsci’s life sees him fighting the hard battle. His analysis of power as ‘consent armoured by coercion’ has to be read the same way. Coercion can also be resisted, as in the massive Resistance of 1943–1945, and smaller-scale resistance from 1921 on. For praxis, the point of analysing hegemony is to identify where organizing can make a difference: why social movements matter. This aligns Gramsci with two often-misunderstood Marxist themes. Marx and Engels emphasize the working class, not because they see workers as most impoverished and oppressed (they do not, in contrast to the lumpenproletariat or the slaves whose liberation struggles fascinated Marx). It is because they see them as potentially the most effective political force: with a specific kind of interest in radical change (the proletariat as universal class), a specific potential for organizing (the proletariat as potentially rational) and strategically located within globalizing capitalism (with a capacity for hegemony). The key question is one of popular collective agency. Similarly too with ‘false consciousness’, read within the neoliberal academy as academics positioning themselves above ordinary people. The point of distinguishing objective interests from current class consciousness is to define where organizing happens: who is it worth talking to, who can be convinced

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that they have an interest in acting differently? The general answer is that it’s most worthwhile to talk to people whose political actions and beliefs contradict their social and economic interests; this is where one crucial kind of organizing conversation happens, where hegemony is unmade and (perhaps) remade. This chapter outlines a more praxis-oriented way of thinking hegemony, which sees any social order as a structure of alliances, where the challenge for social movements (‘from below and to the left’) is to disrupt those alliances and build more effective alliances of their own. The argument draws on work with Alf Nilsen (Cox and Nilsen, 2014) but is fundamentally shaped by activist workshops at the Ulex Project, co-developed with Natasha Adams, Hilal Demir, Holly Hammond, Gee McKeown and Jeroen Robbe.

FORMS OF POWER ARE FUNDAMENTALLY UNSTABLE Societies shaped around class relationships, patriarchy, racialized hierarchies and states only represent a small proportion of our species’ history. Capitalism (with its globalized racial division of labour, its articulation with particular kinds of patriarchy and its variety of state forms) is only one form of class society. From the 1848 Manifesto on, one key Marxist explanation for why social orders rise and fall is class struggle (discussed below in terms of multiple forms of movement). From pre-First World War discussions of monopoly capitalism and ‘imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism’, Marxists in Gramsci’s tradition periodized capitalism. His analyses of Fordism and fascism fit in here, with later analyses of, for example, national-developmentalism in the then ‘Third World’,2 Keynesian welfare states in the ‘First’ and state socialism in the ‘Second’; and (from the 1970s) neoliberalism. Lash and Urry (1987) usefully trace the changing alliances ‘above and below’ that enabled the latter transformation. More recently Arrighi (2010) articulated the relationship between different capitalisms and different globally hegemonic states. This analysis can be read at different levels – the transition from non-class to class societies (still contested in some parts of the world); between different kinds of class societies; from one form of capitalism to another – and need not be global: we can acknowledge the mid-twentieth century competition between fascisms, state socialisms, liberal and welfare capitalisms and national-developmentalisms, for example. This is what we should expect if power structures are formed by alliances. There are constraints on what alliances are possible, but the same thing doesn’t have to happen everywhere at the same time, and the future is not predetermined. Particularly important for movements is just how short the lifespan is of many different forms of capitalism: you could live through 20 years of Italian

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fascism, the postwar ‘thirty glorious years’, British empire in central Burma (1885–1948), the Soviet bloc or national developmentalisms. In 2014, when Alf Nilsen and I subtitled our book Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism, many people disagreed that neoliberalism was in crisis. That now seems far easier to accept, and has been said in many other ways since; however, a glance at the history sketched above makes it clear that no form of capitalism is likely to survive indefinitely, and also how short their shelf-lives are. The question is rather what comes next: another capitalism, a fascist barbarism, ecological collapse, or a better form of society? This is where hegemony and social movements come in. Any social order can be read politically as a form of hegemony, a structure of alliances; social movements can seek to disrupt this by undermining those alliances. That disruption will arrive sooner or later; it is less predictable what new structure of alliances (social form) will result. This is partly because movements ‘from below and to the left’ are not the only players; ‘movements from above’ (with privileged access to state structures, economic power and cultural status) also count. What movements do here matters hugely.

Note: Image © Natasha Adams.

Figure 21.1

Hegemony in detail: elite groups

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Figure 21.1 shows a workshop flipchart visualizing ‘a structure of alliances’ in practical terms, presented as an ideal type of near-total hegemony. For simplicity this is presented within a single state, but there is no reason to think of hegemony only at this level. Starting with social ‘leadership’: a given group succeeds not only in controlling coercion, but also in directive leadership across society as a whole, securing broad consent for what it defines as the most important social strategy(ies) – for growth, development, modernity etc., and successfully asserting authority to speak on this. That strategy is also expressed through organizing material relationships that to a greater or lesser extent meet needs (whatever ‘social contract’ exists), and in ‘common sense’ ideology(ies). For a practice-oriented discussion of hegemony, we can note the multiplicities, ambiguities and contradictions in forming any such group and strategy as well as the complex relationships to material production and the archaeological layers of ‘common sense’. These may be interesting as fracture lines, but we are not trying to develop a standalone social theory or model of political order. For social movements from below and to the left, our main area of interest is everywhere else in Figure 21.1: the relationships that this leading group constructs with other social actors and which constitute its leadership. First, it is not the only elite actor. Other elite actors have to be reckoned with; hegemony involves constructing a ‘historical bloc’ of such actors. In some cases (perhaps political parties, multinational corporations, leading media institutions, hegemonic intellectuals) it needs leadership strata identifying with the hegemonic strategy. This does not mean uncontested leadership: watching the complexities of Brexit or Trump, for example, this is obvious. But successfully asserting longer-term leadership does depend on controlling political parties, subduing or marginalizing fractions of international capital with competing aims, etc. Matters are different for elite groups who are broadly committed to the maintenance of state power (or capitalism, or patriarchy, or the racial hierarchies) without being particularly invested in which form it takes. Thus, the leaders of coercive state forces (police, military, judiciary, border and prison forces) may consistently support the current leading group out of loyalty to power in general. In the 2020 uprising in the United States, the police forces of largely Democratic cities were particularly contested by Black activists: whoever holds power, they will continue to kill young Black men, as indeed before neoliberalism. Of course, in other times and places such forces take sides more actively. The ruling group needs both kinds of support – committed support for its particular policies, and general support because it holds power. One strand of academic work on revolutions and movements discusses ‘political opportunity structures’, including the proposition that when elites are divided popular

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agency has most chances of success. This analysis agrees, but without accepting that everything depends on elites, and that change must suit at least some elite forces. The world’s great social revolutions all went far beyond this.

HEGEMONY IN DETAIL: POPULAR GROUPS The vast majority of society, by definition, does not consist of elites. However, people have different kinds of relationships to power; and this may vary in different parts of their lives, as Gramsci’s race-and-class analysis suggests. At the bottom of the diagram in Figure 21.1 are groups which do not (yet) exist as collective actors: newly emergent social positionalities who have not yet constructed everyday communities, developed shared identities, or learned to act collectively as movements. From the point of view of hegemony, they are therefore irrelevant (in this ideal situation of near-total hegemony). This includes, for example, first-generation university students training for welfare-state jobs before the uprisings of 1968. To the right are social groups whose consent is simply not required in a particular context. This varies: in most capitalisms it includes prisoners, the homeless, addicts, sex workers or indigenous populations. Fascisms expand this category to include many intellectuals, much of organized civil society, ethnic and sexual minorities and trade unionists. Those in this category in a particular kind of capitalism find themselves – largely without recourse – subject to arbitrary violence and normally unable to exercise significant power, except occasionally (riots, short-lived self-organizations of the homeless, prisoners and addicts, etc.). To the left are groups with latent collective agency, for example previously active groups which have not yet recovered from defeat. Social groups which are actively deferential and dependent on more powerful groups are another. Fundamentally resigned populations are a third. As with those subject to violence, they are the recipients or targets of action from above, but not independent actors. All these different categories are currently, in a situation of near-total hegemony, unable to exercise political agency; but it is crucial to realize that they are capable of doing so in the right conditions, and to support them in doing so. Like the Turin communists supporting the emergence of autonomous peasant self-organization, solidarity can be extended to self-articulation and organization of new groups; to organizing attempts among groups which are routinely subject to coercion; and to support steps out of apathy, deference and despair. ‘Solidarity’ here means specifically supporting the collective agency of others on their own terms – while recognizing that this is usually a process, attempting to realize potential.

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The most complex situation, however, is that of subaltern groups, those whose leadership or organizations (in this near-perfect hegemony) are thoroughly reliant on their relationships with the existing ruling group and its social strategy. Conservative trade unions, boardroom feminism, the pink pound, minorities benefiting from tokenistic ‘representation’ are all obvious examples. Typically, such arrangements do benefit some members of the wider group materially (e.g. boardroom feminism can also benefit some middle-class women) while necessarily excluding wider demands (e.g. conservative trade unions accepting precarization, subcontracting, zero hours work etc., particularly when they affect women or ethnic minorities). Here, there is real collective agency, but it is effectively co-opted – while more or less successfully presenting itself as the only way for the subaltern group to represent itself (trading on working-class backgrounds, moralistic pointing at outrageous situations which will supposedly be resolved by a more diverse state, the politics of celebrity etc).3 This model is a large-scale kind of ‘power structure analysis’ – identifying not just who is powerful, but which alliances are key, who those alliances are made with and on what terms.

HEGEMONIC CRISIS For simplicity, we can discuss crises of hegemony as the breakdown of such alliances. But from the point of view of practice, part of the role of social movements – in moving from particularism to social transformation or revolution – is to actively disrupt such alliances, while constructing their own on other terms (Smucker, 2017); these alliances are often with different fractions of subaltern groups, and with other organizations within particular social groups. This is literally ‘revolutionary practice’ because – if successful – it involves upending a particular form of hegemony, an organic crisis opening the way for a different kind of society, and an alternative alliance which may be strong enough to shape that future. As autonomists say, ‘we are the crisis of capital’ – or rather, we can become it. Figure 21.1 showed a near-total hegemony; Figure 21.2 shows a hegemonic crisis. This probably needs less commentary than Figure 21.1. There is no longer one agreed social direction and a largely uncontested leading group; ‘a time of monsters’ ensues with many different experiments, with greater or lesser success. Popular material needs are no longer felt to be met and the ‘social contract’ is seen as having been betrayed. There is no longer a single, broadly accepted narrative of society’s direction. Factions of elite groups that previously supported the current hegemony as a concept are displaced or contested by new ones attempting to articulate

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Note: Image: © Natasha Adams

Figure 21.2

Hegemonic crisis

group survival strategies; meanwhile, the instrumental support from other elite groups stops as they flee the sinking ship. Much of a previously passive society now becomes active: resigned, defeated, deferential groups acquire new hope, refuse to comply and take action on their own behalf. Those normally coerced strike back in many different ways, and new social actors appear from below. Within subaltern populations, internal revolts displace old leaderships: rank-and-file organizing disrupts conservative labour forms, young radicals contest respectable ethnic minority leaderships, new waves of feminism and queer activism emerge, etc. These revolts are characterized (in this ideal form) by much wider participation, the articulation of needs from a much broader proportion of the social group, and more substantively democratic ways of organizing. This typically appears as ‘social movements’ because the poor, the powerless and the culturally stigmatized now find new ways to self-organize outside ‘the proper channels’ and officially approved tactics. Many people cease experiencing themselves simply as inhabiting a positionality or identity and come to understand themselves in terms of collective struggle. We can tell the story of the ‘long 1968’ (for example) like this (Mohandesi et al., 2018). In many countries – West, East and South – previously coerced, passive or emergent groups articulate themselves as communities in struggle, while upheavals displace the conservative leaderships of subaltern

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popular organizations. We also see – usually less successful – attempts at building alliances to pose alternatives to welfare-state, state socialist or national-developmentalist political strategies. While these movements did constitute a ‘crisis of capital’, they did not succeed in co-creating a new form of society (cf. de Smet, 2016), unlike the earlier subaltern struggles which fed into many different national-developmental strategies, some state socialisms and some welfare states.

HEGEMONY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE In this context, the practical uses of hegemony as a concept are: 1. Mapping the structure of alliances that constitute the existing set of hegemonic relationships, including their weak points. 2. Attempting to disrupt these weak points, notably by creating other relationships ‘from below’. 3. Developing different alliances ‘from below and to the left’. 4. Supporting the articulation of popular collective agency in the different popular spaces identified above (emergent, coerced, resigned, subaltern). In practice, of course, these are rarely entirely separate. Gramsci’s interconnected discussions of organic and traditional intellectuals, good sense and common sense, and wars of maneuver and wars of position (Reed and Garrido, Chapter 9 this volume; Egan, Chapter 11 this volume) frame the question somewhat differently. One space where Marxist uses of Gramsci and ‘post-Marxist’ approaches (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) diverge is in the social grounding of movement practice (cf. Carroll and Ratner, 1994). For Gramsci, the tension between good sense (the active development of understanding from subaltern groups’ practice and hence their social relationships) and common sense (the passive sedimentation of ideologies derived from many historical layers but dominated by the powerful) is key. The workers’ movement, or an independent peasant movement, would have to articulate ‘a vision of the world and an ethics consistent with that’ starting from their own ‘good sense’. His analysis does not restrict these terms to class; they can equally be used for thinking feminist struggles against patriarchy, for example. The good sense/common sense distinction parallels that between subaltern groups’ organic and traditional intellectuals. While everyone is an intellectual, Gramsci is interested particularly in those who have this full-time role – often unpaid in the case of activists. Their intellectual activity is both ‘theoretical and directive’, in other words includes organizing, whether politically or in

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Foucauldian ways, ‘an ethics consistent with that’. The organic intellectuals of subaltern groups are organic because their activity articulates the group’s good sense. This is clearer for movements defined by their agents – the workers’, peasants’, women’s, LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, migrant and so on movements – and less so for movements defined by issues (Barker, 2013; Cox, 2013). This is one aspect of the war of maneuver: the process of organizing and arguing that centres subaltern good sense in many social groups, institutions and fields. We can express this as the development of separate social movements (or class consciousness, etc.), but often it is ‘intersectional’, as in Gramsci’s race-and-class examples. My own analysis, around the articulation of ‘local rationalities’, develops from this (see also de Smet, 2015).4 This overview makes it clear that the task of revolutionary social movement activists (there were also social democrat and corporatist kinds – or, today, liberal and NGO strategies, tokenizing and celebrity-oriented ones, etc.) is to carry out the counter-hegemonic tasks above in reverse order: articulating good sense, developing alliances from below and disrupting those from above, while mapping the overall structure of power. This is their contribution to creating an organic crisis (which can start from many different directions); our organizing and their crisis are the same. This is what Nilsen and I (2014) call the ‘ABC of activism’ practised by experienced organizers: within emergent struggles, resist clientelist or charity forms of dependence; broaden out discussions about the issues while linking to related campaigns and other places; seek alliances with other movement actors; develop a wider sense of identity; learn about the international dimension; and so on. Practical actions like these underpin our developmental analysis of movements, from local rationalities (good sense) via militant particularisms conflicting with the strategies of the wealthy, powerful and culturally privileged; as militant particularisms allying across space and developing into (‘single-issue’) campaigns; and multiple such campaigns coming together into a social movement project, carried by a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. While it is easier to think hegemony nationally, world-systemic or continental, etc., forms of hegemony and crisis are crucial (as I have argued elsewhere, such crises underlie ‘waves’ of revolution and movement), and regional and local hegemony also matters. We can also usefully think like this within particular fields: for example, analysing the coalition of coercion that enables power holders to successfully deploy a particular level of violence. Some such analysis is central to movement work attempting to disrupt this coalition and thus reduce the levels of violence they can use against us (Cox, 2014a; Cox, 2015; Cox and Dhorchaigh, 2011).

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THE PAST HUNDRED YEARS Like Lenin, Luxemburg or Connolly, Gramsci’s political activity was cut violently short, so that (unlike Lukács or Trotsky) their sense of what movements could achieve ended with the (extraordinary) global movement wave that produced not only the October Revolution and the Irish Revolution, but also Ghadar, the Egyptian and Mexican Revolutions, and the wave of mutinies, strikes, revolutions and soviets that swept Europe from 1917 to 1923. From the March on Rome, Gramsci and the movements he was involved in were largely on the defensive (with the unfortunate exception of Germany) and from the mid-1920s underwent the internal violence of Stalinization. Space does not allow analysing the subsequent century of popular struggle around the world, but a few points of reference can make it easier to bridge the gap in language between Gramsci’s commentary and contemporary usage. One is the term ‘social movement’. Marx, like other nineteenth century authors, often used the phrase to refer to ‘the whole movement of society’ (Barker, 2013; Cox, 2013). Popular agency developed in many ways and directions, all understood as parts of a general process which there was good reason to be broadly optimistic; the social development of situated rationality, ‘good sense’. We are now – since the 1920s, not just the 1980s – inclined to think of multiple ‘movements’, and to use the term for very specific issues even where the broader struggle is clear, and for individual organizations. From a Gramscian perspective (and in line with his philological training), we don’t need to fix a ‘correct’ meaning of ‘social movement’ as a concrete noun. However, the abstract singular noun – ‘social movement’ as process – is immediately relevant to the development of hegemony, in the articulation of popular agency (on the basis of good sense, by organic intellectuals, etc.). Raymond Williams’ work, not least his 1977 distinction between residual, dominant and emergent social forms, can help here. It fits directly with the historical understanding of many different hegemonic situations replacing one another in conflictual and contested ways; there is not simply one hegemony, but rather the new struggles to be born, and the ghosts of older pasts attempting to return to life. The process of struggle can also be very limited or very far-reaching, as alliances are made, broken or not attempted; and (as in 1922–1937 for Gramsci) it can be driven in the opposite direction by defeat, demobilization and repression. Hilary Wainwright’s (1994) work analyses the rise of neoliberalism in movement terms. Her perspective parallels Gramsci’s thought on good sense versus common sense, giving the example of feminist consciousness-raising as in effect an articulation of good sense through movement activity; it is

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perhaps the single most important contemporary reading of Gramsci in social movement analysis, thanks also to its grounding in practice. While, as far as I know, Gramsci never uses the term ‘counter-hegemony’, it is clear that the logic of opposing hegemony and disrupting hegemonic alliances is largely the point of his analysis (see Carroll, 2010). Williams’s observation, ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’, reworking Gramsci’s Romain Rolland quote about optimism and pessimism, is often ignored by Gramscians disconnected from popular movements. However, ‘counter-hegemony’ as disruption may not be identical with ‘counter-hegemony’ in the sense of an emergent or proto-hegemony; there is also an anarchist reading of counter-hegemony as opposition to hegemony of any kind, what Carroll (2006), responding to Day (2005) and others, calls anti-hegemony. As a Marxist, Gramsci would not have seen anti-hegemony as a realistic strategy: it is only in a world without inequalities where ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (in other words, communism) that an end to any kind of collective social ordering can be imagined. We can, though, imagine a situation where collective consent is achieved without coercion, through alliance-formation and shared language (cf. Hardnack, 2019). Much community organizing, particularly in the majority world and indigenous communities, has this form – movements do not coerce their own participants, but nonetheless manage to achieve broad agreements over strategy. This brings us back to the formation of historical blocs in a positive (movement) sense (Carroll and Ratner, 2010; Sotiris, Chapter 7 this volume). While, for Gramsci, a ‘Modern Prince’ (Chrysis, Chapter 13 this volume) in the form of a political party was a privileged tool for this, the subsequent history of his own party and the others whose bolscevizazzione he saw during the Third International is less happy. This also goes for other kinds of party proceeding from related visions in Europe, Asia, Latin America or Africa: it is not that political parties can contribute nothing, but today the real questions start at the point that naive readings, unfamiliar with the actual history of left and movement parties, imagine as an answer (cf. Antentas, 2022). One other area where Gramsci’s work has been widely drawn on around social movements is popular and adult education, often together with Paulo Freire (Hall et al., 2015; Choudry, 2015; Mayo, Chapter 19 this volume). This is closely tied to practical attempts to develop organic intellectual activity: movements can be seen as spaces where this takes place, or alternatively popular education can be imagined as a route towards movement development. In the 2020s, an important question is how far contemporary movements control what Marx calls ‘the means of mental production’. Paralleling Sears’s

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(2014) arguments about the infrastructure of dissent, I have argued (Cox, 2023) that organic intellectual activity or the articulation of good sense needs some control of these. But if movement-internal (-owned, -controlled) spaces of communication, discussion, education, theorizing, research etc. are crucial (Cox, 2014b), what do we do if (as across the global North) they are weaker than they have been in decades? The contrast with the cornucopia of movement media, internal debate and strategizing, and writing ‘from and for movements’ in the long 1968 (Mohandesi et al., 2018), never mind earlier, highlights the problem. Again, especially in the global North (see Novelli et al., 2024 for startling majority world contrasts), radicals are often reduced to piggybacking on other institutions in order to be heard, let alone communicate with each other, including commercial and state media (including for-profit radical media), subject to the logics of advertising and largely passive audiences; social media algorithms that prioritize celebrity and outrage; and academia, with its own peculiar logics. All this allows limited space for agitation (or rather for bringing people to outrage, not necessarily to action); it offers possibilities for education (understanding the persistence of problems despite ‘awareness’); but it gives very little space for real organizing beyond clicks and petitions.5

CONCLUSION The für ewig Gramsci can be rethought in terms of the longue durée of popular struggles, the centuries-long struggles of subaltern groups to articulate their own good sense despite everything and to become the makers of their own history. In this context, social movements of many kinds appear both as key drivers of democracy, welfare, human rights, formal equality, redistribution, cultural transformation and so on – and as ambiguous, often falling short of their own goals and expectations, or (as in the vast majority of the world’s states, which emerged from anti-colonial struggles within living memory) needing completion by new movements using a different language. For audiences in the global North – especially for those English and US audiences who occupy an unhelpfully strategic location in today’s processes of cultural selection and redistribution – Gramsci is sometimes attractive because of his personal credibility (a retrospective celebrity), the cultural capital represented by his hermetic language, and the possibility of reading him so as to seem intelligent because pessimistic. If we want to recover Gramsci as a social movement intellectual, we have to find points of reference closer to those of the two red years, the Russian or Irish revolutions, the struggles of peasant life or other parts of the wave of mutinies and strikes that brought the First World War to an end (Falossi and Loreto, 2007).

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If we want a better contemporary reference point, we could think of the broad ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberalism, which in many countries successfully undermined its legitimacy in the years before the 2007–2008 crash, which reappeared around 2011 in a second wave of revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, indignad@s movements in southern Europe and smaller Occupy events in the Anglophone world, and which today is contributing to a hundred-year peak of popular mobilization6 (Silver, 2021; Ortiz et al., 2022). If anything gives us a sense of the broad meaning of the struggle over hegemony, it is this relationship between movements and the process of social movement, rather than the more typical media commentary on individual organizations and events. In Ireland, I think of our three genuinely mass movements of the last decade, a peculiar late version of the ‘2011 wave’ – the defeat of water charges (Cox, 2017), the referendum on marriage equality and the successful struggle for abortion rights (Caherty et al., 2022) – experiences of large-scale, radical and transformative action which are simply outside the experience of many contemporary commentators on Gramsci. I think too of the 40-year struggle of the EZLN in Chiapas and globally, which helped spark the ‘movement of movements’ through the 1995 and 1996 encuentros with radical movements around the world (Leyva Solano, 2021). I also think of the extraordinary experience of revolution in Rojava (Knapp et al., 2016), following the Tunisian coup the only survivor of the MENA revolutions, and via the Kurdish women’s movement key to the initiation of the 2022–2023 Iranian uprising. And I note the near-total lack of interest on the part of supposedly radical intellectuals in these events, which are neither commercially saleable, viable sources for social media celebrity, or reliable routes for academic prestige – contrasting with deep movement solidarity with Rojava in the face of ongoing Turkish and jihadi warfare, and the extensive engagement with the 2021 Zapatista tour of European social movements. The ‘traditional intellectual’ recuperation of Gramsci will always fall short for these reasons. But if we want to think of Gramsci in his own terms, as a communist intellectual facing the onset of fascism who ‘went down with his ship’ like Luxemburg or Connolly, we need to try to read him to ask what practical engagement with radical mass movements means today.

NOTES 1.

The defeats of academic unions and rise in university managerialism in these countries provides a very local context of plausibility for this thinking, which intellectuals then naturally imagine as universal.

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2.

The French (tiers état) makes the reference to the Third Estate clear: ‘it is nothing but wants to become everything’, in other words holds potential for transformative agency. On a different scale, see Nielsen et al. (2022) on social movements and hegemonic conjunctures in India. The war of maneuver/war of position discussion also briefly mentions ‘the Irish bands’ – presumably the guerrilla War of Independence; PN quaderno I/XVI; para 134. Gramsci then veers off course to discuss it literally, rather than pursuing the political metaphor. Chalcraft (2021) offers some powerful thoughts along these lines. At least up to 2019, after which data are skewed by Covid lockdowns.

3. 4.

5. 6.

REFERENCES Antentas, J. (2022). The 15M, Podemos and the long crisis in Spain. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 28(3): 365–380. Arrighi, G. (2010). The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Balestrini, N. & Moroni, P. (2003). L’orda d’oro 1968-1977 (3rd ed.). Milano: Feltrinelli. Barker, C. (2013). Class struggle and social movements. In C. Barker et al. (eds), Marxism and Social Movements (pp. 41–62). Leiden: Brill. Caherty, T., Conroy, P. & Spiers, D. (2022). Road to Repeal. Dublin: Lilliput. Carroll, W. (2006). Hegemony, counter-hegemony, anti-hegemony. Socialist Studies (Fall): 9–43. Carroll, W. (2010). Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony. Interface 2(2): 168–198. Carroll, W. & Ratner, RS. (1994). Between Leninism and radical pluralism. Critical Sociology 20(2): 1–24. Carroll, W. and Ratner, RS. (2010). Social movements and counter-hegemony. New Proposals 4(1): 7–22. Chalcraft, J. (2021). Revolutionary weakness in Gramscian perspective. Middle East Critique 30(1): 87–104. Choudry, A. (2015). Learning Activism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cox, L. (2013). Eppur si muove. In C. Barker et al. (eds), Marxism and Social Movements (pp. 125–146). Leiden: Brill. Cox, L. (2014a). Changing the world without getting shot. In M. Lakitsch (ed.), Political Power Reconsidered. Peace Report 2013 (pp. 103–126). Vienna/Berlin: LIT-Verlag. Cox, L. (2014b). Movements making knowledge. Sociology 48(5): 954–971. Cox, L. (2015). Challenging toxic hegemony. Social Justice 41(1–2): 227–245. Cox, L. (2016). The southern question and the Irish question. In M.B. Jørgensen and Ó.G. Agustín (eds), Solidarity without Borders: Gramscian Perspectives on Migration and Civil Society (pp.113–131). London: Pluto. Cox, L. (2017). The Irish water charges movement. Interface 9(1): 161–203. Cox, L. (2023). Social movements producing knowledge. In C. Dolgon (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, L. & Dhorchaigh, E.N. (2011). When is an assembly riotous, and who decides? In W. Sheehan and M. Cronin (eds), Riotous Assemblies (pp. 241–261). Cork: Mercier. Cox, L. & Nilsen, A.G. (2014). We Make Our Own History. London: Pluto. Daniele, C. (ed.) (1999). Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca. Torino: Einaudi.

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Davidson, A. (1977). Antonio Gramsci. London: Merlin. Day, R. (2005). Gramsci is Dead. Toronto: Between the Lines. De Smet, B. (2015). A dialectical pedagogy of revolt. Leiden: Brill. De Smet, B. (2016). Gramsci on Tahrir. London: Pluto. D’Orsi, A. (2017). Gramsci. Milano: Feltrinelli. Eley, G. (1984). Reading Gramsci in English. Center for Research on Social Organization working paper 314, University of Michigan. Falossi, L. & Loreto, F. (eds). (2007). I due bienni rossi del Novecento 1919-20 e 1968-69. Roma: Futura. Fiori, G. (1966). Vita di Antonio Gramsci. Bari: Laterza. Gramsci, A. (1935). Alcuni temi della questione meridionale. France: publisher unknown. Gramsci, A. (1965). Lettere dal carcere. Torino: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1991). Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce. Roma: Riuniti. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., & Treichler, P. (1992). Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Hall, B., Clover, D., Crowther, J. & Scandrett, E. (eds) (2015). Learning and Education for a Better World. Rotterdam: Sense. Hardnack, C. (2019). Gramsci and Goffman, together at last. Interface 11(1): 200–215. Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Knapp, M., Flach, A. & Ayboga, E. (2016). Revolution in Rojava. London: Pluto. Lash, S. & Urry, J. (1987). The End of Organized Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Leyva Solano, X. (2021). Guerras, zapatismo, redes. San Cristóbal: Cooperative Editorial Retos. Liguori, G. (1996). Gramsci conteso. Roma: Riuniti. Marx, K. (1972). The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Moscow: Progress. Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. London: Zed. Mohandesi, S., Risager, B. & Cox, L. (eds). (2018). Voices of 1968. London: Pluto. Nielsen, K., Nilsen, A. & Vaidya, A. (2022). Theorizing law, social movements and state formation in India. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 42(1): 20–35. Novelli, M., Benjamin, S., Celik, A., Kane, P., Kutan, B. and Pherali, T. (2024). Laboratories of Learning. London: Pluto. Ortiz, I., Burke, S., Berrada, M. & Cortés, H.S. (2022). World Protests. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavone, C. (1991). Una guerra civile. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Sears, A. (2014). The Next New Left. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood. Silver, B. (2021). A new rising tide of global social protest? Seminar for UCSB Global Studies Colloquium, May 5. Smucker, J. (2017). Hegemony how-to. Oakland: AK. Spriano, P. (1979). Gramsci and the Party. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Thomas, P. (2009). The Gramscian Moment. Leiden: Brill. Wainwright, H. (1994). Arguments for a New Left. Oxford: Blackwell. Williams, R. (1977). Dominant, residual and emergent. In Marxism and Literature (pp. 121–127). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

22. Hegemonic struggle and right-wing populism Owen Worth INTRODUCTION Central to Gramsci’s thought was his preoccupation with the rise of fascism and to the reasons why it gained ascendency within Italian political society. Contained within the Prison Notebooks are a multitude of pieces that provide commentary – some informative and some probing – on the content and form of fascism and where it could be situated in its historical relevance. Yet, it has been Gramsci’s wider work on hegemony, organic crisis and popular culture that has provided us with perhaps greater insights into the development of right-wing movements in the contemporary era of neoliberalism.1 The successes of Trump in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of radical right Parties across Europe and of divisive figures such as Bolsonaro, Modi and Erdogan have left a backlash to the era of so-called ‘progressive neoliberalism’ that had emerged through the globalization of free market capitalism which had developed with the demise of the Soviet Union (Fraser, 2017). The post-Cold War era saw several studies use Gramsci’s model of hegemony to demonstrate how the legitimacy and market practices of neoliberalism have prevailed globally since the 1990s, leading to the creation of forms of neoliberal common-sense within different levels of political and civil society (for example, Plehwe et al., 2005; Rupert, 2000; Harvey, 2005). Building from the Gramsci-boom across the social sciences, studies have similarly been developed to evaluate how such areas of common-sense have been contested, what forms of resistance have emerged and how neoliberalism has reproduced itself as a result (Gills, 2000; Amoore, 2005; Carroll, 2007; Worth, 2013). In this era of protracted crisis, right-wing movements can be understood and analysed in a similar way. First, they can be seen as forms of contestation to the preceding era of progressive neoliberalism and second as a contradictory set of movements that both comply with and react against the wider reproductive nature of neoliberal capitalism. 388

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This chapter will seek to do a number of things. First, it will look at Gramsci’s own writing on fascism and authoritarianism. Some of this is contained within his work on passive revolution and others located within his understanding of Caesarism. Second, I will show, whilst these are of interest to us, the wider dynamics of hegemony and of hegemonic crisis are more fruitful when it comes to situating current right-wing movements within contemporary (neoliberal) global political society. Of particular interest here is the intellectual composition of such movements and how they have constructed certain narratives that have appealed to and gain public support. As Gramsci demonstrated so effectively, the role of intellectuals in shaping popular ideas is paramount when understanding how such movements are set up and what their wider relevance might be. As such, this chapter will show that we can provide a Gramscian understanding of recent right-wing populist movements by – to paraphrase Stuart Hall – thinking in a Gramscian way to locate their meaning and relevance within wider questions of hegemony, contestation and neoliberal renewal and reproduction (Hall, 1988).

FASCISM, PASSIVE REVOLUTION AND CAESARISM Gramsci’s own work on the development and significance of fascism is both hugely significant yet at the same time obviously incomplete. As he was writing during the heyday of fascism, Gramsci did not have the luxury of placing it in its historical perspective. Where he is especially invaluable however are the many observations he made from his political struggles at the time and his own insights regarding the reactionary nature of Italian civil society. Much of his earlier writings (or indeed pre-prison writings) focused on asking how and why workers consented to fascism when it was not in their interests to do so (Gramsci, 1994). Furthermore, its petty-bourgeois development saw Gramsci quickly understand fascism as a counter-revolutionary form of sabotage that strategically looked to dismantle the advances made by the working classes under the conditions of liberal democracy by shutting this off by authoritarian means, under the rubric of crude nationalism (Gramsci, 1978, 1994). Articles such as ‘The Ape People’ and ‘The Two Fascisms’ that were written in L’Ordine Nuovo demonstrate the levels of mobilization of the petty-bourgeoisie in both the urban and rural areas in constructing the culture of such a reactionary nationalism (Gramsci, 1978). This indeed formed the basis of exploration, commonplace in the Prison Notebooks and which Gramsci termed ‘Father Bresciani’s Progeny’,2 which unpicked the reactionary culture that flourished within Italian civil society by looking at its various historical literary individuals and intellectuals who complemented the cultural development of such a movement (Gramsci, 1992, 1996, 2007).

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The Prison Notebooks also saw Gramsci try to make some historical sense of the development of fascism. Whilst hegemony and the studies of intellectuals, popular culture, folklore and religion in contributing towards the construction of such a state of hegemony, formed the central basis of study within the Notebooks, concepts such as passive revolution also made an important and integral part. Gramsci used the concept of passive revolution to demonstrate how a molecular change occurs within society without creating revolutionary institutional change. Here, Gramsci makes the obvious contrast between the bourgeois uprisings in France and the lack of similar action in Italy (Gramsci, 1971). The term has become increasingly popular in the areas of International Relations, as it provides an avenue to explain capitalist and bourgeois transformations within different states in the international system, which in turn allows us to understand the process of uneven and unequal development within the wider neoliberal capitalist system (Morton, 2010). Many have also located Gramsci’s understanding of fascism within this wider process of passive revolution (Riley and Desai, 2007; Short, 2014). Indeed, Gramsci spent a great deal of time in the Prison Notebooks questioning whether fascism in Italy could be understood as an extension of its process of passive revolution (Gramsci, 2007). Yet, as others have suggested, there is a lack of consistency when looking at how Grasmci understood fascism vis-à-vis passive revolution within the Prison Notebooks (Thomas, 2020). This isn’t to take anything away from the importance of passive revolution as a tool to understand capitalist transformation within states or indeed to suggest that its increasing usage has led to an ‘over-extension’ of the term’s initial purpose (Callinicos, 2010). Yet to understand the emergence of far right and right-wing movements in the contemporary era, Gramsci’s own questions on how to place fascism within Italy’s specific passive revolution are of limited importance. Given the subsequent development and defeat of fascism in the following years, this with hindsight becomes even more limited as the very essence of gradual molecular change became ruptured at the centre. Contained within the studies of historical transformation in which passive revolution is situated are a number of other useful concepts that are of great interest. Gramsci’s use of Caesarism for example allows us to understand how during periods of crisis, an authoritarian form of leadership, often associated with the far right, might emerge. Caesarism emerges when two or more forces struggle to gain supremacy within civil society, creating instability. In such circumstances, a strong leader can emerge, often as a stopgap until an ‘organic equilibrium’ within society is restored (Gramsci, 1971). From the 1970s we saw the beginnings of the so-called hollowing of liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era, where social forces have emerged to challenge the continuity of the centre-right/centre-left party politics that materialized in Europe and North America in the years following the Second World War (Mair, 2006).

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The move to situate these same political arrangements around a neoliberal consensus by the 1990s began to attract resistance from social forces that were ideologically opposed to the fabric and the conditionality of neoliberalism (Gills, 2000; Amoore, 2005). Indeed, this opposition would emerge from a whole array of forces from both the left and the right (Rupert, 2000; Worth, 2002). In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, such competing social forces have increased, and these have led to unstable conditions, which provide a suitable environment for such a Caesar to emerge. In some cases, we have seen distinct cases where forms of Caesarism have emerged. Some of these, such as with Putin, have emerged from instabilities resulting from the failure of post-Communist transition (Worth, 2009). Others, such as with Erdoğan in Turkey or with Duterte in the Philippines emerged in the post-crisis environment and do provide us with examples that have developed alongside the revival of wider right-wing populism. Further instances of Caesarism can be arguably seen with Modi in India and with Bolsonaro, who have both used authoritarian methods and relied upon the premise of the ‘strong’ leader in order to garner support. Modi also utilized this position to build a large base for support, seen with the large coalitions he has built up in parliament. Here, it appears, Caesarism is being strategically utilized so that a legacy can potentially be developed. Bolsonaro on the other hand only represented one particular political tradition (that of the political right) in a country (and indeed South American continent) that continues to forge distinctive forms of left–right opposition (as we saw with his 2022 electoral defeat to Lula). In each of these cases, the examples given have been countries that are not within the heartland of liberal democracy. Despite this, there have been arguments to suggest that even at the core of Europe more authoritarian forms of ‘neoliberalism’ have emerged since the global financial crisis (Bruff, 2014). As the legitimacy of neoliberalism has come under greater strain due to its economic inadequacies then the turn to forms of authoritarianism is not surprising and indeed to be expected in this environment. In addition, the premise here is that once legitimation becomes weaker within a specific material order and the hegemonic equilibrium is threatened, states resort to forms of coercion. Whilst this is certainly a process that has and continues to occur in fragile state/civil societies, there are only certain instances where Caesarism can be used to understand contemporary right-wing populism. It remains a distinct strategy that is used within certain moments in history (Gramsci, 1971). As Caesarism is utilized both as a stopgap and a mechanism to avoid wider instabilities in civil society, it does not really uncover why specific right-wing movements might arise and how they might sustain themselves. To understand them further, Grasmci’s work on hegemonic contestation and organic crisis becomes particularly useful.

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MORBID SYMPTOMS In an oft quoted and much cited passage from the third notebook Gramsci referred to a ‘crisis of authority’ whereby ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ and as such ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms’ or ‘morbid phenomena of the most varied kind’ appear (Gramsci, 1971, p. 275; Gramsci, 1996, pp. 32–33). The passage appears as part of a series of writings entitled ‘past and present’ which are evident from Notebook 3 onwards and provide significant overviews about the nature of transformative political and civil society (Gramsci, 1996). Effectively, this refers to the collection of competing social forces that look to gain ascendency during the times of crisis. As a result of such a clash, several consequences might emerge that could be seen to have catastrophic results. In some instances, this has indeed been used as a metaphor for the emergence of right-wing populist movements (Callinicos, 2017; Worth, 2019). At the same time, the term has provided an apt metaphor to refer to a variety of developments that deepen the crisis of a particular order. In contemporary terms, these might refer to the collapse of specific regimes or to welfare and environmental deterioration (Panitch and Leys, 2010; Achcar, 2016). At the global level, they might also refer to a crisis at the level of world order, where the combination of free market capitalism and globalization has left an unsustainable legacy (Sassoon, 2021). The Morbid Symptoms metaphor also allows us to think about the balance of social forces within civil and political society during periods of crisis. The clashes between the ‘new’ transformative forms of politics which have not developed sufficiently but are evident within forms of opposition, and those that maintain aspects of the ‘old’ and that strive to maintain forms of the existing order provide us with a useful synthesis of progressive vs reactionary forces battling for supremacy (Worth, 2018). As radical and reactionary right-wing movements often contain a contradictory ideological mix of a nationalism from a previous era alongside a market liberalism from the present, a wide array of forces has been unleashed that might add to the sense that the contemporary post-Cold War neoliberal system is reaching a state of morbidity. As governments have sought to account for these forces by subsuming them into the present as a form of continuity, these symptoms seem to have gained strength. For Gramsci, the 1930s was indicative of such occurrences and it was these symptoms that would hasten the unravelling of the political system that he himself lived. It was indeed the historical significance of these morbid developments that would take up much of his musings on history under the ‘past and present’ headings in the Notebooks. Connected to this was Gramsci’s understanding of the wars of position that make up large proportions on his writings on political strategy and contestation

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(see for example Gramsci, 1971, pp. 229–249; 2007). Gramsci distinguished between what he understood as a war of position and what he understood as a war of movement (or maneuver). If a war of movement represented a frontal attack on the institutions of the state, then the war of position represented the battle for its ‘hearts and minds’. In terms of crisis, where the hegemonic legitimacy of the social order comes under constant threat, the war of position takes on a highly significant point of analysis as forms of opposition compete for hegemonic supremacy. The war of position is also one which takes time to win, and even if decisively won at a historical conjuncture, needs constant work to stave off opposition. This, likewise, follows a logic: the process of hegemony is one which is never static, often transforms its character and requires constant analysis to locate the strength and form of its contestation (Hall, 1988). In addition, as Gramsci wrote in 1935, wars of position can take a long time, with Europe seeing out a long war of position from 1815–1870 after the initial war of movement was triggered by the events of the French Revolution (Gramsci, 1971, p. 120). Fascism was naturally one that represented the Italian political society in the wider war of position during Gramsci’s confinement. It is here and from this way of thinking that we can best understand the growth of right-wing sentiment across international civil society. Much has been made of the rise of populism within political society. Populism has often been understood as being an anti-elitist collection of movements that have mobilized from the discontent with the status-quo (Mudde, 2004). Populism can develop the potential to forge what Gramsci terms a ‘national popular’ movement, which would strengthen any advancement within the war of position and mobilize a coherent oppositional strategy (McNally, 2009). Yet, the two should not be confused. Instead, from a Gramscian lens, populism should be understood as movements that have sought to confront and challenge the character and appearance of the social order that they operate within. Right-wing populism has become especially prominent and has emerged in key political actors in the contemporary era; some of the legacy of neoliberalism has certainly been challenged by the existence and rhetoric of these actors. In some cases, right-wing populism has indeed looked to challenge the very fabric of the contemporary order by representing a hegemonic base of nationalism and national protectionism that remains fundamentally at odds with the globalized form of neoliberal capitalism (Steger, 2005; Rupert, 2000). In others, a right-wing resurgence has been mobilized that represents more of a ‘neoliberal nationalism’ as opposed to the national-protectionism or ‘paleo-conservatism’ more associated with the twentieth century (Harmes, 2012). In this instance, support for much of the market rhetoric that has underpinned the contemporary twenty-first century global order works alongside anti-immigration, anti-multicultural and anti-‘globalist’ (or anti global governance) campaigns (Mudde, 2007). This leads us back to Nancy Fraser’s obser-

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vation, quoted in this chapter’s introduction, which sees neoliberal nationalism as a reaction against the progressive neoliberal era that was in ascendency before the 2008 global financial crisis. The loss of moral and legitimate ideological leadership since the crisis has widened hegemonic contestation and opened new directions for the contemporary era to develop. When situating the far right within the three-pronged context of organic crisis, hegemonic contestation and wars of position, a key question is that of the depth of the crisis itself. For Gramsci, the 1930s represented a very real period of crisis, precipitated by economic collapse and the increase of militarism that saw the international system move towards confrontation. Historically, the 1930s now represents a period that goes beyond Gramsci’s own pessimism of the time, as it is consistently referred to as the lowest point of human cooperation and endeavour. Accounts were also quick to portray the 1930s as the decade of crisis and as one in which the wider international order collapsed. Karl Polanyi’s classic 1944 study illustrated how the liberal economic system that had been forged in the nineteenth century finally came to a shuttering halt in the 1930s, bringing with it catastrophic results (Polanyi, 1944). There has been a tendency to question whether the contemporary period is comparable to the structural breakdown of the wider international order of the 1930s, with a whole host of media outlets as well as academic studies quick to point out the similarities between the two eras, especially in relation to the growth of far-right movements (for example, Elliott, 2018; Rayner et al., 2020). It should be noted however that the contemporary capitalist system is not only operational, but having survived one significant financial crisis (followed by an unrivalled pandemic), it may be even more impregnable (Mirowski, 2014). Therefore, the periods of fascism, militarism, neo-mercantilism and ultimately war that characterized the 1930s and later the 1940s – which Gramsci metaphorically termed as the ‘interregnum’ – cannot be understood in the same way as we understand the present. From this, we can even ask whether crisis can be understood in the same light. If the hegemonic crisis of the 1930s cannot be wholly compared to the contemporary era, can we go so far to make claims about contestation and the existence of morbidity in the same light? In other words, is it too premature for us to be discussing the current political trends in terms of ‘morbid’ symptoms? There are two points to be made in response of this. The first considers Gramsci’s own writings on the war of position. As the war of position is a long played-out process in which legitimacy is constantly contested and re-produced, then any movement that appears to confront or alter the form and characteristics of a residing order has wider transformative purpose (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 238–239). Likewise, rather than understanding crisis as a distinct historical phase, it should be seen as a moment of hegemonic contestation which is indeterminate in longevity and its results. Whilst we can certainly see

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increased examples of leadership crises in the last decade and a wider collection of ideological forms of contestation to contemporary neoliberalism, we have not reached a position where it is in the process of collapse. Following from this, the second point to make regarding historical processes can indeed be seen by looking at the work of historical and world order specialists who have been significantly influenced by Gramsci. Here, we need to stress the importance of the overriding historical materialist framework where any form of political agency has to be seen and placed within its wider historical trajectory. This also allows us to make greater historical sense of the reactionary movements that we find at present. Both Eric Hobsbawm from the perspective of socio-economic history and Robert Cox, from the field of International Relations provide interested historical categorizations regarding the legacy of nineteenth century liberalism. In the same way that Karl Polanyi showed how the fallacy of the self-regulated market led to a contradictory spiral that gained momentum throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth, leading eventually to its collapse, Cox and Hobsbawm provide detailed historical accounts of the same period and account for its wider norms and characteristics (Cox, 1987; Hobsbawm, 1987). Following on from the ideological basking of classical economic liberalism of the early and mid-part of the century, the latter part of the century saw the forces of nationalism emerge to the forefront of European politics, which would lead to the unprecedented era of European nation-state supremacy and the quest for Imperialist expansion. The growth of nationalist movements and reactionary ideals was both a cornerstone of this process and a requirement to keep the growing oppositional forces of socialism at bay (Hobsbawm, 1987, pp. 112–140). Gramsci himself would comment on the historical origins of the crisis of the 1930s by referring to the contradictory forces of the internationalization of capital alongside the domestic mobilization of nationalism (Gramsci, 1995, pp. 219–225). Indeed, it was this wider structural decline of the liberal system, illuminated by Polanyi, that allows us to think of the relevance of similar domestic focus today. As expanding nationalist forces by the end of the nineteenth century were placed alongside the wider workings of international capitalism, their contradictions would become increasingly apparent, leading to greater periods of instability and an increased loss of legitimacy. Thus, whilst we should not consider the contemporary position of the neoliberal era to have reached the nadir of the 1930s, the contradictions and instabilities of the years that proceeded it certainly provide similar characteristics. In order to take this further, a closer look at the relationship between far-right forces and the material confines of the contemporary neoliberal social order is required.

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Neoliberalism and Right-wing Populism Despite recent developments, far-right populism has not been a new phenomenon. Indeed, whilst many accounts tend to place the emergence of contemporary right-wing populism from the end of the Cold War, their roots were much earlier (Diamond, 1995; Rupert, 2000; Hainsworth, 2000; Worth, 2019). Whilst divisive in nature and nationally distinct, right-wing populism has generally placed its opposition to what it perceives of as a threat to the nation-state from the forces of ‘globalism’ (Steger, 2005). Multiculturalism, immigration, welfarism, Islam and international integration make up the general oppositional campaigns of right-wing movements as a whole and all of these are underpinned to some extent by a conspiratorial belief that an ‘international’ or ‘global’ elite of some kind is looking to enforce these conditions. Much of the source of reliance on conspiracy seems to follow the ‘New World Order’ claim that was popular with the American paleo-conservative readings of the end of the Cold War and was seen in popular books such as evangelical Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, and with the political campaigning of Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in the US in the 1990s. Here, the ‘new world order’ of cooperation and integration that was enthusiastically endorsed by George Bush in the light of the first Gulf War, was understood to be one that would be run by a secret elite to form a global government that would override the function of the nation-state (Barkun, 2013; McAlister, 2003). Thus, groups such as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and families such as the Rothmans and Rockefellers are conspiring alongside organizations such as the WTO, the UN and regional organizations such as the EU, to forge an undemocratic form of world government against the wishes of the nation-state. To a degree, the New World Order conspiracies have not really moved that far from those of Nesta Webster that had a significant influence on Hitler in Mein Kampf (Worth, 2019, pp. 37–42). For Hitler, ‘globalists’ were seen in the form of Bolshevism and Marxism which are ultimately the product of ‘international Jewry’. The term ‘cultural Marxism’, as appropriated by certain right-wing factions, works similarly in the contemporary setting to depict the purpose and ideological form of ‘globalism’ (Jamin, 2014). What had emerged by the second decade of the twenty-first century was a language that looked to provide a counter-narrative to the politics of (neoliberal) globalization. From appearing on the margins of politics, such counter-narratives have become increasingly mainstream as instabilities and radical right movements have proliferated (Mondon and Winter, 2020). In Europe, radical right-wing movements and parties have gained prominence in uneven ways since the end of the Cold War. Certain political parties such as the Front National (FN) in France have openly attacked the rhetoric of neoliberalism, endorsing a return to national protectionism in

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response (Eltchaninoff, 2017). Here they have followed the examples set by the paleo-conservative American tradition and have followed the same logic in understanding globalism – in this case mondialisme – as an elitist and subversive process that threatens the nation-state and its distinctive traditions. Therefore, opposition to immigration and Islamophobia are both placed within the wider threat to the nation-state that globalism contains. Other radical right parties3 have been far more ambiguous in terms of their relationship to neoliberalism. For many, the economy tends to play second fiddle to the issues of multiculturalism and immigration that are placed at the forefront of campaigning. Parties such as Fratelli d’Italia and Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid – PVV in the Netherlands have been notably uneven when considering economic matters, with positions that tend to move between protectionism to the promotion of low taxes and market economics in a way that are both unclear and lacking in any ideological direction (Worth, 2019, pp. 98–105). Conversely, radical right parties have been quick to embrace a welfare chauvinism which argues that whilst entrepreneurs, wealth creators and communities strive to build a society, the unemployed and immigrants, facilitated by public sector workers, restrict this potential through state expenditure (Mány and Surel, 2002). Parties such the Swiss Popular Party (SVP), The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Flemish nationalism Party Vlaams Belang all place welfare chauvinism at the forefront of their campaigns. In doing so they endorse a reduction of state expenditure which complements market economics and, in many places, argues for greater de-regulation (Betz, 1994). Indeed, in this case, the Thatcher–Reagan doctrines of the 1980s that contained high levels of market populism are being reinforced and given a new breath of life. If the radical right parties in Europe have come to represent contrasting positions on the general ideological foundations of neoliberalism, then the populist earthquakes that emerged from 2016 were to highlight these contradictions even more. In the UK, the Brexit referendum saw an explosion of reactionary sentiment which has been ongoing since. Brexit was pioneered by a Euro-sceptic party, UKIP, which, whilst initially set up as a single-issue party, became increasing more nationalist and populist as it rose in prominence. Headed by the charismatic Nigel Farage, the Party began to cut into a large proportion of the Conservative Party vote and a high proportion of the Northern English Labour vote by campaigning on issues such as anti-immigration and the threat of Islamism (Ford and Goodwin, 2014). Yet UKIP also favoured a more radical market ideology than the status-quo, arguing that the EU has sought to starve the economy of its potential due to its over-regulation (UKIP, 2010). This ideological underpinning formed the partnership between UKIP and the Euro-sceptics in the Conservative Party, who drew on Thatcher’s notorious Bruges speech of 19884 to argue that the EU had stifled the full potential of Thatcher’s free market project.

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By the time the referendum arrived, the respective Brexit campaigns5 led attacks on academics, elites and experts and concentrated on immigration, the perceived threat of population explosion due to open borders within the EU, Islamification and the threat of Turkish membership. Vote Leave also pledged an increased financial commitment towards welfare which allegedly would be increasingly unsustainable under continued EU membership. Thus, whilst the main protagonists of Brexit favoured a form of radical free market idealism, the campaign unleashed a series of social forces that were rooted in a nativist and populist form of reactionary nationalism (Banks, 2017). Here, we see the contradictions that Gramsci pointed out in his ‘Past and Present’ sections of his Notebooks (see above) when referring to the forces of nationalism playing off against the unfettered pursuit of capital. Both the reactionary forces that were unleashed by Brexit and the disruption that it brought to the international community caused a significant rupture in the legitimacy of the neoliberal order. The results within the UK have been even more significant. The instability created between the leave and remain voters, between generations divided by the vote and between the cosmopolitan versus little Englander mindset has put the very Union itself at risk of disintegrating (Dorling and Tomlinson, 2019). The inability to contain the contrasting forces of nationalism and free market idealism combined with the equal inability to provide stable government has appeared to leave the UK in a state of perpetual decline. The final irony of this occurred when, in September 2022 the Liz Truss government, which replaced the disgraced Johnson administration, attempted to unleash a budgetary vision of post-Brexit low regulation, low tax, market Eldorado that had been craved since the 1980s, only for the markets themselves to react so negatively that it was shelved within days. If Brexit contained a complex mix of market and nationalist populism, then the Trump administration took this even further. Trump’s electoral success in 2016 came amidst an atmosphere that had seen the growth of the libertarian Tea Party movement in the years that preceded it. As with Brexit, the intellectual foundation of this was to create a de-regulated market idealism free of regulatory restrictions opposed by central banks and conglomerates (Paul, 2008). Reaction against the debt burden resulting from post-crisis quantitative easing saw a grassroots movement develop into the mirror opposite of the anti-austerity protestors that were prominent in other parts of the world (Worth, 2013). Whilst many of the Tea Party intellectuals were quick to distance themselves from Trump, he engaged the mood that had built up from these protests and added in his own brand of nationalist populism – a brand that would win support from the extreme elements of the ‘alt-right’ and which would bring conspiracy logistics well into the mainstream (Herman and Muldoon, 2018). The Trump administration contained all the contradictions described above in its relationship to neoliberalism within its own remit. It actively seemed to

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promote free market capitalism whilst calling for national protectionism at the same time (Nelson, 2018). By seeking to run the US ‘like a business’ and by utilizing his unique position with the Trump Organization, he embodied every cultural facet of contemporary neoliberalism and to a degree looked to take it to a new populist level (Schram and Pavlovskaya, 2017; Bessner and Sparke, 2018). At the same time, he triggered a succession of trade wars and embarked upon a series of protectionist measures which ruptured the international free trade environment. In addition, he openly attacked ‘globalism’, utilizing a whole variety of conspiracy theories. By using forms of conspiracy to question every common narrative and adopting what would become known as a post-truth logic, Trump looked to destabilize any common assumption and protocol previously taken for granted in governmental circles (McIntyre, 2018). Thus, even as the practices of neoliberalism were being re-enforced, the confrontational politics pursued by Trump opened new forms of instabilities. The election victory of Trump would see a series of forces build up contesting the way that neoliberalism was articulated in the US. It resulted in the unleashing of groups and movements that appeared to be oppositional and confrontation to the existing system. Some of these were indeed rooted in a protectionist tradition that explicitly looked to challenge neoliberal globalization. Some went even further and were based on a succession of extreme ideological positions of the sort that had not been seen previously within the US mainstream. Trump’s flirtation with individuals such as Steve Bannon and Sebastien Gorka, and with extremist groups which would storm the Capitol in response to his 2020 election defeat, saw a wider collection of groups contest the very fabric of legitimacy at the very heart of US power. Wars of Position or the Rearticulation of Neoliberalism? The rise of radical right parties in Europe, and Brexit and Trump are the key cornerstones of the populist nationalist turn in what we might term the Global North. However, the knock-on effects of this have been seen with right-wing individuals and regimes such as Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Erdogen in Turkey. Each of these has added to the trend through which the neoliberal order at a global level is being transformed by populist forces. How then do we understand these by using Gramsci’s logic as outlined above? On one level, we could indeed conclude that we have entered a period of either authoritarian neoliberalism or neoliberal nationalism for which these examples all provide evidence. However, whilst we can see the strengthening of authoritarianism in some of these – we could also add Putin’s Russia to this mix, which Boris Kagarlitsky termed a form of neoliberal autocracy at the turn of the century (Kagarlitsky, 2002). But we cannot merely ignore the multitudes of opposing forces that have looked to challenge the hegemonic composition

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of the world order as a result of these trends. In this way, war of position becomes significantly important. Ideologically, right-wing movements have sought to contest the manner in which neoliberal capitalism is legitimized in a number of ways. Many of these – such as anti-immigration and Islamophobia – seek to alter the way that neoliberalism is articulated; in the case of case of globalization – or ‘globalism’ – this goes far further. It looks to attack the very foundation of the way that neoliberalism is ordered. That the main narratives put forward by the populist right have moved from the margins to the mainstream of politics shows that a war of position has developed in the heartland of neoliberalism. The resolution of this war of position will tell us how far far-right movements have gone in challenging and/ or reshaping the neoliberal order and/or widening the potential for instability and prolonged crisis. As we have seen, the contradictory nature of right-wing populism has also marked its development. As has been stressed above and indeed has been discussed and categorized, specific far-right economic positions in relation to neoliberalism are inconsistent, and this inconsistency deepens as they develop their respective world views (Betz, 1994; Mudde, 2007; Worth, 2009). The protectionist responses at least appear consistent with the wider criticisms of globalization. Those who appeared to engage a neoliberal populism seeking a more concentrated form of market economics have been less consistent as they have unleashed a collection of social forces that oppose such idealism – seen aptly with Brexit and the constantly shifting position of populists such as Nigel Farage. Whilst this adds to an inconsistent potential hegemonic challenge to the existing order, it also stirs greater forces that have destabilizing potential. As such, the rise of right-wing nationalism has done two things. First, it has led to the re-shaping and rearticulation of the way that neoliberal capitalism is ideologically configured. By producing parties, governments and narratives that contest the existing post-Cold War direction of neoliberal globalization, its character has altered. Whilst the norms and processes of the global market continue to function and reinvent themselves (seen perhaps even more considering the COVID crisis), the way these are facilitated are being openly contested and questioned. Second, the nationalist forces that have emerged threaten to transform the neoliberal system as a whole. Some of these appear to confront the entire neoliberal ideological system head-on by endorsing a return to economic nationalism, but others engage in a contradictory mix of nationalist and neoliberal populism which nevertheless results in increased levels of contestation. Although it remains difficult to analyse the wider effects that the mobilization of right-wing populism has had on contemporary neoliberal capitalism, other additional points can be made here. On one level, reactionary positions are often utilized by certain elevated groups in order to avoid the central shortcomings of the system itself. This has certainly been one of the features of

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post-crisis periods under capitalism, where bigotry and racism are often stirred up to create divisions within the working classes and maintain the existing order (Marx, 1992). There are certainly some elements of truth to this. Indeed, it is here where the class structures of a prevailing order can become more profound and aggressive in their prominence. At the same time, this process undermines the social consequences that result from such reactionary positions and the instabilities that they bring. From this we can return to the example of the nineteenth century and the fate of the classical liberal order mentioned above. Then, a sequence of economic downturns aided the development of nationalism that was accelerating as the century developed towards a close. Yet, as we know, the stimulation of these forces unleashed a collection of counter-narratives and counter-movements that would increase the contradictions of the liberal system and sow the seeds of its destruction. Through the guise of populism itself or from an increase in authoritarianism or geopolitical tension, right-wing nationalist movements can serve to alter the way the neoliberal order is articulated, but they can also serve as a foundational, organic base for a war of position. These should not be seen as distinct from each other but rather as processes that can occur concurrently. As a result, the hegemonic nature of neoliberalism is both shifting away from the initial character that it assumed in the 1990s and at the same time is coming under increased threat from a variety of different counter-hegemonic or alternative hegemonic projects that are seeking to contest its legitimacy and leadership. Right-wing/radical-right and populist nationalism represent one of growing challenges within that emerging war of position (Worth, 2018).

CONCLUSION The writings of Gramsci provide many ways in which we can understand far-right and right-wing movements and trends. Writing at the height of Fascism, Gramsci concentrated a great deal of time on where to place this movement within a historical trajectory of capitalism. His work on crisis and on moments such as Caesarism give us greater insight in which we can understand popular authoritarianism within his own wider lens of historical materialism. Yet, it is the rich work that he produced on consent and contestation within the shifting nature of hegemony that provides us with the most useful ways of understanding contemporary right-wing movements. What is particularly important here is understanding the relevance of such movements within the wider longevity of the neoliberal order in which we currently reside. Not only can Gramsci and Gramscian inspired accounts provide answers to the question of how right-wing nationalism challenges the overall nature of the neoliberal order, but they also allow us to view these through a wider historical

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lens that questions the order’s overall sustainability. Moreover, they allow us to locate, analysis and assess the depth of crisis that we find ourselves in today. Finally, understanding the positioning and de-stabilizing effects that recent right-wing forces have had on the hegemonic stability of neoliberalism is vital if the progressive left is to develop its own strategic objectives. For the left to successfully transform neoliberalism, it needs to sustain itself within a successful war of position. Therefore, an acute analysis of the strength and nature of opposing forms of contestation and a sophisticated account of the nature of crisis within the hegemonic order are essential. In this sense, Gramsci’s worldview is as timely as ever.

NOTES 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

By neoliberalism, I refer to the system of governance that relies upon the private sector to generate growth across the international system. Neoliberalism became associated with the Austrian School of Economics’ critique of post-war capitalism and with supply-side economics associated with Milton Friedman in particular. After the free market experience in Pinochet’s Chile, the Reagan–Thatcher dogma of the 1980s saw a post-Cold War atmosphere emerge when free market capitalism flourished and became the dominant form of political economy (Harvey, 2005). As the norms and practices of the global market became increasingly embedded into this post-Cold War environment, the twenty-first century saw neoliberalism emerge as a hegemonic form of governance across global political and civil society. ‘Father Bresciani’s progeny’ refers to Antonio Bresciani, a nineteenth-century novelist, who wrote a series of pieces of fiction that depicted liberals and secularists as satanists that threatened the fabric of cultural life. Gramsci used this metaphoric term as a means to escape censorship, to discuss how contemporary intellectuals contributed to the same reactionary civil environment. The term ‘radical right’ has tended to be used by comparative political scientists in order to make them distinctive from splinter extreme right groups and of pre-existing neo-fascist groups that were more common in the 1970s and 1980s (Mudde, 2010). In her speech to the College in Europe in Bruges she stated that ‘we had not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them imposed at a European level’ (Thatcher, 1988). The two prominent ones were the official Vote Leave and Leave.EU, which was backed by Farage.

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23. Gramsci and hegemonic struggle in a globalized world Thomas Muhr INTRODUCTION In April 2022, the Continental Articulation of Social and Popular Movements toward the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) (Articulación Continental de Movimientos Sociales y Populares hacia el ALBA), or ALBA Movements (ALBA Movimientos), convened its Third Continental Assembly in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with the participation of over 300 delegates from 20 countries (ALBA Movimientos, 2022a). Scarcely noticed, especially in the North beyond solidarity campaign circles, ALBA Movements articulates over 400 popular movements and organizations from 25 countries, struggling for the integration of Our America and the construction of an emancipatory political project for and from the peoples, to represent the richness and diversity of the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, eco-socialist struggle, for an Indo-Afro Our American socialism. (ALBA Movimientos, 2022b, p. 6)1

Denouncing NATO’s imperialist ‘hybrid warfare’ and the advancement of the ‘fascist right’ over the past decade, the Declaration of the Third Continental Assembly reaffirms the ‘unrestricted defence of’ and ‘consolidation of alliances with’ the popular and revolutionary Our American governments within the logic of ‘unity in diversity’ (ALBA Movimientos, 2022a). Illustrative of these commitments was the People’s Summit for Democracy in Los Angeles, USA, co-convened by ALBA Movements in June 2022, as a counter-event to the imperialist Ninth Summit of the Americas from which the USA government unilaterally excluded the socialist-oriented governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.2 This snapshot of the Our American counter-hegemonic struggle is emblematic of the ‘pluri-scalar war of position’, incipiently defined as ‘multidimensional struggle over minds and strategic places at and across different 406

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interlocking [geographical] scales simultaneously in the construction of a historic bloc’ (Muhr, 2013, p. 7). This concept evolved from my research between 2005 and 2012 into the geopolitics of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America–People’s Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) and paralleled growing scholarly interest in the spatiality of Gramsci’s work (see: Ekers and Loftus, 2013; Jessop, 2008; Morton, 2007). Starting from a place-based community in Venezuela and empirically extending into distinct though increasingly interconnecting places in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Northern Brazil, this challenged the common representation of ALBA-TCP as simply an alliance of countries by identifying two dialectically related forces: ALBA-TCP inter-state political society, comprising ten members in 2022 (Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and six members of the Caribbean Community, CARICOM); and transnational organized society through ALBA Movements, which evolved since 2013 as a wider and more autonomous platform than the originally envisioned ALBA-TCP Social Movements Council. Structurally, state-led internationalism (inter-nation-state relations) articulates with movements-based transnationalism (border-crossing forces and relations) via the ALBA Movements Political Coordination (ALBA Movimientos, 2022b, p. 13).3 The pluri-scalar war of position as spatialization strategy is elaborated elsewhere (Muhr, 2021). This chapter contributes to strategy for alliance-building from a decolonial Global South position, for theory (re-)development (rather than problem-solving) ‘with and from a subaltern perspective’ rather than ‘about the subaltern’ (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 211, emphasis in original; Muhr, 2011, 2013, 2021, for methodology). Accordingly, the next section relates Gramsci’s war of position and related concepts with decolonial ideas, identifying Gramsci as a decolonial Global Southerner: methodologically, by eliciting the relevance of the transnational in Gramsci’s work; and politically, through Gramsci’s anti-colonial positionality. Following the pluri-scalar war of position’s geographical grounding, I explore Gramsci’s thinking in Our American political praxis, particularly el pueblo (the people) as the collective historical revolutionary subject. A vignette illustrates the ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements pluri-scalar war of position. The conclusion argues for imagining a counter-hegemonic historical bloc as a Global South bloc, while outlining structural barriers to its construction. These discussions traverse Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and notebooks; however, major references are the so-called ‘Lyons Theses’ (January 1926, co-authored with Palmiro Togliatti; Gramsci, 1978, pp. 340–375), ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (October 1926; Gramsci, 1978, pp. 441–462, henceforth ‘Southern Question’), and Notebook 25 ‘On the Margins of History (History of the Subaltern Social Groups)’ (1934; Gramsci, 2000a, pp. 173–187).

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GRAMSCI AS A DECOLONIAL GLOBAL SOUTHERNER Conceptual Premises Drawing from India’s anti-colonial resistance, Gramsci identified three complementary forms of political struggle: war of maneuver as a ‘frontal attack’ on the state when state power is concentrated (e.g., mass strikes); underground warfare, i.e. the clandestine build-up of combat troops; and war of position or siege warfare, as strategic collective action when the power of the dominant group(s) is diffused in the state/society complex or ‘integral state’ (e.g., boycotts) (Q1§§133–134; Q7§16; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 229–238). In modern capitalist societies, for Gramsci, a war of position constitutes the only viable strategy for gaining state power due to bourgeois hegemony: a regime in which ‘a fundamental social group’ (bourgeoisie or working class) successfully constructs the subalterns’ active consent to their conception of the world, backed by coercive power for those ‘who do not “consent”’ (Q4§49; Q12§1; Gramsci, 1971, p. 12; Gramsci, 1996, p. 201). The production of consent relies on ‘organic intellectuals’, who function as persuaders by propagating particular ideas. They provide legitimation for the dominant group’s economic, political, cultural, moral and intellectual leadership, and hegemonic struggle involves each social group having or forming their own organic intellectuals (Q12§3; Q19§24; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 8–10; Gramsci, 2000a, p. 388; Morton, 2007, p. 92; Green, 2013, p. 97). These foundational premises require further explication. First, hegemony is achieved through historical bloc formation in the integral state. On one hand, Gramsci’s ‘historical bloc’ overcomes Marx’s structure (relations of production or economic base)/superstructure (ideology or the ethico-political) dichotomy by organically linking these as a social totality (Q8§182; Gramsci, 1971, p. 366). Thus, a historical bloc is not simply an alliance but strategically coheres different interests across diverse social classes and groups (Morton, 2007, pp. 93–97). On the other hand, ‘integral state’ means the dialectical unity of political society and civil society. While Gramsci maintains this distinction for methodological purposes (Q4§38; Q6§137; Gramsci, 1996, p. 182; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 194, 263–267; Gramsci, 2007, p. 108), de facto the state apparatus is integrated with the so-called private sphere: religious, educational and corporate capitalist institutions and practices, including the material organization of culture (media and other mass communication), political parties, trade unions, professional associations, so-called non-profits and non-government organizations (NGOs), as well as inter-governmental bodies, the family, language and ethnic, gendered and sexual identities (Egan, 2016,

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p. 437; Hall, 1986, p. 18; Morton, 2007, p. 89). While the material carriers of civil society are relatively autonomous from the state institutions, they are not absolutely separate and oppositional spheres of forces as claimed by liberal ideology (Coutinho, 2000, pp. 24–25). Second, within the war of position as strategy for organic transformation, war of maneuver assumes a more tactical (conjunctural) function (Egan, 2016, p. 449; Q13§24; Gramsci, 1971, p. 235). This implies – as ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements epitomizes – that a war of position must operate not solely in the cultural sphere (civil society) as sometimes assumed, but within/across the integral state. And, third, Gramsci’s category of ‘subalterns’ transcends Marx’s class reductionism by also considering non-classes, which in contemporary societies include: workers and employees (rural, industrial, public, service, informal, self-employed), peasants, students, artists, landless, homeless, beggars as well as women, racially and sexually discriminated groups and other sectors of the so-called general public (Burgos, 2019; Galastri, 2018). While included in the integral state, the subaltern social groups and classes are confined to the relations of civil society, that is, excluded from political society where the ruling classes unite and from where hegemony and the continual fracturing of the subaltern groups is orchestrated (Thomas, 2020, p. 188; see Gramsci, 1996, p. 91; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 54–55; Q3§90; Q25§5). Unifying the subalterns and forming the historical subject is a key moment in/for counter-hegemonic historical bloc formation. A ‘desubalternization’ process (Freeland, 2020) in which the subalterns ‘work out consciously and critically’ their ‘own conception of the world’ (Q11§121; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 323–324) drives ‘moral and intellectual reform’ (a change of fundamental ideas and values) in the construction of a new national-popular collective will (Q13§1; Gramsci, 1999, p. 17). Subaltern organic intellectuals are indispensable in building unity, cohesion and direction, and for self-representation to counter the (divisive) misrepresentation of the subalterns by the dominant classes (Galastri, 2018, p. 57; Thomas, 2020, pp. 183–184). The political party (or formation thereof) is necessary for articulating the diverse groups for sustained, organic transformation (Q8§21; Gramsci, 2007, pp. 246–249). Regarding leadership, throughout his 1921–1926 pre-prison writings, Gramsci advocated for a working class/peasant alliance led by the industrial proletariat within the united front approach (Gramsci, 1978). However, in his later notebooks Gramsci suggests that any subaltern social group may assume leadership (Q19§24; Gramsci, 2000a, p. 387). Although the broad conception of subalterns as the entirety of marginalized social groups and classes, including the proletariat and the peasantry, prevails throughout Gramsci’s writings, especially in Notebook 25 on the topic, he referred also to ‘subaltern states’ (Q15§5; Gramsci, 1995, p. 223) and (at least once) to individuals, however, without losing sight of the fact that these subjectivities are produced in relation to the

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economic (class) structure (Liguori in Burgos, 2019, pp. 207–208; Young, 2012, pp. 30–31). In anticipation of the next sections, I propose to understand subalternity within the global colonial–capitalist regime as expressing itself at a range of scales, from the body, household and other sub-national to national, international, transnational and global scales. Gramsci, Decolonial Thought and the Global South Decolonial thought evolved in/from Our America and is widely associated with Aníbal Quijano’s ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2000, 2007). The decolonial ‘modernity/coloniality’ dialectic accentuates that modernity relies on the continual reproduction of coloniality (Mignolo, 2007). This dismantles the naturalized Eurocentric linear-progressivist myth of Western ‘development’ and ‘civilization’ supposedly being the product of internal ingenuity and exceptionalism (and subsequently diffused to the ‘rest’), unlinked to colonial exploitation, upon which Orientalistic othering and the construal of collective identities of superiority/inferiority rest: rational/irrational; civilized/barbarian; modern/traditional; progressive/backward; democrats/autocrats; permanently renewed, as in 2022 by the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell’s racist ‘garden’ (Europe)/‘jungle’ (the rest) stereotyping (Norton, 2022; also, Morton, 2007, pp. 49–50; Muhr, 2023; Quijano, 2007). Formal juridico-political national-territorial independence notwithstanding, the ‘regime of “global coloniality”’ (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 220) is perpetuated through multi-scalar governance structures, cultures and actors, including states and governments, institutions (e.g., IMF, NATO, World Bank), trans-/multinational corporations, including media conglomerates, NGOs, and other power brokers (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 220; Mahler, 2018, p. 28). For Mignolo (2007, p. 453), decoloniality requires delinking, implying an ‘epistemic shift’ which gives prominence to ‘other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics’. The decolonial movement is not a single theoretical school but subsumes diverse – at times conflictual – cultural, philosophical, political and epistemological currents (Maldonado-Torres, 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, especially pp. 49–53). Shared referents are the intersectionality of multiple, heterogeneous global hierarchies of structural oppressions, exploitations and exclusions established over 500 years of European modernist-capitalist colonization – classist, epistemic, gendered, geographical, linguistic, patriarchial, politico-military, racial, sexual, spiritual – and their dispute through global justice-driven emancipation and liberation from a subaltern perspective (Grosfoguel, 2007; Mignolo, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The purpose here is not to revisit the controversial appropriation(s) of Gramsci

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by ‘Subaltern Studies’.4 Rather, in responding to the occasional framing of Gramsci as Western/Eurocentric in the decolonial literature (e.g., Grosfoguel, 2007, pp. 211–212; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 14), I argue for understanding Gramsci as an anti-colonial and decolonial Global Southerner. This builds on the following initial considerations. First, Gramsci’s non-deterministic historicism already captured subalternity as intersectionality, addressing discrete social processes and relations of race, class, gender, religion, nationalism and colonialism relative to the ensemble of broader social, political, economic, cultural and geographical structures (Green, 2011, p. 400; Green, 2013, pp. 97–98; also, Ekers and Loftus, 2013, p. 15; Freeland, 2020, p. 198; Hall, 1986; Thomas, 2020, pp. 190–191). Second, the Gramscian conception of hegemony is frequently adopted in the decolonial literature, mostly, however, without making this explicit (e.g., Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 213; Maldonado-Torres, 2011, p. 9; Mignolo, 2021; Quijano, 2000). While decolonial ‘historical-structural heterogeneity’ (Quijano, 2000, p. 545) is highlighted as overcoming Marx’s structure/superstructure division (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 218), the strong congruency with Gramsci’s hegemony/historical bloc is less recognized. Perhaps most closely to Gramsci, Quijano (2000) theorizes the ‘globally hegemonic’ system of coloniality around the dialectic of labour and racism as the material and ideological base of capital/ism. Third, rather than a strictly geographical denominator, ‘the global South’ is a political concept-metaphor expressing two distinct though complementary spatialities. In nation-state-centric, methodologically nationalist/territorial terms, where countries appear as homogeneous absolute spaces (fixed, bounded units or containers of societies and social action), the global South (or just ‘South’) refers to formerly colonized countries from the African, Asian and American continents and countries subjected to coloniality (e.g., China, Russia, see Mignolo, 2021). At an international scale, this spatially clearly demarcated South–North binary is manifested in such formations as ALBA-TCP and NATO. However, critical scholarship, including decolonialists, conceptualize the Global South (commonly capitalized, e.g., Berger, 2021; Grosfoguel, 2007; Mahler, 2018) also as transnational relational space produced by/through people’s and places’ shared historical experiences of colonial-capitalist exploitation, subalternization and resistances: ‘the globalized South as coexisting with the globalized North within and across nation-state territories (countries) in both the geographical north and south’ (Muhr, 2023, p. 4, emphasis in original). Conversely, the Global North, as for instance embodied in the transnational capitalist class (TCC), also involves agents in South countries (especially Westernized elites and petty bourgeoisies), aligned or compliant with the colonizing/imperial forces (Maldonado-Torres, 2011; Mignolo, 2021, pp. 732–733). While methodological nationalism underlies the (inherently Eurocentric) comparative approach, the relational approach underscores the dialectical co-constitution of Global

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North:Global South as a historico-spatial structure within which the Global South is not a passive recipient or victim but an actor in its own right (Berger, 2021; Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2007). Intra-national, international and transnational South–South relations of solidarity and resistance can contribute to building a positive, decolonial Global South identity, overcoming the imposed negative identity of colonial othering (Featherstone, 2013, p. 69; Quijano, 2000, p. 551). Empirically, however, due to diverse and divergent trajectories, histories and identities, ‘“the Global South” escapes clear and unambiguous definition’ (Berger, 2021, p. 2012). Henceforth, I use Global South and Global North in relation to both internationalist and transnationalist projects, processes and relations, as these are socio-spatially intertwined and/or mutually constitutive. For example, as in Gramsci’s integral state, the inextricability of imperialist states/TCC, and the ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements articulation. Thus viewed, being a Global Southerner is a matter of positionality rather than of geographical place. Indeed, determining what constitutes ‘decolonial’ through essentializing categories such as nationality, skin colour or country of residence/work/publishing (through which Gramsci inevitably is construed as Western/Eurocentric) has been considered parochial and counter-productive (Brennan, 2013; Burgos, 2021; Rosenthal, 2022). Instead of reproducing or inverting modernist binarizing by playing out Western against non-Western knowledges, a more productive approach pursues ‘critical dialogue’ among ‘diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects’ (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 212). After all, the task is to unify ‘oppositional cultures’ and construct ‘common ground’ around an ‘ethical-political project’ of democratic eco-socialism (Carroll and Ratner, 2010, p. 20). Interlinking Gramsci, decolonial thought and the Global South in both methodological and identitarian terms, I argue, can contribute to this endeavour. In fact, some scholarship actually has recognized Gramsci as a Southerner, a thinker from the periphery (Conelli, 2020, p. 234; Young, 2012, p. 18), even ‘latinoamericano’ (Massardo, 1999), and constructive dialogue is materializing: Carmine Conelli, inter alia drawing from Quijano, proposes ‘repositioning’ Gramsci’s Southern Question through ‘dialogue with other Souths ... within the frame of the global souths’ as subaltern, othered places (Conelli, 2020, p. 247, emphasis in original); Bala Kumaravadivelu encourages subaltern non-native English teachers to become organic intellectuals in war-of-position-like decolonial delinking as a possible counter-hegemonic strategy grounded in context-specific, place-based concerted collective action (Kumaravadivelu, 2016, p. 81); and Cesare Casarino’s reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini leads him to assert that already prior to the 1955 Bandung Conference (a key moment in decolonization, Muhr, 2023), Pasolini understood that Gramsci’s Southern Question had to be posed in relation to ‘the political struggles of the global South’ and ‘in transnational terms ... on a full planetary scale’ (Casarino, 2010, p. 682). By extension, the next two

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sub-sections discuss Gramsci as a decolonial Global Southerner in methodological and political terms. Gramsci as a Global Southerner: The Methodological The methodological argument builds on Gramsci’s adage that ‘the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national”...Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise’ (Q14§68; Gramsci, 1971, p. 240). In this very passage, Gramsci clearly demarcates distinct national ‘internal’ combinations of relations and forces from international ones. On one hand, this suggests a sequential strategy, that national hegemonic bloc formation would (have to) precede internationalization. On the other hand, the double use of ‘but’ (in the Italian original and the Castilian translation, ‘but’/’‘yet’ in the English translation) conveys uncertainty, as if Gramsci sought to ‘sustain both premises simultaneously’ (Dal Maso, 2016). The answer to this ambiguity and to any inappropriately presumed methodological nationalism and nation-state-centrism, lies in the spatiality in Gramsci’s work (Featherstone, 2013; Ives and Short, 2013; Jessop, 2008, pp. 101–117; Loftus, 2020; Morton, 2007, pp. 69–73). For my purposes here, I elicit two interrelated aspects: the transnational as both spatial relation and scale of action; and Gramsci’s underlying relational method. Fundamentally, Gramsci analysed Italian nation-state formation in relation to ‘international’ processes, relations and forces: ‘international relations intertwine with these internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique and historically concrete combinations ... with diverse relations of force at all levels’ (Q13§17; Gramsci, 1971, p. 182). Adherence to ‘international’ notwithstanding, Gramsci here actually refers to transnational elite actors and forces at, across, and producing different scales (‘at all levels’) in colonizing processes: religious organizations, the Freemasonry, the Rotary Club, and career diplomats (Q4§49; Q13§17; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 19–20, 182). There is wide agreement that transnational analyses of civil society institutions traverse Gramsci’s work, differentiating while relating their distinct national manifestations through multiple structural and conjunctural temporalities and spatial modalities (territory, place, space, scale, network) (Ives and Short, 2013; Jessop, 2008; Kipfer and Hart, 2013; Loftus, 2020; Morton, 2007, pp. 99–102). From a counter-hegemonic perspective, Gramsci’s writings on internationalism and cosmopolitanism demonstrate that ‘subaltern geographies of connection’ (translocal, transregional, transnational) drive the relational (trans)formation of subaltern solidarities and identities, and of collective political wills (Featherstone, 2013, pp. 67–68, 79). The Lyons Theses and the Southern Question are key references to exemplify Gramsci’s relational approach. There, analyses of the internal Italian

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north:south (industrial/feudal) and city:countryside (proletariat/peasantry) divides intertwine with those of transnational-global flows of migration and remittances (from the USA) and international metropole:periphery fragmentations within Europe, as dialectically constituted manifestations of uneven geographical development (Featherstone, 2013; Jessop, 2008, pp. 101–117; Morton, 2007, pp. 59–63). This (class) analysis defies the methodologically nationalist container view and its assumed social homogeneity by illuminating the formation of translocal, transregional and transnational elite alliances, giving ‘the toiling masses of the [Italian] South a position analogous to that of a colonial population’ (Gramsci, 1978, p. 345). The relational method also served Gramsci to reveal the co-constitution of East:West (further discussed subsequently), and prefigured what came to be known as dependency theory, world systems analysis, Orientalism, and the conception of Global South outlined above – all of which inform decolonial thinking (Maldonado-Torres, 2011; Mignolo, 2007; Mignolo, 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Recognizing the co-constitution of East:West/North:South renders the relational method a decolonial method that breaks with the Eurocentric, linear-diffusionist idea of historical development (Morton, 2007, pp. 49–50, 70–72; also, Kipfer and Hart, 2013, p. 335). As Stuart Hall argued, as perhaps one of the first to challenge the perception of Gramsci as Eurocentric, the relational method provides essential tools for thinking about ‘racially structured social phenomena’ in/for multi-scalar ‘decolonizing struggles’ (Hall, 1986, pp. 16, 27). It allows, Peter Mayo adds, ‘debunking myths’ by generating knowledges that undermine the hegemonic common sense (Mayo, 2014, p. 393). Gramsci as a Global Southerner: The Political Gramsci’s positionality towards colonialism has been considered ambiguous due to his rather uncritical reproduction of the modernist ‘cultural project of assimilation’ (Slater, 2004, p. 160). Indeed, counter-posing ‘backward’ (colonies, colonized peoples, European periphery, the Italian South) with ‘civilized’ (e.g., Q1§149; Q4§49; Q19§6; Gramsci, 1977, pp. 83, 89; Gramsci, 1978, p. 444; Gramsci, 1995, p. 239; Gramsci, 1996, p. 206; Gramsci, 1971, p. 21); contrasting the English ‘language’ with African ‘dialects’ (Q4§49; Gramsci, 1996, p. 206; Gramsci, 1971, p. 21); and his ‘idealist faith’ (Casarino, 2010, p. 692) in the modernist ideologies of ‘progress’ (Q1§149; Gramsci, 1995, p. 240) and ‘civilization’ (Q8§21; Gramsci, 2007, p. 248) – Gramsci’s language displays Eurocentric othering.5 Similarly, his patronizing of the peasantry in his pre-prison writings – for instance, ‘the peasant ... is incapable of seeing himself as a member of a collectivity ... nor can he wage a systematic and permanent campaign’ (Gramsci, 1977, p. 83) – can be perceived as reproducing internal colonization. And, despite Gramsci’s vast engagement

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with the non-Western world, including his serving on the Comintern’s (Third Communist International, formed in 1919) Latin American Secretariat (Young, 2012, p. 21), absences have been noted regarding the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution (the world’s only successful slave revolution and prime example of desubalternization), and Our American decolonization generally (Kipfer and Hart, 2013, p. 335). These limitations, however, cannot undermine Gramsci’s solidarity with anti-colonial struggles, rooted in his early life experience in the colonized Italian South (Sardinia). An ‘internationalist’, Gramsci was the Italian delegate to the congresses of the Comintern from 1922 to 1924 (Castillo, 2000; Young, 2012), and the anti-imperialist campaigns launched by communist activists and intellectuals in Europe in the 1920s/1930s undoubtedly shaped his thinking (Brennan, 2013, p. 71). In the context of consecutive Pan-African Congresses between 1919 and 1927, inter alia in Paris, London and New York, the Comintern’s ‘Thesis on the Negro Question’, first drafted in 1922, pinpointed the centrality of colonization for capitalist accumulation, linking class with race, although the envisioned articulation of decolonial struggles in the peripheries with the working class struggles in the metropoles never materialized (Judy, 2020, pp. 168–169; Mahler, 2018, pp. 47–49). While colonization traverses Gramsci’s notebooks, his firm anti-colonial positioning is particularly explicit in his political writings (Gramsci, 1977). In ‘The War in the Colonies’ (1919), for example, Gramsci equates liberation struggles with ‘the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their white exploiters and murderers’ while lauding the recreation of ‘[c]onnective tissues ... to weld together once again peoples whom European domination seemed to have sundered once and for all’ (Gramsci, 1977, p. 60; also, pp. 70, 301, 302); that is, effectively calling for Global South unifying. Concomitantly, Gramsci reveals the inextricability of politics and method: by exposing that North:South/East:West are relationally constructed from a Eurocentric perspective, ‘since [outside of real history] every spot on the earth is simultaneously East and West’ (Q7§25; Gramsci, 2007, p. 176); and by denaturalizing biological determinism – the racist construal of the supposedly biologically inferior, deficient and abnormal other (Green, 2011). Justified by ‘science’ (i.e. bourgeois organic intellectuals), Gramsci already explained in the Southern Question, the subalterns are stereotyped as innately ‘lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric’ (Gramsci, 1978, p. 444). Such misrepresentation not only obfuscates the structural-relational production of poverty (Q19§24; Gramsci, 1971, p. 71; also, Q25§1; Gramsci, 1995, p. 50), but also serves the invalidation and depoliticization of counter-hegemonic political movements (Green, 2011, p. 397). The elitist-racist vilification of contemporary Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolutionary movement as irrational and manipulated ‘hordes’ (Cannon, 2008, p. 742; also, Muhr, 2013), for

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example, underscores the continued relevance of Gramsci’s analysis. In sum, Gramsci and decolonial thought share two important methodological and political arguments: that the coloniality of power has generated ‘a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior’ (Quijano, 2007, p. 171); and that liberation may require delinking: ‘By freeing themselves of foreign capitalist exploitation, the colonial populations would deprive the European industrial bourgeoisies of raw materials and foodstuffs, and bring down the centres of civilization that have lasted from the fall of the Roman Empire till today’ (Gramsci, 1977, p. 303).

GRAMSCI IN OUR AMERICA The presumably first mention of Gramsci in Our America dates from 1921, in a newspaper article written by Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui from his exile in Italy, where he moved in Gramsci’s environment (Massardo, 1999). The intellectual affinities between the two have generated wide debate regarding the extent to which Gramsci influenced Mariátegui’s thinking towards his ‘Indo-American socialism’ (Becker, 1993; Friggeri, 2022). For example, like Gramsci, Mariátegui saw culture as a mediating force in the dialectical intertwinedness of structure/superstructure (Munck, 2022, p. 19), and both were conscious of myth and passion as unifying and mobilizing elements (Friggeri, 2022; Slater, 2004, p. 159; Q8§21; Gramsci, 1971, pp. 125–133; Gramsci, 2007, pp. 246–249). Politically, Mariátegui, whom Quijano (2000, p. 573) considers ‘the first to begin to see’ the coloniality of global power, also advocated for delinking: ‘Only by breaking with the metropolis will Nuestra América [Our America] begin to discover its personality and create its own destiny’ (Mariátegui cited in Munck, 2022, p. 19). While Mariátegui was most likely familiar with Gramsci’s pre-prison writings (certainly until 1923, when he returned to Peru), the Prison Notebooks were only available long after Mariátegui’s death in 1930. Gramsci’s Our-Americanization started in Argentina, where his ‘Letters from Prison’ were published in Castilian in 1950, and the worldwide first foreign translation of the Notebooks from 1958 onward (Massardo, 1999). Since the 1960s, his war of position has changed Our American socialist struggles by understanding revolution as multidimensional social process, as ‘successive and continuous anti-capitalist ruptures’, through/in which the social subjects become reconstructed, or reconstruct themselves (Burgos, 2002, p. 16–17). This was never just a theoretical exercise, but in dialogue with the specificities of the diverse Our American social realities and political praxes (Burgos, 2021; Cuppi, 2020, p. 413). For example, the Cuban Revolution published Gramsci from 1965 on, and despite his ousting during the ‘dogmatic’ Marxist-Leninist period (1971–1985/1986), Gramsci subsequently informed

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the ‘rearticulation of socialist hegemony’ and construction of the ‘socialist civil society’ (Acanda González, 2000, pp. 119, 124, emphasis in original). Gramsci was published in Chile during the aborted Popular Unity (Unidad Popular) revolution (1970–1973), and his thinking has crucially guided the revolutionary politics of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN), El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, FMLN), and the Brazilian Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhores, PT) (Becker, 1993; Burgos, 2002; Cuppi, 2020). The ongoing Bolivian revolution draws from Gramsci, inter alia manifested in the writings of former vice-President Álvaro García Linera (Burgos, 2019; Friggeri, 2022, p. 59n10), and Gramsci figures prominently in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, not least because Comandante Hugo Chávez read Gramsci during his imprisonment between 1992–1994 (Muhr, 2011, p. 89). In one of his speeches, which as mass education events always served the purpose of moral and intellectual reform, Chávez (2007) expounded organic crisis, hegemony, political society/civil society, the role of organic intellectuals, and the continual task of ‘forming the new historical bloc’ (Chávez, 2007). To this end, the next sub-section examines the (re)conceptualization of el pueblo as the Our American collective historical revolutionary subject. ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! The people united will never be defeated is ascribed to Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, assassinated in 1948. The slogan entered Our American folk culture through the song of that same title composed in 1973 in support of Chile’s socialist revolution.6 The phrase captures the renewal of Our American Marxism regarding the strategic concerns of unity and who the collective historical revolutionary subject may or should be. This process articulated Mariátegui’s thinking with Gramscian concepts, alongside other theoretico-political currents, especially liberation theology, Enrique Dussel’s liberation philosophy, and strands of dependency theory (Burgos, 2019, p. 202). For Mariátegui, a key question was ‘what is the “proletariat” in a country without a proletariat?’ (Paris cited in Becker, 1993, p. 41). While Mariátegui localized the ‘socialist subject’ in Peru in the community of the original (indigenous) peoples (Burgos, 2021, p. 33; Friggeri, 2022), Gramsci’s ‘subaltern’ further added to overcoming class determinism (Freeland, 2020, pp. 199–200; Galastri, 2018, p. 48; Slater, 2004, p. 158). The equation of ‘subalterns’ with el pueblo, however, is already contained in Gramsci’s work. As Burgos (2019) meticulously shows, throughout the notebooks Gramsci used subaltern groups/classes equivalently with ‘popular masses’, ‘popular classes’, and ‘multitude’ – ‘the people’ as the ‘ensemble of subaltern classes’ (Q27§1;

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Gramsci, 2000b, p. 360; also, Ciavolella, 2020). Concurrently, reference has been made to ‘popular bloc’ (FMLN cited in Burgos, 2002, p. 25), ‘popular Bolivarian bloc’ (Chávez cited in Muhr, 2011, p. 89), ‘popular hegemony’ (González Casanova cited in Burgos, 2019, p. 216; Slater, 2004, p. 159), and the ‘subject people’ (Communist Party of Argentina cited in Burgos, 2002, p. 32). Gramsci’s statement that ‘the subaltern classes ... are not unified and cannot unify themselves until they become the “state”’ (Q25§5; Gramsci, 2000a, p. 182) underlies Nicaraguan President Comandante Daniel Ortega’s ‘...that el pueblo become the state’ (Ortega, 2008) and the contemporary FSLN government’s revolutionary catchphrase ‘The People as President’ (see Sefton, 2022). For Chávez, in his aforementioned speech, el pueblo includes the students, the women, the workers, the youth, the peasants, the blacks, the whites, the indigenous, the artists, the entrepreneurs and the intellectuals, also socially organized in, for example, cooperatives and Community (or Communal) Councils (Consejos Comunales); their unity – the ‘unity of all revolutionary currents’ – is a precondition for ‘victory’ (Chávez, 2007). Our American revolutionary experiences since the 1960s/1970s show that the construction of new national-popular collective wills through moral and intellectual reform is possible by interweaving justice (in its multiple dimensions), solidarity, anti-imperialism, and myth, interpreted as ‘collective passion’, ‘popular tradition’, or ‘folklore’ (Burgos, 2019; Ciavolella, 2020; Friggeri, 2022; Slater, 2004, p. 159). In the ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements, myth-building integrates the anti-colonial indigenous resistances and nationalist liberation struggles of the past 500 years with pre-Hispanic social histories and Afro-Indio spirituality (Muhr, 2013). The following semi-concluding observations frame the subsequent illustrations of the pluri-scalar war of position: first, unifying is inseparable from mobilizing el pueblo in/for exercising poder popular (popular or people power). Second, rather than being restricted to the workplace (workers’ and peasants’ councils), as Gramsci insisted in ‘The Development of the Revolution’ (1919; Gramsci, 1977, pp. 89–93), base organization must encompass the multidimensionality of social life, as in Venezuela’s Community Councils, Cuba’s Popular Power assemblies, and Nicaragua’s Citizen Power Councils (Bell, 2017; Muhr, 2013). Third, any subaltern group, such as the indigenous masses in Bolivia’s revolution today, can be a fundamental social group assuming leadership (Burgos, 2019). Fourth, the decolonial eco-socialist agenda of the ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements vindicates ‘original’ peoples’ traditions and knowledges, specifically el buen vivir/vivir bien (‘the good living’ or ‘living well’) (Bell, 2017; Burgos, 2021, pp. 31–32). Fifth, simultaneity is decisive: ‘the advancement of the revolutionary plans at all battle fronts, in the economic, the social, the political, the territorial, the international, the moral’ (Chávez, 2007). Sixth, Chávez (2007), by counterposing el pueblo to both the national bourgeoisie(s) and the ‘world

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elite’, i.e. the TCC, inherently recognized the necessity of transnationalizing el pueblo in a Global South sense. The Pluri-Scalar War of Position The ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements counter-hegemonic pluri-scalar war of position strategically articulates political and social actors and forces across the state/society complex. In this process, place-based flows, processes, ‘things’ (ideas, commodities) and people associated with the ALBA-TCP/ ALBA Movement South-South cooperation politics and projects interconnect distinct places while transforming them in the (re)constitution of space:scale (for underlying conceptual discussions, see Muhr, 2021). In my research this included: international and supranational regional scales, such as the ALBA Bank and ALBA-TCP Literacy and Post-literacy project; national scales, including ministries and coordinations of educational ‘missions’ (misiones), which transcend assistentialist programmes by driving structural transformation through subaltern organizing and intellectual and moral reform (Muhr, 2011, pp. 123–127; Muhr, 2013; cf. Gramsci, 2007, p. 249); sub-national regional and municipal scales, notably the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), which operates via regional headquarters and over 1,300 centres in all of the country’s 335 municipalities; local scales, including the popular neighbourhood Barrio Cruz Verde in Coro, Venezuela, and a ¡Yo, Sí Puedo! (Sure I Can!) literacy point in San Carlos, Nicaragua; a transnational Brazil–Venezuela cross-border scale termed ‘Special Border Regime’ (Muhr, 2016); and other transnational scales, inter alia materialized as ALBA Petróleos headquarters and Misión Milagro (Mission Miracle) ophthalmological centres, established between the Venezuelan and Cuban governments and FMLN and FSLN-governed mayoralties in El Salvador and Nicaragua (before Nicaragua joined ALBA-TCP in 2007, following the FSLN’s return to the presidency), bypassing the neoliberal governments of the day (Muhr, 2013). Be it Venezuelan petroleum, Cuban doctors and literacy advisors, newly created state transport systems, air transportation of medical patients for free-of-charge treatment in Cuban and Venezuelan state hospitals,7 the global counter-hegemonic information structure teleSUR (https://​www​.telesurtv​.net), or non-commoditized Global South student mobility driving transnational intellectual and moral reform (Muhr, 2011, p. 208; República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 2019), desubalternization and the construction of transnational organized society drive historical bloc formation. My research in Barrio Cruz Verde illustrates the dialectics of organizing and mobilizing el pueblo while re-constituting or re-signifying place (its identity) through intersecting local and extra-local relations, processes and forces. This barrio had derived its dominant identity from a history of depri-

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vation, fragmentation and disorganization. The UBV, founded in 2003 with the mission to universalize free state-provided university education, to form popular organic intellectuals, and to support base organization, assumed a key role in transforming this place through participatory action research. In 2006, as an instance of place-based subaltern agency, el pueblo, including UBV Law students, appropriated an abandoned building to establish a communal health centre, from which the formation of several Community Councils in this neighbourhood followed. By 2009, reflecting growing transnational inter-place linkages within the ALBA-TCP space, the health centre had partially been staffed with Cuban doctors. The identity of such places and their inhabitants is further reconstructed as local organized society actors participate in the relational space of ALBA Movements. Social relations of solidarity and empowerment, through universally accessible health care and education, political participation and cultural recognition, transform collective identities as well as bodily-inscribed subalternity (see Muhr, 2011, pp. 159–166; Muhr, 2013).

CONCLUSION: GLOBAL SOUTHERNERS OF THE WORLD – UNITE! The pluri-scalar war of position addresses the ambiguities of Gramsci’s use of national/international while, throughout his work, also analysing translocal, transregional and transnational relations. Rather than viewing historical bloc construction sequentially starting at the national scale and then be internationalized, as Gramsci appears to suggest (Q14§68; Gramsci, 1971, p. 240), in a globalized world, state apparatuses, national and transnational civil societies, and institutions of the global governance regime simultaneously become strategic places, spaces and scales in/of hegemonic struggle. This does not undermine the strategic importance of the national. Without taking government and/or state power, above all in Cuba and Venezuela, which launched ALBA-TCP in 2004, the ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements would never have materialized. In this sense, ALBA Movements accords with Gramsci by insisting on establishing ‘National Chapters and Coordinations’ (in ALBA-TCP member and non-member territories alike) as a precondition for participating in the ALBA Movements Continental Coordination (ALBA Movimientos, 2022b, pp. 10–11). Historical bloc formation, however, requires more than taking government and state power. The relevance of the transnational strategy precisely consists in counter-hegemonic processes, relations, things (ideas, commodities) and people penetrating territories governed by adversary, colonialist/imperialist forces, thus strategically supporting local place-based subaltern struggles over government/state power. The ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements gambit of also extending into places in the imperialist core, as

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through the aforementioned 2022 People’s Summit for Democracy in the USA (also, Muhr, 2013; Muhr, 2021), is exemplary of actively constructing the Global South through unity in diversity. Identifying Gramsci as a Global Southerner, and reconciling Gramsci with decolonial thought, seeks to imagine a counter-hegemonic historical bloc as a Global South bloc. The coloniality of global power constrains counter-hegemonic action in (at least) two ways. As the ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements experience suggests, historical structural constraints may reinforce existing internal contradictions, such as between the simultaneous quests for social justice and ethno-environmental justice, undermining unity among different subaltern social groups (Angosto-Ferrández, 2021; Bell, 2017; Lalander and Lembke, 2018). More significantly though, the colonial power matrix is reasserted through ‘hybrid warfare’, developed from previous ‘counter-insurgency’, ‘low intensity warfare’ and ‘colour revolution’ strategies. This combines strategic disinformation campaigns with coercive economic, financial, legal and military measures, including illegal sanctions (embargoes, confiscations), abductions (e.g., Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab), paramilitary terrorism, coups d’état and cybernetic attacks. In this, imperialist states and society actors collaborate in unison, which underscores the analytical power of Gramsci’s integral state. Regarding the coercive moment, Gramsci already highlighted the decisive roles of economic blockades and the military in thwarting socialist revolution (Q13§17; Gramsci, 1977, pp. 81, 303; Gramsci, 1971, p. 183). Therefore, military alliances, as incipiently instituted in the ALBA-TCP (Muhr 2012), are imperative. The more insidious element, however, is the globally concerted disinformation by bourgeois media and academia (organic intellectuals), commonly claiming ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘human rights violations’ by counter-hegemonic governments in fact fending off imperialist-fascist ‘regime change’ intervention. Disinformation seeks to colonize the minds of Global Southerners to undermine solidarity, drive division, and impede historical bloc formation, and underscores the previously discussed indispensability of subaltern organic intellectuals for self-representation (see: Baraka, 2021; MacLeod, 2018; Perry and Sterling, 2021; Sefton, 2022). In this regard, decolonial delinking, which should not mean absolute autarky or isolation, involves not only a counter-hegemonic information structure, such as teleSUR, and transnational subaltern organizations such as the Alliance for Global Justice (https://​ afgj​.org/​) and Progressive International (https://​progressive​.international/​), but also contestation within supranational institutions of global coloniality. One such example is the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, on which all current ALBA-TCP members are active.8 At the risk of sounding trite, as hegemony is ‘never totally achieved’ (Hall, 1986, p. 25), I slightly expand Casarino’s (2010, p. 696) reading of Pasolini’s ‘southern answer’ to the ‘southern question’: Global Southerners of the World – Unite!

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NOTES Cuban liberation fighter José Martí’s Our America symbolizes a decolonial Pan-America-Caribbean identity and value system, for transcontinental unity. It is used synonymously for the self-designated Abya Yala, which in the Kuna people’s language means mature, living or flowering land, in counter-position to the Euro-colonial ‘America’ (Burgos, 2021, n14). Throughout this article, all translations from sources in Castilian (‘Spanish’) and Portuguese are mine, including translations from the Gramscian Institute’s critical edition of Gramsci’s notebooks in Castilian. Standard English translations of Gramsci are used whenever possible. 2. See https://​peoplessummit2022​.org/​ for documentation and participating movements/organizations (consulted September 30 2023). 3. See Muhr (2013) for the original ALBA-TCP structure, multidimensional institutionalization and operationalization. On ALBA-TCP/ALBA Movements generally, see the respective sources as referenced throughout this chapter, and https://​www​.albatcp​.org/​en/​; https://​bancodelalba​.org/​en/​home; https://​ albamovimientos​.net/​ 4. Subaltern Studies originated in the Indian post-colonial context, and in the 1990s inspired a short-lived Latin American Subaltern Studies group from whose internal theoretical divergences the Our American Modernity/Coloniality/ Decoloniality project evolved (Grosfoguel, 2007; Rosenthal, 2022). Regarding ‘subalternity’, Burgos (2019, n2) finds that decolonial studies (in contrast to Subaltern Studies) ‘still carries the strength of the Gramscian concept’. See also Chapter 20, this volume. 5. Nonetheless, in later writings Gramsci put certain terms in inverted commas, indicating that they might be problematic (e.g., ‘“barbarian”’; Q15§5; Gramsci, 1995, p. 223). 6. See https://​scoop​.me/​el​-pueblo​-unido​-this​-song​-accompanies​-the​-protests​-in​ -chile/​. For translation: https://​www​.marxists​.org/​subject/​art/​music/​lyrics/​es/​el​ -pueblo​.htm 7. See http://​www​.conviasa​.aero/​es/​nosotros/​misionmilagro 8. See https://​www​.un​.org/​dppa/​decolonization/​en/​c24/​about 1.

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Baraka, A. (2021). We can no longer avoid raising the contradiction of the Western imperial left’s collaboration with the Western bourgeoisie. Black Agenda Report, September 1. https://​blackagendareport​.com/​we​-can​-no​-longer​-avoid​-raising​ -contradiction​-western​-imperial​-lefts​-collaboration​-western Becker, M. (1993). Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist theory. Ohio University. Bell, K. (2017). The dawn of environmental justice? In R. Holifield, J. Chakraborty, & G. Walker (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice (pp. 543–555). Routledge. Berger, T. (2021). The ‘Global South’ as a relational category – global hierarchies in the production of law and legal pluralism. Third World Quarterly, 42(9), 2001–2017. Brennan, T. (2013). Joining the party. Postcolonial Studies, 16(1), 68–78. Burgos, R. (2002). The Gramscian intervention in the theoretical and political production of the Latin American left. Latin American Perspectives, 29(1), 9–37. Burgos, R. (2019). O conceito de classe(s) subalterna(s) na trama conceitual da teoria Gramsciana da hegemonia: uma reflexão a partir da América Latina. In A. Bianchi, D. Mussi, & S. Areco (Eds), Antonio Gramsci – Filologia e Política (pp. 191–229). Zouk. Burgos, R. (2021). Uma escola latino-americana de hegemonia? Elementos para uma proposta interpretativa. O Social em Questão, 51, 15–66. Cannon, B. (2008). Class/race polarisation in Venezuela and the electoral success of Hugo Chávez. Third World Quarterly, 29(4), 731–748. Carroll, W. K., & Ratner, R. S. (2010). Social movements and counter-hegemony: Lessons from the field. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 4(1), 7–22. Casarino, C. (2010). The Southern answer: Pasolini, universalism, decolonization. Critical Inquiry, 36(4), 673–696. Castillo, J. S. (2000). Gramsci y Mariátegui. In D. Kanoussi (Ed.), Gramsci en América (pp. 171–183). Plaza y Valdés. Chávez, H. (2007). Discurso de Hugo Chávez con motivo de la concentración Bolivariana Antiimperialista. Prensa Presidential/Aporrea, June 2. https://​ www​ .aporrea​.org/​tiburon/​a35788​.html Ciavolella, R. (2020). The changing meanings of people’s politics: Gramsci and anthropology from subaltern classes to contemporary struggles. In F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, L. Fusaro, & R. Jackson (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 266–282). Brill. Conelli, C. (2020). Back to the South: Revisiting Gramsci’s Southern Question in the light of subaltern studies. In F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, L. Fusaro, & R. Jackson (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 233–247). Brill. Coutinho, C. N. (2000) El concepto de sociedad civil en Gramsci y la lucha ideológica en el Brasil de hoy. In D. Kanoussi (Ed.), Gramsci en América (pp. 17–46). Plaza y Valdés. Cuppi, V. (2020). The diffusion of Gramsci’s thought in the ‘peripheral West’ of Latin America. In F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, L. Fusaro, & R. Jackson (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 412–429). Brill. Dal Maso, J. (2016). Gramsci’s three moments of hegemony. Left Voice, August 3. https://​www​.leftvoice​.org/​gramsci​-s​-three​-moments​-of​-hegemony/​ Egan, D. (2016). Gramsci’s war of position as siege warfare: Some lessons from history. Critique, 44(4), 435–450.

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Ekers, M., & Loftus, A. (2013). Gramsci: Space, nature, politics. In M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, & A. Loftus (Eds), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (pp. 15–43). Wiley-Blackwell. Featherstone, D. (2013). ‘Gramsci in action’: Space, politics, and the making of solidarities. In M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, & A. Loftus (Eds), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (pp. 65–82). Wiley-Blackwell. Freeland, A. (2020). Subalternity and the national-popular: A brief genealogy of the concepts. In F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, L. Fusaro, & R. Jackson (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 195–208). Brill. Friggeri, F. P. (2022). Mariátegui and the search for the Latin American proletariat. Latin American Perspectives, 49(4), 45–61. Galastri, L. (2018). Social classes and subaltern groups: Theoretical distinction and political application. Capital & Class, 42(1), 43–62. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited/translated by Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith). Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1977). Selections from Political Writings (1910-1920) (selected/edited by Q. Hoare, translated by J. Mathews). Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926) (edited/translated by Q. Hoare). Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1995). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (edited/translated by D. Boothman). Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. (1996). Prison Notebooks, vol. II (edited/translated by J. A. Buttigieg). Columbia University Press. Gramsci, A. (1999). Cuadernos de la Cárcel. Edición críticia del Instituto Gramsci, Tomo 5. Era. Gramsci, A. (2000a). Cuadernos de la Cárcel. Edición críticia del Instituto Gramsci, Tomo 6. Era. Gramsci, A. (2000b). The Antonio Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings 1916-1935 (edited by D. Forgacs). Lawrence and Wishart. Gramsci, A. (2007). Prison Notebooks, vol. III (edited/translated by J. A. Buttigieg). Columbia University Press. Green, M. E. (2011). Rethinking the subaltern and the question of censorship in Gramsci’s prison notebooks. Postcolonial Studies, 14(4), 387–404. Green, M. E. (2013). On the postcolonial image of Gramsci. Postcolonial Studies, 16(1), 90–101. Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 211–223. Hall, S. (1986). Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(5), 5–27. Ives, P., & Short, N. (2013). On Gramsci and the international: A textual analysis. Review of International Studies, 39(3), 621–642. Jessop, B. (2008). State Power. Cambridge: Polity. Judy, R. A. (2020). Gramsci on la questione dei negri. In R. Dainotto, & F. Jameson (Eds), Gramsci in the World (pp. 165–178). Duke University Press. Kipfer, S., & Hart, G. (2013). Translating Gramsci in the current conjuncture. In M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, & A. Loftus (Eds), Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (pp. 323–343). Wiley-Blackwell. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2016). The decolonial option in English teaching: Can the subaltern act? TESOL Quarterly, 50(1), 66–85.

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Lalander, R., & Lembke, M. (2018). The Andean Catch-22: Ethnicity, class and resource governance in Bolivia and Ecuador. Globalizations, 15(5), 636–654. Loftus, A. (2020). Gramsci as a historical geographical materialist. In F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, L. Fusaro, & R. Jackson (Eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 9–22). Brill. MacLeod, A. (2018). Bad News from Venezuela. Routledge. Mahler, A. G. (2018). From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity. Duke University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2011). Thinking through the decolonial turn: Post-continental interventions in theory, philosophy, and critique – an introduction. Transmodernity, 1(2), 1–15. Massardo, J. (1999). La recepción de Gramsci en América Latina: Cuestiones de orden teórico y politico. International Gramsci Society Newsletter, 9 (electronic supplement 3), http://​www​.interna​tionalgram​scisociety​.org/​igsn/​articles/​a09​_s3​.shtml Mayo, P. (2014). Gramsci and the politics of education. Capital & Class, 38(2), 385–398. Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 449–514. Mignolo, W. D. (2021). Coloniality and globalization: A decolonial take. Globalizations, 18(5), 720–737. Morton, A. D. (2007). Unravelling Gramsci. Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy. Pluto. Muhr, T. (2011). Venezuela and the ALBA: Counter-hegemony, Geographies of Integration and Development, and Higher Education for All. VDM. Muhr, T. (2012). Bolivarian globalization? The new left’s struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean to negotiate a revolutionary approach to humanitarian militarism and international intervention. Globalizations, 9(1), 145–159. Muhr, T. (2013). Counter-globalization and Socialism in the 21st Century: The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. Routledge. Muhr, T. (2016). Equity of access to higher education in the context of South-South cooperation in Latin America: A pluri-scalar analysis. Higher Education, 72: 557–571. Muhr, T. (2021). Counter-hegemonic strategy from the Global South: A pluri-scalar war of position. Socialism and Democracy, 35(2-3), 214–240. Muhr, T. (2023). Reclaiming the politics of South-South cooperation. Globalizations, 20(3): 347–364. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14747731​.2022​.2082132 Munck, R. (2022). José Carlos Mariátegui and twenty-first-century socialism. Latin American Perspectives, 49(4), 13–30. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2018). Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. Routledge. Norton, B. (2022). In neocolonial rant, EU says Europe is ‘garden’ superior to rest of world’s barbaric ‘jungle’. MRonline, 19 October. https://​mronline​.org/​2022/​10/​19/​ in​-neocolonial​-rant​-eu​-says​-europe​-is​-garden​-superior​-to​-rest​-of​-worlds​-barbaric​ -jungle/​ Ortega, D. (2008). Daniel instala el CONPES. Intervención de Daniel en reunión con el Consejo Nacional de Planificación Económica y Social, CONPES, presentando el Plan Nacional de Desarrollo Humano. La Voz del Sandinismo, 15 October. https://​ www​.academia​.edu/​90868857/​Ortega​_Daniel​_2008​_Daniel​_instala​_el​_CONPES​ _Intervenci​%C3​%B3n​_de​_Daniel​_en​_Reuni​%C3​%B3n​_con​_el​_CONPES​_Speech​ _by​_Daniel​_in​_the​_Meeting​_with​_CONPES​_

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Perry, J., & Sterling, R. (2021, December 20). How can some progressives get basic information about Nicaragua so wrong? LA Progressive. https://​www​.laprogressive​ .com/​latin​-america​-2/​slandered​-election Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla, 1(3), 533–580. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178. República Bolivariana de Venezuela (2019). Venezuela: Potencia universitaria. Caracas: MINCI. Rosenthal, O. E. (2022). Academic colonialism and marginalization: on the contentious postcolonial-decolonial debate in Latin American Studies. Postcolonial Studies, 25(1), 17–34. Sefton, S. (2022). Nicaragua in Latin America – the invisible and the reality. Tortilla con Sal, 23 October. https://​www​.tortillaconsal​.com/​bitacora/​node/​724 Slater, D. (2004). Geopolitics and the Post-colonial. Rethinking North-South Relations. Blackwell. Thomas, P. D. (2020). We good subalterns. In F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, L. Fusaro, & R. Jackson (Eds.), Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks (pp. 177–194). Brill. Young, R. J. C. (2012). Il Gramsci meridionale. In N. Srivastava, & B. Bhattacharya (Eds), The Postcolonial Gramsci. Routledge.

Section D

Global organic crisis

24. Transnational neoliberalism in organic crisis Henk Overbeek INTRODUCTION The application of neoliberal recipes, particularly in the world of global finance, has contributed considerably to the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008 and to the subsequent near collapse of the global financial architecture. Yet, in the following years, neoliberalism appeared unharmed and even strengthened rather than being irreparably compromised by its failure to stabilize global capital accumulation. In earlier instances of global crisis, the then dominant frame of mind succumbed to its own contradictions to give way to a new frame. The Great Depression of the 1930s was followed by the complete collapse of the liberal order, both nationally with state-led responses as different as Fascism and National Socialism in Europe and the New Deal in the United States, and internationally with the collapse of global trade and the formation of rival protectionist currency blocs. The postwar world saw the emergence of a new global order, characterized by the combination of nationally demarcated welfare states where one or another variant of Keynesianism ruled, with a gradually liberalizing international trade system. John Ruggie labelled this configuration “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie, 1982). Emphasizing the hegemony of a new generation of industrial corporate conglomerates in this configuration Kees van der Pijl introduced the term “corporate liberalism” (van der Pijl, 1984). After the crisis of the 1970s, corporate liberalism was gradually replaced by neoliberalism, characterized by a concerted offensive to “free markets” through deregulation and privatization domestically, and trade liberalization, floating exchange rates and the abolition of capital controls externally. Small wonder, then, that after the crisis of 2008 many observers anticipated the end of neoliberal hegemony and the resurgence of organized forms of capitalism with the state once again in a commanding role, a “Polanyian turn” so to speak. This expectation was primarily based on the immediate appearances of the crisis as a ‘financial crisis’ which necessitated a state-financed bail-out of 428

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banks. But, contrary to initial expectations, the pillars of the global neoliberal order have proven remarkably resilient. In this chapter, I explore some of the causes of this ostensible resilience of neoliberalism, and the conditions under which neoliberalism may be succeeded by a different order. The chapter builds on earlier work on neoliberalism, in which the concepts and insights of Gramsci have played a key role (Overbeek, 1990, 1993, 2004; Overbeek and van Apeldoorn, 2012; Jessop and Overbeek, 2019). In the next section, I briefly situate my contribution in the context of the reception of Gramsci in the fields of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE). In the third section, I turn to the concept of neoliberalism. Do we understand neoliberalism as a political ideology or do we define it as a particular configuration of ideas, institutional arrangements and material interests? I will argue for the latter and define neoliberalism as a comprehensive concept of control, to use the ‘Amsterdam School’ language.1 Following that, I will trace how such configurations rise, become hegemonic, are transformed over time, and gradually are transcended by new hegemonic configurations. Having thus laid the groundwork, I then address in the fourth section why the crisis of neoliberalism played out very differently from the crisis of Keynesianism in the years 1973–1983: what was different this time? In the fifth section, I end by analyzing the current organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism: the conjuncture of crisis in the ecosphere, the geographic reorientation of global accumulation, and the shift in the global system from a hegemonic order led by the United States and transnational capital to a global order characterized by global rivalries and geopolitical competition. In the conclusion I reflect on the contribution that an approach to IPE that takes inspiration from Marx and Gramsci can make to understanding the dynamics of our world.

GRAMSCI IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY The relevance of Gramsci’s work to those working in IR was not widely recognized until well into the second half of the 1970s, ergo after the publication of the English translation of selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971), which preceded the Italian publication of the complete Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del Carcere) in 1975 (Gramsci, 1975). Gramsci was brought to IR in the pioneering work of Robert Cox, who by his own account first came into contact with Gramsci’s work in 1972 (Cox, 1996, xiii). His most elaborate texts on Gramsci are to be found in two articles that appeared in the British journal Millennium (1981, 1983), later expanded into his magnum opus (1987). The essence of Cox’s contribution is the assertion that the essentially global character of capitalism (which for Cox expresses itself in the twin

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processes of the globalization of the social relations of production and the internationalization of the state) allows for the application of Gramsci’s core concepts to the analysis of politics in the international sphere, usually identified as ‘international relations’. This key proposition has come under fire from a range of IR scholars who wholly or partly reject the claim (e.g., Germain and Kenny 1998; Femia 2005; Ayers 2008; see also Gill 1993 and Bieler and Morton 2006 for additional perspectives). The essence of the critique is that Gramsci’s core concepts have all been developed in the context of his historical analysis of national, mostly Italian, politics. In my view, this critique does not hold. Gramsci, like Marx, conceived of capitalism as a global mode of production, in which the social relations of production are determinative, not their nationality. In The Modern Prince, Gramsci presents us with ‘an elementary exposition of the science and art of politics’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 175), in which he very explicitly finds his concept of hegemony applicable to the international as well as to the national level: The elements of empirical observation […] ought, in so far as they are not abstract and illusory, to be inserted into the context of the relations of force, on one level or another. These levels range from the relations between international forces (one would insert here the notions written on what a great power is, on the combinations of States in hegemonic systems, and hence on the concept of independence and sovereignty as far as small and medium powers are concerned) to the objective relations within society – in other words, the degree of the development of productive forces; to relations of political force and those between parties (hegemonic systems within the State); and to immediate (or potentially military) political relations. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 176; emphasis added)

Some of the authors brought together by Ayers do have a valid point when they argue that many neo-Gramscians implicitly or explicitly suggest that Gramsci has transcended Marx, or that one can embrace Gramsci without at the same time embracing his Marxian roots (as indeed Cox himself implicitly did by renouncing the use of essential Marxian concepts such, as first of all, ‘class’). There can, however, be no doubt that Gramsci places his own work squarely within the Marxian, historical materialist, tradition.2 As McNally, in his foreword to the Ayers volume, rightly points out, such denial also compromises accounts of the rise of neoliberalism that, in an exclusive focus on political reorientations and shifts in state policy, underplay the sustained restructuring of capital (including the capital–labor relation) and processes of accumulation that have been decisive to neoliberal transformations (McNally, 2008, x).

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In what follows, I will show how an analysis of the underlying dynamics of capital accumulation is indispensable for a proper understanding of neoliberalism, both of its resilience and its eventual demise.

NEOLIBERALISM Definition The concept of neoliberalism has been used in academic contexts in several different ways. I briefly discuss five, namely neoliberalism as a 1. discourse, an ideology, a set of policy prescriptions; 2. governmentality; 3. political project or movement; 4. really existing institutional mode of regulation; 5. particular historical mode of capital accumulation on a global scale. In the first use, neoliberalism is placed squarely in the ideational realm. Neoliberal thought is then seen as an ideology or as a discourse (in other words a set of propositions or speech acts that enable us to make sense of the world), or as a set of policy prescriptions or normative reasons, in other words a set of propositions outlining what policies should be enacted, what course of action should be taken, what state of affairs is normatively desirable or ‘ought to be’. It is widely noted that neoliberal thought has assumed different forms and shapes and its quintessential ingredients have shifted over time (e.g., Peck, 2010; Davies, 2014). Neoliberal thought originated in the 1930s as a reaction to the rise of Communism and National Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s as well as to various forms of Keynesian state interventionism such as the New Deal. Its guiding conviction was that ‘liberty’ was best guarded by the creation of a ‘suitable framework for the beneficial working of competition’ (Hayek, 1944, p. 29). Indeed, in this early version, far from relegating the state to inaction, the state was seen as charged with safeguarding the supremacy of ‘competition’ and the price system, which produce inherently ‘just’ outcomes. This particular variant of neoliberalism, better known as ordoliberalism (or Ordoliberalismus in German) became the theoretical basis for the social market economy championed by Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, under the impact of work done in the 1960s at the University of Chicago in particular, ‘justice’ (with its metaphysical reference) is replaced by ‘efficiency’, where ‘[e]mpirical outcomes are the barometer of justice, and not conscious intentions, actions or processes’ as Davies (2014, p. 71) phrased it. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, under the impact of the thinking of Joseph Schumpeter (1934) on the

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centrality of the entrepreneurial spirit, Michael Porter (1998) on national competitiveness, and Carl Schmitt (1996 [1932]) on politics as existential combat, the state and indeed much of the public sphere (education, healthcare, social work) became subject, in the words of William Davies, to quantitative audit: (para-)governmental agency is measured not by its outcomes in terms of social objectives, but rather by techniques of benchmarking and financial auditing. Second, in the Foucauldian tradition, the ideational dimension is complemented with a focus on concomitant governing practices; Foucault referred to this ensemble of neoliberal thought and practices as constituting a neoliberal governmentality which he understood as the extent, modes, and objectives of government action in the days of the modern administrative state (Foucault, 2008, p. 92). Third, however, to view neoliberalism as a set of ideas on how to organize the economy, society, politics, whether or not complemented with a set of practices, without bringing up the question of the carriers of these ideas – the individuals or political actors actively disseminating neoliberal thought – means missing a large part of the picture. Neoliberalism is as much a political project, a movement, as it is an ideology. The emphasis then shifts from neoliberal thought and practices to the individuals, parties and movements that espouse and propagate the ideas and promote the practices, or in the words of Philip Mirowski and others the thought collective translating neoliberal ideas and practices into political programs (Mirowski, 2013). We do not necessarily need to go along with Karl Marx’s famous phrase that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Marx and Engels, 1845) to recognize that ideas, discourses, frames, do not usually travel on their own, miraculously spreading from one place to another blown by the wind. Sets of ideas such as neoliberalism gain social traction only if they are actively propagated by influential agents (organic intellectuals in Gramsci’s terms), and if they come to serve as the political program for an increasingly self-conscious configuration of social forces. We may think here of the role played by the Mont Pèlerin Society and its offspring in various countries (such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs in Britain or the American Enterprise Institute in the US). Fourth, capital accumulation requires particular institutional arrangements, both at the national and at the international level. Neoliberalism cannot be just about ideas and agency: for ideas, discourses, normative frames to impact on society, we must include in our analysis the institutional forms in which they are embedded or sedimented. French regulation theory (Aglietta, 1979; Boyer, 1990; Lipietz, 1988) has been particularly influential with its groundbreaking work on the Fordist accumulation regime (the term ‘Fordism’ was of course borrowed from Gramsci) resting on the intensive mode of accumulation developed in the 1920s and beyond, in combination with the Keynesian mode

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of regulation pioneered in the New Deal and further developed in the post-war welfare state in Britain and Western Europe. Nationally, this stage of capitalist development was shaped by the class compromise between productive capital (large industrial corporations) and the organized working class in the core countries of global capitalism. At the international level, this phase of global capitalism was characterized by relatively closed national economies, capital controls and fixed exchange rates, engaging in a controlled and managed form of trade liberalization. This global order of ‘corporate liberalism’ was governed through the Bretton Woods institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Fifth, ideas are carried by influential agents and embedded through institutional arrangements, but what makes these agents influential depends critically on how they are situated in the context of the underlying power structures in society, in other words on how they are able to mobilize and represent a critical mass of interests rooted in the structural dynamics of capital accumulation on a global scale. Likewise, institutions are not neutral, they are imbued with what Ruggie (1982) has called a social purpose: their raison d’être expresses a particular and historically specific configuration of institutions, actors and structural interests, often referred to with the Gramscian concept of historical bloc (blocco storico). The work of the Amsterdam School offers a framework which brings these different strands together, by proposing the notion of comprehensive concept of control (which I use more or less interchangeably with Bob Jessop’s concept of hegemonic project, see Jessop and Overbeek, 2019). At the core of this approach stands the realization that the capitalist class never constitutes itself as a unified social force in an unmediated way. The vantage points from which groups of capitalists, their political and ideological representatives and their organic intellectuals form ‘fractions’, are determined by the coordinates of their position in a field shaped by two axes: first, at the level of social relations of production, the divide between productive capital and circulating capital (subdivided into money capital and commercial capital); and second, at the level of world order, the divide between the Lockean heartland and Hobbesian contender states, or between core and (semi-)periphery to use the language of dependencia theory.3 Class formation, and class-based politics, is an essentially transnational process, especially so in the Lockean part of the world where the boundaries between domestic and international politics have blurred and where the dividing lines between competing hegemonic projects transcend political borders. Outside that sphere, the pursuit of global hegemony stumbles on the aspirations of developmental state classes in the bigger Hobbesian contender states. The contestation around rival hegemonic projects in the Lockean core is partially structured by opposing views (and divergent

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underlying interests) regarding relations with the leading contender states. Most recently we can see this sharply in the struggle within both the US and Europe (and between the US and Europe) concerning Western relations with Russia and China. Although the concrete process of forming a class coalition will always be a contingent and dynamic process, the perspective that the representatives of circulating capital spearheaded by money capital will bring to it will tend to be, ‘the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of the self-regulating market’ (Polanyi, 1957, pp. 138–139); its opposite number, productive capital, will necessarily advance a definite spatial focus, reliance on the state, and elements of social protection necessary for the provision of trained and fit workers, necessary to guarantee the continuity of accumulation. In the history of modern industrial capitalism we have witnessed four phases characterized by the predominance of a particular comprehensive concept of control (Overbeek & van der Pijl, 1993): the (money capital dominated) liberal internationalism of the middle of the nineteenth century, characterized by British hegemony, laissez-faire, free trade, the gold standard; the (productive capital dominated) state monopoly tendency of the period from the 1870s to the Interbellum, characterized by rival imperialisms, protectionism and currency wars; the period of (productive capital dominated) corporate liberalism of the post-war era, characterized by US hegemony and Cold War and by the embedded liberalism of the Bretton Woods system; and post-1970s neoliberalism (once more dominated by the money capital perspective), characterized by the dynamics of liberalization and privatization. But how do the transitions between these phases take place? How do dominant concepts of control emerge, get consolidated, and decline? Let us try to answer these questions by zooming in on the trajectory of neoliberalism. The Lifecycle of Hegemonic Projects4 No hegemonic project is, or ever becomes, the direct and unmediated realization of the objectives and plans of its key ‘authors’. Neoliberalism is no exception. The really existing neoliberalism of today hardly resembles what intellectual forebears such as Hayek had in mind. Like any hegemonic project, neoliberalism is a project in motion: it is continuously contested, it is what Drainville called an unending ‘series of negotiated settlements’ (Drainville, 1994). A hegemonic project typically emerges during a crisis of the previously hegemonic project,5 which is delegitimized as a consequence of mounting contradictions and rising contestation by popular forces and by rival elite projects (as during the 1970s in Britain with the crisis of the Keynesian compromise and the rise to power in the Conservative Party of the Thatcherites; in the US,

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the appointment of Paul Volcker to the Fed in 1979, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, were the defining moments of neoliberal ascendancy). The first task, once the groups initially supporting such a new project come to power, is deconstruction: to destroy the coherence and remaining legitimacy of the previously hegemonic project. This is primarily done through the hollowing out or full-scale dismantling of the institutions that once were the cornerstones of the hegemonic structure (think of the attacks of the Thatcher government on the trade union movement and on the institutions of corporatism such as ‘Neddy’, the National Economic Development Council). In these early phases in the emergence of a new hegemonic project, the organic intellectuals of the emerging new fractional configuration play a key role in the formulation of a new legitimating discourse. The emerging hegemonic project then achieves primacy through the construction of a new common sense, or in other words through the normalization of the new hegemonic discourse (‘there is no alternative’), and through the configuration of a supporting coalition of social forces that redefine their particular interests in the terms of the newly constructed and normalized ‘general interest’. During the consolidation phase, certain crucial path dependencies are created by erecting new institutions that embody the ‘new normal’. Interests become entrenched, ideologies are internalized and, in this manner, institutional and ideological blockages arise that prevent an adequate response to emerging contradictions in later phases (as illustrated by the famous confession of Alan Greenspan who was at a loss to explain what happened with the 2008 financial crisis as it contradicted the model which he had believed in for 40 years – New York Times, 2008). Consolidation in turn is followed by maturation. The new concept of control has become fully ‘normalized’, but contradictions begin to show in the practical implementation of policies (e.g., privatization of public utilities, which is derailed or produces unexpected and contrarian results). Maturation marks the transition from a virtuous to a vicious cycle: hegemony begins to wear thin and shows the first cracks. Finally, delegitimation marks the demise of the hegemonic project and the gradual emergence of a new one: contradictions in the implementation of the project mount, reproduction of hegemony in the heartland leans increasingly on authoritarian imposition rather than hegemonic consensus (something usually true in the periphery from early on), and seeds of counterhegemonic projects and orders may slowly be taking root even if not yet very visible. We are not, contrary to appearances, dealing with an endless replay of a scenario in which the component parts remain structurally the same. The paradox of the years following 2008 was that the bankrupt financial sector, instead of being displaced by an alternative coalition (calling for, say, state intervention

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to foster an eco-industrial transformation and a restoration of social protection), successfully entrenched for another round of financial globalization. So why was neoliberalism not succeeded by an alternative comprehensive concept of control providing coherence and direction to the aspirations of a new configuration of social forces?

THE OLD IS NOT DYING QUITE YET The question has been raised by many scholars in the aftermath of the global financial crisis: why has neoliberalism not died in 2008 or shortly after (see for instance Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2013; Streeck, 2014; Worth, 2015, p. 106 ff.; also Overbeek and van Apeldoorn, 2012). In this chapter, I approach this question by freely building on the work of Robert Cox (1987), employing a multi-layered framework of four mutually constitutive dimensions: 1. The ideational dimension, where ideas, discourses, thought frames, policy prescriptions are central; 2. The agential dimension, where interests, identity and actorness of agents are central; 3. The institutional dimension, where the institutions that sustain the neoliberal order are central; and 4. The structural dimension, where the global dynamics of capital accumulation and modes of social power are central. These dimensions are all equally relevant, they cannot be reduced one to the other, but they are nevertheless closely interrelated and mutually constitutive. I come to the following tentative observations around some of the more obvious answers to the question. 1. There is no alternative idea The most popular and most logical prima facie explanation would be that there was no alternative to neoliberal thought. This is true in the sense that there was no coherent alternative discourse which offered a compelling explanation of the crisis and a plausible and attractive way out. This can be attributed to the success of discursive strategies such as the development of a powerful anti-politics, emptying dominant discourse of any political content (Büscher, 2013, pp. 135–167). The reverse explanation may also be put forward: that ‘the left’ has been unable to produce an effective counterhegemonic narrative. In my view these are all valid observations but at the same time they describe and identify the problem more than that they explain it. There were, and are, plenty of alternative ideas circulating that challenge the precepts of neoliberal

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thought, but they appeared to carry no weight in spite of the obvious failures and contradictions of neoliberalism. 2. There is no alternative hegemonic bloc We may also argue that neoliberal thought remained if not hegemonic then at least dominant, because there simply were no social forces capable of mobilizing a critical mass of interests and articulating a hegemonic project challenging neoliberalism. But then we are again begging the question of why this is so. We must go deeper to explain the survival of really-existing neoliberalism. 3. The institutional dimension Part of the answer, I suggest, can be found in the ways in which neoliberal practices were institutionally embedded. Neoliberal forces in power erected an institutional framework that was fundamentally different from the institutional framework of corporate liberalism. Under corporate liberalism the institutional framework supporting the global accumulation of capital was politically constituted and therefore also susceptible to politically generated changes. This is true first of all of the national arrangements in the welfare states of the Lockean heartland as well as in many of the leading developmentalist states. These institutional arrangements rested on a political compromise between leading class forces (primarily transnational productive capital and the organized industrial working class), a compromise moreover that was subject to continuous contestation and renegotiation in the political domain. On the international level, economic interactions were subject to state control through the system of fixed exchange rates and capital controls. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, there was, in addition, a tendency to further extend state coordination in global governance. The movement for a New International Economic Order, buttressed by the momentary weakness of the heartland due to the oil boycott in 1973–1975, seemed to usher in an era of North–South bargaining on a much more equal footing than ever before. How different was the institutional framework erected after the victory of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Neoliberalism became triumphant at the national level first in Chile, the UK, and the US; regionally in Europe and North America with the agreements on the Single European Market and later the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA); and globally with the introduction of floating exchange rates, the imposition of IMF-led structural adjustment in response to the 1980s Third World debt crisis, the abolition of capital controls and the wholesale liberalization of financial markets, the end of the Cold War, and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994. These were all instances of what Stephen Gill called New Constitutionalism: the de-politicization and lock-in of neoliberal governance principles and practices at the

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international level (Gill, 1998; Gill and Cutler, 2014). Economic and financial policymaking became effectively insulated from political contestation, locked-in so successfully that oppositional political forces found it impossible to politicize issues and make inroads into neoliberal dominance, even during the deep crisis of European monetary union in the years 2010–2015. 4. The structural dimension However, this neo-constitutional order would itself have come under increasing pressure and would probably not have held very long if it had been in fundamental contradiction with the objective exigencies of the accumulation process at the global level. The global economy was characterized since the 1990s by unique features that pre-empted the emergence of a rival historical bloc. The following interrelated features of global capital accumulation in the neoliberal age were particularly important. a.

b.

c.

The replacement of the typical Fordist organization of integrated international production networks (which in themselves, having arisen in the 1950s and 1960s, had made a 1930s-type collapse of world trade during the crisis of 2008 next to impossible) by integrated value chains controlled at the apex by lead-firms typically able to grab a disproportionate share of the value produced in the value chain (through control over finance, R&D and technology, and final market access) without themselves being actively engaged in the production process in direct confrontation with labor (think of firms such as Apple and Nike). At the micro level, the introduction of flexible accumulation and of advanced information technology (IT) into the labor process has fundamentally undermined the possibilities for large-scale mobilization of popular dissatisfaction, not only in terms of political mobilization but also in terms of ‘simple’ trade-unionism, as witnessed by falling union membership rates. Workers have been transformed from members of collective work forces to highly individualized workers or nominally self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’ beyond the reach of party or union activists. At the heart of global capital accumulation in the early twenty-first century was the continued structural power of finance. This was reproduced socially through the dependence on debt for sustaining social demand and simultaneously intensifying social control (see the work of for instance Lazzarato, 2012, and Soederberg, 2014), and politically through what Jessop called the strategic selectivity of the post-Keynesian state in advanced capitalism giving finance nearly exclusive access to the corridors of power (Jessop, 2016).

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In addition, the world’s labor markets have changed drastically since the 1970s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of an alternative social model have considerably undermined the position of organized labor and of the political left in the advanced countries; and the opening of China in the 1980s alone has added more workers to the globalizing labor market than the combined workforce of all the advanced OECD economies put together. In this context of neoliberal globalization, the bargaining position of labor, and consequently popular living standards, stagnated or declined in real terms in all countries except the most successful ‘emerging markets’. This was graphically illustrated in by Branko Milanovic’s ‘elephant graph’ (Milanovic, 2016, p. 11). In the global distribution of income in the years 1988–2008, the big winners were the emerging middle classes in the big and successful developing countries (China of course, but also India, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, etc.), alongside the global billionaire class. The relative losers, with stagnant real incomes, were the working and middle classes in the Lockean heartland (North America, Europe, Japan). More recent research by Milanovic and his associates has meanwhile suggested that after the global financial crisis of 2008, there has been a significant (if perhaps temporary) change in that pattern: the global billionaires took a big hit to their incomes after 2008, and recovered only by 2015 (Milanovic, 2022; see Figure 24.1).

Together, these four factors (1–4) explain why there was no Polanyian swing back to social protection and a productive-capital comprehensive concept of control after the global financial crisis. But can or will this state of affairs last?

ORGANIC CRISIS OF TRANSNATIONAL NEOLIBERALISM Nothing lasts forever, not even neoliberalism. In the wake of the global meltdown, American-dominated global finance successfully averted its demise, for the time being: after 2008, neoliberal capitalism was living on borrowed time (Streeck, 2014). The temporarily successful management of the global crisis and the Eurozone crisis in its wake did not resolve the underlying fundamental problems. In a deep, structural, ‘organic’ crisis, Stuart Hall argued, it is not enough to defend vested interests. Efforts to restructure must be ‘formative’, aiming at a new balance of forces, the emergence of new elements, the attempt to put together a new historical bloc, new political configurations and ‘philosophies’, a profound restructuring of the state and the ideological discourses which construct the crisis and represent it as it is ‘lived’ as a practical reality. (Hall, 1983, p. 23)

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Source: Milanovic (2022), https://www.socialeurope.eu/global-income-inequality-time-t o-revise-the-elephant

Figure 24.1

Real per capita income growth rates per percentiles of global income distribution 1988–2008 and 2008–2018

In the first decade after the financial crisis, none of this happened. In a sense, ‘the traditional ruling class […] reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. […] it retains power, reinforces it for the time being …’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210, writing in the present tense). For the time being, indeed. The organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism was not transcended after 2008, and below the surface creeping crisis tendencies continued to build up, waiting to explode because the contradictions would reach boiling point, or to be activated because major ‘exogenous’ shocks would lead to a sudden aggravation of the crisis. Where do we realistically see potential signs of a weakening of neoliberalism and the emergence of effective challenges? It may be helpful here to recall the notion originally proposed by Braudel (1980) of history as a multi-layered process taking place in three different dimensions: the history of events (short-term), conjunctural history (economic transformations taking place over decades), and what he called the longue durée (the slow-moving changes in

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geography, demography, climate, etc. which take centuries). In itself this is an elegant notion, but it becomes particularly pertinent when we analyze fundamental crises: these are times in which the interaction between these ‘levels’ suddenly becomes manifest. In the longue durée, the world is in the midst of at least two transitions that have a direct bearing on the organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism: on the one hand the crisis of the biosphere (e.g., climate change and erosion of biodiversity), on the other demographic changes, in particular the aging crisis in developed capitalist countries as well as in China. In the sphere of conjunctural history, I would place the ongoing changes in the structure of accumulation on a world scale: the emergence of knowledge-based accumulation, of advanced new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), of a new generation of dominant firms based on these technologies (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon), and the emergence of the ‘platform economy’ with its consequences for working conditions globally. Finally, there is the history of events: lately, the global system has experienced a succession of exogenous shocks that have in some cases catalyzed the sudden eruption of new crisis moments; in other cases merely brought crisis tendencies out in the open. The first shock came with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic at the end of 2019, with years of lockdowns and travel restrictions worldwide. The second was the disruption of global supply chains – partly caused by the pandemic, but aggravated by the grounding of the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal (March 2020) and the ensuing disruption of sea-based transport routes. The third exogenous shock was of course the outbreak of war in Ukraine. In reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western countries imposed wave after wave of economic and financial sanctions on Russia. These sanctions had a huge effect on global energy markets, initially sending oil and gas prices through the roof: apart from the impact of the sanctions on the Russian economy, they have also backfired very unevenly on Western countries, affecting Europe (especially Germany) much more severely than the US. In this polycrisis (Tooze, 2022) it has become very hard to distinguish cause from effect: every adverse development in one sphere has a direct and aggravating effect on several other crises. It is thus risky if not impossible to predict how this polycrisis will work out. Nevertheless, we may perhaps identify a few aspects of the situation, a few contradictions undermining the stability of the neoliberal order, which will affect the turn of events in the near future. Delegitimation First, neoliberal thought is increasingly delegitimized because of its inability to account for the current crisis. Just as Keynesianism could not deal with the

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stagflation of the 1970s, so neoliberal thought cannot deal with secular stagnation. Mildly critical economists (such as Joe Stiglitz) as well as Keynesians (Paul Krugman) and even former neoliberals (such as Martin Wolf or Larry Summers) have become ever sharper in their critique of neoliberal thought and practice. In addition, neoliberal responses to the impact of climate change and energy insecurity have likewise been severely discredited. Technically speaking, effective solutions exist for most issues on the agenda. What is blocking their implementation is the combination of the endurance of the neoliberal belief system and the power of vested interests (nearly all corporate conglomerates are wedded in one way or another to the profitable exploitation of fossil fuels). But given the depth of the crisis, and the rapidly mounting experience with the consequences (heat waves, floods, famines, forest fires, hurricanes, insect plagues), the stability of the neoliberal order is increasingly eroded. Reshoring of Production? Second, regarding the structure of global capital accumulation, it has often been claimed that the combined effect of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine will be a rapid process of deglobalization and reshoring of production. I doubt that this will be the case. Yes, the austerity policies of the decade following the global financial crisis have deepened the need, now more widely recognized, for redistribution to address growing inequality. Secular stagnation has furthermore created a greater need for public investment programs. These developments definitely point towards a much bigger economic role for the state. Whether this implies that the hegemony of finance will be undermined very much remains to be seen. In fact, the grip of predatory finance has only been strengthened in the past years (van der Pijl, 2019). Beyond the resilience of global finance, two further elements support the estimation that there will not be a return to a productivist project in the heartland of global capital. The rise of ‘knowledge-based accumulation’, or perhaps we should rather say information/data-based accumulation, has taken such firms as Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent to the apex of the global corporate pyramid. In spite of the enormous differences between the Chinese and the American political economies, it is striking how similar the might of these corporations is and what challenges they present to existing powers, both the established financial sector and the regulatory authority of the state. Further, in spite of the initial popularity of the idea of re-shoring, a fundamental restructuring of global value chains seems unlikely. Given global patterns of disparities in wage levels and other produc-

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tion costs, it is far more likely that these challenges will be met by relocating essential production from China to multiple other low-cost production centers. From Global Hegemony to Global Rivalry Third, it is not a huge risk to predict that most of the twenty-first century will be dominated by the relationship between the United States and China. By 2012, it had become clear that the US-led transnational power bloc had basically rejected China’s application to join what would then have become a G2, while at the same time emitting signals that the Chinese could only perceive as threatening (such as the ‘pivot to Asia’ and the intensified support for Taiwan). The Chinese state class, especially after the coming to power of the new leadership under Xi Jinping in 2012, responded by shifting its focus to fostering new alliances and constructing a counter-hegemonic international institutional framework. The key components of that new framework are the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); and, most recently, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) with 15 member states in East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The latter three are clearly Chinese initiatives to provide hegemonic leadership to expanding regional networks, and the successful recruitment of traditional US allies such as Australia and the United Kingdom to the AIIB signals the coming of age of China as a twenty-first century global power, ushering in a non-hegemonic global order structured by the strategic rivalry between the US and China.

CONCLUSION In this contribution I have discussed the organic crisis of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a complex phenomenon which is understood by different scholars in quite different ways. My own understanding of neoliberalism as a comprehensive concept of control has been informed by the range of sources from which the ‘Amsterdam School’ has built its critical approach to International Political Economy. The work of Antonio Gramsci has been one of the key pillars under this work. Gramsci’s work is a source of inspiration not because it represents a transcendence of, or even a break with, the historical materialist tradition going back to Marx and Engels, but very much because it shows us how to further develop this legacy in an original and creative way, and how to apply Marx’ methodology and theory to the analysis of contemporary capitalism. While Gramsci has rightly received widespread acclaim for his emphasis on the role of culture and ideology in the maintenance of the capitalist social order, I have

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underlined that Gramsci has always developed his insights within the framework of historical materialism, not beyond. The ideational and the material are not external to each other, they do not represent separate spheres, but they are dimensions of one integral social reality. In my analysis of the trajectory of neoliberalism, I argued that, contrary to the expectation of many, the global financial crisis of 2008 did not lead to the immediate demise of the neoliberal hegemonic project: the social forces making up the neoliberal hegemonic bloc in the global political economy were able to retain control for the time being. However, the foundations of neoliberal hegemony were shaken, and between 2008 and 2020 neoliberal predominance increasingly came to rest on disciplinary rather than consensual rule, while US-led Western hegemony in the international order likewise began to show cracks. The conjuncture of crises in the last few years, both in the form of the ‘exogenous shocks’ of climate crisis and war in Ukraine, as well as the unfolding of a concomitant shift in the pattern of global capital accumulation and the emergence of an increasingly conflictual relationship between the US and China, has exposed and accelerated a deep organic crisis in the capitalist order, spelling the end of neoliberalism as we have known it. Barring a complete collapse of the rule of capital – which although not impossible does not appear to be imminent – a new phase in global capitalism seems in the making which will be characterized by three (interdependent and mutually reinforcing) trends: 1. rivalry and conflict between the leading powers in the global system, overdetermined by the struggle for global leadership between the US and China, taking place against the backdrop of the geo-economic shift of the center of gravity in the global economy from the West to Asia; 2. new patterns of accumulation at the global scale, structured by the rise of information capital and the surveillance state, with all the threats that this implies for democratic politics; 3. the challenges to the survival of post-industrial civilization by the exhaustion and destruction of the biosphere, which will force a fundamental rethink of the market logic of neoliberal capitalism.

NOTES 1.

2.

The ‘Amsterdam School’ originally was a small group of scholars of international relations at the University of Amsterdam in the years 1974–1999 who developed a distinct approach to (international) political economy. In order not to unnecessarily overload this chapter with references, please refer to Jessop and Overbeek (2019) for an overview. There is no justification in Gramsci’s work for any denial of its structuralist Marxian roots, not even in Gramsci’s oft-quoted (but not always well understood) phrase ‘Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fun-

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4. 5.

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damental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 176). Note that Gramsci speaks of social relations without the adjective ‘national’: the juxtaposition here is not between ‘international’ and ‘national’, but between ‘international relations’ and ‘social relations’ (or loosely formulated between superstructure and structure). The Lockean heartland comprises those states sharing the liberal state/society complex that emerged from the Glorious Revolution in England (1688) and that expanded transnationally first through the Anglo-Saxon world and then, after 1945, throughout the rest of what is now called ‘the West’. This Anglo-Saxon or Western heartland has historically been opposed by successive challengers, states with a strong centralized state attempting the ‘catch up’ with the West through a ‘revolution from above’ (see van der Pijl, 1998, pp. 64–97, for further elaboration). This section is largely based on the first chapter in Overbeek and van Apeldoorn (2012). Gramsci speaks extensively about crises of hegemony in the section ‘State and Civil Society’ of the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210 ff., pp. 275–276).

REFERENCES Aglietta, M. (1979). A theory of capitalist regulation. New Left Books. Ayers, A. J. (Ed.) (2008). Gramsci, political economy, and international relations theory. Modern princes and naked emperors. Palgrave Macmillan. Bieler, A., & Morton, A. M. (2006). Images of Gramsci. Connections and contentions in political theory and international relations. Routledge. Boyer, R. (1990). The regulation school: A critical introduction. Columbia University Press. Braudel, F. (1980). On history. University of Chicago Press. Büscher, B. (2013). Transforming the frontier. Peace parks and the politics of neoliberal conservation in Southern Africa. Duke University Press. Cox, R. W. (1981). Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory. Millennium. Journal of International Studies 10(2), 126–155. Cox, R. W. (1983). Gramsci, hegemony and international relations. An essay in method. Millennium. Journal of International Studies 12(2), 162–175. Cox, R. W. (1987). Production, power, and world order. Social forces in the making of history. Columbia University Press. Cox, R. W., with Shaw, T. J. (1996). Approaches to world order. Cambridge University Press. Crouch, C. (2011). The strange non-death of neoliberalism. Polity Press. Davies, W. (2014). The limits of neoliberalism. Authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition. Sage. Drainville, A. (1994). International political economy in the age of Open Marxism. Review of International Political Economy 1(1), 105–132. Femia, J. (2005). Gramsci, Machiavelli and international relations. The Political Quarterly 76(3), 341–349. Foucault (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. Germain, R. & Kenny. M. (1998). Engaging Gramsci: International relations theory and the new Gramscians. Review of International Studies 24(1), 3–21.

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Gill, S. R. (Ed.) (1993). Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations. Cambridge University Press. Gill, S. R. (1998). European governance and new constitutionalism: Economic and monetary union and alternatives to disciplinary neoliberalism in Europe. New Political Economy 3(1), 5–26. Gill, S. R. & Cutler, A. C. (Eds) (2014). New constitutionalism and world order. Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere. Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci (4 vols). Einaudi. Hall, S. (1983). The great moving right show. In S. Hall & M. Jacques (Eds), The politics of Thatcherism (pp. 19–39). Lawrence & Wishart. Hayek, F. (1944). The road to serfdom. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jessop, B. (2016). The state. past, present, future. Polity Press. Jessop, B. & Overbeek, H. (Eds) (2019). Transnational capital and class fractions. The Amsterdam school perspective reconsidered. Routledge. Lazzarato, M. (2012). The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition. MIT Press. Lipietz, A. (1988). Accumulation, crises, and ways out: Some methodological reflections on the concept of ‘regulation’. International Journal of Political Economy 18(2), 10–43. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1845). The German ideology. https://www​.marxists​.org/​ archive/​marx/​works/​1845/​german​-ideology/​index​.htmhttps://​www​.marxists​.org/​ archive/​marx/​works/​1845/​german​-ideology/​ McNally, D. (2008). Foreword. In A. J. Ayers (Ed.). Gramsci, political economy, and international relations theory. Modern princes and naked emperors, pp. ix–xi. Palgrave Macmillan. Milanovic, B. (2016). Global inequality. A new approach for the age of globalization. Belknap Press. Milanovic, B. (2022). Global income inequality: Time to revise the elephant. Social Europe 5 December. https://​www​.socialeurope​.eu/​global​-income​-inequality​-time​-to​ -revise​-the​-elephant Mirowski, P. (2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. Verso. New York Times (2008). Greenspan concedes error on regulation. 24 October. https://​ www​.nytimes​.com/​2008/​10/​24/​business/​economy/​24panel​.html Overbeek, H. (1990). Global capitalism and national decline. The Thatcher decade in perspective. Unwin Hyman. Overbeek, H. (Ed.) (1993). Restructuring hegemony in the global political economy. The rise of transnational neoliberalism in the 1990s. Routledge. Overbeek, H. (2004). Transnational class formation and concepts of control: Towards a genealogy of the Amsterdam Project in international political economy. Journal of International Relations and Development 7(2), 113–141. Overbeek, H., & van Apeldoorn, B. (Eds) (2012). Neoliberalism in crisis. Palgrave Macmillan. Overbeek, H., & van der Pijl, K. (1993). Restructuring capital and restructuring hegemony: Neo-liberalism and the unmaking of the post-war order. In H. Overbeek (ed.), Restructuring hegemony in the global political economy. The rise of transnational neo-liberalism in the 1980s (pp. 1–27). Routledge. Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

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Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation. The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. Porter, M. E. (1998). The competitive advantage of nations. Free Press. Ruggie, J. G. (1982). International regimes, transactions and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization 36(2), 195–231. Schmidt, C. (1996 [1932]). The concept of the political. University of Chicago Press. [Reprint of 1976] Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). The theory of economic development: An inquiry into profits. Capital, credit, interest and the business cycle (2nd ed.). Harvard University Press. Soederberg, S. (2014). Debtfare states and the poverty industry. Money, discipline and the surplus population. Routledge. Streeck, W. (2014). Buying time. The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism. Verso. Tooze, A. (2022). Welcome to the world of polycrisis. Financial Times. 28 October. https://​www​.ft​.com/​content/​498398e7​-11b1​-494b​-9cd3​-6d669dc3de33 van der Pijl, K. (1984). The making of an Atlantic ruling class. Verso. van der Pijl, K. (1998). Transnational classes and international relations. Routledge. van der Pijl, K. (2019). A transnational class analysis of the current crisis. In B. Jessop & H. Overbeek (Eds), Transnational capital and class fractions. The Amsterdam school perspective reconsidered (pp. 241–262). Routledge. Worth, O. (2015). Rethinking hegemony. Palgrave Macmillan.

25. Beyond ecocidal capitalism: climate crisis and climate justice Kevin Surprise INTRODUCTION If a broadly Gramscian theory of political change turns on mounting gradual wars of position in order to strike with mass popular support when shifts in the political climate occur, then shifts in the actual climate bedevil such strategies on account of their escalating urgency. Time is short for marching in the streets let alone for a march through the institutions. Yet the grounds of climate politics are shifting quickly, and in some limited respects the war of position on climate science and action has already been won: climate denial is reserved for the extreme fringes, youth organizations the world over are mobilizing around climate crisis, most major governments have signed the Paris Accord and are in various stages of implementing at least moderate national climate policy, significant segments of corporate power are turning to environmental and social investments, net-zero pledges, and so on. None of this is remotely sufficient, and the ecological crisis continues to worsen, fomented by reactionary-authoritarian forces linked with fossil capital, often aided and abetted by the very actors listed above: corporate greenwashers, climate profiteers, liberal environmentalists, and capitalist states. Recognition of the climate crisis juxtaposed with the tepid response by capital and capitalist states signifies that dealing with the crisis would pose fundamental challenges to their already fraught hegemony. Indeed, climate change merely adds (a dangerous amount of) fuel to already raging fires in the liberal-capitalist world order. The ravages of the climate crisis are emerging amidst considerable upheaval in capitalist hegemony, for instance: supply line disruptions and perceived inflationary pressures due to the Coronavirus pandemic, instability incited by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, extreme financialization overlaying secular stagnation, the emergence of China as a potential hegemonic challenger (and the US warmongering reaction to that threat), and the rise of authoritarianisms around the world. The patchwork deterioration of neoliberalism amidst the social and ecological crises exacerbated by that very 448

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system is generating an organic crisis, wherein capital is failing to deliver the socio-ecological goods, and suffering a genuine crisis of legitimation. We are indeed in the midst of a dangerous ‘interregnum’. To situate the climate crisis and broader ecological crisis in this interregnum, I draw on Gramsci’s conceptions of organic crisis, passive revolution, and ‘relations of force’. I begin by situating Gramsci’s notes on materialism, nature, and humanity in the context of climate crisis. Building from this, I sketch an approach to this crisis and the broader ecocidal tendencies of capitalism through Gramsci’s methodology for the analysis of organic crises and theories on passive revolution via the ‘relations of force’. Gramsci’s ‘relations of force’ compel examination of, first, the material bases of organic crises, followed by political relations and the composition of class forces, and finally the politico-military or geopolitical dimensions of crisis, which ‘can be decisive’. Following this, I work through these three relations by first examining the capitalist roots of the climate crisis and the threat climate change poses to the hegemony of capital, then delve into key political-economic alignments emerging to manage the climate crisis, namely ‘green capitalism’ and ‘fossil authoritarianism’, and finally explore some of the geopolitical questions rendered by climate cataclysm. I then turn to emerging forces of resistance and transformation, examining Green New Deal ecosocialism as well as peasant and indigenous-led struggles for food sovereignty and anti-imperial climate justice, noting their tensions but also sketching out nodes of solidarity for left climate internationalism.

BRIEF NETES ON GRAMSCI’S MATERIALISM: ENSEMBLES, RELATIONS, AND (PASSIVE) REVOLUTIONS In our contemporary era of ecocide, with climate change its dominant expression, proclamations about humanity and the human–earth relationship abound, most acutely expressed in the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’. Along with critiques of the abstract ahistorical generalism inherent in this concept (e.g., the ‘Capitalocene’, Moore, 2017), Gramsci’s conception of ‘man’1 provides an alternative to bourgeois ideologies of ‘humanity and nature’. Humans always exist in social conditions shaped by the more-than-human, and these socio-ecological configurations are not natural or universal but shaped by power and production. Gramsci argues that one must conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) … composed of various elements: 1. The individual; 2. other men; 3. the natural world … understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters into… (Gramsci, 1971, p. 352)

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We cannot understand human existence – our own individual engagement with the world, or the broader human species – without conceptualizing both as an ensemble of relations. This conception enables the notion of ‘becoming’ – that humanity continuously changes with changing socio-ecological relations – and therefore denies the possibility of ‘man in general’. This dialectical approach to the changing nature of human becoming also applies to the material forces of production. In Gramsci’s brief but illuminating note on ‘Matter’, he argues that the emphasis of historical materialism must be placed on the historical contexts that create new forms of material reality. The philosophy of praxis does not study a machine only to understand its physical properties, but ‘only in so far as it is a moment of the material forces of production, and object of property of particular social forces, and express a social relation which in turn corresponds to a particular historical period’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 476). Germane to our discussion, Gramsci uses the examples of steam power and electricity to make this point (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 466–467, emphasis in original): Has the ensemble of properties of all forms of matter always been the same? … For how long was the mechanical power of steam neglected? Can it be claimed that this mechanical power existed before it was harnessed by man-made machines? Might it not be said in a sense, and up to a certain point, that what nature provides the opportunity for are not discoveries and inventions of pre-existing forces – of pre-existing qualities of matter – but ‘creations’, which are closely linked to the interests of society and to the development and further necessities of development of the forces of production? ... The ensemble of the material forces of production is at the same time a crystallization of all past history and the basis of present and future history … electricity is historically active, not merely as a natural force (e.g. an electrical discharge which causes a fire) but as a productive element dominated by man and incorporated into the ensemble of the material forces of production, an object of private property.

Here we can find in Gramsci a germinal but powerful approach to the climate crisis, wherein the widespread use of fossil fuels and resultant steam power and electricity (and pollution) are organized according to the dictates of private property via particular forms of class power – the industrial capitalist class – not humanity in general (see also Malm, 2016). Class control of steam and electricity – more broadly, fossil capital – is the root cause of the climate crisis that will shape ‘future history’ for centuries to come, and the contours of these futures are changing the forces of production themselves as climate and broader ecological crises threaten the reproduction of capital today. Indeed, the climate crisis is a particularly potent aspect of a broader, emergent organic crisis of capitalist hegemony. Gramsci conceptualizes organic crises as deep, fundamental crises of the ruling order that cannot be resolved from within the existing political param-

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eters of that order – a ‘crises of authority … precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210). Organic crises do not refer to the regularized crises encountered by capitalism as a crisis-ridden system. They are not merely conjunctures but rather ‘form the terrain of the “conjunctural”, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organize’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 178, emphasis added). That is, contradictions of a ruling order reach a point such that they pose an existential threat to the ruling class, creating openings for the ‘forces of opposition’ to challenge and abolish existing forms of hegemony. In this context, Gramsci sought to understand how ruling classes maintain and re-establish hegemony in the midst of crisis to better inform revolutionary strategy. The analysis is thus necessarily pessimistic: The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210)

Capital and its cadres have the capacity to orchestrate shifts in contours of power that, while potentially unstable or temporary, ultimately reinforce the ruling order. The ‘reabsorption’ of control – strategies through which the ruling class maintains hegemony – is an integral aspect of the passive revolution. Gramscian philosopher Peter Thomas argues that the guiding thread of the philosophy of praxis can be characterized as ‘the search for an adequate theory of proletarian hegemony in the epoch of the “organic crisis” or the “passive revolution” of the bourgeois “integral state”’ (Thomas, 2009, p. 136). In other words, Gramsci’s central project turned on strategizing for radical change in periods of organic crisis whereby ruling classes seek to (re)secure hegemony via passive revolutions in political and civil society. There is considerable debate over how Gramsci mobilizes passive revolution as an analytical tool, and its ability to ‘travel’ beyond the contexts for which he deployed it (e.g., bourgeois revolution in France from 1789–1870, or Italian Risorgimento in the nineteenth century) (Morton, 2010; Callinicos, 2010). Here, I find Domenico Losurdo’s description of Gramsci’s conception compelling: passive revolution denotes[s] the persistent capacity of initiative of the bourgeoisie which succeeds, even in the historical phase in which it has ceased to be a properly revolutionary class, to produce socio-political transformations, sometimes of significance, conserving securely in its own hands power, initiative and hegemony, and leaving the working class in their condition of subalternity. (Quoted in Thomas 2009, p. 147)

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The capacity for the ruling class to produce significant political transformations from within its own ‘power, initiative and hegemony’ to maintain its rule in the midst of structural crises defines the passive revolution. This is a broad definition. Gramsci framed it specifically as a methodological approach, an ‘interpretive criterion’ for analyzing ‘molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes,’ also understood as a process of ‘revolution/restoration’ (Gramsci, 1971, 109). Gramsci couches this methodological approach to passive revolution in what he terms the ‘two fundamental principles of political science’ derived from Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, which state that a ruling order will remain dominant until the material forces undergirding it are exhausted. Gramsci draws from these passages throughout the Prison Notebooks yet demands that they be: developed critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanism and fatalism. They must be referred back to the description of the three fundamental moments into which a ‘situation’ or an equilibrium of forces can be distinguished … (Gramsci, 1971, p. 109, emphasis added)

Gramsci’s conception of a ‘situation’ or equilibrium of forces is comprised of three interrelated ‘moments or levels’. First, the ‘relation of social forces’ (for which we can say socio-ecological forces) corresponds to material development measured by the physical sciences (Gramsci, 1971, p. 180). Second, the ‘relation of political forces’, which are fully developed when the ruling class is able to establish their narrow interests as universal. Third, the relation of ‘military forces’ which ‘from time to time is directly decisive’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 183). Analyzing the layered interplay between material–economic conditions, class relations and struggles for hegemony, and geopolitical contestation in an era of organic crisis can inform analysis of likely responses by hegemonic actors, and thus strategies for resistance.

‘MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT’: CAPITALIST ROOTS OF CLIMATE CRISIS AND CLIMATE AS A CRISIS FOR CAPITAL How do climate change and the broader ecological crisis contribute to, exacerbate, and drive key aspects of the current organic crisis? Here we can turn to Gramsci’s first ‘moment or level’ in the relations of force, the ‘level of development of the material forces of production’ that ‘can be measured with the physical sciences’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 180). I will briefly focus on the ‘physical science’ of ecocidal destruction, and examine both ways of understanding the forces and relations of production driving that destruction

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and how this destruction has concretized into threats to capitalist hegemony. Gramsci argues that taking stock of the material processes of production in the midst of crisis elucidates capacities on the part of the hegemonic regime to respond to the crisis: ...by studying these fundamental data it is possible … to check the degree of realism and practicability of the various ideologies which have been born on its own terrain, on the terrain of contradictions which it has engendered during its course of development. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 181)

The primary ideology that has emerged in the terrain of climate-capital contradictions is so-called ‘green capitalism’ – a crisis management strategy (and accumulation strategy) attempting to ameliorate or tamp down the structural aspects of ecological crises threatening the hegemony of capital. Signals of a biosphere in extreme distress are not difficult to find. For instance, the World Wildlife Fund (2020) reports that the world has seen an average 68% drop in mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations since 1970. Much of the loss is caused by habitat destruction due to unsustainable agriculture or logging. And climate change, which hasn’t been the biggest driver of biodiversity loss so far, is expected to take that role in the decades ahead.

Indeed, NASA’s ‘Vital Signs’ – no alarmist outfit – clearly lays out the reality of increasing sea level rise (potentially up to 8 feet by 2100), more intense hurricanes and wildfires, deadly heatwaves, changes in precipitation patterns exacerbating drought and flooding on a rapidly warming planet. Marxist perspectives on these environmental catastrophes – from metabolic rift theory and ecological Marxism, to the ‘production of nature’ thesis, the ‘second contradiction’ concept, the world-ecology perspective, and the ‘neoliberal natures’ literature – aver that capitalism is the driving cause. Yet there is significant disagreement over what the climate and broader ecological crisis portend for the future of capitalism. Take, for example, metabolic rift theory, world ecology, and the second contradiction of capitalism argument. Proponents of the ‘metabolic rift’ theory argue that capitalism’s separation of producers from the means of (agrarian) production via mechanized agriculture, driven by logics of competitive growth and concentration of large-scale industry, produces a socio-ecological rift: depleting and degrading soil in the countryside while transporting nutrients to urban centers where they are not returned to the soil but accumulate as waste/ pollution (Foster, 1999). Clark and York (2005) extend this to the biosphere: the expansion of capitalist industrialization engendered both widespread burning of fossil fuels and extraction from ever-greater resource frontiers,

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producing a rift in the carbon cycle via over-accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and degradation of natural carbon sinks. This transgression of key planetary boundaries can never be repaired within the capitalist mode of production, as ‘capital is dictated by the competition for the accumulation of wealth ... in this capitalism successfully conquers the earth (including the atmosphere), taking its destructive field of operation to the planetary level’ (Clark and York, 2005, p. 408). Thus, metabolic rift theory holds that capital’s solipsistic drive for accumulation will inevitably engender ecological catastrophe. Yet, capital cannot merely continue to accumulate in the midst of socio-ecological crisis. Moore’s (2015) world-ecology perspective argues that such ecological degradation threatens the production of value central to accumulation. Moore argues that the capitalist ‘law of value’ is defined by a dialectic of appropriation and exploitation, the latter dependent upon the capacity to appropriate ‘Cheap Nature’. Cheap labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials generate ecological surpluses that subtend innovations in commodity production. Every great era of accumulation has been predicated upon new frontiers that provide an ecological surplus, enabling the appropriation of nature’s unpaid work to proceed faster than the rate of exploitation. Yet, the temporalities of the capitalist value-form exhaust zones of appropriation, increasingly necessitating the capitalization of once freely appropriated natures, raising costs and precipitating crises. Moore suggests that such exhaustion-capitalization is reaching a precipice in the contemporary crises of neoliberalism, signaling the end of the frontier. The double burden of resource exhaustion and toxification is forcing capital to spend more to extract less – a process Moore terms ‘negative-value’, defined as ‘accumulation of the limits to capital in the web of life that are direct barriers to the restoration of the Four Cheaps’ (Moore, 2015, p. 277). In this conjuncture, Moore sees the looming collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions (Moore, 2015, p. 280). Moore’s concept of ‘negative-value’ owes much to O’Connor’s (1988, 1998) ‘second contradiction of capitalism’ thesis, wherein overaccumulation crises (the first contradiction) compel capitals to search for cheaper raw materials and energy to drive down costs. This strategy can be frustrated by the biophysical properties of nature, as ‘nature’s productivity is self-limiting’, yet for capital these limits are merely ‘barriers to overcome’ (O’Connor, 1998, p. 181). The second contradiction thus emerges in the drive to overcome the limits of nature’s productivity: enfolding nature into the logics of exchange-value negates its biophysical properties and tends to underproduce (degrade, exhaust, pollute) the ‘conditions of production’. Underproduction can generate systemic crisis, as production conditions are fundamental to the creation of surplus-value. A key divergence between O’Connor and Moore

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turns on the capacity for capitalist states to manage ecological crises. For Moore, ecological exhaustion driven by the appropriation–exploitation dialectic augurs the end of capitalism. Yet O’Connor places primacy on the political qualities of capitalist crises, allowing for the possibility that state and class forces can manage crises (if not ‘solve’ them). O’Connor argues that the state mediates socio-ecological crises as a social relation defined by multiple, competing material interests, with the definition and management of ‘ecological crises’ turning primarily on politico-ideological questions: ‘ecological crisis’ is as much (or more) a political and ideological category as it is a scientific construct’ (O’Connor, 1998, p. 137). Whether or not capital faces ‘external barriers to accumulation, including … in the form of new social struggles over the definition and use of productive conditions …’ and whether or not these ‘… “barriers” take the form of economic crisis; and whether or not economic crisis is resolved in favor of or against capital are sociopolitical and ideological questions first, and socioeconomic questions’ only secondarily (O’Connor, 1998, p. 165). Capital is beginning to recognize its ecocidal propensities as fundamental threats to continuing hegemony. Of the top 10 ‘most severe risks’ in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2022 Global Risks Report, five are labeled ‘environmental’, with the top three being climate change, extreme weather, and biodiversity loss. Indeed, the climate crisis has been identified as a fundamental threat to the financial stability of capitalism by a range of elite institutions, with recent examples being Deloitte, Swiss Re Institute, BlackRock, and the International Monetary Fund. Deloitte (2022), for instance, posits that climate change could cost the US economy $14.5 trillion over the next 50 years, or 4% of GDP. WEF also cites a study which suggests that 4% of global annual GDP could be wiped out by climate change through 2050, as does Swiss Re (2021), who sees 4% loss of global GDP if Paris Agreement goals are met and the world stays below 2°C, and up to 18% if no action is taken. Moreover, there are sector-specific risks in finance (Dietz et al., 2016), agriculture (Ray et al., 2019), stranded assets and energy transition costs (Mercure et al., 2018; Semieniuk et al., 2021, 2022). As capital destroys the planet, leading capitalist actors and institutions are beginning to recognize that this may augur severe threats to the maintenance, reproduction, and dominance of capitalism as well. The primary response to these contradictions has been so-called ‘green capitalism’: attempts to transition to sustainability via renewable energy markets and investment, carbon markets and offsets, privatized conservation, natural capital, green bonds, green consumerism, bioenergy, carbon capture and storage, carbon removal, and so on without fundamentally altering capitalist forms of class domination, exploitation, and accumulation (Dempsey, 2016; Goldstein, 2018). Wanner (2015) explicitly couches this shift toward the green economy as a passive revolution intended to both open new realms

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of commodification and neutralize radical environmentalism. Similarly, Brand and Wissen (2015) argue that green capitalism has the potential to become a ‘hegemonic capitalist project’. This is no mere green washing or niche market strategy. McCarthy (2015) argues that a broad transition toward renewable energy – while facing myriad obstacles – has the potential to open vast new realms of investment, and stave off both financial crises (overaccumulation) and ecological crises (underproduction). The emergence of political-economic strategies that can address, to varying degrees, accumulation crises, legitimation crises, and ecological crises plaguing capital are animating a fundamental realignment of forces within the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). It is to these struggles within and among capital that we now turn.

ACCUMULATION AMIDST CRISES: FOSSIL CAPITAL, CLIMATE CAPITAL, AND COMPETING HEGEMONIES The competing responses among capital, and among various factions within capitalist states, over how to respond to the climate crisis denotes Gramsci’s second ‘moment or level’ in the relations of force: ‘the relation of political forces’, or the ‘degree of organization attained by various classes’. Gramsci argues that in organic crises, classes and class fractions compete against and among one another to emerge as the dominant group capable of imposing hegemony. Here I focus on competition within the capitalist class (attending to anti-capitalist class struggles later in the chapter). In Gramsci’s terms, the struggle becomes one wherein ‘...corporate interests … transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic class, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups too…’. In this phase, an ideology that had been in conflict with other competing ideologies prevails and begins to propagate itself throughout society – bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups. … the motor force of universal expansion. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 181–182)

The struggle to ‘create hegemony’ plays out nationally but also internationally: ‘international relations intertwine with these internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique, and historically concrete combinations. A particular ideology, for instance, born in a highly developed country, is disseminated in less developed countries, impinging on the local interplay of combinations’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 182). Such processes are manifest in the TCC’s divergent responses to the climate crisis.

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Competing fractions of capital – industrial capital, financial capital, landowning capital, and so on – have always fought over markets, power, and accumulation strategies. Recent years, however, have seen various sectors cohere and split along an axis largely defined by the climate crisis (Ougaard, 2016), with one fraction emerging broadly within technology capital and another with fossil capital, both maintaining strong ties with financial capital. Early signs of a split along these lines occurred with tensions among capitalist fractions concerning the 2003 invasion of Iraq and US imperial strategy under the G. W. Bush Administration. For example, the ‘nationalist’ fraction of transnational US-based capital, comprised of the fossil fuel and defense industries and closely linked to the US state, was in favor of unilateral militarism in the Middle East, whereas the ‘globalist’ fraction, composed of corporations from finance, tech, and beyond were largely concerned with the war’s impact on the global economy and the deterioration of open multilateralism (Bieler and Morton, 2015). This split is now increasingly driven by climate change, as the cheapness of renewable energy and the financial costs of a warming planet are tilting power against fossil capital and toward industries attempting to profit from climate crisis. A range of Gramscian scholars has sought to outline the broad contours of these emerging shifts in capitalist power. For example, Carroll (2020) demonstrates struggles within the TCC concerning new accumulation strategies, hegemonic projects, and historical blocs, driven by the split between ‘fossil capital’ and ‘climate capital’, the latter defined by ‘an emergent accumulation strategy which ‘seeks to redirect investments from fossil fuel energy to renewable energy generation so as to foster an ecological modernization of production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions’ without disrupting capitalist relations of production (Carroll, 2020, p. 12; see also Sapinski, 2015, p. 268). Harris (2019, 2021) adds three dimensions to this analysis: the political alignments of the regimes of accumulation, the (in)capacity for these emergent configurations to cohere into a global historic bloc, the rise of China (particularly within green capitalism). Harris broadens the discussion of fossil capital, borrowing from William Robinson’s (2019) notion of ‘militarized accumulation’ to examine the potential for repression, fascism, and militarization powered by fossil capital to become (even more) dominant – what he terms the ‘authoritarian bloc’. Beyond the fossil fuel industry, key accumulation centers and alliances in this bloc include national security and surveillance sectors, defense and aerospace corporations, the carceral state (prisons, policing, detention), as well as elements of the technology sector that support them – through data collection, platform development, and so on, with Palantir being exemplary, but with key revenue streams for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google as well (particularly via the Pentagon). These sectors, or powerful segments within them, tend to align politically with more

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authoritarian, nationalist, or fascistic tendencies. These accumulation centers and alignments with parties that have leverage over key aspects of capitalist states make for a formidable but ultimately, according to Harris, far too narrow basis for a hegemonic bloc. The competing fraction within the TCC, ‘green capitalism’, holds greater potential to form a hegemonic bloc, but is also beset with tensions and limitations. Harris discusses two major centers of power driving green capital – philanthropies and NGOs on one hand, corporations and their lobbying arms on the other. Examining the Boards of Directors of six leading philanthropies that provide over 70% of funding for climate NGOs, Harris notes: Virtually absent are representatives from the fossil fuel industry or military– industrial complex. Instead, we see a nucleus of transnational elites dedicated to promoting green technology, with West Coast tech capitalists emerging as the most represented fraction. Visible in this network of philanthropies is the core of a hegemonic bloc with global reach, promoting a common accumulation strategy … (Harris, 2021, p. 345)

The corporate faction of this bloc, Harris observes, does include firms from the fossil capital and associated sectors (automotive, mining, etc.) and adheres closer to neoliberal orthodoxy than the philanthropic wing. As such, it is interested in green capitalism as an accumulation strategy but has largely focused on shaping the green transition in order to slow or delay it until these sectors can get a dominant foothold in the green economy. Whether they can come together around a united ideology and strategy remains an open question. Finally, Harris turns to the rise of China, specifically concerning the green economy, renewable energy, and climate action. As the leading manufacturer of renewable technology, leading investor through mechanisms such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and territorial control over key green technology inputs such as rare earth metals, capital’s best bet – if genuinely interested in managing the climate crisis – might lie in fostering green capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics’. But given China’s energy-intensive position within the current world system, and the Chinese Communist Party’s complex relationship to capitalism, this is a risky gamble. The above sketches of emergent political-economic configurations as responses to capital’s organic crisis, with climate change a leading driver, enkindle Gramsci’s insight that struggle within and among classes in the midst of crisis are struggles over the creation of new forms and modalities of hegemony. Next, we examine geopolitical aspects of these shifts, tensions, and struggles.

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WARMAKING AND WORLDMAKING: HEGEMONY ON A WARMING PLANET The fraction-alignments discussed above are still only emergent, but they are rooted in concrete shifts in capitalist power. In terms of market capitalization, technology capital is now the leading sector, and these firms have taken the most aggressive stances on climate action and carbon-negative pledges (e.g., Microsoft and Facebook). Hence, Bichler and Nitzan (2017) argue that the hegemonic coalition of global capitalism, what they term the Weapondollar– Petrodollar coalition – defined by the relationship between oil, the dollar, weapons sales, and US imperialism – is being eclipsed by the ‘ascent of a global “Technodollar Coalition”’ since 2016. The Technodollar coalition is a ‘constellation of capitalist interests concentrated primarily in information, communication, automation, and biotechnology whose members are highly averse to oil crises, stagflation, and regime change – the very processes that make the Weapondollar–Petrodollar coalition tick’ (Bichler and Nitzan, 2017, p. 1). The Technodollar coalition is on the ascent in part because of US hegemonic decline and the inability of the US military to continue to control energy conflicts, and the growing realization that climate change is driving economies to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. Here we can turn to Gramsci’s third level, the ‘relation of military forces, which from time to time is directly decisive’. Gramsci argues that these relations are never purely military but rather ‘politico-military’, which we can interpret as geopolitical. The example he invokes here is telling – one state’s colonial oppression of another state attempting to attain national independence: ‘this relation is not purely military, but politco-military; indeed this type of oppression would be inexplicable if it were not for the state of social disintegration of the oppressed people…’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 183). Gramsci does not elaborate much beyond this, but we can infer that the ‘disintegration’ is caused by colonial oppression, preventing organized military resistance to occupation, and thus social destabilization of the periphery by the imperial core is a geopolitical or ‘politco-military’ strategy. Strategies like this have undergirded US hegemony for the better part of a century. Yet the nominal turn away from fossil fuels, the instability of the liberal international order, the economic and diplomatic rise of China all pose significant threats to US power. Here I focus on options available to the US in the face of these crises to highlight once again the ecocidal tendencies of capitalism. One of the richest fields of Gramsci studies in recent decades has come from neo-Gramsci International Relations (IR) theory (Cox, 1983; Bieler and Morton, 2004). Given limited space, I turn to one use of Gramscian IR that goes the furthest to explain the planetary-scale power and contradictions at

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the heart of US hegemonic decline, the work of Giovanni Arrighi. In contrast to bourgeois notions of international ‘anarchy’ that occupy much of the IR field, Arrighi draws on Gramsci to postulate that the capitalist world system has always been defined by ‘world hegemony’, or ‘the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states’. US-led world hegemony, Arrighi argues, has reached a state of terminal decline and is increasingly reliant on coercion and violence to sustain its rule, potentially running up against the limits of world-systemic capitalism. He asks: ‘do the structures of U.S. capitalism constitute the ultimate limit of the six-centuries long process through which capitalist power has attained its present, seemingly all encompassing scale and scope?’ (Arrighi, 2010, p. 19). The decline of a leading regime has tended to result in sustained periods of ‘systemic chaos’ and interstate conflict out of which new configurations emerge. In this context, Arrighi places emphasis on the rise of China and the wider East Asian region, noting that capitalist history is entering an unprecedented conjuncture wherein financial and military power are increasingly bifurcated, with the former moving towards China, the latter remaining in the hands of the US. Given these conditions, Arrighi sees three possible paths: first, the ‘old centers’ – the West led by the US – may succeed in halting the shift to a new regime as they have accumulated massive state- and war-making powers that ‘may be in a position to appropriate through force, cunning, or persuasion the surplus capital that accumulates in new centers … through the formation of a truly global world empire’ (Arrighi, 2010, p. 369). Second, the old centers of power could fail in this endeavor and China may come to lead a renewed era of expanded accumulation. Third, in the struggle for world hegemony an inter-imperialist rivalry could lead to protracted systemic chaos with no structural resolution (Arrighi, 2010, p. 370). These scenarios broadly align with those proposed by Gramscian scholars Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann in Climate Leviathan (2018). Wainwright and Mann argue that climate change will fundamentally challenge the central political-economic pillars of modernity: capitalism and sovereignty. Whether capitalism prevails in the midst of climate crisis, and whether sovereignty will be ‘reconstituted for the purposes of planetary management’ are the key political questions. For Wainwright and Mann, Climate Leviathan is defined as: …a regulatory authority armed with democratic legitimacy, binding technical authority on scientific issues, and a panopticon-like capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world … It expresses a desire for, and the recognition of, the necessity of a planetary sovereign to seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to the Earth… (Wainwright and Mann, 2018, pp. 30–31)

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Planetary sovereignty is thus constituted in the ‘necessities crisis and catastrophe demand: hegemonic military-political capacity at a scale adequate to “save the planet”, the production and protection of geoengineering … and finally, the sovereign power to name emergency…’ (Wainwright and Mann, 2018, p. 151). Such a configuration could emerge along two geopolitical paths. The first is a US-centric climate Leviathan wherein the United States maintains its current military dominance ‘and exploits the “need to save life on Earth” as the ideological basis of a new imperial hegemony’. The second scenario sees US hegemony continue to falter, with planetary governance unfolding on conflictual geopolitical terrain upon which elites continue to seek ‘adaptations’ that meet their needs … [with] the United States and China (or some other small cohort of globally influential powers) deciding to reorganize the world system in a sort of grand compromise that includes shared planetary management. (Wainwright and Mann, 2018, p. 152)

Wainwright and Mann deem the second scenario more likely. Yet, the notion of a ‘grand compromise’ in planetary management elides the fact that forms of planetary governance are deeply interwoven with questions of hegemonic transition, control of energy, imperialist rivalry, and financial and military power, rendering the US and China more likely to compete rather than cooperate in this realm. Hence, the first scenarios outlined by both Arrighi and Wainwright and Mann – US-led efforts to retain hegemony via military dominance – cannot be seen as simply more or less ‘likely’. Rather, this strategy must be pursued by US power, lest the US voluntary surrender its hegemonic position within global capitalism (which is itself underpinned by US hegemony, see Panitch and Gindin, 2012). The kind of planetary sovereignty envisioned by Wainwright and Mann – a command and control system organized through multilateral world governance managing a transition to highly diffuse forms of renewable energy – would not merely require a new form of sovereign power, but a fundamentally different form of capitalism and wholesale hegemonic transition. It is entirely conceivable that capitalism can thrive within a renewable energy regime (McCarthy, 2015), but there is no guarantee that this would be capitalism under US hegemony, and would require capital to systematically abandon many traditional – and in some cases fundamental – sources of power (namely: cheap, highly concentrated energy subsidized by imperial violence, see Albert, 2022; Malm, 2016; Mitchell, 2009; Moore, 2015). The geopolitical prospects for capital’s response to organic crisis are grim. We are left with a potential world wherein the West under US hegemony reasserts control via planetary management including the deployment of large-scale solar geoengineering technologies – fleets of aircraft that would

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continually spray megatons of reflective chemicals in the upper atmosphere to reducing incoming sunlight, and thereby cool the planet not by reducing greenhouse gas emissions but by altering the Earth’s relationship with the sun for decades, if not centuries. Solar geoengineering could indeed prove a fundamentally vital technology for this strategy (Surprise, 2018, 2020b). Alternatively, or in addition, we could see protracted crises and large-scale warfare, along with militarization of climate change, elite fortification in exclusive zones, the necropolitical rationalization of death for vulnerable populations, and the weaponization of those who survive via border militarization and other forms of violence, wrapped in an ecofascist, neo-Malthusian defense of scarce resources – an (ecological) intensification of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘organized abandonment’. Pessimism of the intellect indeed. What of optimism of the will?

‘HERE, WHERE WE FIGHT, IS WHERE THE STATE IS’: ECOSOCIALISM AND ABOLITION WITH GRAMSCI AND GILMORE Gramscian political ecology has been helping to chart potential paths through the organic crisis for well over a decade. This includes work on the ways in which Gramsci’s open materialism and conceptualization of ‘nature’ can inform both the philosophy of praxis and anti-capitalist environmental social movements (Jakobsen, 2022; Loftus, 2013; Mann, 2009). Others have used Gramsci’s concepts and methods to understand emergent energy transitions and fossil divestment (Blondeel, 2019; Ford and Newell, 2021; Newell, 2019), and the complexities of climate adaptation (D’Alisa and Kallis, 2016; Rice et al. 2015; Routledge, 2015). These studies tend to highlight not the hegemony and dominance of capital (as discussed above) but its contingencies, fissures, and openings through which movements against hegemonic forces emerge at scales ranging from the energy sector to local and regional organizing to the body. They remind us that Gramsci’s rigorous but open materialism and broad strategic analyses can perhaps help to bridge some of the dominant left-wing tendencies in the climate and environmental movement. These tendencies and their tensions largely revolve around (working with extremely blunt descriptive binaries): growth versus degrowth, social democracy versus more revolutionary traditions, global north union organizing versus third worldist anti-imperialism, and so on. These are by no means hard and fixed oppositions. The first tendency, broadly aligned with growth, social democracy, and labor organizing finds expression in the more radical versions of Green New Deal proposals, endorsed, and organized for in leading capitalist states (e.g., the US and UK) by organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, the Bernie Sanders campaign, some elements of the environmental

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movement (e.g., the Sunrise Movement), the Corbyn-wing of the Labour Party and associated institutions. The second tendency includes a broad, uneasy alliance of indigenous and peasant-led activism (e.g., The Red Nation and La Via Campesina), anarchist-inflected environmental justice, and/or defense of social and ecological gains made by socialist states, often coalescing around climate justice through issues such as food sovereignty, climate debt, land back, and energy democracy. To start, there are many versions and interpretations of the Green New Deal (GND) and its relation to socialism. Perhaps the most radical (and most Gramscian) approaches to the GND are those that focus on placing unions and the labor movement at the heart of climate struggle, lucidly articulated by Matt Huber in Climate Change as Class War (2022). Huber critiques the ‘common sense’ at the core of the climate movement that focuses on knowledge (‘listen to the scientists’), consumption, moral persuasion of state power, and strikes/ disruptions not at the point of production, but at pipelines, highways, schools, etc. that are important but unlikely to muster power that can directly challenge capital. Huber implores the climate and broader socialist movement to focus on labor organizing in strategic sectors, such as electricity utilities in the US, which both facilitate fossil capital, and – if the capitalists and capitalist states that control them can be confronted and beaten – hold the keys to a green transition (‘electrify everything’). The strategic, emerging unity of the labor and environmental movements under the banner of socialism in an era of renewed strikes and electoral victories is potentially beginning to shift the climate movement (in the US, at least) from a war of position to a war of maneuver. However, other strands of the socialist climate movement find this strategy far too narrow, parochial, and counter to the internationalism at the heart of socialist struggle. For example, Huber, in his critique of environmentalism and localism dismisses entire populations – and their activism and allies – as too marginal to achieve any real power (the indigenous, peasant, frontline struggles mentioned above). Conversely, Max Ajl, in A People’s Green New Deal (2021) argues that the focus on US climate politics risks silencing demands for sovereignty and climate reparations from the Global South. He views this as ‘Eurocentric arrogance’ which narrowly prescribes an ‘ecological politics for the working class’ means a politics for the northern industrial and service sector workers (cotton farmers in India, pomegranate farmers in Iran, phosphate miners in Tunisia … do not in this view figure as ‘working class’… [they are] somehow not part of the world capitalist system and its prices …). (Ajl, 2021, p. 147)

Drawing from indigenous, national liberation, communist, and climate justice movements from around the world, Ajl argues for three pillars of a global

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ecosocialism which center ‘the national question’: payment of ecological and climate debt in the form of reparations from global north to south, demilitarization particularly in the imperial core, and struggles for sovereignty against settler colonialism (which is also vital for ecologically rational agriculture). Payments would enable nationally determined and democratic mitigation and adaptation, demilitarization would have huge climate effects and free up space for national liberation, sovereignty can center ecologically sound indigenous and pastoral land management (mixing with resplendent cities where basic needs are met and lives flourish). Yet, these strategies are ‘outside’ the point of industrial production, and could require some sacrifices on the part of the global north working classes (in international solidarity). Both of these broad approaches are necessary. Yet one sees the other as too marginal, local, punitive towards workers, and unfocused on the central agent of social change: industrial labor. The other sees the former as Eurocentric, imperial, and reformist (social democratic). Gramsci was, of course, deeply attentive to both the power of modernity and organized labor (e.g., in Americanism and Fordism) and the so-called margins – the political role of the peasantry, the ‘Southern question’, and so on, and sought to reformulate Marxist revolutionary theory by holding these two together in tension. In this chapter I cannot venture definitive suggestions for bridging the many gaps and tensions of contemporary socialist climate praxis, but I will highlight one approach that advances a framework for thinking and acting dialectically at the margins and for direct revolutionary change. Fittingly for a discussion on the work of a communist imprisoned by a fascist regime, I conclude by turning to, communist organizer and intellectual, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on carceral geographies and prison abolition. In terms of ‘the point of production’, it does not get more marginal than incarcerated people and the violently policed places of ‘organized abandonment’ that provide the human fodder for the prison–industrial complex. Yet Gilmore argues that the demand for abolition unifies many and varied movements for liberation – it does not privilege one singular actor in one sector as the fulcrum on which radical climate politics turns, and while it is more aligned with Ajl et al.’s approach, it provides more focus for organizing and unifying struggles. Gilmore briefly but effectively draws on Gramsci’s notion of crisis and passive revolution, often filtered through the work of Stuart Hall, to argue that carceral geographies are a fundamental strategy through which capitalist states manage crises and enact passive revolutions, particularly under neoliberalism. Against this oppression, Gilmore channels and echoes Gramsci’s

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relational materialism, arguing that abolition geographies (Gilmore, 2022, pp. 474–475): start from the homely premise that freedom is a place. Place-making is normal human activity: we figure out how to combine people, and land, and other resources with our social capacity to organize ourselves in a variety of ways … working outward and downward from this basic premise, abolitionist critique concerns itself with the greatest and least detail of these arrangements of people and resources and land over time. It shows how relationships of un-freedom consolidate and stretch … the point is not only to identify contradictions … in regimes of dispossession, but also, urgently, to show how radical consciousness in action revolves into liberated life-ways…

Diverse struggles of placemaking and the forging of liberatory life-ways against carceral capitalism can also unite against state power and violence, working for a new form of state and politics, and thus (Gilmore, 2022, p. 287): maste[r] the Gramscian puzzle of changing the state to change politics, and changing politics to change the state. We have to go deeply into the state in all its aspects – its legitimacy, the ideological apparatus it wields to normalize everyday horror … its budget process, its inner contradictions … all of these places are sites where activists can set their feet to fight the fight. And the sites are, as well, locations where we meet others struggling to piece together lives torn apart by poverty, illness, undereducation, war, long-distance migration, flight. Here, where we fight, is where the state is.

The brilliance of these passages recognizes both the power of ordinary people fighting to make space for their lives amidst the ravages of capitalism and the strategic positionality of the capitalist state as the center of power. With Gramsci, we can situate our humanity among other humans and the non-human world, always shaped by production and power. We can understand and analyze moments of profound crisis, outline the roots of the crisis, the paths open for ruling class response, and the geopolitical dangers lurking ahead. All of this is crucial for strategizing against hegemonic power, and for organizing and uniting labor struggles, anti-imperialism, land back, abolition of the carceral-capitalist state, and radical movements for climate justice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Portions of this chapter are drawn from the author’s previous work on the subject (see Surprise, 2020b; Surprise 2020c; Surprise, and Sapinski 2022).

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NOTE 1.

Rather than insert ‘sic’ after every use of the term ‘man’ as a stand-in for ‘human’, I will note here my objection to Gramsci’s use of gendered language typical of the time.

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Goldstein, J. (2018). Planetary improvement: Cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. MIT Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited by Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith. New York: International Publishers. Harris, J. (2019). The future of globalisation: neo-fascism or the Green New Deal. Race & Class, 61(1), 3–25. Harris, J. (2021). Global capitalism and the battle for hegemony. Science and Society, 85(3), 332–359. Huber, M. T. (2022). Climate change as class war: Building socialism on a warming planet. Verso Books. Jakobsen, J. (2022). Beyond subject-making: Conflicting humanisms, class analysis, and the ‘dark side’ of Gramscian political ecology. Progress in Human Geography, 46(2), 575–589. Loftus, A. (2013). Gramsci, nature, and the philosophy of praxis. In M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer, & A. Loftus (Eds), Gramsci: Space, nature, politics. John Wiley & Sons, pp. 178–196. Malm, A. (2016). Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books. Mann, G. (2009). Should political ecology be Marxist? A case for Gramsci’s historical materialism. Geoforum, 40(3), 335–344. McCarthy, J. (2015). A socioecological fix to capitalist crisis and climate change? The possibilities and limits of renewable energy. Environment and Planning A, 47(12), 2485–2502. Mercure, J. F., Pollitt, H., Viñuales, J. E., Edwards, N. R., Holden, P. B., Chewpreecha, U., ... & Knobloch, F. (2018). Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil fuel assets. Nature Climate Change, 8(7), 588–593. Mitchell, T. (2009). Carbon democracy. Economy and Society, 38(3), 399–432. Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. Verso Books. Moore, J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594–630. Morton, A. D. (2010). The continuum of passive revolution. Capital & Class, 34(3), 315–342. Newell, P. (2019). Trasformismo or transformation? The global political economy of energy transitions. Review of International Political Economy, 26(1), 25–48. O’Connor, J. (1988). Capitalism, nature, socialism: A theoretical introduction. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. A Journal of Socialist Ecology, 1(1), 11–38. O’Connor, J. (1998). Natural causes: Essays in ecological Marxism. Guilford Press. Ougaard, M. (2016). The reconfiguration of the transnational power bloc in the crisis. European Journal of International Relations, 22(2), 459–482. Panitch, L. & Gindin, S. (2012). The making of global capitalism: The political economy of American empire. Verso. Ray, D. K., West, P. C., Clark, M., Gerber, J. S., Prishchepov, A. V., & Chatterjee, S. (2019). Climate change has likely already affected global food production. PloS One, 14(5), e0217148. Rice, J. L., Burke, B. J., & Heynen, N. (2015). Knowing climate change, embodying climate praxis: Experiential knowledge in Southern Appalachia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105(2), 253–262. Robinson, W. I. (2019). Accumulation crisis and global police state. Critical Sociology, 45(6), 845–858.

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Index atomization 20 Austrian Freedom Party 397 authoritarianism 15, 18–19, 68, 140, 163, 197, 204, 206, 211, 215, 228, 294, 318, 358, 389–91, 399, 401, 421, 435, 448–9, 457–8 automobiles 282, 284–6, 289, 292–3, 336 Avanti! 34–5, 66 Ayers, A. J. 430

ABC of activism 381 accumulation strategy 266, 269, 273, 275, 305, 307, 311, 453, 457–8 Action Française 51–2 Adams, N. 374 Adamson, W. L. 197, 319 Adler, M. 77 agential selectivity 273–4 Agnelli, G. 51 agriculture 174, 286, 288, 290–91, 294, 363, 453, 455, 464 Ajl, M. 463–4 ALBA see Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America alcoholism 142, 282–3 alienation 2, 300, 328, 363–4 joyful 10, 149 Allen, T. 363 Althusser, L. 49, 184, 241, 243, 252 Americanism 15–16, 42, 93, 262–3, 267, 276, 282, 299–301, 303–4, 334 Amsterdam School 429, 433, 443 anarchism 37, 204, 206–7, 383, 463 Anderson, K. 76 Anderson, P. 1, 7–8, 21, 49, 104, 223, 317–18 Andrews, S. J. 328 anti-capitalism 13 anti-determinism 5, 21, 66–7, 79, 102, 112, 124 anti-hegemony 48, 232, 383 anti-terrorism 256 Antonioni, F. 6–7, 11 Apple, M. 334, 344 Arab Spring 149, 208 Archer, M. 252–3 Arnold, D. 355 Arrighi, G. 374, 460–61 Arruzza, C. 307 artificial intelligence 441 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank 443

Badaloni, N. 120–21, 126–7, 132 Badiou, A. 234 Bannon, S. 399 Barbusse, H. 37, 42 bargaining power 303 Bartoli, M. 3, 337 base/superstructure metaphor 198 Baudelot, C. 341 Bauer, B. 73 Bavarian Soviet Republic 36, 68 Belt and Road Initiative 443 Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. 351, 363–5 Berlinguer, E. 118 Bernstein, A. 51–2 Bhaskar, R. 240, 252–3 Bhattacharya, T. 307 Bianchi, A. 56 Bichler, S. 459 Bieler, A. 20 bienno rosso 12, 35–8, 40, 68, 199, 214 Bilderberg Group 396 Bill Gates Foundation 342 BlackRock 455 Blaut, J. H. 350 Bloom, A. 344 Blühdorn, I. 210 Bobbio, N. 21, 59, 104, 118, 125, 337 Boggs, C. 196–7, 206, 215 Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America 19, 22, 406–7, 410–12, 415, 418–21 469

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Bolivarian Revolution 12 Bolivian National Revolution 185, 415 Bologna, S. 329 Bolshevism 35–6, 39, 51, 66, 70, 103–5, 197, 211, 226, 276, 300, 396 Bolsonaro, J. 388, 391, 399 Boothman, D. 5–6, 105 Bordiga, A. 38–9 Borrell, J. 410 Bourdieu, P. 341 Brand, U. 15, 22, 456 Braudel, F. 438 Bretton Woods 434 Brexit 376, 388, 397–400 Briziarelli, M. 16 Broccoli, A. 343 Brookfield, S. D. 165–6 Brown, W. 149 Buchanan, P. 396 Buci-Glucksmann, C. 11, 130, 196 Bukharin, N. 4–6, 39, 66–7, 76–9, 104, 130, 136 Burawoy, M. 2, 171 Burgos, R. 417 Burke, E. 360 Bush, G. 396 Bush, G. W. 457 Butler, J. 243 Buttigieg, J. 44, 344 Caesarism 389–91, 401 Calvinism 74–5, see also Reformation Capital (Marx) 16, 35, 51, 141, 143, 157, 265, 334 ‘The Revolution against Capital’ 5, 35, 51, 66–79 capitalism 2, 5–9, 138, 140–44, 149, 166, 171–3, 176–83, 207, 210, 219–21, 253, 256, 299, 370, 374–5, 430, 460 crisis of 144, 263, 274, 450 Fordism see Fordism green capitalism 15, 294, 449, 453, 455–8 imperial mode of living 15, 22, 279–95 intellectuals and 10, 153–5 monopoly capitalism 190, 374 platform capitalism 16, 328

racial capitalism 18, 172–3, 351, 354, 361, 363–6, 374, 376 social reproduction and 299–311 and war of position 11 capitalist class 18, 104, 110, 149, 195, 201, 279, 356, 361, 366, 433, 450 transnational 411–12, 419, 456–8 Capitani, L. 343 Carroll, B. 99 Carroll, W. K. 228, 232, 249, 251, 371, 383, 457 Carta, C. 106 Casarino, C. 412, 421 catharsis 59, 128, 132, 165, 224, 228, 234–5 Catholicism 51, 107, 268, 338 Cavour, C. B. 177 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 318–20 Chalcraft, J. 371 Chatterjee, P. 321, 355 Chávez, H. 418–19 Chrysis, A. 12–13, 18 civil hegemony 145, 176 civil society 145–9, 175, 191, 211, 222–3, 338, 361–6, 389 Clark, B. 453 Clarté 37 class consciousness 121, 226, 317, 373, 381 class reductionism 242, 244, 409 class struggles 6, 51, 99, 112, 129, 172–3, 179, 181–3, 185, 190, 223, 230–31, 251, 254, 302, 308, 325, 337, 374, 401, 410, 415, 456 Class Struggles in France (Marx) 190 Clayton, T. 344 climate crisis 20, 22–3, 114, 288, 293–4, 299, 441, 444, 448–65 climate justice 20, 308–9, 448–65 Club of Rome 288 CO2 emissions 288, 291–2, 457, 462 coercion 7, 9, 12–13, 87, 105, 109, 137, 139, 142–3, 146, 149, 201, 211, 222–3, 228, 230–31, 245, 256, 264, 266, 268, 275, 288, 299, 301, 319, 321, 327, 357–8, 364, 373, 376–7, 381, 383, 391, 460 Cohen, S. 79 Cold War 284

Index

collective agency 5, 10, 14, 372–3, 377–8, 380 collective will 6, 21, 23, 71–5, 79, 113, 122, 126–7, 129, 160, 191–2, 224, 233, 243–5, 338, 409, 418 Collier, A. 254–5 colonialism 17–18, 114, 172, 174–5, 267, 350, 353–7, 359, 361–2, 366, 410–11, 416 Combahee River Collective 303 Comintern see Third International commissioni interne 36–7 commodity fetishism 10, 363 common sense 9–10, 111, 139, 146, 158–9, 163, 212, 255–6, 262, 264–5, 276, 279, 281, 319, 323, 335, 339, 363, 376, 380, 382, 388, 414, 435, 463 Communist Party of China 458 Communist Party of India 12 Communist Party of Italy 2, 21, 31–2, 38–40, 45, 104, 172, 225, 317, 334, 338, 371–2 Communist Party of the Soviet Union 40, 68 complexity 255–8 Conelli, C. 412 Confederazione Generale del Lavoro 36 ‘Conquest of the State, The’ (Gramsci) 213 consciousness 6, 10–11, 13, 37, 56, 72–3, 102–3, 136–9, 141, 146, 157–8, 160, 165–6, 207, 212, 225–6, 229, 232, 234, 241, 248, 279, 309, 317, 323, 326–7, 335–8, 382, 465 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A (Marx) 85, 103, 136 Corbyn, J. 463 corporatism 92–3, 139, 214, 284, 435 Cosmo, U. 50 Cospito, G. 132–3 counterhegemonic projects 21, 156–66, 192, 214, 224, 227, 232–3, 272, 304–5, 309, 325, 383, 401, 406 Covid-19 pandemic 309, 400, 441, 448 Cox, L. 18–19, 371, 374–5, 381, 384 Cox, R. 19–20, 256, 395, 429–30, 436 Creehan, K. 321 crisis management 20, 272, 274–5, 453 Crispi, F. 174

471

Critical Pedagogy 344–5 critical realism 14, 240–41, 247–59 Croce, B. 4, 6–7, 49–50, 53–9, 66, 73, 75, 91, 105, 121–9, 131, 137, 173–4, 336–7, 339, 342 Cromwell, O. 74, 175 Cuban Revolution 416 cultural political economy 15, 241, 257, 261–75 cultural reproduction 16 cultural revolution 130–31, 148, 230 cultural studies 16, 100, 166, 234, 315–31, 343, 345, 371 Cuoco, V. 88–9, 144 Dale, B. 213 Davidson, A. 50 Davies, J. 241, 253, 255, 257–9 Davies, W. 432 Davis, A. 345 Day, R. 232, 383 De Robbio Anziano, I. 343 de Smet, B. 371 decoloniality 17, 19, 167, 287, 289, 352–3, 407–16, 418, 421 Deflorian, M. 210 Delbrück, H. 11, 189 Deloitte 455 Demir, H. 374 Demirović, A. 280 democratic philosopher 227 deskilling of labour 9, 300 determinate market 130, 262 determinism 38, 66, 72–4, 78, 85, 144, 190, 241–2, 299–300, 328, 415, 417 Dewey, J. 339 dialectic of the distincts 122–4, 129 digital media 328–9 dis-articulation 10, 160–61, 164, 166 discourse theory 241, 247–51, see also post-Marxism discursive selectivity 273 divine providence 51, 74 division of labour 198, 213, 215, 263, 265, 273, 283, 362, 374 d’Orsi, A. 42 Douet, Y. 125–6, 133 Drainville, A. 280 dual and triple systems theory 302

472

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Dubois, W. E. B. 345 Eagleton, T. 4 East India Company 353 ecofascism 305 ecofeminism 308, 350–51, 364–5 economic reductionism 14, 127, 230, 249 ecosocialism 308, 406, 412, 418, 449, 462–4 education 17, 37, 67, 293, 324, 334–47 of Gramsci 3, 33–4, 44, 50, 337, 342 Egan, D. 11–12 Egyptian Revolution 382 Einaudi, G. 337 Eley, G. 370 elite groups 375–6, 378–9 elitism 38, 197, 215, 226, 228–9, 265, 341, 359, 393, 397, 415 Engels, F. 9, 20, 44, 48, 52, 54, 106, 113, 143, 190, 197–8, 334–5, 373, 443 English Revolution 74, 175 Entwistle, H. 339, 344 Erdogan, R. T. 388, 391, 399 Erhard, L. 285, 431 Establet, R. 341 Eurocentrism 17, 19, 176, 346, 350, 410–11, 414–15 Eurocommunism 196–7, 234, 317–18 European Economic and Monetary Union 437 European Union 290, 396, 410 Brexit 376, 388, 397–400 EZLN 385 Fabbrica Italiana Automobili di Torino 36, 336 Factory Councils movement 13, 121, 162, 173, 205–8, 214, 219, 317, 335–6, see also Turin strikes falsification 183–5 Farage, N. 397, 400 Farbman, M. 74 fascism 6–9, 14, 31–2, 36, 38–9, 44–5, 59, 73, 83, 91–4, 139–40, 180, 191, 205, 219, 242, 264, 275, 300, 306, 315–17, 338, 340, 344, 370, 372, 374–5, 377, 385, 388–90, 393–4, 401, 406, 421, 428, 457–8, 462, 464

ecofascism 305 neofascism 9, 19, 22, 137 February Revolution 35 Federici, S. 351, 361–2, 364 Femia, J. V. 197 feminism 16, 289, 299, 301–7, 310–11, 361–2, 372, 379–80, 382, 406 ecofeminism 308, 350–51, 364–5 Ferguson, S. 307 financialization–self-care nexus 305–7 Finelli, R. 57 First International 44 Fo, D. 342 Fondazione Gramsci 4 Fonseca, M. 9, 232 Fonzo, E. 344 Ford, H. 142, 283–4 Fordism 9, 15–16, 22, 93, 137, 140–48, 253, 262–4, 267, 276, 279–95, 299–303, 325–9, 334, 337, 341–3, 374, 432, 438, 464 Forgacs, D. 249 form analysis 265–71 Fortunato, G. 174 Forty-Eightist formula 145, 175–6 fossil fuels 285–6, 288, 290, 292, 294, 442, 450, 453, 457–9 Foucault, M. 14, 99, 241, 243, 257–8, 271–3, 345, 372, 432 Francese, J. 315 Francioni, G. 42, 67 Frankfurt School 8, 10, 44, 328 Fraser, N. 307, 344, 393–4 Fratell d’Italia 397 Frazier, D. 303 free choice 9, 148 Frege, G. 357–8 Frei Betto 342 Freire, P. 17, 334, 338–9, 345–6, 383 French Revolution 6, 48, 52, 54–5, 57, 75, 84, 90–91, 108, 128, 137, 145, 175, 178–9, 393 Front National 396–7 Frosini, F. 51–2, 54, 59, 119–20, 125–6, 129–30 für ewig 43, 108, 315–16, 329 Gandhi, M. 354 Garaudy, R. 118 Garcia Canclini, N. 320

Index

Garibaldi, G. 177 Garrido, C. L. 10 gender 16, 166, 246, 281, 299–311, 345, 362–3, 408–9, 411 gender critical feminism 305–7 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 433 Gentile, G. 4, 37, 49–50, 56–7, 59, 73, 340 Germino, D. 4 Gerratana, V. 1, 67, 120, 334 Gerstle, G. 148–9 gig economy 328 Gilder, G. 149 Gilets Jaunes 234 Gill, S. 19–20, 233, 437 Gilmore, R. W. 462, 464–5 Gioberti, V. 177 Giolitti, G. 36 Giroux, H. 334, 344–5 global financial crisis 20, 394, 428, 438 Global North 281–2, 286–7, 290–92, 371, 384, 411–12, 415, 464 North–South relations 281, 287–8, 291, 411–12 Global South 19, 22, 281, 285, 287–93, 371, 407–15, 419–21, 463–4 North–South relations 281, 287–8, 291, 411–12 Gobetti, A. P. 337–8 Gobetti, P. 337–8 Goethe, J. W. von 43 good sense 10, 17, 111–12, 159, 213, 262, 321, 335–6, 380–84 Gorka, S. 399 Gramsci, A. anticipation of CPE 261–5 on Bukharin 67–8, 76–9 childhood of 32–3 continuing influence of 1–2, 4, 13–20, 94, 166, 200 on Croce 49–50, 54–9, 66, 73, 75, 91, 121–4, 127–9, 131, 137 death of 5, 31, 43 on education 334–47 education of 3, 33–4, 44, 50, 337, 342 on Gentile 49, 56–7, 59, 73 health of 31–3, 42–3, 71

473

on Hegel 48–60, 73, 137, 145, 157 incarceration of 3, 5, 31–2, 40–43, 45, 174, 211, 219, 315, 335, 370–71, see also Prison Notebooks life and times of 4–5, 31–45 on Marx 48–53, 55, 57–60, 73, 121, 128, 136, 145, 261, 265, 272 Marxism of 2, 4–5, 21–2, 24, 40–41, 44–5, 51–6, 66–7, 73, 76–8, 113, 127, 152, 156, 166, 196, 198, 200, 206, 215, 219, 228, 317, 334–5, 371, 383, see also philosophy of praxis and Mussolini 34, 39 theories of see individual theories writing of see individual works writing style of 3, 8, 41, 70, 319 Gramsci, F. 32 Gramsci, G. 33 Great Depression 14, 274, 287, 428 ‘Great Men’ 352, 359 Great Recession 149 green capitalism 15, 294, 449, 453, 455–8 green jobs 310 Green New Deal 449, 462–3 greenhouse gas emissions 288, 291–2, 457, 462 Greenspan, A. 435 Grundrisse (Marx) 321–2, 359 Guha, R. 17, 321, 351–61, 366 Habermas, J. 345 Haitian Revolution 415 Halévy, D. 120 Hall, S. 16, 317–19, 321, 323–5, 327–8, 331, 345, 389, 414, 438–9, 464 Hammond, H. 374 Hardt, M. 234 Harris, J. 457–8 Harvey, D. 171 Haubner, T. 210 Heenan, N. 308 Hegel, G. W. F. 5–6, 48–60, 73, 75–6, 112, 144–5, 157, 321, 361 hegemonic crises 191–2, 276, 378–80, 389, 394

474

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

hegemonic projects 14–15, 100, 110–13, 192, 233, 250, 253–6, 258–9, 261–77, 310–11, 325–6, 401, 433–7, 444, 457 hegemony 2, 6–8, 16, 22, 39–40, 145, 157, 161, 166, 204, 219, 221–3, 261, 279–80, 335, 430 civil hegemony 145, 176 and class power 190–92 crises see hegemonic crises critical realist understanding of 14, 250–55 and cultural studies 324–5, 329–30 Fordism as 141 gender and social reproduction 299–311 in a globalized world 406–21 and organic crisis 90–91 origins and influences 102–3 and post-Marxism 241–7 and prefiguration 211–14 in Prison Notebooks 7, 13, 99–101, 103, 106, 108–13, 119, 127, 130–31, 134, 138, 148, 158, 262–5, 280, 330, 373, 407 projects see hegemonic projects as a protean concept 99–114 and right-wing populism 388–402 and social movements 370–85 state as dictatorship + hegemony 13, 137, 194, 222 and subalternity 351–4 terrain of 100, 109–10 and war of position 11 without hegemony 350–66 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau & Mouffe) 14, 242, 246, 249 Hesketh, C. 182 Himmelfarb, G. 149 Hirsch, E. D. 344 Hirsch, J. 18 historical blocs 2, 8–9, 11–13, 16, 18–22, 58–9, 111, 136–9, 141–2, 146–8, 164, 191, 211–13, 224, 226, 230, 233, 244–5, 253, 256, 263, 265, 275–6, 309–11, 325, 339, 364, 376, 381, 383, 407–9, 411, 417, 419–21, 433, 438–9, 457 abandonment of concept 132–3 conceptual elaboration of 122–32

in Prison Notebooks 8–9, 118–34, 137–8 historical materialism 2–6, 8, 14, 18, 21, 48, 54–6, 58, 72–4, 76–8, 100, 122–3, 127–8, 137, 166, 183, 254, 272, 282, 299, 304, 309, 321–2, 395, 401, 430, 443–4, 450 historiography 42, 351–2, 355–6, 358–61 Hitler, A. 38, 396 Hoare, G. 4–5, 8 Hoare, Q. 341 Hobbes, T. 246, 360 Hobsbawm, E. 45, 395 Hoggart, R. 318–20, 322 Holloway, J. 13, 232 Holst, J. D. 165–6 Holy Family, The (Marx) 58, 73 homo oeconomicus 129–30 hooks, b. 345 Howarth, D. 244–5, 249–50 humanism 49, 55, 336–7 Humboldt, A. 341 Humphrys, E. 7 Hungarian Revolution 317 Hungarian Soviet Republic 36, 68 hydra politics 18, 362–3 iceberg model 363–5 idealism 5, 49–55, 58, 67, 72–3, 75–7, 105, 112, 122–4, 127–8, 223, 261, 336–7, 398, 400, 414 ideological dimensions 157–61, 163 ideological orders 156–8, 161, 166 Iglesias, P. 99 Il Corriere della Sera 173 Il Grido del Popolo 34–5, 66 imperial mode of living 15, 22, 279–95 imperialism 15, 17, 374 incorporated comparison 185 indifferent capitalism 302 indignad@s 385 indignado movements 149 industrial democracy 335 industrialism 51, 140–43, 180, 282, 300 inner appropriation 15, 284–5 Institute of Proletarian Culture 336 integral state 9, 11, 13, 21, 100, 105, 109, 114, 130, 137–9, 145–8, 211, 258, 263–4, 275, 311, 408–9, 412, 421, 451

Index

intellectuals 10, 17, 58–9, 69, 110–13, 138, 152–6, 161–4, 166, 172–4, 178, 220–21, 227, 262, 265, 267, 272, 276, 337–8, 371, 389 organic 10, 69, 110–11, 153–6, 161–3, 165–6, 174, 262–3, 265, 371, 380–81, 384, 408–9, 432 traditional 10, 69, 110, 154–6, 162, 165–6, 262, 371, 380 intermedia theory 365–6 International Gramsci Society 4 International Labour Organization 293 International Monetary Fund 433, 437, 455 international order 281, 394, 444, 459 International Political Economy 429 International Relations 19, 100, 175, 182, 184, 246, 256, 390, 395, 413, 429–31, 456, 459–60 internationalism 19, 299, 310, 407, 412–13, 415, 434, 449, 463 Irish Revolution 382, 384 Islam, D. 16 Islamophobia 396–7, 400 Ives, P. 258 Jackson, R. 5–6 Jacobinism 59, 108, 121, 175, 177, 195, 231, 243 Jacobin clubs 5, 53, 145 Jameson, F. 350–51 Jessop, B. 15, 241, 253–7, 259, 271–2, 433, 438 Johnson, B. 398 Joseph, J. 14, 241, 253, 256, 258 journals 320, 429 joyful alienation 10, 149 Kagarlitsky, B. 399 Kaleem, A. 256 Kamenev, L. 39 Kapital, Das see Capital (Marx) Kautsky, K. 189–90 Kerensky, A. 66 Keynesianism 374, 428–9, 431–4, 441–2 Kristol, I. 149 Krugman, P. 442

475

Kumaravadivelu, B. 412 Kun, B. 104 La Città futura (Gramsci) 34, 73 Labriola, A. 2, 41, 48, 54, 74, 77–8, 112, 157, 175 Laclau, E. 14, 60, 99, 197, 233, 240–51, 257–9, 330, 371 Landy, M. 321 Lash, S. 374 Lebowitz, M. 20 Lefebvre, H. 79 Lenin, V. 7, 9, 11, 35, 38–41, 44, 67, 75–6, 104, 114, 130, 157, 181, 221, 226, 228–9, 261, 339, 382 Leninism 18, 36, 44, 197, 200, 204, 206, 228 Liceo Classico Massimo d’Azeglio 337 Liguori, G. 121–2 Linebaugh, P. 363 Lloyd, D. 153–4 L’Ordine Nuovo 36–9, 68, 106, 206–7, 389 Lordon, F. 149 Losurdo, D. 219–20, 451 Lukács, G. 10, 157, 382 L’Unità 68, 104 Lutiis, L. de 4 Lutz, B. 284 Luxemburg, R. 67, 70–71, 189, 194, 382, 385 Lyons Theses (Gramsci) 39–40, 371–3, 407, 413 MacGregor, S. 209 Machiavelli, N. 4, 7, 56, 71, 86, 105–6, 113, 220, 222, 224, 226–7, 231, 246, 267, 338 Malagodi, G. 120 Manacorda, M. A. 341, 343–4 Manifesto (Marx & Engels) 106, 374 Mann, G. 460–61 Manzoni, A. 335 Marcias, P. 32, 40 Mariátegui, J. C. 416 Marsden, R. 257, 272 Martin, J. 246 Martin-Barbero, J. 320

476

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Marx, K. 2, 4, 9, 15, 35, 44, 48–55, 57–60, 73–4, 76, 103, 105–6, 110, 113, 120–21, 124, 128, 136, 138, 140, 145, 176, 197–8, 257, 261, 271–3, 276, 321–2, 334–5, 365, 373, 382–3, 408, 411, 429–30, 432, 443, 452, see also individual works and theories in Prison Notebooks 48–9, 52–4, 57–8, 121, 128 Marxism 2–3, 10, 35, 44, 74–9, 125, 132, 144, 148, 157, 196–7, 328–9, 396, see also philosophy of praxis of Gramsci 2, 4–5, 21–2, 24, 40–41, 44–5, 51–6, 66–7, 73, 76–8, 113, 127, 152, 156, 166, 196, 198, 200, 206, 215, 219, 228, 317, 334–5, 371, 383, see also philosophy of praxis hegemony see hegemony post-Marxism 14, 60, 99, 196–7, 220, 228, 230–31, 233–5, 240–59, 330, 380 rediscovery of 16 Western 7, 44, 49, 136, 317–19, 346, 350–62, 365–6 Maurras, C. 52 Mayo, P. 17, 345, 371 Mazzini, G. 177 McCarthy, J. 456 McKeown, G. 374 McLaren, P. 345 McMichael, P. 185, 291 McNally, D. 430 media 325–7 digital media 328–9 social media 16, 305, 328, 384 Meiji Restoration 185 mercato determinato 130, 262 Mexican Revolution 185, 382 Michaels, R. 71 Mies, M. 351, 363–5 Mignolo, W. D. 410 migrant rights 310, 381 Milani, L. 345 Milanovic, B. 438 military metaphor see war of maneuver; war of position Millenium 429 Mirowski, P. 432

Modern Prince 13, 17–18, 71, 100, 113–14, 139, 199, 204, 219–35, 338, 383, 430 modernity 3, 8–9, 11, 54, 83–4, 90–92, 138, 171–2, 174, 176, 180, 182–3, 185, 336, 354, 376, 410, 460, 464 Modi, N. 388, 391, 399 molecular transformations 89, 192 Monasta, A. 343 monopoly capitalism 190, 374 Mont Pèlerin Society 432 Mookerjea, S. 17–18 Moore, J. W. 453–4 morbid symptoms metaphor 392 Morrow, R. A. 322, 345 Morton, A. 6, 11, 17, 20 Mouffe, C. 14, 60, 99, 197, 233, 240–51, 257–9, 330, 371 mountaintop removal mining 290–91 Muhr, T. 19 Murray, C. 149 Mussolini, B. 34, 38–41, 45, 140, 143, 219, 315 Musté, M. 50, 52 Nader, R. 396 Napoleonic wars 57, 89–90, 128, 179, 208 Napolitano, G. 118 NASA 453 nationalism 34, 51, 140, 287, 305, 325, 353–6, 359–60, 373, 389, 392–5, 397–401, 411–15, 418, 457–8 NATO 406, 411 Naxalbari insurrection 351–3 negation of transcendentalism 51 Negri, T. 234 neocolonialism 281, 291 neofascism 9, 19, 22, 137 neoliberalism, definition of 431–4 neoliberalism in organic crisis 428–44 New Left 196–7, 317–19 new materialism 4 New World Order 396 Nielsen, K. 371 Nilsen, A. G. 371, 374–5, 381 Nimbyism 286–7 Nitti, F. 173 Nitzan, J. 459 North American Free Trade Area 437

Index

North–South relations 281, 287–8, 291, 411–12 Nowell-Smith, G. 341 nuclear family 16, 142, 285, 305, 307–8 Nuit Debout 234 O’Cadiz, M. 345 Occupy Wall Street 208, 210, 234, 385 O’Connor, J. 308–9, 311, 453–4 October Revolution 35, 44, 194–5, 219, 382 OPEC 288 Open Marxism 311 Orban, V. 399 ordinariness 322–4 Ordine Nuovo movement 338 organic crisis 6–7, 11, 13, 16, 18–20, 22, 128–9, 144, 146, 275, 350, 378, 381, 388, 391, 394, 417, 428–44, 449–52, 456, 458, 461–2 in Prison Notebooks 83, 90–91 organic intellectuals 10, 69, 110–11, 153–6, 161–3, 165–6, 174, 262–3, 265, 371, 380–81, 384, 408–9, 432 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 293, 438 Orientalism 99, 321, 410, 414 Ortega, D. 418 Overbeck, H. 19–20 Pajetta, G. 337 Palacios, M. 346 Paris Agreement 455 Paris Commune 34, 84, 145 Parker, M. 211 Parodi, G. 336 Partij voor de Vrijheid 397 Partito Comunista Italiano see Communist Party of Italy Partito d’Azione 177, 180 Partito Moderato 177, 180 Partito Socialista Italiano see Socialist Party of Italy Party Vlaams Belang 397 Pasolini, P. P. 412, 421 Pass, J. 256 Passeron, J. C. 341

477

passive revolution 2, 11, 144, 171–85, 192 essential form 11, 172, 177–81, 183–5 form of appearance 172, 177–8, 180–81, 183–5 permanency of 181, 195 in Prison Notebooks 83–5, 88–9, 93, 140, 144, 148, 172, 174–82, 390 patriarchy 16, 362–3, 376 Pavese, C. 337 permanency 181, 195 Permanent Settlement 353 Perry, J. B. 363 philology 3, 33, 261, 337 philosophy of praxis 2–3, 5–7, 14, 17, 21, 41, 48–9, 54–6, 59–60, 66, 75–8, 85, 100, 102, 112–13, 123, 125–8, 132, 137, 144, 156–8, 161, 165, 204, 224, 253, 339, 360, 450–51, 462, see also Marxism Piedmont monarchy 178, 268, 352–3 platform capitalism 16, 328 Plekhanov, G. 136 Podemos 99, 235 Polanyi, K. 394–5 political parties 139, 199–200, 228–9, 264, 396–7, see also Modern Prince; individual parties Popper, K. 184–5 popular culture 54, 196, 262, 265, 320, 323, 343, 363, 388, 390 populism 7, 19, 22, 233, 388–402 Porter, M. 432 positivism 4–5, 14, 51, 75, 184–5, 261, 336 post-Fordism 283, 288–95, 328–9 post-Marxism 14, 60, 99, 196–7, 220, 228, 230–31, 233–5, 240–59, 330, 380 poststructuralism 4, 14, 232, 240–42, 252, 304 Poulantzas, N. 15, 138, 214, 242, 257, 311 poverty 293, 415, 465 prefigurative politics 12–13, 198–9, 204–15 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 105–6, 220, 226, 338

478

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 1–8, 14, 31, 33–4, 40, 43–5, 66, 388 Bukharin in 67–8, 76–9 Calvinism in 74–5 Croce in 49–50, 54–9, 66, 73, 75, 91, 121–4, 127–9, 131, 137 fascism in 388–90 Gentile in 49, 56–7, 59, 73 Hegel in 48–50, 52–9, 73, 137 hegemony in 7, 13, 99–101, 103, 106, 108–13, 119, 127, 130–31, 134, 138, 148, 158, 262–5, 280, 330, 373, 407 historical bloc in 8–9, 118–34, 137–8 historical materialism in 76–9 historico-political dynamics in 6–7, 83–94 Marx in 48–9, 52–4, 57–8, 121, 128 Modern Prince in see Modern Prince ‘Notes on Philosophy’ 50, 53, 57, 67–8, 74, 76, 78 organic crisis in 83, 90–91 passive revolution in 83–5, 88–9, 93, 140, 144, 148, 172, 174–82, 390 permanency in 181 prefigurative politics in 13 relations of force in 83, 85–7, 89 subalternity in 352 writing of 41–2, 370–71 writing style of 3, 8, 41 Progressive International 22 Prohibition 282–3 prosperity 281–2, 284–5, 291–2, 302 protectionism 33, 393, 396–7, 399–400, 428, 434 Proudhon, P.-J. 59 puritanical values 9, 74, 141–3, 148 Putin, V. 399 Quaderni del Carcere see Prison Notebooks quality of life 12 Quijano, A. 410–12, 416 Quinet, E. 88

race 166, 172–3, 246, 281, 303–5, 345, 362, 371–2, 376–7, 381, 411–12, 415 racial capitalism 18, 172–3, 351, 354, 361, 363–6, 374, 376 racism 140, 291, 302, 350, 363–5, 372–3, 376, 401, 410, 415 Radek, K. 39 radical politics 167, 246, 317, 340, 344 Rancière, J. 351–2, 359–60 Ransome, P. 196 Ratner, R. S. 228, 249, 251 Reagan, R. 149, 371, 397, 435 re-articulation 156, 160–61, 164, 166, 244, 250, 272, 304, 308–9, 311, 399–400, 417 Red Biennium see bienno rosso Rediker, M. 363 reductionism 8, 230, 241, 249, 257, 259 class 242, 244, 409 economic 14, 127, 230, 249 Reed, J.-P. 10 Reflections on Violence (Sorel) 120 Reformation 54, 58, 74–5, see also Calvinism refoundation 102, 148–9 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership 443 regulation theory 15, 257, 432–3 reification 10, 197–8, 200, 350 relations of force 18, 20, 22, 133, 181, 330, 413, 430, 449, 452, 456 in Prison Notebooks 83, 85–7, 89 Renaissance 54, 58, 75, 105, 145 reserve army of labour 303, 307 ‘Revolution against Capital, The’ (Gramsci) 5, 35, 51, 66–79 revolutionary strategy 5, 13, 44, 130, 132, 189, 192, 194–6, 198–9, 211, 219–35, 365, 451 Ricardo, D. 144, 262 right-wing populism 7, 22, 388–402 Risorgimento 33, 87–90, 103, 108, 138, 176–81, 185, 352, 451 Robbe, J. 374 Robertson, P. 396 Robinson, C. J. 363 Robinson, W. 457 Rolland, R. 42, 383 Rosengarten, F. 219

Index

Rousseau, J.-J. 340 Rudy, A. 308 Ruggie, J. 428, 433 ruling class strategy 11 Russian Revolution 6, 12, 14, 32, 35, 37, 51, 70, 92, 276, 384 February Revolution 35 October Revolution 35, 44, 194–5, 219, 382 Said, E. 99–100, 321, 346 Salandra, A. 173 Salem-Eksheikh, M. 346 Sanbonmatsu, J. 232–3 Sanctis, F. de 49–50, 73 Sanders, B. 462 Sarlo, B. 320 Saussure, F. de 4 Schelsky, H. 285 Scherrer, C. 280 Schmitt, C. 246 Schoppek, D. 12 Schor, J. 283 Schucht, J. 39, 41 Schucht, T. 32, 34, 41, 43, 50, 108, 128, 315, 329 Schumpeter, J. 431–2 Sears, A. 383–4 Second International 4–5, 34–5, 44, 66–7, 77, 113, 136, 190 Shanghai Cooperation Organization 443 Shiva, V. 345 siege warfare 193, 195, 198, 200, 408 Simm, S. 246 Simon, R. I. 345 Single European Market 437 slavery 304 Smith, Barbara 303 Smith, Beverly 303 Smith, N. 308, 311 Smucker, J. M. 210 social media 16, 305, 328, 384 social movements 18–19, 120, 149, 167, 209, 233–4, 241, 243, 249, 272, 277, 289, 309, 338, 345, 365, 370–85, 407, 462 social reproduction 16–18, 299–311, 351, 362–3

479

socialism 5, 12–13, 33–7, 68, 190 crisis of 242–3 ‘Socialism and Culture’ (Gramsci) 34 Socialist Party of Italy 34–8, 50–51, 66, 68, 73, 106, 199, 208, 334 solidary mode of living 294 ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (Gramsci) 40, 100, 106–8, 118, 172–3, 339, 371–4, 407, 413 Sorel, G. 4, 37, 119–22 Sorelian ‘myth’ 119–22 Sotiris, P. 8 Southern Question 11, 17, 22, 40, 100, 106–8, 118, 172–3, 177, 262, 268, 339, 371–4, 407, 412–13, 415, 421, 464 Spaventa, B. 49, 57, 73 Sperber, N. 4–5, 8 spiritualism 6, 55, 58, 136 Spivak, G. 321 spontaneity 70–72, 199, 206, 226, 229, 232, 234 Stalin, J. 4, 40, 44–5, 104, 197, 317, 371, 382 state 9, 134, 140, 171, 174–7, 182, 184, 191, 221–3, 263–4, 268 as dictatorship + hegemony 13, 137, 194, 222 integral 9, 11, 13, 21, 100, 105, 109, 114, 130, 137–9, 145–8, 211, 258, 263–4, 275, 311, 408–9, 412, 421, 451 Stiglitz, J. 442 Strauss, L. 41 strikes 35–6, 190 Turin strikes 31–2, 36–8, 141, see also Factory Councils movement structural selectivity 273 structuralism 252, 317 Sturman, A. 16–18 Subaltern Studies 17–18, 353–4, 411 subalternity 1, 4, 22, 59, 99, 109, 140, 142, 149, 156, 158–9, 163, 166, 173, 279, 351–61, 366, 377–81, 407, 409–11, 413, 417, 420, 451 Sum, N.-L. 15, 241, 257, 271–2 Summers, L. 442

480

The Elgar Companion to Antonio Gramsci

superstructure 8, 21, 57–8, 86, 91, 103, 118–19, 122–6, 129–34, 136–8, 141–2, 146–9, 165, 190–91, 194, 198, 224, 230, 241, 253, 261–3, 275–6, 319, 322, 325, 327–8, 408, 411, 416 Surprise, K. 20 Swiss Popular Party 397 Swiss Re Institute 455 Syriza 235 Tarlau, R. 345 Tasca, A. 36–8 Taylor, F. W. 141–2, 285 Taylorism 37, 285, 337, 343 technological selectivity 273 Terracini, U. 36–8 Terranova, T. 329 Texier, J. 118, 125, 129–30 Thatcher, M. 371, 397 Thatcherism 325, 434 theory of revolution 59, 197, 230 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx) 2, 5, 52, 76, 123, 128 Third International 31–2, 38–9, 44, 66–8, 74, 190, 383, 415 Thomas, P. 1, 110, 113, 130, 133, 153–5, 371 Thompson, E. P. 318, 322, 328 Togliatti, P. 36–8, 40, 68, 110, 118, 206–7 Torres, C. 345 Tosel, A. 132 totalitarianism 92, 114, 124–5, 140, 226 trade unions 10–11, 20, 33, 36, 68, 122, 162, 175, 264, 327, 377–8 traditional intellectuals 10, 69, 110, 154–6, 162, 165–6, 262, 371, 380 TradWives 305–7 trans-exclusionary radical feminists 305–7 transnational capitalist class 411–12, 419, 456–8 transnationalism 407, 412 Treves, C. 73–4 Trilateral Commission 396 Trotsky, L. 11, 39–41, 44, 171, 195, 382, see also uneven and combined development Trump, D. 309, 376, 388, 398–9

Truss, L. 398 Turin strikes 31–2, 36–8, 141, see also Factory Councils movement UKIP 397 UNCTAD 287, 289 UNDP 293 uneven and combined development 11, 17, 22, 171–2, 176–7, 182–3, 185 Unitarian School 340–41, 343–4, 346 unitary theory 302–3, 307 United Nations 287–8 Urry, J. 374 Vallès, J. 34 van der Pijl, K. 20, 428 Van Dyk, S. 210 Vico, G. 51, 57, 73–4 Villa, R. 343 Vogel, L. 302–3, 307 Volcker, P. 435 voluntarism 70, 73–4, 231, 336 Voza, P. 90 wage patriarchy 362–3 Wainwright, H. 382–3, 460–61 Wanner, T. 455 war of maneuver 2, 11–13, 157, 189–201, 225–6, 230–31, 270–71, 299, 316, 338, 365, 381, 393, 408–9, 463 war of position 11–13, 19–20, 91–4, 146, 148, 156–7, 160, 189–201, 205, 211–15, 219, 225–6, 230–32, 271, 299, 311, 317, 324, 338, 352, 365, 392–4, 400–402, 406–9, 412, 416, 418–20, 448 Weber, M. 75 Western Marxism 7, 44, 49, 136, 317–19, 346, 350–62, 365–6 Wilders, G. 397 Williams, A. 241, 258–9 Williams, M. 12 Williams, R. 16, 111, 319–22, 324–5, 327–8, 342, 345, 382–3 Wissen, M. 15, 22, 456 Wolf, M. 442 Wood, E. M. 248 World Economic Forum 14

Index

World Trade Organization 437 World War I 6, 34–6, 84, 92, 192–3, 195, 206, 384 World Wildlife Fund 453 Worth, O. 19 xenophobia 140 Xi, J. 443

481

Yom Kippur War 288 York, R. 453 Young, M. 340 Zapatistas 232, 385 Zinoviev, G. 39