Gramsci's Critique of Civil Society: Towards a New Concept of Hegemony [1 ed.] 1138185876, 9781138185876

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For more than thirty years, celebration of “civil society” (as the apparent champion of freedom, pluralism, inclusion, democracy, human rights, etc.) has served as one of the most fruitful mechanisms of neo-liberal ideology, and it has masked the consolidation of new forms of oligarchic power across Latin America and the world as a whole. Fonseca’s valuable book helps to explode the conceptual basis of this charade, and goes a long way towards explaining what must be done to relaunch emancipatory political action on a more resolute, more decisive, and more lucid basis. Debunking one-sided readings of Gramsci that have sought to align him with the demobilising thematics of civil society and postmodern fragmentation, Fonseca’s searching and detailed reinterpretation reconstructs the underlying unity of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis as a forceful articulation of grassroots popular engagement on the one hand with disciplined and coordinated organisation on the other. Peter Hallward, Kingston University London, UK

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Gramsci’s Critique of Civil Society

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist thinker whose radical ideas on how to build an alternative world from below remain vigorously relevant today. Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis critically dissects the institutions of modern liberal democracy to reveal what is perhaps its deepest secret: it is the most successful political system in modernity at preserving an objective condition of domination while transforming it into a subjective conviction of freedom. Based on a careful reading of Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks, Marco Fonseca shows hegemony as more than leadership of elites over subaltern majorities based on “consent.” Following Gramsci’s critique of citizenship, civil society and democracy, including the current project of neoliberal “democracy promotion” particularly in the Global South, he discloses a hidden process of hegemony that generates the preconditions for consent and, thus, successful domination. As the struggles from Zapatismo to Chavismo and from the Arab Springs to Spain’s Podemos show, liberation is not possible without counter-­hegemony. This book will be of interest to activist scholars engaged in the study of Marxism, Gramsci, political philosophy, and contemporary debates about the renewal of Marxist thought and the relevance of revolution and Communism for the twenty-­first century. Marco Fonseca is an instructor in the Department of International Studies at Glendon College, York University. His current research involves a reconsideration of Hegel’s and Gramsci’s critiques of civil society.

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Gramsci’s Critique of Civil Society Towards a New Concept of Hegemony

Marco Fonseca

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Marco Fonseca to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fonseca, Marco, author. Title: Gramsci's critique of civil society : towards a new concept of hegemony / Marco Fonseca. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 108 Identifiers: LCCN 2015038611| ISBN 9781138185876 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315644196 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937. | Gramsci, Antonio, 1891–1937. Quaderni del carcere. | Hegemony–Philosophy. | Civil society–Philosophy. Classification: LCC HX289.7.G73 F65 2016 | DDC 300.1–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038611 ISBN: 978-1-138-18587-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64419-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Preface



Introduction

viii 1

1 Rethinking Structures and Superstructures

21

2 On Moral and Intellectual Reform

38

3 The Process of Hegemony

62

4 A Critique of Civil Society

93

5 War of Position as Counter-­Hegemony

114

6 The Modern Prince: Refounding the State

138



Conclusion: Towards a New Concept of Hegemony

167



Bibliography Index

196 206

Preface

The name of Gramsci was not very common when I was an undergraduate university student in Guatemala during the early eighties, except among a very limited number of senior students and faculty. But the concept of hegemony, although used simply to mean domination, was widely used among activists and revolutionaries in Guatemala and throughout Latin America. The notion of civil society, in turn, was still somewhat foreign to many of us, but the so-­called “revival” of civil society in Europe and South America was clearly starting to have an impact and beginning to open up new ways of rethinking the meaning of political engagement and political change. The spirit of Gramsci seemed to be everywhere. The widespread failure of guerrilla movements to successfully overthrow most right-­wing military dictatorships in Central America and install progressive popular revolutions in their place, and, in turn, the failure of these Washington-­ supported dictatorships to militarily defeat the insurgencies, made it clear, at the time, that the war of maneuver was decidedly over and that only a negotiated “transition to democracy” with meaningful political reforms and some level of “inclusive development” could ensure an enduring peace. The virtual decimation of grassroots popular movements through indiscriminate forms of state-­led counter-­insurgency, violent repression and the genocide of indigenous peoples, largely supported by the US, created a political vacuum and an unprecedented opportunity for the development of civil society as the new privileged terrain of grassroots struggles. It really seemed to many of us, including those of us who were forced to go into exile, that the contractualist potential of civil society, struggles organized around human rights, and demands for the rule of law were certainly worth exploring in theory and pursuing in practice. By the end of the eighties, these ideas had become normal and, indeed, the only acceptable rules of political engagement. After finishing my undergraduate studies in Canada, I dedicated my years as a graduate student, my doctoral dissertation and my first book to the exploration of the usefulness of the idea of civil society to pursuing progressive change through democratic politics and in the context of neoliberal globalization. But the “transition to democracy” turned out to be, in fact, a transition to minimalist peripheral polyarchy, promoted and

Preface   ix consolidated by Washington in combination with structural adjustment policies and free trade agreements as required conditions for joining the process of transnationally dominated neoliberal globalization. The hopes that I once placed in the transformative potential of civil society and the inclusive promises of liberal democracy, even in its minimalist form, turned out to have been largely misplaced. But it was not till after this long detour through the arguments and practical contradictions of contemporary liberal or social-­democratic thought, and after preparing a seminar on civil society in the Department of International Studies at Glendon College, York University, that I finally resolved to return to those critical and, indeed, radical reflections that, in my very early twenties, stirred my hopes and drove my commitment to changing the world. Although it began as part of a much larger investigation into the philosophical roots of the idea of civil society, this study of Gramsci’s critique of civil society became its own project, and has now, in the present book, come to represent not only a critical engagement with the idea of civil society that I once entertained as the hope of the oppressed but also a return to those early dreams that were drastically interrupted by the contingencies of a long exile and the disciplinary demands that institutionalized academia once placed on my research interests and thoughts. Writing this book has been a largely isolated project, mostly undertaken under conditions of precarious academic employment and no institutional support beyond what my local union (CUPE 3903) has been able to ensure for all of its members at York University. Such, I am afraid, is the predicament of contract faculty in North America these days. But I am very grateful to my students at Glendon College, whose work, discussions and queries greatly encouraged my interest in Gramsci and his Prison Notebooks. These highly stimulating interactions, along with the questions and critical observations students often raised in class, have led to some of the more complex answers that I now present in this book. I just hope that the answers I have provided to my students over the course of many years at Glendon College, and those that I am now presenting here, turn out to be at least minimally stimulating to them. I have also had the opportunity to develop or present key ideas of this book thanks to the support of a number of friends and colleagues in Guatemala, whom I would like to acknowledge here. I am particularly grateful to the editorial board of the Guatemalan periodical El Observador and its leading editor, Fernando Solís, for allowing me to develop early sketches on constructing a New Left project under conditions of limited polyarchy, neoliberalism and globalization. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Instituto de Problemas de la Realidad Nacional (IPNUSAC) at San Carlos University in Guatemala, and particularly its director, Edgar Gutiérrez, for providing me with space in their academic journal to begin deploying, in a series of critical essays, key ideas from this book that I consider particularly relevant to the new protest movement called #RenunciaYa, a movement that shook the political foundations of Guatemala for the better part of 2015. And I am very

x   Preface grateful to Routledge’s two anonymous reviewers for taking time to read through an advanced version of this manuscript and kindly offering many valuable suggestions to improve it and get it ready for publication. But I must acknowledge, above all, the unflinching and unyielding support, at every level and at all times, good or bad, of the one person who kept me going throughout these difficult years: Joanne Schwartz. I will never be able to repay her counsel, her company and her support.

Introduction

The philosophy of praxis, Gramsci tells us, “must initially adopt a polemical stance, as superseding the existing mode of thinking” and must, therefore, “present itself as a critique of ‘common sense’ ” and as a “critique of the intellectuals” who, as modern social and political scientists illustrate, think of themselves as guided by an infallible scientific methodology and thus as “free from the idols of the age” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §220, 369; Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §46, 197). Since “common sense” is in Gramsci’s view “the most widespread and rooted ideology” in modern forms of citizenship, civil society and liberal democracy – for these are among the idols of the age – and functions very much like a religion in Croce’s sense, that is, as “a conception of the world that has been converted into a norm of life,” it unconsciously binds the will of the masses to these institutions and provides them with “certitude” of their rightness (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §41, 189).1 But this common sense sometimes also disguises itself as scientific truth in social “science” academic research, and in this form, too, common sense deposits into “reality,” without either knowledge or intention, what it already presupposes about it, and, as such, provides the organic intellectuals of the current historical bloc with the ontological certitude they unreflectively find in the “facts” of their respective and abstract fields of disciplinary intervention.2 For thinkers like Habermas, for example, “our self-­perception as free and responsible agents is not just a necessary illusion, but the transcendental a priori of scientific knowledge itself ” (Žižek 2014a, 185). It is this circular hermeneutic of “common sense” built into the scientific method that makes its products operate as a dangerous form of ideology, a procedure that functions just like a popular conception of the world, or even as a form of religion, which, as such, becomes a necessary target of the philosophy of praxis and a key reason why the critical theorist does not hesitate to take sides. It is as if what Nietzsche saw as the “twilight of the idols” in modern times had, in fact, become what Weber predicted and critical theory confirmed, in culture and politics as much as in science, as the “return of the idols.” But this common sense qua new form of secular religion is not just spontaneously generated by social dynamics. This is a form of knowledge that results from the work of what Gramsci calls “organic intellectuals,” who construct it or abstract it out of

2   Introduction already socialized and deeply entrenched bourgeois norms that underpin modern forms of citizenship, civil society and liberal democracy, thus making common sense a key component of the existing architecture of power. The philosophy of praxis thus targets not only ordinary common sense but also the common sense of these higher intellectuals, these priests of the present reality and these peddlers of abstract creations. In this precise sense, therefore, the philosophy of praxis is a critique of the most cherished idols, fetishes and sacred institutions of the dominant system of reality, and there are no greater or more influential idols today than those of modern citizenship, civil society and liberal democracy, and their systematic promotion worldwide. Against the religion, politics and science of the current system of reality, Gramsci deploys his version of the philosophy of praxis as a philosophy of the “impure act.”3 In doing so, Gramsci ceases to operate within the framework of the pure or practical reason of individualist bourgeois political practice – underpinning the subject of modern liberalism – as elaborated in the Kantian and neo-­Kantian tradition and recently restated in the work of Rawls and Habermas. In key ways, this is a form of reason that entered the field of science as well as that of traditional critical theory, including the kind of orthodox Marxism Gramsci fought against. Instead, Gramsci takes a decisive step towards us and operates according to the new logic of “impure” reason, a reason that turns the Kantian imperative upside down and foregrounds the collective act that is simultaneously committed to the passionate reconstitution of reality (as the case of the factory councils in Turin exemplifies quite well) and to the constitutive practices and collective discipline of the Modern Prince (as the case of the type of political party Gramsci invites us to consider demonstrates). It is through the simultaneous deployment of this dialectically combined impure act that we can engage in the evental and constitutive politics of counter-­hegemony and demolish the sacred hegemonic idols of this highly destructive historical bloc called liberal and neoliberal capitalism. This, for Gramsci, is the impure act “in the most secular sense of the word.”4 It is within the framework of the philosophy of praxis as a combined Marxist critique of existing modes of dominant thinking and political organizing – particularly when these modes have been appropriated even by activists who seek to oppose the current status quo and its ideologies without addressing the process of hegemony in themselves or in their own organizations – that Gramsci’s ideas about modern civil society and Jacobinism, hegemony and counter-­hegemony, war of movement and war position, historical bloc and passive revolution, the Modern Prince and organic intellectuals must be treated. The Gramsci of the Prison Notebooks is, of course, fully aware of the tentative character of his ideas, the sketchy form they took as he was meticulously engaged in writing them clandestinely inside his prison cell, the undeveloped or developing character of their content, and their ultimately unfinished status. I do not think that Gramsci actually intended his Notebooks to have a “fragmentary” character as a

Introduction   3 matter of philosophical commitment, but what he left us and what we must deal with are notes, often written in a highly journalistic style but seldom finished, and never organically linked with one another in such a way as to give the sense of being in preparation for any kind of publication. We call these sketchy notes the Prison Notebooks simply because they were written literally in notebooks while in prison, and not because they were intended to be collected, organized and edited in the form of multiple volumes published under that name. Gramsci is, in fact, very specific about the tentative character of his notebooks, not because he was laboriously developing a whole new proto-­postmodernist stylistic choice as an act of subversion of the grand metanarrative of his inherited Marxism, but because he was keenly aware of the conditions under which he was producing his thoughts and penning his paragraphs. This is perhaps why at times Gramsci appears to be obsessively concerned about the exact meaning that his words, statements and fragments could take, not only in the debates he often had with prison comrades but also beyond prison itself and, particularly, out in the public sphere, where heated debates within the European Communist and larger revolutionary left were taking place and where, because of his stature as an Italian Communist leader, his ideas were obviously bound to resonate.5 Attempting to retain some measure of control over the fate of his work, Gramsci thus explicitly tells us in a key passage of his Notebooks precisely how he wants his ideas to be treated: It is necessary, first of all, to trace the process of the thinker’s intellectual development in order to reconstruct it in accordance with those elements that become stable and permanent – that is, those elements really adopted by the author as his own thought, distinct and superior to the “material” that he had studied earlier and that, at a certain time, he may have found attractive, even to the point of having accepted it provisionally and used it in his critical work or in his work of historical or scientific reconstruction. This precaution is essential, particularly when dealing with a nonsystematic thinker, with a personality in whom theoretical and practical activity are indissolubly intertwined, and with an intellect that is therefore in continuous creation and perpetual movement. (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §1, 137) Tracing Gramsci’s process of intellectual development in order to reconstruct it in accordance with those elements that became stable and permanent and those that remained tentative and unfinished is, thus, critical for an understanding of Gramsci’s combined philosophy of praxis. But it is not the same as writing biography, nor is the objective of the following paragraphs to provide a biographical account of Gramsci’s life. That task has already been accomplished a number of times, and quite well.6 Here, however, I want to briefly sketch a couple of moments – the Turin years

4   Introduction and the trip to Moscow – in Gramsci’s intellectual development that I think became solidly fused and critical components of his later reflections in the Prison Notebooks. Although Gramsci was born and raised in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia, in a large family of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias, after graduating from the Cagliari lyceum in 1911 he moved to Turin, the “red capital” of Italy, the cultural and industrial heart of northern Italy and capital of the Piedmont region. Gramsci’s radical activism got underway at the age of twenty-­two, when he joined in earnest the socialist section of Turin in 1913. Although while in Turin Gramsci had enrolled in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Turin, a degree he would never finish, it was his activism in the relatively young Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI, founded in 1892) that exposed him to political struggles such as those within the PSI between reformists such as Bissolati and Turati and maximalists such as the anarcho-­ syndicalist Arturo Labriola. Equally heated within the party was the debate over the so-­called “colonial question” between the reformists who supported Italy’s colonialist expansionism in places such as Libya and the Mussolini-­led maximalists, who opposed them and, indeed, expelled them from the party in 1912. It was in this highly charged political atmosphere, within the PSI and in Italy’s young and already deeply polarized public sphere as a whole, that at the age of twenty-­five Gramsci took up his critical journalistic activity and joined the Turin editorial staff of Avanti! in 1915. Although the war created ambivalences for the young Gramsci in terms of the national and colonial questions (should revolutionaries try to stir nationalist sentiments in a revolutionary direction?), he was nonetheless already developing a solid position in terms of carving a different path of militant activism and, particularly, in terms of the necessity to act even in the face of formidable obstacles and sterile debates. This passionate belief in the possibility of an unexpected event was sedimented in the mind and actions of Gramsci when, in the middle of Europe’s First World War, the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917. Gramsci was twenty-­seven years old when he penned the following dialectical lines in La Città Futura: We know that the revolution was carried out by the proletariat (workers and soldiers). . . . But is it enough for a revolution to be carried out by the proletariat for it to be a proletarian revolution? The war, too, is made by proletarians, but it is not for this reason a proletarian deed. . . . Yet we are convinced that the Russian Revolution, besides being an event, is a proletarian action and as such it must naturally develop into a socialist regime. (Quoted in Santucci 2010, 62–63; italics added) Here we have, in nuce, two ideas that Gramsci would laboriously continue to connect and develop in his journalistic writing, in both theory and

Introduction   5 practice, until his years in prison and his older and more seasoned reflections in the Prison Notebooks. These ideas concern the connection between the opening of an “event” and the impure and combined nature of “proletarian action” that can bring about moral and intellectual reform as well as revolution. If the Russian Revolution had shown anything, Gramsci argued in his famous essay “La rivoluzione contro il ‘Capitale’ ” (The Revolution Against “Capital”), it is precisely that an “event” even as grand as the Russian Revolution does not need to fulfill all the “necessary conditions” as doctrinally stated, time and time again, by traditional or orthodox Marxism for revolution to break out. It is in the nature of impure political action, Gramsci tells us, also to be able to posit its own presuppositions and its own horizon. In this precise sense, Gramsci wrote on December 24, 1917 in an editorial for Avanti! that Marx’s Capital, and even more so what was made of it in the orthodox readings that had become the norm in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, had in fact been more a book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletarians, in Russia. It was a critical demonstration of the necessity in Russia first to form a bourgeoisie prior to bringing about a capitalist era and establishing a Western type of civilization, before the proletariat could even think about revolt, class-­based claims, or revolution. . . . The Bolsheviks disown Karl Marx. They show, with their examples of explicated actions and realized gains, that the canons of historical materialism are not as rigid as might be or has ever been thought. (Quoted in Santucci 2010, 63) It was to the combined politics of the impure act with the goal of maximizing the opportunities opened by an Event such as that of the Russian Revolution that Gramsci – despite misleading accusations of “voluntarism” and even “idealism” of the Gentile kind coming from his own comrades – would devote the following few years in Turin until his trip to Moscow in 1922. In his capacity as elected secretary of the temporary executive committee of the socialist section of Turin, at the age of twenty-­ seven, Gramsci effectively became a reformer of “moral life” and an organizer of constituent politics. While he continued to be engaged in feverish journalistic work, becoming the director of Grido del Popolo in 1917 (until it ceased publication the following year) and, together with Tasca, Terracini and Togliatti, founding the weekly Ordine Nuovo in 1919, he also set up the “Club for Moral Life” together with a few other friends. Under the weekly’s title, in fact, there appeared “an appeal of clear Gramscian inspiration: ‘Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Be excited because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organize because we will need all your strength’ ” (Santucci 2010, 67). This was exactly the purpose of the Club for Moral Life, an effort to educate oneself in the midst of poverty for the purposes of liberation even when things appear to be impossible (Germino 1990, 34). Gramsci’s opportunity to put

6   Introduction his pedagogy of liberation, his theory of the impure political act, and his theory of the constituent Event into practice came with the factory council movement in 1920, a successor to the defeated revolution of 1919–1920, six years before his arrest and incarceration by the Fascist regime of Mussolini. Santucci summarizes the factory council movement of April 1920 as follows: This time, too, it was the industrialists’ intransigence that resulted in the eruption of workers’ rebellion. Their refusal to meet the wage increase requested by the metalworkers’ trade unions had led to the occupation of all the factories of this sector in the whole peninsula. For a month, more than half a million workers, armed as much as possible, took over factories while trying to maintain production. In Turin, the councils took over the management of work in the factory. In Lombardy, Leguria, Tuscany, and Emilia, but also in some southern towns, workers followed the example of the Piedmontese capital in trying to establish autonomous self-­management. (Santucci 2010, 78) The conception that Gramsci held of the factory council movement had already been expressed, in concise form, in the editorial “Democrazia operaia” (Workers’ Democracy) published in Ordine Nuovo on June 21, 1919. In this piece, Gramsci raised the political and organizational question of “factory commissions” and presented them as “future organs of proletarian power, within a system of workers’ democracy similar to the one that had been developing in the Soviet Union” (Santucci 2010, 68). As Santucci has correctly pointed out, though, this was not a question of transposing a foreign system of subaltern autonomous and constituent politics – for that is what the Soviets were in their early stages – into Italy but, rather, one of “testing,” through trial and error, invention and reinvention, whether the Evental seeds of a constituent collective actor and even a revolutionary state already existed as “potential reality” in the present. As Gramsci wrote in his piece “The Turin factory council movement” in Ordine Nuovo on March 14, 1921, “In the workplaces of Turin there already existed small workers’ committees, recognized by the capitalists, and some of them had already engaged in struggle against the bureaucracy, reformist spirit and constitutional tendencies in the unions” (Gramsci 1921). For Gramsci, then, autonomous and rhizomatic forms of proletarian life, as exemplified by socialist circles, peasant communities, shop-­floor internal committees and the factory councils themselves, did not simply represent a new form of trade unionism or new forms of tactical organizing on the part of a centralized and bureaucratic revolutionary party, but were, in fact, central and defining characteristics of subaltern autonomous politics in their own right, and needed to be kept as such by their own members and participants. The autonomy, multiplicity, heterogeneity, difference and horizontality of these collectives, their “revolutionary

Introduction   7 conscience and rebuilding capacity,” were generated by the logic of organized participants themselves, regardless of political affiliation or party membership. The logic of these councils was thus “molecular” and, as such, inherently opposed to the logic of “industrial centralization and the unitary discipline established in Turin industry” or, as Gramsci would call it in the Prison Notebooks, the “Taylorism” of Fordist capitalism. As Gramsci put it already in a 1920 article entitled “Il congress dei Consigli di fabbrica” (The Congress of Factory Councils), the logic of industrial capitalism tends to “spread to the entire world of the bourgeois economy,” becoming, along the way, the very condition to which “the dominant class looks for its own salvation” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 73). In the cultural logic of industrial capitalism, “capital still rules.” Gramsci did not think of these self-­organizing collectives as trade unions, in terms of either organization or aims, and he did not conceive of their struggle in economistic terms, for their aim was not simply to bargain for better wages but also to develop alternative, bottom-­up and autonomous forms of life, ranging from culture to production, and potentially adequate for refounding the state. The motto here was, therefore, “All the power of the state to the workers’ and peasants’ councils.” However, for Gramsci, already at this stage they also had to bring themselves under a coordinating, educating and disciplined organization – the “national-­popular” collective, which in the Notebooks he would theorize in terms of the Modern Prince – that would ultimately make refounding and binding decisions of a national-­ popular kind. The newspaper Ordine Nuovo was for Gramsci a key independent vehicle for helping to coordinate, if not bring about, the kind of consciousness that autonomous and constituent or revolutionary subaltern organizations needed to spark or advance the constituent or revolutionary Event. In keeping with this idea, Gramsci conceptualized this weekly newspaper as “the newspaper of the factory councils.” But as far as Gramsci was concerned, “whoever wants the ends must also want the means,” and this meant getting involved, participating, in the laborious constructing of the means and the moral and cultural sharpening of the end. This means developing the practices, institutions and experiences of autonomy and solidarity that Gramsci often articulated politically with the help of natural metaphors such as “molecular” or “cathartic.”7 But wanting the end is equally important, and there is no way this end can be ideologically conceptualized – there is no way for a historical act, the constituent Event or the revolution to even emerge as a possibility in the age of hegemony – without simultaneously engaging in changing the moral life of the subjects involved in cathartic or rhizomatic politics. This, therefore, meant developing the means for what Gramsci called a cultural revolution, a “palingenetic” collective self-­constitution or a “Proletkul.”8 The combination of these initial means and ends, as they came together not only in the Club for Moral Life but also in the factory council movement, was, therefore, Gramscian counter-­hegemony and the politics of Communism from the

8   Introduction bottom up. The defeat of the factory councils by industrialists in October 1920, however, served as the unfortunate occasion that would supply Gramsci with important lessons for his future theory of hegemony, a theory that became one of the central components of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis as articulated in the Prison Notebooks, the theory that lies at the  center of his critique of civil society and, thus, at the center of the present book. Indeed, already in his article “La forza della rivoluzione” (The Power of the Revolution) published in Ordine Nuovo on May 8, 1920, Gramsci spelled out how hegemony operated from inside subaltern organizations themselves as a form of realist self-­limitation: The ideal that sustained the workers was mocked even by part of the workers’ representatives; the energy and faith of the leaders of the strike [in response to the industrial lockout in April] came to be considered wishful thinking, ingeniousness, and a mistake, even by some of the workers’ representatives. (Quoted in Santucci 2010, 74) Underscoring the autonomous, rhizomatic and heterogeneous nature of the factory councils, their key role as schools of self-­government not only in production but also in politics, Gramsci’s piece “Il Consiglio di fabbrica” (The Factory Council), published in Ordine Nuovo on June 5, 1920, insisted that “the revolutionary process” is not born out of what he called “voluntaristic and contractualistic revolutionary organizations” such as “the political party and the trade unionists.” Nor is the Event or revolutionary transformation of society that they seek something that can be obtained through the ballot box. In fact, Gramsci wrote in terms of someone who has learned a good lesson, “The relative ease with which the occupation of the factories was achieved should be highly pondered by the workers. They must not deceive themselves in this regard” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 79). At the rhizomatic or liminal stage of the struggle, Gramsci said in “L’occupazione” (The Occupation), “The power still remains under capital’s control.” Lack of participation, confusion, reformism, fragmentation and divisions were certainly contributing factors to the ultimate defeat of the movement. But so was the lack of strength and, in some cases, the impatience and extremism of the Jacobin or neo-­arditista force behind the occupation. And then there was also the lack of coordination and decision-­ making at a higher level of organization. When the time came to make decisions, in fact, it turned out that workers put more trust in the established institutions of parliamentary democracy to reach a compromise than anyone, including Gramsci himself, had anticipated. In Santucci’s words, “the revolution was practically put to the ballot and rejected by the General Council of the Confederation of Labor” itself (!). For Gramsci, then, a revolutionary process must evolve from its rhizomatic and liminal stage, when the movement is still highly susceptible to

Introduction   9 cooptation and its goals can easily be integrated into the Thermidorian politics of restoration and renormalization of emerging or ruling elites, to a more “national-­popular” and decisive one. The struggle must be guided not just by the politics of horizontality, and certainly not by workerist rhetoric, reformist speculations or quick compromises, but by serious analysis of the conjunctural situation – what Gramsci would call in the Prison Notebooks the “crisis of hegemony” – by committed, organic intellectuals. The restoration of normality that hegemony seeks to achieve must be countered by a conscious seizure of the Event that leads not simply to a crisis of governmentality or state legitimacy but to hegemonic crisis and a challenge to the existing historical bloc. This is a crisis that Gramsci would most carefully conceptualize in the Prison Notebooks as issuing from the gap between structures and superstructures, that is, from “the field of production,” where the confrontation between oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited can no longer be contained, captured or deactivated by the liberal ideas of “freedom” and “democracy.” This is a crisis that bursts into the open, as part of the potentially revolutionary Event, through a breakdown of traditional forms of political capture and control (e.g., political parties) and the organization of what are often dismissed as being merely “spontaneous” and “voluntaristic” forms of impure action. But it is from this crisis and from the reality that this uncovered and widening void lays bare, “where the owner’s power is unlimited, the power over the life and death of the worker, his wife, and his children,” that we see forms of independent and autonomous organization emerge and nurture the consciousness that “the worker is nothing and wants to become everything.” Because this rhizomatic and liminal consciousness is always already subject to the restorative process of hegemony, it must pass from the liminal to the actual moment of national-­popular organizing. This was the object of Gramsci’s reflections on “Il Partito comunista” (The Communist Party), published in Ordine Nuovo when he was twenty-­nine years old on September 4 and October 9, 1920. Constructing the culture of communism and revolution is a daily counter-­hegemonic and constitutive task, or, as will be argued later, the spontaneous politics that disrupt the discipline and hegemonic rules of everyday life.9 To serve that purpose, Ordine Nuovo became a daily paper in January 1921, now understood as “the organ of the Turin Communists.” In March of that year, at the age of thirty, Gramsci was also elected a member of the executive committee of the Italian Communist Party after breaking with the “bureaucratic and reformist” PSI. Gramsci’s critique of and break with the PSI had centered around the question of confusing the role of the party in parliament and outside parliament, and particularly the socialist leadership’s failure to incite “the largest number of people to support the cause and the program of the proletarian revolution.” Although Gramsci called for a “renewal of the Socialist Party,” he was already aware that the “bourgeois state’s machinery” was hard at work attempting to capture, incorporate and thus sublate organized resistance

10   Introduction into itself. He had called on the PSI to abandon its “petty bourgeois parliamentary position” and make the conversion towards the cause of the revolutionary proletariat. In his “Programa d’azione della sezione socialista torinese” (Action Plan of the Socialist Section of Turin), published in Ordine Nuovo in 1920, Gramsci had already warned against diluting the educational and revolutionary role of the type of party he had in mind, and which had been explicitly suggested by the Congress of Bologna of October 1919, when the party also decided to join the Communist International. The time had come, Gramsci believed, for “putting into practice the theories of the Third International, acclaimed in Bologna by a large majority and readily forgotten because of the attraction of parliament” (Santucci 2010, 72). Sounding a bit drastic, Gramsci was convinced that the time had come for an organization of “rigid and implacable discipline.” As Gramsci saw it at the time and from the perspective of Italian reality, therefore, the politics of the Third International were clearly and resolutely antithetical to the “reformist tendency” of the PSI, which had “nothing in common with communism” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 77). The time for the Modern Prince was thus at hand. Gramsci offered some reflections on his vision of the Communist Party in several pieces published in Ordine Nuovo, but he had no time to fully develop this vision into a coherent program. It is true that Gramsci proposed to the PSI an important motion on the renewal of the party, a motion Lenin himself had the chance to read and, indeed, approve as “fully in keeping with the fundamental principles of the Third International” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 77), but this hardly amounted to a theory of the Modern Prince. In those days, particularly as the Seventeenth Congress of the PSI unfolded in January 1921 and Bordiga emerged, with Lenin’s endorsement, as the “undisputed leader of the newly founded Communist Party,” Gramsci had a tendency to sound more like the centralist Lenin of post-­1917 Russia than like himself when he had called for a dialectical combination of rhizomatic autonomy and organized discipline at the height of the factory council movement only the previous year. This was evident when, in his critique of the PSI, Gramsci derided the party for falling prey to “the process of disintegration of all associative forms” under its wing, chastised its leaders for moving “lazily and slowly” in responding to “the risk of becoming easy prey for adventurers, careerists, and ambitious people without political seriousness or ability,” and even condemned the very “heterogeneity, the innumerable frictions in its gears” for being “worn out and sabotaged by servant-­masters.” This party, Gramsci lamented, was “never capable of taking upon itself the burden and the responsibility of revolutionary initiatives and actions constantly being imposed by the pressing events.” And so, Gramsci concluded at this stage, this explained “the historical paradox by which the masses are the ones who push and ‘educate’ the working class party and not the party that educates and guides the masses,” for this was a party that had become “nothing but a humble notary who records the operations spontaneously

Introduction   11 performed by the masses” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 80). But these criticisms, although offering important elements for a possible theory of the party, hardly amounted to such a theory. Gramsci went to Moscow from March 1922 and stayed there until November 1923. He was elected to represent the party in the Executive Committee of the Comintern and participated in the Second Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI. Gramsci also attended the Fourth Congress (November 5 – December 5), although he was effectively overshadowed by Bordiga, who actually took the lead in most discussions. But it was at these meetings that the “Italian question” and, particularly, the potential fusion of the PCI and the PSI, promoted by Zinoviev, were discussed. The reality of Italy had changed dramatically with the Fascist March on Rome of October 28. The violent persecution of Communists had also begun, with Bordiga and other leading members of the party being arrested in January 1923, turning the PCI into a semi-­clandestine force. From prison, Bordiga wrote a letter to the Comintern, critiquing the policy of the United Front with the PSI, which Gramsci refused to endorse. But the new terrain of struggle and war of position, with Gramsci having been one of the few to foresee the rise of a Fascist dictatorship, would increasingly pose for Gramsci the need to rethink the policy of the United Front, the question of hegemony and the nature of political practice. The view that begins to emerge was that it was not simply a matter of bureaucratically controlling the masses, organizing them for resistance and guiding them to eventual revolution from above; rather, the party needed to be understood – and, indeed, forged – as “a dialectical process where the spontaneous movement of the revolutionary masses converge with the center’s determination for organizing and guiding” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 92). In the struggle against Fascism, Gramsci would agree with the slogan of the Third Congress (“To the Masses”), but would also submit to increasing critique the strategy of the “united front.” After all, how could the Communist Party “join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie” when the party was a critic not only of the immediate economistic tactics of trade unionism but also of the PSI? (Fourth Congress of the Communist International 1922). In September 1923, Gramsci proposed to implement the Comintern’s decision to start publishing a workers’ daily and suggested calling it L’Unità. The first issue was published in February 1924, and contained a piece by Gramsci with his initial thoughts on an alliance between the poorest strata of the working class in the north and the peasant masses in the south as the foundation of any “democratic” or united front against Fascism. In a letter to Togliatti in January 1924, furthermore, Gramsci not only criticized the PCI’s drift towards “Bolshevization” but also contemplated the possibility of refounding the Italian state through a “democratic opposition” organized around “democratic slogans” calling for a new constituent assembly as a political means to defeat Fascism and prepare the

12   Introduction terrain for revolution. There are reasons to believe that this was the position that Gramsci would carefully set out to develop further before and during the Lyon Congress of January 1926, when he was thirty-­five years old and only months away from his arrest later the same year. Even more, this was the position that Gramsci would develop but not finish in his most important pre-­prison essay, entitled “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.”10 Santucci is right in saying, therefore, that there was a “substantial transformation that began to take shape in Gramsci’s work” precisely around 1926, particularly around the time of his October 14 letter on behalf of the political bureau of the PCI to the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, concerning a number of issues including the question of party unity, the southern question and the concept of hegemony itself, which now began to appear more as a complex concept capturing the relations of force behind the question of moral universality than as a concept of proletarian leadership. It was only in prison, where Gramsci would be sent by Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1926, that he would have a chance to critically develop these ideas and propose a dialectical and combined theory of the militant actor, the impure political act, the “dual” nature of the Modern Prince and the politics of refoundation and revolution. The purpose of this short intellectual biography of Gramsci is not to exhume bits and pieces from the younger Gramsci’s body of work and then use them to bury the “scientific” character of his older take on Marxism. Nor is the intention here to redeploy the sort of passionate and stirring positions that the younger Gramsci took up, for instance during the factory council movement, which some people may regard today as having been irrevocably outpaced by more recent theoretical and practical developments. The purpose of this highly abridged biographical narrative is to do justice to Gramsci’s own suggestion that his life and thought be understood and theorized in light of the elements that became constant and those that did not. Thus, rather than positing an “epistemological break” between the younger and the older Gramsci, this book attempts to show the “epistemological” continuity that we find in the development of Gramsci’s oeuvre, and, in this sense, this book is in full agreement with Santucci’s point that “Gramsci’s writings in the weekly Ordine Nuovo constitute, along with the Notebooks, his most significant legacy in terms of theory” (Santucci 2010, 82). Although the Prison Notebooks contain important changes and developments and cannot simply be read as an expression of the younger Gramsci’s political philosophy, the point of departure for reading Gramsci’s Notebooks should be the obvious continuity in Gramsci’s intellectual trajectory and his evolving and critical relation to the Marxist debates of his day. Very often, indeed, the Notebooks read as highly tentative steps, as new rehearsals of old themes mixed with rapid reactions to new developments in a staggering number of fields and subjects of Gramsci’s interest, in a constant process of dialectical combination and recombination of the philosophy of praxis that Gramsci practiced and executed with delicate yet powerful thrust and stirring passion. The

Introduction   13 strategy here is, thus, not to read the Notebooks as merely representing the arguments of the younger Gramsci in disguise, but to understand the arguments that the younger Gramsci offers us as relevant elements to develop the meaning of what otherwise sometimes appears as the enigmatic or “fragmentary” nature of the Notebooks. This exegetical strategy in no way amounts to surrendering the older Gramsci to what may seem to be the highly romantic passions or “utopian” hopes (because of the non-­Marxist influences) of his younger self. My approach here is, rather, to show how such a continuity is vital to understanding Gramsci, and how this process unfolded not merely as an immanent process within Gramsci’s own work but also in his explicit relation to the evolving and changing debates, movements and struggles in which Gramsci took part and from which he nurtured his Notebooks and developed his critique of civil society. It seems to me that what Ralph Miliband wrote in 1965 about Marx is thus equally applicable to Gramsci: “By vocation, Marx was not an economist, or a philosopher, or a sociologist. He was a revolutionary who, being deprived of the opportunity of participating in revolutions in the years after 1848, turned to the detailed analysis of the economic system he wanted to overthrow. Marx never ceased to stress the liberating quality of practical activity; but he himself was compelled by the circumstances of his time to devote most of his life to theoretical work” (Miliband 1965).11 It is this lack of disciplinary confinement that truly characterizes Gramsci’s intellectual development and his turn in the Prison Notebooks to the molecular and critical analysis of civil society, the type of hegemonic process that operates in it and the strategy he developed to overthrow it. But he was only truly and – paradoxically – freely able to engage in this kind of antidisciplinary thinking once he was confined to prison in 1926 at the age of thirty-­five, where he would remain until 1934, three years before his highly premature death at forty-­six. It is thus true that imprisonment rendered Gramsci’s work, contrary to what prison was meant to do, into a process of “continuous creation and perpetual movement” that resulted in some elements eventually becoming “stable and permanent” and today having effectively come to define Gramsci’s cultural, political and philosophical thought. Therefore, what Gramsci says at the beginning of his Prison Notebooks about the relationship between Marx and his editors, including Engels, we can arguably also say about the relationship between Gramsci himself and his own editors, including Buttigieg: [I]f one wants to know Marx, one must look for him above all in his authentic works, published under his own personal direction. (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §1, 138–139)12 Since Gramsci did not publish any books under his own personal direction, we must do what we can with his pre-­prison journalistic articles and unfinished essays and with his prison work. But Buttigieg’s argument to the effect that the Notebooks should be read as expressions of a philosophical

14   Introduction and methodological commitment to the “fragment,” the “detail” or the “parts” is an argument that I fear endangers the dialectical continuity and combination performed by Gramsci, through a process of constant drafting and redrafting of his ideas, between the whole and the parts, his Turin work and his prison work. For Gramsci remained unflinchingly and explicitly committed to – although he was never able to fully develop – a combined “philosophy of praxis” in which autonomy, multiplicity and heterogeneity are combined with political discipline, national-­popular forms of organization and an awareness of totality.13 Against the one-­sided postmodern reading that would turn Gramsci’s Notebooks into another model of Nietzschean aphorisms coupled with a rejection of systematic clarity, we must reaffirm Gramsci’s own commitment to a militant and dialectical truth linked to a struggle for an alternative objectivity in the tradition we have inherited from Hegel and Marx and extending it to thinkers like Žižek. Postmodern arguments that render Gramsci simply into a mere thinker of the fragments are in danger of being recaptured by the process of hegemony, and thus of slipping back into the terrain of restorative politics. For the moment of radical autonomous politics in Gramsci must be connected to and combined with the moment of decision, discipline and national-­popular organization. It is as if Gramsci had somehow anticipated the one-­sided fate of his work and had written strong cautionary words about the nature of his theoretical practice in prison. And Gramsci’s cautionary words about his  prison work were not simply an expression of false intellectual modesty, but serious ideological warnings against “fitting” him – canonizing, disciplining or recapturing him – into any of the mainstream currents of Marxism or the debates of his day about revolution in Italy or Soviet Russia. It is with equal authority that we ought to listen to these words today and resist turning Gramsci’s work into either a “systematic” dialectical-­materialist philosophy (as Carlos Nelson Coutinho attempts to do) or an intrinsically “fragmentary,” postmodernist and perhaps even neoliberal narrative fit for artistic resistance in the age of early-­twenty-first­century postmodern and neoliberal globalization (as Buttigieg appears to do), which Gramsci never attributed to what he consciously left only as tentative and unfinished work. Against the different varieties of anti-­ Hegelian Marxisms that were already proliferating in his own day, Gramsci explicitly framed many of his most important arguments precisely as a continuation of Hegel’s tradition – as mediated by various intellectuals of his own day – in the context of his own rendition of “combined Marxism.” For Gramsci always and forcefully insisted on taking the “view from totality” – most cogently developed in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia or Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital – as the most absolutely historical, practical perspective and conception of the world in the age of historical materialism.14 So, against all the trappings of the culture industry already putting Gramsci’s ideas through its mills, but also against the pseudo-­ Marxist tendency to canonize its own thinkers, Gramsci writes:

Introduction   15 [A]mong the works of the same author, one must distinguish those that he himself completed and published from those that were not published because unfinished. The content of the latter must be treated with great discretion and caution: it must be regarded as not definitive, at least in that given form; it must be regarded as material still in the process of elaboration, still provisional. (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §1, 137) We can, and certainly should, share the goal that Peter D. Thomas set out to accomplish in his particular and very stimulating reading of Gramsci. The goal of this reading is to comprehend “the meaning of Gramsci’s carceral writings in their historical context” and, in so doing, “understand its possible significance for our own times” (Thomas 2009, xviii). I share this goal, even if not Thomas’s “point of departure” for his own particular reading of Gramsci, that is, “the influential critiques of Gramsci by Louis Althusser’s contribution to Reading ‘Capital’ and Perry Anderson’s ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ in the 1960s and 1970s” (Thomas 2009, xix). I certainly regard the Althusser–Anderson debate as quite important in the context of what Anderson himself calls “arguments within English Marxism” and their influence in the development of the European New Left in the 1960s. I am, however, less certain about its usefulness as the starting point for an activist exegesis of Gramsci in our neoliberal and globalizing conjuncture and in the countries and political processes where, because of the ongoing policies of democracy promotion aimed at diffusing autonomist and refoundational movements from below, Gramsci’s work is most relevant today. As Bosteels has rightly pointed out, despite the importance of Gramsci in Latin America and, indeed, in other parts of the Global South, “Gramsci at the margins” is, in fact, the name for “the black hole” at the center of recent work on Gramsci in the Global North (Bosteels 2013). I am hoping that, even if only in a small way, this book will offer some remedy for this problem. Chapter 1 examines Gramsci’s treatment of the classic dialectic between structures and superstructures. This is a historical contradiction that Gramsci conceptualizes in the Notebooks as issuing from the gap between structures and superstructures or “the field of production” and reaching, at the moment of hegemony and its crisis, the point where the confrontation between oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited can no longer be contained, captured or defused by the liberal ideas of “freedom” and “democracy.” The crisis of hegemony that bursts into the open, and that opens up the window of opportunity for a potentially revolutionary event, is rooted in the reality of a widening social void “where the owner’s power is unlimited, the power over the life and death of the worker, his wife, and his children.” It is from here that we see forms of autonomous, horizontal, pangenetic and “cathartic” organization emerge, such as the factory council movement in Gramsci’s day, organizational forms that can nurture the moral and political consciousness that “the worker is nothing and wants to become everything.”

16   Introduction Constructing the culture of Communism and revolution as a matter of moral and intellectual reform, as Chapter 2 shows, is a daily counter-­ hegemonic and constitutive task. The factory council movement taught Gramsci a great lesson: “The relative ease with which the occupation of the factories was achieved should be highly pondered by the workers. They must not deceive themselves in this regard” (quoted in Santucci 2010, 79). Without an intellectual and moral reform that begins but does not end with the emergence of autonomous and rhizomatic politics, “the power still remains under capital’s control.” It is not simply through perpetual activism that we change the world, but through a substantial transformation of ourselves. The typical problems of organization that are encountered at the initial stages of organizing, such as lack of participation and ideological confusion, and the reformists’ tendencies to settle too quickly for immediate gains, are compounded if the process is not accompanied by a revolution of the self. Rhizomatic and liminal forms of politics offer a fertile terrain for the transformation of the self, but they are also highly susceptible to cooptation and integration into the Thermidorian politics of restoration and renormalization of emerging or ruling elites. For that is the work of hegemony. Moral and intellectual reform is, thus, the politics of self-­transformation that prepares the terrain for a leap to the stage of the “national-­popular,” the level at which enduring decisions can be made. This revolution of the self is needed so that, when the time to make decisions arrives, activists are not going to turn out to be too trusting of the established institutions of parliamentary democracy to reach a compromise. For what is the point of moral and intellectual reform if, at the decisive moment, the revolution is simply going to be entrusted to the ballot box? Chapters 3 and 4 are the central chapters of this book. Given that the notion of hegemony is perhaps the notion in Gramsci’s work that has received the most attention, this is a challenging task. In Chapter 3, I explore how Gramsci developed his critical idea of hegemony in order to capture and explain a historically unprecedented ethico-­political dynamic, what he called the “crisis of hegemony,” a crisis he saw as emerging from the widening gap between structures and superstructures. Hegemony as a process has as its most fundamental task the work of suturing the systemic contradictions of liberal and neoliberal capitalism and sublating the struggles for “moral and intellectual” transformation that issue rhizomatically and cathartically from below. As Gramsci sees it, the process of hegemony is largely invisible and requires what Gramsci calls large outlays of normative investment – a sort of investment of moral values in order to create a more “inclusive” moral universe – and massive “concentrations of power” – a sort of public works program that rebuilds the “trenches and fortifications of the state” – in order to create or re-­create a new form of common-­ sense “moral universalism” and thus secure the hegemonic process once  again. It is the argument of this chapter, however, that although Gramsci developed his critical idea of hegemony as a complex process of

Introduction   17 constructing submission as freely given consent, he was, in fact, unable to finish it. Although I do not pretend in this book to offer a conclusive understanding of hegemony – hence the very subtitle of this volume – I nevertheless contend, particularly in the conclusion, that more recent debates and theoretical developments do enable us to move towards a new concept of hegemony. It is about our production as subjects who come to desire our own domination and oppression as a matter of “free choice.” And the site of this process, as Gramsci saw it, is none other than modern civil society. The widening gap between structures and superstructures, as explored in Chapter 1, can result in a crisis of hegemony when the hegemonic process is no longer able to suture that gap with the needed consent brought about through subjects themselves, as their “free choice,” living in the “freedom” and “democracy” that modern polyarchy affords them. Although Gramsci is convinced that only a “totalitarian” or comprehensive “system of ideologies” can generate a “rational reflection of the contradiction” at the center of the crisis of hegemony and at the same time create or “represent” the existence of the “objective conditions for the revolutionizing of praxis,” the process of forming this revolutionizing of praxis passes through at least two complementary and irreducible moments that Gramsci attempts to capture with his concept of politics as catharsis. The first moment comes about when a social group, a multiplicity of groups or multiple heterogeneous groups are formed but without sharing “one hundred percent” homogeneity at the level of ideology. This is the moment of rhizomatic, autonomist and horizontal struggles, the initial moves in the war of position from below, such as those of the factory council movement that Gramsci helped to organize or, indeed, the Occupy, autonomist and refoundational movements of today. This is the subject of Chapter 5. Although Gramsci offered some reflections on his vision of Communist politics and the Communist Party in several pieces published in Ordine Nuovo, as we saw above, it was in the Notebooks that he had the chance to sketch out his most advanced reflections on the subject. In the final chapter, on the Modern Prince, I attempt a more refined analysis of how Gramsci sees the transformation of an Evental opportunity, a crisis of hegemony and the initial moment of rhizomatic and cathartic politics or war of position to which this gives rise, into a refounding and revolutionary movement; how struggles that initially emerge in rhizomatic and liminal forms, when they are most susceptible to cooptation and their goals can most easily be integrated into the Thermidorian politics of restoration and renormalization of emerging, ruling and transnational elites, can be moved to a more “national-­popular” and disciplined stage.15 The role of the Modern Prince is thus to guide, through the politics of education, mobilization, coordination and decision-­making, the development of the war of position into the politics of constitutional refounding and, further still, the politics of revolution. Although the Modern Prince offers the

18   Introduction elements of discipline and decision, Gramsci is nevertheless careful to point out how the “development of the party into a State reacts upon the party and requires of it a continuous reorganization and development” (SPN 267) that can help check its bureaucratic and “statolatric” tendencies.16 This is why the two moments of the war of position are irreducible to each other and must function dialectically and reciprocally. Against the tendency of hegemonic crisis to renormalization and the tendency of the existing state to wage a war of position of its own, Gramsci proposes the Communist politics of the Modern Prince as a challenge to the existing historical bloc. The context of the present reading of Gramsci’s Notebooks is defined by very significant and ongoing struggles in the periphery against complex processes of democracy promotion and neoliberal globalization. What I draw from these struggles, as is shown in the conclusion to this book, is the need to rearticulate Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis as a renewed critique of the central category and organizing principle of actually existing neoliberal and globalizing capitalist democracies, that is, civil society as an expression of an “enormous concentration of hegemony” in what Mike Davis calls an expanding “planet of slums,” precisely because transnational neoliberal and globalizing capitalist elites and their relatively autonomous executive committees at the national level, particularly in the case of imperial states, are implementing a double policy of “democracy and trade promotion,” simultaneously promoting polyarchies and neoliberal free trade agreements that hollow out the minimalist levels of popular sovereignty in classical liberal democracy, as an “alternative” to participatory and popular democratic movements, from the Mexican Zapatistas to Venezuela’s communalism and Twenty-­First Century socialism throughout Latin America.17 In this context, the task of rearticulating Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis requires a redevelopment and, indeed, expansion and recombination of the concept of hegemony, a task I propose to accomplish by drawing from the experience of Latin American subaltern movements such as Zapatismo and Chavismo as well as from the conceptual consequences of the recent debate between Laclau, Butler and Žižek around the ideas of contingency, hegemony and universality in the Global North.18 The task that Gramsci once faced in his own Italian time and place is the task or, more properly speaking, the event-­in-process that now again interpellates us and prompts us in the Global South to ask the question of how to actually build twenty-­first century communal socialism in what is left of the world after the comprehensive pillage and “creative destruction” of postmodern neoliberal and globalizing capitalism. This task is all the more urgent given the deeply subjective and changing ways in which the hegemonic process operates, even at the heart of protest movements, to the point of masquerading itself as “freedom” and even “revolution.” It is on these bases and in this context that I propose to read Gramsci’s critical notes on civil society and hegemony as formulated in his Notebooks. Although unfinished and only provisional, I nonetheless regard

Introduction   19 these Notebooks as indispensable for a contemporary critique of civil society and the highly mutating forms that hegemony continues to assume in our day.

Notes   1 Gramsci advances his discussion of Croce’s notion of religion as a “conception of the world” in Notebook 10 (Q10II §17, Gramsci 1975b, 1255).   2 Žižek writes: Perhaps the key feature of quantum physics is that for the first time, it has included this reflectivity into science itself, by positing it as an explicit moment of the scientific process. Because of this self-­reflective character of its propositions, quantum physics joins ranks with Marxism and psychoanalysis as one of the three types of knowledge which conceives itself not as a neutral adequate description of its object but as a direct intervention in it. (Žižek 1996, 208).   3 Gramsci’s philosophy of the “impure act” is in key ways a precursor of more recent approaches to political action in today’s context. One of these approaches is, for example, Žižek’s theory of the political act. The work in which Žižek will start most clearly developing this theory is The Indivisible Remainder (Žižek 1996). It is in this work that Žižek starts to “explore in an absolute manner what is distinctive about the political act, that is, an act that is not circumscribed by any pre-­established theoretical framework such as that of (radical) democracy” (Camargo 2011). It is the materialist core of Žižek’s event, just like Gramsci’s impure act at its “most secular,” that distinguishes it from the still metaphysical framework of Bergson’s New or Badiou’s Event.   4 Gramsci’s notion of the philosophy of praxis as the philosophy of the “impure act” is developed, in part, as a critique of Giovanni Gentile’s Teoria generale dello spirit come atto puro (General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act) published in 1916.   5 On this, see Santucci (Santucci 2010, 31).   6 On the biography of Gramsci, see, at a minimum, Santucci (Santucci 2010) and Germino (Germino 1990).   7 Coutinho’s reading of Gramsci’s understanding of the moment of “cathartic” politics in the Notebooks is entirely right: “It could be said that in its ‘cathartic’ dimension politics was seen by Gramsci as the privileged moment of consensual intersubjective interaction among men [and women] and, as a consequence, as an ineliminable part of the ontology of the social being” (Coutinho 2013, 59, n. 27).   8 On the politics of “palingenesis” or the “potential of the impoverished masses who are powerless individually to become powerful collectively,” see Germino (1990, 35).   9 See note 119. 10 Indeed, in addition to his writings in Ordine Nuovo and the Notebooks themselves, Gramsci’s most important pre-­prison writing is “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” written just before his imprisonment in 1926 (Gramsci 1990b, 441–462). On the one hand, this is an essay in which Gramsci applies to the case of Italy a series of ideas that owe much to the work of Giustino Fortunato, drawn from his multiple publications on the state and the “southern question” published between 1882 and 1920. And, on the other hand, this is Gramsci’s last attempt to think potential Italian political reality through the lens of Lenin’s formula of the “alliance between the workers and exploited

20   Introduction peasants” in the struggle against Fascism and for revolution. At the same time, however, this is the first comprehensive essay in which Gramsci starts to develop his own unique theory of hegemony. Gramsci uses his essay as an occasion to connect Comintern debates around the “agrarian question” with the increasingly deteriorating condition of subaltern rural groups, and frames this process as part of a larger “capitalist offensive” in which rural impoverishment and the rise of Fascism were two sides of the same coin. Gramsci’s goal here is, thus, to offer a subaltern and bottom-­up alternative to the Comintern’s top-­ down and party-­centered United Front policy. 11 Note how in this now classic piece of Miliband’s there is no mention of the Marxism of Gramsci. 12 This passage from Gramsci anticipates Althusser’s famous quip that “one should closely read one’s authors” instead of allowing oneself to be swayed by those who discuss certain authors so much that, after reading these second-­hand accounts, it is possible to feel that one knows the original authors intimately (Althusser 1977, 56, note 12). 13 According to Thomas, Gramsci’s notion of a “philosophy of praxis” was developed in the cauldron of “Southern-­Italian Hegelianism.” Indeed, it is here, where Antonio Labriola (1843–1904), one of Gramsci’s great Italian Marxist predecessors, eventually progressed to the elaboration of a distinctive interpretation of the materialist conception of history, in the same period that the first Marxist “orthodoxy” was being consolidated in the ranks of German Social Democracy. Fittingly, for a thinker whose own intellectual biography closely corresponded to those of the founders of historical materialism, Labriola stressed the philosophical dimensions of their thought and attempted to elaborate it as a philosophy of praxis. In a note to this text, Thomas elaborates this point a bit further: “The first time that Labriola called historical materialism a ‘philosophy of praxis’ was in his correspondence with Sorel, collected in Socialism and Philosophy (Labriola 1980)” (Thomas 2009, 259–260 and 260, n. 4). 14 It should be remembered that Gramsci, in fact, termed many of his Notebook entries “encyclopedic concepts.” 15 Although Gramsci develops the notion of restoration as Thermidorian politics, in this book I am using the concept as Hallward defines it in his masterful discussion of Badiou’s philosophy. As Hallward writes, “a situation of thought conditioned by the end of a truth procedure, by the restoration of the status quo and the primacy of the calculable interest.” The opposite of Thermidorian politics is represented by the impure ethics of Jacobin virtue that entails “an unconditioned subjective prescription that refers back to no objective determination” or the “act of insurrection as the ultimate measure of its legitimacy” (Hallward 2003, 27). More generally, I also rely on Gerardo Pisarello’s notion of Thermidorian politics as a form of antidemocratic constitutionalism (Pisarello 2011). 16 Note that all references to SPN refer to the Selections from Prison Notebooks. 17 I am relying here on Leslie Sklair’s notion of the transnational capitalist class (Sklair 2000a) as well as Robinson’s further development of this idea (Robinson 2010). On the notion of communal movements, see, among others, the recent work of Ciccariello-­Maher (Ciccariello-­Maher 2014a, 2014b, 2015). On the Zapatista movement and its critique of the modern subject, see the work of Fernández Farias (Fernández Farias 2013). 18 For a similar attempt to rearticulate Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis in the current Latin American context, see the reflections of Ricardo Ribera in El Salvador (Ribera 2013).

1 Rethinking Structures and Superstructures

Like many Marxists of his day, Gramsci took very seriously the general conclusion at which Marx had arrived by 1859 and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of his studies. This is expressed in the famous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the founding text on the classic structure/superstructure debate in so-­called Western Marxism.1 The classic text reads as follows: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. (Marx 1859)2

22   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures How, then, does Gramsci rethink the dialectical totality of structure and superstructure and how does he go about grasping in thought its various components and moments?3 How does Gramsci conceptualize the crisis that results from the widening of the gap between structures and superstructures, a gap that hegemony can no longer suture and where the confrontation between oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited can no longer be contained, captured or deactivated by the liberal ideas of “freedom” and “democracy”? We start here because this is the conceptual foundation for Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, the quantum site, as it were, for any potentially revolutionary Event rooted in the reality of a widening void “where the owner’s power is unlimited, the power over the life and death of the worker, his wife, and his children,” where we see forms of independent and autonomous organization emerge and nurture the consciousness that “the worker is nothing and wants to become everything.” In his critique of Croce, Gramsci makes it clear that he intends to redeploy Hegel not only against Italy’s foremost philosopher at the time but also against orthodox Marxist hypotheses on this question, and perhaps even against the tendency to a certain reductionism in the work of the late Marx as well. In his somewhat problematic critical reading of Proudhon and his defense of Hegel’s dialectics, Marx himself had already noted the priority of the whole over the parts, totality over singularity, both in philosophy as well as political economy, and not only in the The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx 1976, 6:167) but also in the Grundrisse (Marx 1993, 199).4 This is a lesson that Lukács also takes from Marx when he stated in History and Class Consciousness (1923): “The category of totality, the all-­ pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science” (Lukács 1972, 27).5 But, as Gramsci sees it, “[Croce] treats the structure as a ‘hidden god’, a ‘noumenon’, as opposed to the superstructures as ‘appearances’ ” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §61, 271; see also Gramsci 2007, Q8 §234, 377). The fact is that there is no such thing as a noumenal “reality” and its purely phantasmatic “appearance” but, instead, only historically constructed structures and superstructures that form a totality where “concept and reality,” substance and surface, form a “historically inseparable unity” (Gramsci 1975a, Q10II §1, 1241).6 Gramsci’s initial engagement with the structure/superstructure problematic takes place in direct response to and engagement with the arguments of Second International Russian Marxists like Plekhanov. Consider the following passage, for example: [H]ow does the historical movement arise on the structural base? The problem is however referred to in Plekhanov’s Fundamentals and could be developed. This is furthermore the crux of all the questions that have arisen around the philosophy of praxis and without resolving this one cannot resolve the corresponding problem about the

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   23 relationship between society and “nature,” to which the Manual devotes a special chapter.7 It would have been necessary to analyse the full import and consequences of the two propositions in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to the following effect: 1. Mankind only poses for itself such tasks as it can resolve; . . . the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its resolution already exist or at least are in the process of formation. 2. A social order does not perish until all the productive forces for which it still has room have been developed and new and higher relations of production have taken their place, and until the material conditions of the new relations have grown up within the womb of the old society. Only on this basis can all mechanicism and every trace of the superstitiously “miraculous” be eliminated, and it is on this basis that the problem of the formation of active political groups, and, in the last analysis, even the problem of the historical function of great personalities must be posed. (SPN 431–432; Gramsci 1975a, 1422)8 Marx’s famous preface as read by orthodox Marxists like Plekhanov is thus the starting point not only for Gramsci’s discussion on structures and superstructures, but also for the development of some of the most fundamental critical concepts associated with his version of the philosophy of praxis. In fact, as Gramsci acutely sees it, this problematic is “the crucial problem of historical materialism” and the place where the discussion, in his day as in our own, should start. This is, indeed, the “basics for finding one’s bearings” in an age of theoretical confusion and ideological obfuscation, and one can do so, Gramsci says, paraphrasing Marx, along the following lines: (1) the principle that “no society sets itself tasks for the accomplishment of which the necessary and sufficient conditions do not already exist” [or are not in the course of emerging and developing]; and (2) that “no society perishes until it has first developed all the forms of life implicit in its internal relations.” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 177) It goes without saying that these principles must first be developed critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanicism and fatalism. They must therefore be referred back to the description of the three fundamental moments into which a “situation” or an equilibrium of forces can be distinguished, with the greatest possible stress on the second moment (equilibrium of political forces), and especially on the third moment (politicomilitary equilibrium). (SPN 106–107; Gramsci 1975b, 1774) A crisis exists, sometimes lasting for decades. This means that incurable contradictions have come to light within the structure and that the

24   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures political forces positively working to preserve the structure itself are nevertheless striving to heal these contradictions, within certain limits. (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 177) Gramsci offers a “description of the three fundamental moments” of an “equilibrium of forces” and develops the above principles “critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanicism and fatalism” in Notebook 4 as part of his own complex discussion on “relations between structure and superstructures” (Gramsci 1996, Q4 §38, 177–178). Following Marx, Gramsci regards these relations as being of primary structural and historical importance for social and political life, but resists – indeed, he revolts against – succumbing to the standard economic determinism and philosophy of actor-­less historical necessity of Second International Marxism. More specifically, Gramsci frames the discussion of “relations of forces” and the various “moments or levels” – and combinations – of these “relations of forces” through a complex articulation of various forms of increasingly autonomous and critical forms of political consciousness.9 For only a historically constructed and critical consciousness is capable of “reflecting” on the inner and “objective” contradictions of historical blocs. Although Gramsci does not explicitly refer to Hegel in the passage that concerns us here, it was, indeed, Hegel, before Marx, who offered a detailed discussion of the dialectic of “force and its relations” in the Science of Logic, a dialectic that had a profound impact on Marx, Lenin and, of course, Gramsci himself.10 The first level in the social relation of forces is what appears to be like the level of “objective relations,” a kind of “naturalistic” or positivist fact that, Gramsci argues, can be “measured within the systems of the exact or mathematical sciences,” a level that also corresponds to Hegel’s notion of simple determinate being. On this, Gramsci is simply repeating Marx’s point in the Preface to the effect that “the material transformation of the economic conditions of production [. . .] can be determined with the precision of natural science.” But for Gramsci, this is an abstract level where there are no predetermined or self-­constituted forms of cultural, political or economic consciousness or being on the part of fundamental social groups. In his attempt to visualize what is going on at this level – in Žižek’s words, a level of the Real – Gramsci thinks that social groups here are already exerting a relation of force, he thinks that classes here exist as categories of the Real and not of abstract positivity. For Gramsci is dealing here with what he is, already in the early stages of his Notebooks, beginning to conceptualize as the Real or pure facticity that resists the mediations of hegemony, a Real that proceeds “on the basis of the level of development of the material forces of production” and where “each one of these groups represents a function and a position within production itself.” We can certainly try to capture what Gramsci was trying to conceptualize at this level by using the language of structuralism. We could thus say that this is the level of pure productive structures without the subject of

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   25 hegemony, of functions without normalized subjectivities, and forms of consciousness without ideological apparatuses. Using the language of Spinozism and German Idealism, we could thus say that at this point Gramsci still thinks of this level as a kind of primordial Spinozan substance or a kind of Hegelian “substance without subject” (Macherey 2011). And it is here, in this conception of structure, that Gramsci initially attempts to ground what he calls the “fundamental alignment of social forces,” a structure that is nonetheless already conceived as politicized but in a sort of dynamic quantum state of politics or a substantive condition of pure possibility, the place where someone, at the appropriate moment and from within specific historical situations, has to judge whether there are “sufficient and necessary conditions” for its constitution into a given reality. But that decision and possibility are not yet here. The second level is the “political,” or a level constituted through relation of forces that Gramsci further breaks into “various moments corresponding to the different levels of political consciousness as they have manifested themselves in history up to now.” This is arguably Gramsci’s own version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in combination with the Science of Logic’s treatment of the becoming of being-­for-self and the eventual emergence of historically constituted self-­consciousness. First, there is the moment when “consciousness” is born as the “most rudimentary” and “primitive economic level,” that is, at the individual level within what Gramsci calls “fundamental social groups” – particularity in Hegel’s civil society, and incipient class consciousness in Marx. Gramsci thus speaks of an individual merchant or an individual manufacturer “feeling himself in solidarity” with another merchant or another manufacturer. At this abstract, simple or “primitive” level of consciousness, Gramsci emphasizes the “feeling of solidarity” that one member of a fundamental social group experiences towards another member of a similar group. In other words, this basic feeling of solidarity corresponds to the idea of people with consciousness in themselves – such as the notion of a “class in itself ” – who have not yet become strategically organized “for themselves” around material or ideological self-­interests. Here, a one-­to-one identification or a basic Hegelian relation of mutual recognition – or even a sort of Levinasian fundamental encounter with the other – appears to Gramsci to be the primary – if “primitive” – experience of political consciousness. This might very well be what we encounter at the level of an abstract family, a relatively “simple” community or a “primitive” tribe. A second moment within this level of political force and its relations occurs, however, when individual members of a primary or fundamental social group acquire or develop a higher form of consciousness, defined by the “solidarity of interests among all the members of the social group,” particularly within the “purely economic sphere,” and thus, what was merely a dynamic quantum political possibility in the first moment becomes here actualized and stabilized as “class for itself.” This is, thus, the moment when class solidarity and class struggle develop and become entrenched as a second nature.

26   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures Although this is still a purely “politico-­economic phase” in the development of political consciousness, the “question of the state” is already posed here, even if only embryonically and in terms of a “rudimentary political equality” demanded by those who claim the “right to participate in, modify, and reform administration and legislation within the existing general framework.” Class solidarity and struggle thus appear to Gramsci as the primary – but only primary – drive towards the development and institutionalization of the state within the second moment in the formation of political consciousness. But there is a third and final moment at this level, and this occurs when “one becomes conscious of the fact that one’s own ‘corporate’ interests, in their present and future development, go beyond the ‘corporate’ confines – that is, they go beyond the confines of the economic group – and they can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups.” This moment corresponds to the development of political consciousness proper, and is, thus, not properly accounted for by the notions of “class in itself ” or “class for itself ” and their respective levels of engagement typical of the prior moment. Here, Gramsci has reached the point where he develops the notion of “common sense” and, more decisively, the notion of “moral universalism,” what Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community,” that is to say, the dialectically combined totality of structural/superstructural moments that make possible what Gramsci calls a certain historical “equilibrium of political forces.” This is also the moment when the process of hegemony gets underway. In his discussion of the moment of hegemony, when the process of hegemony is at its most invisible and its results at their most commonsensical or universal, and hence when “moral universalism” is at its maximum reach, Gramsci performs a kind of reversal of Hegel’s argument in the Philosophy of Right about belonging to corporations. As Hegel developed the idea, in the passage from civil society to the state, the goal of membership in the corporations of civil society is precisely to coordinate action and thus address problems that cannot be addressed by the infinite and market-­driven mechanisms of civil society and, at the same time, link up with the higher institutions of the state and thus transcend the particularity, self-­seeking interest and inevitable social problems that define the system of reality of civil society. For Gramsci, by contrast, the moment of transcending corporate interests is precisely the moment when political force and its relations reach the “most patently ‘political’ phase,” and this happens when ruling groups link downwards with “subordinate groups” and, in so doing, confer on the state itself a morally universalizing purpose. For Gramsci, it is this downward move that “marks the clear-­cut transition from the structure [with only quantum forms of social and political consciousness] to complex superstructures [with moral universalism],” with multiple forms and levels of consciousness always already seeking to embed themselves downward into the structure itself. This last moment in the dialectic of structures and superstructures thus turns out to be, paradoxically, the driver of more primary, more fundamental, more seemingly

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   27 “primitive” and “material” moments in the historical construction of concrete totalities or historic blocs. It is in this process of linking downwards that “previously germinated ideologies [generated from the structure and from previous generations] come into contact and confrontation with one another” and from where “only one of them – or, at least, a single combination of them – tends to prevail, to dominate, to spread across the entire field, bringing about, in addition to economic and political unity, intellectual and moral unity, not on a corporate but on a universal level” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 180). By the time Gramsci is writing Notebook 7, he is in a position to state the following: Marx [. . .] stated that a popular conviction often has as much energy as a material force, or something similar and it is very important. The analysis of these statements, in my view, lends support to the concept of “historical bloc” in which in fact the material forces are the content and ideologies are the form. This distinction between form and content is just heuristic because material forces would be historically inconceivable without form and ideologies would be individual fantasies without material forces. (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §21, 172) When considering the value of ideologies and their capacity to affect, indeed change, the very material structure of society, Gramsci says, thinkers often commit an error. This error is particularly glaring when “the term ‘ideology’ is applied both to the necessary superstructure of a particular structure and to the arbitrary elucubrations of particular individuals.” Gramsci reconstructs the course of this error in three steps. First, ideology is commonly defined as distinct from structure, and then “there is the assertion that it is not ideologies that change structures but vice versa.” This is Gramsci’s rejection of the vulgar interpretation of Marx’s claim in the 1859 Preface that “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Second, a certain political solution is declared to be “ideological,” that is, “it does not have the wherewithal to modify the structure,” and so, although there is the belief that structure can be changed, “the effort to change it is dismissed as useless, stupid, etc.” Here, again, Gramsci is reconsidering the notion that only “changes in the economic foundation [can] lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure,” that it is only when “the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production” turns into an obstacle to the further development of the social forces of production that the gap opens that gives place to “an era of social revolution.” And yet, at this point, any conscious and collective effort to change the very forces of production – the structure or the anatomy of bourgeois civil society – is nevertheless ridiculed as useless, idealistic,

28   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures antihistorical or utopian. Finally, there is the standard assertion that “every ideology is ‘pure’ appearance, useless, stupid, etc.” Against these different errors in the standard Marxist understanding of ideology, Gramsci offers his own critical conception: One must therefore distinguish between historically organic ideologies – that is, ideologies that are necessary to a given structure – and arbitrary, rationalistic, “willed” ideologies. Insofar as they are historically necessary, ideologies have a validity that is “psychological”; they “organize” the human masses, they establish the ground on which humans move, become conscious of their position, struggle, etc. As for “arbitrary” ideologies, they produce nothing other than individual “movements,” polemics, etc. (but they are not completely useless, either, because they function like the error that by opposing truth affirms it). (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §21, 171) If “social existence” directly determines forms of cultural and political consciousness, Gramsci maintains, there would not be much of a chance for political error or, indeed, ethical or political life. But Marx himself cautioned us against jumping to this naturalistic and deterministic conclusion. First, there is the “difficulty of identifying the structure at any moment, statically (like an instantaneous photographic image).” For Gramsci, instead, politics is in fact “always a reflection of the way the structure is tending to develop, but there is no guarantee that these tendencies will necessarily reach their fulfillment.” These tendencies are just dynamic quantum possibilities that may or may not be realized by the immanent logic of the structures themselves, by the proper technical, bureaucratic and ideological management of these structures from above, or by a particular political act. Second, “a particular political act may have been an error of calculation on the part of the leaders of the dominant classes, an error that historical development corrects and moves beyond through the governmental parliamentary ‘crises’ of the ruling classes.” Yet mechanical historical materialism does not take the possibility of error into account. Instead, “it assumes that every political act is determined directly by the structure and is therefore the reflection of a real and permanent (in the sense of secured) modification of the structure.” It assumes that the political act is always pure, true and necessary in itself even when it justifies itself ideologically. Finally, and quite crucially, the usual discussion on structures and superstructures pays little attention to “the fact that many political acts are due to internal necessities of an organizational character; in other words, they are tied to the need to give coherence to a party, a group, or a society” and, as such, posit their own presuppositions. And these political acts – once they develop sufficient collective mass – can not only intervene directly in the “automatic” life of structures, but can also change the “force of circumstance” that the structures appear to impose on

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   29 the ethical, cultural or political life of society (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §24, 174). The “internal necessity” of a political act can, in fact, open or widen the gap within and between structures and superstructures and, thus, initiate “an era of social revolution,” an Event, not dictated by an appropriate or even sufficient development of the productive forces or the material structure of society.11 The final moment in Gramsci’s discussion of the relation between structures and superstructures is the moment when the process and bourgeois mode of hegemony emerges as the structuring of “common sense” or, in other words, an ethical mode of moral universalism. Here we also find Gramsci articulating hegemony not only as a process but also as the possibility of hegemonic breakdown, as a contradiction internal to hegemony itself, the dynamic quantum possibility of a “permanent crisis” that threatens to widen the gap within and between structure and superstructures if, and only if, an act can intervene to prompt it. This is the context where and when the possibility of what Gramsci calls the “efficient premise” of revolutionary transformation becomes not only ethically possible, in the form of an adequate consciousness, but also materially or structurally achievable, in the form of a collective actor capable of giving it birth and emerging from the gap. This is the third level in the political relation of forces, and it constitutes what Gramsci, in the fashionable military language of his time, calls the “relation of military forces,” which, from time to time, can indeed be “immediately decisive.” We must remember here that in Gramsci, from the earliest Notebooks, “military” force is also political force, and vice versa. This is the level, then, where the widening gap at the level of the “anatomy of bourgeois society” requires “complex ideological work” – a hegemonic or counter-­hegemonic process – not only to conceal it but also to make it visible, and for this reason, this is the level where the suturing and mutating work of hegemony must also be met with the “spirit of cleavage” proper to counter-­hegemonic praxis. Counter-­ hegemony is, thus, not understood as practice that emerges only when “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production” – which would be a necessary condition for possible revolutionary transformation – but when the development of a popular collective will posits an “efficient premise” both actively and retroactively – out of the dynamic quantum possibility mentioned above – as a premise “that has become operative in collective consciousness” and that, at the same time, “contains the sufficient material conditions for the realization of the impulse of collective will” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §237, 379, italics added). Here, then, the superstructure intervenes directly into the structure, and the quantum possibility that lies latently within it, the premise itself that is posited by and becomes active in collective consciousness, transforms an “efficient” premise into a “sufficient” one that already contains the material conditions for a leap into the future. If this collective will can be successfully organized and mobilized, Gramsci believes, it can intervene directly in the “force of circumstances” and change them.

30   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures We must be careful to distinguish Gramsci’s discussion of the three fundamental moments in the relationship of structure and superstructure from Plekhanov’s own interpretation. In his Fundamental Problems of Marxism, for instance, Plekhanov had already distinguished five such levels: (1) the state of the productive forces; (2) the economic relations these forces condition; (3) the socio-­political system that has developed on the given economic “basis”; (4) the mentality of men living in society, which is determined in part directly by the economic conditions obtaining, and in part by the entire socio-­political system that has arisen on that foundation; (5) the various ideologies that reflect the properties of that mentality. (Plekhanov 1908, Section XIII) The problem is not simply that Plekhanov leaves out the fact of human practice as the key constituent element of historical structures – more importantly, it is the fact that he leaves out the dialectical character of human praxis as such. It is in his discussion on the relationship between structures and superstructures, then, that we find Gramsci developing his version of a “combined Marxism” in a direction that many contemporary thinkers, including some neo-­Gramscians, may be very reluctant or skeptical to see him go. Nevertheless, in a revealing passage on the “objectivity of the real,” for example, Gramsci develops the familiar idea that it is precisely in the relationship between structures and superstructures, or, better yet, in the possibility of what this relationship may become, that “the rational and the real become one and the same thing.” As Gramsci puts this, It seems to me that unless one understands this relationship, it would be impossible to understand historical materialism, its philosophical position vis-­à-vis traditional materialism and idealism, and the importance and significance of superstructures. (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §25, 176) In one of Gramsci’s most profound philosophical statements in the published Notebooks, Gramsci offers a defense of the Hegelian Idea that only a few Marxists of his day, such as Korsch or Lukács, and a few neo-­ Gramscians of today were, or would be, prepared to offer: 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 “historicized.” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §25, 176)

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   31 If there is a “Gramscian moment” in the history of so-­called Western Marxism at all, particularly in the sense in which Gramsci himself used the word “moment” in his Notebooks, then I think it is to be found in Notebook 4 and can, in fact, be more precisely situated than Thomas has done (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §3, 140).12 Note in passing that this is not a moment in the sense indicated by J. G. A. Pocock in his now classic The Machiavellian Moment (Pocock 1975), an unavoidable source for any discussion of a possible “moment” in the development of Gramsci’s political ideas but curiously not referenced in Thomas’s book (Pocock 1975, viii).13 In other words, Gramsci’s thought is not developing against a background that has no way of conceptualizing the historicity of the New Prince, the process of hegemony or an idea of communal socialism. Gramsci’s thought is not operating against any eschatological notion of time or trying to articulate the essential finitude of the impure political act now firmly established at the heart of socialist modernity. Instead, it is a moment that, in Laclau’s terms, approximates, if not actually generates, an “epistemological break” within the tradition of Marxism until his day, an intellectual event that at once determinedly abandons the reductionist and dogmatic notion of “determination in the last instance by the economy” and reasserts instead the open-­ended, absolute historicity and irreducibly practical, if not thoroughly ethical, character of the social totality (Laclau 2005, 116).14 The Gramscian moment is thus, I argue, as much a “philosophical event,” indeed, a key return of Hegel within Marxism, as it is a “philosophical fact” within Gramsci’s own thought leading to a highly significant philosophical turn. And I believe this moment is to be found precisely where Gramsci develops the idea that it is in the “reciprocity between structure and superstructure” – by which one becomes the other and thus negates itself and becomes sublated and hegemonized – that we find what he calls “the real dialectical process,” and where hegemony as a process is most fundamentally at work, suturing from the inside what ideology in its more narrow connotations may fail to legitimize from the outside (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340). In other words, the moment of hegemony cannot be explained as the moment when people are simply at their most deceived in terms of the reality of the structure and the superstructure. The moment of hegemony is close to the moment of maximum ideological influence, provided that the word “ideology” is used “in its highest sense of a conception of the world,” a lifeworld, like a religion in Croce’s sense, something that is “implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestation of individual and collective life” (SPN 328; Gramsci 1975a, 1380). The moment of moral universalism is, thus, not the moment of maximum ideological self-­deception precisely because “self-­deception can be an adequate explanation for a few individuals taken separately, or even for groups of a certain size, but it is not adequate when the contrast occurs in the life of great masses. In these cases the contrast between thought and  action cannot but be the expression of profounder contrasts of a social-­historical order” (SPN 327; Gramsci 1975a, 1379). A useful way of

32   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures thinking about what Gramsci means here is to use some of Mészáros’ recently proposed ideas, critical as they are of Marx’s 1859 distinction between the economic base and the legal and political superstructure, in his Beyond Capital (Mészáros 2000). As he writes, “the modern state as the comprehensive political command structure of capital was brought into being, becoming as integral a part of the ‘material base’ of the system as the socioeconomic reproductive units themselves” (Mészáros 2000, 59).15 It is this reciprocity between structure and superstructure that Gramsci has in mind when he argues that structures and superstructures form a “historical bloc” in a similar sense to that in which Hegel conceived the Idea.16 The view of structures and superstructures as forming a “historical bloc” – Gramsci’s revolutionary version of the Hegelian Idea – is, indeed, a key Gramscian insight (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340), and one that became central in Latin American debates around Gramsci, as illustrated by the work of Hugues Portelli (Portelli 1998). But Gramsci’s discussion of the historical bloc is a means to address what Gramsci sees at work in the complex relationship of structures and superstructures. For Gramsci, following Hegel, “the ‘rational’ is actively and actually real” and, through the formation of a conscious collective movement, extends the crisis, the “gap” that opens up between structures and superstructures, and that hegemony, in turn, seeks to suture – to “heal” and conceal – in an ever more complex process of expanded reproduction combined with the extensive work of passive revolution or transformismo.17 But the gap nevertheless remains, and when it threatens to widen and expand into a long-­term organic crisis, with a correspondingly extended effort to expand the hegemonic process to suture it, then only “a comprehensive system of ideologies” capable of rationally rearticulating the contradictions of the structure/superstructure complex can represent – indeed, collectively posit and even retroactively generate and validate – the “objective conditions for revolutionizing praxis” and even an “anti-­historical” “leap” beyond the current conditions of “historical development and progress” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340; Gramsci 2007, Q8 §210, 357).18 Directly addressing Marx’s 1859 Preface in Notebook 10, in a section entitled “Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,” Gramsci outlines the possibility of the passage from the “merely economic moment” (the passionately egotistic sphere) to the “ethico-­ political” moment as what he calls “catharsis.” This concept designates the passage “from the ‘objective to the subjective’ and from ‘necessity’ to ‘freedom’ ” or, in other words, “the starting point of the philosophy of praxis” and thus revolutionary counter-­hegemony (Gramsci 1975a, Q10 §6, 1244). This, then, is Gramsci’s creative and sympathetic reversal of Marx’s 1859 Preface – and of his very own conception of the initial moment – on the dialectical relations of structures and superstructures. In this reversal, historical materialism becomes “a reform and development of Hegelianism” or “the full consciousness of contradictions [that] posits itself as an element of the contradiction and raises this element to a principle of

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   33 politics and action” (Gramsci 1996, Q4 §45, 45). The hope that guides this philosophy of praxis is, of course, the hope that “contradictions will disappear” in history and, with that, historical materialism itself – as the supreme awareness of these contradictions – will also disappear. In a reference to one of Marx’s most famous ideas, Gramsci tells us how the Communist horizon opened up in theory and practice by historical materialism is one where “the realm of necessity will give way to the realm of freedom, that is, to a period in which ‘thought’ or ideas are no longer born on the terrain of contradictions,” the very ones that the hegemonic process sutures and that the counter-­hegemonic war of position attempts to expose. These reflections recall Marx’s famous passage from Capital 3, developed in chapter 48, entitled The Trinity Formula, that reads as follows: The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (Marx 1894) But Gramsci’s deeper return to Hegel also recalls the Berlin master’s notion of religious reconciliation to further illustrate his point. And there is perhaps no place in Hegel’s oeuvre where this idea is better expressed than in the following passage from his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The deepest need of spirit is that the antithesis within the subject itself should be intensified to its universal, i.e., its most abstract, extreme. This is the cleavage, the anguish that we have considered. The sublation of the antithesis has two sides. First, the subject must become conscious of the fact that the antithetic opposites are not [things] in themselves, but that instead the truth, the inner nature [of spirit], consists in the sublatedness of the antithesis. Second, because the antithesis is implicitly and truthfully sublated, the subject as such, in its

34   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures being-­for-itself, can reach and attain peace and reconciliation through the sublation of the antithesis. Furthermore, the consciousness of the absolute idea that we have in philosophy in the form of thinking is to be brought forth not for the standpoint of philosophical speculation or speculative thinking but in the form of certainty. The necessity [that the divine–human unity shall appear] is not first apprehended by means of thinking; rather it is a certainty for humanity. In other words, this content – the unity of divine and human nature – achieves certainty, obtaining the form of immediate sensible intuition and external existence for humankind, so that it appears as something that has been seen in the world, something that has been experienced. It is essential to this form of nonspeculative consciousness that it must be before us; it must essentially be before me – it must become a certainty for humanity. For it is only what exists in an immediate way, in inner or outer intuition, that is certain. In order for it [this divine–human unity] to become a certainty for humanity, God had to appear in the world in the flesh [cf. John 1:14]. (Hegel 1988, 454–455) Gramsci’s totality is decidedly not the same as Althusser’s or, indeed, structuralism’s “structure.”19 For Gramsci, “totality” designates a “historical bloc,” a site of political practice, and in order to understand and potentially transform this totality, Gramsci argues, we need “a comprehensive system of ideologies” that can rationally reflect “the contradiction of the structure” and, at the same time, “represents the existence of the objective conditions for revolutionizing praxis” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340). In other words, in order to comprehend a historically constructed totality, we need to deploy an equally historically constructed “system of ideologies” that, in this specific rational way, can enable us to perceive – “reflect” – the contradiction at the heart of this totality and, thus, open up the space, posit the existence, of “objective conditions” for revolutionary praxis. How these “objective conditions” can be politically posited, either presently or retroactively, and as “efficient” by a collective will in the form of necessity as an ought to do, and how, thus, Gramsci reverses Marx’s 1859 Preface, is something that will be examined later in this book. For now, it is sufficient to note one of Gramsci’s most insightful comments on the possibility of generating or becoming conscious of the “objective conditions” for revolutionary praxis within a historically constructed totality. As he states, “If a group is formed that ideologically is 100 percent homogenous, it means that the premises for this revolutionizing exist at 100 percent” and, in this limit or transcendental situation that Gramsci sets up in classic Hegelian terms, “the ‘rational’ is actively and actually real” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340). But this is not actually the case in any historically concrete totalities. Indeed, if a dominant group is formed but is not ideologically 100 percent homogeneous, as is always actually the case, then there has to be a means of revealing this lack of

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   35 ideological saturation, just as this group, in turn, will strive to find multiple ways of concealing it. In actual fact, Gramsci argues, “no innovative force in history immediately fulfills itself 100 percent,” and such a force is, in fact, “always rational and irrational, historicist and antihistoricist; in other words, it is ‘life’ with all the weaknesses and strengths of life, with all its contradictions and antitheses” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §27, 253–254). This impurity is not external to praxis but, in fact, inherent to it. Such is the “impure act” in the dialectic of both domination and resistance at the heart of historical blocs and in the current articulation of this contradiction as a philosophy of praxis. But it is different with dominant forces that do aim to achieve 100 percent saturation. It is precisely this lack in the totalization of a group where we find either its very strength or the root of its efforts to fulfill itself – to extend itself through the subaltern others, to install in them the solicitation of force and domination, to create in them the desire for moral universalism created by ruling intellectuals, and to suture the ideological gap that threatens to burst open within and between structures and superstructures – by means of hegemony. The depth of these profoundly dialectical comments will not really be fully clear until the end of this book. The lesson of Hegel and Gramsci fused together is that we should abandon any talk of “reconciliation” based on the reappropriation of our alienated externality in labor, products or social relations. The construction of the revolutionary collective actor posits its own substance and emerges from its own loss in the hegemonized gaps of history. If religion once expressed and represented “the most ‘colossal’ utopia” of reconciliation, Gramsci certainly thinks that a combined version of historical materialism as a new  and popular conception of the world – with the emphasis on the  “historical” and with its key source being a return to Marx via Hegel  – now gives us the most intuitive certainty of reconciliation of the rational and the actual in history and in practice (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340) as the most intense, passionate and stirring Idea of the future to come.

Notes   1 What is usually called “Western Marxism” is often said to have started with Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (1923). The name itself was only used in the 1970s by Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty in his Adventures of the Dialectic (1973). At the heart of the distinction between “Western Marxism” and Soviet-­centered “Dialectical Materialism” we find what Sartre – himself designated by later commentators, such as Martin Jay, as a “Western Marxist” (Jay 1984) – distinguished as a proper historical materialism or a “dialectical monism” with scientific and doctrinal pretenses (Sartre 2004).   2 Note that Gramsci was not aware of Marx’s earlier, more radical and, indeed, more Hegelian formulations of the structure/superstructure totality as formulated particularly in the Grundrisse, because the latter were not discovered and published until 1953.

36   Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   3 The question of how to conceptually grasp the nature and relationship of structures and superstructures was also one of the initial questions motivating Joseph V. Femia’s pioneering examination of Gramsci’s work (Femia 1981). But whereas Femia’s work posits from the outset the possibility that Gramsci’s political thought does, indeed, lead to a social-­democratic “peaceful road to socialism,” the present study arrives at a radically opposite conclusion.   4 The later Marx, in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value, will find it very difficult to distance himself from the “reality” vs. “appearance” dichotomy. As Tom Bottomore has reminded us, in Theories of Surplus Value (1862–1863) Marx makes a significant, but perhaps insufficient, effort to distance himself from any reductionist view of the base/superstructure idea by means of historicizing the social relationships involved (Bottomore 1992, 46).   5 The price that Lukács paid for agreeing with the basic premises of Hegelian dialectics, but also for critically rethinking the orthodox dualisms of thought and being, subject and object, structure and superstructure, historical time and social space as well as society and nature, was very high indeed. Almost immediately condemned by the Comintern after its publication, Lukács was forced to “recant” History and Class Consciousness and, in “a gesture of a personal Thermidor” (Žižek’s words in Lukács 2002, 156), move on to more “socialist-­ realist” work in the 1930s. However, and fortunately, the story did not end there. The discovery in the Soviet archives of Lukács’ manuscript entitled Tailism and the Dialectic, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, written as early as the mid-­1920s, reveals not only his deadly polemic against Stalinism and the bureaucratization of “really existing socialism” – the name given by Stalin to Soviet socialism, in opposition to what he regarded as merely speculative or theoretical forms of socialism – but also the Hegelian direction of Lukács’ philosophical work against the grain of his times and the constitution of his thought as the philosophical expression of Bolshevism, or what Žižek calls “the philosophy of Leninism.”   6 Michael Lebowitz is, therefore, right when he points out that “This [Hegelian] focus upon the whole constitutes a methodological revolution. It breaks with the ‘Cartesian’ heritage that views the parts as ‘ontologically prior to the whole; that is, the parts exist in isolation and come together to make wholes’.” In that Cartesian paradigm, described brilliantly by Levins and Lewontin, “the parts have intrinsic properties, which they possess in isolation and which they lend to the whole.” In Marx’s dialectical perspective, by contrast, the parts have no prior independent existence as parts. They “acquire properties by virtue of being parts of a particular whole, properties they do not have in isolation or as parts of another whole” (Lebowitz 2012, 30).   7 It is also partly in direct response to the relationship between society and nature as formulated by Engels and Plekhanov that Lukács will write his Tailism and the Dialectic and the defense of his own History and Class Consciousness (Foster 2013).   8 Despite Lenin’s assertion that Plekhanov’s The Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908) represented “the finest exposition of Marxism” until then, Gramsci offers many bitterly critical comments on Plekhanov’s work and his relapse into “vulgar materialism” (SPN 387; Gramsci 1975a, 1507).   9 Note that Gramsci carefully avoids the use of the standard concepts of “productive forces” or “social relations of production” as found in all mainstream Marxist discussions of the base and the superstructure. 10 Lenin’s thoughts on Hegel’s concept of “force and its relations” can be found in his Philosophical Notebooks (Lenin 1895). 11 Gramsci’s effort here anticipates by a long margin the Miliband and Poulantzas debate in the late 1960s and early 1970s and, particularly, the latter’s argument. In the words of Miliband himself (!) –

Rethinking Structures and Superstructures   37 What he is concerned to re-­affirm is that the political realm is not, in classical Marxism, the mere reflection of the economic realm, and that in relation to the state, the notion of the latter’s “relative autonomy” is central, not only in regard to “exceptional circumstances,” but in all circumstances. (Miliband 1973, 85). 12 Thomas locates the timing and meaning of the “Gramscian moment” as follows: The “Gramscian moment” [. . .] refers not only to the astounding annus mirabilis of 1932, in which Gramsci, deepening and articulating his interdisciplinary and multi-­faceted research project, delineates the “three component parts” of the “philosophy of praxis” in the notions of an absolute “historicism,” absolute immanence and absolute humanism. It also refers to his integration in this year of his research into the nature of the modern state, on the one hand, and the social and political overdetermination of  philosophy, on the other. The “Gramscian moment” thus signals the transition from a conception of the state as a “philosophical event” to the  elaboration of a notion of hegemony as a “philosophical fact.” The implications of this position, I argue, amount to a new way of conceiving both the political status of philosophy and the philosophical status of Marxism. (Thomas 2009, xix) 13 Bruno Bosteels offers other possible interpretations of what the word “moment” may mean in Thomas’s work (Bosteels 2014). 14 In this regard, the Gramscian break within Marxism is also not unlike Sartre’s break with “external dialectical reason” (Sartre 2004, 29–32). 15 It is possible that this is the passage to which Žižek refers in his discussion of the same problematic of structures and superstructures in Mészáros but without providing a specific reference for it (Žižek 2011, 432). 16 It should be noted here, in passing, that Latin American Gramscian scholars have been aware of this “real dialectical process” in the form of the “materiality of the superstructure” since the 1960s (Campione 2014). 17 I am using the notion of expanded reproduction here in the sense used by William I. Robinson. Note also that Gramsci did not put his hope for a final crisis of liberal capitalism 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 – drafted by Marx but finalized by Engels in chapter 13 of Capital 3 – were the ultimate cause leading liberal capitalist society to its own mortal crisis and “cataclysmic change,” while in the process slowly producing its own gravediggers, was translated into a dogmatic and “synthetic principle” of “dialectical materialism” by thinkers such as Bukharin (Bukharin 1969, chap. 3). Instead, Gramsci’s approach to the debate on this “law” follows the suggestions of his close friend Piero Sraffa and is, in some ways, close to Neo-­Ricardianism, much to the chagrin of some of his followers (Q7 §34, Gramsci 2007, 184). At one point, in fact, Gramsci goes as far as claiming that “in a certain sense we can say that the philosophy of praxis equals Hegel + David Ricardo” (Q10 §9, Gramsci 1975a, 1247). 18 The notion of “suture” is here similar to Laclau’s. In Žižek’s words, “Another name for this short-­circuit between the Universal and the Particular is, of course, ‘suture’: the operation of hegemony ‘sutures’ the empty Universal to a particular content” (Žižek 1997, 29, n. 1). 19 For an explanation of Althusser’s conception of structure and his critique of Hegelian totality, see Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 319).

2 On Moral and Intellectual Reform

Constructing the culture of communism and revolution is a daily counter-­ hegemonic and constitutive task. As I discussed in the Introduction, the factory council movement in Turin taught Gramsci that it is all too often much easier to organize resistance than it is to translate that resistance into lasting and long-­lasting results. And that is the case because without an intellectual and moral reform at the heart of autonomous and rhizomatic politics, “the power still remains under capital’s control.” It is thus not simply the case that we can change the world through perpetual activism and without taking power; it is also the case that without the subjective transformations that participatory, rhizomatic and horizontal politics make possible, we cannot take power and hope to change the world. It is in the cauldron of rhizomatic and liminal forms of politics that we find highly fertile ground for the transformation of the self, even if this terrain is also highly propitious for the process of hegemony to undo the deep work of reform. Moral and intellectual reform is thus the politics of self-­ transformation that prepares the terrain for a leap to the stage of the “national-­popular,” that is, the level at which enduring decisions can be made. The revolution of the self is needed so that when the time to make decisions arrives, activists are not going to turn out be already rehegemonized and accordingly more trusting of the established institutions of parliamentary democracy as adequate mechanisms to reach a compromise. For what is the point of moral and intellectual reform if at the decisive moment the revolution is simply going to be entrusted to the ballot box? The consciousness of intellectuals, the very people Gramsci thinks can most adequately advance the politics of moral and intellectual reform, of course reflects the complexities and contradictions of structure and superstructure and their multiple levels, phases and combinations. In Gramsci’s terms, A new historical situation creates a new ideological superstructure whose representatives (the intellectuals) must be regarded as ‘new intellectuals’ brought forth by the new situation and not as a continuation of the preceding intelligentsia. If the ‘new’ intellectuals position themselves as the direct continuation of the previous intelligentsia,

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   39 they are not ‘new’ at all; they are not tied to the new social group that represents the new historical situation but to the residues of the old social group of which the old intelligentsia was the expression. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §171, 332) The new social group of intellectuals is thus divided into different strata with their own “typical cultures.” Ideologically, also, “many of these strata are still steeped in the culture of past historical situations” and some even continue to hold a “Ptolemaic worldview” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §171, 332). “The fundamental characteristic of common sense consists in its being a disjointed, incoherent, and inconsequential conception of the world that matches the character of the multitudes whose philosophy it is” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §171, 333). Further, “common sense is a disorderly aggregate of philosophical conceptions in which one can find whatever one likes.” Having said this, however, we must not lose sight of the fact that common sense is not simply the result of social and cultural tradition, but also the result of power relations. Thus, the point of intellectuals, particularly the new organic intellectuals, is to approach the people and “guide it ideologically and keep it linked with the leading group” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §171, 334). The point of these intellectuals is to unify the philosophy of praxis and the practice of counter-­hegemony, refoundation and revolution until it becomes a “concrete universal, historically concrete” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §171, 337). Gramsci links the transformation of common sense and the transformation of its “molecular processes” in the public sphere – the overlapping space between civil and political society – to an autonomously organized consciousness and revolutionary “collective will” rather than civil society. He places emphasis on the work of intellectuals clustered around the Modern Prince and organically linked to subaltern and popular groups. In the context of modern forms of liberal capitalist democracy, however, this modern form of collective revolutionary praxis becomes attainable only after the formation of large popular organizations, civil society and the party system, “when permanent collective wills” come about and “set themselves goals that are both immediate and intermediate” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §195, 346). For Gramsci, it is from within the large popular organizations that such a molecular process of counter-­hegemony – the “molecular transformation of ways of thinking and acting” (SPN 267) – can be set into motion by the Modern Prince. Gramsci lays great emphasis on the politics of the will, particularly collective will, as an instrument of radical change. When discussing the common notion of Machiavelli as a Realist thinker more concerned with “what is” rather than “what ought to be,”1 for example, Gramsci writes: The question is more complex: one must determine whether the “ought to be” is an arbitrary act or a necessary fact, whether it is concrete will or passing fancy, desire, daydream. The active politician is a creator,

40   On Moral and Intellectual Reform but he does not create out of nothing, and neither does he draw his creations out of his brain. He bases himself on effectual reality; but what is this effectual reality? Could it be something static and immobile? Is it not, rather, a reality in motion, a relation of forces in continuous shifts of equilibrium? When applying one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium among really existing and active forces – basing oneself on the force with a progressive thrust in order to make it prevail – one is always moving on the stream of effectual reality, but for the purpose of mastering it and superseding it. The “ought to be” comes into play not as an abstract and formal idea but as a realistic interpretation and as the only historicist interpretation of reality – as that which alone is active history or politics. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §84, 283) The common understanding of Machiavelli as merely concerned with “what is” misses what Pocock calls the Machiavellian moment. For Gramsci, though, Machiavelli’s efforts to think in ways that could contribute to the political will of the Prince are grounded in “effectual reality,” that is, “a reality in motion” and “a relation of forces in continuous shift” whose “mastery” requires the “ought to be” as a “historicist interpretation of reality.” This alone is “active in history or politics.” Gramsci’s notion of consciousness thus tries to capture the difference between a merely Realist intervention into “what is” and a critical and counter-­hegemonic consciousness aimed at the creation of a whole new set of forces and equilibriums opposed to the kind of ordinary common sense implicit in daily activity in the following terms: The average worker has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his activity in and understanding of the world; indeed, his theoretical consciousness can be “historically” in conflict with his activity. In other words, he will have two theoretical consciousnesses: one that is implicit in his activity and that really unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the world and a superficial, “explicit” one that he has inherited from the past. The practical-­theoretical position, in this case, cannot help becoming “political” – that is, a question of “hegemony.” Consciousness of being part of a hegemonic force (that is, political consciousness) is the first stage on the way to greater self-­awareness, namely, on the way to unifying practice and theory. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §169, 330) What hegemony does psychologically, morally and culturally in consciousness is precisely to conceal the separation between the individual and society, labor and interaction, lifeworld and system, theory and practice, and suture the always unstable gap between these structures and superstructures. Gramsci has an idea of this when he writes the following:

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   41 A crisis exists, sometimes lasting for decades. This means that incurable contradictions have come to light within the structure and that the political forces positively working to preserve the structure itself are nevertheless striving to heal these contradictions, within certain limits. (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 177, italics added) In doing so, hegemony sutures the gap opened by these contradictions and restructures the internal balance of the self while generating a cultural environment of common sense and moral universalism. By contrast, the role of consciousness-­raising is for Gramsci a “greater self-­awareness” that exposes the concealment of hegemony through the “spirit of cleavage” and a praxis of counter-­hegemonic transformation. But this is no easy process. In Gramsci, the role of a critical self-­consciousness is not to merely increase personal autonomy or individual self-­assertion in the individualist and performative sense of these terms. It is not an effort to make people adapt themselves better to the “normality” of the existing world and “function” better as organs or representatives of the accepted ideologies. On the contrary, for Gramsci, “Self-­consciousness in the historical sense means the creation of a vanguard of intellectuals: a ‘mass’ does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become ‘independent’ without organizing itself, and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is, without organizers and leaders. But this process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §169, 330). And this process cannot take place either within the ordinary multitude, “mass society,” or the “system of intellectual and moral” life of existing civil society, public sphere and liberal capitalism. Rather, “It is the parties that elaborate the new integral and all-­embracing intelligentsia; the traditional intellectuals of the earlier phase (clergy, professional philosophers, etc.) will necessarily disappear, unless – following a long and difficult process – they are assimilated” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §169, 331). Here, the word “parties” must of course be understood in a broad sense as the organization of autonomous initiatives by the mass of the people. In other words, the earlier experience of socialization and learning in civil society, largely organized by traditional intellectuals and private associations, has to be overcome by people as they learn to organize themselves autonomously, by the intellectuals organically emerging from them but linked to the new Modern Prince and eventually “assimilated” into the tasks of moral and intellectual reform, refoundation and revolution. In this context, then, the social function of twentieth-­century revolutionary intellectuals, at a time when the classical bourgeois civil and political societies inherited from the nineteenth century were already becoming hegemonized and turned into fetishistic “societies of spectacle,” is to organize moral and intellectual counter-­hegemony, a counter-­fetishistic form of praxis, a people’s revolution against both civil and political society.2 Gramsci sees the function of modern intellectuals as being tied to the changing nature of the class structure and struggle as capitalism spreads, develops and becomes increasingly reifying (e.g., Taylorism) as

42   On Moral and Intellectual Reform well as the changing nature of the bourgeois public sphere and the rise and consolidation of the parliamentary system and the modern constitutional state. There is here also a significant distinction in terms of the idea of the state held by intellectuals in those liberal capitalist countries that first went through the process of industrialization and political modernization (England and France) and those in the second wave (Germany and Italy). Here is an early passage in which Gramsci develops this idea with his own Hegelian twist: The conquest of power and the assertion of a new productive world are inseparable: propaganda for one is also propaganda for the other; in reality, it is only in this connection that the unitary origin of the dominant class, which is simultaneously economic and political, resides. However, when the push for progress is not closely connected to a local economic development [[as it was in England and France]], but is the reflection of international developments which drive its ideological currents [born on the basis of the productive development of the more advanced countries] to the periphery [[as it was in Germany and Italy]], then the class bearing the new ideas is the class of intellectuals and the conception of the state changes aspect. The state is conceived as a thing in itself, as a rational absolute. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §150, 229, double brackets and italics added) Why is Gramsci introducing Hegel’s conception of the state as “the thing in itself ” and the “rational absolute” in connection with intellectuals in the periphery? Is not this formulation supposed to be inverted and constitute the philosophical experience of intellectuals in the first wave of industrialized liberal capitalist countries? Should not the state, in those countries where ideological currents appear as a mere reflection of international currents, be conceived by intellectuals as an alien or an imposed entity? Are these questions not at the root of why Gramsci thinks that when it comes to a critical understanding of the state “from the standpoint of the productive [function] of the social classes” – as the title to this passage says – “some criteria of historical and cultural evaluation must be turned upside down”? Does Gramsci think that the standard Leninist ideas of historical development, class constitution and domination, and nation-­state formation are therefore not entirely applicable to the Italian case or, indeed, many other cases of full or partial peripheral development? Is this not a challenge to the idea that in so-­called “backward” countries where the bourgeoisie has not yet completed its historical mission, where capitalism has not yet achieved maturity, and where the state retains aristocratic, even feudal, characteristics, any appearance of the state as a “thing in itself ” or as the “absolute” is, in fact, nothing but false consciousness and evidence of the distorting ideological function of bourgeois intellectuals? In countries like Italy, after centuries of foreign domination and its final unification around Victor Emmanuel II in the Kingdom of Italy in 1870,

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   43 where the state had yet to achieve liberal capitalist maturity or the age of elite self-­limitation and moral universalism, where all the characteristics of uneven development were already visible in the large developmental and cultural disparities between the rapidly industrializing Piedmontese north and the increasingly impoverished and marginalized Mezzogiorno, the state nonetheless appears to intellectuals as a “thing in itself ” and as “absolute.” In a context like this, Gramsci maintains, it is not the ruling elites themselves but intellectuals who have played a prominent role in forging the imagined national community – the Idea of the prince, the city or the state – ever since the times of medieval “cosmopolitanism” linked to Church and Empire. In other words, it is intellectuals who have traditionally brought a certain theoretical consciousness or political awareness to the ruling elites rather than to the subaltern classes. Gramsci points out repeatedly through the Notebooks how Italian intellectuals have always been “international” or “cosmopolitan” in predisposition and outlook. But now he also compares intellectuals to their Jacobin predecessors during the French Revolution by saying that these intellectuals “really want to apply to Italy a rational intellectual scheme, elaborated on the basis of the experiences of others and not the national experience.” Does this mean, then, that their idea of the state is altogether utopian or idealistic? Gramsci performs an interesting reversion – a turning “upside down” – of Marx’s famous statements on the relationship between the German Restoration and Classical German Philosophy and Marx’s overextended claim that the “Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content.” First, there is Marx’s famous statement, in his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1844), written before the Restoration and the revolutionarily passive rise of the German bourgeoisie to a position of clear economic domination, to the effect that “In politics the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical consciousness. The abstraction and conceit of its thought always kept in step with the one-­ sidedness and stumpiness of its reality. If therefore the status quo of German statehood expresses the perfection of the ancien régime, the perfection of the thorn in the flesh of the modern state, the status quo of German political theory expresses the imperfection of the modern state, the defectiveness of its flesh itself ” (Marx 1844). Over forty years later, in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), written after the bourgeoisie had attained the position of an economically, if not also politically, dominant class in Germany, Marx wrote: But to the same degree that speculation abandoned the philosopher’s study in order to erect its temple in the Stock Exchange, educated Germany lost the great aptitude for theory which had been the glory of Germany in the days of its deepest political humiliation – the aptitude for purely scientific investigation, irrespective of whether the result obtained was applicable in practice or not, adverse to the police or not.

44   On Moral and Intellectual Reform It is precisely under these circumstances, Marx concludes, that “The German working-­class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy” (Marx 1886). What is the kind of reversion that Gramsci performs on these classical passages from Marx? Gramsci explicitly states more than once that “Marx reduces the French maxim ‘liberté, fraternité, égalité’ to German philosophical concepts (The Holy Family)” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §152, 231). What Gramsci does not explicitly state is what happens when we develop this argument further. The fact that “Germans thought what other nations did” does not mean that this thinking was merely idealist or utopian in method and content. The Italian context illustrates quite the opposite: The Italian currents that are “branded” as French rationalism and as “Enlightenment philosophy” are, instead, precisely the ones that adhere most closely to Italian empirical reality, insofar as they conceive of the state as the concrete form of an Italian economic development. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §150, 230) The fact that Germany was the “theoretical consciousness” of the French Jacobin revolutionaries does not mean that there was no moral and intellectual revolution – and resources – brewing up in Germany itself as a result of the “organic intellectuals” of the German bourgeoisie: “the really ‘Jacobin’ currents are the ones that seem most autochthonous in that they appear to develop a traditional Italian current,” that is, the very internationalism of the old cosmopolitan intellectuals (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §150, 230). Drawing from one of these cosmopolitan intellectuals in Italy (Croce), Gramsci argues that the Protestant Reformation created a popular culture that only after a long period of maturation “created the solid foundations of the modern state” and then “high culture” (Gramsci 2011, Q4 §3, 142). The fact that German statehood remained trapped in the form of feudalism – the monarchy, the rule of landed elites and the continuation of serfdom until well into the nineteenth century – does not mean that a modern constitutional state was not already gestating as the content of its theoretical consciousness – German Idealism – and that, in this precise sense, this theoretical consciousness was not helping to create the very premises that would, eventually, become its presuppositions. In the Italian Renaissance, too, a vernacularly oriented thinker like Machiavelli became the most important contributor to the political theory of the state precisely because he was “more strongly influenced by France, Spain, etc. and their travail of national unification, than by Italy” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §150, 230). And in nineteenth-­century Germany, Hegel himself, the greatest of the classical German philosophers “straddling the French Revolution and the Restoration” and joining “the two moments of philosophical life, materialism and spiritualism, dialectically” (Gramsci 2011, Q4 §3, 143), managed to conceive of the state as “a thing itself ” and as “a rational absolute” precisely because of his connection with the deepest aspirations

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   45 of an intellectually reformed bourgeoisie that still acted as a movement or as a collective will. In this sense, then, Hegel’s “combined” and dialectical thought became the horizon of what was politically possible in Germany’s future. Rather than reject the purely theoretical, speculative or universal idea of the Hegelian state, then, Gramsci argues that in places like Italy “the universal is better served by greater particularity” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §2, 6) and not by a dogmatic rejection of the abstract universal and its banishment to the land of dead-­end utopias. Rather than reducing the conclusions of Classical German Philosophy to “spiritual nonsense,” Gramsci thinks of this philosophy and its intellectuals as “enlivening” the very particularity of the German national liberal movement from 1848 to 1870. Now, does the particular national experience of Italy not need its own theoretically “combined” version of historical materialism and its own committed intellectuals to enliven its own process of autonomous popular moral and intellectual counter-­hegemony? Does this not mean a rejoining of “materialism and spiritualism dialectically, just as Hegel had tried to do and as Marx really did,” a new “romantic attitude, but of the kind of romanticism that consciously seeks for its own serene classical quality”? (Gramsci 1992, Q4 §3, 143–144). Is that not what Gramsci calls on the philosophy of praxis to do among the people, and does he not expect the cultural dissemination of historical materialism – the philosophy of the subaltern classes, inheritors of Classical German Philosophy, “crowning point of this entire movement of intellectual and moral reform” (Gramsci 1992, Q4 §3, 143) – to spur a molecular moral and intellectual counter-­hegemony in Italy, as the tradition running from the Protestant Reformation to Classical German Philosophy once did in Germany? Does Gramsci not reverse and then counter-­reverse the historical sequence of party and intellectuals in Germany when he claims, first, that “the historical bearers of the Reformation are the German people, not the intellectuals” (Gramsci 1992, Q4 §3, 143–144) and, second, that a new group of intellectuals “surfaced slowly from within the reformed popular masses – and then came the German philosophy of 1700–1800”? Should this sequence and historical combination of material and intellectual events not be considered seriously again by a critical, combined and dialectical Marxism in Italy as well? Is this not the kind of task that the struggle against mature civil societies in industrialized – “Taylorized” – liberal capitalist societies demands? In the context of what Gramsci calls the “people-­nation” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §76, 72), the context of the universalism of a greater particularity or, in Hegel’s terms, “concrete universality,” Gramsci argues, “What is ‘politics’ for the productive class becomes ‘rationality’ for the intellectual class,” and, thus, the rationality of the intellectual is really not superior to the politics of the masses, just as “ideological abstraction” is not really superior to “economic concreteness.” When certain Marxists propose the superiority of rationality (the core of Realpolitik) or ideological abstraction (the claim of political leadership), then, they are actually performing

46   On Moral and Intellectual Reform an inversion of the relationship between structures and superstructures, particular and universal, people and intellectuals in the wrong way. What is needed, instead, is a new Hegelian reinversion of the simplistic Marxist inversion of Hegel’s notion of the Absolute, whereby the internal dynamic of this Absolute becomes once again combined philosophically and practically with the external dynamic of morality and politics, as happens in the Gramscian idea of the Modern Prince.3 Is this, then, not a subtle critique of Lenin’s famous comments in his “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic” (1914–1916), in the Philosophical Notebooks, that “The Thing-­in-itself is altogether an empty, lifeless abstraction” and that Hegel’s Absolute is actually an intellectualist “nonsense” (Lenin 1895)? Is this not an argument against the dismissal of autonomous and marginal popular politics or the politics of the subaltern classes on the grounds that consciousness among them or their organic thinkers is not yet scientific enough, and economic concreteness not yet properly resolved into clear and distinct ideological lines? Is Gramsci’s call to turn “some criteria of historical and cultural evaluation upside down” thus not an activist – and intellectually committed – call for a daring philosophical and political Master recombination of the dialectical logic of the Hegelian Absolute with the Marxist Idea of Communism rather than the strategic logic of the dictator (Fascist or otherwise), the critical conception of the state as the “thing in itself ” rather than the sycophantic and bureaucratic idea of the state as a mere tool for hegemony (consensual or otherwise), and the Idea of Communism itself as the internal horizon for an autonomous counter-­ hegemonic politics of the popular and marginal masses (positional or otherwise)? Is this not a call to reevaluate the claim of those who reevaluated Marx’s famous assertion that all he had done, in fact, was to have turned Hegel’s dialectic “right side up” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §152, 231–232)? “Therefore” – writes Gramsci somewhat lyrically (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §4, 11) – “I return to the people.” Gramsci’s call for intellectual and moral reform leads him to a discussion of some of the greatest intellectual and moral movements in Europe, starting with the Protestant Reformation and climaxing with German Idealism. As we saw above, Gramsci is concerned with how, to what extent and in what form these cultural and intellectual movements did, or did not, take root in Italy. In the German case, Gramsci writes, “the intellectual coarseness of the men of the Reformation foreshadowed classical German philosophy [Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel] and the vast movement of modern German culture” up to and including the Weimar republic (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §1, 154). But in the case of Italy, Gramsci claims, the best that the Italian Risorgimento was able to produce philosophically was the figure and philosophy of Benedetto Croce, the quintessential intellectual in Gramsci’s Notebooks. How, then, does Gramsci relate to this iconic thinker of Italian liberal modernity? Gramsci regards Croce as an organic intellectual of the bourgeoisie.4 But  no comment on Croce stands out more glaringly than Gramsci’s

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   47 comparison of Croce with Erasmus, the quintessential Renaissance Catholic theologian and humanist philosopher. Despite his greatness and influence as well as the depth and breadth of his knowledge, Erasmus is nevertheless said to have made the following narrow-­minded remark about Luther: “Wherever Luther goes, culture dies.” In like manner, Gramsci argues, Croce attacked historical materialism for its “scientism” and its “materialistic superstition.” Despite Croce’s extensive engagement with Hegelian philosophy, he “no longer understands how the historical process that started with the ‘medieval’ Luther could extend all the way to Hegel” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §1, 154, italics added). Beyond misunderstanding the nature of the historical process that sustained his own thought, Croce also failed to “go to the people” and thus become a “ ‘national’ [organic] element (just like the men of the Renaissance, as opposed to the Lutherans and Calvinists), because he has not been able to create a group of disciples who would have made his philosophy ‘popular’, [. . .] so that it could become an educational factor [. . .] for the common man” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §1, 154). Given his stature and significance in Italian intellectual and, indeed, moral life, Croce’s failure to reach the people represents, for Gramsci, the failure of traditional, cosmopolitan intellectuals to create an entirely post-­Catholic and post-­corporatist national culture. But this is not just the failure of traditional intellectuals, but the great failure of the entire Italian bourgeoisie and the Risorgimento. Gramsci’s critique of Italian intellectuals such as Croce occurs as part of a simultaneous gesture to critically recover or reconstruct “the source” of the philosophy of praxis as found in the most advanced philosophy of France and Germany in the nineteenth century. In his reading of Hegel, for instance, Gramsci finds the link between will, consciousness and action and their articulation into a single spiritual ensemble that constitutes the Ego – the inner self – of the modern bourgeois subject. Whereas in Germany, Gramsci says, citing Hegel, “the new principle [of subjectivity or particularity] ‘has burst forth as thought, spirit, Notion,’ in France it has manifested itself ‘in the form of actuality’ ” and, particularly, in the form of Jacobin rebellion. In a revealing statement, commenting on the above passage from Hegel, Gramsci signals his desire to rearticulate the philosophy of praxis once again by means of a return to “sources,” that is, a new practical synthesis of Marx and Hegel, one specifically geared for the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century, particularly struggles against civil society. He writes: “This passage from Hegel is, I believe, the same one that Marx specifically refers to in the Holy Family when he cites Proudhon against Bauer. But the passage from Hegel, it seems to me, is much more important as 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. The ‘source,’ then, of the theory of the unity of theory and practice” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §208, 355). In fact, for Gramsci, the philosophy of praxis

48   On Moral and Intellectual Reform absorbs this whole tradition of German Idealism in the form of “the subjectivity of the superstructure” (Gramsci 1975b, Q10II §11II, 1244). In this way, too, Gramsci responds to one of Croce’s key objections to historical materialism and asserts the protagonism, the passion and virtue,5 and the impure but transformative act at the heart of modern revolutionary praxis.6 In reference to how Hegel himself interpreted the meaning of his immediate philosophical predecessors in the tradition stretching from Kant to Schelling, Buttigieg references the following pertinent quote from section 3, “Recent German Philosophy,” of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: In the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the revolution to which in Germany mind has in these latter days advanced, was formally thought out and expressed; the sequence of these philosophies shows the course which thought has taken. In this great epoch of the world’s history, whose inmost essence is laid hold of in the philosophy of history, two nations only have played a part, the German and the French, and this in spite of their absolute opposition, or rather because they are so opposite. The other nations have taken no real inward part in the same, although politically they have indeed so done, both through their governments and their people. (Quoted by Buttigieg in Gramsci 2007, 627, note 4, italics added)7,8 In a further passage from The Philosophy of History, Hegel adds: The metaphysical process by which [the] abstract Will develops itself so as to attain a definite form of Freedom, and how Rights and Duties are evolved therefrom, this is not the place to discuss. It may however be remarked that the same principle obtained speculative recognition in Germany, in the Kantian Philosophy. According to it the simple unity of Self-­consciousness, the Ego, constitutes the absolutely independent Freedom, and is the Fountain of all general conceptions – i.e., all conceptions elaborated by Thought – Theoretical Reason; and likewise of the highest of all practical determinations [or conceptions] – Practical Reason, as free and pure Will; and Rationality of Will is none other than the maintaining one’s self in pure Freedom – willing this and this alone – Right purely for the sake of Right, Duty purely for the sake of Duty. Among the Germans this view assumed no other form than that of tranquil theory; but the French wished to give it practical effect. Two questions, therefore suggest themselves: Why did this principle of Freedom remain merely formal? And why did the French alone, and not the Germans, set about realizing it? (Quoted by Buttigieg in Gramsci 2007, 627–628, note 5, italics added) The principle that obtained “speculative recognition in the Kantian philosophy” was, in fact, the very same principle that had already obtained

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   49 widespread practical, moral and spiritual validity through the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern bourgeois subjectivity. It is this Protestant ethic and spirit that underpin Kantian Practical Reason, the “free and pure Will,” a moral and intellectual reform that enabled an increasingly self-­assertive and powerful class of people to experience themselves – and, indeed, speak of themselves – as autonomous individuals and as “selves in pure Freedom willing this and this alone – Right purely for the sake of Right, Duty purely for the sake of Duty.” In a sense, then, Hegel is wrong when he asks, “Why did this principle of Freedom remain merely formal?” and “why did the French alone, and not the Germans, set about realizing it?” In fact, the Germans had set out to realize this principle as practical reason precisely through the Protestant Reformation and its legacy long before the French were able to do so as political reason. By the time the Germans were ready to elaborate these ideas in thought in the form of Classical German Philosophy, the French were finally able to realize them in political practice through the French Revolution. This is the reason why Gramsci insists throughout the Notebooks on the necessity of thoroughly understanding the Protestant Reformation as the precursor of Classical German Philosophy and, indeed, as the correct model to be emulated – in terms of a moral and intellectual reform – in his own Italy and by revolutionary intellectuals. For the Protestant Reformation is, for Gramsci, the quintessential model of a “war of position” fought within the religious, cultural and spiritual trenches and embankments of the old historical bloc. And Gramsci, of course, is also keenly aware of the philosophical links drawn by Hegel between the “Ego” as “absolutely independent Freedom” and “Fountain of all conception” and the role of the “Will” in “maintaining one’s self in pure Freedom” and in growing abstraction from, and negations of, the universal. For these links underpin the very common sense and moral universalism of the bourgeois self, now firmly protected by the trenches and embankments of modern civil society and the taken-­for-granted moral validity, the common sense, of liberal capitalism. But Gramsci did not significantly engage the emerging work of psychoanalysis and its critique of the “psychophysics” of the modern Taylorized and Fordist self. Insofar as Gramsci does not develop his insightful critique of the “trench system” of the “most advanced states” into a deeper critique of the modern self itself, the bourgeois Ego or the idea of “one’s self ” as “pure Freedom” inscribed at the heart of liberal capitalism, and instead directly translates these ideas to collective terms and sets out to defend a morality of the collective subject, of the collective will and of “man as mass” aiming towards a “totalitarian universalism” through the Modern Prince, he remains trapped in this regard precisely in the very categories of liberal philosophical thought and political practice that he is desperately trying to demolish. In this sense, Gramsci reproduces a contradiction within his own philosophy of praxis. Gramsci is certainly right in emphasizing anew the immanent link between civil society and the modern state, a link that he knows began

50   On Moral and Intellectual Reform with the historical process that started with the “medieval” Luther and that extends all the way to Hegel, with the profound transformations in culture, morality and politics that brought about the very modern self of civil society that confronts us like the original crime scene of a collective sacrifice. The Protestant Reformation, as Gramsci argues, became connected to the “common man” in a deeply subjective and religious sense, and, through the very subjectivity of the rising bourgeoisie and its infinite expansion, transformed itself into what Gramsci calls a “law of numbers” able to keep the large masses of people politically passive. And civil society is certainly not the vehicle that will “stir the great multitudes out of passivity, that is, to destroy the ‘law’ of large numbers.” What is needed for that is an alternative principle, what Gramsci calls “the collective organism,” that “knows the sentiments of the great masses through ‘coparticipation’ and ‘compassionality’ and, if the collective organism becomes successful and vitally embeds itself among the masses just as the Protestant Reformation did so as to know ‘their sentiments through experience of immediate particular’, then it may very well be able to overturn the very self that has become deeply lodged even in the ‘common man’ ” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §6, 159). For Gramsci does see the Protestant Reformation as a process led by nationally linked intellectuals and leading to a profound moral reform of societies, reaching into the very process of subject formation at the dawn of, and indeed at the heart of, modernity. By contrast, he sees movements such as the Renaissance or the Risorgimento, particularly in the Italian context, as remaining purely intellectual, international or cosmopolitan, led by intellectuals like Erasmus or Croce, but without managing to establish an organic connection to the popular masses of society. Therefore, Gramsci tells us, “It is clear that one cannot understand the molecular process by which a new culture asserts itself in the contemporary world unless one has understood the Reformation-­Renaissance historical nexus” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §43, 192). Attempting to dig a little deeper into the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the Reformation leads Gramsci to propose an interesting quasi-­Weberian link between “grace” and capitalism that is worth noting here.9 As he writes, The historico-­cultural node that needs to be sorted out in the study of the Reformation is the transformation of the concept of grace from something that should “logically” result in the greatest fatalism and passivity into a real practice of enterprise and initiative on a world scale that was [instead] its dialectical consequence and that shaped the ideology of nascent capitalism. (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §44, 193) In another note, where Gramsci further analyzes the relation between structure and superstructure, capitalism and the theology of grace, he again makes an explicit reference to Weber. What needs to be explained, he

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   51 writes, is “the paradox of a narrowly and barrenly materialistic ideology that, in practice, gives rise to a passion for the ideal, to an ardor for renewal that, in a certain sense, is undeniably sincere.” And to explain this, we have the example of “the Protestant theory of predestination and grace and how it gave rise to an early and vast expansion of the spirit of initiative” in places like Germany, or later to the Jansenist “activist conversion of the theory of grace” into a passion for the ideal that flowed into the French Revolution (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §231, 376). In terms of the Protestant Reformation, therefore, we have to reverse Marx’s famous claim in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – in turn influenced by Hegel himself – to the effect that “in politics the Germans thought what other nations did,” or that Germany was reduced to being simply the “theoretical consciousness” for other countries. For, as argued above, the Protestant Reformation, with its passion for the ideal, was as much a political development as a religious and theological one, and, as such, the Germans actually did structurally and superstructurally what other nations, including the French, only thought about later. Gramsci’s link between grace and capitalism may not be wholly original, precisely because this link had already been made and systematically explored by Weber. But we should not forget that Gramsci is working within the discursive universe of Second International Marxism; like Lukács, he is deeply interested in foregrounding the importance of these seemingly superstructural elements in the making of contemporary forms of political consciousness and practice, and argues that their meaning and influence exceeds any form of mechanical or economistic reductionism. Yet, as remarkable as it is, Gramsci’s effort in this regard does not go deeply enough into the exploration of the concepts of grace and predestination, and does not trace these ideas and their fateful consequences all the way back to their “source” in – as I see it – the life and thought of Augustine of Hippo, the “inventor of the inner self,” the first great Church Father to again invert Paul’s critique of the Law back on its head,10 the master thinker of the subjected will as true freedom through grace. However, Gramsci’s understanding of the theological foundations of these ideas and their continuing influence even in his own collective translation of them remains rudimentary. In some ways, the philosophy of the will, the ego, self-­consciousness and freedom, what Pippin and Rozitchner call in their own terms the persistence of Augustinian subjectivity in modernity and within the left (Pippin 2005; Rozitchner 1968, 1997)11 and what, when extended to the identity and practice of collective subjects or humanity as a whole, Benhabib calls the “philosophy of the subject” (Benhabib 1986), remains an unresolved problem in Gramsci. As largely articulated by pre-­Hegelian Classical German Philosophy, the philosophy of self-­consciousness remains deeply lodged at the heart of Gramsci’s understanding of the individual will and freedom and, by extension, of the attribution of these properties to his notion of the collective subject. Yes, Gramsci does take steps in the

52   On Moral and Intellectual Reform direction of solving this problem by critically examining and challenging the “psychophysical” adaptation of people to the conditions posited and required by Taylorization and the transition to the new Fordist industrial and cultural practices of liberal capitalism. This process, Gramsci tells us by echoing a quip Taylor himself once offered, renders people into “trained monkeys,” thus leading not simply to a loss of humanity but to the replacement of the human essence by exchange value. Gramsci thus unwittingly transfers this model of the individual will to the level of collective subjects and repeatedly attempts to give it a historical materialist shape in the form of autonomous, constitutive, historical-­bloc-transcending collective action. But Gramsci did have the philosophical resources to undertake a deeper critique of the bourgeois self. Marx himself, for example, not only offers a critique of English political economy and its notions of civil society; he also draws from Hegel to construct an incisive critique of the very Kantian and liberal conception of the self that Gramsci ambivalently retains as the philosophical heart of collective action. For Marx, in fact, the task of critique involved “a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the German political and legal consciousness as practiced hereto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of a science, is the speculative philosophy of law itself ” (quoted by Buttigieg in Gramsci 2007, 628). Of course, there is no proper critique of the “speculative philosophy of law” unless there is also a critique of the philosophy of the bourgeois subject underpinning it. After all, Marx tells us, this philosophy is founded on the modern idea of “rights,” bourgeois civil society, parliamentarism and the modern state, which, because of the transvaluation of values effected by the system of reality in liberal capitalist society, actually “disregards real man or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination” (quoted by Buttigieg in Gramsci 2007, 628). Gramsci’s critique of civil society remains unfinished precisely because he does not develop his concept of hegemony according to its own immanent logic and use it to reach deeper into the trenches and fortifications of civil society, into the heart of moral and intellectual life, that is to say, into an examination of the modern bourgeois self. For this is the subject that underpins the category of modern civil society, and even (if not more so) knowledge at the level of “common sense” – including the “Ptolemaic worldview” that Gramsci says prevails as a form of knowledge and morality, a conception of the world not only among certain ruling groups but, quite crucially, among some segments of the “masses” of people. In a crucial way, then, Gramsci leaves basic ideas of “free will” and the self untouched, and, in doing so, commits the metonymic error of thinking about the collective life of subaltern classes precisely in terms of this individualist subject. Gramsci understands well the process through which the popular masses become collectively conscious of themselves as an autonomous, sovereign but also historically committed actor – thanks to the work of their organic intellectuals – and the steps they need to take to become organized into revolutionary

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   53 political parties or the New Prince, seeking to constitute themselves into a new society and a new state. Moreover, Gramsci places a great deal of emphasis on the work of these “organic intellectuals” as developers of new forms of moral consciousness and leaders in the “struggle for objectivity” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §177, 337). As he writes in the same passage, What does “objective” mean? Does it not mean “humanly objective” and therefore also humanly “subjective”? It follows, then, that objective means universal subjective. In other words: the subject knows objectively insofar as knowledge is real for the whole human race historically unified in a unitary cultural system. The struggle for objectivity is thus the struggle for the cultural unification of the human race. This unification process is the process of the objectivization of the subject, who becomes increasingly a concrete universal, historically concrete.12 But Gramsci is also fully aware – and had been since the early days of his political and ideological practice in Turin – that the passage to a new society and a new state requires a certain kind of “moral action” not only on the part of individuals but also on the part of collectives. He is right in saying that the moral action that must be developed as part of the process of counter-­hegemony cannot rely on moralistic formulae like Kant’s categorical imperative, according to which, in Gramsci’s deliberately impure terms, each abstract individual should in a puritan way “behave as you would want everybody else to behave in the same circumstances” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §156, 323). This somewhat impure rendition of Hegel’s critique of the Kantian categorical imperative, deliberate or not, helps Gramsci develop his own critique of individualistically based forms of modern liberalism and, by extension, the bourgeois politics of human rights and mutual recognition. Paraphrasing Hegel, Gramsci writes: Analyzed realistically, Kant’s formula is only applicable to a specific milieu, with that milieu’s moral superstitions and barbaric mores; it is a static, empty formula into which one can pour any actual historical content (with its contradictions, naturally, so that what is a truth on  the other side of the Pyrenees is a falsehood on this side of the Pyrenees). (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §156, 323)13 However, as a remedy to the emptiness of Kant’s moral imperative, Gramsci offers us a limited, even if collective, version of the moral grammar of Second International Marxism, a grammar and an ideology that demanded again a retrofitted commitment to yet another abstract universal, yet another process of “the purification of impulses” and yet another dogmatic directive instructing the people, the militants and the intellectuals to be “freed both from their [embodied] form as immediate

54   On Moral and Intellectual Reform and natural determinations.” Although the ethics of revolutionary sacrifice as a necessary component of revolutionary commitment in the twentieth century – as both Gramsci and Ché Guevara understood all too well in their own distinct ways (Burgos 2009)14 – requires a preferential option for the “impure” act, what Hegel calls the moment of negativity and finitude, the mundane, the embodied and the passionate, a revolutionary ethics requires us to move towards a third moment, the moment of collective and historical solidarity and recognition, the moment when “in its restriction, in this other, the will is with itself; in determining itself it still remains with itself and does not cease to keep hold of the universal” (Hegel 2008, 33, italics added).15 A simple restriction of the impure and embodied act in the name of the universal is thus not only insufficient, but potentially the root of yet another version of moral authoritarianism or the absolutist political correctness of contemporary left projects and their sanctimonious propensity to ever new forms of moral purity and regulation.16 Already, the politics and ideology of Stalinist purges had been substantively based precisely on the ever-­elusive search to purify the Party and the state, to purge the revolution of all mundane “bourgeois” contamination, in a way that Gramsci himself anticipated and critiqued as possible and dangerous “Statolatry.”17,18 The Gramscian moral grammar of subjectivity is, even if carefully translated into the collective morality of the Modern Prince, no better than the “primitive infantilism” and deterministic consequentialism of thinkers like Bukharin, whom Gramsci himself condemned repeatedly precisely for their vulgarization and, indeed, betrayal of “the authentic testimony of Marx” and the ethical Jacobinism of Lenin (Q7 §24, Gramsci 2007, 173).19 Nor, of course, is this moral grammar properly equipped to help us fight the “bad infinity” that, as the historical examples of the French and Russian Revolutions illustrate quite well, eventually took over the politics of Jacobin Terror as well as the logic of endless Stalinist purges, paranoia and repression. Yet Gramsci’s critique of Kant’s moral and political philosophy is certainly on the right track, and by already proposing a return to Hegel as the proper starting point for an ethical and political correction, it provides us with a more suitable avenue for our praxis of critique. Repeating a formula developed by Marx in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Gramsci maintains that a new society and a new state cannot be developed until all the necessary social conditions are ready for it. But the logical development of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and its background operation from within subjects themselves does not simply require the further development of “necessary social conditions” ready for the kind of counter-­hegemonic revolutionary process that preoccupied Gramsci before and during his prison years. In fact, the development of the myth-­Prince as articulator of a new collective actor also requires a permanent revolution of moral consciousness in the members of the subaltern groups that will constitute the “national-­ popular” actor of revolution. Before going to prison, in fact, Gramsci

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   55 developed the important insight that revolutionary consciousness cannot be developed without a radical change in ethical character, and that this change in character is often the result of painful subjective disruptions. He indicated this, for example, in his 1920 “Speech to the Anarchists,” in which he borrowed the famous expression “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” from Romain Rolland, an expression he repeats in at least one of his letters from prison and in the Prison Notebooks themselves (on this, see Santucci 2010, 121–123). Gramsci’s critique of Crocean liberalism, and his particular version of the idea of bourgeois freedom, thus represents a devastating critique of the ideas of free will/free choice, of the individual as free will, as self-­possession or self-­property, and of these ideas as the content of freedom in the sphere where this freedom is hegemonically exercised as “free choice,” that is, civil society. Perhaps it is worth summarizing these stages once more just to appreciate their critical value. First, as Gramsci himself argued, repeating Hegel’s three moments in the development of the will and consciousness, “Consciousness of being part of a hegemonic force (that is, political consciousness) is the first stage on the way to greater self-­awareness, namely, on the way to unifying practice and theory” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §169, 330). Second, “Self-­consciousness in the historical sense means the creation of a vanguard of intellectuals: a ‘mass’ does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become ‘independent’ without organizing itself, and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is, without organizers and leaders. But this process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult.” Finally, so as to prevent the universal from staying universal and thus reverting to a new prescriptive authoritarianism, self-­ transformation must constantly involve elaborating and reelaborating “consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world” and in engaging with “one’s sphere of activity” so as to “participate actively in the creation of universal history” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §204, 352).20 Taking one’s “predestination” and “providence” into one’s hands means, therefore, that “The reach and the ascendancy of the ‘force of circumstance’ will diminish. Why? Precisely because the ‘subaltern’ subject who yesterday was a ‘thing’ is now no longer a ‘thing’ but a ‘historical person’; whereas yesterday he was not responsible because he was ‘resisting’ an extraneous will he is now responsible, no longer a ‘resister’ but an ‘active agent’, a protagonist” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §205, 353). In other words, in Gramsci’s conception of the impure ethical subject, “Critical understanding of the self takes place therefore through a struggle of political ‘hegemonies’ and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a higher level of one’s own conception of reality” (SPN 333; Gramsci 1975b, 1385). What this idea suggests is that the task of moral and intellectual reform – as the foundation of constructing a new collective will, organizing a new myth-­Prince, engaging in the Jacobin war of position within but against civil society and liberal capitalism while at the same time expecting the response of passive revolution as a standard spin of ideology – requires nothing less than the

56   On Moral and Intellectual Reform overcoming of the bourgeois subject itself, its (in Adorno’s words) “authoritarian personality,” and what in this subject has the ethical propensity to (in Fromm’s words) – “escape freedom” and seek consolation and reassurance in ideologies of economic or political submission or discourses of moral and transcendental fundamentalism. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony – the subject of the next chapter – comes close to capturing the hidden process that renders domination psychologically desirable and ideologically binding. But, as stated above, it is my contention that he left unfinished this concept and the critique of the bourgeois self qua citizen, civil society and liberal capitalism that it opens up. As already suggested in the Introduction, Žižek offers us one way to further elaborate the concept of hegemony, in the lineage of Gramsci, in the following terms: “To work, the ruling ideology has to incorporate a series of features in which the exploited majority will be able to recognize its authentic longings. In other words, each hegemonic universality has to incorporate at least two particular contents, the authentic popular content as well as its distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation” (Žižek 1997, 29). Far from constituting one more piece of what popular blogger Deogolwulf dismisses as Žižek’s “posturing and piffle and political knavery” (Deogolwulf 2007),21 I find the conceptual predecessor of this idea well formed and incisively articulated by Hegel in his critique of civil society. And it is found not just in Hegel but also, in fact, in one of his most tenacious critics: in Kierkegaard’s own critique of the modern bourgeois subject. Kierkegaard articulates this thought in many of his works, and the following passage, from Fear and Trembling (1983), is an excellent example of the Danish thinker’s surgical operation on the subject: The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its τελοζ [end, purpose] but is itself the τελοζ for everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it goes not further. The single individual, sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τελοζ in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal. As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal. Every time the single individual, after having entered the universal, feels an impulse to assert himself as the single individual, he is in a spiritual trial [Anfœgtelse], from which he can work himself only by repentantly surrendering as the single individual in the universal. If this is the highest that can be said of man and his existence, then the ethical is of the same nature as a person’s eternal salvation, which is his τελοζ forevermore and at all times, since it would be a contradiction for this to be capable of being surrendered (that is, teleologically suspended),

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   57 because as soon as this is suspended it is relinquished, whereas that which is suspended is not relinquished but is preserved in the higher, which is its τελοζ. If this is the case, then Hegel is right in “The Good and Conscience,” where he qualifies man only as the individual and considers this qualification as a “moral form of evil” (see especially The Philosophy of Right), which must be annulled [ophœvet] in the teleology of the moral in such a way that the single individual who remains in that stage either sins or is immersed in spiritual trial. (Kierkegaard 1983, 54; italics added) Instead of pursuing his thoughts on intellectual and moral reform and turning them inward into a critique of the modern bourgeois subject as a presupposition of civil society, as the internal standard by which civil society judges its own teleological development, and thus into an ethical and liberating program for the permanent annulment of the subject’s singularity in order to become the universal, Gramsci turns to a relatively simple moral philosophy of the collective subject to articulate his thoughts on the imperative of action as both fulfillment and revolution: If the conditions do exist, the completion of the tasks becomes “duty,” “will” becomes free. Morality thus becomes, in a certain sense, a search for the necessary conditions for the freedom of the will, a will aimed at a certain end and at proving that the necessary conditions exist. (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §4, 158) Instead of pursuing the implications of his radical historicist articulation of the philosophy of praxis, Gramsci calls his own replacement for the Kantian categorical imperative the “scientific foundations for a morality of historical materialism.” Although this idea of a “moral science” has never been widely adopted outside small numbers of Communist/socialist intellectuals, it nonetheless plays a large role in Gramsci’s theorizations. Gramsci’s unfinished development of the idea of moral and intellectual reform thus leaves the central subject of modern civil society largely intact. Although it is going in the right direction, Gramsci’s moral and political philosophy of praxis nonetheless ends up falling short of what is needed and what needs to be done to uproot the foundations of Western civil society, that is, the modern bourgeois “self ” that is lodged at the heart of modern forms of civil society and liberal capitalism. It is precisely in the direction of developing a critique of this self that we can also develop Gramsci’s idea of hegemony and attempt to render it more adequate for the revolutionary tasks of our present time.

58   On Moral and Intellectual Reform

Notes   1 On Machiavelli’s distinction between “the imagined and the real” (and between what is and what should be), Buttigieg rightly points to the opening paragraph of chapter 15 of The Prince (Gramsci 2007, 583–584).   2 This is a good place to point out that the expression “moral and intellectual reform” was coined by the French thinker Ernest Renan in his 1871 work La réforme intellectuelle et morale. Although I have not found evidence that Gramsci was directly familiar with this work, at the request of his friend Piero Sraffa he did write a review of Croce’s Storia d’Europa nel secolo XIX in 1931, in which, in his discussion of the relationship of Croce and Sorel and the question of the “religion of liberty,” he also “posed the problem of ‘intellectual and moral struggle’.” As Jean-­Pierre Potier has pointed out in his biographical essay on Piero Sraffa, “Sorel did indeed owe much to Ernest Renan’s philosophy of history, and, in 1906, devoted to it Le Système historique de Renan, in which he indicated that the method best adapted to the study of historical phenomena originated from psychology” (Potier 2005, 34).   3 The “absolute,” Žižek tells us in his most recent reading of Hegel, “does not add some deeper, more substantial, dimension – all it does is include (subjective) illusion in (objective) truth itself. The ‘absolute’ standpoint makes us see how reality includes fiction (or fantasy), how the right choice only emerges after the wrong one” (Žižek 2014a, 186).   4 Thomas’s comments on the relationship between Croce and Gramsci are interesting. According to Thomas, Gramsci understood Croce’s thought not as external to Marxism properly understood (as Anderson and others have suggested), but as a deformed moment internal to the Marxist paradigm, standing on its head and needing to be placed the right way up. (Thomas 2009, 260, n. 45)   5 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, editors of the SPN, have captured quite well the meaning of what Pocock calls the “Machiavellian moment” when they write the following: Literally “virtue,” but in connection with Machiavelli better rendered by a word without moral overtones, such as “prowess.” In The Prince, Machiavelli sets up an opposition between fortuna (roughly – “circumstance”) and virtù – the ability of the individual to act on and overcome the given world of circumstance. In Latin virtus meant an inherent quality such as (for example and in particular) military valor: Machiavelli tends to make it rather a quality of the will. The moral sense of the English word “virtue” evolved through an intermediary phase in Stoic and Early Christian thought where it meant “inner strength” and hence the ability to act well. (SPN 413n, quoted by Buttigieg, Gramsci 2007, 643, n. 3)   6 Buttigieg summarizes Croce’s key objection to historical materialism as follows: In Elementi di politica (pp. 91–92), Croce wrote of historical materialism, “A kind of dialectics did follow . . . naturalism, but it happened to be in the form of historical materialism, which considered economic life a reality and moral life an appearance, an illusion or a ‘superstructure’ as it was called” (Croce, Politics and Morals, p. 95). (Gramsci 2007, 498, n. 16)   7 The common view that for Hegel, the history or, indeed, the life of other countries or regions outside Germany, France or Europe does not count for anything is deeply flawed. In fact, the opposite is the case. What other nations have not done is take real inward part – the German part – in developing the new

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   59 principle of subjectivity or particularity, even though they have indeed developed the political – the French part – “both through their governments and their people.” It is the unilateral and, indeed, abstract development of the first part that Hegel regards as the key error of the modern world. And an example of the development of the second part is what the Haitian people set out to do under the protagonist leadership of what C.  L.  R. James calls the Black Jacobins. It is precisely because of this nuanced view in Hegel that Susan Buck-­Morss’s objections to the German philosopher must now be reevaluated (James 1989; Buck-­Morss 2009).   8 With the exception of the return to Kantianism in Bauer, Gramsci argues that Second International Marxism was largely constituted by the violent exclusion of the legacy of German Idealism and its careful integration into the philosophy of praxis. He writes: The philosophy of praxis as the result and the crowning point of all previous history. Out of the critique of Hegelianism arose modern idealism and the philosophy of praxis. Hegelian immanentism becomes historicism, but it is absolute historicism only with the philosophy of praxis – absolute historicism or absolute humanism. (SPN 417; Gramsci 1975c, 1826) For Gramsci, then, The philosophy of praxis has been a ‘moment’ of modern culture. To a certain extent it has determined or enriched certain cultural currents. Study of this fact, which is very important and full of significance, has been neglected or quite simply ignored by the so-­called orthodoxy, and for this reason: the most important philosophical combination that has taken place has been between the philosophy of praxis and various idealistic tendencies, a fact which, to the so-­called orthodoxy, essentially bound to a particular cultural current of the last quarter of the last century (positivism, scientism), has seemed an absurdity if not actually a piece of chicanery. (SPN 388; Gramsci 1975c, 1854)   9 In proposing this link, Gramsci anticipates the work of Latin American philosophy of liberation thinkers, from León Rozitchner and Enrique Dussel to Horacio Cherutti and Raúl Fornet-­Betancourt. 10 The argument that Augustine actually represents an inversion of Paul’s theology, its turning upside down, differs substantively from the recent readings of Augustine offered by leading thinkers of the so-­called “religious turn of philosophy,” including Badiou and Žižek. Sometimes, however, Žižek makes correct observations on Augustine, such as this: Saint Augustine took the first major step in this direction by way of “inventing psychological interiority,” thereby withdrawing from a literal and socially dangerous interpretation of Christ’s radical sayings (to follow him one must hate one’s mother and father; the rich will never enter paradise; etc.). (Žižek 2012, 114) 11 We can find a rare discussion of Rozitchner’s critique of the Augustinian self in the work of Bosteels (Bosteels 2011, 2012). 12 Against contemporary Marxists who still cling to the idea of historical materialism as a “science” preoccupied with an “objectivity” that is just out there “independently of the mind,” Gramsci replies in classic Hegelian terms: In vulgar materialist philosophy, the concept “objective” appears to mean an objectivity that transcends man and can be known even apart from man

60   On Moral and Intellectual Reform – this is just a banal form of mysticism and nebulous abstraction. When it is said of a thing that it would exist even if man did not, one is either speaking metaphorically or falling into mysticism. We know phenomena in relation to man, and since man is a becoming, knowledge is a becoming, as well, and so is objectivity, etc. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §177, 337–338) 13 There are many passages that Gramsci could be referencing when paraphrasing Hegel’s critique of the Kantian Categorical Imperative. Buttigieg provides a direct reference to Kant’s famous passage from his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which the Königsberg philosopher writes: “There is, therefore, only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law . . ” (Kant 2012, 31; quoted by Buttigieg in Gramsci 2007, 608). Gramsci’s discussion, however, makes no direct reference to Kant’s texts, and suggests, rather, that he has a passage from Hegel in mind. And one of the most famous Hegelian passages on Kant’s Categorical Imperative is from the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel states, for example, that a will that “wills only the abstract universal,” the Kantian Categorical Imperative, “wills nothing and is therefore no will at all” (Hegel 2008, 31). The will as “the self-­determination of the I,” the will that can “abstract from everything,” the will which is “free only in itself [an sich] is the immediate or natural will,” the most basic will but also the will of “arbitrariness [Willkür],” a will that demands “the purification of impulses” and desires that “they should be freed both from their form as immediate and natural determinations.” This will, Hegel tells us, is “the freedom of the void,” so-­called “negative freedom,” the form of freedom that “appears more concretely in the active fanaticism of both political and religious life,” as happened, according to Hegel, “during the Terror in the French Revolution” when “all differences of talent and authority were supposed to have been superseded” but were, in fact, not fully sublated at all (Hegel 2008, 30). By contrast, willing in the negative or impure moment – in the Gramscian impure “act” – is, in fact, “restriction, since the will, in order to be a will, must restrict itself in some way or other.” And what the will wills is actually impure or, as Hegel calls it, “something” mundane, embodied, capricious and passionate, and always deeply historical. Unlike Kant, Hegel never rejects this second, historical moment of the will, nor does he trivialize it as driven by sinful impulses or evil self-­deception, as happens with Augustine. For the determination of the will through the phenomenology of its body, the history of its impulses and the passion of its ideals is not only necessary but also, in fact, unavoidable. It is the very way of restriction and negation, or the process through which “particularization” becomes real “finitude.” Thus, the very “fact that the will wills something” and that this necessarily means restriction and negation constitutes “the negative aspect of the will,” and, as such, this aspect has been something intolerable in moral and political philosophy from Augustine to the Protestant Reformation and, indeed, Second International Marxism. 14 Michael Löwy has written, quite rightly, that for Ché Guevara, as for Gramsci before him, Marxism was above all “a philosophy of praxis” and a “theory of revolutionary action” (Löwy 2007, 11). 15 This means, therefore, not a movement towards bourgeois humanitarian ethics, but a rejection of it. And Hegel and Marx, before Gramsci, already give us good reasons for doing so. As Žižek explains, The partisans of such an approach, which limits its zeal to combating suffering while leaving intact the economico-­legal edifice within which that suffering takes place, “only demonstrate that, for all their bloodthirsty, mock-­humanist yelping, they regard the social conditions in which the

On Moral and Intellectual Reform   61 bourgeoisie is dominant as the final product, the non plus ultra of history” – Marx’s old complaint which applies perfectly to contemporary humanitarians such as Bill Gates. (Žižek 2014a, 94) 16 I share a number of important points with Peter Hallward’s proposed approach to emancipatory politics (Hallward 2014). These points will be developed in the Conclusion. 17 Gramsci defines “Statolatry” as follows: Attitude of each particular social group toward its own state. The analysis would not be accurate unless one took into account the two forms in which the state manifests itself in the language and culture of particular epochs, namely, as civil society and as political society, as “self-­government” and as “official government.” Statolatry is the term applied to a particular attitude toward the “official government” or political society, which in ordinary language is the form of state life that is called the state and is commonly understood as the entire state. It is understandable that for certain groups at certain historical moments, such as the Jacobins during the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution, “without first having had an extended period of independent cultural and moral development of their own […] a period of statolatry is necessary and indeed appropriate.” But, Gramsci warns us, this kind of “statolatry” must not be abandoned to itself; above all, it must not become theoretical fanaticism or come to be seen as “perpetual.” It must be criticized, precisely in order for it to develop and to produce new forms of state life in which individual and group initiative has a “state” character even if it is not indebted to the “official government.” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §130, 310) 18 As Žižek writes, “This is why Hegel would have immediately comprehended the logic of the reversal of the emancipatory promise of the October Revolution into the Stalinist nightmare, or, today, of the rise of religious fundamentalism in the midst of consumerist permissiveness” (Žižek 2014a, 55). In the struggle to preserve the purity of the Idea, indeed, “one can imagine a Stalinist purge as the effort to liquidate all chimney sweeps who disturb the socialist harmony” but, in the process, “was not Stalin himself also the supreme sweep?” (Žižek 2014a, 771, n 7). 19 It is precisely in terms of an impure but virtuous ethical Jacobinism that Žižek interprets the ethico-­political stand of Lenin after 1914 (Lenin 2011, 4–5). 20 It is in Q8 §204, in fact, that Gramsci restates his view of the key moments in the development of the will and a critical consciousness. 21 The online or mainstream media dismissal of Žižek by bloggers and academics has now reached feverish proportions. In his review of Žižek’s Trouble in Paradise (Žižek 2014b) for the Irish Times, for example, Pól  Ó  Muirí writes that “Žižek’s underlying thesis to this mish-­mash of philosophy and prattle is that ‘Communism remains the horizon, the only horizon, from which one can not only judge but even adequately analyze what goes on today’ ” (Muirí 2015). Even serious left-­wing reviewers like Terry Eagleton cannot, in the end, hide the irresistible urge to point out the ultimately “irresponsible” nature of Žižek’s writing, particularly when the Slovenian thinker makes claims such as “the worst of Stalinism (is better) than the best of the liberal-­capitalist welfare state” (Eagleton 2014).

3 The Process of Hegemony

Gramsci develops his critical idea of hegemony in order to capture and explain a historically unprecedented ethico-­political dynamic that emerges from the gap between structures and superstructures. This process has as its most fundamental task the work of suturing the systemic contradictions of liberal capitalism and sublating the struggles for “moral and intellectual” refoundation from below. Gramsci presents this process in a way that creatively repeats Marx’s own discussion of the process of capital accumulation and the adjustments that capitalism needs to make to resolve the organic contradictions of capital and the self-­destructive tendencies of its system of expanded and uneven reproduction and development. If the accumulation of capital constitutes the basis of capitalism but occurs in a largely invisible way, and if this process nevertheless requires large investments in order to realize profits, Gramsci, in fact, asserts something quite similar about the process of hegemony as well: it is largely invisible and requires what Gramsci calls large outlays of normative investment (a sort of investment of moral values in order to create a more “inclusive” moral universe) and massive “concentrations of power” (a sort of public works program that builds the “trenches and fortifications of the state”) in order to create a new form of common-­sense “moral universalism” and thus secure the hegemonic process itself. As Rosa Luxemburg understood all too well, the process of capital accumulation is, at its heart, a question related to the systemic and expanded reproduction of capitalism, which is nonetheless rendered largely invisible and normalized by the ideological operations of the ruling elites (Luxemburg 1913). As I. I. Rubin was able to show at the time of Gramsci’s writing, at the heart of the process of capital accumulation there is an esoteric and mystifying process that Marx called the “fetishism of commodities” (Rubin 1928). Contrary to the usual interpretations, including Marxist ones, this is no mere effect of distorted perception, advertising campaigns or the unfettered circulation of exchange values in ever-­ expanding markets. Nor is it an effect of Marx’s own extravagant and metaphorical language. Rather, this is something inscribed in the process of subject/commodity production and accumulation itself. At its heart, this is not a process that renders the “true” nature of use values, subjects/labor

The Process of Hegemony   63 or knowledge into “false” representations, identities or ideologies in the minds of those who only perceive them from the perspective of circulation, consumption and performance, or from that of the captivated audience in a spectacle. Instead, this is a process that inscribes animate properties into the life of the commodity, it inscribes the perspective of the viewer into the perceived object itself so that the object is what does the perceiving and the knowing, and it subsumes the audience into the spectacle itself, so that the totality of the spectacle becomes “reality” itself. In sum, this process transvaluates fantasy into reality and thus enables the commodity, the spectacle and the ideology to present themselves as the real social subject and moral universe of liberal capitalism. Only when liberal capitalism can thus normalize the subjects of subalternity and sublate them into this new form of moral universalism can the process of hegemony be said to be operating – in Gramsci’s words – at close to “100 percent.” But what is still missing in Marx and Luxemburg, and in more recent studies that identify ideology with mere deception or cover up, is an account of the process needed to render ideology actually binding from within subjectivity itself. What is needed is a notion that can help us explain what happens precisely if and when there is a lack or failure in the totalization of ideological domination and when renormalization must kick into high gear. The failure of revolutionary struggles in Italy, Germany and elsewhere to transform themselves into successful revolutions, and the failure of the factory council movement in Gramsci’s time, made this question all the more urgent. Gramsci’s critique of civil society and his concept of hegemony as a process, the notion of the subject as hegemony, is thus an attempt – even if still unfinished – to provide an answer. In general terms, Thomas captures the conceptual status and historical importance of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony quite well as “a moment of rupture with the conceptuality of the bourgeois epoch,” as a concept that “points to the possibility of breaking out of this conceptuality’s self-­ referential and contradictory circularity, but it does not itself enact such a liberation; it remains prospective, tentative, exploratory.” In Thomas’s view, this concept is a rather “ ‘practico-­indicative’ or ‘practical’ concept, emerging from within a Konstellation of concepts as a provisional solution to the problems posed within it” (Thomas 2009, 134).1 Although the concept of hegemony does render visible what the autopoietic self-­ referentiality of bourgeois systems of thought and practice systematically conceals, this is only one of its goals. Another one is to critically engage with the discursive universe of Second International Marxism and its inability to inspire individual or collective acts of rebellion and revolution in the “advanced” Western countries of Europe, or its failure to lead towards a successful revolutionary outcome. Thus, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is a formidable attempt to break with hegemonized Marxism, that is, with a Marxism that has uncritically adopted and deeply integrated an essentially bourgeois – instrumental, strategic and Realist – notion of hegemony and liberation into its own orthodoxy and then presented this

64   The Process of Hegemony notion as a true and faithful representation of Marxism itself. This means, as Gramsci writes already at the outset of Notebook 4 (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §14, 156), that “while historical materialism is not subjected to hegemonies [in itself], it has itself started to exercise a hegemony over the old intellectual world [supplying it with more effective weapons and drawing from it as well]. This happens in reciprocal ways, naturally, but that is precisely what needs to be thwarted.” As is widely known, Gramsci attributes the “starting point” of his idea of hegemony to Lenin (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 187; Gramsci 2007, Q7 §33, 183). In doing so, Gramsci presupposes that we have an understanding of how Lenin – and, indeed, Marxism more broadly – constructed the concept of hegemony until then. And it just so happens that there are at least two closely related but nevertheless significantly distinct notions of hegemony found in the work of Lenin alone. The first one is a notion of hegemony developed from within the trenches of clandestine revolutionary struggle just before 1905. The second one is developed on the eve of 1917 or after, as the question of what an actual Soviet government would look like and the tasks of actually governing become a priority. Let’s explore this development for a moment. First, there is a broad concept of hegemony as a political and ideological dynamic developed by Lenin as part of his critique of economism before 1905. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, written in 1902, is an example par excellence of this first and broad notion of hegemony. This work does not represent yet another reiteration of the standard critique of “economism” and “spontaneism” being the wrong strategy for the working class because of its short-­sightedness. Lenin does highlight “the fundamental political tendency of ‘Economism’  ” as being “let the workers carry on the economic struggle (it would be more correct to say the trade-­unionist struggle, because the latter also embraces specifically working-­class politics) and let the Marxist intelligentsia merge with the liberals for the political ‘struggle’  ” (Lenin 1902). But Lenin goes beyond this to develop the insightful perception that “spontaneism” is not only a theoretical approach among the economists but can, under certain conditions, also be a form of bourgeois ideology, influencing workers and their intellectuals from behind their backs. First, it can understandably grow out of their immediate needs and interests as a form of independent response. But, second, it can also become a theoretical justification of pure trade unionism as an expression of the necessary laws of capitalist development and, thus, as standing in need of further or more disciplined organizing because of the system’s inherent tendency to self-­destruct. Clearly, therefore, this critique is directed not at the spontaneous autonomy of the working class but, rather, at short-­termist activism and at the likely cooptation of such a strategy by dominant ideology.2 In other words, just as workers organize and express themselves in the most representative form of association that the liberal capitalist order makes possible for them, just as they exercise their “freedom” to organize and assert their rights as workers and demand

The Process of Hegemony   65 better working conditions within the liberal capitalist order, in doing so, they in fact “strengthen the influence of bourgeois ideology” and the hegemonic argument that practically any incremental change is possible within the current system of power. Lenin is, of course, not rejecting the autonomous form of trade unions in itself, for trade unionism is, in fact, an organizational invention and conquest of the working class. But he is calling our attention to the fundamental ideological dynamic at work already within the workers’ movement and those intellectuals of economism, the “followers of Bernstein.” It is precisely in the internal relationship between theory and practice under conditions of liberal capitalism and its incipient culture industry that Lenin locates the influential dynamic of bourgeois ideology over the autonomous organizing of the working class. This dynamic is what Lenin’s first notion of hegemony as an ideological and political influence over the working class attempts to capture, and does so, in fact, quite well. Until 1905, Lenin still considers Karl Kautsky to be essentially correct in his own ruthless critique of the ideology of economism (Lenin 1902). But if Kautsky is correct that “socialist consciousness” is not “a necessary and direct result of the proletarian class struggle,” if “socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other,” and if modern socialist consciousness originates “only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge” in – at least in the nineteenth century – the minds of bourgeois intellectuals, and it is they who communicate it to “the more intellectually developed proletarians,” then Lenin is here unequivocally endorsing the autonomy of the political. But that is not where Lenin’s idea of hegemony is rooted. It is rooted, instead, in his endorsement of Kautsky’s reversion of the Austrian Social Democratic Party position to the effect that the more capitalist development increases the numbers of the proletariat, the more the proletariat is in fact compelled and, indeed, rendered fit to live – happily, peacefully and normally – under liberal capitalism. When the “gravediggers of capitalism” have in fact become its key allies and ideological defenders, therefore, socialist consciousness is something that can only be introduced into the proletarian class struggle from outside, and not without subjective resistance and objective struggle by the working class. Although not the first to do so, Lars Lih has nevertheless emphasized quite correctly how much Lenin, in fact, drew from Kautsky, and how much he owed to him despite his later “break” from the old “renegade” master. But Lih has also puzzlingly concluded in his otherwise excellent Lenin Rediscovered that What Is To Be Done? is “not a good place to get Lenin’s theoretical or programmatic outlook,” partly because “it has been used in this way” and “it has led to such distortions by figures both on the far left and in the academy” (Lih 2010). The problem with this argument about the consequences of reading What Is To Be Done?, rather than about the conceptual structure of the work itself, is that Lenin himself regarded What Is To Be Done? as the work in which he was able to offer

66   The Process of Hegemony his most systematic theory of the party and its program, at least to the extent that he was able to articulate these ideas before 1905. It is certainly the case that many of Lenin’s theoretical and programmatic points in this pamphlet are rendered obscure by some of the polemical exaggerations that Lenin himself performs against his most bitter and immediate adversaries within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). But beyond questions of party, program and Lenin’s own rhetorical expressions of indignation, this work clearly contains a number of very substantive theoretical suggestions on the meaning and implications of hegemony that need to be explored with some care.3 It is, indeed, widely known that What Is To Be Done? explicitly addresses theoretical and programmatic issues around the question of the origins of socialist and revolutionary consciousness (or, as Lih puts it, “awareness”) and the tasks and challenges of organizing a “vanguard” and leading party with a “scientifically” informed socialism as its central program, as opposed to one that merely follows or encourages “spontaneous” and reactive trade-­unionist forms of struggle.4 These were all widely shared ideas among Social Democrats in Lenin’s time, and Lenin certainly gives all these issues their due in his own pamphlet.5 But what does What Is To Be Done? have to say about hegemony that is not already found in the conceptual universe of Kautsky and the Second International or, in fact, Marx and Engels themselves and that, as such, represents genuinely new thinking? This is where the present reading departs from Lih’s interpretation. Following Kautsky, Lenin articulates the argument that by its own development, within the context of autocratic or liberal democratic regimes, the working class cannot develop anything other than a bourgeois or bourgeois-­dependent consciousness. But this argument in itself is not ground breaking. It turns ground breaking, however, when we begin to understand that the role of bourgeois “influence” consists, precisely, in operating at the heart of the “spontaneous” movement of the working class and, indeed, at the heart of the most advanced form of working-­class organization, not only in the context of rapidly industrializing liberal capitalism but also in a “backward” and peripheral country such as Russia or in a Fascist regime such as Gramsci’s Italy. If we look at it in this way, then Lenin’s emerging conception of hegemony represents a real Copernican turn within the universe of Second International thinking. As it operates within the spontaneous consciousness of the working class, therefore, ideology masquerades precisely as the workers’ own consciousness. This capacity of bourgeois ideology to operate at the heart of the “spontaneous” movement and consciousness of the working class and trans-­ substantiate itself into their own ideology is not due simply to the normative “prestige” of ruling classes and the respect they can earn from subaltern classes as long as they can convincingly manage and maintain the system of capitalist production moving successfully along through the ups and downs of cyclical economic and political crises, as long as they can manage the affairs of the state without corruption or scandal, or as long as

The Process of Hegemony   67 they can make concessions, in the form of basic welfare provisions or increasing political rights, to the working class. Instead, the “leadership” role of bourgeois ideology is rooted, precisely, in the capturing of proletarian consciousness from within and in its capacity to prevent the development of an organized party of the working class defined not so much by its working-­class membership, composition or participation in the reformist parliamentary or republican system of modern bourgeois liberal or parliamentary democracy as by its alternative, Communist ideology and its goal of transcending such forms of bourgeois democracy. As Lenin sees it at the time, then, there is a serious problem with those who “worship” the “objective” and “spontaneous freedom” of the working class – or, as we would say today, autonomist and horizontal movements – and its “right” to organize itself as it sees fit or considers necessary, and strictly according to the appropriate stage of spontaneous or natural liberal capitalist development in a particular place. There is a serious problem with the economist and reformist Social Democratic idea that class struggle is essentially expressed through struggles around exclusive, and, indeed, even selfish, economic interests. And there is a serious problem with the notion that the goal of class struggle is to simply fight for better wages, working conditions and even liberal, democratic or human rights, and that the attainment of these goals, rights and piecemeal reforms – certainly made difficult, but not impossible, and thus more desirable by capitalists and ruling elites – is, somehow, a necessary stage in the struggle for the achievement of “democratic socialism.” Such are the theoretical and practical implications of Lenin’s concept of hegemony – not found in Kautsky’s work – in this initial formulation. But how does Lenin see bourgeois ideology operating at the core of the very “spontaneous” consciousness of the working class and, particularly, in the absence of an organized and disciplined party of the working class capable of engendering an entirely new revolutionary consciousness from the outside? In his writings up to 1905, Lenin articulates a broad notion of ideology, which he conceptualizes as operating precisely as the ideology of economism. This also amounts to saying that, in the absence of a clearly alternative form of ideology, a dominant ideology also generates its opposite and critical ideological response and, in turn, that it engages with this posited response and within its own contestatory universe. In other words, if there is no opposition, dominant ideologies create it. The problem with economism, then, is not limited to being a mistake – a theoretical “deviation” – in the application of essentially correct and already fixed Marxist theory to rapidly industrializing liberal capitalist societies, as many critics of orthodox Marxism have repeatedly pointed out. Lenin is, in fact, suggesting something more subtle and perverse at work within economism, something that previous thinkers – including Kautsky – were unable to understand, let alone explain. The problem with economism is that it becomes hegemony – or contains a hegemonic process that generates subjectivity, identity and ideology – precisely when the “closest ‘organic’

68   The Process of Hegemony contacts” of the proletariat themselves make it operative within the “spontaneous” movement and consciousness of the working class.6 For Lenin, then, “The fact that economic interests play a decisive role does not in the least imply that the economic (i.e., trade union) struggle is of prime importance.” The fact that economism is itself an ideological product of the dominant ideology means that the bourgeoisie is going to do everything in its power to simultaneously confront (coercion) and fulfill (consent) the demands and desires of its class enemies, and there is no better way of doing this than through economic struggles taking place within the established legal and political framework, the symbolic universe within which economism strengthens the influence of bourgeois ideology in the form of various “rights” and in which the working class “feels” it can make tactical, if not strategic, gains. Within this terrain, in fact, ruling elites become increasingly open to the idea of working-­class or Social Democratic parties participating in the competitive game of democracy, precisely because they come to accept the fundamental norms and facts of liberal capitalism as the only game in town. In this context, then, the bourgeoisie must and, indeed, does come to exercise what Gramsci calls “self-­limitation.” In what way, then, is economism fundamentally problematic? The problem of economism as a form of “spontaneous” trade-­unionist practice guided by the distributive and rights-­discourse ideology of social or liberal democracy lies in the core fact that the fulfillment of these rights is, eo ipso, the fulfillment of bourgeois domination and the strengthening of a system fundamentally centered around the – largely invisible – process of extraction of surplus value. Economism thus fulfills desires for change as much as it conceals the strategies to prevent real change. This concealment is the work of suturing the gap in structures and superstructures from which consciousness arises. It conceals the fact that the most essential, the “decisive” interests of classes can be satisfied only by radical political changes in general. In particular the fundamental economic interests of the proletariat can be satisfied only by a political revolution that will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Lenin sees it, then, if the goal is revolution, there is just no “third way” or nonradical way of approaching the struggle, no way of changing the world without a fundamental rearrangement of power relations, precisely because of the way ideology operates. Any form of working-­class struggle that, because of its lack of a critical theoretical consciousness brought in from the outside and explicitly subversive of hegemonized forms of ideology, falls short of this process and goal, is in fact “a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.” As Lenin understands it, then, it is ideology as hegemony that makes it vital that people do not develop a consciousness of who they are apart from their relationship with the bourgeoisie, or, even more, an autonomous and critical consciousness

The Process of Hegemony   69 about the inherent gap and “conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” For Lenin, writing in or before 1905, the key task of revolutionary Social Democracy is, therefore, “to combat spontaneity” or the conceit of a natural and balanced development between “social forces of production” and their corresponding “relations of production.” We thus find in What Is To Be Done? an insightful and ground-­breaking treatment of the role of “bourgeois influence” or ideology operating as hegemony within the ranks and consciousness of the natural class enemies of the bourgeoisie. Of course, Lenin also uses this argument to reject the idea that the working class can purely and simply “elaborate an independent ideology” for itself without – in Kautsky’s terms – the “scientific knowledge” of a committed and revolutionary intelligentsia. But What Is To Be Done? should be regarded as a point of departure, marking the place where Lenin leaves behind his original understanding of hegemony and moves towards a more narrow conception of hegemony as Realpolitik. Indeed, after the founding of the Bolshevik Party in 1912, on the road to the October Revolution and once the Soviet government has been set up, we encounter a Lenin who is more concerned with the construction of the vanguard party, the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat – now understood as the dictatorship of the party – and with the tasks of the Soviet government, in the context not only of the First World War but also of “War Communism.” In fact, Lenin’s famous rejection of Kautsky, at least as articulated by Lenin himself in his “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (1918), can be understood as a repudiation of his own earlier views on hegemony, a repudiation that takes place in the context of developing a narrow conception of proletarian hegemony in the form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the now urgent debate around “the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism.” Lenin’s specific charge is the following: Kautsky’s great discovery of the “fundamental contrast” between “democratic and dictatorial methods.” That is the crux of the matter; that is the essence of Kautsky’s pamphlet [“The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”]. And that is such an awful theoretical muddle, such a complete renunciation of Marxism, that Kautsky, it must be confessed, has far excelled Bernstein. (Lenin 1918)7 Beyond the narrow conception of hegemony as Realpolitik, however, the task of developing Lenin’s earlier notion of ideology in a more critical way will thus fall on the shoulders of thinkers like Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness (1919–1923) and, even more centrally, Gramsci in his  Prison Notebooks. For Gramsci, in fact, the self-­destructive logic of Leninism, Bolshevism and rising Stalinism after the Revolution, the civil war and the New Economic Policy (NEP) provide the rationale, indeed the

70   The Process of Hegemony imperative, for a more critical and comprehensive notion of hegemony beyond narrow Leninist Realpolitik. Indeed, if we turn to Gramsci, we will notice that his “real starting point” in the Notebooks is, in fact, the narrow Leninist understanding of hegemony as Realpolitik rather than the first understanding of it as an ideological process of subject, identity and consciousness formation. Already in the early stages of writing the Notebooks, however, Gramsci introduces important – although often overlooked – modifications that amount to more than a simple development or “correct application” of Leninism. It is, in fact, by further expanding and developing these modifications that Gramsci will eventually arrive at his own qualitatively unique and critical concept of hegemony as a process in later Notebooks. Understanding the intellectual development of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony thus means understanding how he increasingly develops his ideas and what modifications he introduces in order to turn the concept of hegemony not only into the central concept of his work, but also into the central target of a theoretically informed counter-­hegemonic praxis. Let us examine this process in some detail.8 In the early stages of writing his Notebooks, Gramsci starts by identifying what John Greville Agard Pocock has called “the Machiavellian Moment” (Pocock 1975). This is the moment when secular, power-­driven, bourgeois Realpolitik enters the spheres of politics and philosophical reflection in Europe. This notion makes possible an understanding of Machiavelli as a pioneering theorist of Realpolitik and the “balance of power,” just as the late Lenin, in fact, understood him as well. But Gramsci also draws out Machiavelli’s conception of domestic politics as an early form of Realpolitik, as a struggle for power and “reciprocal balance of forces” – perfectly understandable in the context of Machiavelli’s historical moment. As he writes, Given the military character of the head of state, as is required in a period of struggle for the formation and the consolidation of power, the class references contained in the Art of War must be understood as referring to the general structure of the state: if the urban bourgeoisie wants to put an end to internal disorder and external anarchy, it must have the support of the peasants as a mass, and create a secure and loyal armed force. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §10, 103) Furthermore, Gramsci argues, All too often Machiavelli is considered as the “politician in general,” good for all seasons: this is certainly an error in politics. Machiavelli linked to his times: (1) internal struggles within the republic of Florence; (2) struggles among the Italian states for a reciprocal balance of power; (3) struggles of the Italian states for a European balance of power.

The Process of Hegemony   71 Gramsci is in no doubt about the specificity of Machiavelli’s moment: Machiavelli is wholly a man of his times and his art of politics represents the philosophy of the time that leans toward absolute national monarchy, the structure which permits bourgeois development and organization. In Machiavelli, one finds in nuce the separation of powers and parliamentarianism; his “ferocity” is directed at the residues of feudalism, not the progressive classes. The prince must put an end to feudal anarchy and this is what Valentino [Cesare Borgia, c.1476–1507] does in Romagna, relying on the support of the productive classes, peasants and merchants. Gramsci’s understanding of Machiavelli’s significance thus anticipates important aspects of Pocock’s highly regarded study on the “Machiavellian moment” as well as Skinner’s highly influential study on the Italian republics of the Renaissance (Pocock 1975; Skinner 1978). But Gramsci will not leave his understanding of Machiavelli’s contribution and significance at that stage.9 In an extensive and complex passage in Notebook 1 entitled “Political class leadership before and after assuming government,” Gramsci translates Machiavelli’s and Lenin’s ideas on hegemony into a prolegomena for his own politico-­historical analyses. He writes: The politico-­historical criterion on which our own inquiries must be grounded is this: that a class is dominant in two ways, namely it is “leading” and “dominant.” It leads the allied classes, it dominates the opposing classes. Therefore, a class can (and must) “lead” even before assuming power; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but it also continues to “lead.” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §44, 136–137) Although superior to Croce’s idea of history – including the history of the Risorgimento – as “the history of liberty,” an idea that became incorporated into the dominant liberal account of the Risorgimento, it is important to realize that it is precisely this secular but narrow Realist understanding of hegemony that Gramsci himself also applies to his analysis of the Italian Risorgimento (1815–1871) and the French Revolution in his initial historical reflections on these monumental events. Let us see how he does that.10 According to Gramsci, the gist of the Italian Risorgimento can be summarized as follows: The Moderates continued to lead the Action Party even after 1870, and “transformism” is the political expression of this leadership action; all Italian politics from 1870 to the present is characterized by  “transformism,” that is, by the formation of a ruling class within the framework determined by the Moderates after 1848, with the

72   The Process of Hegemony absorption of the active elements that arose from the allied as well as from the enemy classes. 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. The solution to the problem of how to exercise political leadership without entirely relying on the material force of the state is, thus, “a revolution without a revolution” or a “passive revolution” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §44, 137).11 This, then, is Gramsci at his most Leninist. Gramsci’s famous analysis of the French Jacobins and the “Jacobin party” in his early notes also bears a striking resemblance to Lenin’s own analysis around the rise of the Bolsheviks, but with a few startling modifications and some original additions. First, in standard Leninist terms, Gramsci states that “the Jacobins won their function of leading party by means of struggle” and by “imposing” themselves on the French bourgeoisie. This means that the bourgeoisie was forced to develop a “very advanced position,” more advanced than it would otherwise have been able to “spontaneously” develop on its own, precisely because it was essentially composed of “moderate reformers.” Second, also in standard Leninist terms, they came to constitute “a group of extremely energetic and resolute men” who, instead of waiting for the right economic or political conditions, in fact appeared to force the situation and “produce irreversible fait accomplis, pushing the bourgeois class forward with kicks in the backside.” Finally, and still following Lenin rather closely, what the Jacobins confronted in the Third Estate as a whole was “the least homogenous of the estates,” with the bourgeoisie only as its “most economically and culturally advanced segment” but by no means ready to exercise political leadership, let alone power itself. The bourgeoisie was willing to pose “only those questions that interest its actual members, its immediate ‘corporate’ interests.” In this revolutionary process, then, “the precursors of the revolution are moderate reformers who speak loudly but in reality demand very little.” This “advanced segment” of the bourgeoisie will become “advanced” only to the extent that it gradually loses its “corporate” characteristic and becomes a “hegemonic class” – in Lenin’s sense – pushed into this by the struggle with and “resistance of the old classes” as well as by the work of the Jacobins themselves as midwives of an Event from the future. It is in the context of Gramsci’s subtle modifications of Lenin, however, that we also encounter a momentous dialectical leap within the development of Marxism. This is the moment when Gramsci begins to sublate Lenin. For Gramsci, the Jacobins became “the only party of the revolution” or its leading party precisely because of an alternative ideological process that enabled them not only to perceive the immediate interests of the actual physical individuals who constitute the French bourgeoisie, but also “the interests of tomorrow and not just those of particular individuals, but of the other social strata of the third estate which tomorrow will

The Process of Hegemony   73 become bourgeois.” The Jacobins were able to develop and embrace this inclusive vision of the future revolution – an Event that had not yet come to pass – precisely because “they take the principles of égalité and fraternité very seriously.” For Gramsci, therefore, already at this stage of his writing, seeing the Jacobins as midwives of a future Event means that “the Jacobins were not abstractionists, even if today, in a new situation and after more than a century of historical elaboration, their language appears ‘ abstractionist’.” It is more appropriate to think of the Jacobins’ language and their ideology as perfectly expressing the needs of the time. Although they may not correspond or “reflect” the reality of France, nonetheless, Jacobin phraseology “corresponded perfectly to the formulas of classical German philosophy,” which, as Gramsci sees it, gave rise to “modern historicism.” If the secret of possible Jacobin hegemony initially resided in their coercive and “realist” capacity to “annihilate the enemy class” or “at least reduce it to impotence” by means of revolutionary Terror and thus eliminate the threat of counter-­revolution forever, the guarantee of this triumph could only come from their capacity to “enlarge the class interests of the bourgeoisie, discovering the common interests it shares with the other strata of the third estate, to set these strata in motion, lead them into the struggle.” This is how the Jacobins attempted to force their hand, to bring forward an event from the future, “but only in the direction of real historical development.” The eventual defeat of the Jacobins did not preclude the founding of the modern French state and the emergence of the larger liberal bourgeoisie as “the ‘dominant’ class” and, indeed, the “leading hegemonic class.” In other words, the Jacobins “provided the state with a permanent base” even if they did so at the expense of their own partisan existence (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §47, 147–148). This is how, in Gramsci’s view, the concrete revolution of the Jacobins managed to move France and the world into the universe of bourgeois modernity. Gramsci offers us theoretical and historical points on the Risorgimento that can be read also as further modifications of Lenin’s first conception of hegemony. Here I want to concentrate on three such modifications, all developed already in Notebooks 1 and 2, and all raising important questions about the nature of counter-­hegemonic politics and revolutionary refoundations under conditions of occupation, colonialism, or peripheral and uneven and combined development at the time of Gramsci’s writing and, certainly, in our own time. These modifications include the question of military and/or political leadership, the relationship between military and/or political organization, including the role of what Gramsci calls the question of arditismo, and finally, the role of intellectuals and their relation to the state. First, Gramsci says, “one must make some preliminary observations on method and terminology” to the common understanding of the Risorgimento in the Realist terms of political and military leadership. This means, as Gramsci will insist repeatedly in later Notebooks, that military leadership

74   The Process of Hegemony should not be understood only as military leadership in the strict, technical sense, that is, as a reference to the strategy and tactics of the Piedmontese army, or of Garibaldi’s troops, or of the various militias that were improvised during local uprisings. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §114, 198) The key problem facing Italy and its elites in the Risorgimento (1815–1871), Gramsci maintains, is first of all a national problem, that is to say, the problem of Austrian colonial occupation, with Austria being the center of power of the Habsburg Empire and possessing one of the biggest armies in Europe. In the struggle to expel this foreign power from Italy, therefore, the narrow militaristic conception of leadership and its failure to understand the wider process of class, nation and state formation dismally failed to generate the necessary cultural, political and ideological conditions required for real independence and for the launching of a nationally controlled process of liberal capitalist development. In this anticolonial struggle the central challenge was, therefore, “how to succeed in mobilizing a force capable of expelling the Austrian army from Italy” while at the same time “preventing it from coming back with a counteroffensive, given that the violent expulsion would endanger the [Habsburg] Empire and, therefore, would galvanize all the essential forces for reconquest.” It is in the context of formulating this astute observation that Gramsci introduces one of his key modifications to the narrow, strategic and militaristic notion of military/class leadership favored by the mature Lenin. Gramsci’s operation consists in broadening this conception so as to capture the political dynamic and complex dialectics of national independence. Gramsci’s theoretical solution to the problem of a restricted, militaristic, class-­ reductionist or mechanical understanding of the Risorgimento is the following: Military leadership, then, is a much larger issue than the leadership of the army as such and the establishment of the strategic plan which the army has to carry out: military leadership is concerned with the mobilization of popular forces who would rebel at the enemy’s back and impede his movement, it tends to create mass auxiliary and reserve forces from which new armies could be drawn and which would provide the “technical” army with an atmosphere of enthusiasm and zeal. Popular policy was not carried out even after 1848 [and thus the] policy of the Piedmontese right delayed the unity of Italy by 20 years. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §114, 199) Let us not be deceived by the military language of this passage. The key political suggestion here is that in the absence of a popular uprising, not only behind the “technical” army (the party) at the service of the Piedmontese right but also active “at the enemy’s back” (i.e., the Empire, the colonial authorities, their local allied elites and their enforcers), the possibility

The Process of Hegemony   75 of a military victory is uncertain, but the certainty of an imperially led counter-­revolutionary movement and a restoration is virtually guaranteed. In processes of national independence and anticolonial struggles, political leadership and the mobilization of popular masses have to be, thus, much larger than military or narrow class leadership or the command of an army of professional soldiers (professional revolutionaries, the storm troops and commanders of the “technical army”) if they are to result in successful and sustainable liberation and the even trickier process of constitutive refoundation. Leadership is, therefore, about developing a “popular policy” beyond narrow strategic or military interests; it is about mobilizing the people to provide “an atmosphere of enthusiasm and zeal” without which national liberation, refoundation or revolutionary struggles, even if they resulted in momentary victory, would remain short-­sighted and internally weak. The idea that a popular uprising must, therefore, exceed the organization and mobilization of a “technical army” around narrow interests is vital here, and will only grow more central for Gramsci throughout the writing of his Notebooks. Gramsci’s idea of the Modern Prince, indeed, does not make sense without this irreducible moment in political action, a point Gramsci reiterates several times in his early Notebooks (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §117, 206–207). From now on, it should be clear that in Gramsci, if a struggle for national liberation, independence, refoundation or revolution – think of the resistance to Nazi occupation during the Second World War, think of revolutionary struggles in Latin America during the first wave of guerrilla fighting and the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and early 1970s, think of refoundation struggles today – has any chance of victory, then the worst thing the leadership can do is reduce popular struggle to military or strategic concerns, restrict membership into the “party” on purely ideological or militaristic grounds, or privilege support for the technical or specialized organizations holding “technical-­military leadership.” The way to deal with an increasing level of autonomous – if not rhizomatic – popular uprising or mobilization is not to simply and presumptuously pick the wheat from the chaff, but to provide the opportunity for furthering “moral and intellectual reform” and supply a framework for the development of disciplined political leadership before and certainly during the evental process of counter-­hegemonic and refounding politics. One can say in this context, based on a later passage in which Gramsci draws again from the work of Max Weber to analyze the nature of various types of political parties and retrospectively applies it to this discussion on the political challenges of the Risorgimento, that there is no justifiable place in modern liberation, refounding and revolutionary struggles for the old and traditional “charismatic” forms of leadership or politico-­military organization (Gramsci 1992, Q2 §75, 318). In the age of maximum secularism, radical humanism, the movement and the “muscular, nervous and psychic” forces of the mobilized popular masses involved in this type of war of position must really exceed the political party. The principle that can be drawn from

76   The Process of Hegemony these historical lessons is, thus, that it is not the party that plays the greatest role in the struggle, but the autonomous and mobilized popular masses with their deepest aspirations, their moral strength and their fighting spirit. A people’s uprising must not only exceed party politics but also remain as the atmosphere of any political or military leadership in order for this leadership – assuming it has also become “very skilful” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §117, 208) – to have any effectiveness and chance of real success. Gramsci introduces a second, more comprehensive modification to the narrow concept of hegemony as leadership. In a passage entitled “Military Art and Political Art,” Gramsci develops further the idea that a people’s autonomous mobilization or cathartic uprising must always exceed the disciplined and vertical organizing and remain as the atmosphere of any political or military leadership for this to be effective and successful. Gramsci here goes beyond the standard quasi-­Gramscian binary idea that political struggle is a choice between a war of movement and a war of position, depending on international context or the developmental stage and degree of consolidation of liberal capitalism in any given national context.12 Gramsci makes this point very emphatically as follows: [P]olitical deployment is not even remotely comparable to military deployment. In political struggle, there exist other forms of warfare besides the war of movement and the war by siege or war of position. True arditismo, that is modern arditismo is peculiar to the war of position as became apparent in 1914–18. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §133, 217)13 The arditi were the elite storm troops used by the Italian army during the First World War, but also, and this is important, a militant organization launched in Rome in June 1921 to fight the rise and spread of Fascism and, particularly, the violent tactics and repression of the Blackshirts.14 Gramsci introduces this notion here to make an important theoretical point. Gramsci compares the arditi with “fast moving forces in general” and several kinds of “forward patrols” that may well contain the “germs” of modern arditismo. But what is important for Gramsci is not simply the military nature of this phenomenon in the Italian experience during the First World War or during the rise of Fascism, but the obvious and critical comparison Gramsci makes between arditismo as the “assault troops of the vanguard” in the Italian context and the standard Leninist (actually Stalinist) idea of “the advanced detachment of the working class” during the period leading up to 1917 in Russia.15 The problem with this narrow form of politico-­military strategy is not simply that the Arditi del Popolo could develop outside of party control. First, Gramsci says, “in political struggle one should not ape the methods of struggle of the ruling classes, and avoid falling into any ambushes. This phenomenon occurs frequently in current struggles” (italics added). In fact, this is the problem with the narrow version of hegemony as a struggle for leadership conceived in

The Process of Hegemony   77 technical and militaristic terms, that is, precisely in terms of arditismo, militaristic Bolshevism or, as happened in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, Communist or Trotskyist foquismo. Second, to engage in a war of national liberation, refoundation or revolution under conditions dictated by a colonial or imperial power or an existing illegitimate state is to engage in narrow Realpolitik in the very terrain and under the very terms and conditions that one is aiming to overthrow. The forward troops of the arditi, for example, “enter the field with a double task: to use illegality while the state appears to remain within legality, and as a means to reorganize the state itself.” The problem here, Gramsci points out, is that “it is foolish to believe that an illegal private action [either that of the arditi or the professional revolutionaries of the party] can be countered by another action of a similar kind, i.e., that one can fight arditismo with arditismo; it means believing that the state would remain eternally inert, which never happens.” The state is likely to respond to insurrectionary or clandestine revolutionary action also with reactionary illegality – and always of a more brutal, widespread and escalating kind – rather than remain inert and protect itself simply with the armor of the law. It is actually “foolish,” Gramsci insists, to restrict the choice of one model of struggle over another strictly on military calculations: “here, too, politics must rank higher than the military element and only politics creates the possibility of maneuver and movement” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §133, 217–218). The principle that Gramsci is defending here is, of course, the principle of the priority of politics and, indeed, the political itself as the condition of possibility of the liberation, refounding or revolutionary struggle. If there is no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory, as Lenin said, it is equally true, if not more so, that there is no revolutionary theory without appropriate revolutionary practice. This is, indeed, one of Gramsci’s most vital modifications to the narrow Leninist idea of hegemony.16 The idea that revolutionary consciousness is something that must be brought to the working class from the outside was central to Lenin’s critique of economism and his understanding of and justification for the “vanguard party,” the central role of its leadership for the working class and the role of intellectuals in relation to people, party and state. Lenin’s conception of intellectuals within the party was, indeed, intended as a critique of the bourgeois notion that, somehow, intellectuals are above the class divisions in society and that, within political organizations, they should retain that role. In What Is To Be Done?, in fact, Lenin argues that in the organization of the working class or the vanguard party, “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession, in both categories, must be effaced” (Lenin 1902). In other words, the leading role over the working class is not played by intellectuals but by the party itself. What fuses the old division between intellectual and manual labor, according to Lenin, is the very condition of political struggle in the context of a repressive and autocratic regime where both trade unionism and politics are considered illegal or subversive.

78   The Process of Hegemony In this context, workers engaged in economic struggle must therefore also concern themselves directly with political questions, and Social Democratic intellectuals engaged in political struggle must themselves embrace trade unionism. Lenin does not permanently abandon the idea that those who remain active in trade unions alone and see this as their chief modus operandi – the workers – can only have a certain level of “understanding,” whereas those who are active in Social Democratic politics have already attained – or can more easily attain – a revolutionary socialist consciousness that they can pass on to the working class. For Gramsci, by contrast, “nothing could be truer” than the proposition that “all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §49, 203). But the question is what “function” those intellectuals play in the larger terrain of society, and how their conception of the world is transmitted to the people. The proper terrain to discuss the question of intellectuals is, thus, not simply the party or the private organization. We already know that when intellectuals join these private or public organizations, as Gramsci says, they blend with the intellectuals of the fundamental group to which the organization belongs. Gramsci’s originality lies, then, not in drawing the standard distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals or in claiming that the difference between organic intellectuals and workers dissolves away within the party, where, henceforth, everyone is a philosopher. What must be understood about Gramsci on this point, instead, is the broader “system of relations” within which he places the function of intellectuals, that is, “the general ensemble of social relations” in which that function acquires a definite character. Traditionally, Gramsci writes, it is the political party that constitutes “the mechanism that carries out in civil society the same function that the state carries out, to a greater extent, in political society.” In fact, the political success of parties is measured precisely in terms of how much they are now able to “democratically” mobilize the mass of the people and get them to enthusiastically participate in the kind of liberal democracy of universal suffrage and political rights that emerged in France after the Revolution, and that took a particularly farcical – constitutionally undemocratic and counter-­revolutionary – form after the election of Louis Napoleon in 1848.17 For this democracy is, in fact, as Hobsbawm has argued, ideally “compatible with the maintenance of social order” (1975, 40). If this is the case, as Gramsci believes it is, then political parties and their intellectuals certainly play a crucial role “as organizers of all the functions intrinsic to the organic development of an integral civil and political society.” Both traditional (e.g., the clerics of the Risorgimento) and organic intellectuals (e.g., the technicians in modern corporations, the bureaucrats and policy-­makers of the modern state) play a key role in the organization of “social hegemony” that is “exercised throughout society by the dominant group and in the ‘domination’ over society that is embodied by the state, and this function is precisely ‘organizational’ or connective” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §49, 200). That intellectuals

The Process of Hegemony   79 have come to play this function is, after all, one of the great lessons of the Risorgimento and, indeed, post-­1848 Europe more generally, when what remained of aristocratic rule in Europe, or what was being established as the rule of the big bourgeoisie, could no longer, if it ever had, take the consent of the masses for granted. The increasingly dominant bourgeoisie was thus forced to learn the lesson that successful rule now very much depended on an increasingly “open” political process and on making some concessions to an increasingly mobilized middle-­class public and an emerging militant working class.18 But what function do revolutionary intellectuals play, and how is counter-­hegemonic and refoundational consciousness born in the people? Gramsci offers an explicit, if somewhat sardonic answer, to these questions. Having shown in earlier reflections that “everyone is a philosopher” in their own way and that no “normal human being of sound mind” exists who does not participate, even if unconsciously, in some particular “conception of the world,” since “every language is a philosophy,” in a later passage, Gramsci says that we must move on to the second question: Is it preferable to “think” without being conscious of doing so, in a disjointed and inconsistent manner? Is it preferable to “participate” in a conception of the world “imposed” from the outside by some social group (which can range from one’s village to one’s province or can come from one’s parish priest, or the old patriarch whose “wisdom” is law, or the little old woman who practices witchcraft, or the minor intellectual embittered by his own stupidity and ineffectiveness)? Or is it preferable to elaborate consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and, through the labors of one’s own intellect, choose one’s sphere of activity, participate actively in the creation of universal history, etc.? (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §204, 352) Clear sketches of Gramsci’s unique notion of hegemony can be found already in Notebook 4 (written between 1930 and 1932), in which Gramsci begins to see “hegemony” as more than just political or ideological leadership among the people before or after the seizure of state power. In this Notebook, hegemony is reconceptualized as a state of “moral universality,” that is, as the shared moral universality between ruling elites and subaltern groups constituting something roughly similar to what E.  P. Thompson calls a “moral economy” (Thompson 1993) or what Habermas calls the “lifeworld,” that is, a complementary concept to praxis, the “horizon within which communicative actions are ‘always already’ moving” (Habermas 1987, 119–152). Understood in this way, hegemony is not ideology, nor is it merely consent from below or leadership from above. Rather, hegemony begins to emerge as a process that works in the background, a process that makes both consent and dissent possible in the first place, and without which even ideology would fail and

80   The Process of Hegemony coercion would become increasingly necessary and unavoidable. This is something that is neither simply structural nor superstructural but, in fact, the glue that keeps the always precarious “equilibrium” between structures and superstructures from breaking apart and widening the real void that always threatens to separate them. Hegemony is, thus, the most comprehensive effort to make class struggle vanish from the visible world, transvaluate that struggle into consent or acceptable dissent, and sublate the dialectical relation of forces between structures and superstructures. This hegemony does not stamp out contestation but can, in fact, facilitate its functioning and legitimacy. Is it any wonder, then, that the most fitting discourse for this type of hegemonic process today is the discourse of “lifting people out of poverty” through “free markets” and political pluralism? Hegemony as the background of consent or acceptable dissent, as a process that constructs moral universality and allows pluralistic contestation, sutures the void – the dark and abysmal cleavage of the Real – that always threatens to open up between the pluralistic politics of superstructural consent/dissent in political society and the monistic political economy of structural coercion in civil society. Here, Gramsci articulates the key reason why domination must be self-­limited in the following terms: “If a group is formed that ideologically is 100 percent homogenous, it means that the premises for this revolutionizing exist at 100 percent” and, in this limit or ideal situation, “the ‘rational’ is actively and actually real” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340). In politics, however, no group can ever achieve such a level of homogeneous domination. In other words, ideological self-­limitation as the moral-­universal partner of the process of hegemony forestalls revolution. When a group’s “maximum expansion” is attained through the “organism” of the “state-­government,” as happens with the big bourgeoisie in the context of modern liberal and neoliberal capitalism, this expansion is also the skillful expansion of moral universality itself, and, as such, it performs a suturing work on the void that threatens to open between coercion and consent, structures and superstructures. Gramsci’s conceptualization at this stage, however, is only able to articulate what emerges here as an ensemble of “unstable equilibriums between the interests of fundamental social groups and the interests of subordinate groups in which the interests of the fundamental group prevail.” At this stage of his intellectual development, in fact, Gramsci still retains the idea that “in the final analysis” structure remains the defining element in the formation of ideologies and struggles (Santucci 2010, 151). But what is important to point out for now is that these “equilibriums” are possible only when the fundamental group can exercise economic self-­restraint rather than “economic selfishness,” only when the fundamental group is capable of constructing a shared form of universality operative at the level of the lifeworld, and only when the “self-­sacrifice” of ruling elites appears not as an act of cunning or hypocrisy or, even less, imposition, but as an act of true sacrifice and universal hospitality – even reconciliation! – that includes the subaltern classes (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 180).

The Process of Hegemony   81 But hegemony is no simple work of altruism, hospitality or even reconciliation. Hegemony is fundamentally antithetical to the possibility that subaltern classes may develop a “spirit of cleavage” through the “progressive acquisition of the consciousness of one’s historical identity” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §49, 53) and its combination with moral and intellectual or “complex ideological work” that may result in the extension of this spirit of cleavage to all potential allied classes and result in radical forms of counter-­hegemonic, refoundational and revolutionary action (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §90, 91).19 If hegemony thus renders subaltern groups “capable” of holding a seat at the negotiating table, it does so precisely to ensure that these groups will consent to the terms of the game as if they were their own. By contrast, the “spirit of cleavage” can potentially enable these same groups to challenge their own “disjointed” history and integration as a mere “segment of civil society” (“the formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the ruling class”) together with the broader “civilizational” processes that advanced capitalism offers as the terms of its game: some welfare, some political rights, and some say in government. The critical analysis of hegemony as moral universality clearly sketched out in Notebook 4, then, signals Gramsci’s “break” with the idea of hegemony as simple “leadership,” as a “balance of forces” based on the “dialectical relationship between consensus and coercion” or as “strategically differentiated forms of a unitary political power” that Lenin, not Gramsci, adhered to in virtually unmodified terms throughout his late work.20 The uniquely Gramscian notion of hegemony that emerges in Notebook 4 aims to capture something that is more than just leadership of one class or another, based on a moral universalism that serves as the background of consent or dissent, common sense or intellectual work, or communicative action, particularly in the terrain of civil society and in the context of industrialized liberal capitalist societies. It is literally possible to see Gramsci in this Notebook wrestling with the theoretically challenging process of capturing something that his very own intellectual universe, partially informed by the Second International Marxism of Plekhanov and Bukharin and by Lenin’s “dialectical materialism,” could not disclose or perceive.21 In other words, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as moral universality is actually an attempt to render visible something new about the cultural, political and economic force and its relations in the development of modern liberal capitalism “in the West,” something that is not at all accessible by means of the notion of hegemony as Realpolitik. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as moral universality, indeed, points to a theory of subjectivity, a “psychophysical” structure of desire, ready for subjection through the exercise of freedom, similar to the ideologies of economism, syndicalism or, in our time, neoliberalism. In social relations structured by the process of hegemony, Gramsci tells us, a specific “fundamental social group” brings about “intellectual and moral unity” through a background process of hegemony that creates moral universality. This process greatly facilitates the transformation of

82   The Process of Hegemony the “state-­government” ensemble into more than a blunt means to coercively expand the strategic interests of the ruling group itself or, in the case of the executive power of this ensemble, into more than just “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” as Marx famously spoke about the essential nature of executive power in The Communist Manifesto. Gramsci’s point is more radical, in that, according to this new conception, the “state-­government” ensemble comes to be gradually seen, indeed experienced, as actually “tied to the interests of the subordinate groups” in the sense that this process involves the production of a structure of subjectivity and desire – what he calls the “Taylorized worker” of advanced liberal capitalism (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §4, 11) – in the members of these groups themselves as well as in the members of state bureaucracies and ruling elites that binds them together into a solid bloc. The social group in question may indeed have its own conception of the world, even if only embryonic; a conception that manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes – when, that is, the group is acting as an organic totality. But this same group has, for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group; and it affirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be following it, because this is the conception which it follows in ‘normal times’ – that is when its conduct is not independent and autonomous, but submissive and subordinate. (SPN 327; Gramsci 1975b, 1379, italics added) When this happens, what we observe is a perverse – even obscene – transvaluation of values that allows thinking and believing that “man is aristocratic insofar as man is a serf,” bourgeois insofar as she is proletarian, or a philosopher insofar as he is just an ordinary person or a sycophant (Gramsci 1996b, Q7 §36, 186).22 This is the hegemonic process that enables the interests of the “fundamental group” to prevail, but only insofar as fulfilling them amounts to the realization of moral universality, insofar as they also and simultaneously come to be desired by subaltern groups and constitute, in these precise if perverse and obscene terms, a “common sense.” Indeed, “Mass adhesion or non adhesion to an ideology is the real critical test of the rationality and historicity of modes of thinking” (SPN 341; Gramsci 1975b, 1393). A dominant group ceases to be rational, then, if it ceases to realize universality. Here, “modes of thinking,” conceptions of the world or hegemony constitute the bedrock of ideology, and not the other way around. In another critical passage from Notebook 8, Gramsci adds the following: [T]he philosophy of an epoch is not the philosophy of an individual or a group. It is the ensemble of the philosophies of all individuals and groups [+ scientific opinion] + religion + common sense. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §211, 358)

The Process of Hegemony   83 In Notebook 10, largely dedicated to a critical study of the philosophy of Croce, Gramsci expands this argument further by explicitly and conclusively calling it a process that culminates in a general trend, a norm of collective action and, indeed, a new reality: The philosophy of an age is not the philosophy of this or that philosopher, of this or that group of intellectuals, of this or that broad section of the popular masses. It is a process of combination of all these elements, which culminates in an overall trend, in which the culmination becomes a norm of collective action and becomes concrete and complete (integral) “history.” The philosophy of a historical epoch is, therefore, nothing other than the ‘history’ of that epoch itself, nothing other than the mass of variations that the leading group has succeeded in imposing on preceding reality. History and philosophy are in this sense indivisible: the form a bloc. (SPN 345; Gramsci 1975b, 1255, italics added) Hegemony is, thus, this “process of combination” that generates an entire “philosophy of a historical epoch,” a general “conception of the world” that, if successfully generated and “imposed” right down to the capillary levels of social life, actually “precedes reality” or, indeed, successfully merges itself with the real or with the things of the real themselves and creates new reality, new objectivity or the new “universal subjective.” Hegemony thus becomes the process of fashioning subjectivity; it is the capillary logic that generates moral universality and, in Hegel’s terms, it fills the content of the “spirit of the time.”23 Understood in this way, then, hegemony is far from something merely “derived,” as both Cox and Gill have it, “from the dominant social strata of the dominant states in so far as these ways of doing and thinking have acquired the acquiescence of the dominant social strata of other states” (Cox cited in Gill 1992, 42). Hegemony is not simply, as Thomas has argued, in tandem with widely accepted interpretations of Gramsci, “a strategy aiming at the production of consent, as opposed to coercion” before the conquest of power that leaves subjectivity untouched. Nor is hegemony simply something that “can be applied equally to bourgeois and proletarian leadership strategies, because it is in nuce a generic and formal theory of social power” (Thomas 2009, 160). Various formulations of hegemony do capture important dynamics in processes of hegemonic combination.24 But most prevailing notions of hegemony are nevertheless limited and do not represent a substantial improvement over Lenin’s narrow formulations of hegemony, and, as such, they can easily take us two steps back to a purely instrumental, Realist and politically vanguardist conception of revolutionary politics. As we saw above, however, Gramsci performs a number of significant modifications to Lenin’s narrow understanding of hegemony, and it is these modifications that should serve as our starting point for an analysis of the concept

84   The Process of Hegemony of hegemony as formulated in the more advanced stages of his Notebooks. If Gramsci underwent “a gradual transformation of vocabulary, which becomes definitive in the early phases of the Prison Notebooks,” as Thomas rightly says that he did, this surely includes more than a pluralist extension of the number of classes that can engage in the strategic exercise of leadership and a more nuanced map of the process of hegemony that makes possible the very framework of consent/dissent in which rival forms of elite leadership compete. As Gramsci says, the development of the concept of hegemony does represent a great philosophical advance over the philosophical discourse available at the time of its formulation. But it also, and equally, represents a new “politico-­practical” approach to counter-­ hegemony, refounding politics and revolution that takes us beyond a mechanical approach to how consciousness is formed, how people become part of and participate in counter-­hegemonic struggles, and how “the way to greater self-­awareness” through the construction of the Modern Prince and the national-­popular brings us into confrontation with and, indeed, takes us beyond hegemony (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §169, 330). Where, then, is Gramsci’s step forward in terms of the question of hegemony? Although Gramsci’s analyses of Americanism and Fordism are deservedly famous, it is his critique of those views, which see twentieth-­century Americanism and Fordism as mere technological developments in the productive forces, that now deserves some attention. For Gramsci, indeed, Americanism and Fordism are, in fact, products of new hegemonic processes of combination; they constitute a “mass of variations that the leading group has succeeded in imposing on preceding reality” and, as such, they have become new objective reality itself. In other words, Americanism and Fordism are not merely developments in the process of capital accumulation but also, and for Gramsci most importantly, developments in the process of hegemony. Gramsci’s starting point here is – as evidenced by Notebook 4 (§2) – Trotsky’s interest in Americanism, which Gramsci does regard as pointing in the right theoretical direction. The secret to Americanism and Fordism is, for Gramsci, that in them the “new methods of work and the way of life are inseparable” and cannot, in fact, be separated lest the whole edifice, the new historical bloc, should fall apart (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §52, 215). This process of transforming the structures of labor and production is intimately related to the process of managerial “rationalization” and moral “prohibitions” or allowances in the superstructures of subjectivity, identity and ideology, as 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 workers.” The point of prohibitions, for example, is not just to generate some simplistic “puritan” inclination on the part of capitalists or workers alike, but, in fact, part of a cultural process to create a whole new type of personality. For Americanism is best understood, Gramsci says, as “the biggest collective effort [ever made] to create, with unprecedented speed and a consciousness of purpose unique in history, a new

The Process of Hegemony   85 type of worker and man.” And, of course, a new type of hegemony and reality itself. Gramsci certainly thinks that Taylorism represents the development of a new system of labor production in factories, but one that has implications for the process of hegemony and, therefore, implications beyond the mere industrial and managerial reorganization of division of labor and application of new technologies. As Gramsci understands it, in fact, what Frederick Winslow Taylor proposes to do in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911) is not only to develop the workers’ “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 the operations of production solely to the physical aspect.”25 Gramsci, of course, understands what is involved in the process of subjecting labor to industrial discipline beyond the old customs of community and cycles of rural and natural life or the traditional rhythms of premodern urban daily life. He understands what is involved in separating the worker from the products of his/her own labor, as this is precisely what the Industrial Revolution itself made possible and Marx and Engels themselves already observed taking place in the factories of the industrial centers of England. But what is unique about the rise of Americanism and Fordism in the early twentieth century is, Gramsci observes, a whole new level of systematicity, intensity and brutality, with the purpose of not just squeezing more surplus value out of the workers, but also creating a whole “new psychological nexus” between the world of work and the world of ideology, structure and superstructure, civil society and political society. This is what many of the initiatives introduced by industrialists like Ford were aimed at accomplishing with increasing efficiency and calculation. The goal was not simply to care for the humanity or spirituality of the working class, as this was part of the world of production itself, in the figure of the preindustrial artisan. Rather, the goal was precisely to eliminate the old forms of humanity and spirituality altogether, and replace them with a new “psychological equilibrium outside the place of work in order to prevent the new method from leading to the psychological collapse of the worker” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §52, 216). Let’s not forget that any potential “psychological collapse of the worker” would now represent a threatening failure in the process of hegemony in terms of suturing the void at the heart of modern liberal capitalism. And this was dangerous not only for the project of Fordism but also for the entire new order of ethical, cultural and political life called Americanism, and in which Fordism makes sense. This spirit of American life was to remain like objective reality, like a historical bloc, until the advent of neoliberalism and corporate globalization, the emergence of post-­Fordist forms of globalized production, and the reconfiguration of the process of hegemony on new grounds. Beyond the “external equilibrium” made possible by Fordism within the time-­space of the new workplace of the twentieth century, Gramsci argues

86   The Process of Hegemony that another “internal equilibrium” must also be established if the totality of the project, from its new structures to its new superstructures, is to succeed and the widening gap between the two to be momentarily halted and, even better, hegemonically sutured. This “internal equilibrium” is not something that can be simply imposed on the worker from the outside or by means of technological, managerial or political (“extra-­economic”) 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); the rewards of “his” standard family; the security and stability of a heterosexual and monogamous conjugal relationship, and the 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 that the system makes 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 behavior such as alcoholism (“the most dangerous factor in the work force”) or sexual incontinence (“after alcoholism, the most dangerous enemy of nervous energies”).26 When the private initiatives of the industrialists prove inadequate or insufficient to foster the kind of “puritanical” lifestyle that Americanism and Fordism require at this stage, then these “puritanical struggles” must become functions and matters of direct public policy by the state, from the education system to who gets to enjoy slowly expanding welfare rights. In fact, as Gramsci sees it, one of the most important roles of the American phenomenon, clearly understood by industrialists themselves even if not always successfully addressed by them, is precisely the increasingly active role of the state in forging the conditions – from  primary schools to public programs – that make possible this new type of worker (including the new culture of Fordist sex, consumption and lifestyle) in such an indirect or hegemonic way that the worker feels that he/she has, in fact, made all the decisions and “succeeded,” as measured by an increasingly large number of social and psychological indicators, in adjusting and creating the “internal equilibrium” needed to live in the modern world. After all, Gramsci says, “adaptation to the new methods of [sex, life and] work cannot come about solely through coercion” and must involve “opportunities for thinking, especially after he has  overcome the crisis of adaptation” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §52, 219, brackets added). In the modern social system of Americanism, then, coercion is combined with persuasion in mutually reinforcing but also autopoietic “forms that are suitable to the society in question.” And nothing has come to shape these forms of life more than the power of money, mass consumption and the ideology of self-­interest and personal success. There is, indeed, a deep connection between the process of hegemony and the process of capital accumulation, a connection that is rendered invisible by the process of

The Process of Hegemony   87 hegemony itself. To paraphrase Marx’s insightful discussion of the general formula of capital in chapter 4 of Capital I: It is not just the industrialist who has to feel himself to be the conscious representative of Americanism or liberal capitalism, the only possessor of money and, thus, the only possible capitalist. The worker, too, must increasingly feel that his person or his pocket is the point to which money duly arrives through high wages and from which it returns to the economy as indispensable consumption for overall growth. In this way, then, the expansion of value also becomes the worker’s subjective aim, as is the desire for greater and greater appropriation of more wealth. This must also become the sole motive of his work and life, to function as a key component of liberal capitalism itself, that is, as yet another personification of capital equally endowed with consciousness and will. In Marx’s own words, “This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser” (Marx 1867). Indeed, with the exception of neoliberalism, no other version of modern liberal capitalism has made the worker feel more like a capitalist without the rational burden of accumulation than the system Gramsci calls Americanism.27 And no other system allows its intellectuals more capacity to “detach themselves from the dominant class” and become part of a “real superstructure and not just an inorganic and indistinct element of the structure-­corporation” but only “in order to unite themselves to it more closely” and thus contribute more effectively to its ideological reproduction and expansion (Gramsci 1996b, Q5 §105, 355). These are the organic intellectuals, the bureaucrats and policy-­makers in the state, and the technicians in modern corporations who play a key role in the organization of “social hegemony,” which is “exercised throughout society by the dominant group and in the ‘domination’ over society that is embodied by the state” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §49, 200). This purposive and possessive “new type of worker,” with the attendant work culture of discipline, good morals and corresponding material success and upward social mobility, is, thus, a carrier of the deepest and most abysmal void sutured by hegemony, and, in this sense, not even the widening “moral disjuncture” between the “puritanism” of the working class and the increasingly conspicuous wealth and luxury of the ruling elites can threaten this void, as Gramsci himself at times believed it might. For the hegemony of ruling elites in liberal capitalism is most firmly and stably secured as consent – and sometimes dissent – if the obscene transubstantiation of this self-­interested drive and passionate chase after value becomes a new form of subjectivity, shared in common by elites and subaltern groups alike, as an integral component of the liberal capitalist historical bloc.

88   The Process of Hegemony

Notes   1 I do not share, however, the way in which Anderson or Althusser tend to understand these concepts.   2 We should not forget that the immediate target of Lenin’s critique in What Is To Be Done? are his own comrades within the RSDLP. Later Lenin will direct a similar critique against Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist League and their failed attempt to overthrow capitalism during the 1919 German Revolution. However, Gramsci will respond to these kinds of critiques and the morality of “judging” philosophical and political positions based on their consequences and failures. For Gramsci, these judgments presume that “there is a dogma of thought valid for all times and all places” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §219, 368).   3 According to Lih, Lenin did not think that What Is To Be Done? “went too far” in its polemic against the economists. But Lenin himself did think he had exaggerated a bit, and acknowledged this in the conclusion to his “Speech on the Party Programme” during the Second Congress of the RSDLP on August 4, 1903 (Lenin 1903a).   4 Alan Shandro provides an excellent background and discussion of the current debate over the meaning and significance of What Is To Be Done? between Neil Harding and Lars T. Lih (Shandro 2014).   5 Lenin’s theory of the party is something that will be briefly revisited below in the context of discussing Gramsci’s idea of the Modern Prince.   6 Note here how until 1905, Lenin actually rejects the idea of “organic” intellectuals of the working class precisely because, in his view, these “closest ‘organic’ contacts” of the proletariat are, in fact, prone to being swept up by the spontaneous logic of ideologies such as economism.   7 According to Lenin, the essence of Kautsky’s apostasy from true Marxism lies in his rejection of a single statement that Marx made in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). The statement reads as follows: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” According to Lenin, “First of all, to call this classical reasoning of Marx’s, which sums up the whole of his revolutionary teaching, ‘a single word’ and even ‘a little word’, is an insult to and complete renunciation of Marxism” (Lenin 1918).   8 In arguing for the centrality of the complex concept of hegemony in Gramsci’s work, I am also distancing myself from those who put other concepts, such as “historical bloc” or “organic intellectuals,” at the center of manualistic or bookish readings by what Gramsci calls “certain inferior strata of intellectuals” (Q8 §46, Gramsci 2007, 263) Such might be the case, in fact, with Hugues Portelli, who, by mechanically foregrounding the concept of “historical bloc” at the center of his bookish manualization of the Notebooks, ends up reducing Gramsci’s work to a few working slogans of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Portelli 1998).   9 Gramsci is aware that there are various other ways of reading Machiavelli, or, in other words, there are different versions of Machiavellianism. In all these cases, Gramsci argues, “Machiavelli should not be held responsible for what all those who came after him have been pleased to attribute to him” (Q4 §8, Gramsci 1996b, 150). Something similar can be said about Gramsci himself. Much of what has come to be called “Gramscianism” is, in fact, the product of those who have either not read Gramsci carefully enough or never read Gramsci at all – but only second-­hand versions of Gramsci – yet make erroneous use of his ideas and arguments. This is very much the case in terms of Gramsci’s critique of civil society, hegemony and the liberal capitalist state.

The Process of Hegemony   89 10 Given that the narrow Realist understanding of hegemony is supposed to have its conceptual and practical roots in Classical Antiquity, see John Wickersham’s discussion of the meanings of hegemony in the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Ephorus (1993). As for the notion of hegemony in terms of war strategies, it should also be noted, in passing, that the ideas of “positioning” and “maneuvering” as military strategies in specific historical conjunctures and geographical terrains were already brilliantly suggested in chapters four, seven and nine of Sun Tzu’s own war treaty and are, thus, not of Gramsci’s making. 11 Riall and Patriarca offer a brief assessment of the impact of Gramsci’s interpretation of the Risorgimento in Italy after the First World War (Riall and Patriarca 2012, 2). Needless to say, it is Gramsci at his most Leninist who had the greatest impact on post-­Second World War scholarship of the Risorgimento, because this is the Gramsci whom the earliest and most heavily edited publications of his Notebooks tended to foreground and the one who became best known, then as now. But questions of nationalism, regionalism, culture and identity were also central to Gramsci’s later studies on the Risorgimento, and it is these issues that have become once again central in the so-­called “revisionist” turn in Risorgimento studies (Hearder 2013). For a recent critique of both the liberal and the Realist versions of the Risorgimento, see also Clark (2013). 12 Gramsci’s critical remarks about the “national war of insurrection” as an important politico-­military concept and potential strategy of national liberation are rarely, if ever, discussed in the literature. In a passage found in Notebook 7, Gramsci writes, as if to remind himself to look into it more carefully, that he should “study the origins and the reasons behind the conviction, found in [radical revolutionary leader of the Risorgimento] Giuseppe Mazzini, that the national insurrection [against Austria] was bound to start – or that it was easier to get it started – in southern Italy,” where the contradictions of uneven development were most acutely lived. This conviction, Gramsci says, was also shared by Carlo Pisacane – one of Italy’s earliest socialist thinkers – who more properly developed it into the concept of “the national war of insurrection” (Q7 §92, Gramsci 2007, 218). The similarity of this proposal to Giuseppe Garibaldi’s own ideas, as exemplified by his own uprising in Piedmont in 1834 and his subsequent escape and participation – for 14 years – in some of Latin America’s anticentralist republican wars of national liberation (e.g., fighting for the cause of the Republic of Rio Grande do Sul in today’s Brazil or that of republicans in Uruguay) until his return to Italy in 1848, is actually remarkable. 13 It should be mentioned, in passing, that although Lenin wrote his own pamphlet on “guerrilla warfare” in 1906 (Lenin 1906), prior to 1917 revolutionary struggle in Russia did not take the form of sustained armed insurrection. And there are, in fact, no references to Lenin’s pamphlet in the Notebooks. 14 According to John Riddell, the Arditi del Popolo (People’s Commandos) “sprang up independently of the workers’ parties,” they won “broad support among working people, including among Communists, Socialists, and anarchists,” and the movement “grew into a national organisation with some 20,000 members and scored initial successes against the Fascists.” According to Riddell, also, “The CP leadership, which favoured self-­defence against the Fascists only when conducted by organisations under Communist control, barred its members from joining the Arditi, on pain of expulsion” (Riddell 2011, 14). For Gramsci, too, there was more to the Arditi del Popolo than the PSI or the CP were willing to admit or able to see. Gramsci put the question of informal PSI support in Ordine Nuovo on July 15, 1921 as follows: Does Hon. Mingrino then believe that fascism is a superficial manifestation of post-­war psychosis? Has he not yet been persuaded that fascism is

90   The Process of Hegemony organically linked to the present crisis of the capitalist order and will only disappear with the suppression of that order? On the question of party control, Gramsci again asks: “Are the communists opposed to the Arditi del Popolo movement? On the contrary: they want the arming of the proletariat, the creation of an armed proletarian force which is capable of defeating the bourgeoisie and taking charge of the organization and development of the new productive forces generated by capitalism.” And on the question of consequences, Gramsci insisted that we must remember the following: It is essential not to sow illusions among the popular masses, who are suffering cruelly and are led by their sufferings to delude themselves, to believe that they can alleviate their pain simply by shifting their position. It is essential not to make them believe that a little effort will be enough to save them from the dangers which loom over the entire working people today. It is essential to make them understand, it is essential to compel them to understand, that today the proletariat is confronted not just by a private association [of Fascist civil society], but by the whole State apparatus, with its police, its courts, its newspapers which manipulate public opinion as the government and the capitalists please. It is essential to make them understand what they were not made to understand in September 1920: when the working people leaves the terrain of legality but does not find the necessary spirit of sacrifice and political capacity to carry its actions through to the end, it is punished by mass shootings, by hunger, by cold, by inactivity which kills slowly, day by day. (Gramsci 1990b, 57) 15 The first of Stalin’s six main characteristics of the Leninist party is, precisely, the party as “the advanced detachment of the working class” (Stalin 1939). 16 Gramsci’s critique of arditismo is also and arguably a critique, avant la lettre, of Ché Guevara’s foquista theory of guerrilla warfare (Guevara 1961) and Debray’s theory of armed struggle as “revolution within the revolution” (Debray 1969) as they formulated these ideas in the early stages of Latin America’s armed and revolutionary New Left. Although some of Gramsci’s works were already available in France and Latin America in the late 1950s and 1960s, Gramsci’s devastating critique of arditismo was unknown, ignored or unheeded by Ché Guevara and Regis Debray. There are no references to Gramsci’s critical reflections on armed struggle in the most widely disseminated work on revolutionary armed struggle in Central America (Harnecker 1982), the most Althusserian grounding of Lenin’s theory of social revolution as the framework for the “people’s revolutionary war” in Latin America (Harnecker 1985) or the most explicitly vanguardist conception of the party and hegemony still widely held by the Latin American Communist and revolutionary left as late as the 1990s (Harnecker 1990). 17 It was Marx, in fact, who first pointed out the farcical nature of France’s regime after 1848: Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-­historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew [Louis Bonaparte] for the uncle [Napoleon Bonaparte]. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire! (Marx 1979, 11:103) 18 It is no coincidence that the political space we now call the “public sphere” – what Habermas has famously called “Öffentlichkeit” and once conceptualized

The Process of Hegemony   91 as “a category of bourgeois society” – was, in fact, historically consolidated as such – as the “discursive” intersection of civil and political society – only in the second half of the nineteenth century (Habermas 1991). However, if this public sphere indeed flattened the old aristocratic hierarchies of status and exclusivity and rendered the question of political consent and legitimacy into a more fluid and “debatable” affair, Nancy Fraser rightly argues that it not only retained but, indeed, reproduced and even found new ways of justifying the exclusion of women and the emerging working classes, with the exception, perhaps, of some of their intellectuals (Fraser 1996, 69–98). 19 Buttigieg’s explanatory note for Gramsci’s use of the expression “spirit of cleavage” is quite useful and reads as follows: “Spirit of cleavage” (spirit de scissione) is a phrase that recurs frequently in Gramsci’s writings. It is an adaptation of a concept found in Georges Sorel, who in the first section of chapter 6 of Reflections on Violence discusses “that cleavage between the classes which is the basis of all Socialism.” (Gramsci 1996b, 449, n. 1) 20 On this, see Santucci (2010, 104). 21 On this, see Santucci (2010, 149). 22 Recall Marx’s famous quotation from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in his analysis of money and its fetishistic effect on social relations in Capital I: Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? . . . Thus much of this, will make black, white; foul, fair; Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant. . . . What this, you gods? Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads; This yellow slave Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed; Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves, And give them title, knee and approbation, With senators on the bench; this is it, That makes the wappen’d widow wed again: . . . Come damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind. (Marx 1867) 23 Recall Hegel’s point that “No man can overleap his time, the spirit of his time is his spirit also; but the point at issue is, to recognize that spirit by its content” (Hegel 1894, II:96). 24 William I. Robinson is correct in saying that although “hegemony may be firmly situated in our social science lexicon,” it actually means “different things to different speakers” (Robinson 2005, 2). The narrow formulation of hegemony, or any of its slightly modified variants, is what we find broadly in use by scholars in the field of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) today. It is in its basic sense, as “leadership” of a “hegemon” or “hegemonic power” among states, that the term entered the central lexicon of both Realism and the neo-­Gramscian school in IR and IPE, from Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (1948) to Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984) and from Cox’s Production, Power and World Order (1987) to Gill’s Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (1993). Even Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003), not usually really counted by the neo-­Gramscians themselves among the neo-­Gramscians, can nevertheless be counted here. This is how the narrow notion of hegemony has been turned in our time into a quasi-­Gramscian common sense of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony itself. 25 On Gramsci’s knowledge of Taylor’s book, see Buttigieg’s editorial note to an earlier passage (Gramsci 1996b, 570, n. 2). 26 It is in this context that Gramsci’s remarks on Fordist sex and “mores” must be understood, remarks that are, in fact, a critique of bourgeois sexuality in the

92   The Process of Hegemony context of early Americanism rather than an expression of some “conservatism” still inflecting Gramsci’s views on this matter. 27 On how neoliberalism has transformed the perception that workers have of themselves, their interests and their place in civil society, particularly in Chile, see Harvey’s analysis of the “construction of consent” in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, 39–63).

4 A Critique of Civil Society

In the most advanced states, Gramsci argues, civil society has become “a very complex structure that is very resistant to the catastrophic ‘irruptions’ of the immediate economic factor (crises, depressions, etc.): the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare.” This means, therefore, that “one must conduct an in-­depth study of those components of civil society that correspond to the defensive systems in a war of position” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §10, 162–163). Note how in these passages civil society appears at once as a “structure,” a “superstructure” and a “defensive system” in a hegemonic war of position waged by ruling elites. Mapping this “object,” this phenomenon that can occupy multiple sites and operate at multiple levels at the same time, a “thing” that is simultaneously subject and substance or structure and superstructure at one and the same moment, is no easy feat. But it is to the mapping of civil society in these terms, Gramsci’s terms, that we now turn. In the context of the ensemble of structures and superstructures that Gramsci uses to map out the social terrain of modern liberal capitalist societies, what he calls “private associations” (e.g., Rotary Clubs, Freemasonry, intellectual associations, legal associations, and religious and worker associations) constitute the sphere of morality and “custom in general” that Gramsci designates as civil society (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §81, §84, 64, 69). In Notebook 6, though, Gramsci elaborates his conception of civil society and presents it as the sphere where people acquire the consciousness of “common sense,” without which neither the state nor the economy would be able to relax the coercive and blunt application of force and its expressions. It is in this precise context, therefore, that Gramsci articulates his most famous and often-­quoted conception of the state as “political society + civil society” (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §88, 75).1 In conceiving of the state as the nexus of “political society + civil society,” Gramsci is not proposing to see the state in an “expanded” way, but nor is he proposing to view it as a “limited” formation. Gramsci’s view automatically rejects and, indeed, renders obsolete other conceptions of the state as “limited government” or as “night watchman” (Nachtwächterstaat), as was proposed by Ferdinand Lassalle in the wake of the defeat of the 1848 Revolution, in his famous speech “On the Essence of Constitutions” delivered in Berlin on

94   A Critique of Civil Society April 16, 1862.2 It must be remembered, Gramsci tells us, that behind this Lassallian conception of the liberal state after 1848 as limited government, we find a “dogmatic and non-­dialectical” formulation precisely because it assumes that the minimal state can exercise coercion without hegemony.3 In Gramsci’s conception, by contrast, “hegemony” (as it is constructed in the sphere of common sense within civil society) must certainly be understood as being “protected by the armour of coercion” (the sphere of political society and the state), but not as relying on it for its successful production and reproduction. Hegemony must be forged a priori and outside the restricted sphere of political society. Once the private associations of modern liberal capitalist societies have developed, the internal, subjective or symbolic equilibrium of hegemony comes to play a greater role in regulating society before the armor of coercion has to be regularly or widely deployed.4 This is the situation that Gramsci designates as a “phase in which state is identified with civil society,” a formulation that represents a concept of civil society and the state that Gramsci thinks adequate to account not only for the social and historical situation of Italy in his time but for modern liberal capitalism as such. But it is only an initial formulation. On numerous occasions, Gramsci stressed how Hegel was the fundamental theorist of the “ethical state.”5 Gramsci himself frames the conceptual rise of the ethical state in Hegel’s thought as follows: “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 (disparaging and sarcastic polemics against von Haller) before anything else” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §187, 343). But for Hegel, the possibility of thinking about the state requires thinking conceptually and historically about its presuppositions: hence Hegel’s conceptual organization of his Philosophy of Right, starting with the family, moving through civil society and reaching the crowning achievement of the state. This in no way entails the simplistic interpretation today that the phenomenological world of civil society is the “space” of nongovernmental organizations standing between economies and states. Although Gramsci frames his discussion of civil society by adopting the three phases of “ethical life” that Hegel distinguished in his Philosophy of Right, he is careful to designate them in new terms, namely, “The corporate phase, the phase of hegemony (or struggle for hegemony) in civil society, and the phase of state power,” with their corresponding forms of consciousness and “specific intellectual activities” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §46, 197). Thus, Gramsci makes it conclusively clear that his conception of civil society in no way implies a sphere independent from either economy or state or a site free of the process of hegemony. Quite the opposite is the case: civil society is the “phase of hegemony.” Gramsci accords particular significance to Hegel’s concept of “associationism” as emerging from his reaction to and reflections on the French

A Critique of Civil Society   95 Revolution. In the first of his Notebooks, Gramsci is already able to write the following: Hegel’s doctrine of parties and associations as the “private” fabric of the State. It ensued historically from the political experiences of the French Revolution and was to help give greater concreteness to constitutionalism. Government by consent of the governed, but an organized consent, not the vague and generic kind which is declared at the time of elections: the State has and demands consent, but it also “educates” this consent through political and trade-­union associations which, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. Thus, in a certain sense, Hegel already goes beyond pure constitutionalism and theorizes the parliamentary state with its regime of parties. His conception of association cannot but be still vague and primitive, in between the political and the economic, in keeping with the historical experience of the times which was quite narrow and offered only one accomplished example of organization, the “corporative” one (politics embedded in the economy). (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §47, 153–154) But Hegel’s constitutional conception of associations, although already beyond “pure constitutionalism,” remains “vague and primitive” as something simply “in between the political and the economic” or as “politics embedded in the economy.” Hegel’s conception does not yet account for the parliamentary state, the regime of parties and the role of hegemony through political and even subaltern associations such as trade unions and other private organisms. Hegel’s conception of “corporations” is, in Gramsci’s view, inadequate to account for the kind of “educated” consent – beyond the time of elections – that emerges only in modern civil society. Does Marx offer us a more developed understanding of civil society in his critiques of Hegel and Feuerbach? This is an important question, because Gramsci’s critique of civil society begins, in some ways, with the young Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (written rather quickly between December 1843 and January 1844), the text in which Marx articulates his original alternative. Given that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right had only been published in 1820 and the great master himself had died just over a decade before Marx penned his work, Gramsci maintains that the young Marx “could not have historical experiences superior (or, at least, greatly superior) to Hegel’s” even if he did have a distinct and insightful “sense of the masses” because of his activity as a journalist and political agitator outside the milieu of academia (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §47, 154). But this “sense of the masses,” what both Marx and Gramsci call “the ensemble of the social relations,” in fact, is not only already a Hegelian intuition but, as the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) makes abundantly clear, is also an idea that Marx appropriates from Hegel as part of his own critique of Feuerbach and his “theoretical” materialism.

96   A Critique of Civil Society Contrary to conventional readings, then, it turns out that Marx repeats against Feuerbach, in his own terms, what Hegel had already managed to articulate in terms of the “chief defect of all existing materialism.” The defect of this new materialism consists in that “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” The key to a proper understanding of this “sensuous human activity, practice and subjectivity” is, however, not an objectivistic reversal, a simplistic turning upside down of thought or a reduction of speculative truth to a realist “question of theory.” Rather, the key is to search for the immanent dialectical meaning of practice, particularly revolutionary activity, not in some “human essence inherent in each single individual” but in the totality or “the ensemble of the social relations” that the system of reality of bourgeois civil society – as part of the current historical bloc – systematically conceals and seeks to transvaluate into an ensemble of purely individual interactions. Gramsci is thus correct when he points out that the young Marx’s conception of social or political organization, association and social relations is, in fact, not superior to Hegel’s in terms of offering a more nuanced conceptual understanding of what constitutes the real essence of human beings or what happens to that essence or substance in the context of civil society or, indeed, in the context of counter-­hegemonic, refoundational or revolutionary praxis.6 It is certainly the case that in 1840s Germany, as Marx expressed in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the task of turning “the criticism of heaven” into “the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics” was still largely outstanding (Marx 1844). The contradiction between thought and reality that the young Marx still encountered in Germany meant to him that “German philosophy of law and state is the only German history which is al pari with the official modern reality.” What critical German intellectuals needed to do, then, was to “take into account not only its present conditions but also its dream-­history, and subject to criticism not only these existing conditions but at the same time their abstract continuation.” Not only had Hegel gone a long way in doing precisely this during the previous decade, but his thought far exceeded the mere positing of the “abstract continuation” of existing German conditions as its theoretical or, indeed, practical goal. For Hegel was not Haller, the true conservative and idealist philosopher who wanted to maintain and legitimize the German constitutional status quo ante, precisely because, as Marx understands it, his thought constitutes “a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the whole German political and legal consciousness as practiced hitherto.” If Marx can confidently claim that “in politics the Germans thought what other nations did,” he can do so only because he presupposes and takes for granted Hegel’s already accomplished and shattering critique of the state and civil society. For Hegel’s critique is, in fact, already

A Critique of Civil Society   97 “the perfection of the thorn in the flesh of the modern state” precisely because “the status quo of German political theory expresses the imperfection of the modern state, the defectiveness of its flesh itself.” What should no longer be confidently claimed today is, therefore, what Gramsci himself showed as untenable in his Notebooks, that is, the thoroughly outdated idea that the young Marx finds a “ ‘speculative hypostatisation’ at the heart of Hegel’s philosophical method” or that his developing critique constitutes a “rejection tout court” of the old master from Berlin.7 A close exegesis of the texts at hand reveals, instead, quite the opposite. The young Marx’s 1843–1844 text on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right constitutes a dialectical engagement of absorption, combination and redeployment of Hegel’s materialist “idealism” and Feuerbach’s idealist “new materialism.” After Gramsci’s critique of the young Marx, it is no longer possible to doubt that in the young Marx, nothing concerning Hegel’s theory of civil society or the state is solidly superior to Hegel’s own conceptions, despite all claims to the contrary. Of course, Feuerbach and his rather simplistic reading of Hegel exerted a strong influence on the young Marx, the Left Hegelians and the Marxist tradition, but there are important elements in the young Marx that already begin to exceed the Feuerbachian misreading of Hegel.8 As Marx writes, again, in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The criticism of the German philosophy of state and law, which attained its most consistent, richest and final formulation through Hegel, is both a critical analysis of the modern state and of the reality connected with it, and the resolute negation of the whole German political and legal consciousness as practiced hitherto, the most distinguished, most universal expression of which, raised to the level of a science, is the speculative philosophy of law itself. If the speculative philosophy of law, that abstract extravagant thinking on the modern state, the reality of which remains a thing of the beyond, if only beyond the Rhine, was possible only in Germany, inversely the German thought-­image of the modern state which disregards real man was possible only because and insofar as the modern state itself disregards real man or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination. In politics the Germans thought what other nations did. Germany was their theoretical consciousness. The abstraction and conceit of its thought always kept in step with the one-­sidedness and stumpiness of its reality. If therefore the status quo of German statehood expresses the perfection of the ancien régime, the perfection of the thorn in the flesh of the modern state, the status quo of German political theory expresses the imperfection of the modern state, the defectiveness of its flesh itself. (Marx 1844)9 The critique of the Young Hegelians, including Feuerbach, in this passage is subtle but important, perhaps as important as the critical operation we

98   A Critique of Civil Society find in the German Ideology (1845–1846), which explicitly constitutes not a rejection of but an acknowledged return to Hegel. The mistake of the Young Hegelians, Marx tells us, is actually compounded by a further reversion of factors, so that it became “uncritical towards itself when, proceeding from the premises of philosophy, it either stopped at the results given by philosophy or passed off demands and results from somewhere else as immediate demands and results of philosophy, although these, provided they are justified, can be obtained only by the negation of hitherto existing philosophy, of philosophy as such.” Hegel’s philosophy could, therefore, not be “overcome” or “negated” simply by turning one’s back on philosophy and “with averted face muttering a few trite and angry phrases about it.” Hegel’s philosophy could only be property negated if it could be transformed into existing reality, a possibility that Hegel’s own notion of the Absolute in his Science of Logic forecloses permanently. The “speculative hypostatisation” of the ensemble of social relations – the essence of “real man” – that Hegel is so often accused of enacting is, in fact, not Hegel’s but a product of the modern state itself – one that Hegel consistently, richly and conclusively formulated precisely as his critique of the modern state and of the reality connected with it in his Philosophy of Right – because it “makes abstraction of real man, or satisfies the whole of man only in imagination.” It is, in fact, Feuerbach, not Hegel, who does not see that “the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society,” that the “standpoint of the old materialism is civil society” and that “the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.” It is Hegel, not Feuerbach, who discloses the process by which this individual – this “particularity” – is turned into an abstraction – an error – precisely by the system of civil society that has emerged in modern times. Those who have read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right carefully will, in fact, know that this is precisely Hegel’s critique of modern ethical life, in the form of either civil society or, indeed, the state.10 What neither Hegel nor the young Marx was able to articulate in the above-­examined texts was, however, the changing function or internal dynamic of civil society – beyond being “politics embedded in the economy” – in the process of consolidation of the modern state, particularly after 1848. But for Gramsci, the historical stage of what he calls the “economic-­corporatist” mode of class rule – a kind of rule that could still dispense with an independent process of hegemony within civil society – that characterized the “communal states” or the city-­states of Renaissance Italy until 1848 was now irretrievably gone. After 1848, and even more so after 1870, things change more dramatically, demanding also new forms of consent and, by extension, more critical or complex ideological work to understand it. In a passage written in 1933–1934, Gramsci writes: [I]n the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change. The internal and international organisational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the

A Critique of Civil Society   99 Forty-­Eightist formula of the “Permanent Revolution” is expanded and superseded in political science by the formula of “civil hegemony” [. . .]. The massive structure of the modern democracies, both as State organisations and as complexes of associations in civil society, are for the art of politics what “trenches” and permanent fortifications of the front are for the war of position. (Gramsci 1975b, Q13 §7, 1566–1567, cited in Thomas 2009, 149) After the 1870s and the rise of the massive structures of “modern democracies,” then, the open forms of domination and resistance that characterized the Forty-­Eightist formula are now replaced by a new mode of struggle: “civil hegemony” and, by extension, counter-­hegemony through the war of position against the civil and political society, the “trenches and permanent fortifications” of modern liberal capitalist democracy. In an earlier passage, Gramsci puts the same idea like this: [T]he question of so-­called permanent revolution, a political concept that emerged around 1848 as a scientific expression of Jacobinism, at a time when the great political parties and economic trade unions had not yet come into existence – a concept that would subsequently be absorbed and superseded by the concept of “civil hegemony.” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §54, 267) In what Gramsci calls the “post-­corporatist stage” of national development after the 1870s, the state can no longer be simply identified with government in the same way as, during the economic-­corporate stage of class/ state development, civil society (then reduced to the sphere of economic activity) was identified with political society (then reduced to and understood as the sphere of governmental activity). The new context of state and national development, extended and transformed by the colonial expansion of Europe, served as the new context for the growth and transformation of civil society, a transformation requiring that “certain elements that fall under the general notion of the state must be restored to the notion of civil society.” In this regard, Thomas is right in saying that in the first half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie “had not yet developed the highly articulated state apparatus penetrating into the innermost depths of civil society,” but after 1870, “in its integral form, [civil society] had become 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” (Thomas 2009, 143). As Thomas explains, Civil society’s primary role was to act as a mediating instance or moment of “organic passage” for the subaltern classes towards the state of the ruling classes: a school of modern “statehood.” As a field of hegemonic relations, civil society gave the non-­leading social groups

100   A Critique of Civil Society a real and substantial image of this distinctive “freedom of moderns,” to use Domenico Losurdo’s suggestive phrase, such as had not occurred in previous “castal” conceptions of social and political relations. In principle, (bourgeois) freedom and its consummation in the state is open to all, and it is precisely this that constitutes the immense revolution of the “political” brought about by the bourgeoisie. Hegemony, then, emerges as a new “consensual” political practice distinct from mere coercion (a dominant means of previous ruling classes) on this new terrain of civil society; but, like civil society, integrally linked to the state, hegemony’s full meaning only becomes apparent when it is related to its dialectical distinction of coercion. Hegemony in civil society functions as the social basis of the dominant class’s political power in the state apparatus, which in turn reinforces its initiatives in civil society. (Thomas 2009, 144)11 The situation of “political emancipation” in Italy during the Risorgimento is, in fact, not substantially better than the situation encountered by Marx in his own Germany or the situation of Latin America at the same time. We should recall here the young Marx’s point that Germany had all the ideological and philosophical trappings of the constitutional state with none of the material development of civil society as was the case in other more advanced European societies: “Germany did not rise to the intermediary stage of political emancipation at the same time as the modern nations. It has not yet reached in practice the stages which it has surpassed in theory.” But the transition to the new “state-­form” that emerges in Italy after unification in the 1870s – and, incidentally, also in Germany and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America – does involve a fundamental change in the nexus of state and civil society: it involves the emergence of an entirely new hegemonic process, rendered increasingly invisible as the nexus of state and civil society, superstructure and structure, undergoes proper suturing with the advance of liberalism, the eventual emergence of the welfare state and the rise of the “society of the spectacle” that Gramsci did not live to see. The process of hegemony in the context of the new “state-­ form” is thus charged with generating a whole new shared form of moral universalism. Under these modern conditions, then, not only is the model of the state as a “night watchman,” as a primarily repressive apparatus, largely overcome (except, obviously, in the colonial and neocolonial frontiers of capitalist accumulation and expansion), but so are the traditional ideologies of political coercion or religious subjection (no Reformation in Italy!) that had until then been the norm in Europe and Latin America.12 The state that emerges from the Risorgimento in Italy is in no way capable yet of “immanently resolving the contradictions of civil society,” but it is engaged in the construction of the “trenches and fortifications” of modern civil society where the hegemonic process is to operate. This is where hegemony begins to emerge as a process of “educating” and socializing

A Critique of Civil Society   101 individuals in the context of a larger and more differentiated – in Gramsci’s sense (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §47, 154) – array of “private organizations” beyond the “corporative” ones that Gramsci rightly says constituted the now surpassed “historical experience” of Hegel and the young Marx. A key element of the liberal capitalist state that begins to emerge in Italy after unification in the 1870s and becomes a focus of Croces’ political philosophy is the so-­called “integral state” (not Gramsci’s words). This is the state in which, contrary to Gramsci’s conception, the distinction between civil and political society becomes cemented even at the very moment when the emergence of civil society as an ensemble of private organizations is already facilitating the dissolution of the authoritarian state and the rise of a new organic state-­form precisely by means of trenches and fortifications that enshrine a hegemonic process generating new forms of moral consensus and linkages with the state. It is, in fact, “Benedetto Croce’s reinforcement of liberalism with his tale of modernity as the evolution of ‘Freedom’,” rather than any “speculative hypostatisation” in Hegel’s work, that contributes greatly to Gramsci’s development of the critical notion of hegemony.13 From now on, the process of hegemony leads to the increasing “dissolution” of key state functions into civil society, not by physically or institutionally superseding the “state-­form” as such, but by rendering the most coercive and blatantly one-­sided ideological elements of domination by ruling elites and the private system of production that grounds such ruling into something more than ideologically acceptable, that is, into a subjectively desired tale of freedom demanded by subaltern groups themselves and a new ideologically universalist conception of the world. Gramsci does not take his own analysis of the Risorgimento this far, but it is logically suggested in many passages of his Notebooks and, particularly, in his most careful and developed studies on Croce. For only in this way is it possible to fully appreciate his idea of the “state-­coercion element withering away” in the age of liberal capitalism precisely because the “increasingly conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical state or civil society) assert themselves” and, indeed, take over the regulation of social, cultural and economic life.14 Until this situation of subjectively rooted hegemonic subject formation and domination is fully achieved, however, the notion and, indeed, the institution of the “strictly political state” as “night watchman remains a necessary transitional stage, that is, a form of coercive organization that will protect the development of those elements of regulated society [i.e., civil society] that are continually on the rise and, precisely because they are on the rise, will gradually reduce the state’s authoritarian and coercive interventions” (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §88, 75–76).15 As we saw in the previous chapter, the process of hegemony, located in the trenches and fortifications of everyday life and defined as the process of production of subjectively desired domination transvaluated into an individual life lived as a matter of “free choices,” is precisely what modern bourgeois civil society is tasked with protecting and expanding in the

102   A Critique of Civil Society context of modern forms of liberal capitalism.16 This is the process that Gramsci has in mind when he examines the modern liberal capitalist paradox, whereby the modern proclamation of the bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality from within civil society must, in fact, go hand in hand with an acceptance of, and free subjection to, new forms of Fordist domination and discipline. As we have known since the days of Hegel and Marx, it is, in fact, only possible to see what the inner logic of a phenomenon looks like when this phenomenon has become fully developed – or, in Hegel’s terms, “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk” (Hegel 2008, 16). This is the reason why Gramsci did not manage to articulate his critique of civil society as the site of hegemony in quite these terms, even though the logic of his analysis of “private associations” already points in this specific and unquestionably original direction. Associations are not simply our private or nonprivate, profit or nonprofit, religious or civic-­minded, grassroots or public nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), nor are they simply identified with the family or the church, the paramount institutions of civil society that Gramsci identifies. We must remember that Gramsci witnessed their growth at an earlier stage of liberal capitalist development, when they still functioned primarily as collective forms of will or when these “wills” could still be largely understood as embryonic parties (such as those that participate in political society, like modern political parties), as states and even as stepping stones towards the “unification of the whole humanity.” The point of Gramsci’s distinction among different types of associations is, however, that “in any given society nobody is unorganized and without a party, provided that organization and party are understood broadly, in a non-­formal sense” (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §136, 107). But the distinction between generic associations and private associations is already crucial for Gramsci’s broader argument about the suturing work that hegemony performs precisely through the dissemination of private association in order to conceal the totality of social relations and the cleavages and struggles that fundamentally underpin/undermine civil society and the state. Since the concept of private associations is important to Gramsci, it is important to dwell on their examination a bit further. He distinguishes two general types: “natural” and “contractual or voluntary” (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §136, 107). Among the latter, the only ones that Gramsci sees as becoming civil society, “one or more prevails, relatively or absolutely, constituting the hegemonic apparatus of one social group over the rest of the population (civil society), which is the basis for the state in the narrow sense of governmental-­coercive apparatus.” What enables the conversion of private associations into formal parties, and eventually even the “state-­ form” in the sense of “governmental-­coercive apparatus,” is precisely that the individuals and groups that go through the entire hegemonic process are, from the start, trained in and ethically oriented to the logic of hegemony in its narrow sense. Real individuals can, of course, belong to one or multiple private associations, even if they are in conflict with one another,

A Critique of Civil Society   103 for such is the nature of increasingly complex social relations and the multiple “subject positions” that people come to occupy in modern societies. But Gramsci thinks that the immanent hegemonic logic of private associations in liberal capitalism is also to compete and grow into a dominant party, and, indeed, to become the state and adopt a “totalitarian policy,” forcing “all members of a particular party to find in that one party the satisfaction that they had previously found in a multiplicity of organizations” and, further, to seek to prevent other parties from themselves becoming “totalitarian.” The outcome of this Realist and narrow dynamic – imposed by the logic of civil society – is the eventual transformation of the dominant party into a regressive and, indeed, “objectively reactionary,” restorative or constitutionally antidemocratic formation (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §136, 108). In this particular type of political situation, Gramsci thinks, the excluded and dominated parties, the voluntary associations left out, particularly those from subaltern groups internally organized so as to minimize or exclude the Realist and strategic logic of political society, have no choice but to engage the dominant party in resistance or a “war of position” with the goal of attaining their own liberation from the shackles of civil society. Thomas’s argument that in this context “ ‘War of position’ in Gramsci’s conception, just as for Lenin and Trotsky, was not a programmatic strategy that he recommended be adopted by the proletariat. Rather, he recognised it as a technique of nascent ‘biopower’ deployed by the bourgeoisie, and to which the proletariat, subalternly confined in bourgeois civil society, was constrained to respond with a realistic political strategy” (Thomas 2009, 149–150) is perplexing.17 For Gramsci, instead, the modern struggle between associations, parties and, indeed, “fundamental social groups” within the highly flexible and hegemonic terrain of civil society reaches a decisive point that, following Trotsky’s use of military language and Luxemburg’s “little book” (The Mass Strike, 1906), indeed requires a “transition from the war of maneuver (and frontal assault) to the war of position” (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §138, 109).18 Behind the work that openly bourgeois and elite private associations such as Rotary Clubs do, Gramsci argues that they have an ultimately common way of connecting with the people. Although other organizations, such as Freemasonry, may well be characterized by “petty bourgeois democracy, secularism, anticlericalism,” they are, in fact, not divorced from the process of bourgeois hegemony (Gramsci 1996b, Q5 §2, 271). All of these associations help disseminate “a new capitalist spirit: in other words, the idea that industry and trade are a social service even prior to being a business and that, indeed, they are or could be a business insofar as they are a ‘service’ ” (Gramsci 1996b, Q5 §2, 269). Like many NGOs of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, particularly those pushing for so-­called “corporate social responsibility” or working to hold capitalist corporations accountable to civil society, the private associations that Gramsci examined also want to see open and violent “capitalism of plunder” – today’s accumulation by dispossession and extraction – superseded and replaced by a

104   A Critique of Civil Society more humane form of economic system, one that is more favorable to development and individual freedom or, in Gramsci’s terms, one that is more favorable to the equal expansion of all “economic forces.” Gramsci does remain consistent throughout the Notebooks with the definition of civil society as an “ensemble of private organizations,” but it is now a deeply entrenched mistake both among followers and detractors of Gramsci to think that he left his conception of civil society as a sphere of action “between” family and state. In fact, Gramsci expanded and, thus, qualitatively changed the notion of civil society. It is, thus, no mere “sphere” in “between” state and economy but a complex and dynamic “system of trenches and embankments” undergirding the modern “integral state” or the modern historical bloc of liberal capitalism and modern democracy. When properly understood in Gramsci’s terms, civil society appears as an ensemble of private initiatives and organizations internally, normatively or culturally linked to the politically confined system of the modern state rather than a sphere of mere private or voluntary activities separate from or, indeed, against the state. For the politics of dissent and contestation constitute, in liberal capitalist and polyarchic regimes, the reverse side of the politics of consent and mutual recognition, and both forms of politics, in their own ways, help alleviate the widening void in structures and superstructures and the potential hegemonic crisis of liberal capitalism. There certainly are political and ideological discourses that represent the nature and dynamics of civil society as separate from and, indeed, opposed to the state,19 but this is, in Gramsci’s mind, a product of hegemony. What Gramsci finds at the heart of civil society is, thus, a similar process to the one that Marx detected at the heart of capitalism and conceptualized in terms of “the secret of primitive accumulation,” the “valorization process” and the “fetishism of the commodity.” Gramsci thus theorizes the secret of the hegemonic process as the transvaluation process of freedom into subjection and the fetishism of the private self. As we saw in Chapter 3, the hegemonic process is lodged inside those socially bioproductive places in charge of subject, identity, communication and discourse formation whose function is to underpin, fortify and secure – precisely like “trenches and fortifications” of the modern integral state – the more culturally, socially and politically diffused forms of dominant ideology circulating in civil society as moral universalism and generated by consent, dissent, contestation or recognition by elites, the state, the private associations of civil society, and even entire social movements or subaltern groups (e.g., economism). But here we must draw a clear distinction between hegemony and ideology. A Gramscian perspective on ideology would maintain that ideologies of domination are actually ineffective on their own without a hegemonic process working in the background to secure, stabilize and legitimize them. Propaganda can help this process but never finally secure it. And “common sense,” although as solid as a fact, is by itself insufficient to guarantee leadership or domination. Hegemony is thus not ideology or common sense as such, but the process that enables

A Critique of Civil Society   105 their social construction and ethically binding nature on the will, desires and motivations of individual and groups. Since one of the key functions of dominant ideologies is, of course, to render the gap between structure and superstructure increasingly, if not totally, invisible, those ideologies depend for their ultimate success on the effectiveness of the invisible process of hegemony suturing the gap subjectively by generating a conception of the world that Gramsci calls – not only echoing Croce but also retroactively rewriting Kant – “moral universality.” Understanding modern civil society in this way – and, indeed, the process of subject formation in modernity itself – changes the nature of the relationship between civil society and political society, the mediating mechanisms and dynamics between the two, and particularly the role that intellectuals play in “bonding” these two seemingly separate systems into what Gramsci calls a “historical bloc.” Indeed, the intellectuals who help construct, disseminate and legitimize modern forms of liberal, pluralist and capitalist ideology exercise their function not just within civil society but also from within political parties and the state, and their key function is to secure “the bonding of the organic intellectuals of a social group with traditional intellectuals, a function it can carry out as part of its basic function, which is to lift the ‘economic’ members of a social group to the level of ‘political intellectuals’, that is, organizers of all the functions intrinsic to the organic development of an integral civil and political society” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §49, 202). This is what makes Gramsci’s critique of civil society a real watershed in the history of critical Marxism. For those accustomed to reading about Gramsci as a “radical democrat” committed to the fundamental ideals of civil society, Gramsci’s clarion call for a “war” against the private associations of civil society must, indeed, sound somewhat surprising, if not openly extravagant. In view of the fact that these private associations are widely regarded today as the embodiments of modern liberal and pluralist freedom, the incubators of civility and “human capital” itself, this is far from a casual critique. For thinkers such as Robert D. Putnam, in fact, the “decline” in the number and influence of these associations accounts for the very crisis of liberal capitalism in the US (Putnam 2000). But this is a point on which Gramsci is at his least ambiguous, and so should we be: the “so-­called private initiatives and activities have the same goal, and they constitute the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §179, 338). It is true that in Hegel’s time, when modern civil society was just taking its initial steps, there was still considerable room in the private organizations of civil society and its corresponding spaces in the emerging public sphere for citizens and republican groups within the rising bourgeoisie to articulate a relatively progressive form of constitutional politics. For this was a time when the rights to “life, liberty and property” were still widely restricted to traditional patrimonial and  monarchical elites, and the principle of popular sovereignty, made seemingly achievable by the American and French Revolutions for the first

106   A Critique of Civil Society time, was still widely feared as a potential expression of a new so-­called “tyranny of the majorities” by many intellectuals, from Bentham to de Tocqueville. Gramsci thus captures the context of Hegel’s ideas quite well when he writes that Hegel’s conception of “ethical life” and the state belonged to a period when the progressive role of the bourgeoisie not only appeared possible, but also seemed limitless, and therefore one could affirm its fundamentally universalist character by unabashedly affirming that one day – and why not? – “the entire human race will be bourgeois.” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §179, 338) The potentially universalist character of bourgeois individual autonomy and political self-­determination or citizenship, both historically combined within the context of nascent republicanism, was, therefore, indeed a key moment of modern politics. This, according to Gramsci, is no longer the case under modern cultural and political conditions. The particular case of post-­Risorgimento Italy, comparable to Latin America at the same time, actually illustrates quite well how the once “progressive role of the bourgeoisie” became increasingly restricted and circumspect precisely as the new hegemonic regime started to take root in the new civil society. The original ideals of popular sovereignty or republicanism mixed with a modern liberal version of the universal “rights of man” came together and were crystallized in the Spanish Constitution of 1812, adopted by the Spanish Cortes when the kingdom was under Napoleonic occupation and absolutist King Ferdinand VII had been abducted.20 Here we have a constitution that boldly provides for the “right of insurrection,” the limitation of the king’s ability to make peace, declare war or conclude treaties “without the previous consent of the Cortes,” the creation of a “Permanent Committee” to watch over the “strict observance of the Constitution during the prorogation of the legislative body,” the creation of a State Council to stamp out the power of traditional “camarillas,” the “exclusion of the highest functionaries and the members of the King’s household from the Cortes, as well as the prohibition to the deputies to accept honors or offices on the part of the King,” the abolition of the property requirement and establishment of universal suffrage, the establishment of democratic assemblies without reserved seats for the clergy or the monarchy, the separation of the judiciary from the executive, and the reestablishment of “the old municipal system, while they stripped off its medieval character” for the administration of local communes. Following Marx, Gramsci sees the Cádiz Constitution as “a true expression of historical necessity by Spanish society,” similar in many ways to the reality of the Italian south and, indeed, Latin America.21 Marx points out how this historical document was variously accused by its reactionary detractors of being “the most incendiary invention of Jacobinism” or being “a mere imitation of the French Constitution of 1791, transplanted on the

A Critique of Civil Society   107 Spanish soil by visionaries, regardless of the historical traditions of Spain.” The truth is, Marx tells us, “that the Constitution of 1812 is a reproduction of the ancient Fueros, but read in the light of the French Revolution and adapted to the wants of modem society” (Marx 1854).22 Both Marx and Gramsci understood quite well, long before Pocock and Skinner proposed their own reinterpretation of the liberal tradition in the 1950s and 1960s, that the virtue-­driven republicanism of the Cádiz Constitution represented a bulwark against the more predatory bourgeois factions bent on pursuing primitive accumulation by any means. Is it any wonder that, right after his restoration in 1814, the first order of business for Ferdinand  VII was to abolish the Cadiz Constitution? Is it surprising that the republican ideals of this Constitution were, in fact, the ideals adopted by leading members of the Italian bourgeoisie as “the object of their demands,” but only in the initial stages of the Risorgimento (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §199, 142) and, more particularly, by the more radicalized liberal Neapolitan intellectuals, who, after the collapse of their own virtuous Parthenopean Republic in 1799 and their subsequent exile, took those ideals with them to the rest of Italy?23 After unification, when Italy is moving fast in the direction of state-­led, north-­centered uneven and combined capitalist development, the new relations of ruling leave increasingly little room for the socially and politically inclusive ideals of republicanism or the extension of further equal rights and popular sovereignty to subaltern groups or regions, such as the Italian south, now subjected to violent extraction and exploitation. The relatively progressive republican ideal at the outset of the process is now in the process of being decisively replaced. This is not unique to Italy, but Gramsci foregrounds the peculiar national elements that exacerbated the increasing restriction of the public space and contributed to the reactionary regulation of subaltern politics in his native country. The Vatican question and the Southern question are the most obvious peculiar national elements that Gramsci has in mind. But so is the lack of a fundamental moral and intellectual reform inspired by leading Risorgimento intellectuals, a reform that would not only have accelerated the liberal transformism of the elites, but would also have softened up the grip of Counter-­Reformation Christianity (“Jesuitism”) and fomented a cultural assault on “ignorant” common sense in the moral economy of the masses. Even in the south, where we would have most expected it, there did not develop any real equivalent of the French revolutionary Jacobins, either within the ranks of the bourgeoisie, capable of agitating from inside, or within the ranks of middle or subaltern groups, capable of agitating from below. It is only in Gramsci’s time, a time of renewed revolutionary upsurge and Europe-­wide upheavals, that this begins to change, a time when Gramsci regards the spread of historical materialism in the same light and in the same way as the spread of the Protestant Reformation or late Renaissance republicanism. The autonomous organizations of the people are starting to generate their own intellectuals and “parties,” the time of the Modern Prince has arrived, and the goal of

108   A Critique of Civil Society this party is not just a “conquest of power” with the goal of establishing yet another invisible form of hegemony. The strategy is now Janus-­faced, both counter-­hegemonic and refoundational, and the fight is as much against civil society as against political society, through a counter-­hegemonic moral and intellectual reform capable of unsettling the process of hegemony (the transvaluation of freedom into a new form of subjection, the normality and fetishism of the private self ) and the increasingly vertical, cooptative and top-­down institutions of modern liberal and polyarchic democracy. The goals now are “the end of the state” and, quite explicitly, of the Modern Prince itself, combined with the organic and progressive growth of people’s self-­constituted autonomous, horizontal and collective organizations. In the short term, though, counter-­hegemonic politics is about the construction of “an ethical state – a state whose aim is to put an end to the internal divisions of the ruled” and to “create a technically and morally unitary social organism” against the normal politics of civil society (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §179, 338). This is one of Gramsci’s most important arguments against constructing or reconstructing civil society along “progressive” lines. Although it is not often articulated in such surgical terms as here, it is the point of view at which Gramsci arrives in the later Notebooks. There is, thus, little in Gramsci’s critique of civil society that can lead us to conclude that he is outlining a cultural, political or “agonic” strategy aimed at the construction of some new “radical,” “progressive” or “alternative” form of civil society as the means to fight the very thing that makes the adoption of “war” against civil society into an inescapable choice. The possibility that intellectuals may fail to connect with the “masses” or the fundamental social groups, and, thus, the lack of a moral and intellectual reform reaching into civil society, is a key element behind what Gramsci calls the “organic crisis” of the state. Gramsci assigns great importance to this question throughout the Notebooks, and consequently undertakes an important dialectical analysis of it.24 An intellectual and moral reform is a necessary effect of the hegemonic process at the heart of civil society. The absence of one is, thus, indicative of a failure in the process of hegemony. 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. In the case of Italy, Gramsci writes, “there has never been an intellectual and moral reform involving the popular masses. The Renaissance, eighteenth-­century French philosophy, nineteenth-­century German philosophy: these are reforms that touch only the upper classes and often only the intellectuals” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §75, 243–244). In other words, Italy required not only an initial moral and intellectual reform of the kind that Europe experienced with, for example, the Protestant Reformation, a reform that transformed the subjectivity, identity and moral discourse of rising bourgeois and subaltern groups (e.g., peasants, the developing working class) alike. This was, in fact, the precondition for the prodigious

A Critique of Civil Society   109 development of nineteenth-­century German philosophy. Italy also needed a continuous process of intellectual and moral reform to consolidate, socialize and turn the initial gains into a new common sense. 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 deepening the gap between structures and superstructures and thus creating the conditions for a crisis of hegemony. The kind of hegemonic process that Gramsci charts here is, therefore, unlikely to develop without an intellectual and moral reform that involves elites and subaltern groups alike, as well as their intellectuals. This is a reform that transforms the ruling elites into elites capable of exercising self-­limitation in favor of moral universalism, and prepares subaltern groups to see in transformism and, sometimes, restoration the possibility of real improvements without having to change the system altogether. The hegemonic process must be operative, therefore, not only at the level of the popular masses but also among ruling elites. In other words, moral universalism must be widely shared, or else it is neither moral nor universal. The historical failure to spur a moral and intellectual reform by Risorgimento intellectuals is one of the most central themes in Gramsci’s prison work, and it resonates throughout the Notebooks. Gramsci illustrates this process through a detailed and extensive exegesis of the work of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italy’s foremost philosopher and liberal thinker in Gramsci’s time. Croce’s thought was important to Gramsci, among other reasons, because it called attention to the function of intellectuals in the life of the state and the “moment of hegemony” and consensus as the “necessary form of the concrete historical bloc.” However, Gramsci tells us in Notebook 10 that in Croce the “passive revolution” – as conceptualized by Cuoco – becomes the formula for action, where the “real meaning” of its ethico-­political and historical background is “an arbitrary and mechanical hypostasis of the moment of hegemony.” Above all, Gramsci argues elsewhere, Croce’s work arbitrarily maintains a classical liberal “distinction between civil society and political society, between hegemony and dictatorship” when, in fact, his Hegelian background should have enabled him to see their internal connection (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §10, 9). Croce’s failure is, however, Gramsci’s opportunity. For, in the same way in which Marx availed himself of the work of Smith and Ricardo to reveal the hidden connection between use value and exchange value that their versions of political economy essentially concealed, Gramsci now uses Croce’s theory of the state to show, against Croce himself, the internal connection between political and civil society. And nothing reveals this connection better than the dialectical critique of the ideologically posited separation of civil society and state, or the connection between what appears as the “spontaneous” life of abstract individuals and the highly organized “bureaucratic” life of the state. Viewed dialectically, Gramsci says, enables us to see that “every individual is a functionary,” not because he or she is

110   A Critique of Civil Society 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 (that is, of the particular social group, or civil society)” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §142, 317). The secret of hegemony lies, just like the secret of valorization and fetishism at the heart of the isolated and abstract commodity, in the very notion that each individual is merely “acting spontaneously.” And the more this spontaneous action appears as normality, the more effective is the process of hegemony. In the explicit conceptual terms of Croce’s liberal historiography, therefore, it is impossible to perceive the hidden connection between civil and political society, precisely because in this theory “Ethical history is the aspect of history that is related to ‘civil society’, to hegemony” and “Political history is the aspect of history related to state-­governmental activity,” and the link between the two is thus concealed and lost from sight (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §9, 161). For Gramsci, however, the key link between civil and political society is established through the hegemonic process, and, when viewed as a dialectical and contradictory totality, civil society constitutes what he calls, in standard Hegelian terms, “a determinate system of moral life” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §227, 373) supporting the integral state.

Notes   1 Thomas is correct is making the following point: “the term ‘expanded State’ is not to be found in the Prison Notebooks. It was proposed by Buci-­Glucksmann as an interpretation of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘integral State’, and has since won wide assent from a variety of critics” (Thomas 2009, 139–140). Note also that the term “integral” was commonly used by Croce in various contexts, for example, “integral humanity.”   2 Lassalle’s speech is available on www.marxists.org.   3 On Lassalle’s conception of the state as night watchman, see also Buttigieg’s editorial note (Gramsci 2007, 430–431).   4 When it comes to the use of force in modern liberal capitalism, Žižek tells us, we are dealing with a kind of “negation of negation” that thinkers like Althusser were unable to account for. As Žižek writes, The first negation operates at the level of the imaginary: the real of the brutal use of force is substituted by a fascinating spectacle designed to deter protestors. The second negation operates at the level of the symbolic: it is only within the symbolic order of differentiality that “the presence-­absence (a presence rendered effective by its very absence)” functions, i.e., that absence can count as a positive feature even more powerful than presence. (Žižek 2014a, 115–116)   5 On this, see also Thomas (Thomas 2009, 144).   6 In the context of revolutionary praxis, though, Žižek is right to put the question of essence in the following terms: When positedness is self-­sublated, an essence is no longer directly determined by an external Other, by its complex set of relations to its otherness, to the environment into which it emerged. Rather, it determines itself, it is “within itself the absolute recoil upon itself ” – the gap, or discord, that introduces dynamism into it is absolutely immanent. (Žižek 2014a, 18)

A Critique of Civil Society   111   7 This is, I am afraid, the position that Thomas seems to defend (Thomas 2009, 185).   8 On the influence of Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel on the young Marx, see Žižek’s comments in Less than Nothing (Žižek 2012, 857).   9 Thomas argues that “Hegel’s speculative grammar presented a point of arrival – in this instance, the state – as a point of departure” (Thomas 2009, 185). But Hegel himself explains exactly why the state constitutes the logical and philosophical ground of its own constitutive and contradictory parts: The scientific proof of the concept of the state is this development of ethical life from its immediacy through the divisions of civil society to the state, which then reveals itself as their true ground. A proof in philosophical science can only be a development of this kind. (Hegel 2008, 227) Moreover, Since the state appears as a result in the development of the scientific concept through displaying itself as the true ground [of the earlier phases], that mediation and semblance cancel themselves in favour of immediacy. In actuality, therefore, the state as such is rather what is first. Finally, “it is the Idea of the state itself which divides itself into these two moments” (Hegel 2008, 228). Through the development of civil society, the substance of ethical life acquires its infinite form, which contains in itself these two moments: (1) infinite differentiation to the point at which the interiority [Insichsein] of self-­consciousness is for itself [für sich], and (2) the form of universality involved in education, the form of thought whereby spirit is objective and actual to itself as an organic totality in laws and institutions which are its will as thought. In this sense exactly, then, “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea.” 10 Žižek has recently developed a critique of standard misreadings of Hegel that is worth reading with care (Žižek 2012, 261). 11 Thomas is right in pointing out how “Gramsci stressed on numerous occasions [that] Hegel was the fundamental theorist of such an ‘ethical’ state” (Thomas 2009, 144). In Gramsci’s words, 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 (disparaging and sarcastic polemics against von Haller) before anything else. (Q8 §187, Gramsci 2007, 343) But Hegel is also a harsh critic of the new civil society created by the bourgeoisie that he conceives as part – as the “system of reality” – of the “ethical life” of the modern state. 12 In Germany, the young Marx tells us, if “Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem [of material bondage], it was at least the true setting of it.” Why? Because Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.

112   A Critique of Civil Society 13 The political conjuncture that serves as the framework in which Gramsci develops what has come to be mistakenly known as his concept of the “integral state” is, in Thomas’s words, “on the one hand, Benedetto Croce’s reinforcement of liberalism with his tale of modernity as the evolution of ‘Freedom’ ” and on the other, and more importantly, “the resurgence of economism in the international Communist movement in the late 1920s, with resulting ‘Third-­ Period’ catastrophism” (Thomas 2009, 141). As is well known, Croce’s notion of history as the story of freedom is found in a collection of his essays published in book form in 1938, where Croce again takes up the subject of the “Theory and History of the Writing of History” that he had already published in book form in 1912–1913 (Croce 1941). 14 Although Gramsci usually reserves the notion of “regulated society” to refer to the Idea of Communism after the liberal capitalist “state-­form” is historically overcome, here he tellingly uses it to refer to hegemonized civil society. 15 This is the situation that characterizes what is called authoritarian liberalism in Latin America (1870s–1930s). 16 The analysis of the transformation of everyday life into a site of hegemony in modern liberal capitalist society was taken up, starting in the late 1940s, by thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) and Guy Debord (Debord 2000). 17 Thomas’s understanding of the war of position “as a technique of nascent ‘biopower’ deployed by the bourgeoisie” and to which the subaltern proletariat had no choice but to respond with a “realistic political strategy” may very well be a Foucaultian reading of Gramsci’s texts. But this reading risks missing the important Gramscian, and indeed Marxist, conception of the historically protagonistic action of the proletariat or the subaltern groups that the process of hegemony from below, certainly assisted by the work of ideology from above, is designed to neutralize, and which, in the complex context of civil society, the war of position, understood as a war on the trenches and fortification of civil society, is uniquely suited to counteract. Where Thomas’s point may have more relevance, however, is in terms of understanding “biopower” as a form of hegemonic process organizing everyday life and, thus, understanding everyday life in turn as a new site of struggles against hegemony, just as – as Stefan Kipfer has recently reemphasized – counter-­cultural French Marxist writers of the 1960s, such as Lefebvre and Debord, understood the notion of everyday life (Goonewardena et al. 2008, 193–211). 18 Thomas has made the following interesting observation: It was Engels, and not Kautsky, who had first recognised that something had changed in the techniques of bourgeois domination that required a long-­term strategic response from the political organisations of the working-­class movements if they were successfully to pursue the goals of the forty-­eightist “revolution in permanence.” However, we must be careful with the use of concepts here. Gramsci argues that “revolution in permanence” is no longer tenable. Thomas’s argument that “ ‘The truth is that one cannot choose the form of war one wants’,” that “ ‘War of position’ in Gramsci’s conception, just as for Lenin and Trotsky, was not a programmatic strategy that he recommended be adopted by the proletariat” (Thomas 2009, 149–150), is flawed, because Gramsci explicitly argues in favor of a shift to a war of position under conditions of advanced civil society and liberal capitalism. It is important to note here Gramsci’s use of the notion of “rivoluzione permanente” as part of Gramsci’s critique of Trotsky (Q10I §12, Gramsci 1975a, 1235). By contrast, Gramsci places the expression “rivoluzione in permanenza” in suggestive quotation marks in Notebook 19 (Q19 §24, Gramsci 1975b, 2032), and he does so to indicate a substantial difference from

A Critique of Civil Society   113 Trotsky’s formulation. Thomas, however, retains the expression “revolution in permanence” as if it were the exact same thing as “permanent revolution,” against Gramsci’s explicit indication that such linguistic rendition of Jacobin language was, in fact, an expression of an “extreme democratic left” current as this emerged in the particular context of Germany after the failure of 1848. 19 Philip Oxhorn’s commendable reconstruction of the notion of civil society in the Latin American context and his more recent discussion on how to “sustain” civil society in the neoliberal era is a case in point (Oxhorn 1995, 2011). 20 According to Gramsci, Marx’s “acute analysis of the Spanish Constitution” can be found in his article on “Espartero” published in the New York Tribune, August 19, 1854. More accurately, as Buttigieg points out, it is Marx’s discussion in an article entitled “Revolutionary Spain” published in the New York Tribune of November 24, 1854 “that bears most directly on Gramsci’s observations” (Gramsci 2007, 480; Marx 1854). 21 On the significance and importance of the Cádiz Constitution and republicanism for early nineteenth-­century Latin America, see the various essays in Aguilar and Rojas (2002). 22 Hegel’s considerations on religious change as a precondition for successful political revolution in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History are worth reading, as they touch on the lack of “moral and intellectual” reform in places such as Spain and Italy before and during the Risorgimento as well as post-­Independence Latin America (Hegel 2011, 519–520). 23 Gramsci was well acquainted with Croce’s reflections on the Parthenopean Republic as published in Croce’s La Rivoluzione Napoletana del 1799 (1912). Gramsci’s own reflections on this and other works by Croce are contained in Notebook 10 (written between 1932 and 1935) with the heading “La filosofia di Benedetto Croce” (Gramsci 1975a). Before the SPN, this notebook was edited and published separately as Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Gramsci 1996a). 24 Gramsci’s analysis of the hegemonic process and the construction of subjectivity, identity and moral discourses among subaltern groups is comparable, in some ways, to Marx’s analysis of the “organic composition of capital” and “the influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class” in Capital I (Marx 1867).

5 War of Position as Counter-­Hegemony

The widening gap between structures and superstructures, as explored in Chapter 1, can result in a crisis of hegemony or, as Gramsci also calls it, a “general crisis of the state.” This is the time when the unexpected Event can happen, and Gramsci believed that it is possible to understand key moments of this seemingly automatic process and actively participate in its making. First, at the more basic level, the Event can occur when the hegemonic process is no longer able to suture that gap with solicited consent brought about through subjects themselves as their “free choice” or as a choice exercised in “freedom” and “democracy.” Although rare, these moments do occur. In many forms of contemporary electoral systems, as Gramsci puts it, this “choice” is filtered through the “banal belief ” that “numbers decide everything, and that the opinions of any idiot who knows how to write (or in some countries even of an illiterate) have exactly the same weight in determining the political course of the State as the opinions of somebody [the rich, elites] who devotes his best energies to the State and the nation.” What is actually measured in opinion polls and elections is thus not people’s autonomous freedom but “the effectiveness, and the expansive and persuasive capacity, of the opinions of a few individuals, the active minorities, the élites, the avant-­gardes, etc. – i.e., their rationality, historicity or concrete functionality” (SPN 192–193; Gramsci 1975c, 1624–1625). A crisis of hegemony in the first sense arises, then, when elites fail to fill the gap between their persuasive capacity to shape people’s beliefs and choices as a matter of their own freedom and the deteriorating reality of people’s real living conditions. Second, and this is the more open and obvious level, when “social classes become detached from their traditional parties,” that is, when “the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression,” the possibility of turning the Event into a fully open crisis of hegemony has become actual. The crisis of hegemony occurs, then, “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

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   115 state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution” (SPN 210; Gramsci 1975c, 1602–1603). In his discussion on “Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership” in the Notebooks, Gramsci makes a number of critically important distinctions that require careful attention but also careful development. First, “spontaneity is [. . .] characteristic of the ‘history of the subaltern classes’, and indeed of their most marginal and peripheral elements.” In other words, to an important extent, there is no organizing of the subaltern masses without spontaneous self-­organizing. Second, “in such movements there exist multiple elements of ‘conscious leadership’, but no one of them is predominant.” This is the Gramscian understanding of the rhizomatic character of “spontaneous” organizing. Third, the fact that “every ‘spontaneous’ movement contains rudimentary elements of conscious leadership, of discipline, is indirectly demonstrated by the fact that there exist tendencies and groups who extol spontaneity as a method.” This awareness of “spontaneity as a method” is, again, inherent in the Gramscian conception of subaltern power, a conception and, indeed, a method of organizing that is not supposed to disappear or be sublated by its opposite logic, the logic of the One or the party. When we find “apoliticism” in these cathartic, autonomous and rhizomatic movements, it may be due to the political cooptation of previous historical sequences and events or the capturing techniques of established political parties, classes and ruling elites. “Apoliticism” can thus be, initially, the very way of resisting the siren song of restoration by a renewed drive of cooptation. But “apoliticism” is not a necessary or permanent characteristic of these movements, precisely because, in fact, they are inherently political. These movements tend to go beyond the traditional or, in fact, even recently theorized boundaries between the political and the economic systemically drawn up by the constitutional models of liberal and neoliberal democracy, and, for this reason, these movements tend to politicize capitalism itself. Hence, Gramsci’s insistence that “the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared ‘unpolitical’,” naturalized and rendered “unpolitical” by liberal capitalism, was of great importance then, and remains so now (Butler et al. 2000, 98). Gramsci’s most explicit defense of the cathartic, autonomous and rhizomatic moment of the war of position, and his call for a combination of catharsis with discipline, are expressed in the Notebooks in the following terms: The Turin movement was accused simultaneously of being “spontaneist” and “voluntarist” or Bergsonian. This contradictory accusation, if one analyses it, only testifies to the fact that the leadership given to the movement was both creative and correct. This leadership was not “abstract”; it neither consisted in mechanically repeating scientific or theoretical formulae, nor did it confuse politics, real action, with theoretical disquisition. It applied itself to real men, formed in specific

116   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony historical relations, with specific feelings, outlooks, fragmentary conceptions of the world, etc., which were the result of “spontaneous” combinations of a given situation of material production with the “fortuitous” agglomeration within it of disparate social elements. This 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 modern theory – but in a living and historically effective manner. The leaders themselves spoke of the “spontaneity” of the movement, and rightly so. This assertion was a stimulus, a tonic, an element of unification in depth; above all it denied that the movement was arbitrary, a cooked-­up venture, and stressed its historical necessity. It gave the masses a “theoretical” consciousness of being creators of historical and institutional values, of being founders of a State. This 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. (SPN 198; Gramsci 1975c, 330) Note here, first of all, that although Gramsci is already in prison when he writes the above passage, Gramsci reflects back on the experience of the factory council movement of 1920 and vindicates it again – particularly the politics of spontaneity – together with his own Bergsonian thesis of creating the presuppositions of political action itself, of giving the masses “a ‘theoretical’ consciousness of being creators of historical and institutional values, of being founders of a State.” Here, then, Gramsci draws a clear link between autonomous and spontaneous movements and the politics of refoundation. John Schwarzmantel is correct in saying that one of the “core themes of the Prison Notebooks is the reflection on the defeat of the  working class movement and the subsequent victory of fascism, and the implications of both for political action and the need for a new type of political party” (Schwarzmantel 2015, 15). Schwarzmantel is also right in saying that it is not correct to oppose the “early” Gramsci with his stress on the factory councils to the “later” Gramsci with his emphasis on the party. To this it should be added, however, that those who go as far as dismissing the “early” Gramsci’s “voluntarism” and “Bergsonianism” in favor of the “later” Gramsci’s “scientific” and “true” Marxism-­Leninism, not to mention those who favor a “pluralist” and “democratic” Gramsci against the radical activist one, do so at the expense of how Gramsci himself understood his own intellectual and political development and productively combined the different intellectual moments of his own life. In key ways, therefore, the Notebooks represent a real combination of two distinct but dialectically related moments of the political that, taken as a whole, constitute Gramsci’s concept of power. Although Gramsci himself never used the word “rhizomatic” in his work, he uses other equally naturalistic metaphors to try to capture the

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   117 nature of the impure political act under conditions of liberal capitalist societies. The word “rhizomatic” belongs, rather, to Deleuze and Guattari, who understand it to mean principles of connection and heterogeneity, whereby a rhizome can be “connected to anything other, and must be,” so that “a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” Further, rhizomatic politics are about the principle of multiplicity, or “when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, ‘multiplicity,’ that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.” This is particularly visible in collective assemblages, in which any increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity “necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” Rhizomic politics are also about the principle of asignifying rupture, that is, “against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure.” In this instance, the “rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.” Rhizomic politics territorialize and deterritorialize space as needed, and there are no simplistic “good” and/or “bad” positions here, for “how could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?” Finally, as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomic politics are about the principle of “cartography and decalcomania,” whereby “a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.” There is in the rhizome, therefore, no “pretraced destiny,” no deterministic outcome, no “necessary” form and no single root (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7–14). These are principles that help us understand and develop the cathartic, autonomous and horizontal moment in Gramsci’s concept of constituent power, his understanding of the initial moment in the war of position.1 When the “complex, contradictory and discordant” ensemble of structures and superstructure forming the modern liberal or neoliberal historical bloc begins to crack, when a crisis of hegemony ensues, this is the moment when the possibility of an Event that revolutionizes praxis becomes available. Recalling the philosophy of Bergson, one of Gramsci’s most important influences, we can say with Žižek that “when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes or conditions” (Žižek 2014a, 392).2 This is precisely what the Event makes possible and, as Žižek also reminds us in his magisterial discussion of Hegel, “from a truly materialist position [the] multiplicity [that responds to the opening of the Event] is only possible against the  background of the Void” and only from this widening gap of structures and superstructures, exacerbated by the crisis of hegemony, which makes multiplicity “non-­All” or nontotalizing and thus, at the same time, the initial moment in counter-­hegemony (Žižek 2012, 227). In Gramsci’s words,

118   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony 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. (SPN 366–367; Gramsci 1975b, 1244) As the extract above indicates, Gramsci does not conceive of the “passage” from the purely economic (or individualistic) to the purely universal moments of praxis as a direct one. The “ethico-­political moment” is the proper moment of catharsis, discovery of autonomy, the politics of horizontality and multiplicity, and critical work on the self, where structure “ceases to be an external force” and the hegemonic process can no longer simply “assimilate” subjects or peoples into itself and “make them passive.” This is the moment when it becomes possible to “create a new ethico-­political form,” a critical awareness of the self and others, and the starting point and source for “new initiatives.” This is just the starting point of “all the philosophy of praxis” and not, by any means, its climactic or universal point. The cathartic moment, thus, has to be defended as a key moment of the war of position. According to Gramsci’s materialist conception, though, the war of position “can only 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” from below (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §54, 267). Note that when Gramsci speaks of “popular organizations” with their own “trenches and permanent fortifications,” he is not talking about alternative forms of civil society organizations (CSOs). When Gramsci talks about “large popular organizations” that constitute the “trenches” of the people in the counter-­ hegemonic war of position, he is not indicating the same “private associations” – the NGOs or civil societies of today, in which the “individual can govern himself without his self-­government thereby entering into conflict with political society” (SPN 268). Gramsci sees these NGOs and civil societies as the stealthiest trenches of “transformism,” the vanguard of Thermidorian restoration if not open counter-­revolution, that nonetheless see themselves – according to their own discourse and ideology – as the vanguard of genuine change. For Gramsci, therefore, popular organizations such as autonomous peasant movements, independent trade unions, poor people’s movements, anticolonial movements and the like are the

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   119 means for an initial moment, an initial position of war against civil society. In Gramsci’s sense, then, popular organizations committed to counter-­ hegemony are radically autonomous, rhizomatic, multiple, heterogeneous, and even prefigurative or utopian expressions of what can be called self-­ constitutive, self-­authorizing and self-­legitimating practices of modern militant activism that, if we look at them in the context of today’s neoliberal capitalism, can also operate as a form of neo-­arditismo, a kind of cultural guerrilla warfare subversive of the process of hegemony and the passive revolution that operate invisibly at the heart of modern types of civil society. Counter-­hegemonic popular organizations are, thus, radically collective and oppositional forces in the war of position, and Gramsci by no means suggests that civil society should be fought with civil society, or hegemony with hegemony, or the state with the state. In this regard, Gramsci transcends Lenin’s basic notion of hegemony as leadership and Lenin’s basic formula for a shift in the balance of forces towards the leadership of the proletariat and its party within an existing liberal capitalist hegemonic regime or historical bloc.3 Gramsci is here decidedly post-­ Leninist. In Notebook 8, Gramsci gives a historical materialist interpretation to the development of passive revolution or “one of the historical forms of transformism in the process of formation of the modern state in Italy” that, again, takes up the dynamics of the Risorgimento as an example. In reference to the development of political parties, Gramsci writes: Two periods of transformism: (1) from 1860 to 1900, “molecular” transformism; that is, individual political figures molded by the democratic opposition parties were incorporated one by one into the conservative-­moderate “political class” (characterized by its aversion to any intervention by the popular masses in state life, to any organic reform that would replace crude dictatorial “dominance” with a “hegemony”); (2) from 1900 onward, transformism of whole groups of extremists who crossed over to the moderate camp (the first event was the formation of the Nationalist Party with ex-­syndicalist and anarchist groups that culminated in the Libyan war, followed by interventionism). Between these two periods, one can insert an intermediate period (1890–1900) during which a mass of intellectuals joined the parties of the Left – called socialist but in fact simply democratic. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §36, 257) But transformism or passive revolution is also a changing “molecular” exercise in terms of broader “incorporation” and capturing of subaltern groups – even of entire groups of “extremists” among them, such as syndicalists and anarchists – and their intellectuals, and changes depending on the historical context and the stage of state formation that a ruling elite or combination of elites has managed to achieve and consolidate. In the context of Italy, Gramsci also locates the cultural process of constructing

120   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony subaltern and working subjects as starting with the Risorgimento itself. This process involved the molecular construction among subaltern groups of the highly integrated “Taylorized man” and the corresponding cultural experience of Fordist liberal capitalism, as represented, for example, by the modern experience of work, time and space in new industrial complexes such as Fiat, whose plant in Turin began operation in 1899.4 This is, in other words, the cultural making of the modern and “democratic” Italian working class. It is only once the nation-­state is consolidated, once liberal capitalism has become the dominant historical bloc and the only game in town, once the state of hegemony has been reached, that the immanent logic of passive revolution acquires the form of postmodern disintegration dedicated to either preventing or dispersing the “cathartic moment” of rebellion that a crisis of hegemony can generate or channeling it into a process of transformism and restoration.5 If we want to avoid the same familiar academic trap in our reading of Gramsci that, according to Charles Taylor, Peter Dews avoids in his treatment of post-­structuralist thinkers, namely, the trap of a “selectively simplified translation [of their works] into [our] familiar slogans,” then we must read Gramsci in his own terms and horizon.6 Here, this means that transformism must be understood as the molecular work of passive revolution ultimately aimed at ensuring that subaltern groups and their intellectuals make the passage through hegemony and into consent with as little disintegration of their own common sense or conception of the world as possible, but also with as much “absorption and incorporation” into the dominant system of moral universalism as possible. In the context of historical blocs successfully stabilized by a hegemonic process, passive revolution does not entail what Theodor Adorno famously called the “logic of disintegration” (the implicit reference in Thomas’s wording), as that would be a contradiction and a self-­negation. This logic of disintegration (as a new process of hegemony) only arises with the hegemonic crisis of Taylorism and Fordism much later, after Gramsci’s time. As Peter Dews writes, “At the psychological level, the process of disintegration is manifested in the decline of the bourgeois individual, the breaking down of the autonomous ego. During the liberal phase of capitalism, Adorno argues, the mediating power of the ego in the process of social reproduction reached a historical apogee. Although he does not underestimate the extent to which capitalist society has always rested on a framework of coercion, he suggests that, during the high bourgeois epoch, individuals were at least able to experience themselves as constituting their own society through the market-­mediated pursuit of private interest” (Dews 2007, 225). The kind of disintegration that Adorno describes as following this stage is, thus, not going to happen in the advanced liberal capitalist world of the Global North until the rise of post-­Fordist neoliberal hegemony. This is also the stage that Latin America entered, paradoxically, with the transitions to “democracy” and neoliberal globalization in the 1980s and 1990s. But once this transition takes place, the results will be

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   121 exactly the opposite of those predicted by Adorno. In other words, postmodern neoliberal “disintegration” will become, in Gramsci’s terms, another historical form of transformism and sublated integration, in which “the breaking down of the autonomous ego” actually becomes one of the very quintessential features of what Jameson and Harvey call “the postmodern condition,” what Debord calls the “society of the spectacle,” and the resulting – in Kroker and Cook’s words – “excremental culture” of hyperconsumerism (Kroker and Cook 1986). Passive revolution makes possible the transition from the “economic-­ corporative phase” of blunt ideological domination and the state as night watchman, from the model of the state as a primarily repressive apparatus – a case of primitive and coercive production of hegemony – to a state that is capable of “immanently resolving the contradictions of civil society,” a state that engages in “molecular” transformism by carefully constructing the “trenches and fortifications” of modern civil society cocooning the private self of modern self-­interested citizens, in which the hegemonic process operates as a matter of the free will itself, and where the gap that separates structures and superstructures of modern liberal capitalism can be sutured. This is precisely what passive revolution makes possible, and what the subsequent and more advanced “transformism of whole groups of extremists who crossed over to the moderate camp” enables to be cemented. It is in the context of this expanded passive revolution involving both subaltern groups and “extremist intellectuals,” workers and capitalists/managers – and also including what Allan Megill calls “prophets of extremity” (Megill 1987) – that a new regime of capillary hegemony consolidates itself by normalizing the process of educating, socializing and sublimating even “radicalized” individuals as they are culturally and politically – even aesthetically – sublated into larger and more differentiated arrays of “private organizations” in civil society and, through them, into political society, the state and the dominant historical bloc (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §47, 154).7 Gramsci himself was a militant and critical witness of how, in the context of hegemonic crisis within liberal capitalism, the aim of passive revolution and hegemony is to stamp out the ability of any subaltern group to successfully challenge hegemony and, only in this precise sense, become – anticipating Hannah Arendt’s idea – “faber of an historical epoch.” Passive revolution thus aims not simply to incorporate dissent but also to forestall the rise of a new counter-­hegemonic militant activism and the organization of a rupturist and Jacobin Modern Prince. As a process of hegemony, passive revolution does this by seeking to suture the widening gap in and between structures and superstructures and, in doing so, to close the gaps that give rise to hegemonic crisis and prevent the passage towards an evental situation that could threaten the existing historical bloc. But if the Event does occur, if there is a flourishing of rhizomic politics threatening to become more organized and disciplined and portending a takeover of power, then hegemony has clearly failed, the “organic crisis” of the historic bloc has passed the point of successful

122   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony hegemonic suture, and the politics of Caesarism and Fascism and their attendant aggressive ideologies of nationalism, racism and classism arise as extreme solutions to the failure of hegemony. This is the reason why Gramsci repeatedly rejects the mechanistic idea that subaltern classes must wait until the proper conditions have developed to become – using the language of Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler – “faber” of a historical epoch. In Gramsci, this is precisely what living and acting according to the revolutionary ethics of the impure act, engaging in the politics of rhizomatic activism, enables committed individuals and subaltern groups to do already here and now from within the context of counter-­hegemonic praxis and within the currently dominant historical bloc.8 As Gramsci writes, The war of position calls on enormous masses of people to make huge sacrifices [in countering hegemony]; that is why an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is required [on the part of the state] and hence a more “interventionist” kind of government that will engage more openly in the offensive against the opponents and ensure once and for all, the “impossibility” of internal disintegration by putting in place controls of all kinds – political, administrative, etc., reinforcement of the hegemonic positions of the dominant group, etc. All of this indicates that the culminating phase of the politico-­historical situation has begun, for, in politics, once the “war of position” is won, it is definitely decisive. (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §138, 109) Gramsci here foregrounds the role of government in reinforcing hegemony through interventionist political and administrative controls (such as those of Taylorism and Americanism) whose hegemonic effect is felt from the ground up and from the inside out. Here, then, we find a deep connection, an “absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution” as part of state-­driven attempts at constant “restoration” in response to the threat of reemerging catharsis from below (Gramsci 1975c, Q15 §11, 1766).9 For, as Gramsci writes, the “concept of passive revolution, it seems to me, applies not only to Italy but also to those other countries that modernise the state through a series of reforms or national wars without undergoing a political revolution of a radical-­Jacobin type” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §57, 232).10 Beyond the restoration that a passive revolution may facilitate, the hegemonic effect of the war of position from above and passive revolution from below is thus reproduced and amplified by civil society – and mass media – and this is the reason why an autonomous, rhizomatic and cathartic actor, mobilized through a war of position, is guided not by the “democratic ideals” of liberal capitalism – which constitute the “internal criterion of its own legitimacy,” the language they want us to speak and in whose terrain we can most easily be defeated, coopted and renormalized – but by its own impure ethical imperative, which negates all the established tropes of political normality or legitimacy. For, as Gramsci writes, if “the

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   123 1848 concept of the war of movement is precisely the concept of permanent revolution,” then “the war of position is the concept of hegemony” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §54, 267). Gramsci does not doubt the social and economic benefits that the construction and progressive extension of rights, welfare and stability or so-­called “governmentality” can bring to the “enormous masses of the people” – that, after all, is the point of state concessions and reforms. The socialization of the discourse of rights, welfare, development and governability – and its further strategic deployment through more recent policies of democracy and trade promotion worldwide – is, indeed, one of the ways in which hegemony ensures the “impossibility of internal disintegration” of the established system of reality or historical bloc. Now, in the age of neoliberal globalization, post-­Fordist capitalism, global supply chains, and transnational practices of accumulation by extraction and dispossession, we see the discourse of rights, development and governability that global and local civil society socializes from the top down as an ideology of consent and subjection, as a new form of post-­Fordist adaptation, as the expression of a war of position aimed at building “reinforcements” and “controls of all kinds” while allowing a certain level of contestation and negotiation with national and transnational actors. The response of the state to the counter-­hegemonic war of position thus comes, in Gramsci’s time as in ours, through the private organizations of civil society and the widespread deployment of passive revolution. But, at the same time, the response of growing numbers of subaltern actors to this passive revolution is the further mobilization of “enormous masses of people” willing to make “huge sacrifices,” willing to take a leap in the “offensive against the opponents.”11 It is at this point that Gramsci’s sense of an imminent “culminating phase of the politico-­ historical situation,” where the normality of “durable” time and “stable” space, constructed by hegemony in the interior and subjective environments of the historical bloc, seems once again to be on the verge of global breakdown.12 When successfully organized and waged by the ruling elites, the goal of the war of position is to ensure the impossibility of a crisis of hegemony leading to “internal disintegration.” The current state does this by ramping up “controls of all kinds” and “reinforcement of the hegemonic positions” that transform gains – even through compromises – into a decisive restoration, which may include some expanded benefits for subaltern groups. Failure to implement a successful war of position and implement a passive revolution may very well be the result of “ineptitude” on the part of ruling elites rather than a successful counter-­hegemonic war of position waged by subaltern groups. But it is an open question whether subaltern groups, even when organized spontaneously and rhizomatically in response to the  evental opportunity before them, will pick up and “hegemonize” (in  Laclau’s and Mouffe’s sense) or appropriate whatever “historically unfinished tasks” the bourgeoisie or ruling groups may have left unfulfilled. This is very much a nineteenth-­century view of specific hegemonic

124   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony conditions – both structural and superstructural – that needed to be fulfilled by bourgeois-­democratic revolutions as stepping-­stones towards socialism or Communism. Although hegemonic failure may mean that “the bourgeoisie [opens] the way for the emergence of a workers’ movement capable of assuming the responsibilities of social and political leadership and carrying them to their logical conclusion” (Thomas 2009, 153), the outcome of the war of position is anything but a forgone conclusion. But when successfully organized by spontaneous, autonomous and rhizomatic “large popular organizations” and supported through a campaign of moral and intellectual reform, perhaps through the kind of “cultural associations” and Clubs for Moral Reform that Gramsci himself organized in his younger years, a successfully organized counter-­hegemonic war of position may well lead to the next phase in politico-­historical development, which Gramsci tends to call, in keeping with the language of his time, “regulated society,” and which is today again starting to be called “refoundation,” “Socialism of the Twenty-­First Century,” “the Idea of Communism.” But this is a war of position in which subaltern groups do not organize themselves to appropriate and “hegemonize” the unfinished tasks of the “bourgeois-­democratic revolution” so as to fulfill all necessary social and economic conditions before the proper refoundation and transition to socialism can become possible. This is not a war of position that will result in subaltern groups being transformed into a local or global civil society mobilized around the discourse of rights, sustainable development and the consolidation of the “rule of law” through the “well-­ordered” institutions – and “veil of ignorance” – of liberal democratic or polyarchic institutions. For in the liberal capitalist context, as Gramsci reminds us, “the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §10, 162). It is those superstructures that are mobilized against the very emergence of any spontaneous, autonomous, cathartic and rhizomatic uprising. A “good civil society” is mobilized precisely to forestall any chance that a radical militant threat to the state-­form of modern liberal or neoliberal capitalism will arise, no matter how severe the crisis of hegemony may be. In the counter-­hegemonic war of position, as Thomas rightly reminds us (Thomas 2009, 153), subaltern groups require nothing less than a “leap into the open air of history” as an act of the will.13 In opposition to the trenches of civil society formed by private associations, Gramsci identifies “the 1848 concept of the war of movement” or “permanent revolution.” What exactly, then, is the war of maneuver or war of movement? In politics [. . .] the war of maneuver drags on as long as the positions being won are not decisive and the resources of hegemony and the state are not fully mobilized. But when, for some reason or another, these positions have lost their value and only the decisive positions matter, then one shifts to siege warfare – compact, difficult, requiring

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   125 exceptional abilities of patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is reciprocal, whatever the appearances; the mere fact that the ruling power has to parade all its resources reveals its estimate of the adversary. (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §138, 109)14 When the positions being fought over are decisive and the struggle shifts to reciprocal “siege warfare,” the ruling elites “parade” all their resources of hegemony, including, of course, the resource of civil society. It is even better when this civil society can behave critically towards power itself, but without ever crossing the Rubicon and moving on to militant counter-­ hegemony, as such a move would turn it into a “bad” civil society. Gramsci’s notes on the “war of position” and the “war of maneuver” or “war of movement” are sometimes placed within his discussions on “structure and superstructure.” But he also uses theory of war and martial language – just like Lenin and Trotsky before him – to articulate his thoughts on historical, political and economic dynamics. For example, Gramsci compares “the economic factor” or economism – such as workers’ strikes – in certain historically and geographically concrete contexts, as in Russia prior to 1917, to “field artillery in a war of maneuver.” Just like field artillery, Gramsci maintains, the “immediate economic factor [is] 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, Q6 §138, 161–162). Gramsci’s critique of Second International orthodoxy is here at its most clear when he argues that “economic determinism” or economism leads to “historical mysticism,” the “anticipation of some sort of dazzling miracle,” and ultimately to defeat (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §138, 162). The opportunity opened up by the economic crisis of the First World War, however, enabled the development in the East (i.e., Russia) of popular or revolutionary “tactics of assault and incursion” that made possible the Russian Revolution of 1917 and thus the “revolution against Capital.”15 But Gramsci also argues that “among the most 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, Q6 §138, 162). In these states, a similar reduction in the importance and effectiveness of the war of maneuver “must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in those cases pertaining to the most advanced states, where ‘civil society’ has become a very complex structure that is very resistant to the catastrophic ‘irruptions’ of the immediate economic factor (crises, depressions, etc.).” For in the most

126   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony “advanced states” of liberal capitalism, “the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare,” and, in this context, the war of maneuver ceases to be the relevant political strategy for either the state or subaltern groups. If “the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare,” can the sphere of civil society represent the proper terrain in which to organize the spontaneous and rhizomic struggle against hegemony not only in the “advanced” liberal capitalist states in the West but, in the age of neoliberal globalization, in the peripheral states of flexible accumulation and expanded extractivism and dispossession? Does counter-­hegemony consist in building an alternative, grassroots or “radically democratic” form of civil society – even on the basis of “agonistic” rather than “deliberative” democratic politics as proposed by Mouffe – capable of putting checks on the state and the economy, spurring social and economic reforms and development, and also holding governments accountable, as has become generally understood today among so-­called “left liberals,” social democrats and even anti/alter-­globalization activists, and some Gramsci scholars? When coming face to face with civil society as  a “resource of hegemony,” Gramsci makes the following laconic suggestion: [O]ne must conduct an in-­depth study of those components of civil society that correspond to the defensive system [of the ruling groups] in a war of position. (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §138, 163) Gramsci’s concern with the possibilities of revolution in “advanced states” such as those of Western Europe, including Italy, and the failures of successive revolutionary sequences from 1848 to his own day led him to shift his attention from an exclusive focus on the structures of political economy to those of political hegemony. After the French Revolution and, even more so, after 1848, the bourgeoisie “was able to present itself as an integral ‘State’, with all the intellectual and moral forces necessary and sufficient for organising a complete and perfect society” (cited in Thomas 2009, 142). In the context of the “integral state,” therefore, attacks on particular factories, individual churches or temples, or state offices or ministries cannot be confused with attacks on capitalist accumulation, religious ideologies or the process of hegemony. As Gramsci writes, Sometimes, it would appear that a ferocious artillery attack [in a war of maneuver] against enemy trenches [the complex structure of civil society] had levelled 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 crisis. (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §138, 163)

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   127 Gramsci’s critical analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the lessons he drew from it are, thus, deeply informed by his considerations on the war of position and the war of maneuver, as outlined above. These reflections are also the basis for Gramsci’s critique of Trotsky’s notion of “permanent revolution” and his repeated warnings against turning the war of maneuver into the only option for political struggle. “One should determine,” Gramsci writes, “whether [Trotsky’s] famous theory about the permanence of movement is not a political reflection of the theory of the war of maneuver [. . .]; whether it is not, in the final analysis, 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, Q7 §16, 168). The “permanence of movement” is, thus, something conceivable in fluid structural and superstructural conditions, but not in those contexts where state development has reached the stage of hegemony. For Gramsci, then, the theory of “permanent revolution” is intimately tied to a social situation defined by the absence of civil society and, thus, a situation in which “frontal assaults” seem to make more sense than tactical battles against hegemony or “trench warfare.” Gramsci expands his reflections on the concept of “permanent revolution” as follows: With respect to the “Jacobin” slogan [permanent revolution] formulated in 1848–49, its complex fortunes are worth studying. Taken up again, systematised, developed, intellectualised by the Parvus-­Bronstein [Trotsky] group, it proved inert and ineffective in 1905, and subsequently. It had become an abstract thing, belonging in the scientist’s cabinet. The [Bolshevik] tendency which opposed it in this literary form, and indeed did not use it “on purpose,” applied it in fact in a form which adhered to actual, concrete, living history, adapted to the time and the place; as something that sprang from all the pores of the particular society which had to be transformed; as the alliance of two social groups [i.e., proletariat and peasantry] with the hegemony of the urban group. In one case, you had the Jacobin temperament without an adequate political content; in the second, a Jacobin temperament and content derived from the new historical relations, and not from a literary and intellectualistic label. (SPN 84–85; Gramsci 1975c, 2034) Defenders of Trotsky such as Hoare, Smith and Buttigieg, all important editors of Gramsci’s Notebooks in English at one point or another, argue that Gramsci’s comparison of Trotsky’s notion of “permanent revolution” with the war of maneuver or the “tactic of the revolutionary offensive” is, in fact, “mistaken” (see Buttigieg’s point in Gramsci 2007, 505, n. §16 1). According to Buttigieg, in fact, Trotsky himself argued that his theory of permanent revolution “pertained specifically to the stages of revolution in the ‘backward bourgeois countries’.” As quoted by Buttigieg, Trotsky

128   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony emphatically – or dogmatically – argued that in the so-­called “backward countries,” the “road to democracy pass[es] through the dictatorship of the proletariat,” whereby “democracy is not a regime that remains self-­ sufficient for decades, but is only a direct prelude to the socialist revolution.” To bolster this position. Buttigieg quotes Frank Rosengarten to the effect that “the divergence between Trotsky and Gramsci lies in their understanding of how the national and international dimensions of the socialist revolution are to be interrelated with each other” (see Buttigieg’s point in Gramsci 2007, 506, n.  §16 1). But if Buttigieg is right on this point, then the theory of permanent revolution would actually be even more problematic and questionable. In light of Gramsci’s discussion of the need to pay close attention to the structures of civil society within national states as a central defense of “advanced states” or, in its relative absence, the key variable that may explain not only a victory like that of the Russian Revolution but also its weakness, it is Rosengarten, and by extension Buttigieg, who may be mistaken. For Gramsci, the interplay between national and international elements was important, but in his day and age, Gramsci was convinced that “social relations” within nation-­states preceded international relations (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §37, 259). And within the social dynamic, for Gramsci, the relationship and reciprocal conditioning between “structures” and “superstructures” within specific historical blocs or hegemonic formations takes precedence. As Gramsci writes, “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 superstructure” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §61, 271). In short, “[t]he structure and the superstructures form a ‘historical bloc’ ” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §182, 340), and the mediations – “moments of the absolute spirit” – introduced between them, such as civil society, constitute the site of the war of position and initial moment of counter-­hegemony.16 In contrast to Trotsky, Gramsci argues that Lenin “understood the need for a shift from the war of maneuver that had been applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position, which was the only viable possibility in the West [. . .] where the structures of society were still capable of themselves becoming heavily fortified trenches” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §16, 168). But Lenin did not have time, or eventually abandoned the possibility of developing “his formula” or its implications. In fact, the shrewdest comment ever made by Lenin on the differences between East and West and the chances of revolution in their respective and unevenly developed political economies and geographies is contained in his speech to the Moscow conference of trade unions in 1918: “The whole difficulty of the Russian revolution is that it was much easier for the Russian revolutionary working class to start than it is for the West European classes, but it is much more difficult for us to continue. It is more difficult to start a revolution in West European countries because there the revolutionary proletariat is opposed by the higher thinking that comes with culture, while the working class is in a state of cultural slavery” (cited in Eagleton 1991,

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   129 114). Gramsci himself made a similar admission about the factory council movement: the fact that it was relatively easy to start but extremely difficult to keep going should have alerted its participants that something was off. This, too, should have alerted Lenin that something beyond questions of development in political economy was at stake in developing the Russian Revolution. Now Gramsci wants to develop Lenin’s basic theory, and, indeed, his Notebooks can be understood as a long and complex effort to develop it in the form of a critique of civil society, particularly in the West. For Gramsci’s concept of power, then, “the fundamental task was a national one; in other words, it required a reconnaissance of the  terrain and an identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the components of civil society, etc.” (Gramsci 2007, Q7  §16, 169). Gramsci’s critique of civil society in the Notebooks thus reaches its  height with one of his most critical and deservedly celebrated formulations: 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. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements. Needless to say, the configuration varied from state to state, which is precisely why an accurate reconnaissance on a national scale was needed. (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §16, 169) So, for Gramsci, Lenin supplied the starting formula for the critique of bourgeois civil society, but left it unfinished. Trotsky’s ideas of the ultimate impossibility of long-­lasting revolution in one country without a transnational activist or revolutionary movement to support and nurture it give Gramsci the chance to develop his argument that, when it comes to the struggle against hegemony in the age of Fordism, the decisive plane of action ultimately remains the national, and the key dialectical relationship remains that of the temporal and spatial dynamic of structures and superstructures, understood as a relationship between the trenches of civil society and the adequate tool or instrument needed to articulate an effective counter-­hegemonic “war of position” capable of breaching and, eventually, destroying the “sturdy structure of civil society.” This tool or instrument is, precisely, the Modern Prince. For Gramsci, therefore, the reason for thinking about civil society is precisely in order to find a way to destroy it, not merely by engaging in some permanent and potentially unending war of maneuver against merely tactical, syndicalist and “economistic” targets, but by developing the resources and capabilities of highly inventive rhizomatic struggles in “spontaneous” and autonomous movements, in combination with the organization and discipline of the Modern Prince, to effectively engage in a decisive and strategic war of position that

130   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony can reach deep into the “sturdy fortresses and emplacements” of the advanced or modern liberal capitalist state. The counter-­hegemonic war of position is, thus, not merely about “destroying material things, but invisible and impalpable ‘relations’, even if they hide in material things” (cited in Santucci 2010, 153). Gramsci is, thus, not a theorist of civil society in the sense of being a thinker who is reformulating some “radically democratic” or pluralist concept of civil society for present-­day radical activists. Gramsci is, instead, a theorist of the war of position from below, the counter-­hegemonic struggles of autonomous and rhizomic movements. Although Gramsci is also the theorist of the Modern Prince, his theory of the war of position conceptualizes its double approach or two-­moment dialectic in terms of “a reciprocal ‘reduction’ so to speak, a passage from one to the other and vice versa,” a passage that becomes possible in the opening of the refoundational and revolutionary Event that issues from a crisis of hegemony (SPN 199). The lessons that Gramsci drew from the factory council movement, the failure of revolution in the West, and also the “statolatric” and increasingly authoritarian tendency in the Russian Revolution taught him that if the organizers of the Modern Prince neglect or dismiss the so-­called “spontaneous” movements that spring up cathartically and rhizomatically in response to the widening cracks of liberal capitalism and the process of hegemony, if the Modern Prince fails to give these movements the space to develop anew a conscious and constitutive leadership of their own and thus “raise them to a higher plane by inserting them into politics,” we may face extremely serious consequences. For, as Gramsci asserts, “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,” which, in doing the work of hegemony, can easily transform itself into either a restoration of the status quo ante or a reactionary coup d’état. And both of these consequences can result from “the failure of the responsible groups to give any conscious leadership to the spontaneous revolts or to make them into a positive political factor.” Against the pure Leninists and Trotskyists, who see as real and worthwhile “only such movements of revolt as are one hundred per cent conscious, i.e., movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory (which comes to the same thing),” Gramsci deploys a combined Marxist and Bergsonian argument affirming an evental reality that “produces a wealth of the most bizarre combination” and rejects “a reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema” (SPN 200).17 In The Gramscian Moment, Thomas invites us to see Gramsci as a “democratic philosopher.” He writes: “The categories of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals are related to the figure of the ‘democratic philosopher’. This figure enables us to rethink the contemporary significance of Gramsci’s proposal of the ‘Modern Prince’ and an apparatus of proletarian hegemony as the organisation of expansive democratic social relations” (Thomas 2009, xxiv). This position takes Lenin’s “basic formula” of

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   131 hegemony as political leadership based on consent as Gramsci’s finished conception, and, replicating not only Laclau and Mouffe’s retroactive articulation of Gramsci in “radically democratic” terms and as proposing “expansive democratic social relations” but also continuing Togliatti’s and Bobbio’s similar “democratic” reading, Thomas delivers us Gramsci as a “radical democratic thinker” who, in the end, falls hopelessly short of what current counter-­hegemonic struggles actually require. For all its merits, and it certainly has many, Thomas’s operation is thus not dissimilar to that performed by Coutinho, who, in similar terms, retroactively defuses Gramsci’s radical Jacobinism – which he identifies with the “idealist character of this formation” that paid little or no attention to the “moment of causality, of determinism” (Coutinho 2013, 11) – and effectively transforms the Italian radical thinker into a precursor of “transitions to democracy” in Latin America, more particularly of Lula, the Workers’ Party and the so-­called Pink Tide in Brazil. Clearly, this is a Gramsci against Gramsci, who is better placed in the tradition of thinkers such as Bobbio, Dahl, Rawls, Laclau, Mouffe and Habermas, but someone who is simultaneously “more radical and more realistic” than they are, precisely because of what appears to Coutinho as his unyielding commitment to the classical ideas of thinkers such as Machiavelli and Rousseau and the particular “re-­evaluation of democracy” they make possible today. However, in light of the Gramscian call for a “dual perspective” that combines “spontaneous” and “disciplined” action, rhizomatic and organized strategies in the war of position against civil society and the modern liberal capitalist state, these scholars seem to miss what appeared to Gramsci as the “fundamental theoretical question” to be raised then and today: “Can modern political theory be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ feelings of the masses?” Has the Gramscian call for spontaneous, rhizomic and autonomous organization of subaltern movements been irrevocably outpaced by more recent forms of theoretical and practical developments? When the crisis of hegemony breaks out into the open and reverberates out “from the terrain of the parties (the party organisations properly speaking, the parliamentary-­electoral field, newspaper organisation) throughout the State organism,” Gramsci argues, the solution can take the form of either normalization/restoration or refoundation/revolution (SPN 219; Gramsci 1975c, 1619). In a crisis of hegemony, however, the odds are highly stacked against subaltern actors, because, first, “the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm.” Second, the “traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp.” And, finally, in this particular context, the ruling elite can and does overtly engage in the politics of restoration to the point where “it may make sacrifices” and may even be willing to “expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises.” If need be, the ruling elite can promise to reform everything, thus entering

132   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony into an uncertain future, precisely so as to ensure that nothing fundamental is going to change and that everything remains certain. This last attempt to rebuild moral universalism by a renewed strategy of self-­limitation, sacrifice, and even some market and ideological uncertainty as to the future extent (perhaps 80–90%) of domination is, perhaps, the most dangerous of all weapons available to elites in the war of position, and requires an even more complex ideological response from subaltern groups. The complexity of the crisis of hegemony requires, therefore, an equally complex response from subaltern groups and not, I argue, a social democratic response disguised as “agonistic” politics. Gramsci is convinced that only a combined and dialectical “system of ideologies” can generate a “rational reflection of the contradiction” between structures and superstructures, representatives and represented, and at the same time posit or bring about the existence of the “objective conditions for revolutionizing of praxis.” And the process of forming this revolutionizing praxis passes through a dual process, that is, at least two combined but irreducible moments that Gramsci attempts to capture with his concept of politics as catharsis in the war of position. The first moment comes about when a social group, a multiplicity of groups or many heterogeneous groups are detached from political society and “spontaneously” form and make demands directly related to their material conditions. At this level, these groups may not share among themselves “one hundred percent” homogeneity at the level of ideology or organization, but by their very nature, their struggles do share a rhizomatic, autonomist and horizontal nature, as was the case with the factory council movement that Gramsci helped to organize in his time, or, indeed, the Occupy, autonomist and prefigurative movements of today. These are the militant activist movements that help deepen the crisis of hegemony and drive the initial moment of a counter-­ hegemonic war of position. Gramsci’s classic definition of catharsis is precisely his attempt to capture this logic. Gramsci reserves the capacity to “elevate” cathartic, autonomous and rhizomatic struggles to a more general moment of coordination, organization and discipline, the moment of “force and consent” or “tactics and strategy” that Gramsci also calls the “dual perspective” of the Modern Prince (SPN 169; Gramsci 1975c, 1576). That is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes   1 To an important extent, this is also the concept of power we encounter in the Zapatista movement today, as John Holloway has distilled it into theory (Holloway 2002, 2005).   2 Žižek develops this Bergsonian line of thought in his In Defense of Lost Causes (2009).   3 Thomas has argued that “a close examination of Gramsci’s arguments reveal that his fundamental point of reference was instead Lenin’s emphasis upon hegemony as a complement of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the postrevolutionary conjuncture, conceived as a process of cultural revolution” (Thomas

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   133 2009, xxii). Gramsci himself explicitly acknowledges his debt to Lenin in the basic formulation of hegemony. However, Gramsci went beyond Lenin in his understanding of hegemony, and that is, as is being argued here, where the real Gramscian moment actually begins.   4 We must be careful not to smuggle back into our critical work the old deterministic view according to which, as even David Harvey still subtly expresses it, the modernism that emerged before the First World War was more of a reaction to the new conditions of production (the machine, the factory, urbanization), circulation (the new systems of transport and communications), and consumption (the rise of mass markets, advertising, mass fashion) than it was a pioneer in the production of such changes. (Harvey 1989, 23) We must resist the temptation of slipping back into a linear reading of Lukácsian realism and critique of the “aesthetization of politics” that reduces the experience of time and space or time-­space – in Harvey’s seemingly Einsteinian terms – to being “embodied” by each “distinctive mode of production or social formation” (Harvey 1989, 204). Even Jameson, the thinker who has probably had most influence on Harvey’s discussion on the rise of space over time as a central postmodern motif, tells us that modernist space proves to have merely reproduced the logic of the system itself at a greater level of intensification, running on ahead and transferring its spirit of rationalization and functionalism, of therapeutic positivism and standardization, onto built space not yet even dreamed of. (Jameson 2010, 163) Instead, we can still productively pursue Marx’s and Gramsci’s critical thinking on these matters and regard such Modernist experiences – without receding back to uncritical Kantianism and the search for the absolute external objective Thing itself and the (in Harvey’s terms) “objective qualities as well as the meanings of space and time” – as co-­constitutive of modes of production (structures) and social formations (superstructures) themselves. We find an approximation to and a creative circumscription of the experience of space-­time from within historical blocs in Lefebvre’s theorization on “social” and “contradictory space” and in how these become part of what Hegel calls the “system of reality” or, in more recent terms, Baudrillard’s world of simulacra, where “things and products [including time and space] do not speak the truth about themselves,” where “appearances and illusion are located not in the use made of things or in the pleasure derived from them, but rather within things themselves,” and where space – or time for that matter – “never quite becomes absolute, never quite emancipates itself from activity, from use, from need, from ‘social being’ ” (Lefebvre 1992, 80–83). But even in this Lefebvrian avant garde critique of culture, it is still possible to detect the logic of a materialist “last instance” rather than the logic of dialectical co-­constitution when Lefebvre affirms that “There can be no doubt that the problematic of space results from a growth in the forces of production.” Although Harvey is right to “challenge the idea of a single and objective sense of time or space, against which we can measure the diversity of human conceptions and perceptions,” a challenge that we can also find clearly expressed in Gramsci’s Notebooks, I agree with Žižek that we do need to go beyond the “boring dialectical claim” that “every immediacy is already ‘mediated’, grounded in and generated by a complex network of mediations, so that we should ‘de-­fetishize’ anything that appears to be an immediate given” (Žižek 2014a, 315–316). We do, indeed, need to go beyond the boring and endless repetition, through second-­hand quotations themselves endlessly repeated within the same edited collections on one or another theme

134   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony related to Gramsci’s work, that Gramsci indeed offers us a “nuanced” analysis of time or space, here and there, in never actually referenced passages of his Notebooks where Gramsci explicitly addresses these subjects. When it comes to historical time and social space, we must, therefore, dare to conjecture, to speculate and to posit “the substantial content itself,” something we can do only if we presuppose a “Substance” as the ground of our praxis: “we work for a common Cause which is alive only through us, but we have to presuppose it” (Žižek 2014a, 315). In this Jacobin act of impure radical politics, “leading toward a form of society in which politics and hence morality as well are both superseded” (Q6 §79, Gramsci 2007, 63) even the ultimate consolations of the modern physics of time and space are not enough to allay the feelings of vertigo brought on when, within history and our social world, we leap from the certainty of old metaphysical materialism to what Žižek calls “the status of the Real qua impossible” (Žižek 2014a, 29).   5 For an illustration of Gramsci’s use of the term “catharsis” in the context of the Risorgimento, see his letter from prison of May 9, 1932 to Tatiana Schucht in which Gramsci discusses Croce’s Storia d’Europa (Gramsci 2011, 171–172, cited in Gramsci 2007, 642, n 2).   6 In his review of Peter Dews’ The Logic of Disintegration (Dews 2007), Charles Taylor points out how this work manages to avoid a “selectively simplified translation into familiar slogans” of the work of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard and Foucault (Taylor 1988).   7 Thomas offers a very different interpretation of the passage in question here. As he writes, In its over-­arching logic of disintegration, molecular transformation, absorption and incorporation, the passive revolution in both of its phases was single-­mindedly dedicated to this one goal: prevention of the cathartic moment in which the subaltern classes cross the Rubicon separating a merely “economic-­corporative” phase from a truly “hegemonic” phase, or, in other words, the phase in which a subaltern social layer becomes a genuine class, architect and faber of an historical epoch. (Thomas 2009, 151–152)   8 The necessity of this impure ethics of revolutionary subjects is well captured by Žižek: From the standpoint of emancipatory struggle, it is thus crucial to take into account how, in the process of the actualization of a Notion, the Notion itself changes (into its opposite). And the purer this Notion is, the more brutal the reversal. (Žižek 2014a, 80) Here, the old Marxist historical consolation for the eternal failure and/or postponement of revolution must be rejected: the story according to which progress goes from substance to alienated subjectivity, i.e., subjectivity separated from the objective conditions of its labor. This development reaches its apogee in capitalism, in the figure of proletariat as substanceless subjectivity; however, this point of extreme alienation is in itself already a resolution, for it opens up the perspective of its own overcoming, of the collective subjectivity reappropriating its objective conditions – this time not by being substantially immersed in them, but by asserting itself as the subject of the entire process. From a strict Hegelian standpoint, a teleological process like this will always go wrong, and the intended goal will turn into its opposite (as confirmed by the reversal of revolutionary emancipation into Stalinist nightmare). (Žižek 2014a, 80–81)

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   135 Current struggles to build another world in places such as Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela disclose the true dialectical matrix of the process we need to keep in mind: “one must first fail in reaching the goal, as the intended reconciliation turns into its opposite, and only then, in a second moment, will the true reconciliation come, when one recognizes this failure itself as the form of success” (Žižek 2014a, 81–82). This is what communal activists in Venezuela variously capture when they say – repeating Chávez – we must try, we must fail, we must try again, we must invent again (Harnecker 2010).   9 Hegemony is, thus, a process that takes particular forms under conditions of passive revolution, and since the war of position is fought not only from below but also from above, its dynamic, too, is that of the war of position. Coutinho interprets Gramsci’s statement that there is an “absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution” as follows: in a time when ‘war of movement’ has been replaced by “war of position” – that is, in already “Westernized” societies – the ruling classes try to face this new form of struggle with passive revolutions (such was the case with Fascism and Americanism); but this means precisely that, if the subaltern classes accept this terrain of struggle, then they are condemned to inevitable defeat. (Coutinho 2013, 105) 10 As is well known, Gramsci adopted the concept of “passive revolution” from Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) and used it in his own discussion of Cuoco in Notebook 4, written in 1930 (Q4 §57, Gramsci 1996b, 232; see also Buttigieg’s note on p. 584). For more on Cuoco, see Buttigieg (Gramsci 1992, 422, n. 2). 11 Note that it is only possible to speak of the prehegemonic years of authoritarian liberal capitalist (“uneven and combined”) development in Italy, Germany or Latin America until 1914 as years of “ ‘permanent structural adjustment’ avant la lettre” (Thomas 2009, 154) in a formal or analogical sense. We have to wait for the arrival of neoliberal globalization after the 1980s to properly speak of years of permanent structural adjustment. 12 Thomas rightly raises the question of whether Gramsci conceptualized the objective temporality of the passive revolution in terms of “the time of duration” as opposed to a “historical epoch.” Every historical epoch in Gramsci’s sense involves the stabilization of time as “duration” or – in Braudel’s terms – as “longue durée,” for this is the time that is needed to successfully suture the gaps within and between structures and superstructures and thus stabilize historical blocs. But I have found nowhere in Gramsci the notion that time moves as simple “duration,” equally operative as such in times of ascendancy and consolidation of a new historical bloc as it is in times of hegemonic crisis. Instead, what we find explicitly stated in Gramsci is an idea of how time changes in the context of hegemonic crisis, when the whole civil world is shaken to its core, when everyone is compelled to think “in global terms,” when events set “the social totality, the entire conceivable human race, the whole ‘spirit’ in motion.” In these times, Gramsci tells us, we come face to face with “the fundamental difference between [the temporality and historicism of] Vico and Hegel, between God and Napoleon-­world spirit, between pure abstract speculation and the ‘philosophy of history’ ” (Q4 §56, Gramsci 1996b, 232). Hegemony is thus inseparable from these stabilizing or revolutionizing temporal arrangements, just as it is inconceivable without revolutionizing the arrangements of subjective and objective spaces, environments and ecologies. 13 According to Thomas, “a dialectical ‘leap into the open air of history’ ” is what Gramsci proposes for the subaltern classes in “the third and final movement of Q 8, § 2” (Q8 §2, Gramsci 2007, 234; compare with Q5 §127, Gramsci, 1996a, p. 382).

136   War of Position as Counter-Hegemony 14 Gramsci calls Luxemburg’s 1906 The Mass Strike “the most significant theory of the war of maneuver applied to the study of history and to the art of politics” (Q7 §10, Gramsci 2007, 161). 15 In his pre-­prison article “The Revolution against ‘Capital’,” published in Avanti! on December 24, 1917, Gramsci celebrates the Russian Revolution, sides with the Maximalists (the young Gramsci referred to them as “the Russian revolution itself ”) and at the same time articulates a scathing critique of economism, dogmatism and orthodoxy as applied in Russia as follows: It’s a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was the book of the bourgeoisie, more than of the proletariat. It was the crucial proof needed to show that, in Russia, there had to be a bourgeoisie, there had to be a capitalist era, there had to be a Western-­style of progression, before the proletariat could even think about making a comeback, about their class demands, about revolution. Events overcame ideology. Events have blown out of the water all critical notions which stated Russia would have to develop according to the laws of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks renounce Karl Marx and they assert, through their clear statement of action, through what they have achieved, that the laws of historical materialism are not as set in stone, as one may think, or one may have thought previously. As Gramsci sees it, then, “Socialist thinking instantly gave life to the history of the proletariat, to their fight against capitalism.” In Gramsci’s view, “Revolutionaries will themselves create the conditions needed for a full and complete fulfilment of their ideal and they will do so in less time than capitalism would have” (Gramsci 1990a, 34–37). 16 If it is true, as Eagleton has argued, that “Marxism was never intended to be a theory and practice of how desperately backward societies could leap, isolated and unaided, into the twentieth century; and the material consequence of such an attempt is generally known as Stalinism” (Eagleton 1991, 115), it is also true that the dogmatic linearity and historical necessity of this Eurocentric and essentially setentrionalist lineage of Marxism are precisely what Gramsci’s concept of power as a combination of spontaneous and disciplined politics is intended to overcome. 17 Gramsci writes that for Sorel, “the ‘myth’ found its fullest expression not in the trade union as organisation of a collective will” whose “highest achievement [. . .] was to have been the general strike – i.e., a ‘passive activity’, so to speak, of a negative and preliminary kind.” The problem with this conception, Gramsci argues, is that as politics it does not contemplate “an ‘active and constructive’ phase of its own” and thus leaves the outcome of political action to “the intervention of the irrational, to chance (in the Bergsonian sense of ‘élan vital’) or to ‘spontaneity’ ” (SPN 127; Gramsci 1975c, 1557). Curiously, this is the text that is often quoted to illustrate Gramsci’s supposedly “anti-­ Bergsonian” and “anti-­voluntarist” version of realist Leninist politics. In fact, however, this text is a critique of Sorel’s limited understanding of politics as “vital [creative, rhizomatic, autonomous] action” and as illuminated by Bergson’s thought. The editors of the SPN rightly recognize that Bergson’s ideas were, nevertheless, filtered to Gramsci through Sorel and “provided him with a psychological antidote to the fatalism of Austro-­Marxism.” They go so far as to admit that Bergson had “a systematic influence on Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ as such” (SPN 325 n.  4), but qualify this admission by stating that Gramsci engaged in a “reexamination and criticism of idealistic and Bergsonian influences in Sorel’s work” (SPN 343 n. 28). The textual evidence suggests, rather, that Gramsci’s critiques were sympathetic appropriations of Bergson’s work rather than a puritan exorcism of his ghost. As remains undoubtedly clear

War of Position as Counter-Hegemony   137 from many notes scattered throughout the Notebooks, Gramsci continued to draw inspiration from Bergson throughout his prison years, and used his ideas to illuminate the meaning of more traditional political concepts (e.g., “the art of politics”) or emerging realities for which the old concepts in the Marxist tradition, by themselves, were not adequate to explain (e.g., vital, rhizomatic, inventive or spontaneous action from below and in the context of modern law and constitutional liberal capitalism) (SPN 252; Gramsci 1975a, 660–661).

6 The Modern Prince Refounding the State

Gramsci has deservedly acquired the reputation of being the thinker of the “Modern Prince.” But is the Modern Prince equivalent to a Leninist type of party? Are Gramsci’s politics the same as the politics of the “united front,” as has often been suggested? As we saw in the previous chapter, Gramsci’s position in his journalistic work as well as the Notebooks is one in favor of what he calls cathartic politics and what we today, developing Gramsci, can also call rhizomatic, autonomist and prefigurative politics. In fact, Gramsci is very conclusive about the “moments” of his proposed political strategy, and the politics of mobilization occupy the first place. But Gramsci also moves to a second moment of his proposed political strategy, and that is the moment of disciplined and more organized strategy. As was discussed in the Introduction, although Gramsci developed important ideas on the party in his Ordine Nuovo articles, it is only in the Notebooks that we find these discussions coagulating into Gramsci’s most advanced sketches in terms of his overall political vision. Gramsci’s theory of the party simultaneously distances him from Lenin’s “democratic centralism” and brings him closer to our current modes of militant struggles, centered around the twin ideas of counter-­hegemony and “Refoundation” of new states that we see emerging around the world as bulwarks against democracy promotion and neoliberal globalization. The idea of “Refoundation” is certainly suggested by Gramsci, but it is, of course, our own chavista extension of Gramsci’s claim that the party “has the aim of founding a new type of State” (SPN 147).1 In this chapter, I thus attempt a more careful analysis of how Gramsci proposes to transform those initial explosions of cathartic, rhizomatic and autonomous forms of protest, the heightened spirit of cleavage that haunts elite power in time of crisis, struggles that may emerge out of an evental opening produced by a hegemonic crisis, into the organization of a “national-­popular” Modern Prince, which alone is capable of refounding the state and challenging dominant national and, now, transnational processes. This reading of Gramsci is possible if, following Gramsci himself, we understand his conception of Communist politics as a dialectical combination of the rhizomatic and the organizational and disciplined moments required for revolution in his and our times. As Gramsci himself states, “This unity between ‘spontaneity’ and ‘conscious

The Modern Prince   139 leadership’ or ‘discipline’ is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes” (SPN 198). The question of the Modern Prince concerns, for Gramsci, “the problem of the formation of a collective will,” particularly in the context of the breakdown of old political parties. Reversing the original Marxist formulation of the 1859 preface, Gramsci ties this problem to the question of whether “society does not set itself problems for whose solution the material preconditions do not already exist” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §195, 346). Gramsci analyzes the “molecular phases” of the process of formation of a collective historical movement not only as his theory of the “party,” but also as part of his dialectical reversion of Marx’s 1859 Preface and his argument that, as we saw in Chapter 1, the formation of a revolutionary collective actor also involves the very process of positing and retroactively creating the very conditions for revolutionary transformation. The retroactivity in the positing of “effective premises” for problems “for whose solution the material preconditions do not already exist” happens, Gramsci tells us, as an “act of faith” in “the rationality of history transmuted into an impassioned teleology that is a substitute for the ‘predestination,’ ‘providence,’ etc., of religion” or, indeed, the so-­called “laws of history” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §205, 353). In Gramsci, then, the modern political impure act replaces Machiavelli’s notion of “fortune,” Vico’s notion of “virtù,” Kant’s notion of the “good will,” Sorel’s notion of the myth-­ Prince and, certainly, Gentile’s own notion of, well, “the pure act” itself (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §237, 379). But Gramsci does not carry out this substitution in order to embrace yet another unabashed version of political puritanism or historical determinism. Instead, what happens in the becoming of this collective and constitutive impure act is that, in the very process of construction and mobilization of this self-­conscious collective actor or this “demiurge” or creator of the people and from the people (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §150, 320), the very meaning of historical necessity and rationality changes: the superstructures intervene in, blend with and change the structures, as a collective ought to – a myth, a utopia, an Idea – that functions more like Ernst Bloch’s notion of utopia, a subjective/objective “drive” that effectively posits from within the gap of history “the existence of an efficient premise that has become operative in collective consciousness, similar to a popular belief ” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §237, 379).2 Here, then, “criticism reformulates speculation into its own real terms of ideology, but the critique itself will have its own speculative phase” from where passion, myth and utopia emerge and merge to forge a new Idea (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §238, 380). Here, the will is seen as “active” and understood as a collective actor that intervenes directly in the “force of circumstances” and can even change them. Gramsci insists that this argument is not akin to advocating some sort of “relativism or scepticism” or, still less, vulgar idealism or mere voluntarism. But it is certainly an argument that unapologetically retrieves and reworks into the philosophy of praxis the old Hegelian idea of history as the history of the Idea of freedom, which is

140   The Modern Prince simultaneously the ethical imperative of necessity and the notion that – in Žižek’s words – “the resistance is inscribed into the very notion of the Ideal.” The construction of the Modern Prince is, therefore, a daring act of will, determination and hope, a program that seeks the Idea, but in such a way that “we can only asymptotically approach in an endless effort, but never fully realize” (Žižek 2014a, 120). For Gramsci, therefore, the construction of the Modern Prince is an “expression of liberty” and, consequently, of something that is at once ethical necessity and social contingency. The Modern Prince is the movement of a vanishing mediator as well as the consciousness of the Absolute. Only in these dialectical terms, Gramsci tells us, can we conceive of this project as “the history of liberty” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §112, 298). Like its classical Machiavellian precedent, the Modern Prince’s role is also to establish “a new type of state” (Gramsci 1996b, Q5 §127, 382). But the construction, actions and goals of the Modern Prince do not take place in a legal and constitutional vacuum. Even if the political party in its early stages “neither rules nor governs,” even if the initial moment of revolt is about changing the world without taking power, as soon as the construction of the Modern Prince gets underway, it can enter the game of power, in fact, feel like a “de facto power,” and even exercise “the hegemonic function, and hence the function of balancing various interests in ‘civil society’.” Such is the game that party construction plays in a context where “ ‘civil society’ is in fact so thoroughly intertwined with political society that all the citizens feel instead that the party rules and governs,” or else they do not feel the presence of the party at all. This is the effect that modern political systems and constitutional law have on the construction of political parties and the reason why, when it comes to the construction of the Modern Prince, Gramsci also calls for an entirely new form of constitutional law, a new refoundational constitutionalism as “a system of principles asserting that the end of the state is its own end, its own disappearance: in other words, the reabsorption of political society into civil society” and, consistently with the argument developed in this book, the sublation of the latter into the new state. What Gramsci takes from Machiavelli’s The Prince is, thus, the idea of “the process of formation of a ‘collective will’ ” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 246), a vindication of the emancipatory tradition that affirms “the will of the people as the basis of political action and legitimacy” (Hallward 2014). In this tradition, the Idea of Communism remains the guiding thread. Gramsci outlines the double character or “dual perspective” that we need to keep in mind as we examine, and indeed embark on, the process of construction of the Modern Prince. In a passage from Notebook 8, Gramsci writes: Another issue that needs to be defined and developed: the “dual perspective” in political action and in the life of the state. The dual perspective can manifest itself at various levels from the most rudimentary

The Modern Prince   141 to the most complex. But this, too, is related to the dual nature of Machiavelli’s Centaur – force and consent, domination and hegemony, violence and civility (“church and state,” as Croce would say), agitation and propaganda, tactics and strategy. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §86, 284) What is really important about this passage is, however, Gramsci’s careful critique of the vulgarization and manualization of Machiavelli’s The Prince while at the same time carefully qualifying its meaning for us today. How, then, is this passage to be understood? Gramsci himself gives us the answer: Some have reduced the theory of the “dual perspective” to something that is narrow-­minded, petty, and banal; in other words, they have reduced it to nothing more than two forms of “immediacy” that succeed each other. Instead, the opposite might take place: the more the first perspective is “absolutely immediate” and absolutely rudimentary, the more the second perspective might be distant, complex, and lofty. In other words, it might turn out, as it does in human life, that the more an individual is compelled to defend his own immediate physical existence, the more he will uphold and identify with the loftiest and most complex values of humanity. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §86, 284) The key to understanding this passage is, thus, not a regression of Gramsci’s understanding of the dual perspective of the Modern Prince to his earlier view of hegemony as leadership and Realpolitik, because this is precisely what he calls “immediacy” and what these later passages are meant to leave behind. It is my sense that Thomas regresses Gramsci to an underdeveloped theory of hegemony when he writes that “this perspective is already announced explicitly in Gramsci’s first notebook, in fact, in the first note in which the term hegemony appears, ‘Political class leadership before and after assuming government’ (Thomas 2009, 163; I 136).3 There is, thus, no question of reducing the theory of the “dual perspective” – in the sense of coercion and consent, rhizome and discipline, domination and hegemony, in short Machiavelli’s Centaur – to only one of its immediate terms. If we think of the moments of hegemony simply as “strategically differentiated forms of a unitary political power,” then we are committing Gramsci to the narrow Leninist interpretation of “unitary political power” that his dual conception of the party and power, and, indeed, his whole critique of hegemony, is attempting to overcome, even if it does not result in the same precise Leninist distinction between hegemony among friends and domination among enemies, immediate party tactics based on dictatorship and long-­term party strategy based on “regulated society,” that we are accustomed to hear passing for Gramsci’s work. This is precisely why Gramsci insists again, in Notebook 13, that “Machiavelli’s Prince could be

142   The Modern Prince studied as an historical exemplification of the Sorelian myth – i.e., of a political ideology expressed neither in the form of a cold utopia nor as learned theorising, but rather by a creation of concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will” (SPN 125–126; Gramsci 1975c, 1555–1556). It is here that Pocock’s conception of the Machiavellian moment becomes pertinent once again, and we must remember Gramsci’s anticipation of this concept when he writes: For Machiavelli, “fortune” has a double meaning, objective and subjective. “Fortune” is the natural force of circumstances, the propitious concurrence of events; it is what Vico meant by Providence. Alternatively, it is that transcendent power fabled by old medieval doctrine – i.e., god; and for Machiavelli this is nothing other than individual virtù itself, with its power rooted in man’s will. As Russo says, Machiavelli’s virtù is no longer the virtue of the scholastics, which has an ethical character and derives its power from heaven; nor is it Livy’s virtue, which generally means military valor. Machiavelli’s is the virtù of Renaissance man, which is capacity, ability, industriousness, individual strength, sensibility, acumen, and a proportionate sense of one’s own potential. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §237, 379) It is certainly the case that the Machiavellian and Sorelian language Gramsci uses in the above passage does not easily lend itself to clear Leninist, Trotskyist or Third Internationalist political distinctions regarding the immediate tactics and strategy of the party. For Thomas, this is the case because “Gramsci’s formulation of the relationship between these categories was less inspired by Machiavelli’s metaphor than articulated with it, at an advanced stage of his research, when he entered a period of revision and reformulation (partially overdetermined by a crisis of health and a change in the tempo and rhythm of his thought).” For Thomas, again, “This and similar allusions or metaphors represent not Gramsci’s ‘starting-­ points’, but a very particular type of conceptual – or even ‘mythical’, in the sense – summary of his previous research, prior to undergoing further elaboration” (Thomas 2009, 164). In this sense, then, the intention of the above passage on the “dual perspective” is to “emphasise the underlying dialectical unity within the commonly accepted oppositions he adumbrates at the outset” of the Notebooks and reject any simplistic “antinomian relationship of coercion and consent, or their simple (Gentilean) identification.” But let us not forget that this reading of Gramsci is uncannily similar to positions that a Bukharin, or certainly a Lenin, would also have been comfortable to endorse. And if that is the case, I wonder, why do we need Gramsci to tell us that “Consent and coercion now figure as moments within each other, theoretically distinct but really united as moments (simultaneously der Moment and das Moment) of a political hegemonic

The Modern Prince   143 project” (Thomas 2009, 167)? Have we come this far in our reading of the Notebooks only to end up back at the “real starting point” of the notion of hegemony and the politics of the Modern Prince as Realpolitik? What happened to the development of Gramsci’s thought through the writing of his Notebooks? A proper understanding of Gramsci’s ideas about the Modern Prince requires, therefore, an understanding of the philosophical stakes Gramsci raises when he introduces his dual version of the revolutionary party into the language of Marxist discourse and the debates of his day. If we want to understand Gramsci’s heterodox ideas on the Modern Prince, then, we will have to briefly examine Lenin’s idea of the party, as this constitutes an important background for Gramsci’s discussion. Lenin’s conception of political struggles and the party in the context of “uneven development” and imperialism, clandestinity and revolution lends Gramsci a series of conceptual inputs for the construction of his own notion of the Modern Prince. Although in many ways Lenin remained a Second International thinker, he also adopted and further developed the ideas of “proletarian hegemony” and “uneven development.” This latter aspect of Lenin, I think, is well understood by Laclau and Mouffe when they write: For Lenin, the world economy is not a mere economic fact, but a political reality: it is an imperialist chain. The breaking points appear not at those links which are most advanced from the point of view of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, but instead, at those where the greatest number of contradictions have accumulated, and where the greatest number of tendencies and antagonisms – belonging, in the orthodox view, to diverse phases – merge into a ruptural unity. This implies, however, that the revolutionary process can be understood only as a political articulation of dissimilar elements: there is no revolution without a social complexity external to the simple antagonism among classes; in other words, there is no revolution without hegemony. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 60, italics added)4 As used by Laclau and Mouffe in the above-­quoted passage, the notion of “hegemony” appears like an extension of the idea of Realpolitik that we examined in the second chapter of this book. And this is exactly how Lenin used the notion of hegemony in the context of the political struggles in Russia between 1905 and 1917. Against the economist fixation with objective economic conditions and what these conditions make or do not make possible, Lenin privileges the moment of revolutionary politics and develops the concept of the party as a “vanguardist” organization capable of developing socialist consciousness and teaching this consciousness to the “spontaneous” working class even under the challenging conditions of uneven development and Tsarist autocracy. “We have said” – Lenin writes

144   The Modern Prince in What Is To Be Done? – “that there could not have been social-­ democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have had to be brought to them from without” (Lenin 1902). Under the harsh reality of a repressive and highly exploitative regime such as Russia’s – even after 1905 – the choices that confronted revolutionary Social Democrats were, therefore, quite stark: “Since there can be no question of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is – either bourgeois or socialist ideology.” Waiting for the social relations of production to generate the required and properly developed consciousness for socialism and limiting the organization of the party to the needs of trade unionism was, for Lenin, tantamount to political suicide. For Lenin, then, “the organization of the revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession” and where the distinction between workers and intellectuals among the members of such an organization “must be effaced.” But the party must also have the capacity to “articulate” dissimilar elements – bring together multiple classes or fractions of classes – with their consent and, indeed, trust. For Lenin, decisively, this type of “hegemony” does not compromise the essentially socialist and working-­class character of the party, because such a nature does not depend on sociological characteristics, but on the nature of the theory and ideology (“scientific socialism”) adopted as the core program in the struggle. In Lenin’s view, then, the party is not only the vanguard of the revolutionary process but also the point of maximum focus and awareness of the most oppressed sectors of all society. Under the conditions of Tsarist repression, this means that it is impossible for this party to organize itself internally along “democratic” lines. But even after these conditions are overcome, particularly in the context of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party must be organized around the principle of “democratic centralism.” These are the core tenets of Lenin’s theory of the party in What Is To Be Done? If Lenin’s immediate reason for proposing all of this as he articulated it in To the Rural Poor (Lenin 1903b), and given the autocracy of the Tsarist regime (Lih 2010), was, as Lih has recently argued, “political freedom,” then Lenin certainly did not understand this “political freedom” in liberal terms. How Lenin understood “political freedom” not only internally (within the party), but publicly (in terms of how to organize the public sphere and political society), is revealed in his ideas of who can or cannot belong to the party and, by extension, who can or cannot enjoy the political freedom to express their ideas both within the party and in the public sphere. The birth of the Bolsheviks as a party in 1912 can be traced to the dispute over party membership as contained in paragraph one of the membership rules at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which met in Brussels on July 30 and ended in London on August 10, 1903. As Lenin recalls this dispute in One Step Forward, Two

The Modern Prince   145 Steps Back (1904), “Those who recall the debate on Paragraph 1 will now clearly see that the mistake committed by Comrade Martov and Comrade Axelrod over Paragraph 1 had inevitably to lead, when developed and deepened, to opportunism in matters of organisation. Comrade Martov’s fundamental idea – self-­enrolment in the Party – was this same false ‘democracy’, the idea of building the Party from the bottom upward. My idea, on the other hand, was ‘bureaucratic’ in the sense that the Party was to be built from the top downward, from the Party Congress to the individual Party organisations” (Lenin 1904). In 1904, as this passage was written, Lenin emphatically rejects the idea of building the party democratically, from the bottom up, and argues in favor of building the party from the top downwards, “bureaucratically.” As he writes these words, it occurs to Lenin that the same factionalism that eventually led to the downfall of the French Revolution is now threatening his movement with the specter of “anarchism” and, as he puts it, two entirely different models of revolution. As Lenin writes, attempts to analyse and precisely define this detestable “bureaucracy” inevitably lead to autonomism; attempts to “lend profundity” to their stand and vindicate it inevitably lead to justifying backwardness, to tail-­ism, to Girondist phrase-­mongering. At last there emerges the principle of anarchism, as the sole really definite principle. The split between the Bolsheviks (the “majority,” the “maximalists”) and the Mensheviks (the “minority”) thus concerned the very question of “democracy” (participation) and “political freedom” (capacity to dissent and criticize) that, according to Lih, effectively motivated Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Except, however, that Lenin’s position was in favor of rejecting any form of independent, autonomous, rhizomatic or horizontal grassroots or “democratic” participation and organizing – what he called “false democracy” – in favor of the “bureaucratic” or centralist road to political emancipation. Lenin’s argument in terms of membership (the minority argument) was not in favor of respecting dissent (always, obviously, a real risk of cooptation and hegemony) in an inclusive party, but, rather, of a pure party purged of theoretical perverts and sociological impurities. When representatives of the General Jewish Labour Bund proposed to the Congress that Russian citizens should have the “right to use their own language,” for example, Lenin was outraged and opposed the motion, while Stalin, of all people, supported it (!).5 It is clear that the Mensheviks were becoming increasingly defined as a liberal faction that also supported legal and reformist participation in the Duma, and the Bolsheviks as a more radical and militant one, favoring a system of political alliances – but not subject to local autonomy, spontaneous activity or autonomous consciousness of individual party organizations – particularly with the peasants, and rejecting the idea of any meaningful participation in the institutions of the Tsarist regime except, perhaps, for purely propaganda purposes. Note that

146   The Modern Prince in the early stages of the process, Plekhanov threw his support behind Lenin and Trotsky threw his behind Martov and Axelrod. Despite the walkout of the Bund – Lenin calls them “the extreme opportunists” – Lenin conceptualizes the entire sequence of stages through the Congress as follows: “In each of these stages the circumstances of the struggle and the immediate object of the attack are materially different; each stage is, as it were, a separate battle in one general military campaign.”6 And then Lenin pulls a dialectical twist on this entire militaristic process, which has, until now, remained as a model of rigorous dialectical thinking (Lenin 1906).7 In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), borrowing from Hobson and Hilferding, Lenin attributed great importance to the structures of imperialism, colonialism and “uneven development” for creating the conditions for a new national “political conjuncture” that requires a new type of political logic, as he had not quite articulated it in his earlier writings. There is no question that Trotsky also saw in this changed historical situation the need for new political tasks and declared, once he had extended the concept of “uneven development” into “uneven and combined development” in works such as History of the Russian Revolution Vol. I (1932), that this was, in fact, “the historical condition of our time” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 60).8 Under these conditions, then, the only way to successfully organize revolution is by an “unceasing expansion of hegemonic tasks.” But it is here, precisely, that questions about the nature of hegemony and counter-­hegemony, or restorative and bottom-­up constitutive praxis, begin to emerge, and where Gramsci’s answers will progressively differ from those provided by Lenin and Trotsky. For Lenin and Trotsky, the notion of hegemony simply means the strategic idea of “political leadership within a class alliance” in a given state and at a particular time. Partially under the widely acknowledged influence of Clausewitz’s classic work On War (1832), this basic formula will be given a political logic in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902) and will be expanded by the militarization of national Bolshevik politics and the Bolshevization process of world Communist parties, with increasingly centralist and authoritarian consequences.9 Even if this narrow idea of hegemony represents a move forward when seen against the background of Second International economistic orthodoxy and “nationalist chauvinism” (Lenin), and even if this idea – according to Laclau and Mouffe – helped to reconceptualize the terrain of politics as “different from that on which the social agents are constituted,” i.e., the economic base, for Gramsci, hegemony is here still conceptualized in at least two problematic ways. First, it is confined to an external (i.e., nonvital, noncultural, nonmoral) relationship of strategic “leadership” and “alliances” that Gramsci finds equally deterministic because it fails to reconceptualize the fundamentally dialectical relationship between structures and superstructures and the logic of hegemony that emerges from the unstable gap and restorative equilibrium between the two. And second, and more importantly, this notion of hegemony effectively shifts what is a systemic mechanism of moral and cultural

The Modern Prince   147 domination and concealment over to the side of subaltern and collective groups struggling against hegemony itself (!). As Gramsci says, one cannot fight the enemy with the political and ideological weapons of the enemy, which, in this case, presuppose a systematic weapon of concealment and domination. In this second sense, then, hegemony as a strategy to fight hegemony actually becomes autocratic and ultimately self-­defeating, precisely because, in keeping with the martial language of the time, it constitutes a fifth column of elite moral universalism and common sense lodged deep in the terrain of resistance – in its very own earthworks and embankments – and through moral and intellectual means that remain unaddressed by Lenin and many of his orthodox followers. On the eve of his incarceration in 1926 and in his last pre-­prison and unfinished essay, Some Aspects of the Southern Question, Gramsci still relied on the narrow idea of hegemony as leadership of the proletariat in a class alliance or “united front” with the peasantry. But this Realist notion of worker–peasant alliance, this Realpolitik notion of the “united front” and, thus, this narrow notion of hegemony, is what Gramsci started to modify in that essay and eventually left behind as he wrote the Notebooks. Aside from the obvious influence exerted by Machiavelli, another key element that emerges in Gramsci’s combined language about the Modern Prince is the work of Georges Sorel and, particularly, Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908). Needless to say, the controversy around the extent and significance of Sorel’s influence on Gramsci continues today. But Gramsci himself was not – in his words – “Jesuitical” about critically engaging with Sorel, any more than he had been with Bergson and other thinkers outside the orthodox Marxist tradition. Coutinho has once again suggested that Gramsci’s use of Sorelian terminology constitutes a mere “flirtation” that in no way implies support for “a subjectivist or voluntarist conception of the formation of the collective will.” For Coutinho, indeed, it is actually scandalous to imagine Gramsci arguing that “nothing but the construction of an ‘idea-­force’ or of a ‘myth’ […] could mobilise the class without having anything to do with the concrete objective reality (as in Sorel’s ‘general-­strike’ myth).” Rather, Coutinho argues, Gramsci “conceived this collective will as ‘operative awareness of historical necessity’, that is, as structural necessity raised to superstructural consciousness and converted into ‘transformative praxis’.” Note, however, that “historical necessity” in Gramsci no longer means the blind necessity of historical laws of capitalist development, but the necessity that is born of an ethical conviction and imperative and from within the impure act of social transformative praxis. Note also that critical awareness of the self in Gramsci does not mean that consciousness “reflects” (as in a mirror) the “structural necessity” (as in “objective reality”) so as to “convert” that reflection into a “transformative praxis” that once again, fatalistically, waits for the conditions to generate the Event. Necessity in Gramsci must be understood in the “historical-­concrete sense” as “the existence of an efficient premise that has become operative

148   The Modern Prince in collective consciousness, similar to a popular belief ” and, more precisely, as a premise that “contains the sufficient material conditions for the realization of the impulse of collective will” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §237, 379). Gramsci is thus arguing for – and also anticipating more recent discussions of – a collective actor that itself retroactively posits the “efficient premise” through its moral and intellectual organization as a collective agent and for revolutionary transformation. To some extent, in fact, Gramsci anticipates Žižek’s point that “the core of the dialectic of contingency and necessity lies in revealing not a deeper notional necessity expressing itself through contingent empirical reality, but the contingency at the very heart of necessity – not only the necessity of contingency, but the contingency of necessity itself ” (Žižek 2014a, 62). This is not only beyond the old Machiavellian notion of “fortune” or even the Sorelian notion of “spontaneity” (which he took from Bergson and proceeded to misinterpret) but also beyond its Second International equivalent – wrapped up in the language of “science” – as “historical laws of capitalist development” and, more recently, as structural or systemic determinism. But Gramsci nonetheless takes inspiration from Sorel’s notion of the “general strike” as the “myth” in which “socialism is wholly comprised, i.e., a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society” (Sorel 1999, 118). Gramsci also takes inspiration from Lenin’s critique of the Second International argument that the party could only struggle for socialist revolution when the necessary structural and objective conditions had created their corresponding superstructural subjective predispositions. My sense is, thus, that Coutinho reverts Gramsci to an orthodox position, arguing that since a collective will “can only be aroused and developed when the necessary objective conditions are present, the party must have ‘a historical (economic) analysis of the social structure of the given country’ in order to prepare a political line that is able to have a real effect on reality” (Coutinho 2013, 113). This is, in fact, how Coutinho reinterprets Gramsci’s important passage, in Notebook 3 (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §48, 48–52), on “Spontaneity and conscious leadership.” As we saw above, however, the climax of Gramsci’s discussion on “spontaneity and conscious leadership” is not an uncritical and dogmatic reendorsement of Lenin’s theory of the party, but actually a significant critique of it and a development of his version of the “dual perspective.” As Gramsci writes, “This unity of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘conscious leadership’, or ‘discipline’, is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes, insofar as it is mass politics and not a mere adventure by groups that appeal to the masses.” For Gramsci, this insight into the dialectic of the autonomous self-­organization or self-­constitution of the popular masses combined with the consciousness of intellectuals raises a key challenge for the philosophy of praxis: “can modern theory be in opposition to the ‘spontaneous’ sentiments of the masses?” And the answer is typically

The Modern Prince   149 Gramscian and, indeed, Hegelian: “It cannot be in opposition: there is, between the two, a ‘quantitative’ difference – of degree not of quality; it should be possible to have a reciprocal ‘reduction’, so to speak, a passage from one to the other and vice versa.” This is, precisely, what Marx meant when he said that “the political formulas of the French Revolution are reducible to the principles of classical German philosophy.” And this is why Gramsci now thinks that something like the Sorelian myth or the Crocean “conception of the world” – as part of Gramsci’s combined and extended version of historical materialism – can help translate the philosophy of praxis into the principles of the Italian revolution, mobilize the masses’ own “theoretical consciousness” – remember that, as bearers of a “conception of the world,” all people are already philosophers (SPN 323; Gramsci 1975b, 1375, compare with 1996a, 351) – and turn them, through their own collectively developed agency and constitutive power, into “founders of states.”10 Ignoring or downplaying the critical superseding or sublation of thinkers such as Bergson, Sorel and Croce into Gramsci’s combined philosophy of praxis, as thinkers like Coutinho seem to do, is precisely one of the serious obstacles to “understanding” not only Gramsci’s political thought but, more importantly, the people and their deepest passions. Appropriating the political idea of the party as “myth” from the work of Sorel, however, enables Gramsci to critically engage the idea of the party as an exclusively disciplined and organizational tool perfectly suited for the politics of Realpolitik and largely monopolized by professional intellectuals in possession of a pure theory of “scientific socialism.” This does not mean dispensing with historical materialism as a valid critical theory for the modern world and, particularly, as a kind of committed hermeneutic and normative program fit for “moral and intellectual” transformation among the modern masses. But it does mean abandoning its positivist and mathematical certitudes and the search for ultimate causes.11 As we saw above, Gramsci defines the Sorelian myth – and his reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a “historical example” of it – as “a concrete ‘fantasy’ that works on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will.” It is, in Bergsonian language, a noninstrumental source of moral motivation or “vital action” that functions also like an Idea (in Hegel’s sense), a “waking dream” (in Bloch’s sense) or even an “ontological” and “hermeneutic horizon” (in Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s sense) of action and interpretation. This is what allows the “passage from knowing to understanding and feeling and vice versa from feeling to understanding to knowing” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §33, 173). As Gramsci explains, The popular element “feels” but does not understand or know; the intellectual element “knows” but does not understand and, above all, does not feel. The two extremes, therefore, are pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other.

150   The Modern Prince The error of the intellectual consists in believing that one can know without understanding and, above all, without feeling or being impassioned: in other words, that the intellectual can be an intellectual if he is distinct and detached from the people. One cannot make history-­ politics without passion, that is, without being emotionally tied to the people, without feeling the rudimentary passions of the people, understanding them, and hence explaining [and justifying] them in the specific historical situation and linking them dialectically to the laws of history, that is, to a scientifically elaborated superior conception of the world: namely, “knowledge.” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §33, 173) If the party of intellectuals fails to understand and feel with the masses, and if relations with the people are, instead, “reduced to purely bureaucratic” relations, then “intellectuals become a caste or a priesthood (organic centralism).”12 For Gramsci, then, only a “life of connectedness” – the organic and molecular life of the rhizome – can become a transformative “social force” and a new “reality,” and only this rhizomatic foundation can enable the rise of the Modern Prince and its struggle for a new state and a new “historical bloc” to “come into being.” Only in this way, also, is it possible to get people imagining the possibility and actually moving in the direction of a “catharsis of modern civilization.” For Gramsci, then, “studying Sorel can provide many clues in this regard [i.e., how Marxism has become a moment of culture, a mythical force].” But “it is necessary to study, above all, Bergson’s philosophy and pragmatism” as a means to bridge the link between the molecular and rhizomatic politics of everyday life and the larger refoundational project of the Modern Prince.13 This is what Gramsci means by saying that if, theoretically, “Marxism actually superseded the highest cultural manifestations of the time, i.e., classical German philosophy,” then, practically and culturally, or in the minds and dreams of the popular masses, what emerges is “Marxism in combination” as the only ethical way to “combat the residues of the precapitalist [and the liberal capitalist] world among the popular masses, and especially in the domain of religion” and prepare the way for a higher “moral unification of society” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §3, 141, brackets added). Gramsci is keenly aware of the social conditions of the popular and subaltern masses in Italy (the “southern” question). The poor masses of the Italian south were “shattered and dispersed” as a consequence of the uneven development of capitalism and also the defusing and normalizing work of “passive revolution” during and after the Risorgimento. Gramsci insists on how the Italian model of capitalist development in the “post-­ corporatist” stage, which began after the 1870s and extends well into Gramsci’s own days, supported by its own immanent process of hegemony, in fact led to a more complex and contradictory development of subaltern groups. On the one hand, there is the Taylorized industrial proletariat

The Modern Prince   151 c­ oncentrated in urban centers in the north-­western Piedmontese region of the country and, on the other hand, a deterritorialized southern peasantry subjected to the condition of primitive accumulation, kept deliberately “scattered, isolated and ignorant” throughout the south, and reterritorialized within the integral state as a “periphery” of the north. Taken as a whole, this is an integral system of reality that many an intellectual born in the Global South will find readily recognizable and count as a common legacy with Gramsci. But this is not the case with those from the North whose natural outlook was – and in some cases remains – one that either ignores the South or pathologizes it as backward, traditional and reactionary. Gramsci’s point here is, thus, not the usual simplistic view that uneven development means that one subaltern class (e.g., the industrial proletariat) is more advanced than another (e.g., the traditional peasantry), or that one region of Italy (the industrialized north) is more prepared for socialism while another (the underdeveloped south) is only ready for the consolidation of capitalist productive relations and the conclusion of the historical tasks of bourgeois-­democratic revolutions (e.g., the abolishment of feudal relations of production and corresponding forms of politics). Instead, Gramsci is arguing that an entirely new, differentiated, multiple and contradictory subaltern actor, what Gramsci calls “the people-­nation,” has resulted from Italy’s peculiar process of uneven and combined liberal capitalist development in the whole country, and that it is this collective actor, as a whole, that needs to move forward towards the refoundation of the state.14 One of the key functions of the hegemonic process is to erase from view, even from official history, the gap in structures and superstructures and the contradictions in the process of development. Gramsci points out how northerners came to develop an understanding of the “agrarian question” that functions not just ideologically but also hegemonically. This is the context in which Gramsci assesses the “real importance” of the Francesco Crispi administrations in the 1890s period of the Risorgimento.15 Gramsci writes: [T]he real importance of Crispi’s “obsessive unitary” policy is the complex of feelings created in the North about the South. The “poverty” of the South was “historically” inexplicable to the Northern popular masses: they did not understand that unity had not been created on a basis of equality, but as a hegemony of the North over the South in a city-­country territorial relation; in other words, that the North was a “parasite” which enriched itself at the expense of the South, that industrial development was dependent on the impoverishment of the Southern agriculture. Instead they thought that if the South made no progress after being freed from the obstacles that Bourbon rule had placed in the way of modern development, this meant that the causes of the poverty were not external but internal; moreover, given the deep-­seated belief in the great natural wealth of

152   The Modern Prince the land, there remained but one explanation: the organic incapacity of the people, their barbarity, their biological inferiority. These already widespread opinions (Neapolitan Lazzaroni had long been legendary) were firmly established and even theorized by positivist sociologists (Niceforo, Ferri, Orano, etc.), thus acquiring the validity of “scientific truths” at a time of scientific superstition. Meanwhile, the North persisted in the belief that the South represented Italy’s “dead weight,” the conviction that the modern industrial civilization of the North would have made greater progress without this “dead weight,” etc., etc. (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §44, 143–144) This passage is not only an assessment of the function of hegemony in the late Risorgimento and the popular and “scientific” perception of the southern question, created by northern intellectuals but also promoted by southern ones (Croce, Fortunato, etc.) and, most problematic of all, deeply held by workers themselves – in the north, but also in the south’s popular self-­ understanding as well. The ideas of “the organic incapacity of the people, their barbarity, their biological inferiority” and the idea of a “human nature” as “fixed and immutable” behind it all were widely held beliefs in north and south alike, and constituted both ideological and hegemonic constructions designed to conceal a common but differentiated humanity as a “historically developing organism” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §8, 150). In this precise sense, Crispi, although deploying what was then a relatively progressive government program of national and industrial development involving the “systematization of the state apparatus, roads, railways, telegraph – and rectified the finances overwhelmed by the debts of the Risorgimento,” nevertheless embraced “the principle-­fact of Piedmontese hegemony with an energy and ardour which the Piedmontese politicians themselves did not possess” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §44, 141). And in this project of national and industrial development dominated by the Piedmontese north, the widespread perception that developed about the south was not only an ideological and racist prejudice but also a hegemonic dynamic charged with the more fundamental function of concealing the gap in structures and superstructures conditioning the uneven and combined development that defined the contradictions of late Risorgimento Italy and could have seriously threatened the national unity project of its ruling elites.16 The frightening specter of an open spirit of cleavage and a potential upsurge of the southern barbarian masses, then, is what explains the “obsessive” proposal of “national unity” by Crispi. This is a project of national unity, of course, grounded on the ideological solution to the national and the “southern question” on the basis of moral universalism as projected from the north. In response to the liberal call for national development and unity based on a shared idea of the elite nation, then, Gramsci proposes the alternative program of the Modern Prince. Although revolting against the north’s

The Modern Prince   153 solution may well start with a “spontaneous uprising” of the people, when left to its own devices, the real danger of spontaneity, particularly in the context of a hegemonic crisis, is that it is always in danger of being rehegemonized on the basis of extended transformism, normalization and restoration. The people’s “spontaneous uprising” must, therefore, be “combined with the conscious element” of the Modern Prince (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §48, 52). Although “spontaneous” movements of the broadest popular masses can make it possible “for the most advanced subaltern class to come to power because of the objective enfeeblement of the state,” under conditions of advanced Western liberal capitalism, much more is also required to push this process further. People must engage in innovative forms of local, independent and autonomous organization and combine them with larger political experiments, while their intellectuals – particularly those “who are not in the know,” those not bought up by the system or co-­opted by the glittering color of money and prestige (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §8, 151) – must engage in the organization of the Modern Prince. The concept of power behind the Modern Prince does not, however, presuppose “classes” as “categories of positive social reality, parts of the social body, but categories of the Real of a political struggle which cuts across the entire social body, preventing its “totalization” (Žižek 2011, 198; 2012, 898–899). It is a concept that sees class politics also as the formation of classes. Gramsci is emphatic about the absence of an essentialist popular culture naturally belonging to subaltern groups, some kind of “collective persuasion and faith” inherently capable of mobilizing the masses towards the goal of taking history into their own hands and autonomously forging their own destiny. Understanding this requires treating actually existing forms of popular culture and common sense as hegemonized forms of consciousness, just as Sorel treated determinism and as Lenin treated economism. The development of an alternative moral and intellectual consciousness and action thus requires not a simple reaccommodation of social groups as – in Žižek’s words – “categories of positive social reality” but an action, an intervention and perhaps an Event that sets the Real of a political struggle into motion. As Croce pointed out in his Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (1929), Gramsci is fully aware that developing an alternative subaltern culture requires an extraordinary combination of counter-­ hegemonic forces, maybe even counter-­intuitive strategies, to get people dreaming and moving in solidarity again.17 For without a moral and intellectual reform, the contradictory subject that is the collective amalgam of subaltern groups will, in fact, remain the subject of hegemony. But Gramsci emphasizes the political moment of the masses and injects that moment with the powerful idea of the “myth” – not, as in Sorel, with the expectation of a mystical intervention, but with the myth as a massively conscious resistance to and struggle against the integral system of the liberal capitalist state: the myth as something that posits necessary preconditions for radical transformation. This is the myth that drives the quest

154   The Modern Prince for another world, the myth that infuses the need and initial awareness among the masses about the construction of a “collective will,” and the myth that bars the instrumentalist and vanguardist form of leadership before or after the seizure of state power. The purpose of this collective actor is, thus, not to reduce politics either to socialist Realpolitik (the Soviet model of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “workers’ government,” PSI politics) or to what Sorel calls “civilized socialism” (the Western model of parliamentarism, “pluralist socialism” or even the “united front”), but to develop the politics of the subaltern classes into a dual-­pronged strategy, at once counter-­hegemonic and disciplined, at once “moral and intellectual,” and at once refoundational and revolutionary. The purpose is to develop the war of positions on multiple fronts and against simultaneous targets, including modern civil society as well as political society, its system of parties, representation, constitution and law. The purpose is to prepare the ground for refoundation and possible revolution. Gramsci is convinced that this is what the Modern Prince – the “myth-­Prince” – represents and can, in fact, provide. Now, Gramsci is aware of the kind of relationship between party and people that was emerging in Soviet Russia under Stalin after 1922. And Gramsci cautions us against it. On the one hand, in the West, the spontaneous and autonomous organizations of the subaltern classes were under increasing pressure from the modern liberal capitalist state to turn themselves into private organizations of civil society and, thus, participate in the ethical life and moral universalism of the state. But, on the other hand, the modern dictatorship as it was emerging in the East also abolished these forms of subaltern autonomy and tried hard to “incorporate them into the activity of the state: in other words, the centralization of the whole life of the nation in the hands of the ruling class becomes frenetic and all-­ consuming” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §21, 25). It must be recognized that spontaneous movements and their autonomous organizations generate their own forms of “internal life” – their own combined form of consciousness, organization and strategy – which can enable subaltern groups and classes, through their own organic process, to be “reborn as parties, trade unions, cultural associates” of the people. The role of the Modern Prince with respect to these “autonomous organizations” is to foster and strengthen the politics of autonomous, horizontal and heterogeneous solidarity that emerge from and sustain these “spontaneous” organizations. This is not simply a gesture of tolerance and respect for the rank and file of the party or their independent organizations, but the raison d’être of the party itself. After all, it is these organizations, their autonomy and solidarity, that foreshadow the future state, not the party. The role of the Modern Prince with respect to the state, however, is to press hard for the development of the “spirit of cleavage” – the constant specter of the political general strike – against domination rooted in “the formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the ruling class” that is the process of hegemony. As the passage above suggests, hegemony is reproduced morally

The Modern Prince   155 and intellectually through popular beliefs and “scientific truths” that conceal and suture the fundamental divisions and cleavages, the gap in the structures and superstructures in the process of developing and consolidating liberal capitalism. But it is also reproduced in and through political society, the parliamentary system and the constitutional state of modern liberal capitalist societies. The complex ideological work that is required to engage in a war of position against the private associations of civil society and expose the formal liberal trappings of the constitutional state is, precisely, the first condition of the counter-­hegemonic work of the Modern Prince. This is, thus, not a party exclusively bound for large-­scale refoundational or revolutionary struggle or for participation in the parliamentary complex with the goal of passing laws that can legislate liberal capitalism out of existence. This is a party bound for the urban streets and rural roads of the country, where the trenches and fortifications of hegemony are produced and where counter-­hegemony – in a kind of counter-­hegemonic arditismo – must establish its own fronts: the libraries, schools, churches, temples and associations as well as the clubs and the press of the country. Gramsci’s idea of the Modern Prince as a myth or a project, and, as such, as a stirring source of counter-­hegemonic and refoundational energy, enthusiasm and passion, represents not only his departure from Lenin’s theory of the party but, more importantly, his conception of how the collective will of people should be framed in the context of the modern historical bloc of liberal and, in our days, neoliberal capitalism. If the people can perceive the “myth,” relate to this Idea, then it can propel the people to struggle and engage in an autonomous war of position precisely against, and not for, an alternative form of hegemony. But this task of bridging the transition from the spontaneous and cathartic protest to the organized and disciplined party is not easy. Although Machiavelli offers us important elements, Gramsci finds Machiavelli’s basic model of autonomous and collective will-­formation in The Prince insufficient to develop the idea of a counter-­hegemonic and refoundational collective actor, because Machiavelli’s idea remained essentially ahistorical and “utopian” in an abstract sense, like the gods of ancient Greece, in that “the ‘prince’ did not really exist historically and did not appear before the Italian people in a historically immediate form; he was, rather, a ‘theoretical abstraction’, the symbol of the generic leader, of the ideal ‘condottiere’.”18 Gramsci turns to Sorel’s critique of orthodox Marxism as a deterministic science of politics and economy and, particularly, to Sorel’s idea of the class struggle, in his Reflections on Violence, as the “alpha and omega” of socialism guided by the central tenets of Marxism now understood as “myths.” Although these ideas certainly represented an important departure from any view of the political in terms of mechanical necessity driven by the economic base, the political quietism of the Second International and, simultaneously, the vanguardism of the Leninist party, there is also a problem here. There certainly is something quite promising in the idea of autonomous trade unionism. But Sorel never advanced “from the concept

156   The Modern Prince of ‘myth’, via the concept of trade unions, to the concept of political party” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 247). At the core of Sorel’s limitation is his insistence on “syndicalism” and the idea of the “general strike” as the ultimate horizon of autonomous politics, as sufficient in themselves to bring about the moral and intellectual transformation required for the construction of a collective actor around the myth-­Prince and, thus, as preconditions for revolution. This does not mean, as Laclau and Mouffe argue against Sorel, that Gramsci was overly concerned with Sorel’s apparently insufficient break with the ultimate centrality of the proletariat as agent of the revolution,19 precisely because Sorel came very close to a conceptualization of such centrality, not as a natural expression of the economic structure but as a result of the moral grammar of social conflicts.20 For Gramsci, the critical limitation in Sorel is, rather, his lack of theorization on how, without advancing from the autonomous to the Modern Prince, the process of hegemony does not only act as a mechanism of concealment of the Real social totality that is not simply false consciousness; it is also capable of setting in within autonomous movements themselves, as a structure of political demands that are productive of subjectivity and subjection in and by the workers themselves. In short, Sorel did not conceptualize the necessity for moral and intellectual reform within subaltern groups themselves, and, thus, the critical role that autonomous and rhizomatic organizations of different kinds must play in countering hegemony within these organizations themselves. For this kind of hegemony cannot be touched by “the practical action of the union and of a collective will that is already organised and in operation – a practical action whose greatest achievement was to have been the general strike.” Gramsci sees the activity of already existing subaltern organizations without any moral and intellectual transformation from within, from trade unions to political parties, as “passive activity” – as the very ground of passive revolution – that has yet to enter “an ‘active or constructive’ phase.” In this sense, Sorel’s reflections on violence are, well, just not violent enough, in the sense that this violence is not directed at the process of subject formation that is hegemony itself. By contrast, Gramsci argues, while the Modern Prince can no longer be “a real person, a concrete individual,” it nevertheless is “an organism, a social component in which a collective will – one that is recognized and, to some extent, has asserted itself in action – has already begun to take shape.” For Gramsci, historical development has already produced this organism, and “it is the political party – the modern formation that contains the partial collective will with a propensity to become universal and total.” It is the instrument for the “foundation of all modern states” and, even more so today, for refoundation (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 247–248). Gramsci clearly identifies two important organizational aspects of the Modern Prince that define its dual nature and program. First, it “must have a section devoted to Jacobinism,” revolutionary mobilization, a kind of modern revolutionary arditismo but with the critical qualifications that Gramsci introduces to this concept. As if this were not enough, this

The Modern Prince   157 programmatic aspect of the party must also be linked with the creation of a national-­popular political will, that is, “operative awareness of historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and immediate historical drama” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 248). The Modern Prince thus empowers its “individual” members through cathartic engagement, rhizomatic mobilization and collective self-­constitution rather than through the mere procedural participation in electoral systems fundamentally designed to render the individual vote meaningless and the decisions of the poor and working majority essentially ineffective. These systems are designed, precisely, to entrench the power of elites while making it appear as if people actually have a political choice and the freedom to choose among different political and ideological options. These systems are designed to ensure, by means of a complex institutional division of jurisdictions and procedures, that real structural/superstructural change cannot come about from subaltern groups, and if it does, if an “opposition” from these groups manages to slip through the trenches and fortifications of political society, that it will fail in the implementation of its policies.21 What we have here is the old strategy of making the losers appear as the real winners.22 For Gramsci, instead, Jacobinism is “a particular party in the French Revolution which conceived of the revolution in a particular way, with a particular program, based on particular social forces, and which carried out its party and government activity with a particular methodical action characterized by extreme energy and resolve that depended on a fanatical belief in the merits of both that program and that method” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §44, 140–141). Instead of resigning ourselves to participating in the institutions of modern representative politics, we should heed the call of Danton as both Engels and Lenin recalled him: “de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!” (Hallward 2014). The question of whether “the basic conditions exist for the awakening of a national-­popular collective will” is, thus, as important as the question of how to “awaken” it if it does not already exist. But Gramsci does not link this with a crude version of economic determinism or a passive resignation of the “good will” to either the eschatology of historical predestination or the fait accompli of electoral politics. The presence of an effective Jacobin actor and force can be the key factor authorizing itself to create the national-­popular collective actor in the absence of “effective conditions,” in refusal of the existing order and as foundation for the future state. The subjective and objective obstacles, admittedly, are never easy to overcome. The second organizational aspect of the Modern Prince concerns “the question of moral and intellectual reform, that is, the question of religion or worldview” (Q8 §21, Gramsci 2007, 248). Here, we must recall Gramsci’s longstanding commitment to moral and intellectual education already in the days of his militant youth in the Socialist Party, and afterwards in terms of what I would like to call a pedagogy of liberation.23 In 1916, Gramsci wrote a piece entitled “Socialism and Culture,” in which he quotes Vico’s invocation of the ancient Socratic dictum “Know Thyself ” as

158   The Modern Prince a principle for the education of the “bestialized” plebeian masses as follows: “Vico maintains that in this dictum Solon wished to admonish the plebeians, who believed themselves to be of bestial origin and the nobility of divine origin, to reflect on themselves and see that they had the same human nature as the nobles and hence should claim to be their equals in civil law” (Gramsci 1990a, 10). Here, Gramsci still conceives of the productive role of culture as “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, one’s own rights and obligations.” Later, in 1917, when he proposed and founded the Clubs for Moral Life, he argued that these clubs could make an even more substantial difference in the process of necessary conversion in the subjective life of the subaltern classes and the process of consciousness-­raising among them. As he wrote, “We in Turin believe that it is not enough just to exhort people in words to adopt the principles and moral maxims which must necessarily accompany the advent of the new socialist civilisation. We have attempted to organise this exhortation and, in doing so, to provide new (for Italy) models of association” (cited in Coutinho 2013, 10). Something similar can be said about Gramsci’s experiment with the factory councils in 1919–1920 as alternatives to mainstream trade unions. The latter were not only the organization of workers as wage earners, designed to negotiate “better prices for the commodity of labour power” (Coutinho 2013, 16), but they were also vehicles of hegemony in liberal capitalist society, in the same way as economism is, in fact, a creation of bourgeois ideology. For Gramsci, then, trade unions are “an integral part of capitalist society, and have a function that is inherent in a regime of private property” (cited in Coutinho 2013, 16). The councils, like revolutionary Zapatista o Chavista councils today, can enable workers to fight against the condition of being socially “Taylorized” by the modern factory, management and cultural system of Fordism or flexible-­post-Fordism, and thus gain critical consciousness of their historical identity, position and collective possibilities. It is from here that the distinct notion of the Gramscian actor begins to emerge, the actor engaged in the “impure” ethics of worldly commitment within a collective project of liberation.24 The factory councils were, therefore, the model or the germ of self-­government within the Communist state, which Gramsci saw as already operative in these autonomous forms of workers and peasants organizations. As he put it in “Workers’ Democracy” (Ordine Nuovo, June 21, 1919), the challenge was to link these institutions, coordinate and order them, and “respect the necessary autonomy and articulation of each” so as to “create a genuine workers’ democracy here and now – a workers’ democracy in effective and active opposition to the bourgeois state” (Gramsci 1990a, 68). As for the question of whether there are “objective conditions” for this kind of politics, Gramsci’s famous 1917 piece entitled “The Revolution Against ‘Capital’ ” offers an interesting answer: “The revolutionaries themselves will create

The Modern Prince   159 the conditions needed for the total achievement of their goal” (Gramsci 1990a, 36). Now, in 1930–1932, as Gramsci ponders the tasks of the Modern Prince and writes Notebook 8 in Mussolini’s rotten prison, he repeats once again the argument of his younger self: In this field, too, we find the absence of “Jacobinism” and a fear of the “Jacobinism” expressed in philosophical terms (latest example: Benedetto Croce). The modern Prince must be the promoter of moral and intellectual reform, which constitutes the terrain for a subsequent development of the national popular collective rooted in a complete and accomplished form of modern civilization. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 248) The construction of a new culture through cultural, religious and political education – what Hegel calls Bildung and what I have called here a pedagogy of liberation – is at the heart of rhizomatic politics, the war of position and the construction of a counter-­hegemonic national-­popular collective actor. The critical questions Gramsci asks are the following: “How, on the other hand, should this theoretical consciousness, proposed as autonomous consciousness, be formed? How should everyone choose and combine the elements for the constitution of such an autonomous consciousness? Will each element imposed have to be repudiated a priori? It will have to be repudiated inasmuch as it is imposed, but not in itself; that is to say that it will be necessary to give a new form which is specific to the given group” (cited in Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 68). Hegel himself had already assigned a critical role to education in the progression of Spirit from family through civil society and then the state. Now, Gramsci redeploys a similar argument in the context of his conception of the Modern Prince as the conscious intellectual instrument of revolutionary formation and transformation. Thus, rather than aiming at the construction of a new “grassroots civil society” or at the development of new “capabilities” for further human development and democracy within the structures and superstructures and moral universalism of liberal and neoliberal capitalism, in the end the Modern Prince “should focus entirely on these two basic points: the formation of a national popular collective will, of which the modern Prince is the active and operative expression, and intellectual and moral reform” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 249). The latter is aimed, of course, at the psychological, ethical and cultural transformation of subjects themselves. In Gramsci’s words, As it grows, the modern Prince upsets the entire system of intellectual and moral relations, for its development means precisely that every act is deemed useful or harmful, virtuous or wicked, depending on whether its point of reference is the modern Prince and whether it  increases the Prince’s power or opposes it. The Prince takes the place, in people’s consciousness, of the divinity and of the categorical

160   The Modern Prince imperative; it becomes the basis of a modern secularism and of a complete secularization of life and of all customary relations. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 249) If the Modern Prince were to strive to fully realize in practice its own “divinity,” if all its members were to fully engage in political life guided by its “categorical imperative,” if it were to be fully taken over by the logic of infinity that informs modern ideologies of market, democracy or state, then one of two things could happen: either it becomes authoritarian and destructive, as in the case of Stalinism, or it “becomes everyone and so disappears” back into the people.25 Gramsci seeks to sketch out a comprehensive strategy that may lead to the latter outcome, that is, to a rhizomatic or “national-­popular” dissolution of the Modern Prince and the state, the horizon whereby the mediating institution of the party vanishes among the people, just as – and this Gramsci leaves unfinished – individualism dissolves into a new universalism. In this strategy, the function of the Modern Prince is to serve as “the cell wherein the germ of the collective will is gathered” and not the other way around, that is, as the iron cage that autocratically controls the collective will of the autonomously organized people (cited in Santucci 2010, 157). Of course, if there is a subaltern and collective approach to Gramsci’s idea about the Modern Prince, there is also a strong debt to “the historical contingency in which Gramsci’s thought developed” (Santucci 2010, 157). This is what explains Gramsci’s retention of key Leninist language about the party when he says, for example, that in the context of “a totalitarian and repressive regime that gives way only to frontal conflict,” such as the Fascist regime that threw him in jail, a  hegemonic regime that became solidly “armored with coercion,” “it can  be necessary – in fact, it is almost always necessary – to have a strongly centralized party” to withstand the coming assault (cited in Santucci 2010, 157). This type of conflicting tension in Gramsci’s language is, in fact, typical of most of his main ideas, particularly in the Notebooks. Part of it is the result of his own historical horizon, and part of it is the result of his own notion of a “combined Marxism.” Either way, there are times when Gramsci left these tensions openly unresolved in the context of the Notebooks, and they represent a challenge for anyone reading or attempting to reassemble this work and make it relevant, once again, for our time. But there is one constant in what seems to be the variable nature of the Notebooks, and this is the hermeneutic constant that is used here to reassemble Gramsci for the specific tasks of our time. Gramsci’s political commitment comes through in his uncompromising adoption of the perspective of what is feared and rejected (Jacobinism) or secondary and marginal (poor, peasant, the people, etc.). This is the perspective that enables him, and us, to think about a common collective effort around moral and intellectual reform, the emancipatory project of today, as an initial critical political act in the construction of new national-­popular or collective

The Modern Prince   161 actors in opposition to democracy promotion and neoliberal globalization. But this national-­popular actor, as such, does not spring into life “voluntaristically,” that is, as a result of the mere subjective willing for its existence by activists, academics or organic intellectuals. On the contrary, it is the result of a deep structural and historical failure of liberal capitalism, whereby subaltern groups break away from all traditional parties, and the hegemonic process is no longer capable of concealing the widening historical gap between structures and superstructures: a hegemonic process that is expressed by the politics of moral universalism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and democracy promotion in a constantly renewed dynamic of hegemony. Gramsci himself illustrates rather well how a collective actor can emerge even from the “shattered and dispersed” or the “scattered, isolated and ignorant” elements produced by the structural failures and gaps in the development of liberal and neoliberal capitalism. But, in all cases, Gramsci takes the perspective of what is considered “secondary,” “subordinate” and “even incidental” in order to formulate his arguments and develop his thinking on how a collective actor can emerge: What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex [of existing reality] is subjected by the first representation of a new historical phase [the initial counter-­hegemonic act of collective subjects]. 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. (Cited in Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 68) Indeed, the crisis of hegemony and the widening gap in structures and superstructures make “the old collective will dissolve into its contradictory elements” and enable “the subordinate ones” to develop cathartically, rhizomatically and autonomously from the process of hegemony operative in civil society and the cooptation and capturing enacted by political society. This collective agent is a rhizomatic agent precisely because it is a constant work in progress, always unfinished, heterogeneous, multiple, always refusing to totalize itself or be totalized by others and, indeed, consciously renouncing the temptation of a new hegemonic totalitarianism and a new version of inquisitorial universality. Gramsci’s own failure and incarceration poignantly exemplify the failure of the subject in what Žižek refers to as “the intimate link between subject and failure” (Butler et al. 2000, 119). But that does not have to be the fate of the Modern Prince. Gramsci opposes the notion of a national-­popular “collective will” to ordinary “common sense,” which he sees as prevailing in the modern world of civil society as the normality of moral universalism. The key

162   The Modern Prince question is, thus, not whether a new and alternative civil society or “radical democratic politics” can arise from the molecular, biopolitical and administered life of actually existing civil societies, but, rather, whether or not “a national-­popular collective will” can be awakened and mobilized for the demanding task of counter-­hegemonic moral and intellectual transformation (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §21, 248).26 The fact that Gramsci calls here – as he says of Oriani – for a kind of Italian “national-­popular greatness” or “a great national popular democratic movement” does not mean he is in any way embracing old-­style forms of Risorgimento nationalism or emerging forms of fascist populism (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §165, 328). On the contrary, the mythical rhetoric of the “national-­popular collective will” is Gramsci’s own way of turning revolutionary slogans into a “ ‘dramatic’ representation” of republican Communism in an attempt to galvanize people’s imagination. It is moral and intellectual preparation for Jacobin politics. There is, thus, no Gramscian idea of an alternative civil society or a liberal people’s democracy per se, but there clearly is a Gramscian idea of a well-­organized political party, centered around the combination and development of autonomous and rhizomatic forms of popular organization together with an organized and disciplined Modern Prince. The immediate goal of the Modern Prince is, for Gramsci, a comprehensive strategy aimed at upsetting the “entire system of intellectual and moral relations” or, in our context, the entire discourse and structures of modern civil and political society. Already in Gramsci’s time, and even more so in our globalized world, the moral and intellectual reform that the Modern Prince brings about in one country must also transform the level of education of “the great majority of the world’s population” (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §167, 329). In the end, Gramsci says, These two basic points – the formation of a national-­popular collective will, of which the modern Prince is at one and the same time the organiser and the active, operative expression; and intellectual and moral reform – should structure the entire work.

Notes   1 Elsewhere, I have extensively developed a Gramscian approach to the idea of refoundation in the context of Guatemalan politics (Fonseca 2015b).   2 On Bloch’s notion of utopia and its critical function, see Bloch (Bloch 1986) and, more recently, de Sousa Santos (de Sousa Santos 2006).   3 Thomas is thinking of Notebook 1 §44, but he is referencing §48, a passage devoted to a discussion of “reverse Jacobinism,” where Gramsci is discussing how the “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary régime is characterised by a combination of force and consent, which counterbalance each other [si equilibrano], without force predominating excessively over consent; rather, it appears to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-­called organs of public opinion. (Thomas 2009, 164; Gramsci 1992, 155–156)

The Modern Prince   163   4 Note that one of Thomas’s central arguments, in the crucial chapter five of The Gramscian Moment, is the claim that “Gramsci’s theory of hegemony gives rise to a Marxist theory of ‘the constitution of the political’, or of the transformation of social forces into forms of political power adequate to different class projects” (Thomas 2009, xxii). The only caveat here is that this is, in fact, Laclau and Mouffe’s argument (!).   5 On this, see Lenin’s comments on “The Equality of Languages Incident” in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis In Our Party) (Lenin 1904).   6 Eric Blanc has recently written an interesting piece in which he analyzes this process from the perspective of the “Borderlands” (Blanc 2014).   7 Here, in Žižek’s words, Lenin appeals to “the infamous Hegelian triad” as “grounded in the temporal structure of a repeated choice” going from a given situation, its abstract theoretical negation (supplemented by a negation of the negation), and then followed by a sublation to a “higher level” (Žižek 2012, 70). Although Lenin tells us that this dialectic should “never be confused with the vulgar trick of justifying the zigzags of politicians,” that is, precisely, the use that Lenin makes of it in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. This version of the dialectic is to be rejected today more than ever.   8 In the Preface to his History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. I, Trotsky writes: The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course, in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class. (Trotsky 1932)   9 In Lenin’s “The Collapse of the Second International” (1915), which includes his critical reflections on Plekhanov and Kautsky and their political strategy, he wrote: With reference to wars, the main thesis of dialectics, which has been so shamelessly distorted by Plekhanov to please the bourgeoisie, is that “war is simply the continuation of politics by other [i.e., violent] means.” Such is the formula of Clausewitz, one of the greatest writers on the history of war, whose thinking was stimulated by Hegel. And it was always the standpoint of Marx and Engels, who regarded any war as the continuation of the politics of the powers concerned – and the various classes within these countries – in a definite period. (Lenin 1915) 10 Gramsci accepts and integrates into his version of historical materialism “Croces’s definition of religion as a conception of the world which has become a norm of life.” This means, Gramsci writes, that “the majority of mankind are philosophers insofar as they engage in practical activity and in their practical activity (or in their guiding lines of conduct) there is implicitly contained a conception of the world, a philosophy” (SPN 344; Gramsci 1975b, 1255). 11 For Bukharin, there is but one “scientific law” for the interpretation of society: “any investigation of society, of the conditions of its growth, its content, etc., must begin with an analysis of the productive forces, or of the technical bases,

164   The Modern Prince of society” (Bukharin 1969, 120). It is precisely with Bukharin’s “Popular Manual” in mind that Gramsci writes: An erroneous interpretation of historical materialism that is made into a dogma and its quest is identified with the quest for the ultimate cause or single cause, etc. [as Bukharin does in chapter one of his book]. The history of this problem in the development of culture: the problem of ultimate causes is, in fact, dispelled by dialectics. Engels had warned against this dogmatism in some of the things he wrote during his final years. (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §26, 166, brackets added) 12 Although the critique of “organic centralism” is explicitly directed against Gentile, it is hard not to think also of what was happening in Soviet Russia with the rigid application of Lenin’s principle of “democratic centralism” in the party. This problem spread to other parts of the world, particularly Latin America, like an ideological wildfire. 13 In Notebook 1, Gramsci had already discussed Bergson’s critique of positivism and its version of scientific materialism, but also what Gramsci saw as Bergsonism’s “fatal limit,” that is, its “declaration of the principle of eternal flux and the practical origin of every conceptual system, even the highest(!)” and how here “truths were in danger of vanishing” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §78, 183). 14 Gramsci’s argument about the uneven and combined nature of capitalist development in Italy after 1870 and the popular-­national actor to which it gave birth is conceptually similar to the argument that Jose Carlos Mariátegui, the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, was developing at the same time in his Andean country and published in 1928 as Siete Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana (Mariátegui 2008). Morton convincingly shows that Gramsci accepts key ideas from the theory of “uneven and combined development” developed by both Lenin and Trotsky (Morton 2007). 15 Francesco Crispi was the first relatively progressive prime minister from the south of Italy, who entered parliament in 1861 as an “extreme” left-­winger, turned into a pro-­colonialist and ended up as a supporter of monarchy. 16 I draw the idea of a “deep Italy” from Claudio Lomnitz’s insightful study of the cultural politics of nation building in Mexico in his work Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico (2001). 17 Recall here Gramsci’s Clubs for Moral Life in his youth, his factory councils later in Turin, the fundamental role of “education” in Hegel’s sense of Bildung, and how all of this amounts to nothing less than a Gramscian version of Freire’s pedagogy of liberation. 18 Gramsci’s argument that Machiavelli’s prince is, in fact, a “theoretical abstraction” goes to the heart of Machiavelli’s political theory. One key element that we find at the center of The Prince is, as Mikael Hörnqvist shows, an early or pre-­ Risorgimento longing for Italian national unification and resistance to foreign invasion that can only appear as utopian in Machiavelli’s Renaissance Italy. This kind of nationalism is expressed in Machiavelli’s reference to and reinterpretation of key verses from Francesco Petrarca’s Italia Mia included in his Il Canzoniere (c.1350s). This is what the idea of uniting Italy under one ruler – on the model of Spain, France and Britain – in order “to free her from the barbarians” means (on this, see Hörnqvist 2008, 257). Thus, as J. S. McClelland argues, the fact that The Prince is called “the prince” has misled many readers into thinking that it is specifically and solely intended for the princes of the Renaissance and the restored Medici princes in particular. This is far from being the case. By “princely government” Machiavelli means any government by one man. “One Man Rule,” though an ugly phrase, would be a much less misleading title for The Prince. (McClelland 1996, 146)

The Modern Prince   165 This “One Man Rule,” of course, is the kind of rule that must draw in moral and political resources from this world and from within the very practice of politics. This is the historical moment, the break of Machiavelli with the politics of the ancients and even, in part, the politics of the Renaissance. 19 This is, at any rate, Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of Sorel (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 40–41). 20 I am borrowing the expression “moral grammar of social conflicts” from Axel Honneth (Honneth 1995). 21 The South American countries in which revolutions have taken place by means of preexisting electoral and political systems, while able to a degree to implement significant and substantive changes, have, nevertheless, run up against either their own Thermidorian moment or the moment of open sabotage and putchism on the part of displaced petty bourgeois or bourgeois oppositions. The situation in Venezuela after the death of Chávez and under the presidency of his successor, Maduro, was largely a case of crisis management: the government had effectively lost its revolutionary communal program and, in the middle of an escalating economic crisis due to a massive drop in the price of the revolution’s main source of income and the planet’s scourge, oil exports, found itself in a constant economic and political battle against the open war launched by the “private sector.” The momentum, passion and determination of Chavez’s Bolivarian Jacobinism appeared to have been lost. 22 In his most recent book on the “extreme centre,” Tariq Ali warns us as follows: “What is the point of elections? The result is always the same: a victory for the Extreme Centre” (Ali 2015). 23 This is, of course, an explicit reference to Paulo Freire’s work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 2000). Recall one of Freire’s key arguments: it is the oppressed who actually teach revolutionary intellectuals, and not the other way around. 24 I borrow the idea of “history as a project” from Josep Fontana’s work (Fontana 1999). 25 Exactly the same phenomenon Gramsci says would obtain in the full realization of bourgeois hegemony, whereby the state itself would collapse and revert to civil society (Q8 §2, Gramsci 2007, 234; Q5 §127, Gramsci 1996b, 382). 26 Thomas notes how the concept of “biopower” has recently become the subject of much discussion in political theory due in large measure to Hardt’s and Negri’s reworking of Foucault’s ambivalent formulations. Cf. Hardt and Negri 2000, in particular p.  364. For an overview of some problematic aspects of the subsequent debate, cf. Toscano 2007. Recently Adam Morton has emphasized that Gramsci is a “paramount theorist of capillary power” (Morton 2007, p. 92 et sqq.) (Thomas 2009, 150, n. 42) Gramsci, indeed, develops a complex argument for what he calls “molecular” power in the life of and link between state and civil society, rulers and ruled, strategist and tactician, administrator and administered, theory and practice. In a classically Hegelian passage, where he discusses how the “idea” of a “first-­ rate statesman” can go through the “concrete process of its realization,” he writes: What does it mean that in the “idea” the project must be linked to regulations? That the project has to be understood by every active element in such a way that everyone can see what his role is in the carrying out of the project and bringing it to fruition; that in suggesting an action, the project also enables one to foresee the positive and negative consequences of

166   The Modern Prince endorsing it and of reacting against it, and the project contains in it the response to these endorsements and reactions and thus provides the basis of organization. This is an aspect of the unity of theory and practice. This is partially why, Gramsci continues, every great politician is also bound to be a great administrator; every great strategist a great tactician; every great theorist a great organizer. To administer means to foresee which actions and operations – even the “molecular” (and of course the most complex) ones – are needed to realize the plan. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §180, 339)

Conclusion Towards a New Concept of Hegemony

Developing Gramsci cannot mean returning Gramsci to the simple Leninist conception of hegemony as leadership of one class over others based on consent. For, as I have shown in this book, Gramsci arrives at the perspective where he sees hegemony as a process linked to an elite-­generated form of moral universalism, that is, as a socially disseminated “conception of the world” particularly active in modern forms of civil and political societies. In his later Notebooks, Gramsci develops further the notion of hegemony as a process grounded on the very ideas of freedom and democracy and, as such, as a process that constructs moral consent from within liberal capitalist and subaltern subjectivity itself. Although the argument of this book is that Gramsci left this latter program unfinished, we nevertheless need to carefully follow him along this path if we are to fully understand and appreciate the value of Gramsci’s critique of civil society and its potential for a militant critique of contemporary forms of democracy promotion in the context of neoliberal globalization. In his comment entitled “The Validity of Ideologies” in Notebook 7, Gramsci recalls a statement from Marx to the effect that “popular conviction often has as much energy as a material force” (Gramsci 2007, Q7 §21, 172). In this comment, Gramsci manages to explicitly tie up the process of hegemony disguised as the positivity of “popular convictions” with the ideologies that “give them form.” It is only through this combination of the materiality of hegemony and the formality of ideology that the always already widening gap between structures and superstructures, the void from which the crisis of hegemony emerges, can be sutured and concealed by a moral universalism or the normativity of “what ought to be” – “things can always improve” in this system of reality – that I have examined in this book as the subjectivized dialectic of desire and successful modern force and domination. This analysis echoes not only Hegel’s “master and servant” analysis in the Phenomenology of Spirit but also Hegel’s comments on the production of “solicitation” as part of the dialectic of force and its expression in the Science of Logic. Although Gramsci did not take his idea of hegemony as a process of subject formation internally and dialectically linked to the production of moral universalism in this precise direction, he nonetheless suggests in various places that in the

168   Conclusion world of “real history” – through the moments and stages of subject formation or the formation of consciousness, as examined in Chapter 1 – in modern liberal or neoliberal capitalist society, the subject goes through the process of hegemony and emerges “Taylorized,” with hegemony itself installed as subjectivity. The individualized subject is, thus, hegemony. This is what explains the force of “common sense” as a “material force” and as a religion, and this is, therefore, what accounts for the power of passive revolution and passive conformity to the system of reality of the present historical bloc. This is the material force behind the response of modern states undergoing hegemonic crisis in their efforts to restore “normality” and “stability.” This point alone, therefore, already suggests what counter-­ hegemony must involve at the ethical and political levels. There are many passages in the later Notebooks that clearly suggest that Gramsci was moving towards the development of the notion of the subject as hegemony. Gramsci’s complex comments on the development of Americanism and Fordism irrefutably illustrate this tendency better than anything else: In America rationalisation has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process. This elaboration is still only in its initial phase and therefore (apparently) still idyllic. It is still at the stage of psycho-­physical adaptation to the new industrial structure, aimed for through high wages. Up to the present (until the 1929 crash) there has not been, except perhaps sporadically, any flowering of the “superstructure.” In other words, the fundamental question of hegemony has not yet been posed. The struggle is conducted with arms taken from the old European arsenal, bastardised and therefore anachronistic compared with the development of “things.” The struggle taking place in America, as described by [André] Philip [in his Le Problème ouvrier aux Etats-­Unis, Paris, 1929], is still in defence of craft rights against “industrial liberty.” In other words, it is similar to the struggle that took place in Europe in the eighteenth century, although in different conditions. (SPN 286; Gramsci 1975c, 2146) It can clearly be seen in this passage that Gramsci explicitly links the process of modern “rationalisation” with the emergence of alienated and reified social relations – the conceptual equivalent of Hegel’s “system of reality” or Marx’s world of “commodity fetishism” – in terms that are remarkably similar to those of Weber, Lukács and even Adorno.1 But this passage also illustrates the unique way in which Gramsci attempts to account for rationalization as more than the notion of “development of the productive forces” or, more recently, Habermas’s concept of “system” could capture. For Gramsci, rationalization is the simultaneous expansion of hegemony in the sense developed in this book, and, therefore, it is precisely the expansion of irrationality at the same time and to the same

Conclusion   169 degree. This is, thus, a profoundly disturbing and dialectical process that seriously challenges Habermas’s neo-­Kantian, systems-­based idea of the progressive communicative rationalization of the “lifeworld.” What is distinct about Gramsci’s discussion of the process of rationalization is, therefore, that he sees it as inextricably linked to the process of hegemony, that is, as the creation of a “psychophysical” structure of subjective or ethical predispositions perfectly adapted to the requirements of the new model of work organization and liberal capitalism (e.g., Fordism, Taylorism, Americanism) that he witnessed when they were being created in North America and parts of Western Europe through the expansion of workers’ rights, a basic form of corporatist welfare and developing liberal democracy.2 Something similar can be said about the expansion of neoliberal capitalism through the globalization of the transnational corporation in conjunction with the development of a transnational middle class predisposed to demand this brave new world as its own. What had been politically sufficient in the early stages of capitalist development in order to integrate those from below while making them feel and think that they were slowly integrating themselves – that is, by “defending craft rights” against “industrial liberty,” or what Lenin called the ideology of “economism” – drastically changes under conditions of Fordist capitalism, let alone under the conditions of uneven and combined development in the context of post-­ Fordist neoliberal globalization. In both of these contexts, as Gramsci put it, “the fundamental question of hegemony” requires the “flowering of the ‘superstructure’.” Once the “formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the ruling class” has been established, however, and the territory of political contestation has been predetermined by the parliamentary system and the modern constitutional state, the struggle can no longer be “conducted with arms taken from the old European arsenal” that have become “anachronistic compared with the development of things.” As we have seen in this book, the process of hegemony and its reinforcing ideologies are deeply hostile to the possible cathartic development of a spirit of cleavage, the “progressive acquisition of the consciousness of one’s historical identity” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §49, 53) and the kind of “complex ideological work” – done by revolutionary intellectuals – that may extend this spirit of cleavage to all other subaltern groups and result not only in the further expansion of radical, rhizomatic or cathartic forms of “autonomy” (Gramsci 1996b, Q3 §90, 91) but also in the development of a New Prince. This dual concept of power, this understanding of praxis, is well suited to challenge the “disjointed” place that people have come to occupy as a mere subaltern “segment of civil society” in the current historical bloc. How, then, can we activate these practices today? Gramsci’s notion of “catharsis” and the development of a “spirit of cleavage” are directly linked to the notion of “contradiction” between structures and superstructures (as explored in Chapter 1), the crisis of hegemony, and the evental rise of the impure political act. This is the kind of militant Jacobin activism or “absolute humanism” (as explored in Chapter

170   Conclusion 6) that is capable of perceiving the Event, seizing the crisis of hegemony, widening the void of the contradiction and resisting the counter-­hegemonic work of transformism, restoration and normalization that suture the void. Gramsci’s cathartic spirit of cleavage is, therefore, our rhizomatic, radically militant, horizontal and agonic politics of counter-­hegemony.3 A recent exploration of this notion of contradiction and the kind of refoundational and revolutionary action – the “revolutionary humanism” that it can activate – in the context of contemporary neoliberal capitalist globalization can be found in Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014). In the last chapter of this work, Harvey draws from thinkers such as André Gorz, Frantz Fanon and Gramsci himself in order to address the question of “alienation” and revolution in relation to production, consumption, everyday life and nature in contemporary postmodern neoliberal globalization. From the work of Gorz, Harvey draws the following lines: But such an emancipatory development is threatening in the extreme for capitalist class power and the resistances and barriers created are strong. “The development of the productive forces may of itself reduce the amount of labour that is necessary; it cannot of itself create the conditions which will make this liberation of time a liberation for all. History may place the opportunity for greater freedom within our grasp, but it cannot release us from the need to seize this opportunity for ourselves and derive benefit from it. Our liberation will not come about as the result of material determinism, behind our backs, as it were. The potential for liberation which a process contains can only be realised if human beings seize it and use it to make themselves free.” Confronting collectively the multiple alienations that capital produces is a compelling way to mobilise against the stuttering economic engine that so recklessly powers capitalism from one kind of crisis to another with potentially disastrous consequences for our relation to nature and for our relations to each other. Universal alienation calls for a full-­ blooded political response. So what might that response be? (Harvey 2014, 163–164) Drawing from Fanon, Harvey adds: It is in a political climate such as this [neoliberal globalization of today] that the violent and unpredictable eruptions that are occurring all around the world on an episodic basis (from Turkey and Egypt to Brazil and Sweden in 2013 alone) look more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the post-­colonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play. If there is an end to capital, then this is surely from where it will come and its immediate consequences are unlikely to prove happy for anyone. This is what Fanon so clearly teaches.

Conclusion   171 Finally, retrieving the “absolute humanism” of Gramsci, despite Althusser’s famous dismissal of absolute humanism as “pure ideology” irrevocably abandoned by more recent theoretical and practical developments, Harvey concludes: So what kind of humanism do we need in order to progressively change the world through anti-­capitalist work into another kind of place populated by different kinds of people? There is, I believe, a crying need to articulate a secular revolutionary humanism that can ally with those religious-­based humanisms (most clearly articulated in both Protestant and Catholic versions of the theology of liberation as well as in cognate movements within Hindu, Islamic, Jewish and indigenous religious cultures) to counter alienation in its many forms and to radically change the world from its capitalist ways. There is a strong and powerful – albeit problematic – tradition of secular revolutionary humanism both with respect to both theory and political practice. This is a form of humanism that Louis Althusser totally rejected. But, in spite of Althusser’s influential intervention, it has a powerful and articulate expression in the Marxist and radical traditions as well as beyond. (Harvey 2014, 163–164) Harvey’s call to arms, his rallying cry for a new kind of secular revolutionary humanism that can help us activate subaltern struggles and “change the world” into a new place “populated by different people,” reflects a deep awareness that the need to change subjectivity is, despite Althusser’s dismissal of it, a fundamental revolutionary task already outlined by the young Marx and well articulated again by Gramsci. It is, indeed, a proper, if minimal, response to the meaninglessness of the void covered up and sutured by, in our time, the process of neoliberal and globalizing hegemony. But is it just alienation that we need to overcome in order to activate militant activism and a new historical spirit of cleavage? Are we not confronted with the deeper question of how to overcome hegemony – indeed, the subject as hegemony – itself? If the process of counter-­hegemony begins within a process of “molecular” subjective conversion – with “violence on the self ” – that entails a radical shift in our mentality and in our forms of engagement and solidarity, it also requires the collective project that Gramsci identified simultaneously with the “spontaneous” struggles for autonomy, as in the factory councils, and with the organized and disciplined struggles that he thought the New Prince could advance. What is needed to fight the largely invisible process of hegemony, the politics of passive revolution and the ideologies that the system deploys in order to promote the necessity of normality is, therefore, the dialectically combined development of an entirely new form of counter-­hegemonic people’s struggle, a collective movement, at once rhizomatic and disciplined, cathartic

172   Conclusion and committed, autonomous and refoundational, involving and combining several fronts of positional war closely tied to the simultaneous development of subjective or moral capabilities as well as the skillful development of the New Prince with a clarity of targets.4 This radical emancipatory struggle – at once individual and communal, spontaneous and disciplined – must surely involve a war of position expressed as a multidimensional, but always autonomous and collective, organization of emancipatory actors laying siege to the “formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the ruling class” that define both postmodern civil society and neoliberal and globalizing capitalism. It must also involve the organization of the New Prince and its key tasks. The task of Jacobin or refoundational politics is to weaken the fortifications of “democratic” political society and its “organs of political hegemony,” including the entire liberal ideology “epitomized by the principle of the separation of powers,” the system of regular elections of the head of state that “create the illusion” that popular demands are being met, the parliamentary system and its “closer ties to civil society,” as well as the whole constitutional state, as they exist at present (Gramsci 2007, Q6 §81, 64–65).5 And the task of moral and intellectual transformation of individual subjects themselves is to burst the “psychophysical” structure of not merely alienated individuals but, in effect, hegemonized or Taylorized subjectivity itself, its massification through infinite market mechanisms and its reification through the moral universalism of modern capitalism – mediated by the spread of societies of risk, spectacle and consumption – that has taken deep residence in and become indistinguishable from the secular self of postmodern and globalizing neoliberalism and globalization. Gramsci cites an article from La Civiltà Cattolica entitled “Individualismo pagano e individualismo cristiano” to illustrate how Catholic individualism itself – Augustinianism – could only become hegemonic through “violence on the self ”: Faith in a secure future, in the immortality of the soul destined to beatitude, in the certainty of attaining eternal happiness, motivated the intense effort to achieve inner perfection and spiritual nobility. This is what spurred true Catholic individualism to victory. All the strength of the Christian was gathered around this noble purpose. Free from the flux of speculation that exhausts the soul with doubt and illuminated by immortal principles, man felt his hopes reborn; secure in the knowledge that a superior force supported him in the struggle against evil, he did violence to himself and conquered the world. (Gramsci 2007, Q8 §213, 360, italics added; see also Gramsci 1975b, Q11 §12, 1389) Does Gramsci not give us, in the passage above, a vitally important clue on how people can break free from the process of hegemony through the violent development of consciousness – a moral and intellectual conversion – from within the historical and pedagogical context of liberating praxis

Conclusion   173 (hence, Marxism or historical materialism as a combined philosophy of praxis) that has become the new “rationality of the world and of life”?6 Is this not also why, for example, Hegel’s narrative of liberation ends with the promise of “reconciliation,” not as a historical fact of Hegel’s present, but as a necessary utopian horizon? Indeed, liberation must hurt subjectively, at the deepest levels of the self, as is illustrated by Gramsci’s own self-­transformative, liberating but painful pedagogical process within and against the Fascist violence of Mussolini’s prison. If liberation does not hurt subjectively, it is not subjective liberation and, thus, not the beginning of the end of the subject as hegemony.7 But this subjective liberation must take place simultaneously within the context of a Jacobin struggle against the constitution of dominant political society and a spontaneous, rhizomatic and autonomous struggle against the notion of a good civil society that works to strengthen the existing state. This is the real, impure, ethical practice of counter-­hegemony. This is an opportune juncture to recognize that Gramsci was fundamentally wrong about Freud and Freudianism in his Notebooks. Although Gramsci had barely read anything written by Freud himself, as the Notebooks show, he nevertheless had very critical things to say about a possible convergence of Marx’s and Freud’s work. From the outset of Notebook 1, in fact, Gramsci declares: “I have not been able to study Freud’s theories and I do not know the other type of so-­called ‘Freudian’ literature” (Q1 §33, Gramsci 1992, 120; see also Buttigieg’s note on pp.  404–405). In Notebook 11, Gramsci states: The orthodox tendency has determined the growth of its opposite: the tendency to connect the philosophy of praxis to Kantianism and to other non-­positivist and non-­materialist philosophical tendencies. This reached its “agnostic” conclusion with Otto Bauer, who writes in his book on religion that Marxism can be supported and integrated by any philosophy, even Thomism. This second tendency is not really a tendency in the strict sense, but an ensemble of all the tendencies – including even the Freudianism of [Belgian Social Democrat Henri] De Man – that do not accept the so-­called “orthodoxy” of Germanic pedantry. (SPN 387; Gramsci 1975b, 1508)8 Gramsci’s failure to engage with and understand the work of Freud is, however, compensated by his close acquaintance with the work of that most “sublime” of nineteenth-­century “hysterics,” Hegel.9 And Hegel did develop an understanding of the deeper psychological dynamic of ideology and hegemony in terms of what he calls the dialectic of “force and its expression” or – as Hegel himself puts it in the Science of Logic – a form of “solicited subjection” that is deeply rooted in and constitutive of the interior space of modern subjectivity itself. As in all dialectical relations, the relation of force and its expressions is not devoid of the “progress to

174   Conclusion infinity” tendency, either in its “spurious” form or in its ideal or conceptual form. In force and its relations, Hegel says, force is finite, because its moments have the form of immediacy, and conditioned, because of its very form-­determinateness. However, force also expresses itself in “sublating externality and determining it as that in which it is identical with itself ” (Hegel 1998, 523). Thus, like power, coercion and hegemony in the struggle for recognition, “what force in truth expresses is that its relation to other is relation to itself, that is passivity consists in its very activity.” The subtle, invisible and always vanishing mediation of force or coercion in favor of the suturing work of hegemony to fill the gap between structures and superstructures consists in that the impulse by which it is solicited into activity is its own soliciting; the externality which affects it is not an immediate but is mediated by force itself; just as its own essential identity-­with-self is not immediate but is mediated by its negation. (Hegel 1998, 523) When force reaches the point at which “its externality is identical with its inwardness,” force passes over into and discloses [to the critical observer of this conceptual transition] the dynamic that Hegel understands as the spurious progress to infinity. From the perspective of an infinity that can never be reached, but that solicits or interpellates, in the form of a drive or desire deep in the subject, the quest for its realization, when force stays within this spurious dynamic, it then takes on the task of self-­legitimation (not to be confused with self-­solicitation) of force as the key moment in the dialectic of the essential relation or law. In Hegel’s terms, this is akin to ideals without the Idea or blueprints without the Notion. In other words, ideals without the Idea unleash the fury of spurious infinity, the madman of Terror deluded into thinking that this is the ladder to heaven, the root cause of the fall to the ground, the unraveling, and the unfinished business of the French Revolution. The key to understanding Hegel’s notion of force and its relations is to understand the dialectics of what he calls “solicitation.” At its deepest level, the “impulse by which it is solicited into activity is its own soliciting,” the soliciting factor from one of the moments in the dialectical relation, a solicitation that is not something merely and coercively imposed from the outside on the soliciting subject. For this soliciting is not in any way the same as Althusser’s ideological interpellation of the subject by the state and its apparatuses. Just as totality does not impose order on the parts from the outside or the Absolute from above, force does not impose rule on its expressions or subjects from the outside, but, rather, constitutes itself through them as the soliciting factor, thus turning – in postmodern and neoliberal terms – the hyperindividualist, privatizing subject into hegemony. In other words, for Hegel, force – now internalized as desire and solicitation for force and subjection – is the negative unity or the gap into

Conclusion   175 which the contradiction of structures and superstructures or, in Hegel’s terms, “the contradiction of whole and parts” has resolved itself (Hegel 1998, 518). Here, of course, the negative unity is the hegemonic substance of the particular individual, the subject of hegemony, a part that has broken off from the whole, but always attempting to suture this break as the fruit of choice, freedom and fulfillment. Just as with the relation and contradiction of the whole and the parts, the dialectic of force and its expression cannot be reduced to a mere Kantian opposition but, instead, consists of the fact that these apparently opposite terms sublate themselves within themselves and pass over into each other, just as ideology and phantasy sublate themselves within themselves and also pass over into reality and vice versa, just as force – in Hegel’s words – “passes over into its expression, and what is expressed is a vanishing something which withdraws into force as into its ground” (Hegel 1998, 519, italics added). This “vanishing something” is precisely the vanishing gap between structures and superstructures or between the whole and its parts, the vanishing of the Real. In this exact sense, therefore, Hegel anticipates Lukács’ critique of the reduction of ideology to either mere false consciousness or a form of Realpolitik, Gramsci’s critique of hegemony as mere domination or leadership, and, more recently, Foucault’s critique of the notion of power as merely the power to command exercised by the state or ruling elites. Although Gramsci touches briefly on the idea of “force and its expression” (Gramsci 1996b, Q4 §38, 179), he unfortunately did not develop this fundamental Hegelian notion as a source for his concept of hegemony or his conception of the “psychophysical” structure of subjective desire for domination. This is the reason why this concept of hegemony is further developed here along Hegelian lines and deployed to account for the nature of hegemony under conditions of contemporary postmodern and neoliberal capitalist globalization. Given the nature of hegemonic “force and its expression” under the current historical bloc, it is thus dangerous to suggest – as many on the “progressive and democratic left” do – that real change that “changes everything” depends on the successful articulation of progressive consent around a commonly shared project of higher and more authentic moral universalism or behind the leadership of liberal or radical democratic politics in the context of actually existing civil or political society. Without a simultaneous, profound and permanent transformation of the subject of hegemony, it is dangerous to suggest that ever more threatening and bigger issues produced by the global system of postmodern and neoliberal capitalist globalization, such as climate change, can by themselves serve, as Naomi Klein proposes, as [T]he best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals  and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of

176   Conclusion essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them could become a catalyzing force for positive change. (Klein 2010, 7) No single crisis in the local or global structure of contemporary postmodern and neoliberal capitalism can, on its own, lead to any change or to the unification of criteria among “progressives,” even if the various connections among the multiple crises afflicting our common humanity today were – in Klein’s words – “more widely understood” and the urgency of, for example, the climate crisis could form the basis of a powerful mass movement, one that would weave all these seemingly disparate issues into a coherent narrative about how to protect humanity from the ravages of both a savagely unjust economic system and a destabilized climate system. We are confronted today with complex situations that serve to reassert the process of hegemony, and for which not even sound scientific understanding of current multiple crises can help activate the proper counter-­ hegemonic response. At a time when the New Social Movements (NSMs) of the 1980s and 1990s have been transformed into national and transnational NGOs or CSOs and traditional left-­wing parties have either declined or become transformed into what Tariq Ali calls parties of the “extreme centre,” Leslie Sklair argues that one of the key elements of contemporary neoliberal globalization is the construction of a “transnational middle class” that includes, among others, well-­off or well-­paid transnational activists (Sklair 2000b). This is exactly what Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink “find” as they “observe” these activists through the work of scholars such as Mary Kaldor and John Keane, enlist a handful of selected concepts of what has effectively been reassembled into a “democratic” Gramsci, and, fond as they are of empirical social science research, proceed to document them as the emergence of “transnational advocacy networks” (Keck and Sikkink 1999). This kind of work illustrates quite well the way in which the process of hegemony operates in our time within academic social science research and within “civil society” activism. After decades of actually demanding that NSMs become serious about their support of democracy and thus convert themselves into good CSOs, institutions at the heart of neoliberal globalization have effectively demanded that their civil society clienteles (“partners”) adopt the language of human rights, citizenship, democracy, sustainable development and international law (Chimni 1999). And now, after all these years of learning how to speak this language, scholars such as Keck and Sikkink “find” this discourse to be

Conclusion   177 the lingua franca of CSOs and what civil society in the Global South is demanding as its very own. In doing so, these scholars close the circle of hegemony planted by transnational bureaucrats and policy-­makers decades ago. Even without intending it, then, the work of scholars such as Thomas Risse further illustrates how this process involves, in “progressive liberal academia” as well as in “civil society activism,” the promotion of “international norms” in order to achieve the very kind of orderly and democratic “domestic change” that transnational elites, now operating through post-­Fordist neoliberal and globalizing institutions, accumulation regimes and global free trade agreements, require: that is, the consolidation of minimalist polyarchy, the strengthening of the rule of increasingly privatized law, the building of human rights and development capacities in a world of widespread insecurity and precarity, and the dissemination of a culture of pluralism and tolerance even in the face of widespread hunger, disease, ecological damage and death (Risse et al. 1999). Even as neoliberal globalization hollows out the last liberal components that once amounted to only a basic form of popular sovereignty, today minimalist polyarchy is being promoted by civil societies themselves, through the transnational construction of territorialized and circumscribed liberal public spheres that privilege “arguing and communicative behavior” instead of “voluntaristic” and radical contestation of the structures, procedures and policies of local, national or transnational power that some of these scholars identify as typical of “bad” civil society. Although these polyarchies lack any substantial power over transnational processes, they nevertheless help to build and reinforce the trenches and fortifications of global hegemony. Although they speak as if democracy promotion amounted to the emergence of a global cosmopolitan culture of the kind promoted by scholars such as David Held and Daniele Archibugi, what Risse and Sikkink conceptualize as “the socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices” is, in fact, the very dynamic of democracy promotion critically conceptualized by scholars such as James Petras (Petras 1997), William I. Robinson (Robinson 1996) and Leslie Sklair (Sklair 2000a). This complex political dynamic got underway in the 1980s with Reagan’s “Project Democracy” and has now reached feverish pace through a whole series of complex policies and institutions in charge of the global project of “democracy and trade promotion.”10 And there are many regional and international NGOs, such as Latinobarómetro and CIVICUS, dedicated to examining and supporting the consolidation of this project of global democracy promotion, as if it were a sovereign matter of democratic growth within each country they examine. It is, thus, this project of global promotion of citizenship, civil society and democracy that, once again, requires a Gramscian critique of naïve calls to organize and enlist “grassroots” and “progressive” civil society to the cause of resisting and humanizing neoliberal globalization and fighting climate change. We certainly need, as Robinson argues, a Gramscian model of international relations and world order and, by extension, a Gramscian model

178   Conclusion of the hegemonic process at this level, which can help us understand and critically engage with the “shift to promoting polyarchy” as the twin of promoting neoliberal free trade agreements. But Robinson also argues that there is a link between global policies of democracy promotion and national political processes throughout the world, a link that needs to be explained in terms of a transnational political practice that supports the kind of flexible and no-­longer-sovereign democracy that is safe and, indeed, productive for neoliberal globalization. For this, we need an unorthodox reading of Gramsci, because the orthodox reading of Gramsci, coupled with what is taken for granted as “Gramsci’s theory of civil society,” serves, rather than challenges, the purposes of polyarchic promotion. As it actually functions, it sets about not just to secure and stabilize polyarchy but to have the U.S. and local elites thoroughly penetrate not just the state but civil society – the site of a Gramscian hegemony. This is a change from social control “from above” to social control “from below” (and within). (Robinson 1996, 643) In this context, then, scholars such as Lakin, Lipset and Huntington argue, and they are echoed by many “extreme centrist” scholars of democratic politics in Latin America and elsewhere, that the only relevant question it is possible to ask when it comes to civil society is not whether it is “progressive” but whether it “supports democracy” or not (Fonseca 2015a). Although violence is regularly used by transnational corporations in getting and exerting access and control over resources (minerals, water, land and labor) in the periphery of the Global South, the idea of democracy promotion is to minimize the use of force and its relations and shift the process over towards “soft” and “consensual” models of communicative capitalism. Since the age of dictatorships has ended and the age of “transitions to democracy” and “Arab Springs” has fully begun, the goal now is the consolidation of polyarchic regimes compatible with freely obtained forms of subjection at the level of deep psychological and cultural dimensions that depoliticize behavior and desires. The concept of “democracy” has certainly always been, and remains today more than ever, a contested concept. But the Washington Consensus around it, a consensus that has by no means diminished in ideological or political importance around the world, is that democracy promotion is about the promotion of polyarchy and the discouragement, if not outright condemnation, of popular democracy in the Rousseauian–Marxist tradition. The purpose of polyarchy is, as Robinson argues, to “pre-­empt more fundamental social change” by binding together normatively and procedurally political and civil society (Robinson 1996, 627). For transnational domination requires, in order to become hegemonic, “the ideological incorporation of both dominant and subordinate groups in the center and

Conclusion   179 periphery.” Such domination requires “a sufficiently developed civil society constituted on the foundations of capitalist production relations” (Robinson 1996, 630). One of the virtues of polyarchic political systems is precisely that they lend themselves perfectly to “more durable forms of social control, and therefore to stability” in our age of post-­Fordist and flexible forms of global accumulation (Robinson 1996, 635). The culture-­ideology of consumerism, in turn, reaches deep into subjectivity, “Taylorizing” and adapting it to the requirements of postmodern forms of spectacle (Debord 2000). Martin Hans-­Lansberg shows how production from developed countries has been massively outsourced to the Global South (Hart-­ Landsberg 2013), but post-­Fordist patterns of consumption “shaped largely by transnational advertising and the use of popular culture” are emerging everywhere and equalizing the playing field. The deep level at which the process of hegemony operates by renormalizing and restabilizing worlds torn asunder by the plunder and extraction of neoliberal globalization cannot be underestimated, and must, indeed, be critically engaged with an advanced concept of hegemony. As this book has shown, although Gramsci’s Notebooks develop a concept of hegemony as moral universalism, we need to take this further towards an examination of domination through desire for submission that is nevertheless experienced as the will to freedom. In response to the crisis of traditional political parties and the hegemonic role played by CSOs, spontaneous, rhizomatic and autonomous people’s movements have emerged all over the world to challenge not only the politics of austerity but also the structures and transnational processes of neoliberal globalization and the traditional politics of hegemonizing civil society. And they have done so while also managing to turn themselves into more disciplined and organized political parties of the New Prince type. Thus, in Spain, Podemos emerged from the antiausterity indignado or 15-M movement formed in 2011, a movement that was rooted in earlier digital activist networks like Democracia Real YA. In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left, also known as Syriza, emerged from Space for Dialogue for the Unity and Common Action of the Left, formed during the 1990s. After winning the election of January 2015, Syriza went on to form the first – albeit unstable and prone to fragmentation – left-­wing European government since the Second World War. Amador Fernández-Savater has, in fact, recently discussed the adoption of Gramscian language in the constitution of Podemos in Spain (Fernández-Savater 2013). Íñigo Errejón Galván – an important figure in Podemos – examines the concept of hegemony in the Bolivian context (2006–2009) in terms that approximate those developed in this book (Errejón Galván 2012). For his part, Bécquer Seguín discusses the Latin American – specifically Bolivian and Venezuelan – “roots of Podemos” through key Podemos figures such as Juan Carlos Monedero (political scientist at the Complutense University of Madrid, Podemos’s secretary of the constituent process and program, and former advisor to Chávez’s government) and Errejón Galván (cited above),

180   Conclusion Podemos’s secretary of politics, whose doctoral field work was on popular movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (Seguín 2015). When it comes to understanding “prefigurative political practices” or movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the indiganos, Podemos, the Greek Space for Dialogue and Syriza, however, it is important to keep in mind the following caution from David Harvey: in all these movements, activism is fundamentally important, and again I think the problem here is the Left’s inability to channel it into anything. There’s a number of reasons for that, but I think the most important of them is the Left’s failure to abandon its traditional focus on production in favour of a politics of everyday life. In my view the politics of the everyday is the crucible where revolutionary energies might develop, and where we can already see activities that are seeking to define what a nonalienated life might look like. These activities are more a matter of the space where we live than the space where we work. Syriza and Podemos offer us a first glimpse of this political project – they are not pure revolutionaries, but they have awakened very great interest. (Watson 2015) This is, thus, the kind of contemporary political context that explains and, indeed, justifies the present interpretation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as a “combined” version of Marxism that puts one firmly on the path of a complex concept of hegemony particularly adept at engaging with the hegemonizing threat of democracy promotion. When David Forgacs argues that “Outside Italy, nowhere more than in Britain have Gramsci’s writings exercised so prolonged, deep or diversified an influence” (Forgacs 1989), he forgets that there is a long, vibrant and fighting tradition of committed Gramscian scholarship in places such as Latin America (Fernandez Buey 1994, 2001; Burgos 2004, 2010; Zorzoli 2004; Aricó 2005). Many of these Gramscian thinkers have been, and continue to be, active in antidictatorial, anticapitalist and now antineoliberal struggles, reaching back to the work of pioneering thinkers such as José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s and Manuel Sacristán’s reflections on Gramsci, beginning in Spain in 1958 and reaching a climax with his immensely popular anthology of Gramsci’s writings – which could not be published in Franco’s Spain – being published in post-­1968 Mexico at the height of the New Left boom in 1970. Of course, Latin American Gramscism experienced its own boom, not unlike the explosion of Latin American literature and Liberation Theology, in the 1960s and 1970s.11 This boom came to be exemplified by the founding in 1963 of the Argentinian journal and publishing house Pasado y Presente under the guidance of José Aricó, who was himself an important voice within Latin America’s own New Left movements in the 1960s. But it is in the present, in the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the Bolivarian movement in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, that key ideas of Gramsci, particularly the need to combine

Conclusion   181 the counter-­hegemonic work of moral and intellectual reform through rhizomatic and autonomous – and in some cases indigenous – struggles from below (what John Holloway calls “changing the world without taking power”) with the politics of refoundation and revolution by means of the New Prince in power, have found their most fertile terrain. The evolution of this radical “Pink Tide” is, however, not without challenges. These popular and militant activist movements are being actively confronted by a war of position from above and below that operates, precisely, through democracy promotion and the lure of so-­called “colour revolutions.” Gramsci’s dual approach to power, his call for counter-­hegemonic moral and intellectual reform within autonomous movements, as well as his call for the construction of a disciplined New Prince, is today, therefore, more urgent than ever. Today, militant activists and revolutionaries are asking a series of questions that bear an uncanny resemblance to those for which Gramsci had already formulated answers in his Notebooks, however unfinished and sometimes contradictory, in startlingly contemporary and relevant terms: How is “another world possible” in moral, intellectual and political terms? What does one have to do to change oneself and participate meaningfully in this event-­in-process? What is the role of “civil society” or its alternative – what Laclau, in close proximity to the populist reception of Gramsci in Latin America, calls the “popular subject” – in this process? What kind of political organization, collective actor or “national-­popular” agent is needed to help push this process forward, bring it into being, or channel its fury, its passion and its force into a systemic and structural refounding of the state? A question driving the debate around “modes of production” and “conditions for revolution” in Latin America was, and remains, the extent to which refounding politics can or cannot proceed, and can or cannot “skip stages of development,” and whether or not refoundation needs to wait for the “necessary objective conditions” that can make it both possible and, thus, politically realistic. What version or Idea of communalism, socialism or Communism should constitute the horizon of revolutionary struggles today? These questions and the key debates around them, both in Latin America and abroad, constitute the context within which I propose to read Gramsci anew and frame the significance of engaging with Gramsci’s critique of the idols of this age: citizenship, civil society and democracy. Gramsci already wrestled with ways to go beyond commonsensical understandings of political struggle or political organization requiring only superficially conceived forms of political consciousness – struggles for human rights, struggles for sustainable development, and now struggles for “adaptation” to climate change – or merely contingent forms of political organization (e.g., Battle for Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, 360.org’s divestment campaign) around “issues” or “causes” of “common concern.” Counter-­hegemony is not a process that requires a simple awakening of consciousness to the seriousness of one issue, even if it is the most pressing

182   Conclusion issue, of our time. As we have seen in this book, indeed, moral universalism can most successfully endure and reproduce itself even within “progressive movements” if it can effectively and invisibly – thus based on neither consent or coercion but, in fact, beyond both and in the form of dissent and protest itself – re-­create the subject as hegemony underpinning the private and “autonomous” self and its sense of pure free will at the heart of contemporary identity, cultural and even class politics in the Global North or human rights, civil society and “sustainable development” discourses in the Global South. The ideologies of postmodern and neoliberal human rights, sustainable development and globalization with a human face, in fact, pervade the current public sphere and its ideologies, rendering public life – and its social, cultural and political narratives, spectacles and economic “bubbles” – ready for public forms of consumption and subjection transvaluated as exercises in democratic – even radical – freedom. These are the hegemonic and ideological preconditions that successfully create a socially widespread desire for submission-­in-freedom absolutely fundamental not only for post-­Fordist, flexible and neoliberal forms of global commodity production, but also for postmodern forms of cultural identity and political legitimacy.12 Despite the end of all metanarratives and the loss of the real object in the age of postmodern aesthetics, this is where the validity of postmodern and neoliberal capitalist universalism is nevertheless justified and legitimized a priori, hegemonically. As we have seen in this book, the struggle against the process of hegemony starts with a process of critical self-­understanding “first in the ethical field,” aimed at nothing less than the production – the positing – of a “higher level of one’s own conception of reality.”13 But how can we take Gramsci’s notion of a “critical understanding of the self ” further? I propose that we do so by exploring the idea that hegemony is, in fact, inscribed in the subject itself as a hidden or invisible “psychophysical” or “biopolitical” process of production of subjective desire for domination and submission, nonetheless experienced by abstract individuals as their own free will. Deep inside the subject, hegemony transvaluates itself into a fantasy of spontaneous and individualistic freedom that accounts for why the individualized and abstract subject deemed to be the “freest” in history is nonetheless the most perversely enslaved or Taylorized subject, perfectly adapted to the emerging conditions of neoliberal and globalizing forms of consumption, alienation and reification that characterize the current historical bloc.14 Through an ethical and certainly political experience of what Gramsci calls “catharsis,” we can become critically aware that our struggle is not simply against the symptomatic crises of postmodern neoliberal capitalist globalization but – in Paul’s words – “against [deep] principalities, against [hidden] powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). But what can this seemingly cryptic reference to a struggle against “spiritual wickedness” mean in what Charles Taylor has called our contemporary “secular age”? I  want to develop this idea further, but not by following Taylor’s

Conclusion   183 award-­winning but, sadly, mistaken solution.15 Instead, I think it is worth following a suggestion on how to understand and, indeed, overcome the “subject supposed to believe” of contemporary hegemony recently made by Žižek, partially as a result of his debate with Laclau and Butler, over nothing other than the concept of hegemony itself. In order to actually perform its function, Žižek tells us, “the ruling ideology has to incorporate a series of features in which the exploited majority will be able to recognize its authentic longings.” In other words, “each hegemonic universality has to incorporate at least two particular contents, the authentic popular content as well as its distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation” (Žižek 1997, 29). In this regard, as Žižek puts it in the same passage, “Etienne Balibar was fully justified in reversing Marx’s classic formula: the ruling ideas are precisely not directly the ideas of those who rule,” or, at least, not all the ruling ideas are simply those of the ruling elite. This is a line of argumentation that Gramsci also suggests repeatedly and to the same effect in the Notebooks. In fact, Žižek also uses the case of Christianity – which is, like any other religion or cultural phenomenon, not reducible to a mere ideology – to illustrate his point: How did Christianity become the ruling ideology? By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of the oppressed – truth is on the side of the suffering and humiliated, power corrupts, and so on – and rearticulating them in such a way that they became compatible with the existing relations of domination. (Žižek 1997, 30) If we distinguish between the hegemonic process and ideological dynamics, in a similar way as Žižek distinguishes, in his analysis of fetishism, between “the formal/differential structure (which is by definition ‘absent,’ i.e., it is never given ‘as such’ in our experiential reality) and a positive [ideological] element of this structure” (Žižek 1998), then the logic of the hegemonic process cannot be conceived in the same way as a traditional ideology or, in a mechanical way, as simply “reflecting” or reacting to developments in the economic base, as Poulantzas himself started to notice in his later work.16 Instead, the concept of hegemony as process and as subject, as performing a “primordial substitution” at the core of who we are, a substitution that depends on the operation of replacing nothingness with what appears as something, is something that remains absent and hidden from view. This view of hegemony allows us to perceive what otherwise remains as an invisible psychophysical structure of desire, a set of concealed forms of reified domination hegemonically transvaluated into the desire for subjection and simultaneously ideologized and fetishized as a primordial and foundational freedom of choice that gives ultimate “validity,” “facticity” and “objectivity” to particular social arrangements and historical blocs. Organic ideologies thus complement this process from above, as it were, by linking down with the motifs and aspirations from below “in such a

184   Conclusion way that they become compatible with the existing relations of domination” and, in the process, transvaluate the dominant ideas into a “common sense.” Here is where we find, in Gramsci’s words, the construction of the modern Taylorized subject – what Žižek calls the “subject supposed to believe” – and where the normality of modern living, thinking and working, even in our times of increasing precarity and unemployment, could not take place without hegemonic suture “over the whole social sphere,” where, initially, “a puritan ideology develops which gives to the intrinsic brutal coercion the external [and subjective] form of persuasion and consent” (Gramsci 1992, Q1 §158, 235). “In other words” – Gramsci writes in the same early passage on “Animality and industrialism,” commenting on the “subjugation of the instincts” – “there develops a situation of great totalitarian social hypocrisy” similar to, but more radically conceived than, Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of “mass deception,”17 in which “the working masses are compelled to be virtuous” but “those who preach virtue do not practice it even though they pay verbal homage to it.” A crisis of hegemony occurs, of course, when the ideology that compels us to be virtuous, to play by the rules of the liberal capitalist game, no longer binds us. When the belief in this system of widespread modern hypocrisy translates itself into a full-­blown crisis of hegemony, then the system must find a way of socializing norms, new modes of “self-­discipline,” in order to avoid a situation of “permanent crisis.” Contrary to the later Althusserian relegation of the “subject” to being a mere “effect” of ideology, Gramsci takes the subject as hegemony as “being nothing” supposed to believe that he/she is something. This is why Gramsci foregrounds the “psychophysical” and “molecular” structure of desire and his argument that Taylorization, as a particular form of the process of hegemony, implies the production of just this psychological structure of desire and the subject’s violent and disciplined preparation for subjection. But all of this must be done as a matter of “free choice.” The suturing effect of hegemony is vital to ensure that the interstitial gap always present in the never totalized or finalized relationship between structures and superstructures does not widen into an openly visible and insurmountable cleavage and a “permanent crisis.” Hegemonic/ideological formations, in turn, can now be understood as performing ongoing repair work to suture this gap with personal (success stories), social (philanthropy) or religious (encounters with UFOs or with gods) narratives. Contemporary global corporate media generate an endless supply of stories that conform perfectly to the demands of the hegemonic process. As indicated above, Gramsci himself did not have the opportunity to fully develop this dynamic of hegemony and ideology or connect his own concepts in this specific way, but his Notebooks nevertheless suggest that hegemony is precisely what constructs a certain interior space within the subject where the desire for its own subjection and the fantasy of achieved freedom are rooted.18 The development of Gramsci’s critique of hegemony and civil society along the lines suggested here, therefore, offers the possibility of

Conclusion   185 developing the philosophy of praxis, as well as the praxis of philosophy, in new ways. But there is a potential for hegemonic reassertion even within our effort to develop further Gramsci’s counter-­hegemonic philosophy of praxis. The danger of reproducing hegemony through a mere critique of ideology lies, then, in using a simple or distorted notion of hegemony – itself ideologically produced – that can be illustrated with reference not only to how Laclau and Mouffe understand the new condition of postmodernity, but also to how Coutinho reduces the notion of hegemony to a new social contract. For Laclau and Mouffe, “[t]he incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘society’ as a sutured and self-­defined totality. ‘Society’ is not a valid object of discourse” (cited in Bosteels 2011, 69). Aside from the fact that this is an argument that Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan and their neoconservative successors would certainly have found pleasantly convincing, it can be argued that this totalizing obliteration of totality and its corresponding ontologizing of the infinity of subjectivity, this conception of a structure of desire that is simultaneously constructed as the achievement of freedom and the failure to achieve it and, indeed, the failure of the subject itself, constitutes precisely the effect of hegemony in late capitalist societies in the context of the profound transformations of “reality” brought on by neoliberal capitalist globalization. Take, for example, Žižek’s understanding of ideology as a critique of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s understanding of the ontology of postmodernity as being, in fact, an “identification with the symptom” of a hegemonic formation finding ever more subtle ways to “avoid that the symbolic order [not to mention the material order of production through private property itself] disintegrate altogether.” Here is how Bosteels reconstructs this crucial point: The critique of ideology, therefore, can no longer consist only in unmasking the particular vested interests hidden behind the false appearances of universality, as in the metapolitics that Rancière ascribes to Marx. Instead, two rather different tasks impose themselves, which can be compared to the ends of the psychoanalytical cure as discussed by Žižek. The aim is, first, a traversing of the fantasy, so as to acknowledge how an ideology merely fills out a traumatic void in the midst of the social field and, second, in order to avoid that the symbolic order disintegrate altogether, the identification with the symptom, or what Lacan names sinthome, that is, the piece of surplus enjoyment that continues to resist even after the dismantling of the fundamental fantasy and that thus somehow gives body to the radical inconsistency of society itself. This obscene enjoyment, which attaches itself to the symptom and is ultimately nothing else but pure death drive pulsating around the central emptiness in the midst of the symbolic order, cannot be overcome by means of an old-­style symptomal reading of ideology nor even by a revolutionary social change. Žižek

186   Conclusion writes about the drive to enjoyment, which, as our human condition, is the ultimate pre-­ideological support of all ideology. (Bosteels 2011, 72)19 As for Coutinho, we should remember that his version of Gramsci’s “extensions” of Lenin and his theory of the revolutionary party represent a contemporary effort to remain faithful to an orthodox phantom – if not, in Quentin Meillassoux’s terms, an undead spectral figure that still complains to us if we critique certain aspects of its legacy (Meillassoux 2008). Coutinho’s Lenin is, thus, the phantom of a Gerondist Lenin critical of “voluntarism” or the militant activist Jacobinism unmistakably present in today’s struggles for refoundation in Latin America. Coutinho’s exhumation of the ghost of Lenin is, thus, an effort to once again resurrect the supposedly scientific idea of “developing the necessary conditions” before any revolution can take place. And this is done while at the same time proclaiming the “dialectical” overcoming of Lenin in the work of Gramsci and the “dialectical” appropriation of Gramsci, all in the same breath. We have seen this exact sort of “dialectical” appropriation of Marx, Lenin or Gramsci done and redone in the context of Jesuitical appropriations of Marxism-­ Leninism by many Latin American leftist intellectuals who have moved to the side of “realism” and “pragmatic” politics in post-­transitional times. An early example of this is Santiago Carrillo’s favorable reassessment and “dialectical appropriation” of Popular Front politics and Eurocommunism in the 1970s (Carrillo 1977). I fear that Coutinho’s reading of Gramsci is doing something similar today by systematically foregrounding Gramscian passages in which the philosophy of praxis most closely repeats the “Realist,” “anti-­voluntarist” and anti-­Jacobin Lenin, a Lenin nicely fit for today’s neoliberal social democracy. In this operation, Coutinho performs a reconciliation of Gramsci not only with the reality and undeniable correctness of the Comintern’s Popular Front policy (1934–1939) but also with the electoral politics of a “transition” period marked by the “need for a constituent assembly” – understood as a social democratic contract – now reinscribed into Gramsci’s work as the essential concept of a hegemonic politics as the construction of the “general will” expressed through clean and fair elections and political renewal, such as those that took place, for example, in Latin American “transitions to democracy” during the 1980s and 1990s. Gramsci does raise the possibility of refounding the modern state through the mechanism of a constituent assembly. But Gramsci’s proposal for a constituent assembly is a proposal to empower autonomous movements, transform the architecture of power in political society and pave the way for a transformation of the integral state. Coutinho’s discussion of the constituent assembly is, instead, grounded not in Gramsci’s direct suggestions but in the recollections of Bruno Tosin and Athos Lisa – prison-­ associates of Gramsci – and the practice of no less an authority than Palmiro Togliatti himself, Il Migliore, founding figure of the PCI together

Conclusion   187 with Gramsci.20 There is a retroactive rewriting of Gramsci and, indeed, a positing of the “necessary conditions” for “transition” processes such as those that punctuate the rise of the “moderate” Pink Tide in Latin America. In Coutinho’s own words: “In Togliatti’s formulation political democracy was no longer seen a stage to be completed and abandoned when the time for the ‘assault on power’ comes, when the so-­called ‘great day’ arrives, and becomes a set of conquests to be conserved and brought to a higher level – that is, dialectically overcome – in socialist democracy” (Coutinho 2013, 109). Although all the evidence in the Notebooks suggests what Gramsci’s position would have been on so-­called “socialist pluralism,” for Coutinho’s rather anti-­Gramscian notion of “hegemony as contract,” the task of formulating a “theory of progressive democracy” is not only a natural outcome of Gramsci’s supposedly pro-­liberal democratic ideas of socialism but, indeed, the task left for his heirs to complete. This is what “strengthening civil society after taking power” – as some argue is happening in some Pink Tide cases in Latin America – can help accomplish, and the theory of “socialist pluralism” – Gramsci “dialectically” sublated by Dahl – “contains in nuce the bases for the dialectical overcoming of aspects of Lenin’s theory (assimilated by him) of the working class party.” This is, thus, the theoretical basis for Coutinho’s own support for Brazil’s so-­called “transition to democracy,” the role of the Worker’s Party (PT) in that process, and the PT’s social democratic cum neoliberal mix of policies that have come to define the “moderate” and “democratic” Pink Tide. In Brazil’s case, however, this “dialectical overcoming” of radical Jacobin politics – and Lenin’s theory of the working-­class party was only an initial Communist version of it – as actually proposed by Gramsci, now amounts to little more than minimal welfare policies sustained by the national and corporate pursuit of extractive neoliberalism and cheerfully celebrated by democracy-­promoting NGOs (Gudynas 2013).21 Instead of building pluralist “democracy,” however, we must fully assert Gramsci’s impure ethics of struggle, the spirit of cleavage, the struggle to pry open the gap that hegemony sutures and ideologies justify, and thus embrace the “myth” or the Idea of Communism once more and use it to build the combined cathartic and disciplined movements from below here and now. Here, the reading of Gregory Fried’s work on Heidegger and the idea of polemos (struggle) as proposed by Žižek in Less than Nothing gets us closer to the spirit, if not the letter, of Gramsci’s work than many current theoretical discussions on hegemony. As does the impure ethics of the war of position within and against civil society for Gramsci, so, too, Heidegger’s idea of war captures an important element of the class struggle: the collective identity of the New Prince emerges only through this war itself and involves not only an individual ordeal – a violent conversion of the self to the collective – but also a simultaneous collective ordeal through which we reinscribe “non-­sublatable negativity and finitude into the abyssal heart of being itself ” and struggle to overcome the illusion of structural–superstructural fusion through any automatic or Absolute means.

188   Conclusion We will only “perceive” the riches of our goal when we accept its soiled nature. The New Prince is, thus, not aiming to be the Absolute Subject that finally enables the proletariat to overcome its self-­alienation in neoliberal capitalist globalization. The New Prince emerges from the gap and stays in  the gap! This idea, politically speaking, does change everything. As Žižek writes, It is class struggle (social antagonism), not the state, which is the mode of Being of a people – the state is there to obfuscate this antagonism. Such a radicalized notion of the polemos as class struggle brings us to [. . .] another way to approach the “question of the consciousness of the will of the community” as “a problem in all democracies.”22 Heidegger’s idea of political commitment involves the unity of a people and the leader who mobilizes them in a shared struggle against an (external) enemy, bringing them all together (“accepting” even the proletariat). If, however, we take class struggle as the polemos constitutive of political life, then the problem of the common political will appears in a radically different way: how to build the collective will of the oppressed in the class struggle, the emancipatory will which takes the class polemos to its extreme. (And was this will not at work already in Ancient Greek democracy, was it not operative at the very core of the Athenian polis?) This collective will is the crucial component of communism, which [quoting Peter Hallward] “seeks to enable the conversion of work into will. Communism aims to complete the transition, via the struggle of collective self-­emancipation, from a suffered necessity to autonomous self-­determination. It is the deliberate effort, on a world-­historical scale, to universalize the material conditions under which free voluntary action might prevail over involuntary labour or passivity. Or rather: communism is the project through which voluntary action seeks to universalize the conditions for voluntary action. Exemplary cases of such activity can be found in people like Robespierre, Toussaint L’Ouverture or John Brown: confronted with an indefensible institution like slavery, when the opportunity arose they resolved to work immediately and by all available means for its elimination. Che Guevara and Paulo Freire would do the same in the face of imperialism and oppression.” (Žižek 2012, 899–900, brackets added) I share a number of important points with Peter Hallward’s proposed approach to emancipatory politics, points that extend the argument of this book. As he writes, I think the general emphasis on universalisable and egalitarian principle, on subjective commitment and resolve, on the logic of consequence and anticipation, on an engagement with the strategic constraints of a specific situation, etc., remain pertinent to any

Conclusion   189 conception of emancipatory politics worthy of the name. Although important initial contributions were made by early modern thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, I think that it’s only with Rousseau that the notion of a collective or “general” will began to receive adequate theoretical definition. It is only with Rousseau’s Jacobin admirers, furthermore, during the French and Haitian revolutions, that such a notion came to orient political practice, and it is only after Marx that such practice gained the sort of historical determination required to give it far-­reaching strategic purchase on a situation. If we can clarify what is meant by these elusive terms “people” and “will,” and what their combination requires and implies, then we may also clarify what is required to move from merely formal to actual democracy. My hypothesis is that their conjunction is enough all by itself to provide a normative basis for democratic practice, and thus for the political project of changing a world ruled by and for the few into a world ruled by and for the many. By “will” I mean, first of all, the actual exercise of willing a particular purpose or end. For precisely this reason I will prefer the generic term actor over the term “subject,” since it avoids or recasts some of the well-­known ambiguities of latter (as both agent and substrate, active and passive, free and “subjected,” etc.) in favour of a direct derivation from the verb to act, a verb whose own ambiguity is productive and illuminating. Examples of the sort of egalitarian political will I have in mind are easy to list [but they include] the Bolivarian projects of Latin America. In each case, a threshold is crossed when the actors in these sequences apply a version of Danton’s principle, later cited by Engels, Lenin and many others: “de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!” In each case, a decisive element in the struggle is the respective actors’ capacity and willingness to act – the capacity of those who control the economic levers of power and the repressive machinery of the state, on the one hand, versus the people’s collective capacity to act deliberately and forcefully in pursuit of common goals. Anyone involved in a popular struggle knows that if we are to continue to fight, and to fight to win, then we need to maintain solidarity and unity, to resist fragmentation and dispersal, to invent forms of discipline and organisation, and to encourage means of leadership that are both responsive and decisive. (Hallward 2014) I do think, with Hallward, that it is in the tradition from Hegel, Marx, Blanqui, Luxemburg, Lenin and, most emphatically, Gramsci – and his successors Mao, Fanon, Che and Chávez – that we find today, at its richest and most productive, “the notion of a resolute, determined and autonomous proletariat, as the ‘leading edge’ of a mobilisation in pursuit of the political and economic emancipation of the people as a whole” and where “the cultivation of a collective spirit, discipline and courage” can most fairly be described in terms of “virtue” (Hallward 2014).

190   Conclusion Can we, then, conceive of the New Prince as a “true master”? Only if the Master learns how to obey the mandate from below. For Žižek, though, this is how a true Master works: he does not try to guess what people want; he simply obeys his own desire and leaves it up to others to decide if they want to follow him. In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his desire, from refusing to compromise on it. Therein lies the difference between a true Master and, say, the fascist or Stalinist leader who pretends to know (better than the people themselves) what people really want (what is really good for them), and is then ready to enforce it on them even against their will. (Žižek 2014a, 116–117) Žižek’s master is, thus, not the exact equivalent of the New Prince in our autonomous and refoundational struggles. As the Zapatistas put it, the Master must learn to rule by obeying (Holloway 2005). The obvious question to be raised is whether or not actors, militants and committed intellectuals who are moving on to the moment of the New Prince still need to assume that their freedom, to put it once again in Augustinian terms, depends on resubjection. Žižek’s answer is as startling as it is revelatory: The emergence of a Word [an Idea, a proper and self-­critical revolutionary Program] interrupts this mad circular dance by “concentrating” the shapeless Void that causes dread into a signifier, and since this signifier refers to the Void, it has to be an “enigmatic” signifier naming the unnameable. The first Word thus has no determinate content, it is an empty “Don’t!” whose object can only be the Void of the impossible Real – in short, the first prohibition can only prohibit what is already in itself impossible. The advantage of this operation is that the impossible becomes something prohibited, with the accompanying illusion that, if we violate the prohibition, we can thereby reach the impossible. It is in this sense that, as Kierkegaard puts it, the prohibition awakens the possibility of freedom—the freedom to violate the prohibition, i.e., to eat from the tree of knowledge. (Žižek 2014a, 261–262) It is, therefore, not a case of having to have a Stalin first in order to discover, after Stalin, the true meaning of the Idea of refoundation, revolution or Communism. It is, instead, a matter of “retroactive delegitimation” of  old programs and the audacity to invent an entirely new one even through mistakes. The New Prince is the new Master only if, through its development, the project of refounding the state goes from the actuality made possible by the Event to the new reality made possible by a decision (Fonseca 2015b). The act of the New Prince, as Žižek puts it, quoting Hegel,

Conclusion   191 reabsorbs all particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality. (Žižek 2014a, 60) For revolutionary purists, the fundamentalist fifth column of hegemony among us, there are only the erroneous, if not poisonous, decisions of traitors, but for those engaged in the ethics of the impure act, there are failures, repetitions and new inventions, even if in saying “I will” the New Prince gets it wrong. Under the conditions of revolutionary Jacobinism, where no one is under the illusion and “supreme danger in all revolutions” that “a particular instant in the new life is definitive, and that they must halt to look behind them, to consolidate what has been achieved, to rejoice at last in their own success,” when, instead, “numerous political groups have formed, each more audacious than the last, not wanting to call a halt, believing that the definitive stage to be reached is not yet at hand, is still far off,” here actors – both individual and collective – must “renew themselves” or be replaced; here “the revolution never pauses, and never completes the circle. It devours its men, it replaces one group by another more audacious group and, by virtue of this instability, this never-­achieved perfection, is truly and solely a revolution” (Gramsci 1990a, 31). The party, for Gramsci, “will be defined when it becomes everyone and so disappears” (cited in Santucci 2010, 93). This party is no longer under the illusion that “breaking out of the capitalist horizon” means “returning to the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, (self-)restrained society” as constructed by contemporary forms of bad infinity (Žižek 2012, 257). This, Žižek argues, brings us to the the crux of the matter, the crux which is, as expected, the subject itself. The Hegelian-­Lacanian subject is the ultimate “vanishing mediator”: it is never present here-­and-now, in every present constellation it already vanishes in its symbolic representation. In other words, the “subject” is an X which always already vanishes in its representations, and this is what makes this concept an eminently dialectical one. (Žižek 2014a, 392) The attempt to retain the error that is the centrality of the subject, either individual or collective, results not only in the Cult of Personality, the old Prince, illegitimate dictatorship, Stalinism or “statolatry,” but also in the cult of necessity and determinism.23 Gramsci, I think, would actually agree.

Notes   1 On the link between rationalization and reification in the work of Marxist thinkers from Lukács to Adorno, see Habermas (1984, 339–365) and Honneth (2008).

192   Conclusion   2 Italy introduced universal male suffrage in 1912 for all citizens aged 30 and older. The age requirement was reduced to 21 in 1918. Full universal suffrage was extended to women in 1945.   3 We must bear in mind that the notion of contradiction we find in Gramsci was developed in the classical Hegelian sense, as also used by Marx and further explained by, for example, the now largely forgotten Lucio Colletti during the height of his own Marxist moment in the 1970s (Colletti 1975).   4 Note that this proposal for the development of a counter-­hegemonic collective movement is also critical of mainstream ideas, even among liberal “progressives” such as Elinor Ostrom, on developing institutions for collective action oriented towards “governance of the commons” (Ostrom 1990).   5 It is on these bases that we can ground our critique of the whole institutional framework of modern liberal democracy or – in Dahl’s terms – “polyarchy”: from voting through electoral systems to the division of powers and the modern constitutional state of what Rawls calls the “well-­ordered society.” These institutions are carefully designed to empower subjective, private and possessive – market-­driven – individualism, an empowerment that rests – as Hegel saw long ago – on the ultimate meaninglessness of the personal and secret vote while at the same time processing and repackaging the vote through systems that precisely ensure the sovereignty and constituent power of capitalist elites. The whole idea of this system – and of the hegemonic process working from inside people themselves – is to convince institutionalized losers that they are, in fact, winners, to convince the people that their “choice” actually counts while ensuring that such a choice, when aggregated through particular electoral mechanisms, divisions and procedures, effectively amounts to an endorsement of the will of the few and their powerful financial backers. The extent to which any real ideas or desires from below manage to filter through the system and are taken up by the elites is, often, the product of the autopoietic and tautological character of a system that works at its best when it successfully posits its own presuppositions and simultaneously reflects the public opinion that it painstakingly creates as it carefully barricades itself against the encroachment of impure or foreign agents or environments – the “barbarians at the gate” threatening to overthrow it from the outside. This has been the tradition in liberal capitalist democracies ever since early suspicions of the potential evils of a “tyranny of the majority” – “bad civil society” – were voiced by thinkers such as de Tocqueville and Ferguson, and systems of what Foucault calls “governmentality” were, therefore, carefully engineered to ensure that democratic success could only mean the defeat of the people and democratic failure could only mean the success of subaltern majorities. All of this, of course, took place while convincing the subaltern majorities, through various mechanisms ranging from “elections without real democracy” to more propaganda-­driven versions of “elections with market democracy,” that in the pure act of voting they are actually exercising the most supreme and sacred freedom of modern liberal democracy: the freedom to choose the model of their own servitude. Under these circumstances, therefore, any real popular or collective victory, let alone  revolution, can only mean so-­called “democracy break-­down.” Our struggle against this world must, therefore, involve a permanent act of resisting the “re-­enactment of Thermidor” – the “parliamentarization” of permanent revolution – and the end of the revolutionary event as a process of constituting the New Prince in pursuit of the communal horizon. Here, Thermidorian means, as Hallward defines it in his masterful discussion of Badiou’s philosophy, “a situation of thought conditioned by the end of a truth procedure, by the restoration of the status quo and the primacy of the calculable interest.” By contrast, the impure ethics of Jacobin virtue we must uphold entails “an unconditioned subjective prescription that refers back to no objective determination”

Conclusion   193 or the “act of insurrection as the ultimate measure of its legitimacy” (Hallward 2003, 27).   6 A recent Hollywood representation of what a violent development of consciousness may look like is provided by David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club. But against the idea that radical self-­transformation is all that is needed to change the world, that we do not need to actually seize state power (and for that reason this is an idea that is often dismissed as just an empty call from the “speculative Left”), Žižek replies: When people try to ‘organize themselves’ directly in movements, the most they can create is an egalitarian space for debate where speakers are chosen by lottery and everyone is given the same (short) time to speak, etc. But such protest movements prove inadequate the moment one has to act, to impose a new order – at this point, something like a Party is needed. Even in a radical protest movement, people do not know what they want, they demand a new Master to tell them. But if the people do not know, does the Party? Are we back at the standard topic of the Party possessing historical insight and leading the people? (Žižek 2012, 1000)   7 Commenting on a number of recent films, Žižek illustrates the way in which liberation is actually supposed to hurt one’s self if it is to be liberation at all: About an hour into Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900, there is a shockingly violent scene during a confrontation between the poor striking farmers and their landowner. The landowner explains that due to catastrophic weather which had ruined the harvest, he has to cut the farmers wages by half. Exasperated by their mute resistance to his “rational” arguments, he shouts at one of them: “Don’t you have two big ears to hear me?” The farmer then takes a knife from his belt, and with one strike cuts off his left ear and offers it to the farmer, who, terrified by this crazy gesture, runs away in a panic. This scene (structurally similar to the famous scene from David Fincher’s Fight Club in which, during a confrontation with his boss, Edward Norton starts to beat his own face with his fist), with its logic of the realized metaphor (“Lend me your ears”), conveys in a harsh manner the price (the proverbial pound of flesh) one has to pay for liberation: the defiant offering of one’s ear, with its implicit subversion: “Now I no longer have ears, I will not hear you, I am deaf to your arguments!” Again, such a refusal, such a withdrawal or disconnection from the shared field of communication, is a condition sine qua non of freedom. (Žižek 2011, 397–398)   8 On Gramsci’s knowledge of Freud, see Buttigieg’s comment on Notebook 6 §134 (Gramsci 2007, 452).   9 The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan is the title of Žižek’s reedited 1982 doctoral thesis. 10 I have also critiqued “good civil society” in my piece La teoría de la mala sociedad civil (Fonseca 2015a). 11 Peruvian Liberation Theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, indeed, opens up his magnum opus A Theology of Liberation, published first in 1971, with a key reference to Gramsci: “only with the exercise of the prophetic function understood in this way, will the theologian be – to borrow an expression from Antonio Gramsci – a new kind of ‘organic intellectual’ ” (Gutiérrez 1975, 37). 12 The expression “ideology of submission” was developed by Franz Hinkelammert along, I believe, implicitly Gramscian lines in his critical study on the role of the Catholic Church and the “theology of death” in support of the 1973

194   Conclusion Pinochet coup against the Allende government in Chile and the dictatorship of national security installed afterwards (Hinkelammert 1977). 13 Massimo Modonesi develops a very compelling argument to the effect that after Gramsci’s formulation of the process of critical subject formation leading to subalternity and the option of radical autonomous politics, there is no going back to anything else (Modonesi 2013; originally Modonesi 2000). Note also that Modonesi’s work is an excellent example of a new wave of critical engagements with Gramsci in early-­twenty-first-­century Latin America. 14 It is no wonder, then, that McKenzie Wark makes arguments such as the following: this then is our task: a critique of the spectacle as a whole, a task that critical thought has for the most part abandoned. Stupefied by its own powerlessness, critical thought turned into that drunk who, having lost the car keys, searches for them under the street lamp. The drunk knows that the keys disappeared in that murky puddle, where it is dark, but finds it is easier to search for them under the lamp, where there is light – if not enlightenment. (Wark 2011, 1118) 15 In effect, Taylor calls for a kind of restoration of “belief,” understood in the broad communitarian sense as a subjective experience of “fullness” that characterizes Taylor’s entire political philosophy as developed in his Sources of the Self, as a solution to the crises in self, society and even liberalism brought on by the dawn of what Taylor calls “subtraction stories” and, particularly, those that have clustered around what he calls “Secularism 3.” According to Taylor, “Secularism 3” is the contemporary condition characterized by “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (Taylor 2007, 3). The idea that within the current system of reality we can achieve this communitarian “fullness” is, indeed, a hegemonic effect of subjection. But Taylor’s ideas nevertheless earned him the religious Templeton prize in 2007. 16 There is in Poulantzas’ work, in fact, an understanding of the complexities of ideology that is often overlooked in favor of his strictest structuralist reflections. According to Eagleton, Nicos Poulantzas has argued [that] ideology, like social class itself, is an inherently relational phenomenon: it expresses less the way a class lives its conditions of existence, than the way it lives them in relation to the lived experience of other classes. (Eagleton 1991, 101) Eagleton develops this idea as follows: Just as there can be no bourgeois class without a proletariat, or vice versa, so the typical ideology of each of these classes is constituted to the root by the ideology of its antagonist. Ruling ideologies, as we have argued earlier, must engage effectively with the lived experience of subordinate classes; and the way in which those subaltern classes live their world will be typically shaped and influenced by the dominant ideologies. (Ibid.) 17 Horkheimer and Adorno developed the notion of the culture industry as “mass deception” in their essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 94–136). 18 The construction of the interior space of the bourgeois self is intimately connected with a long historical process of subject formation (or the historical

Conclusion   195 formation of the private subject) that Hegel traces back to the dissolution of the world of antiquity and the rise of what he calls “the principle of particularity” in late Roman and early Christian Church times. In this sense, then, the “spirit of capitalism” is by no means something to be traced back simply to the Protestant Reformation, as Max Weber did, but must instead be connected with the thought of Augustine. See also Marion (2012) and Rozitchner (1997). 19 In this context, it is possible to see the most bizarre therapies for the anxieties emerging from the cracks of hegemonic work, whose suturing tasks always remain unfinished and, thus, demand an engagement that goes beyond traditional ideology critique. Take the case of feel-­good mainstream philosophers and art critics such as Alain de Botton and John Armstrong proposing “art therapy” for the average, trembling and beleaguered European citizen torn further asunder by financial crisis in the age of austerity, baroque globalization and what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000). In the exhibit on the occasion of the reopening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in an effort to boost the number of tourists who visited the museum in 2013 from a mere 2.2 million visitors to three million or more, the authors of Art as Therapy were invited by the museum to place giant Post-­it notes all over the interior of the museum and around some of the 8,000 objects of art and history housed in it (De Botton and Armstrong 2013). As reported by Adrian Searle for the Guardian, a couple of giant Post-­it notes stood out as hegemonically illuminating. The first one was placed next to Dutch master Jan Steen’s 1665–1668 baroque painting The Feast of Saint Nicholas, and it read: “You suffer from fragility, guilt, a split personality, self disgust. You are probably a bit like this picture. There are sides of you that are a little debauched.” Searle’s comment on this note continues: “The labels tell us what’s wrong with us, and how the artworks and artefacts they accompany can cure our ills.” The second note was placed in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1640–1642), the centerpiece of the collection and one of the greatest of the so-­called Dutch Golden Age at the height of Dutch commercial ascendancy, and it read: “I can’t bear busy places – I wish this room were emptier.” And Searle’s comment is: “De Botton sees the Night Watch as an image of communality, which I suppose it is. There’s not much fellow-­feeling in the audience around it, and I guess that’s the point, too” (Searle 2014). 20 After Gramsci’s imprisonment, Togliatti became the party’s chief leader for life and one of the architects, in the 1940s, of the svolta di Salerno, or the moment when the PCI took its “democratic” turn, strategically abandoning any idea of a Jacobin route to socialism and thus laying the foundations for the development of Eurocommunism until, in 1991, under the leadership of Achille Occhetto – and with Gramsci no doubt turning in his grave – the party’s own dissolution into the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS) or Italy’s equivalent of New Labour and its own version of the so-­called “Third Way.” 21 Anne Showstack Sassoon also offers a similar social democratic reinterpretation of Gramsci’s work as precedent not only for Clinton and Blair but also, by extension, for moderate social democratic Pink Tide politics in Latin America (Sassoon 2000). 22 Not forgetting here that modern liberal democracy is designed precisely to make it impossible for the will of the community to translate itself into real power and to protect the real power of the will of political and economic elites. 23 According to Žižek, Rosa Luxemburg was well aware of this entire problematic when “in her polemic against Eduard Bernstein, she proffered two arguments against the revisionist fear that the proletariat would take power prematurely, before the circumstances were ripe” (Žižek 2014a, 461).

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Index

360.org 181

autopoiesis 63, 86, 192

absolute humanism 37, 59, 169, 171 accumulation 62, 84, 86, 100, 126, 151, 177; Marx on primitive accumulation 104, 107; Robinson on 37n17, 179 Adorno, Theodor 56, 120–1, 168, 184, 191n1, 194n17 agonistic politics 132 Ali, Tariq 165n22, 176 Allende, Salvador 194n12 Althusser, Louis 15, 20n12, 34, 37n19, 88n1, 90n16, 171, 174, 184 American Revolution 105 Americanism 84–7, 92, 122, 135; see also Fordism; Taylorism; Fascism anarchism 4, 55, 70–1, 119, 145 Anderson, Perry 15, 58n4, 88n1 anticapitalist movements 180 arditi 77, 89–90; arditismo 73, 76–7; neo-arditismo 119; counter-hegemonic arditismo 155–6 Archibugi, Daniele 177 Arendt, Hannah 121–2 Aricó, José 180 armed struggle 6, 89n13, 90n14, 90n16 Augustine, Saint 51, 59n10–11, 60n13, 195n18; see also Augustinianism 172, 190 autonomy 41, 45–6, 64, 106, 118, 159, 188–9, 194; see also autonomous organizations 7–9, 45, 124, 130, 148, 153–4, 156, 158, 162, 179, 181; autonomous politics 14, 16, 38–9, 46, 76, 108, 115–17, 122, 132, 136, 138, 155, 156, 161; autonomous selfmanagement 6; Lenin on autonomy of the political 65; Miliband on state’s relative autonomy 37n11; rhizomatic politics

Badiou, Alain 19n3, 20n15, 59n10, 192n5 Balibar, Etienne 37n19, 183 Battle for Seattle 181 Baudrillard, Jean 133n4 Bauer, Otto 173 Bauman, Zygmunt 195n19 Benhabib, Seyla 51 Bentham, Jeremy 106 Bergson, Henri 19n3, 115–17, 130, 136–7n17, 147–50, 164n13; Žižek on 117, 132n2 Bernstein, Eduard 65, 69; Žižek on 195n23 Betancourt, Raúl Fornet 59n9 Bildung 159, 164; see also pedagogy of liberation biopower 103, 112n17, 165n26; see also biopolitical 162, 182 Blanc, Eric 163n6 Blanc, Louis 90n17 Blanqui, Louis Auguste 189 Bloch, Ernst 139, 149, 162n2 Bobbio, Norberto 131 Bolivarianism 165, 180, 189 Bolshevism 5, 36n5, 61n17, 69, 72, 77, 127, 136n15, 144–6; see also bolshevization 11 Bordiga, Amadeo 10–11 Bosteels, Bruno 15, 37n13, 59n11; on Žižek’s critique of ideology 185–6 Bottomore, Tom 36n4 Braudel, Fernand 135n12 Brown, John 188 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 110n1 Buck-Morss, Susan 59n7 Bukharin, Nikolai 37n17, 54, 81, 142, 163–4n11

Index   207 bureaucracy 6, 110; Lenin on 145 Buttigieg, Josef 13, 14, 48, 58n1, 60n13, 91n19, 110n3, 113n20, 127–8, 135n10, 173, 193n8 Butler, Judith 18, 183 Cádiz Constitution 106–7, 113n20 Caesarism 122 capillary hegemony 121; see also capillary logic 83; capillary power 165n26; see also biopower capital 5, 7–8, 14–15, 32–3, 36n4, 37n17, 38, 86–7, 91n22, 113n24, 125, 136n15; see also capitalism capitalism 2, 5, 7–8, 16, 18, 20n10, 37n17, 41–3, 49, 50–2, 55–7, 62–8, 74, 76, 80–2, 84–7, 88n2, 90n14, 93–4, 99–105, 107, 110n4, 112n18, 115, 117, 119–24, 126, 130–1, 134n8, 136n15, 137n17, 146–8, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158–9, 161, 168–70, 172, 176, 179, 184, 185, 188, 191, 195n18; see also capital Carrillo, Santiago 186 catharsis 17, 32, 115, 118, 122, 134n5, 150, 169, 182; see also cathartic politics 7, 15–17, 19, 76, 115, 117–18, 120, 122, 130, 132, 134n5, 138, 155, 157, 161, 169–72, 187 Central America 90n16 chauvisnim, see nationalism; SocialDemocracy 146 Chávez, Hugo 135, 165, 179, 189; see also Chavismo 18 Ché Guevara, Ernesto 54, 60n14, 90n16, 189 Cherutti, Horacio 59n9 Chimni, B.S. 176 Chomsky, Noam 91n24 Christianity 107; see also Žižek on 183 Ciccariello-Maher, George 20n17 citizenship 2, 106, 176–7, 181 CIVICUS 177 Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) 118, 176–7, 179 Clausewitz, Carl von 146, 163n9 Classical German Philosophy 43–6, 49, 51, 73, 109, 149–50 “Club for Moral Life” 5, 7, 124, 158, 164n17 Colletti, Lucio 192n3 colonialism 73, 77, 98–100, 146, 164; see also colonial question 4, 74; see also post-colonialism 170

combined Marxism 30, 45, 59n8, 150, 160, 173, 180 Comintern 11, 20n10, 36n5, 112n13, 186; see also Bukharin; democratic centralism; ECCI 11; Lenin; Marxism-Leninism; NEP; proletarian revolution; PSI; Spartacist League; Stalin; Stalinism; Third International; Third Period 112n3; Trotsky; United Front; war communism 69; Zinoviev common sense 1–2, 16, 26, 29, 39–41, 49–50, 52, 62, 81–2, 91n24, 93–4, 104, 107, 109, 120, 147, 153, 161, 168, 184 commons, the 192n4 Communism 1, 7, 9–10, 16, 38, 46, 124, 162, 181, 190; see also Idea of Communism; War Communism 69; Žižek on 61n21, 188 constituent politics 5–6; see also constituent Event 6–7; constituent power 117, 192n5 constitutionalism 95; antidemocratic constitutionalism 20n15; see also constituent assembly 186; refoundational constitutionalism 140 contradiction 15–17, 23–4, 29, 32–5, 37n17, 38, 41, 49, 62, 89n12, 96, 100, 121, 132, 143, 151, 152, 169, 170, 175, 192n3 Cook, David 121 Counter-Reformation 107 Coutinho, Carlos Nelson 14, 19n7, 131, 135n9, 147–9, 158, 185–7 Cox, Robert 83, 91n24 crisis of hegemony 9, 15–17, 22, 32, 41, 109, 114, 117, 120, 123–4, 130–2, 161, 167, 169–70, 184; see also hegemonic crisis 18, 121, 135, 138, 168; organic crisis 32, 108, 121 Crispi, Francesco 151–2, 164 Croce, Benedetto 1, 22, 44, 46, 50, 55, 58n2, 71, 83, 101, 105, 109–10, 110n1, 112n13, 113n23, 134n5, 141, 149, 152–3, 159; on Hegel 47; on historical materialism 47–8; on Protestantism 47; on religion 19n1, 31 cultural revolution 7, 16 culture industry 14, 65, 194n17 Cuoco, Vincenzo 109, 135n10 Dahl, Robert 131, 187, 192n5; see also pluralism Danton, Georges 90n17, 157, 189 Davis, Mike 18

208   Index de Botton, Alain 195n19 De Man, Henri 173 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura 162n2 de Tocqueville, Alexis 106 Debord, Guy 112n16, 121, 179 Debray, Regis 90n16 Deleuze, Gilles 117 democracy 9, 17, 22, 68, 114, 128, 145, 159, 160, 176, 187, 189; see also capitalist democracy; Dahl on 192n5; democracy break-down 192n5; democracy promotion 15, 18, 123, 138, 161, 167, 177–8, 180–1, 187, 192; direct democracy; Hobsbawm on 78; liberal democracy 1–2, 18, 39, 68, 78, 99, 108, 115, 169, 192, 195n22; parliamentary democracy 8, 16, 38, 67; petty bourgeois democracy 103; polyarchic democracy 108; see also polyarchy; radical democracy 19, 162; Robinson on 178; see also Social Democracy; transition to democracy 120, 131, 186–7; Togliatti on 187; workers’ democracy 6, 158; Žižek on 19, 188 democratic centralism 164 democratic politics 126, 162, 175, 178 Deogolwulf (blogger) 56 Derrida, Jacques 134n6 deterritorialization 117; see also reterritorialization 117 development 24, 27, 29, 32, 42, 44, 65, 74, 76, 81, 84–5, 90, 99, 102, 104, 123, 126, 129, 147–8, 161, 169, 177, 181; see also Harvey on 170; human development 159; Marx on 21; sustainable development 124, 176, 181–2; uneven and combined development 43, 62, 73, 89n12, 107, 128, 135n11, 143, 146, 150–2, 163n8, 164n14, 169 Dews, Peter 120, 134n6 dialectical materialism 35, 37n17, 81 difference 6; Hegel on 60n13 Dussel, Enrique 59n9 Eagleton, Terry 61n21, 128; on Marxism 136n16; on Poulantzas 194n16 elections 95, 114, 172, 186, 192n5; Ali on 165n22 Engels, Fredrick 13, 36n7, 37n17, 66, 85, 112n18, 164n11; on Danton 157, 189; Lenin on 163n9

English Marxism 15 Erasmus, Desiderius 47, 50 Errejón Galván, Íñigo 179 Eurocommunism 186; Togliatti and 195n20 Event 5, 6–9, 22, 29, 72–3, 114, 121, 130, 153, 170, 190, 192n5; Badiou on 19n3; see also evental 2, 6, 17, 75, 123, 138, 169; philosophical event 31, 37; Žižek on 19n3, 117 excremental culture 121 Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) 11 expanded reproduction 32, 37n17; see also accumulation; Luxemburg on 62 factory council movement 2, 6–8, 10, 12, 15–17, 38, 63, 116, 129–30, 132, 158, 164n17, 171 Fanon, Franz 170 Fascism 11, 20n10, 76, 89n14, 116, 122, 135n9 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain 106 Fernández-Savater, Amador 179 fetishism 108; see also Marx on 62, 104, 110, 168; Žižek on 183 Feuerbach, Ludwig 43, 47, 95–8, 111n8 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 46; see also Hegel on 48 Fight Club 193n6–193n7 Fincher, David 193 Fontana, Josep 165n24 foquismo 77, 90n16 Ford, Henry 85; see also Fordism; postFordism Fordism 7, 49, 52, 84–6, 91n26, 102, 120, 129, 158, 168–9; see also Americanism Forgacs, David 180 Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl 59n9 Fortunato, Giustino 152 fortune: Machiavelli on 139, 142, 148 Foucault, Michel 112n17, 134n6; on biopower 165n26; on governmentality 192n5; on power 175 Fraser, Nancy 91n18 free choice 17, 55, 114, 184 free will 52, 55, 121, 182; see also pure will; free choice Freire, Paulo 164n17, 165n23; Žižek on 188 French Revolution 43–4, 48–9, 51, 54, 61n17, 71–3, 95, 105, 107, 126, 145,

Index   209 149, 157, 174, 189; Hegel on 60n13; Marx on 107; see also Jacobinism; Terror Freud, Sigmund 173, 193n8 Fried, Gregory 187 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 149 Garibaldi, Giusseppe 74, 89 Gentile, Giovanni 5, 19n4, 139, 142, 164n12 German Idealism 25, 44, 48, 59n8; Marx on 97 Gill, Stephen 83, 91n24 global civil society 124 Global South 15, 151, 177–9, 182 governmentality 9, 123, 192n5 grace 50–1 Guattari, Félix 117 Gudynas, Eduardo 187 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 193n11; see also Liberation Theology Gorz, André 170 Habermas, Jürgen 1–2, 79, 90–1n18, 131, 168–9, 191n1 Haller, Karl Ludwig von 94, 96, 111n11 Hallward, Peter 20n15, 61n16, 140, 157; on emancipatory politics 189; on Hegel 189; on Thermidorian politics 192–3n5; Žižek on 188 Hans-Lansberg, Martin 179 Harding, Neil 88n4 Hardt, Michael 165n26 Harnecker, Marta 90n15, 135n8 Harvey, David 121, 133; on construction of consent 92n27; on contradiction 170; on humanism 171; on modernism 133n4; on politics of everyday life 180; on revolts against neoliberalism 170 Hegel, G.W.F. 14, 24–6, 31–5, 37, 42–57, 58–61, 83, 91, 94–8, 101–2, 105–6, 113, 117, 133–5, 149, 159, 189–90, 193, 195; on the Absolute 98; on Bildung 159, 164n17; on consciousness 55; on contradiction 192n3; on corporations 26; on force and its relations 24, 36, 167, 173–5; on ethical life 98; on Idea 30, 32; on Kant, Fichte, and Schelling 48; on Kant’s categorical imperative 53, 60n13; on master and servant dialectic 167; on mutual recognition 25; on negativity 54; on particularity

195n18; on reconciliation 33–4, 173; on religion 113n22; on spirit of the time 83, 91n23; on subjectivity 58–9n7; on substance 25; on system of reality 133n4, 168; on totality 22 Hegelian Marxism 14, 31, 35n2, 36n5, 59n8 Hegelianism 20, 25, 32, 36–7, 42–3, 46–7, 59–60, 109, 110, 148, 163, 165, 191–2 Heidegger, Martin 149, 187 Held, David 177 heterogeneity 6, 10, 14; see also heterogeneous 8, 17, 119, 132, 154, 161 Hinkelammert, Franz 193–4n12 historical bloc 1–2, 9, 18, 24, 27, 32, 34–5, 49, 52, 83–4, 85, 87­, 88n8, 96, 104–5, 109, 119–20, 121–3, 128, 133, 135, 150, 155, 168, 175, 183 historical materialism 5, 20n13, 23, 28, 30, 32–3, 35, 45, 47–8, 57, 58, 64, 91n24, 107, 136n15, 149, 163n10, 164n11, 173 historicism 37n12, 59n8, 135n12 Hoare, Quintin 58n5, 127 Hobsbawm, Eric 78 Holloway, John 132n1, 181, 190 horizontality 6, 9 Horkheimer, Max 184, 194n17 Hörnqvist, Mikael 164n18 human rights 52–3, 67, 105, 158, 176–7, 181–2; life, liberty and property 105; see also rights of man 106 humanism 171; see also absolute humanism; revolutionary humanism 170 Huntington, Samuel 178 Idea of Communism 46, 112n14, 140, 187 ideology 1, 17, 27–8, 31, 50–1, 53–6, 63–9, 73, 79, 82, 84, 85–6, 98, 104–5, 112n17, 118, 123, 125, 132, 136n15, 142, 144, 158, 167, 169, 171–3, 175, 179, 183–6, 194n16, 195n19; see also ideology of submission 16–17, 179, 182, 193n12 impure act 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 19n3, 20n15, 35, 48, 54, 60n13, 61n19, 117, 122, 134n4, 134n8, 139, 147, 158, 169, 173, 187, 191, 192n5 individualism 160, 172, 192n5

210   Index Jacobinism 99, 106, 131, 156–7, 159–60, 162n3, 186, 191; see also Bolivarian Jacobinism 165n21; ethical Jacobinism 54, 61n19; French Revolution; Terror James, C.L.R. 59 Jameson, Fredric 121, 133n4 Jay, Martin 35n1 Jesuitism 107; see also Jesuitical 147, 186 Kaldor, Mary 176 Kant, Immanuel 46, 48–9, 52–4, 57, 59n4, 60n13, 105, 133n4, 139, 173, 175; see also neo-Kantianism 2, 169 Kautsky, Karl 65–7, 69, 88n6, 112n18, 163n9 Keane, John 176 Keck, Margaret E. 176 Keohane, Robert 91n24 Kierkegaard, Søren 190; on Hegel 57; on the modern bourgeois subject 56–7 Kipfer, Stefan 112n17 Klein, Naomi 175–6 Korsch, Karl 30, 35n1 Kroker, Arthur 121 Labriola, Antonio 20n13 Labriola, Arturo 4 Lacan, Jacques 134n6, 185, 191, 193n9 Laclau, Ernesto 18, 123, 159, 161, 163, 165, 183; on Gramsci’s epistemological break within Marxism 31; on hegemony 146, 183; on popular subject 181; on postmodernity 185; on radical democracy 131; on revolution without hegemony 143; on Sorel 156, 165n19; on suture 37n18; on uneven development 146 Lakin, Jason M. 178 Lassalle, Ferdinand 93, 110n2–110n3 Latin America 18, 37, 59, 75, 77, 89n12, 100, 106, 112n15, 113n19, 113n21–113n22, 120, 131, 135n11, 164n12, 165n21, 178–9, 186–7, 189, 194–5; see also consolidation of polyarchy 177; Gramsci in Latin America 15, 20n18, 32, 37n16, 59n9, 90n16, 180–1, 194n13; Pink Tide; transition to democracy; Twenty-First Century Socialism Latinobarómetro 177 Lebowitz, Michael on Hegel 36n6

Lefebvre, Henri 112n16–112n17, 133n4 legitimacy 9, 20n15, 80, 91n18, 122, 140, 182, 193n5 Lenin, V.I. 10, 19n10, 24, 42, 46, 54, 61n19, 67, 70–4, 76, 81, 83, 88n2, 88n5, 89n11, 89n13, 103, 112n18, 119, 125, 129–30, 132–3n3, 138, 142, 155, 157, 164, 186–7, 189; on colonialism 146; on dictatorship of the proletariat 68–9, 88n7, 132n3; on Economism and spontaneism 64, 69, 153, 169; on Hegel 36n10, 46, 163n7; on hegemony 146–7; on ideology 68–9; on imperialism 146; on intellectuals 77–8, 144; on Kautsky 69, 88n7; on party membership 144–5; on Plekhanov 36n8; on revolution in the West and the East 128–9; on significance of What Is To Be Done? 65–7, 88n3; on “The Collapse of the Second International” 163n9; on “The Equality of Languages Incident” 163n5; on the party 90, 138, 143–8, 155; on uneven development 146; see also Leninism Leninism 36n5, 42, 69, 70, 72, 76–7, 89, 90n15–90n16, 116, 119, 130, 136, 141, 160, 167 Levinas, Immanuel 25 liberalism 2, 100–1, 112n13, 194n15 Liberation Theology 171, 180, 193n7 life, liberty and property 105 lifeworld 31, 40, 79–80, 169 Lih, Lars T. 65–6, 88n3–88n4, 144–5 liminal 8, 9, 16, 17, 38 limited government 93–4 Lipset, Seymour Martin 178 Lomnitz, Claudio 164n16 Louis Napoleon 78, 90n17 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 188 Löwy, Michael 60n14 Lukács, György 22, 30, 35n1, 36n5, 36n7, 51, 69, 168, 175, 191n1; on Hegel 36n5 Lula da Silva, Jose Ignacio 131 Luther, Martin 47, 50 Luxemburg, Rosa 62–3, 88n2, 103, 136n14, 189, 195n23 Lyon Congress 12 Lyotard, Jean Francois 134n6 McClelland, J.S. 164n18 Macherey, Pierre 25 Machiavelli, Niccolò 39–40, 44, 58n1,

Index   211 70–1, 88n9, 131, 140–2, 147, 149, 155, 164–5n18, 189; on fortuna and virtù 58n5, 139, 142 Mariátegui, José Carlos 164n14, 180 Marion, Jean-Luc 195n18 Marx, Karl 13–14, 22–5, 36, 43–7, 54, 66, 85, 101–2, 104, 109, 111, 133, 136, 139, 167–8, 171, 173, 183, 185–6, 189, 192n3; on 1848 90n17; on Cádiz Constitution of 1812 106–7, 113n20; on Classical German Philosophy 43–4, 51–2, 95, 100, 149; on dictatorship of the proletariat 88n7; on fetishism of commodities 62, 91n2; on Feuerbach 95–6; on general formula of capital 87; on Hegel 43, 46, 51, 90n17, 95–7; on ideology 27–8, 32; on law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall 37n17; on organic composition of capital 113n24; on Proudhon 22, 47; on revolution 88n7; on state 82, 100; on structure/ superstructure 35n2, 36n4, 36n6; on Trinity Formula 33; on Young Hegelians 98; see also combined Marxism; English Marxism; Hegelian Marxism; Marxism; Marxism-Leninism; orthodox Marxism; Second International Marxism; scientific Marxism; Western Marxism Marxism 3, 12, 14, 19n2, 20n11, 24, 28, 31, 36n8, 37n11–37n12, 37n14, 46, 58n4, 60n14, 63–4, 69, 72, 88n7, 105, 112, 130, 134, 136n16, 137, 139, 143, 147, 150, 163, 171, 178, 191, 192 Marxism-Leninism 116, 186 mass deception 184, 194n17 masses 1, 10–11, 19n8, 28, 31, 45–6, 50, 52, 75–6, 79, 83, 90n14, 95, 107–9, 114–16, 119, 122–3, 131, 144, 148–54, 158, 184 maximalists 4, 136n15, 145 Mazzini, Giuseppe 89n12 Megill, Allan 121 Meillassoux, Quentin 186 Mészáros, István 32, 37n15 Miliband, Ralph 13, 20n11, 36–7n11 military language 74, 103, 125 military leadership 73–6 Mingrino, Giuseppe 89n14 Modonesi, Massimo 194n13 molecular 7, 13, 39, 45, 50, 119–21,

134n7, 139, 140, 162, 165n26, 166n26, 171, 184 Monedero, Juan Carlos 179 Morgenthau, Hans 91 Morton, David Adam 164n14, 165n26 Mouffe, Chantal 159, 161, 163n4; on democratic politics 126, 131; on hegemony 123, 143, 146; on Lenin 143; on post-modernity 185; on Sorel 156, 165n19; on uneven development 146 Muirí, Pól Ó 61n21 multiplicity 6, 14, 17, 103, 117–88, 132 Mussolini 4, 12, 159, 173 mutual recognition 25, 53–4, 104, 174 national liberation 75, 89n12 national-popular 7, 9, 14, 16–17, 38, 54, 84, 138, 157, 159–62, 164n14, 181 nationalism 89n11, 122, 162, 164n18 Negri, Antonio 165n26 neoliberal globalization 14, 18, 120, 123, 126, 135, 138, 161, 167, 169–70, 172, 175–9, 182, 185, 188; see also capitalism; neoliberalism neoliberalism 81, 85, 92, 172, 187; see also neoliberal globalization New Economic Policy (NEP) 69 New Labour 195n20; see also third way 68 New Left 15, 75, 88n8, 90n16, 180 New Social Movements (NSMs) 176 Nietzsche, Fredric 1, 14 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) 102–3, 118, 176–7, 187; see also Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) 118, 176–7, 179; private organizations 101, 104–5, 121, 154 normality 9, 41, 108, 110, 122–3, 161, 168, 171, 184; see also governmentality; legitimacy; spectacle; stability objectivity 14, 30, 53, 59–60n12, 83, 183 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 17, 132, 180–1 October Revolution 61n17–61n18, 69; see also Russian Revolution organic intellectuals 2, 9, 39, 41, 44, 46–7, 50, 52–3, 78, 87, 88n6, 88n8, 105, 108, 130, 161 Oriani, Alfredo 162

212   Index orthodox Marxism 2, 5, 23, 36n8, 59n8, 64, 67, 69, 88n7, 125, 147, 155, 173; see also Bernstein; Kautsky; Plekhanov; Second International Marxism Ostrom, Elinor 192n4 Oxhorn, Philip 113n19 palingenesis 19n8 Parthenopean Republic 107, 113n23 Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) 4, 9–11, 89n14, 154; see also Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCI) 11–12, 89n14, 186, 195n20 Pasado y Presente 180 passive revolution 2, 32, 43, 55, 72, 109, 119–23, 135n9, 135n12, 136n17, 150, 156, 168, 171; Thomas on 134n7; see also reformism; transformism; transformismo 32 Paul, Saint 51, 59n10, 182 peasants 6–7, 11, 20n10, 70–1, 108, 114, 118, 127, 145, 147, 151, 158, 160 pedagogy of liberation 6, 157, 164n17, 165n23; see also Bildung permanent revolution 54, 99, 112–13n18, 124, 127–8, 192 Petrarca, Francesco 164n18 Petras, James 177 philosophy of praxis 1–3, 8, 12, 14, 17–18, 19n4, 22–3, 32–3, 35, 37n17, 39, 45, 47, 49, 57, 59n8, 118, 128, 136n17, 139, 148–9, 173, 185–6; Löwy on 60n14; Thomas on 20n13, 37n12 philosophy of the subject 51, 57 Pink Tide 131, 181, 187, 195n21; see also Gramsci in Latin America; Latin America Pinochet, Augusto 194n12 Pippin, Robert 51 Pisacane, Carlo 89n12 Pisarello, Gerardo 20n15 Plekhanov, Georgi 22–3, 30, 36, 81, 146; Lenin on 163n9; see also Second International Marxism pluralism 80, 177, 187; see also Dahl Pocock, John Greville Agard 31, 40, 58n5, 70–1, 107, 142 Podemos 179–80 political act 6, 12, 19n3, 28–9, 31, 117, 160, 169 polyarchy17, 177–8, 192n5; see also Dahl; democracy; democracy promotion

Popular Front 186; see also United Front popular masses 45, 50, 52, 75–6, 83, 90, 108–9, 119, 148, 150–1; see also popular movements popular movements 18, 115–16, 130–2, 181, 187 popular sovereignty 18, 105–7, 177; see also self-determination populism 162 Portelli, Hugues 32, 88n8 post-Fordism 123, 158, 169 postmodernism 14, 120, 133n4, 161, 172, 174–5, 179, 182, 185 Potier, Jean-Pier 58n2 Poulantzas, Nicos 36n11, 183, 194n16 private organizations 101, 104–5, 121, 154; see also Civil Society Organizations (CSOs); NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) private property 158, 185 proletarian revolution 4–6, 9, 69, 90n14 Proletkul 7 Protestant Reformation 44–6, 49–51, 60n13, 100, 108, 111n12, 195n18; see also Counter-Reformation 107 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 22, 47 psycho-analysis 19n2, 49 public opinion 90n14, 162n3, 192n5; see also public opinion polls 114 public sphere 3–4, 39, 41–2, 90–1n18, 105, 144, 177, 182 Putnam, Robert D. 105 Rawls, John 2, 131, 192n5 realism 133n4, 186; see also Realism 91n24 Realpolitik 45, 69–70, 77, 81, 141, 143, 147, 149, 154, 175 reformism 4, 6, 8–10, 16, 26, 67, 72, 145; see also transformism; passive revolution refoundation 7, 11–12, 15, 17, 39, 41, 62, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 84, 96, 108, 116, 124, 131, 138, 140, 150–1, 154–6, 162n1, 170, 172, 181, 186, 190 religion 2, 35, 82, 139, 150, 157, 168; Bauer on 173; Croce on 1, 19n1, 58n2, 31, 163n10; Hegel on 33, 96; Marx on 91n22; Zizek on 183 republicanism 106–7, 113n21, 162 restoration 9, 16–17, 20n15, 43–4, 75, 107, 109, 115, 118, 120, 122, 130–1, 170, 192n5, 194n15

Index   213 reterritorialization 117; see also deterritorialization 117 revolution 8, 9, 12, 14, 18, 20n10–20n21, 27, 29, 38–9, 41, 54, 57, 63, 68, 72, 73, 75, 77, 80, 84, 88n2, 90n16, 111n12, 113n22, 115, 122, 125–6, 128–9, 130, 131, 134n8, 136n15, 138, 143, 145–6, 148, 154, 156–7, 158, 165n21, 170, 181, 186, 190–2; see also bourgeois-democratic revolution 151; cultural revolution; French Revolution; passive revolution; permanent revolution; Russian Revolution rhizomatic politics 6–10, 16–17, 38, 75, 115–17, 119, 122–4, 129–32, 136–7n17, 138, 145, 150, 156–7, 159–62, 169–71, 179 Ribera, Ricardo 20n18 Ricardo, David 37n17, 109 rights of man 106; see also human rights Risorgimento 46–7, 50, 71, 73–5, 78–9, 89n12, 100–1, 106–7, 119–20, 134n5, 150–2, 162; Hegel on 113n22; Riall and Patriarca on 89n11 Risse, Thomas 177 Robespierre, Maximilien 188 Robinson, William I. 177; on democracy promotion 178–9; on expanded reproduction 37n17; on hegemony 91n24, 178; on transnational capitalist class 20n17 Rolland, Romain 55 Rosengarten, Frank 128 Rotary Clubs 93, 103; see also private organizations Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 131, 178, 189 Rozitchner, León 51, 59n9, 195n18 Rubin, I.I. 62 Russian Revolution 4–5, 54, 125, 127–30, 136n15 Sacristán, Manuel 180 Santucci, Antonio A. 6, 12, 19n5, 80, 91n20–91n21 Sartre, Jean Paul 35n1, 37n14 Sassoon, Anne Showstack 195n21 Scheler, Max 122 Schelling, Friedrich 46, 48 Schucht, Tatiana 134n5 Schwarzmantel, John 116 scientific Marxism 12, 35n1, 47, 57, 59n8, 65–6, 69, 99, 116, 127, 144, 149–50, 163n11, 164n13

Searle, Adrian 195n19 Second International Marxism 22, 24, 51, 53, 59n8, 60n13, 63–4, 66, 81, 125, 143, 146, 148, 163n9 Seguín, Bécquer 179–80 self 16, 38, 47–52, 56–7, 104, 108, 118, 121, 158, 171–3, 182, 187, 193n6–193n7, 194n15, 195n19; see also ego 47; self-deception self-determination 60n13, 106, 188 self-government 8, 61n17, 118, 158 Shandro, Alan 88n4 Sikkink, Kathryn 176–7 Skinner, Quentin 71, 107 Sklair, Leslie 20n17, 176–7 Smith, Adam 109 Smith, Geoffrey Nowell 58, 127 Social-Democracy 20, 65–8, 69, 78, 144, 186–7, 195 Socialism of the Twenty-First Century 18, 124; see also Latin America; Pink Tide society of spectacle 41, 63, 100, 110n4, 121, 172, 179, 194n14; see also Debord; Wark; Žižek Socrates 157 Solon 158 Sorel, Georges 20n13, 58n2, 91n19, 136n17, 139, 142, 147–50, 153–6, 165n19 southern question 12, 19n10, 89n12, 107, 147, 150–2 Soviet Union 6, 12, 14, 35n1, 36n5, 64, 69, 154, 164n12 Spartacist League 88n2 speculative Left 193n6 Spinoza, Baruch 25 spontaneity 9, 11, 64, 66–9, 110, 115–16, 123–4, 126, 129–32, 136–7n16, 137n17, 138–9, 143, 145, 148, 152–5, 171–3, 179, 182 Sraffa, Piero 37n17, 58n2 stability 86, 123, 168, 179; see also normality Stalin, Josef 36n5, 54, 61n18, 145, 154; on Leninist party 90n15; see also Stalinism 69, 76, 134, 136n16, 160, 190–1; statolatry state see capitalist state; state as night-watchman statolatry 61n17, 191 structural adjustment 135n11 structuralism 24, 34, 194n16 subalternity 63, 194n13

214   Index subject 2, 17, 24–5, 33, 36n5, 47, 56–7, 70, 101, 117, 168, 174–5, 182–5, 189, 191, 194n13, 195n18 sublation 34, 140, 149, 163n7 syndicalism 4, 81, 119, 129, 156 Syriza 179–80 system of reality 2, 26, 52, 96, 111n11, 123, 133n4, 151, 167–8, 194n15 Tasca, Angelo 5 Taylor, Charles 120, 134n6, 182–3, 194n15 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 52, 85, 91n25; see also Taylorism Taylorism 7, 41, 45, 52, 82, 85, 120, 122, 150, 158, 168–9, 172, 179, 184; see also Taylor, Frederick Winslow Terror 54, 60, 73, 174 Thermidorian politics 9, 16–17, 20n15, 36n5, 118, 116n21, 192n5; see also restoration Third International 10–11, 112n13, 142; see also Comintern Thomas, Peter D. 15, 20n13, 31, 37n12–37n13, 58n4, 63, 83–4, 99–100, 103, 110n1, 111n7, 111n9, 111n11, 112n13, 112n17, 112–13n18, 120, 124, 130–1, 132n3, 134n7, 135n11–135n12, 141–3, 162n3, 163n4, 165n26 Thompson, E.P. 79 Tocqueville, Alexis de 106 Togliatti, Palmiro 5, 11, 131, 186–7, 195n20 Toscano, Alberto 165n26 totality 14, 21–2, 26, 31, 34, 35n2, 37n19, 82, 86, 96, 102, 110, 111n9, 135n12, 156, 174, 185 trade unionism 6, 11, 64–5, 77–8, 144, 155 transformism 71, 107, 109, 118–21, 153, 170; see also passive revolution; reformism transition to democracy 120, 131, 178, 186–7 transnational advocacy networks 176; see also Sikkink transnational capitalist class 17–18, 20n17, 123, 138, 169, 177–9; see also Sklair; Robinson transnational domination 178–9 transnational middle class 169, 176 Trotsky, Leon 77, 84, 103, 112n18, 113n18, 125, 127–30, 142, 146, 163n8, 164n14; see also Comintern; Third International

truth 1, 14, 20n15, 28, 33, 53, 58n3, 96, 133, 152, 154, 164n13, 183 tyranny of the majority 192 United Front 11, 20n10, 138, 147, 154; see also Popular Front uneven and combined development 62, 73, 89n12, 107, 128, 135n11, 143, 146, 150–2, 163n8, 164n14, 169 Vatican question 107 Vico, Giambattista 135n12, 139, 142, 157–8 virtù 139, 142; see also Vico voluntarism 5, 8, 9, 115–16, 139, 136n17, 139, 147, 161, 177, 186 Washington Consensus 178 Wark, McKenzie 194n14 Watson, Mike 180 Weber, Max 1, 50–1, 75, 168, 195n18 Western Marxism 21, 31, 35n1 Wickersham, John 89n10 Worker’s Party (PT) 187 working class 10–11, 44, 64–9, 76–9, 85, 87, 88n6, 90n15, 91n18, 108, 112n18, 113n24, 116, 120, 128, 143–4, 187 Young Hegelians 97–8; see also Left Hegelians 97 Zapatista movement 18, 20n17, 132n1, 158, 180, 190 Zinoviev, Grigory 11 Žižek, Slavoj 14, 18, 140; on the absolute 58n3; on Augustine 59n10; on Bergson 132n2; on contingency 148; on Christianity 183; on essence 110n6; on failure 135n8, 161; on Feuerbach’s misreading of Hegel 111n8; on Habermas 1; on Hegel 58n3, 61n18, 111n8, 117, 163n7, 190–1, 193n9; on Heidegger 187–8; on humanitarianism 60–1n15; on ideology 56, 183–5; on liberation of the self 193n7; on Lukács 36n5; on Luxemburg 195n23; on the Master 190–1, 193; on mediation 133; on the New 117; on the party 193n6; on quantum physics 19n2; on Substance 134n4; on the Real 24, 153; on structures and superstructures 37n15; on violence in liberal capitalism 110n4